PILVI EKSAM

Visionary poetry and the role of thę poet in the Romantic period (Blake, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley).

BLAKE He was not very popular during his lifetime. His most circulated works released only 20-30 copies. It was said that Blake died singing songs of joy and triumph, songs which were described to be truly sublime in music and verse. He was born into a Dissenting tradition and remained religious, political and artistic radical throughout his life. He claimed to have seen Ezekiel, the prophet, sitting under a tree in an earlyage and insisted on getting visions by God, which he later interpreted as designs which interfused picture and word. He was a trained engraver and he transferred his poems to an etched copper plate, accompanying it with an appropriate illustration or decoration. He printed those later and elaborately hand-coloured them or printed in colour, which was a technique invented by him. His works interrelated image and text. The text and image do not follow or represent each other, but have to be interpreted separately; together they form a total text with co-operative or contradictory signs. His work was in many ways eclectic and syncretic. He had many influences, buthe mainly identified himself with Milton and his angels in Paradise Lost (both fallen and unfallen). He saw himself as a prophet, a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator, as he said. He was searching for new patterns of religious symbolism and experience. He was looking forward to a 'New Age', creating new myths to strive towards it. COLERIDGE Coleridge and Robert Southey (1774-1843) were both committed radicals who were devoted to plan the foundation of an ideal commune based on Godwinian libertarian principles. Most of Coleridge's early work is tinged by radicalism and by an urge to proclaim a political cause, namely a Godwinian cause, which in his eyes was threatened by the PM Pitt and by Burke and Sheridan who were adored by the 'brainless mobs'. He shared his opinions of revolutionary enthusiasm for change in society and literature and later in nature with Wordsworth. They were close friends as Coleridge helped WW to articulate his ideas and to explore unfamiliar intellectual territory (a rejection of Godwinism). His conversation poems moved away distinctly from the declared style of sonnets to a new intimate style, from the Miltonic style to the Cowperian. His poems held a sense of joy in the detail of the natural world and a profound awareness of its unity, a power which he believed to transcend both separation and temporary confinement. In his poems he seeks benevolence and universal harmony from nature. His Kubla Khan(1797) shows Coleridge's knowledge of mythology history and religion. The poem is a 'fragment', because that was all he remembered from a dream, where he wrote 200-300 lines and was interrupted by a business call. Like, Blake, he recognised complementary states of being, but unlike him, he attempted to argue for wholeness and for continuity in self-consciousness as the dynamic of human creativity. His philosophy is mostly a personal apologia and a public discourse on metaphysics, he was a very traditional philosopher. BYRON Properly George Gordon, he alone managed to eclipse Scott's primacy as the best-selling poet of the second decade of the 19th century. He never attempted to rival him as a novelist though; in fact he admired him and wished to 'someday get drunk with him'. Byron gained immediate celebrity with his 1812 Childe Harold, or as he himself said 'I awoke one day and found myself famous'. To his readers, Byron was the most articulate voice of the post-revolutionary era and the writer who could most fluently express the spirit of the age. If Scott was the insider explaining the evolution of the past into the present and reconciling historic contradictions, Byron was by choice the outsider, who was vexed and amused by the anomalies of his own time and culture. He despised and undervalued the contemporary writers. Instead of contemplation of nature, his poetry is informed by public life and by recent history, by British politics and by the feverish European nationalisms stirred by the FR. Byron the liberator and libertine was the self-conscious commentator of his times, relishing his fame and enjoying the Romantic pose of opposing to the society. He had a profound effect on his fellow-artists around Europe with his sullen and restless 'Byronic' hero taking on an international currency as if all societies had universally conspired to complicate his destiny. He never cast himself in the role of a latter-day spokesman for a received culture. Instead, he spoke as an outsider and an exile, an articulator of disdain not simply dissent. He did not praise many (calling Coleridge turgid and Wordsworth simple). He reserved it for Scott and the 'Monk' Lewis. He departed to the Mediterranean in 1809 to seek alternative ways of thought. His Childe Harold describes the western Mediterranean scarred by war and the 'sad relic' of Greece decaying under the Ottoman misrule, but he also depicted memories of feuds and passions of recent times and of history which he was completely sick of. The poem easily and comically turns between extremes of suffering and luxury, hunger and excess, longing and satiety, ignorance and knowingness, shifting appearance and an equally shifting reality. His poetry emerges from an energetic restlessness tempered by an amused detachment rather than being a carefully formulated theory of literature. It's this writing out of passion that made him the most popular romantic. SHELLEY He was Byron's friend and a companion in self-imposed exile. He had an equally low view of 'public applause' and a distinct distaste for the British Establishments, both literary and political. Unlike Byron, his works come from a consistent ideology, determined by a philosophical scepticism questioning its Platonic roots as much as rejecting Christian mythology and morality. He wrote The Necessity of Atheism which got him expelled from University College at Oxford in 1811. Even though his works consistently depict atheism, his later works suggest a search for the source of 'Power' and 'reason' which he acknowledged to be implicit in wild nature and in the inspiration of poetry. He was fascinated in revolutionary politics, influenced by his father-in-law William Godwin. He went further than to simply oppose to liberty and tyranny; he explored future possibilities in attempting to adduce egalitarianism and moved beyond the general disillusion resultant of the defeat of the ideals of the FR. He was constantly seeking possibilities of new perceptions and orders, which was the root of his intellectual idealism. He was deeply disgusted by the 'Peterloo' massacre and hoped for an English revolution. In his The Revolt of Islam (1818), he describes the doomed but heroic struggle for liberations against the oppressing Ottoman Empire. The poem reflected on the temporary failure of the liberating impulse of the FR and on the present state of Britain. The poem was written to kindle an enthusiasm for liberty and justice in his readers. His Hellas was inspired by the Greek rebellion against the Ottoman rulers, prophesising a triumph of the Greek cause. His Prometheus derives from Milton's Satan, whom Shelly, like Blake, saw as a moral being far superior to his God, but it's essentially a heroic struggle concerned with more than self-vindication. His battle with tyranny brings liberty both to the body and spirit and as a heightened senseof consciousness which implies a wider liberation from enemies both internal and external. In his A Defence of Poetry (1821/1840), he most confidently proclaims the essentially social function of poetry and the prophetic role of the poet. He saw poetry as a liberator of the individual moral sense. He saw the imagination as the synthesiser and unifier of the reason, which finds its ultimate expression in poetry. He claimed Shakespeare, Dante and Milton to be philosophers of the mightiest power and Plato, Bacon and such were claimed to be poets. The essay states that poetry prefigures other modes of thought and anticipates the formulation of a social morality. Love is the great secret of morals, feeding the imagination. Basically the poet tells the truth and shows the beauty in everything and the philosophers speak rubbish. The poet is above all a liberator and an explorer. He basically claimed the poet to be the hero of the society.

Reflective and nature poetry in the Romantic period (Cowper, Burns, Crabbe, Clare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats).

COWPER C. celebrates the natural world in blank verse and is attached to his local landscape. Late 18th and early 19th century were filled with both evangelical religion and international political engagement. In the battle against slave-trade and against colonial slavery itself, pious sentiment and moral conviction went hand in hand with political action. Cowper embodies these contradictory movements better than anyone else. He was constantly depressed by religious melancholia and a strong Calvinist sense of sin and damnation. He was very anti-urban, anti-court and retired from city life. This did not mean forhim a desire for solitary contemplation or a removal from secular concerns. He describes that when retiring from the urban society, one meets a lack of society, friendship and love. His verses are against oppression, slavery and colonial intrusion into non-European societies. In The Task (1784), he complains about colonial oppression, condition of the poor at home, the corruption of London and its commercial enterprise, the conduct of war, etc. The poem itself deals with landscape scenes and meditation, yet the main character is a prisoner in Bastilles, a victim of tyranny. Cowper's liberty yearns not only for political liberty, but religious liberty as well. The poems books are each written in a separate season, describing his local surroundings, but the newspaper that arrives at his door, allows him to view the world at a safe distance. The urban environment itself is rejected in favour of therapeutic stillness of the nature. He steadily grew more popular. BURNS He saw the Bible as the book of liberty and created visions based upon it. He was a Scottish Presbyterian, believing in the ideal of human community in the classless brotherhood of Freemasonry. Scotland was beginning to prosper under the Act of Union and Edinburgh became a leading artistic, educational and intellectual centre of Europe. His poetry remained close to its vital roots and oral traditions of Scotland. Hecollected folk-songs and made a few of his own in poetry. He was a distinctly national poet, writing mostly in dialects. His best works are satirical or descriptive of the hardness of rural work, uprightness of 'honest poverty'and the roughness of country amusements. His expression of human solidarity which could dispense with class distinction came from his intimate understanding of the rural community from where he came. CRABBE Although he was a contemporary of Wordsworth and concerned himself with the relationship of character and rural environment, he remained rooted in earlier traditions of poetic representations and in established moral and religious prescriptions. His mentors were Pope, Goldsmith and Johnson and he was introduced to a London literary establishment attached to conservative norms in poetry by Burke. He was a respected parish priest more concerned with charity than revolution, more with the relief of suffering. He was a conservative poet, staying true to the 18th century poetic norms. He was a determined anti-pastoralist and sought to provide a real picture of the poor. He interprets village life as a life of pain; his towns are dotted with human and architectural wreckage and haunted by rejection and the poor house. Byron admired him as the nature's sternest painter, Hazlitt considered him a renderer of discoloured paintings of life and a misanthrope in verse. He also influenced Scott's novels with his interconnections between character and environment. His views were based from a loyally Anglican understanding of the nature of society, ranks, relationships and responsibilities. His representation of nature in poems is confined to a picture of a co-operative working environment, conditioned by the shifting moods and patterns of the sea. His contemporaries saw his work as a defect of the high imagination, but Coleridge and later romantics became to appreciate his style, explaining that it has a power of a certain kind. CLARE He was a rural writer, heralding the coming period of reassessment and lost content (Victorian era). He was employed in various ill-paid agricultural jobs and was highly aware of the changes brought about in the countryside by the extension of the estates of the gentry through the parliamentary Acts of Enclosure. He was seen as the English Burns as he managed to publish his works on poverty through chance. He was not determined to have his provincial voice manipulated to be acceptable to upper-class or metropolitan tastes. His phrases and wording is provincial. He was not untutored though, he learned readily from Cowper and Byron, but he was aware that his sense of locality gave him an individual voice. His poetry took delight in the profuse variety of the natural world, but instead of describing the poverty or the threat of the workhouse, he described the social and private ramifications of the Fall (of Victorian Era?). WORDSWORTH He expanded on Burns' ideas of rural communal relationships greatly. He was a great fan of Burns, devoting a poem to him and making a trip to Scotland. In his Prefaceto Lyrical ballads(1798) he sought to find an appropriate language through humble and rustic life as there lay the essential passions of the heart and a better soil for attaining their maturity and because they speak a plainer and more emphatic language. He was seeking for these values to contrast the exclusively aristocratic or urban civilisation which was happening all around him. His early poetry was radical because it attempted to shift a literary perspective away from what he saw as gentility and false sophistication. Industrialisation and the urban environment became increasingly uglier and intolerable. He was born in the mountainous Lake District where he saw an acute sensitivity to wild nature and the co-operative workings of humankind and nature. His early poetry is marked by protest against unnecessary suffering, injustice, incomprehension and inhumanity. He, unlike others partially retreated from politics to escape to the nature. His love for nature was intensified by the acute class divisions in urban industrialisation and the depopulation of the countryside. He was most disgusted by the explosion of social questioning presented by FR. The understanding of society was secondary to the experience of a natural world still largely undamaged by human mismanagement. He believed nature to be morally educative. His Prelude showed his egotistical sublime, where he rendered the poet the hero of his own poetic life, or the period of preparation for self-expression in poetry. The poet's destiny is to experience and prepare to express himself. He moved further than all of his descendants in natural descriptions. He didn't represent the nature as a painting, as his neo-classicist predecessors had, but he represented nature as a dynamic, panoramic, variously lit, multitudinous and shot through with the creative energy of God. Wordsworth's landscape is at once useful and massive, historic and impersonal, peopled and empty, readable, yet infinitely larger than the reader. He effectively completed his process of breaking old prejudices and tastes and pervasively made new ones for a whole generation to follow. SHELLEY Mont Blanc- He is contemplating on the mountain from a resort and is overthrown by the experience. Shelley loved writing, he also loved powerful descriptions. The eternity is important for the sublime. The Power lives on top of the mountain and is unreachable for us. We cannot comprehend it as mortals, it's sublime and infinite. The Power is also the source of creativity. Nature is eternal compared to man and his reason and reflecting on its sublimity takes one into a state of trance. The trance itself is overwhelming because it is an exchange of knowledge between the eternity and the human mind. We can only glimpse this power through imagination indirectly (Neo-Platonism), we are left with the recognition of the Power, but no comprehension when it hits us. The Power itself manifests at the peak of the mountain, eternal and life giving, its surroundings are dead and icy. The sublime is never beautiful; the joy comes from the lack of harmony. The lifeless mountain speaks life. The Mountain is the ultimate intelligence holding the universe together, eternal and Powerful like a God, but not a Christian God as Shelley was an atheist. Everything earthly is at the bottom below. The twist of the poem lies in the fact that the Power could not be, if there weren't a human imagination who'd listen to it speak. KEATS Ode to a Nightingale (p. 55)- Keats died of tuberculosis when he was 23. He wanted to get away from the city to stop this. He was an autodidact and was not taken seriously. He was part of the second generation of romantic poets. In Nightingale he writes about tuberculosis which spread largely amidst the soot and shit of the industrial era. This poem was his last (1819). Nature with its purity has healing powers, but it cannot defeat death.

