The Nineteenth Century

Question 1

What were the overarching topics of the of the ninth session?

Answer 1

The Nineteenth Century:

1. Searching for Frames of meaning.
2. The works of Jane Austen.
3. Victorian Poetry
4. Americanising American Literature

Question 2

What are the historical backgrounds and topoi of the pre-victorian Female Novel particularly personified by Jane Austen?

Answer 2

1. Growth in female readership and authorship: Towards the end of the 18th century more female authors are publicizing texts.
2. There was a supposed need for the education of manners
3. negotiation of class differences
   (upper vs. middle class)
4. materialism and (vs.?) emotionality
   (romance and/or marriage plot)
5. Discussion of gender roles as social constructs (?)
6. love relationships as models of human interaction:
   mutual respect, self-awareness, maturity
7. the conduct book and the (counter-)discourses of
   female education
8. They often had female names in the title and deal with young women from the middle classes having to find a husband from the upper class if they want to survive. The plot is often taking place at the time when these young women are placed on the marriage market.

Question 3

What is typical of Janes Austen’s novels?

Answer 3

1. Use of free indirect discourse. (First british author to use this style).
2. They are more psychologically subtle and interested in real human relationships than previous novels. (She is the first female author that uses psychological realism)
3. The Focus on female characters between autonomy and adherence to patriarchal gender constructions.
4. They fulfilled the allegorical function of the romance plot by bringing the middle and upper classes together.
5. Other Topoi were: Moderation, Connecting reason and feeling, and
   the concept of the gentleman.
6. Notions of honor, shame and truthfulness.

Question 4

How was Victoria stylised?

Answer 4

As symbol of stability in times of drastic change due to her long reign.

Often being depicted as part of her family which is interconnected throughout Europe (Queen Victoria as grandmother of Europe and progress).

Question 5

Name the victorian ambivalences

Answer 5

1. Change and Conservatism
2. Progress and Decay (Living and Working conditions didntt progress at the same time as Machinery and Economics)
3. Euphoria and Doubt (Doubt in religion, but belief that things will only get better in the future.
4. Prosperity and Poverty (Massive Pauperism and the division between lower and working class)
5. Morality and Hypocrisy
6. Realism and aestheticism

Question 6

What are some of the transformations the perception of time goes through in the 19th century?

Answer 6

1. Standardisation of time through required by increased travel.
2. Globalisation of time and colonisation. (Progress led to transformations of time place and distance).
3. Measurability.
4. Modern Modes of communication (1865 telegraph cable between England and America is established.)

Question 7

What was life as a worker in 19ht century like?

Answer 7

1. The Workers were attuned to the rythm of the machines. (The machines were often running 24 hours a day with children and women often working)
2. Child labour: 1833 factory act (Visualizing the massive exploitation as the ugly part of the industrialisation).
3. Pauperism (Middle class persons could go through their entire life without meeting the workers that caused their prosperity).

Question 8

What were characteristics off Victorian Poetry?

Answer 8

1. Poetry as a major medium of lay philosophy
2. book-length poems read by middle- and upper-class readership
3. approaching feelings of loss and insecurity (Many poets were adressing this feeling of loss and insecurity which is caused by the rapid change)
4. an ‘objective viewpoint’ (beyond the self-centredness of the Romantic lyrical speaker)
5. social relevance and ‘realism’ (e.g. Survival of the fittest/Darwinism)
6. Many people turned to it for reassurance and lay philosophy.

Question 9

Who is Alfred Lord Tennyson?

Answer 9

The proto-typical victorian poet

Question 10

Who are the Mid-Victorian Poets and their main topoi?

Answer 10

1. Matthew Arnold: Retreat and Isolation
2. Robert Browning: Dramatic monologues
3. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning: Extending the petrarchan sonnet

Question 11

Who are the Pre-Raphaelites?

Answer 11

The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of English artists, poets, and critics who formed a movement in the mid-19th century, specifically around 1848. They were known for their desire to reform art and literature by rejecting what they considered the mechanistic approach of academic painting that had become dominant after Raphael (hence the name “Pre-Raphaelites”). They sought inspiration from earlier art styles, particularly from the late medieval and early Renaissance periods before Raphael’s influence.

Their founders were:

1. Dante Gabriel Rossetti
2. Christina Rossettii

Question 12

What is the Main Theme From the early republic to the american renaissance?

Answer 12

Americanising American literature.

1. Barlow attempting tto write a national epic
2. The frontier experience as a cultural meeting ground that is also distinct and inaccessible for the british.
3. First female novelists questioning gender and race categories (Women were emerged in all parts of the american society at the time).
4. The American Renaissance brought about a national canon that was split in optimists and pessimists.