The major High Victorian novelists (Dickens, Gaskell, Thackeray, Trollope, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot).

DICKENS He was highly influenced by Carlyle's writings describing the condition of England of the early Victorian age. Dickens too dealt with his 'Condition of England Question'. He learned to direct his fiction to a questioning of social priorities and inequalities, to a distrust of institutions and to an appeal for action and earnestness. He campaigned against what he saw as injustice using his fiction as the weapon. Dickens was not perhaps the most radical of propagandists, but nonetheless the success of his propaganda lay in his charming writing style and its appeal to a large spectrum of readers. Christianity was the moral basis of his thought, action and writing. A critical awareness that there was something deeply wrong with his era gave his fiction its distinct political edge. He used comedy to confront and subsume the anarchy all around him. His novels effectively reflect the nature of Victorian urban society with its conflicts and disharmonies, its eccentricities and constrictions, its energy and its extraordinary physical and intellectual fertility. He effectively transformed the 18th century modes of writing (Defoe, Goldsmith etc.) into the new age. Oliver Twist(1837-8) for example dealt with the New Poor Law of 34 and the cruelty of the workhouses and to an extent managed to do away with them. In his Nicholas Nickleby(1838-9) series he attacked the snobbery of the aristocracy and the inefficiency of the Parliament and the aggression of market capitalism. This novel made him the dominant novelist of his time. People talked of his characters as if they had grown up with them. His later fiction was darker and tidier, like his most popular novel David Copperfield(1849-50). His main concern with the condition of England lay in the Industrial Revolution and its negative effects on London and Northern England. Despite his specific details and the acuteness of his observation, he could not be defined as a realist as he rarely speculatedover the workings of his characters' minds and he is probably the creator of a surprisingly varied line of murderers and Gothic villains. GASKELL Her most popular novels take place in the industrial Manchester, which as Carlyle also recognised, was the urban phenomenon of the age. It has pioneered the factory system and exploited huge amounts of human and physical energy; it's a truly sublime city. It was said that science is to the modern world what Art was to the ancient and that Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens. Gaskell observed the problems of rapid industrialisation through all this commercial success of manufacture, noting the same divisions of class, labour and quality of life as did Friedrich Engels in his critical texts about Manchester. The strengths of her Mary Barton (1848) lie not in its political analysis or its suggested resolution, but in its detailing, observation and careful establishment of contrasted ways of living, working and perceiving. It also exposes the ignorance of the readers who knew nothing of the living conditions of Manchester slums. Her second Manchester novel, North and South (1855), views class-conflicts from a politically optimistic viewpoint instead, offering compromise. It also points to the independence of industrial workers and their pride in themselves which survived despite the appalling working and living conditions which they had to endure. THACKERAY He came into novel writing relatively late in his life. His early novels experimented with criminal literature. He wrote The Luck of Barry Lyndon in 1852, the protagonist of which deserts the Seven Year War and becomes a professional gambler. Barry is a congenital liar and is continually corrected by the narrator. The novelist held the novel in little esteem though. He attempted to disconcert narratives as he wrote the Vanity Fair series which denied heroism to its characters and questioned all of their pretentions to vice and virtue. All of the achievements of the characters are squashed by the narrator who demands ever more of them. Thackeray's narrator is a preacher and a showman, manipulating the puppets of the story. His later novel's characters find themselves to be their enemies which partly owes to a Victorian seriousness. Like Scott, he mixed the private and the public, but most of his narrators were confused by the era. TROLLOPE He was Thackeray's most determined admirer. Trollope mistrusted the campaigns, prejudices and tear-jerkings of Dickens and Carlyle. He was the most informed political novelist in English, but his politics are those of parliamentary scandals, of country-house shuffles and of personalities in conflict and in mutual complement. He himself tried to be a neutral writer when it came to party politics, which fascinated him as an observer of human tribalism and ambition. He tried to enter Parliament himself, but his campaign was a disaster. In his The Prime Minister (1876) he proved that power is both elusive and hollow. He learned from Thackeray that heroes and ideals are constantly challengeable and judgement is always conditional. Despite his easy-going tolerance, he distrusted both politics and politicians. He received bad schooling and was neglected by his parents. He published 47 novels, travel books, biographies, essays and critical works which were written by determined daily self-discipline and an addiction to routine. He was capable of writing everywhere, every day. His novels take a comical look on political processes not as national or parliamentary acts, but as a series of petty ploys and manoeuvres and a clash of personalities. He had an ambition to relieve parliamentary concerns by putting in love and intrigue and social incidents with a dash of sport for the sake of his readers. BRONTE sisters Charlotte Bronte (1816-55) was also an admirer of Thackeray, claiming his early satirical journalism and first works of fiction as statements emanating from the first social regenerator of the day. She even dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him. She lived in a secluded parsonage with her sisters Emily (1818-48) and Anne (1820-49), but nonetheless shared with them an informed, yet detached view of the wider world. The sisters immersed themselves in the ideological debates publicised in the great journals of the time andthe late works of European Romanticism. Their first collaborative fictions are variations on oriental and Gothic extravaganzas heightened by modern political realities and personalities. In their adult fiction, escapism is diminished in the face of an oppressive, isolating present; the romanticism and Gothicism are still creativelytransmuted in those. Charlotte's first mature novel was not accepted by publishers, but Eyre was completed in three weeks and enthusiastically accepted by them in 1847. The novel was and remains an extraordinary phenomenon as a completely assured and provocative piece of realist fiction. It seemingly came out of thin air, ascribed to the genderless editor 'Currer Bell', obviously female judging by the narrative. The book has established itself as a classic and popular love-story, insisting on independence as forcefully as it recognises the importance of sexual and marital interdependence. It recognises the virtues of self-discipline and rejection as much as it tests the probity of passionate commitment. Jane's narrative burns with a sense of injustice both sexual and religious. Jane is feeling restraint, yet never giving up in her search to find a partner worthy of her intelligence, wit and determination. She rejects both an adulterer and a missionary. Her later novels dealt with politics of the day, dealing painfully with the issues of women's choice and employment. The sisters wrote under non-specific pseudonyms, leaving it unclear whether the novels were written by a single person, a collaboration or different people. Charlotte was quite an unsympathetic critic of her sisters' works. Wuthering Heights writtenby Emily in 1847 got no praise. The readers admired the novel for its extraordinary narrative complexity though. It opposes freedom and restraint, love and pain, while holding these oppositions in different geographical areas. The narrative seems arbitrary, but becomes less so through the act of reading, remaining one of the most unconventional and demanding of all English novels in its Gothic and confusion. ELIOT She introduced the new fiction of the 1860s, being the most earnestly imperative and the most probingly intelligent of the great mid-Victorian novelists. Her seriousness was readily praised andacclaimed by the reviewers. Queen Victoria read her Adam Bede (1859) with such pleasure that she keenly recommended it to her royal relatives and also commissioned two paintings of scenes from the novel. The appeal of her book lay in its detailed and sympathetic representation of a rural community in the recent past, a workingcommunity free of the confusions and contradictions of the industrial and urban present. She also introduced a new kind of heroism which manifested from the conditions and the morality of ordinary country life. Despite her deliberate masculine pseudonym and the ruse that her narrator had the tastes, opinions and clothes of a man, Dickens said that no man had ever before the art of making himself mentally so like a woman. She had to maintain the pseudonym, because she was regarded an adulteress and a religious sceptic, she won respect on the merits of her work alone. Her narrative voice not only calls for a sympathetic intellectual and emotional response from readers, but more insistently, for a flexible and demanding moral one. She was a learned woman philosophically. She mixed historical conditioning and progressive development in her novels. Her novels were far removed from the 'Condition of England' novels of the 40s, being political, but not radical. She studied provincial life and put it masterfully into her novels, her heroines were realistic, not ambitious and knew thatthey would, among with men be swept away by culture in the future.

Radical and conservative responses to the revolutions in America and France (Gibbon, Burke, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft).

GIBBON He was the greatest English historian of the 18th century. He was quite sceptical of the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution. He did not believe the Revolution to be a new dawn for humanity. He had thorough knowledge of the ancient Roman Empire and its fall and he did not believe that the French Empire would be rebuilt by a society intent on merely demolishing the political structures of the Middle Ages. His history The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire looked back to a lost era of civic duty, military and patriotic service and to the principle of public participation in national affairs but his history did not seek to predict how the ideals of a new generation of 'patriots' might be formed. Instead of being excited about the modern cause, he posed troubling questions about the past Empire. His vast historical narrative made it possible to compare the modern developments with the ancient and question modern assumptions about progressive development. The Romantic period of 1780 to 1830 was more open to conflicting interpretation than most others as the contemporaries of Gibbon such as William Blake and Ann Radcliffe seemed to belong to a new age and sensibility, which seemed to be the opposite opinion of Gibbon's scepticism. The age itself was moulded by the impact of the revolutionary upheaval in France and neutrality was difficult to maintain. The avoidance of taking sides or silence or withdrawal of commitment was the Romanticist way of reacting to it. It is, however, very hard to define 'Romanticism' as a variety of ways of writing, thinking about, criticising and defining literature were distinguishable their distinctions sharp and the era was one of diversity. BURKE He gave the most persuasive survey of the immediate consequences of the first stage of the FR in his Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to that Event (1790). He was one of the most polished parliamentary orators of his day, being a libertarian optimist. He stressed a need for tradition rather than innovation, for gradualism rather than radicalism. He once defended the principles of the American Revolution, but later attempted to explain the dangers of putting faith in such radical new orders. American rhetoric was fine, but the French philosophies of Rousseau were dangerous. He claimed that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a moral act regulated by the Bill of Rights; the 'metaphysical abstractions' that started the French Revolution seemed far from the ancestral freedoms which were close to English hearts. He was confident in accepting the British constitutional status quo and believed in a perfectly adequate representation of the British people in their existing Parliament. Despite this it can be seen that he tried to define a theory of government based on reasoned fear of the revolutionary reform. Burke mourned chivalry in France, but he did not write Reflections to mourn for the spirit of The Middle Ages, but to the 18th century conception of an equable political balance, a balance which he found to exist in the order of Britain. PAINE He was a committed nonconformist radical who supported both the American and French revolution. An independent republican, he made friends in those nations and powerful enemies at home. His books were burned at home and he was allowed to exile to Paris in 1792 and was granted French citizenship. He saw himself as a victim of discriminatory English laws and an heir to the 17th century revolutionary spirit (a supporter of the Jacobean claim; James III). His criticism of Burke's philosophy in The Rights of Man lacked Burke's elegance and systematic arguments, but the attack had a new faith in constitutionally defined rights and liberties. It was hostile towards the British Constitution. His most notorious work The Age of Reason (1794-6) was written when he was saved from the guillotine. In it, he claims the age of Revolutions to be poisonous to Christianity and atheism alike. This tract was dedicated to his fellow-citizens of the United States of America. He proclaimed theism and faith in a broad egalitarian morality of doing justice, loving mercy and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy. There, he rejected all forms of established, defined or 'revealed' religions. He claimed the books of Old Testament obscene, cruel and torturous. He claims the Word of God to be the creation that we behold and God himself stands for 'moral truth' not 'mystery or obscurity'. GODWIN He was born into a strong dissenting tradition an abandoned both his Calvinist theology and Congregationalist ministry in 1783 to follow a career of a journalist and pamphleteer. He was provoked by Burke's treatise and started writing a treatise of his own, the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice(1793). In it, he saw human happiness and social well-being as the sole purpose of existence, like Rousseau, but unlike him, he looks forward to a gradual melting away of all governments to be replaced by a system of radical anarchy. He wished law, government, property, inequality and marriage to be abolished as a gradual process through which, the human perfectibility would transcend existing limitations to fulfilled happiness. He held hatred for all forms of injustice, privilege and political or religious despotism. He wrote in the preface of his novel Things as They Are or, the Adventures of Caleb Williams(1794) that 'It is now known to philosophers, that the spirit and the character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society'. The novel was strongly anti-English government written as an adventure story. Chivalry, according to him, served to corrupt a noble mind and perverted the purest and most laudable intentions. He suggests that the survival and revival of aristocratic codes works as a disguise to, and a justification of, class-oppression. WOLLSTONECRAFT She was anti-Burke as well, protesting against his nostalgia for the age of chivalry by ridiculing upper-class codes of behaviour. Her treatise Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790) went beyond attacking the aristocratic values. She wrote that the greater part of humankind embraced the thraldom of women of all classes. She was part of Godwin's circle, which used fiction to propagate certain key aspects of the new revolutionary ideology. Her novels were radically feminist and original at the times. Her Mary (1788) and unfinished The Wrongs of Woman (1798) dealt with the evidence of a universal oppression of women by men. Mary was ironic, in a way, but hard-hitting. In the Wrongs she describes a heroine who is sensitive to landscape and ambience and who rejects intellectual passivity and sympathises with the new virtues of revolutionary France. Her most effective attempt to convey feminist ideals was in her A Vindication of the Rights of Women(1792), which was an adaptation of French revolutionary theory to the universal needs of women. She appealed to education and reason: education to render the further subjection of women indefensible and reason applied to all future questions of gender. The new order in France has a vital relevance to all future attempts to define relationships between class and class, gender and gender.

Modernist poetry (Pound, Lewis, Hulme, T. S. Eliot).

POUND he started the 'Imagistes' movement in 1912. He arrived in London from the US in 1909. He had a massive influence over the modernist poetry of the next 11 years. He was discerning and arrogant, stimulating to fellow-writers and discriminating about their work equally. He later lost popularity amongst the poets in his radicalism. LEWIS He was close to Pound as they had a co-operative relationship but it broke down after Lewis started to concern himself with painting and prose and Pound towards a highly complex referential poetry. His work mostly grated nerves more than shook foundations. He pioneered the modernist novel, by writing Tarr (1918) in which he attempted to eliminate anything less essential than a noun or a verb. Inhis later novels he argued that society had been inevitably revolutionised by mechanical change and that both change and revolution ought to be embraced by the artist. He addressed the problem of the divide between the artistic and intellectual elite and an indifferent mass. He determinedly abandoned the use of certain capital lettersas a gesture against the inherited privileging of certain words and titles. He slid towards an inevitable and lonelykind of Fascism in the late 1930s. HULME He died in the war, but wrote A Lecture on Modern Poetry before it, which gave rise to modernist poetry. He propagated the rejection of old forms as they were not fit for the new age. ELIOT hen his The Waste Land first appeared in 1922, it struck many as forcefully expressing the disordered and irregular nature of the modern condition in a language that was indisputably 'modern'. It gained in esteem and notoriety after it was published separately. He was the most important and influential English poet of his own and of the two subsequent generations, but he did not write his most popular poem as an Englishman. Like Pound, he was an American resident in London; unlike Pound, he had studied and found employment in England and taken British citizenship by 1927. He was also received to the Church of England. He did not agree with the critics who stated that he expressed the 'disillusionment of a generation'. He claimed that instead he may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, which was not his intention. He can be called an American and an English writer, but he was mainly a British one as much of his topography and awareness of public history and culture in his works are self-consciously British. He was a student in Harvard, where he became acquainted with a wide range of philosophical, historical and literary scholarship. He was deeply influenced by Baudelaire and Dante. He claimed Baudelaire to be the inventor of modern poetry and Dante, in contrast, to be the medieval and spiritual authority, which seemed to address the modern condition directly. He also claimed Dante's verse to be disciplined and easily intelligible. He was also majorly influenced by the metaphysical poets, justifying Donne's poetic thought as perfectly equipped for its work. The common man's experience is chaotic, irregular and fragmentary. He falls in love or reads Spinoza and these experiences have nothing to do with each other, but for the poet like Donne, the experiences are always forming new wholes. He was very learned in religion and compared other writers with his knowledge. He admired Shakespeare, Jonson, Andrewes, Marvell, Virgil, Dante and Baudelaire, but Milton, for him, fails aesthetically, Blake intellectually; Matthew Arnold he sees as a man who was more than an undergraduate in philosophy and theology and a philistine in religion. He acknowledges Yeats as a contemporary, but dismisses the agnostic Hardy. After showing Pound his 'Prufrock', Pound answered that he had finally found a self-trained American poet who had modernised himself on his own. Prufrock carefully presents himself as modestly fashionable and sociable but he also reveals an acute self-consciousness about the opinions of others. He indulges in the social niceties, but is aware of the impossibility of saying what he truly means in these. His Waste Land still remains a mystery in its ambitions. The poem's only unity lies in its exploration of a desert both physical and figuratively urban in its references to the'falling towers' of London, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria and Vienna. These metropolises all share the corruption and Eliot delves into this corruption like an archaeologist exploring the layers of broken civilisations. The urban wasteland also assumes a mythical identity as a landscape in which a quest for healing, fertility, power and meaning is pursued. The quest is both Arthurian and anthropological. It's most striking effects are its play of juxtapositions, inconsistency of perceptions, multiplicity of narrations and fluidity of time and place.

The Chivalric Revival (Scott, Digby, Tennyson).