Question 13

Which movement did the Optimists of the american renaissance represent?

Answer 13

Transcendentalism

Question 14

Which movement did the Pessimists of the american renaissance represent?

Answer 14

Dark Romanticism

Question 15

What were the take-home messages for session 9?

Answer 15

• Jane Austen‘s novels are sensitive to the gradations in the class
  system and to human psychological entanglements
• the Victorian period is characterized by a tension between progress and stability, euphoria and doubt
• industrialisation and urbanisation
• much Victorian poetry negotiated pervasive feelings of loss, doubt, and insecurity, but turned from the Romanticist preoccupation on the individual to larger scenes
• the sonnet continued to be used to express concepts of human
  relations
• American literature became more aware of its independence from continental models

Question 16

What were the overarching topics of the of the tenth session?

Answer 16

1. The individual and/vs. the social world
2. The victorian novel as a Medium of social analysis
3. The New England Brahmins

Question 17

Why is the 19th century described as the age of the Novel?

Answer 17

1. ca. 7000 novelists, ca. 60.000 works of fiction (including fiction
   for young adults)
2. à ca. 860 titles/year, 16/week
3. They brought ‘realism’ in an age of change
4. individual life cycles in the context of, and dependent on, society
5. the relevance of form: serial novels in monthly instalments or magazine serialization
6. three-decker novels (circulating libraries)

Question 18

What did the circulating library of Charles Edward Mudie work like?

Answer 18

Charles Edward Mudie‘s Circulating Library (Mudie’s Select Library; 1842-1895)
* subscription fee: one guinea (=21s) per year to borrow an unlimited number of titles, but only one
volume at a time (one novel could be distributed to three readers)
* cf. average worker’s wage: 12s (simple worker) to 24s (skilled worker) per month
* standard prize for a three-decker novel in a book shop: one-and-a-half guineas (31s 6d)
* Mudie payed publishers only 15s – exploiting his market monopoly
* censorship

Question 19

How did the circulating library W.H. Smith perform?

Answer 19

Well due to its position in trainsttations where people could lend ttheir books for tthe ride.

Itt was a lending library with mostly one volume eddittions which however also sold cheap copiies to keep.

Question 20

What are the subgenres of the Victorian Novel?

Answer 20

1. Novel of Society.
2. Novel of Development.
3. Condition of England novel/iindustrial novel
4. “popular” novel
5. New Woman novel

Question 21

What were the topoi of the Novel of Society?

Answer 21

1. the individual in society: panoramic and personal
   views
2. conflict with social norms / values
3. negotiation of validity of values
4. conflicts of aims and motivations, vested interests
   and pressure groups
5. analysis of social categories (class, gender, age)

Question 22

What were the topoi of the Novel of Development?

Answer 22

• novel of development / education /
  apprenticeship (Bildungsroman)
• model: Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
  (1795/96)
• female novel of development (About the role of women, womens professions and class)
• novel of negative development

Question 23

What were the topoi of the Condition-of-England Novel (IIndustrial Novel)?

Answer 23

• industrialization and changed realities
• the „novel of social consciousness“
• analyses of the distribution of powers
  (financial, political, physical)
• working class life/hardships
• changes from pre-industrial to industrial England
• the working class as the the middle-classes’ “Other” (As antagonists)?

Question 24

What were the topoi of the Popular Novel?

Answer 24

• negotiation of values, questioning and reaffirming dominant discourses
  (subversion and containment)
• sensation novel, crime / detective novel (mid viictorian)
• melodrama
• continuations of the Gothic and adventure novel (extremely popular and reembursing racism and british morals. Assetion of hegemonic ideas of reality) (late victorian)
• the morality system is turned on its head.
• The idea was that middle-class morality is shown, but everybody carries a side he is hiding.
• Villains are typically not from the british middle-class. Fears are projected to the outside.

Question 25

What were the topoi of the New Woman Novel?

Answer 25

• late-Victorian re-definitions of femininity – fictional and real
• against the legal, material, ideological discrimination of women (Against the idea that women were to be mothers).
• ‘purity’ school: against double standards of morality (men were almost never made responsible e.g. syphilis epidemic)
• ‘neurotic’ school: impossibility of developing new roles for women (Novels in which women who want to break out fail and turn “crazy”)
• Both female and male writers wrote New Woman novels.
• Women can have erotic desires and can formulate them to the outside world.

Question 26

What is “New” about the New Woman?

Answer 26

She didn’t aspire to early viictorian beauty standards preferiing pragmattism as she enrolled in the work force and ini general ttook more agency. The new women wore new clothes and turned on the expectations men had plastered on them for centuries.