SCOTT The main literary starting points for the medieval revival were Scott's novels which offered a stylised and simplified version of bygone ages and presented vividly a host of Merry England images. All of his historical novels celebrated feudal, chivalric or old-fashioned virtues, filled with examples of bravery, loyalty, hospitality, consideration towards women and inferiors, truth to a given word, respect for rank combined with a warm relationship between different ranks, and a refusal to take advantage of an enemy except in a fair fight. Scott's heroes were brave, honourable, proud of their birth, pure-minded, gentle to women and loyal to their masters. He basically combined the medieval knight with the modern gentleman and made these values ageless. During the French wars, translations of numerous romances popped up as well, but the stories of Arthur, which took place in Britain, remained the most important ones. During the 1800-20s saw the peak of the craze for building castles and collecting armour. DIGBY who was mad about chivalry and religion became a Catholic and showed that true chivalry and the Catholic Church go hand in hand and that the Reformation was the cause of the decay of chivalry. He brought chivalry up to date as a code of behaviour suitable for all men who wished to adopt it. For Scott, chivalry was a purely medieval phenomenon, for Digby it was a permanently valid code, which found a new evaluation in every age, but stayed the same regardless. He thought chivalrous virtues to be belief and trust in God, generosity, high honour, independence, truthfulness, loyalty to friends and leaders, hardihood and contempt of luxury, courtesy, modesty, humanity and respect for women. Anyone holding these qualities could call themselves a gentleman, irrespective of birth. Digby's most important arguments stated that character is more important than intellect, cold baths keep young men sexually pure, aristocrats and working men have a natural affinity between them as they both despise the middle classes and the idea of the 'natural gentleman', a peasant or a shepherd who has natural dignity but nodesire to rise above his station in life or equally the man of no birth who uses his abilities to be accepted amongst gentlemen of high birth. The only people not capable of acquiring this were the prosperous middle-classes. TENNYSON The Lady of Shallot (p. 80)- Tennyson tried to revive King Arthur tales after the chivalric revival had toned down. The poem was a very popular one, showing the two sides of Victorian society. Men and women used to work together, but once a man earned enough money to retire the lady to the suburbs and hire a maid, a woman could only stay at home and had nothing to do. Thus the woman was supposed to be the one who retired to the home, unpretentious and hidden. This was supposed to keep away temptation by hiding them at home. Lady of Shallot works at home all the time and no one knows of her existence. The moment she rebels, she is doomed. Desire was dangerous and lead to prostitution. London had millions of prostitutes on the streets. Ladies took care of men's morals at home and kept them away from temptation. The poem symbolises purity and fall. Epic and Morte d'Arthur (p.119)- Tennyson reintroduced Arthur as a modern gentleman, but he did so cautiously. His Epic was written as a Christmas Eve story (Christ's birth), to dampen its actual scope. The poem describes how the Christian faith is eroding and how Arthur needs to be revived to cure this.

The novel in the Romantic period (Smith, Burney, Austen, Edgeworth, Scott).

SMITH Her work was directly touched by the French Revolution, but she did not hold any radical causes in her fiction. The world was depicted as unstable and oppressive and it stimulated Gothic sensibilities on war and revolution, but generally it's observed as one providing an uncomfortable environment, in which the moral maturity of men and women is tested. Smith was a passive victim of a miserable marriage and wrote to make money and support her children. Her poems are powerful because of their combination of detailed observation and recurrent evocation of misery. Her novels are not as personal and emotional as her poems and are rather concerned with money, inheritance and the country house world. She expresses her doubt in ghosts in her Old Manor House (1793) which is a novel preoccupied with dilemmas, politics and the sentiments of the present. These novels are more concerned with romantic love and a proper line of succession BURNEY She was influenced by the FR as well, but neither did she express a radical cause in her fiction. She emphasized the passivity of her female protagonists. Her heroines enter the society at an awkward age or in unfavourable circumstances and are thus obliged to learn from mistakes, but they are also allowed to enjoy love and a happy marriage. She sympathised with the revolution, describing an English society far removed from the flirtuous Paris in her first novel. Her later works are more comical and deal with the heroine entering the world early. She also wrote a more tragic novel about a Camilla (1796), which presses home its moral message about the importance of good conduct. She insisted (against Wollstonecraft's feminism) in a later novel that the destiny of woman is enwrapt in more impenetrable obscurity than that of manand the proper education of a female is still to seek, a problem beyond human solution. Her heroines are often struggling, rejected and isolated. AUSTEN Wordsworth said that Austen's novels were an admirable copy of life, but he insisted that he nonetheless could not be interested in productions of that kind. This comment showed that the new gulf of poetry was going to become separate from the staid and older fashion of a literature which aspired merely to represent nature by copying it. Austen was an admirer of Johnson in prose, Crabbe in verse and Cowper in both. She jested that if she'd ever have to marry, she'd fancy being Mrs Crabbe. She shared the air of moderate Toryism in her family. Her novels do not commit actively to political, national and international affairs. The class to which she belonged and which she describes in her novels were not shaken by national politics, but the immediate aftermath of FR and the threat of a French invasion and the Napoleonic Empire that fought against the repressive Tory governments touched home. Even though Austen's family was connected with the war, she eschewed the topic in her novels. Austen's upper-middle-class world is seen as secure in its values, privileges and snobberies. It is a society which defines itself very precisely in terms of land, money and class and accepts that rank is an essential part of life. Its attachment to nature and natural scenery is only expressed in enthusiasms for picnics and seaside walks. Her work stood apart from the preoccupations of her many literary contemporaries in this, but she was the voice of her class and her time. It is a conservative, but not necessarily a reactionary class. When the Jacobin libertarians spoke of rights, she spoke of duties; when they looked for steady human improvement, Austen remained sceptical about the nature of the fallen human condition. She sees the 'Romantic' insistence of passion in an ironic key. Her moral message is infused with an ideological insistence on the merits of good conduct, good manners, sound reason and marriage as an admirable social institution. Her heroines are intelligent and witty, egotistic and independent, but all gain emotional fulfilment later on. In her Pride and Prejudice (1813), first impressions, illusions and subjective opinions give way to detachment, balance, reasonableness and reassessment. The education that Austen requires of her major characters is also required of her readers. These novels are not meant for escapism. She obliges her readers to participate in the moral processes of disciplined learning, weighing and judging. She believes that the values she propagates are essential for happy development of human affairs. EDGEWORTH She was an Irish royalist, a writer drawn by circumstance and experience to a depiction of the cultural divisions settled by her colonising ancestors. She was born and educated in England. She followed her father's spirited resistance to the Union with Great Britain, but they both gave in to its legal enforcement. She sympathised with the oppressed Catholic majority, but she was still securely Protestant. Her early novels were sympathising with Rousseau and insisted on equal education for women. Her novels in general form subtle comic discourses on the present state of society and presents different cultural viewpoints. All of her novels mirror the complexion of Ireland in the years preceding and succeeding the Act of Union of 1801. She also had a good understanding of Irish history and hid many historical events into her novels. The relationship between her fiction and the writing of history gives her novels a political edge, which aims to change the valuesof leadership, good management and the principles of the ruling class. SCOTT Scott was heavily influenced by Edgeworth's ability to puncture the pretentions of conventional historians and to establish a 'behind the scenes' picture of the society. Scott claimed that her novels familiarised the English with their joyful Irish neighbours so much that she might have been the sole completer of the Union. Scott hoped that there would be a similar person to do the same with Scotland. Scott managed to achieve for Scotland a far broader popular understanding of the Scottish history and culture though. He eschewed from the Scots dialect both as a poet and a novelist to open his works to a wider audience. Like Shakespeare, Scott suited his history with his own beliefs (Unionist and Tory) as well. He invented tradition and used it to create an overly romantic view of Scotland's past. He also effectively created the 19th century historical novel, which influenced both Europe and America widely. By the time of Waverly in (1814) he was already the bestselling poet of his age. He was an avid collector of antiquity as well. His novels were an epoch-making phenomenon in their own time. He aimed to concern himself with Scottish affairs and include the foreign observer with him. Scott always exposed his protagonists to conflicting ways of thinking; his Scotland was divided by factions - the Jacobites and Unionists, Highland clansmen and urban Lowlanders. These factions clashed in order to open up a progressive future. He opened up the past as a carefully established picture of men and women moving naturally in a historic environment. His characters were no longer in the fancy dress of Gothic fiction, but rather shown at ease with the objects, furniture, and attitudes of their proper times. The characters of the novels are shaped and determined by environment, both local and temporal and as subject to geography as it is to history. His Ivanhoe (1820) took an abrupt turn away from Scotland and from the recent, remembered history. It questioned the origins and usefulness of the medieval code of chivalry and military honour and distantly reflects on the survival of both into the age of the FR. He left his Waverly as an anonymous novel, but he fooled no one, as Byron himself claimed that anyone would recognise Scott, who has read his novels at least fifty times.

The Late Victorian literature of romance, adventure and colonial experience (Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Kipling, Conrad).

STEVENSON He was a writer of a great variety and invention despite his singular fascination with horror. He was a Scottish writer who flourished in the last years of the century, using small-town settings and the Scots dialect to reinforce a precise sense of the Scottish place. His work was far fromparochial as his most notable works were detached from Scotland or looking retrospectively at Scottish issues. This is proven by his The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), standing apart from the rest of his fiction, reaching back to a variety of English precedents and nodding to the great Scottish example of what can only be called Calvinist Gothic. The novel is set in England and centres on the horrid possession of a successful London physician, who lives amid seaside villas in England. It is a story of agonisingly disparate perceptions and actions which leads ultimately to Jekyll's suicide as the only effective release from the predatory alter ego of Hyde. He also wrote Scottish historical fiction, owing to the tradition of Scott, but his novels deal with deception, suspicion and injustice. None of them ends with a sense of achieved serenity and purpose or with any emphasis on historic justice. His other adventure stories reflecting his self-imposed exile to the South Seas offerindictments of the malign effects of 18th century colonialism as a new variation on piracy. DOYLE He was the one who introduced Sherlock Holmes to the reading public in 1887. Along with the crime stories, the super-perceptive scientific amateur who runs rings around plodding police detectives became an immediate success. Doyle himself resented being the creator of Holmes alone, but these were the stories that captured an impression of a foggy, disordered London, a city of mayhem, mystery, and murder, which overshadowed his other works. KIPLING He was the author of 'The White Man's Burden', which was a poem addressed, incidentally to the American imperial mission in the Philippines. The poem has been seen as the noisiest popular apologist for the climactic expansion of the British Empire. The closing years of the century were marked by the European grab for Africa to see which power could grab most territory. Britain did rather well, cementing its foothold with effective influence over Egypt and Sudan. The wars against Boer settlers in SA were brought to an end in 1902 with an uneasy compromise over British influence in the colony; the wars themselves had not always gone Britain's way. Kipling was born in Bombay and was always stimulated by the idea of the British imperial adventure in India than by the less romantic drive to acquire a colonial hegemony over Africa. He was the most perceptive observer of the anomalies of the British Raj in the peaceful period between the suppression of the Mutiny of 1857. His work gained esteem both in Britain and British India in the 1880s, becoming the first British Nobel Laureate in 1907. He was in many ways an outsider though, a colonial articulator of a commonsensical philosophy and a conservative upholder of the powers that were, but not a cultivator of the styles of the London literary scene. His storytelling was deliberately plain and compared to the complex British writers of the era, flat. He was not an untroubled apologist for the common man's idea of Empire and of the colonial races. He was always alert to human weakness, manipulation, vulnerability and failure. India with its empty spaces and densely overcrowded cities, its hot deserts and princely states educated him. Its ancient and mutually severed cultures fascinated rather than overwhelmed him. Ha was a writer of vitality, moving from ghost-stories to tales of flirtation and adultery, from isolation to communal riot and fromthe fear of death to the waste of life and talent. He wholeheartedly acquiesced to the idea of Empire, but he alsosteadily pointed out to both the Brits and the Indians the merits and demerits of the colonial regime. Despite the kaleidoscopic nature of Kipling's India, his heroes find something akin to a focus. CONRAD He was a different kind of outsider in search of integrity. He was born in Poland as a son of the prominent nationalist victim of Russian repression and naturalised as a British citizen in 1886. In a way, a sense of betrayal of his homeland haunts his work. He was an exile, writing as a merchant seaman, writing sea-stories about the East Indies and the Pacific. He became more popular with his political fiction in the early years of the 20th century. He wrote tales set in troubled European colonies and in an equally troubled and ignorant Europe. His themes naturally broaden in the larger world beyond the confined and masculine world of the ship. He describes ship life as a relatively ordered society, which is by nature prepared to face the challenges of an external hostility. The ship contains a small hierarchical society in which individual decision and responsibility take on the moral force of paramount virtue. His stories that are concerned with the nature and effects of European imperialism, economic and colonial are of a different order of Kipling's. He deals with the intrusion and interference of Europeans in the colonised territories. His colonisers are drawn from a variety of backgrounds and mostly uncomprehending and intolerant. In his works, colonialism emerges as both brutal and brutalising, alienating native and settler alike. Power not only corrupts, but is open to abuse. Imperialism is developed as a variety of brutish idealism, like the conquest of the earth, which means taking it away from those who have a different complexion. His gentlemanly Polish background and his diverse professional and intellectual interests made for ambiguities which run through his life and work. He explores themes of guilt and dislocation in his works as well, writing about the dangerous instabilities of society under the Russian autocracy in Poland.

The Victorian quest for moral purity

Sex in the Victorian home was a secret, even though there were many children. All the questions were answered with white lies like the stork. A Victorian child did not know anything about the reproductive organs. The conspiracy of silence was a mistaken effort to protect the child from temptation. The boys especially were tried to be kept away from masturbation, by condemning it unhealthy and immoral. Sexual act was associated with duty for the women. Some women would have preferred the stork to be a reality as they reflected the shame of their parents when the topic was brought up. Only the boys were told about sex, it being unclean and nasty. The boys were taught to be as pure as Tennyson's Galahad. To keep body and mind untainted, the boys were taught to view women as objects of respect and awe. Women were seen as angels rather than human beings, which turned love from sex to worship. Of all the women, the most pure was the mother. Sexual irregularity became the blackest of sins and adultery was spoken of with horror; feeble and erring women became social outcasts. This ethic of purity, which lasted until Freud and WWI, was accompanied by the notorious Victorian prudery. With it came a massive censorship of sex and passions in literature. This censorship was not banning books, but simply stated authors not to be read or poems that are vulgar. For example, Bronte explained how Shakespeare and Byron are not bad men and wrote marvellous literature, one knows themselves which works to avoid though. There was a similar idea with the ban of levity, something which Queen Victoria found not amusing. Levity is the light treatment of serious things, especially sexual evil. The Victorians were distressed by the fact how moral and gross images were connected in medieval literature. The whole quest for moral purity was carried out by the Puritan fear of the sexual impulse that was threatening to overthrow the society. The first worry came from the popularity of the 'literature of prostitution' by Balzac, Sand, Baudelaire and Zola and the alarming increase of divorce, which seemed to come along with it. Second source of anxiety came from the philosophy and practice of free love in America; an idea that was formulated first by Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Shelley who claimed that love withers under constraint as liberty to escape from an unhappy marriage was almost impossible. The final reason why sex was frightening to the Victorians was the fact that sexual license in England existed on a large scale and seemed to be increasing. Prostitution was free indulgence of passion and there were a lot of illegitimate children, which meant that many strayed from the path of virtue. Prostitution only arose because women were poor and found that they could earn money with the trade. By 1850 there were around 50k prostitutes known in England and Scotland. Then again if men were chaste, prostitution wouldn't exist, which meant that many were profoundly corrupted and were in desperate need of purification. It was believed also that from the sins of flesh came other sins like murder, deceit, disloyalty and atheism. Tennyson wrote his Arthur poems to warn the English civilisation of steering towards destruction. The only treatment seen for this was love. Love was made the supreme experience in life and also the means to save the soul. Success in life is brought by unrequited love and to be faithful until death and heaven, where perfect union is achieved. Scott's novels saw love and marriage as constituents of human happiness, modern novels saw them as the sole object of happiness and life. This was Romantic attitude inherited directly from Romanticism; partly from its naturalism, which found the instincts good and the feelings of the heart as the supreme guide to conduct and wisdom; partly from its idealism, Platonic and chivalric.

The major High Victorian poets (Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hopkins).

TENNYSON His early poetry was derived from the emotional norms evolved by Shelley and Keats. His early verses were unfavourably reviewed though, proving that the Romantics were not yet universally accepted. His best friend and critic saw him as the poet of a new age, using sensation instead of reflection in an era of machines. It was because of his friend Hallam, who suggested him to turn away from idiosyncrasy towards an interest in ordinary life and community, that Tennyson became the most admired poet of the Victorian era. Many of his poems deal with death-like states or with death itself as a climatic and releasing experience. Hallam died when he was 22 leaving Tennyson into mourning because of which he later wrote his popular In Memoriam (1850). He was committed to poetry of social purpose and communal concern, moving uncertainly from modern day to stories set in undefined medieval pasts attempting to explore the pressing modern subjects. He managed to write evocative and dramatically effective lyrics, some of them being the most erotic poems of the 19th century England. In Memoriam offered a different view on love and education, mixing grief for a friend and elevating an idea of spiritual and physical evolution. It describes time moving slowly for the mourner, but suggests that nature has other rhythms, impersonal and unsympathetic. He was informed in 19thcentury scientific theory, broadening the intellectual perspectives of his poetry. He wrote about dinosaurs and the evolutionary process which links the material to the spiritual, the animal to the divine. In Memoriam, he holds that there is no escape from decay, but there is afterlife and hope for evolution. It most powerfully recognises to conflicting validities, those of the reasoning mind, which comes to perceive ultimate purpose, and the agnosticism of the feelings, which continue to crave for present comfort. He became Poet Laureate after Wordsworth in 1850. He later began to develop the great Arthurian cycle, revising and republishing is Morte d'Arthur in 1870 as the 'Passing of Arthur', removing its original framework and offered it as an optimistic climax to a series of poems about the failure of an ideal. His later works are rejected nowadays as they are lexically complacent and boring. BROWNING He got married to another poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-61), junior to her in both years and in terms of publication, but their roles soon reversed. Since their marriage, Robert's reputation largely overshadowed that of Elizabeth's and it has been only recently that her individuality andquality in poems has been critically recognised. They moved to Italy in 1846 because of Liz's health and responded variously to the history, tradition and the politics of a nation experiencing a painful evolution into a modern state. Robert retreated into historical perspectives and Liz confronted contemporary issues, confronting the Italian political flux and feminist issues. Robert's verse differed radically from his wife's with his viewpoint being multiple, the effect cumulative and the narrative lines requiring exploration rather than imaginative sympathy or suspension of disbelief. Browning obliges his reader to play the role of an alert investigating magistrate, probing confessions and impressions and sifting a weight of contradictory evidence. Most of his poems were innovated by a document of a Roman murder trial of 1698, which appealed to his delight in exploring the self-justifying areas of the minds of sinners and criminals. He wrote scenes and monologues divorced from theatre. He requires a reader's involvement in his poems to unravel the story and to do guesswork while reading. Browning gave no answers or opinions for the reader and often explored vulgar territories. His Childe Roland has a first-person narrator who draws the reader into his quest by suggesting a Gothic response to an already posed question. The narrator knows how and why he framed his journey from the beginning, but he wants the reader to get to it through the ominous and disturbing evocation of horror. The reader is alienated not by the strangeness of the knight and his quest, but by an impersonality and by receding layers of 'truth' and 'lying', which Browning loved to use and which brought him near to the experiments of the modernists. ARNOLD From the late 1860s onward, the prospect of radical change to society and to its political constitution was viewed with increasing unease by liberal and conservative-minded Victorians alike. With the threats of revolutionary upheaval and imminent collapse of institutions having receded, so too had economic optimism and the spirit of compromise of the middle of the century. Arnold claimed in his Dover Beach that he heard the 'melancholy, long withdrawing roar' of the sea of faith in 1867. Darwin's theory helped evaporate this sea of faith quickly in the coming age, bringing a new tide of uncertainty and 'modern' gloom over the English intellectual life and the literature of ideas. Arnold's father was the eminent headmaster of the Rugby school and the godfather of Victorian earnestness, which influenced his son's work greatly. The school he went to, aimed to produce a generation of restless, socially conscious boys forced into adult decision-making before their time, which often exhausted them. His Culture and Anarchy divides the English society into 3 classes: a barbaric aristocracy, a philistine bourgeoisie and an unlettered populace. In his eyes, none of these classes sympathises with, or upholds a truly refined high culture which could withstand further decay in the political and religious order. He believed that his culture needed the balance of the softer arts of the ancient Greeks in order to shape a more tolerant civilisation. He believed that the pragmatic, anti-idealistic English present was ruled by the low-brow, which could be cured by the spirit of universal enlightenment and of personal integrity. He held up the intellectual, philosophical and educational enterprise of France and Germany to the mentally foggy England as he was very learned. He fatally ignored the real energy of the literature of his English contemporaries, not saying a word about Tennyson and Browning. He was critical of the early romantics having read too little, but being influential in imagination and spirit and criticised Wordsworth without paying any attention to the advances of modern poetry. His criticism counters negatives, but his poems embrace them, worrying over them and attempting to redirect them towards some glimmer of progressive hope. Throughout his poems, a nostalgia for an easier and idealised past and an uneasiness toward the present is felt. HOPKINS During his period the Oxford Movement loomed large, trying to revive the Roman Catholic church with the 16th and 17th century Catholic writers like Donne, Andrewes etc. Dickens and other Victorian progressives, this movement seemed dangerous in its undoing of national history and self-indulgent withdrawal from modern concerns. Hopkins was in the Jesuit priesthood and a poet, who might have argued against these withdrawals if his both vocations had been known to the contemporaries. He converted to Roman Catholicism at Oxford and entered the Society of Jesuits in 1868, cutting himself off from the English contemporary life. His Jesuit superiors did not approve of his poetry, because of which, he burned most of his work and only took up poetry again later. His poems appeared again at 1918, being preserved by his poet-friends. He observed nature in painstaking detail, patiently examining flowers and leaves, noting the effects of light and shade and delighting in the gradations of texture and colour. His intellectual disciplines also benefited from his theology. Most of his poems are distinctly God-centred. His God is the one who draws all the strands of Creation back to himself. The glory and wonder of God is implicit in nature. His descriptions of nature are veryacute and sensational, but never naively 'green'. He sees patterns not only in nature or in seasons, but also in religious imagery and in the observances of the Christian calendar and in the ultimate meaning of the universe. The very intricacy of his verse is an attempt to express and record something of the multifariousness of the visible and aural world. His poems were difficult, intellectual and yoking together violently 'metaphysical'images, offering a fusion of divergent impressions. He found order where other Victorians saw anarchy; he recognised purpose where many began to despair over what they believed to be meaningless fragmentation. Even in his darkest sonnets, a barely comprehended God comprehends all things.