Question 27

What is the backgroundd of the New England Brahmins/Fireside poets?

Answer 27

1. Boston as the centre of cultural activities
2. ‘Brahmins’ = highest caste in the Indian caste system
3. families with roots in earliest settlements, the ‘establishment’
4. steeped in (European) culture and history, ethical commitment
5. Regarded themselves as literary aristocracy.

Question 28

What are tthe characteristtics of the firesiides poetts works?

Answer 28

1. very popular, family entertainment
   (suitable for fireside reading)
2. conventional poetic style
3. topics: national pride, romanticism, the notion of ’freedom’, abolitionism
4. Middle class moraliity and conservatism (conventional non-flagrant poetry)
5. Indians were often presented as noble savages because civilization hadn’t yet taken their nobiliity away.

Question 29

Whatt were tthe take-home messages aftter session 10?

Answer 29

• the novel became the major literary genre in the Victorian period
• the novel was ’realist’ in its negotiation of topical concerns of
  Victorian society, but its plotlines, characters and character
  constellations were still heavily constructed
• in the realm of popular fiction, gothic elements were revived for the negotiation of central Victorian anxieties concerning, e.g., gender, class, progress, and property
• in America, a literary establishment developed on the East coast that dominated literary culture throughout the country
• topics and styles were mostly compatible with a patriotic, middleclass mentality
• some poetry took on a political stance (abolitionism)

Question 30

What are tthe themes of 19th century american literatture?

Answer 30

1. Americanising American Literature
2. American Transcendentalism
3. Poetic Individualists in America
4. The New England Brahmins

Question 31

What are the characteristics of American Transcendentalism?

Answer 31

1. broad and vague term: heterogeneous group of non-conformists (transcending boundaries of thinking, traditions, institutions, hierarchies)
2. influence of British/European Romanticism, but less introspective, more utopian
3. individual spirituality
4. program of self-actualisation and perfectability
5. principle of self-reliance (American Dream)
6. Those writers thought of establishing a global brotherhood.

Question 32

What are the topoi of the leading transcendentalist thinker Ralph Walddo Emerson?

Answer 32

1. Idealism
2. Natture
3. Spiirituality

Question 33

What are the topoi of the transcenddentaliist Margaret Fuller?

Answer 33

Feminist transcendentalism: Women were engaged in work in all parts of the american society of the time.

Question 34

What are the topoi of the transcenddentaliist Henry David Thoureau?

Answer 34

Anti-consumerism and environmentalism

Question 35

Who are the main two 19th century poetic individualists in America?

Answer 35

1. Walt Whitman
2. Emily Diickiinson

Question 36

What are the main topoi of Emily Dickinson?

Answer 36

1. Orthodox religion vs. unconventional poetry.
2. idiosyncratic semantics, syntax and punctuation
3. Proto-Modernism (?)

Question 37

What are the main topoi of Walt Whitman?

Answer 37

1. American Nationalism
2. anti-conventional in use of metre, disregard of rhyme (= free verse), poetic form and content

Question 38

What were the take-home messages on American Literature?

Answer 38

1. American literature became more aware of its independence from continental models
2. a literary establishment developed on the East coast that dominated literary culture throughout the country
3. topics and styles were mostly compatible with a patriotic, middle-class mentality
4. in America, the use of Gothic motives, Transcendentalism and other forms of non-conformism can be seen as parallels to the facets of continental Romanticism
5. some poetry took on a political stance (abolitionism)

Question 39

What does the Fin-de-siecle notion stand for?

Answer 39

A particular cultural mood (pessimism) that something is being lost creating stories of horror and desperation at a time when census was loosing its grip.

Question 40

Whatt does tthe notiion of proto-moddernism sttandd for?

Answer 40

The term proto-modernism refers to a body of literary works, ideas, and movements that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, preceding and paving the way for the fully developed modernist movement. Proto-modernism captures the transitional phase in literature, where traditional forms and Victorian conventions were being questioned, and experimental techniques and themes characteristic of modernism were starting to take shape.

Question 41

What does the Naturalism notion stand for?

Answer 41

Naturalism is a literary movement that emerged in the late 19th century as an extension and intensification of realism. It sought to portray life with a heightened emphasis on accuracy and scientific objectivity, often exploring the darker and more deterministic aspects of human existence.

Question 42

Are women part of the workforce in the 19th century?

Answer 42

Atleast for the middle classes, women weren’t supposed to work but got education. They often dream of marrying upwards (both socially and financially).

Question 43

What does the victorian ambivalence Change and Conservatism refer to?

Answer 43

The nineteenth century is an age of massive quick changes…Newly invented means of transport thus also new ways for mail. Invention of telegraph system, photography and film.)
This is also personified in Victoria who is very modern and took a liking to modernity whilst at the same time being a symbol stability through her long reign.

Question 44

What does the victorian ambivalence progress and decay refer to?

Answer 44

Belief in progress of life by overcoming the forces of nature. Darwins theories led to a fear that what we might return to what we come from.

A new believe in what is possible and what wasn’t but on the opposite of progress is the loss of faith and disillusion of many due to the repic change and scientific discoveries of extinct species and plants (Fossile hunting became a popular sport) Before that period people believed that the earth was roughly six thousand years old. It was clear, that the dinosaurs were older than the six thousand years assumed.

Question 45

What does the victorian ambivalence prosperity and poverty refer to?

Answer 45

Immense prosperity among the trading middle classes through entrepreneurism is accompanied by the exploitation which leads to poverty (pauperism).

Question 46

What does the victorian ambivalence Morality and Hypocrisy refer to?

Answer 46

Naked female bodyparts were to be covered at all times while at the same time prostitution was at the peak in the victorian age; Extreme underside of the victorian prudity.

Question 47

What is Pteridomania?

Answer 47

The craze for ferns. The ferns were what connected the people to the dinosaurs. People had private terrariums growing ferns.

Question 48

What are the topoi of Matthew Arnold?

Answer 48

Retreat and isolation (wrote Dover Beach: encapsulates notions of loss of faith and the retreat into the private life] Thus the nuclear family became the antidot to this disillusion caused by progress [idea that faith connected the world but is now gone])

Question 49

What are the topoi of Robert Browning?

Answer 49

He is most well known for his dramatic monologue: Historical person as narrator and we intend to understand his psychology [Was interested in the role of women in the society] Against the notion of women being “either pure or sluts”)

Question 50

What are the topoi of Elizabeth Barrett Browning?

Answer 50

1. She wrote love letters to Robert Browning in the form of poems.
2. Introduced new concepts of love = Finding Love for loves sake.
3. She plays with the form of the sonnett.

Question 51

What were the topoi of the pre-raphaelites?

Answer 51

1. Aestheticist escapism (Why would i look where it is ugly? They only wanted to look where it is beautiflul)
2. They wanted to paint like medieval painters again going back before Raphael (thus pre-raphaelites)
3. They wanted something different than the realism the royal academy of arts was promoting. They were looking for more aestheticism and lived together a secluded life.
4. They again turned to the petrarchan sonnets.

Question 52

What does americanising American literature refer to?

Answer 52

In the second half of the 19th century the Americans realised what it meant to be American. The overarching idea that the American people were chosen to rule over the continent by god and bring the light of civilisation to the country. They started a movement of american literature to distinct themselves from the confinement of “Britishness”…The American Renaissance.

Question 53

What does the decadent movement refer to?

Answer 53

The decadent movement as opposite to Art must fulfil a purpose in society. Art should no longer be realistic because the reality is ugly.

Whatever you find beautiful is beautiful…Beauty is in the eye of the individual.

Question 54

What does dandyism refer to?

Answer 54

A decadent sort of rockstar lifestyle.

Question 55

What was told about Oscar Wilde in the lecture?

Answer 55

1. His maincharacters sin in hedonism
2. According to him everything you surround yourself with should be beautiful.
3. He was mainly known for his witty expressions.
4. He fashioned himself as a dandy.
5. His style is about provoking the victorian understanding of art and decency.
6. He was a relatively open homosexual and was convicted to indecent behaviour.
7. Topoi of love, despai and prostitution.
8. He was taking inspiration from the renaissance.

Question 56

What does Individualism refer to?

Answer 56

Individualism in American poetry refers to the celebration of the unique, autonomous self and the expression of personal experience, perspective, and creativity. It aligns with broader cultural and philosophical themes in American thought, where individual freedom, self-reliance, and non-conformity are emphasized. In poetry, this concept manifests through a focus on the subjective voice, an exploration of personal identity, and a resistance to traditional constraints or collective norms.

Question 57

What was noted on the Fireside poets in the lecture?

Answer 57

1. They represented the literary establishment (and regarded themselves as literary aristocracy).
2. They come from families with roots in the earliest settlements.
3. They carried a conservative/traditional middle-class morality.
4. They were staying in connection to europe.
5. Their topics were: national pride, romanticism, the notion of individual freedom and abolitionism.
6. They regularly represented indians as “noble savages” because civilisation hadn’t yet taken their nobility away.

Question 58

Which caesura happened in the 1880s?

Answer 58

Due to many crises that the empire endured including the death of Queen Victoria many beliefs that were cherished by the victorians began to be disillusioned.