The Gothic/Romantic hero and heroine.

The Gothic HEROINE'S troubles are real, they attempt to shed some light on their mysterious surroundings and find their ways out of their Gothic dilemmas. Here, approximately, is what happens in Gothic Romance, from Ann Radc iffe and her many imitators in the 1790s and following, through Victoria Holt, and hers, in the 1960s. A young female is stripped of her human support, her mother usually dead before the novel begins, her father or other guardian dying in the early chapteĪs. The lover (if any) who might Protect her is sent arwvay or prevented from seeing her. Depending upon the period of the novel, she may be kidnapped, or fall into the hands of an unscrupulous guardian, or 80 out as a governess/ or marry hastily- Out in the world her troubles multiply. People want to kill her, rape her, lock her up in a convent for life, and make off with her small fortune- Her task is to defend her virtue and liberty, to resist evil, and especially to penetrate disguises - spot the plausible seeming villains, trust the suspicious looking heroes _ and thereby rebuild a support system that will restore her to a quiet life. With pluck and luck she manages these near impossibilities and is rewarded with the discovery of lost relatives and/or the promise of reliable domestic love in a house- hold of her own. In the early Gothics heroines are pretty and possess aristocratic relatives. After Jane Eyre though, they consider themselves plain. THE HERO appears in The Wandering Jew legend. The legend deals with a person who has committed a serious crime against basic and sacred values of human society. His punishment lies in restless exile for infinity. He'd have to travel the world for several human lifespans to atone for his sins. In the 18th century, the legend made it possible to describe the suffering, homeless individual of high moral and social responsibility who has to live without the support of transcendental beliefs. These heroes have no home and are guilt-ridden and suicidal. Maturin combined in his Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) Dr Faustus, Lucifer and the Wandering Jew to create the ideal Gothic hero. The Jewish hero of Joyce's Ulysses also follows this tradition. The hero stands for a mind depressed by human suffering, for the search of a disappeared God and for the difficulties of striving for self-realisation.

The High Victorian cultural scene.

The High Victorian era brought along with it a tidal wave of reform and a social conflict. During the 1830s it was realised that a sharp break had occurred and that the world of 1970 was by then extremely remote and that England had passed from being a rural and mercantile society into a predominantly urban and industrial one. The arts tried to respond and interpret the changes and to find a new context for politics, but it got caught in the work of the novelists who endlessly described the oppression, smoke, grime and misery of the new England. The new commitment was to individualism, to a deep belief that men should be free. It was an era which evaded the revolution of a kind which had happened everywhere else in Europe by 1848. The old aristocracy and the middle classes could meet in the new ideal, the gentleman. New public schools were set up for those who wished their children to move up the social scale and join the elite. These were the years of remarkable stability as the population grew from 9 to 27 million in 30 years by 1841 without a violent upheaval. The railways and the telegraph connected the remotest areas of the island and brought a tide of communication. Such hasty change brought along with it an intense preoccupation with the past. History was the main motivatorof the Victorian age influencing its architecture, literature and visual arts. It was argued that Britain had its revolution in the 1640s and that the history of the nation was filled with a series of heroic struggles against autocracy of different kinds across the centuries. The cultural thought of the Victorian era was hypnotised by the Middle Ages only. There lied a native alternative to the foreign classical past which was the essence of the aristocratic Georgian civilisation. Scott's Ivanhoe brought the Middle Ages into the Victorian age with a boom, as democratic liberties were asserted against Norman autocratic rule, which could be used to justify aristocraticrule. The Victorians saw the medieval world as Catholic, devout and caring. In 1839, the Eglinton Tournament was held where participants dressed in armour to re-enact a medieval joust. The culture was further popularised by the advent of cheap printing, which drew in the skilled working classes as well. The era seemed to search for a compromise between the past and the present, reform and tradition, romance with the need for the preservation of domestic stability. With the common past of the nation, all classes could be united. The 'Olden Time' was seen as a golden age that gave birth to the nation, with the centre being Tudor and Stuart periods. Medieval castles like the Tower of London were opened for tourists and with it came cultural tourism. Homes of the previous writers also opened their doors to tourists with the help of railways. The main reason why this expansion happened was due to the spread of literacy. The English language was seen as the source of the nation's identity.

Victorian and Edwardian drama.

Theatre was hugely popular throughout the 19th century, but shunned by the polite classes. It was given over to sensation to lighten the lives of the working classes. With the upper classes gone, the sophistication of Georgian drama was gone as well, because the urban working class merely sought escape in the form of exotic melodramas. As a consequence, the technical side of the theatre developed and acting became stylised and broader. Theatres multiplied after the end of the licence act in the 40s, but what replaced it, was the Censorship Act. Anything remotely sensitive like religion, sex or politics was kept off stage. The upper classes were slowly wooed back into the theatre at around 1870s with the change of atmosphere in the arts. Theatre was beginning to portray and attract the society with its plays and new acting style. The late Victorian and Edwardian age was the golden age of society drama. This shared with the other arts the backwards look, beginning with Restoration drama where it was aimed at a small select circle of the king. Edwardian drama had a larger circle, consisting of a ten thousand which was deemed as society. The audience sat looking at itself on stage as the theme was the society, how to get into it and how to stay in it. Everything also upheld the established consensus in respect of religion and morals of social structure and imperial supremacy. In this sense, the audience saw their status quo affirmed on stage. The stage was different from the novel though, as its primary aim was to entertain. This was the time when theatre became respectable and acting a career and a profession which required formal training. Schools of drama popped up, which showed that becoming a playwright can be profitable. This was mostly due to the copyright acts which removed piracy and made it possible to earn royalties. The new plays were mostly adult drama, started by Wilde who depicted modern life through distressed wives in his plays. The plays of Shakespeare were also acted more and more masterfully, as acting became a career, the plays became more believable, introducing romantic realism to theatres. The educated classes increasingly demanded a form of drama that responded to Ibsen and explored social issues that were censored by the Lord Chamberlain's Office.This was done in the form of a private staging in clubs. These clubs staged plays of literary and artistic worth, performing Ibsen. Shaw was the first playwright to begin to explore these new horizons in Britain. Most of his plays never reached the public stage, being performed in clubs. In the plays that did make it, Shaw utilised the formula of the society play to his own end, adapting it to satirise and attack conventional middle class ideas. Newer playwrights started to push the censorship and doubt religious ideals on stage, which started an attack on the established theatre by the new drama, which opposed escapism. With Edwardian times came the genre of musical comedy. Since an academic study of Shakespeare was possible, by the new century, the romantic realism was dropped and realistic sets were replaced by stylised ones, which improved the speed of the play and speech delivery. Theatre was turned into firm art by some and it was opposed by commercial theatre. The established theatre disappeared and regional theatre opened up instead, following the credo of the new drama: Stage new writing, foreign and local, make use of their own group of actors and not depend on import stars.

Victorian earnestness and its various manifestations.

'Earnestness' was a word that came into fashion at around 1830s. The one thing that every schoolboy knew to characterise the Victorians with was that they were earnest. The word came into fashion to describe a 'good'attitude, which the Victorians were eagerly seeking, using it in protest against another well-established attitude, which wasn't so good. Being in earnest was to take life seriously, to be intellectually concerned with ideas. The people the Victorians opposed to were the people who thought that ignorance is bliss, who lived their lives as if they were entirely self-contained, oblivious to a larger scheme of human destiny. These were the people who enjoyed sensual pleasures daily. This earnestness came with the Evangelical Movement in the Church of England, transforming the whole era and giving it a distinguishing moral characteristic. The whole movement was fuelled by the threat of crisis, middle-class businesses and religious doubt. According to George Eliot, to be in earnest intellectually is to have or to seek to have genuine beliefs about the most fundamental questions in life and not to play around with them carelessly. To be in earnest morally is to recognise that human existence is not a short interval between birth and death, which one spends in pleasure, but a spiritual pilgrimage from here to eternity in which he is called upon to struggle with all his power against the forces of evil in his own soul and in society. This was believed to be the 'real' nature of life. Life is not one of pleasure, but one of toil, effort, appointed work and of vast ends to be achieved in eternity. This conception of life was held even by the agnostics who ignored the religious implications and interpreted the vast ends as those of the human race. They were connected by attacking a casual, easy-going attitude in both intellectual and moral life, demanding that men should live with a high and serious purpose.

The Victorian crisis of faith

A great deal of Victorian intellectual effort was spent in trying to hold together a universe which was exploding. It was an age of conflicting explanations and theories, of scientific and economic confidence and of social andspiritual pessimism, of a sharpened awareness of the inevitability of progress and of deep disquiet as to the nature of the present. Traditional solutions and universally acknowledged truths were found wanting and philosophical and ideological tensions were evident in the literature of the period. It was an age of stark paradoxes. Faith was degrading as there were a lot of men and women who easily found alternative and more agreeable ways of spending their time on the one day of rest allowed to them and there were also among educated classes, deep and growing doubts regarding the doctrines of the bases of Christianity. This was heightened by Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection. Queen Victoria herself was the stereotype of virtuous womanhood propagated by many novelists of the time. The age was an age in which the Greek, the Gothic and the Italianate could merge, as the age produced both the intricate Gothic of the new Palace of Westminster and the functional classical ironwork of the Great Exhibition pavilion. Generally it was an age where the working class became self-conscious and demanded rights their own rights from the parliament.

The evolution of the Gothic romance in the 18th and 19th centuries (Walpole, Radcliffe, Lewis, Maturin, Beckford, Mary Shelley, Stroker)

ANNE RADCLIFFE (1764-1823)- Her work was both more expansive and more serious in its implications than Walpole's. Sir Walter Scott later acknowledged Radcliffe as the true founder of a class or school which we today call the Gothic novel, which in essence affects the mind of the reader powerfully. She herself drew a distinction between the representation of terror and that of horror: terror expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life; horror by contrast, contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them. It was terror that was her source of fictional sublime. Her fiction wasn't as horrific as the later gothic works though. She closely followed Burke's notion of 'tranquillity tinged with terror'. The Italy of course is imagined as she never went to Italy. Her heroines are threatened by all kinds of men: bandits, feudal princes, Machiavels and a sinister Catholicism. Her heroines are sensible and reasonable. She was praised as the Shakespeare of Romance writers, a novelist who had the tact never to degenerate into horror. WALPOLE in a way also started the Gothic Novel literary genre with his The Castle of Otranto. It was the main source that engendered enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. It wasn't without precedent as these novels were already around in France at 1740s but it needed to be put into native context. The novel tells the story of a castle ripped apart by a monstrous ghost. It contained all the dynamics which were to be utilised by almost all the Gothic novels following it. They focused on a crime committed in the past which had not been avenged yet. The criminal was usually a murderer or a usurper and the real heir was generally with a false identity, unaware of his destiny. The novel itself was entitled a 'Gothick Story'. Walpole teasingly framed the story as a 15th c manuscript which was translated by someone else. The critics sensed that this was a fake but were not quite sure. The public was completely taken in though. Walpole later revealed himself to be the author. It characterises the Gothic Novels to come with its looking back to the feudal world, mostly medieval Italy. The story has everything from the monsters, to the incest to the usurpers and the true heirs being a young peasant of noble bearing and who the heroine falls in love with. LEWIS Unlike Radcliffe, he and Maturin relished the degeneration into the world of horror. His The Monk (1796) contrasts vividly with the calm reflection of Radcliffe's convents. His world is full of repression, obsession and ambition. It lacks the psychological depth of investigating a tormented soul, but it exploits images and incidents almost semi-pornographically. His hero is really the villain as when he escapes, he attempts to rape a girl and he meets with the Devil who slowly and agonisingly kills him. The death itself is described in self-indulgent detail. What he lacked in discretion and tact, he made up for in energetic verve and wild action. MATURIN He was a priest of the Church of Ireland, strongly Calvinist. His work Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) was a fiction filled with appreciation of disappointment and a gloomy sense of theological despair and incipient damnation. Melmoth is yet another hero trying to rid himself of the consequences of his crime. Instead of seeking for just sympathy, he is trying to persuade a fellow-despairer to take his place. Maturin himself thought that his only talent was darkening the gloomy and developing the sad, of painting life in extremes and representing those struggles of passion when the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed. His wanderer is an archetype of northern European Romanticism, linked with Byron's Childe Harold and Cain, Goethe's Faust, Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov and with the legend of the Wandering Jew. He is also the product of an increasingly restless and marginalised Anglo-Irish culture, troubled by the cultural oppositions of guilt and detachment, of rootlessness and disinheritance. BECKFORD His Vathek (1786) is narrowly 'Gothic' as it deals with medieval trappings and the diabolic in favour of an investigation of esoteric or forbidden knowledge. Beckford was heir to a huge fortune, so he, like Walpole, lived out his dreams and built architectural pleasure-domes and assembled an extraordinary collection of artefacts. Vathek was originally written in French and offered an escape form the plodding, orderly pleasures of the life of the 18th century gentleman. The hero who is Arabian, desires for power, for a supernatural control over life and death, an appetite which can be filled only after entering the underworld.He and his hedonistic companions are finally condemned to lose the gift of hope and to 'wander in an eternity of unabating anguish ... the punishment of unrestrained passions and atrocious deeds'. The novel is a study of unhappy yearning and unfulfilment. MARY SHELLEY Frankenstein (1818) is not that Gothic either. Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin and the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She wrote her novel as a pastime during a wet summer in Switzerland with Shelley and Byron. It came from the philosophical talk of thatcircle about nature, the origins and meaning of life, the myth of Prometheus and the enterprise of modern science. They proposed to each write a ghost story. What followed for Mary were a sleepless night and a fertile unconscious drift into 'terror'. Frankenstein is a morally probing exploration of responsibility and of the body of knowledge which we call 'science'. It is a study of the consequences of experiment and of moving into the unknown and it is also an imaginative expatiation of the principles of liberty and human rights of Shelley's parents. Dr Frankenstein is punished by a challenge to his authority on the part of the creature that he has rashly made. The artificial man, like the ruined Adam in Paradise Lost, turns to accuse his creator with an acute and trained intelligence. He feels loneliness and his wretchedness and comes to recognise his similarities with Milton's Satan as well. Envy, defeat and unhappiness express themselves in jealous destruction. The novel ends in the wild and frozen polar landscape where it began, a wasteland which purges and purifies the human aberrations of Dr Frankenstein and his created experiment. The novel is not a meditation on historical, pictorial, or mythological terrors; its fascination and power lie in its prophetic speculation STOKER He was an Irishman, who at the age of 7 became ill and he could neither stand up nor walk on his own. This illness and helplessness was a traumatic experience which is noticeable in his literary work. Everlasting sleep and the resurrection from the dead, which are the central themes of Dracula, were of great importance for him, because he was forced to spend much of his life in bed. After his recovery he became an athlete. He supplemented his income by writing a large number of sensational novels, his most famous being the vampire tale Dracula. Before writing Dracula, Stoker spent eight years researching European folklore and stories of vampires. Dracula is an epistolary novel, written as collection of diary entries, telegrams, and letters from the characters, as well as fictional clippings from the Whitby and London newspapers. Stroker wrote several other novels dealing with horror and supernatural themes, but none achieved the lasting fame or success of Dracula, which is a masterpiece of horripilation (kananahka minemine). It intermixes diaries, letters, journals, and newspaper articles and is suggesting a new kind of mythmaking, which moves beyond the moral dilemmas. The novel is charged with sexuality, which is, though, mental and spiritual disturbance. The novel is charged with sexuality - a perverted and exploitative sexuality - and with a pervasive sense of mental and spiritual disturbance. If the outward and visible signs of the Christian faith ultimately triumph over darkness, they often seem but token gestures designed to ward off a profound and recurrent spiritual malaise.

Thę poets of the First World War (Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg).

BROOKE The Dead (p. 173) - He did not die in combat, but he died from a bee sting on a ship. He was allergic to bees and suffocated. Brooke was the voice of war, the Galahad of the people nonetheless. The Soldier- The most famous war poem. It gave consolation to the parents who lost their children at war. Ironically Germany had better trenches than Britain. Belgium was originally created to protect the English Channel from the French. The French had good defence, so the Germans decided to attack Paris through Belgium. The German trenches were permanent and high-ground. The Brits had to make wet makeshift trenches. The Germans were also looking inside their trenches at all times. The British made on attempt to secure their trenches as they hoped the war would be over soon. Life at trenches was absolutely horrible because of the noise. IT was muddy as the first months of the war turned the green soil upside down. The Brits fought in wet mud. All the young men in planes died in 6 months max. It was a young man's war. The gun noise turned the brain to jelly. The reality of trench warfare was so terrible that it was kept secret and romanticised til the end. There isn't a lot of pictorial material of WWI as people didn't want to show how horrible the war actually was. In the trenches, everything was done at night as when you got out at day, you were picked out by the snipers. The dawn was the most important part of the day as you could see what the enemy had been up to. They were only 500m away. The landscape was extremely wet and when it was bombed, the mud literally ate people whole. It was a proper wasteland. Even the night-time was light as flares were constantly shot up in the air. The dawn was the time of attacking. Even this was hard as there was barbed wire mess at the trenches, which the men had to climb over to get to the no man's land. Rats were the only free man, feeding on the dead and growing very large. Tanks were very ineffective as well as they got stuck in the mud. The only time when the battlefield was close to romanticism was during spring when the red poppies popped out, which fed on human blood; hence the poppy of Remembrance Day. Gas attacks were often dangerous too because the wind brought the gas back to one's own trenches. OWEN Only four of his poems were published during his lifetime. He was profoundly attracted to the work of Keats, which is evident in his poems. He experimented with many inherited forms and devices, notably the sonnet and a fondness for rhyme which he developed. He displays anger at the sheer waste of human life in 'Futility'. He wrote about morbid scenes in classical poetic contexts. SASSOON He wrote an autobiography dealing with soldiers' experiences of the war. In his 1917 'A Soldier's Declaration', he stated that the war was deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. He also included referenced to the 'callous complacency' of the majority of men and women at home who had refused to comprehend the dire nature of conditions in the trenches. His frustration and anger at the futility of the progress of the fighting Is evident in his war poetry which emphasizes the chasm between those who make decisions and those who suffer the consequences of them. He attacks both the generals and the non-combatant civilians. He openly mocked patriotism and the women who could not understand what was happening. ROSENBERG he war provided a disturbing context which forcibly transformed the unadorned poetry of the 1900s into a painfully observant record or a vehicle of protest. The poetry itself was rarely innovative, however agonised its subjects or extraordinary its imagery. However, Owen's and Rosenberg's poems were the most individual ones of the war poets as they showed radical poetic talent already before the war. Rosenberg's war poems showed a curious fascination with the nature of war and with ravaged men and landscapes which is almost expressionist in its stark and often contrary energy. He remained explorative in his interest in the imagery around him, found in the desolation of the trenches. His poems express a proto-Modernist fragmentation, discovering an objectivity in a world being physically pulled and blown apart.

The major Late Victorian novelists (Butler, Hardy, Gissing, Moore).

BUTLER His work was central to the cultural debates of the 1880s and 1890s. He actively debated Darwinism and Darwin, but was only known for his Erewhon (1872; anagram for 'nowhere'). It was a perplexing work, an utopian fantasy, which defines its terms of reference by negatives while relegating its positives to singularly dark corners. Its reflections of the High Victorian England still remain open to various interpretations. There, he treats religion with quizzical disrespect, ridiculing the narrator's attempts to convert the natives of his country to Christianity. Erewhon itself is not an alternative to England as it's seen as a semi-lunatic nation where sickness is punished and crime cured, a land which lives without watches and machines and which dedicates its colleges of higher education exclusively to the study of hypothetics and 'Unreason'. His posthumous The Way of All Flesh offers an account of the Victorian family of Ernest Pontifex. The work denounced the narrow values of Victorian and attempts to stress the significance of family influence and social evolution. It's at its most power when it displays the distorting power of an inherited Victorian ideology which confuses theology with righteousness. HARDY His fictional world lacks the comfortable shapes and contours of the old theology. The Church of England is observed as firmly rooted in a rural society, and its buildings are seen as a part of landscape, but its authority has been withdrawn and its physical structures are seen as incapable of holding and interpreting a grand idea of the universe. Hardy himself claimed that he was 'churchy' in his instincts and emotions, but not in an intellectual sense. This doesn't show in any of his novels though. He only praises the churches for their architecture as he himself studied it, but their use was redundant. He claimed that the religion went along with feudalism. His churches are replaced by tall new buildings of modern Gothic design to show that people have faith. His major novels are concerned with characters wrenched form their roots and from the communities, which might have sustained or tolerated their distinctiveness. His novels also have a narratological density, infusing biblical and literary citation, scientific reference and allusion, philosophical speculation, superstitious hints at folkloric and dark suggestions of animism. It was in poetry, that Hardy found the ultimate expression of his instinctive ambiguity and intellectual evasiveness. The 1860s had witnessed the emergence of the 'New Woman': educated, individualistic, but still unfulfilled by the very fact of her continued subservience to men. Hardy's women are not university educated campaigners, but they generally emerge as more intelligent than his male characters. He ultimately suggests that it's not only the letter that kills, but the general human inability to grasp the implications of the modern spirit, a spirit which offers a painful but more clear-sighted freedom. His discussion of sexuality and sexual morality scandalised the Victorians. His provocative frankness was not unique though. GISSING He was equally determined to press home the significance of fictional 'realism'to English readers, though his tastes were less French. He was a great admirer of Dickens and reflected his work with his gloomy and disillusioned fiction. Gissing rejected social remedies and anything resembling an optimistic prospect of a political dawn. In his novels, he empathises with the urban poor and powerfully evokes the miseries and degradations of slum life, but portrays popular radicals as self-deceived. Most of his fiction is haunted by sentiments of deep fear and resentment and personal failure as felt by the middle-class outsider, an exile in a nether world whose sympathies are drawn towards those who have been denied a chance of prosperity and self-improvement. His pervasive disillusion refuses to accept any new illusions, be they religious or philosophical, social or political. His most notable work deals with the emancipation of women and with the difficulties of the bohemian literary life. His novels also reinforce the old-fashioned belief in the Romantic idea of the isolated, suffering artist even though it shuns romantic affectation. His literary heroes and heroines have no worldly success, all sharing a childhood misery. He is the pessimistic Dickens. MOORE An Irish writer, he was similarly open to Hardy in style. In 1880s, he launched a series of attacks on the censorship exercised on readers' behalf by the libraries. He appealed to the wider 'truth'of art, spending 7 years in Paris and being accustomed to the new French literature of the age, which did not ban young girls from literature. He was in the vanguard of the British struggle for freedom form an 'illiterate censorship' and for a new realism in fiction. His early works were written under the shadow of Zola, reflecting the novels in Britain. He thought that the English novels were flat and conventional, lacking observation and analysis. He depicted a working-class heroine in his Esther Waters (1894), forced out of her home by a drunken stepfather and obliged to work as a servant at a racing stables. The 'realist' Esther is seduced, impregnated and abandoned. Her grim experiences are compounded by her former lover's return, marriage and his gambling. She finally returns to the racing stables where she finds happiness.

The Greek Revival (Byron, Shelley, Keats).

BYRON Byron's The Isles of Greece (p. 67)- This should have been sung by a modern Greek poet. The English were angered at the time, because the Greeks were unwilling to be free. They used their donated money on silly things instead of gathering together as one against the invading Turks as was expected of them. Byron went to Greece and tried to help them restore liberty. The Greeks just took his money and weapons and fled. So the modern Greeks were really disappointing. Ancient Greek sculptures are inhuman as well, perfectly muscular beyond reality even. Nobody can be the Ancient Greeks. The poem describes a disillusioned Byron. The Greek are still not living up to their ancestors. SHELLEY Shelley'sOde to Liberty (p. 62)- Liberty was apparently present on Earth only during the Greek era in Athens. During 1821 when the poem was written, freedom was apparent around topical events. Europe is still dreaming of freedom, but there is hope. KEATS He was sensitive to criticism and open to the influence of other living and dead poets. He was also able to assimilate and then transform both criticism and influence. His development as a poet was rapid and individual and filled with bursts of energetic self-critical analysis. He had no classical training because of his birth and education which denied it to him. He was an autodidact, enthused about every discovery, especially George Chapman's 16th century translation of The Iliad. This proves that Homer's Greek was not open to him. He was extremely well read, exploring Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto and Tasso in his letters. He described the poet as a chameleon, being able to identify with external objects, both animate and inanimate. He felt himself a creature of impulse. He drew his immediate experience into verse, finding metaphors in the natural world, in his responses to architecture, painting and sculpture. By the end of hislife, his experimentation with different styles and self-criticism left him in a disappointment. He chose his epitaph to be' Here lies one whose name was writ in water'.

Walpole and the Gothic Revival(coursebook)

Building a Gothic Castle was a bold move for Walpole, since though Gothic was popular at that time, Horace Mann, British minister in Florence, thought it to be a betrayal of aristocratic ideals. Walpole was not highly liked, for he was an outsider, a homosexual and arrogant. What he wanted to achieve through Strawberry Hill was to sell Gothic to high society as a fashionable living style. The result though was an unhappy tension between at the same time maintaining a respect for the classical heritage and a devotion to the national heritage of the Gothic style. Walpole's contribution to leading Gothic to Gothic Revival was crucial, since at Strawberry Hill there was an insistence on archaeologically correct Gothic, and he introduced asymmetry into domestic architecture. The full impact of Strawberry Hill on architecture lay in the future when Walpole died. So too did his impact on the literary world which included not only his letters and memoirs but items which he produced from his own press which he had set up in 1757.

The Romantic essayists (Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Peacock).

HAZLITT Along with Coleridge, he was the foremost literary critic of the age. Herecognised the importance of journals in disseminating information and in reflecting on contemporary issues and responded to and indulged the growing metropolitan taste for public lectures. Both were acquainted with modern German thought and were religious about the cult of Shakespeare. He was particularly alert to the significance of art and the creative imagination amid the political demands and disappointments of the post-revolutionary era. He idolised Napoleon even though he was an early disciple of Godwin and an aristocrat. To him, Napoleon was the radical hero, the champion of progress and the alternative to the negatives of modern Britain. Despite that, hemost influenced his contemporaries as a literary theorist and a critic of Shakespeare and Elizabethan drama. He was the main source of information on these for Keats. Hazlitt was irritated by Dr Johnson's prose and criticism of Shakespeare. He did not like to see Shakespeare acted though and mainly kept his plays in a closet. He emphasised Shakespeare's continuing political relevance as a hater of kings. He was an equally sharp critic of his contemporary writers and politicians. His Spirit of the Age (1825), he examined the zeitgeist (ajavaim) of a period which he himself saw as an age of talkers and not of doers. In it he praised, discriminated and when necessary, damned with an aphorism or an image, 25 prominent thinkers, writers and politicians. He did not like Byron, Cobbett or Crabbe, but he was supportive towards Godwin as a standard in the history of intellect. He was also kind enough to the much despised Southey's prose. He praised Wordsworth highly, proclaiming him the central figure of modern English culture and his genius a pure emanation of the Spirit of the Age. Charles Lamb(1775-1834)- He was a friend of Hazlitt's who acknowledged him as a successful writer not by conforming to the Spirit of the Age, but in opposition to it. Lamb was an antiquarian and a reflective exploiter of nostalgia and as such, turned his back on modern issues. He was fascinated with classic English drama. He wrote as 'Elia' for the London Magazine, gaining widespread popularity. His essays there cultivate a form and a style that Lamb himself admired in his mentors, Bacon, Browne, Addison and Steele. He plays with their archaisms but superadds his own delight in reminiscence and digression. He was strikingly a cockney (middleclass man?) from London with an attachment to countryside at a convenient distance. de QUINCEY He wrote essays, stories, articles and reviews to various prominent journals for a living. He wrote on opium addiction and hallucinations, which moved far beyond the Gothic fascination with the dark and contorted architecture of the soul. It was a psychological work prefiguring Freudian theories, nightmarish recalls of childhood trauma and a justification of taking drugs also exploring the moral sublime of an individual's past. PEACOCK His novels satirically explored ways, in which philosophical or ideological stances sever his characters from ordinariness and human communication. He modelled his fictions as parodies of Socratic dialogues withdrawing his carefully sketched characters into the luxury and seclusion of country houses where they can make fools of themselves. He wrote on the nature of French comic romance, distinguishing two classes of comic fictions: one in which the characters are abstractions, and the implied opinions the main matter of the work; another in which the characters are individuals and the action is those of real life. He was intimate with Shelley and the radical speculations of his circle. This gave him an amused grasp of a particular language and an innate inconsistency. He ridiculed 'the Spirit of the Age' sceptically. He projected the romantics satirically in his novels.

The major Edwardian and Georgian poets (Kipling, Hardy, Yeats, Housman, Brooke).

KIPLING The verse of the younger generation of poets was of a distinctly diverse kind. Kipling's verse enjoyed a popular success, as it appeared to give a voice to the otherwise inarticulate, to those supposed to be lacking in 'poetry', that is soldiers of the ordinary type. He used the role of a citizen narrator in order to express what he took to be the appropriate middle-brow sentiments on the Queen's Jubilee, the Empire or uppity women. HARDY He was the one writer of an older generation whose poetry seemed to chart new territory in the opening years of the new century. He abandoned fiction after public furore over Jude the Obscure, and gave the impression of embarking on a new career as a prolific poet in the year 1898. It seems that many of his poems were written much earlier. The agnosticism which marks his novels takes on a new shaping of power in the poetry, but the awkwardness, strain, conflicting perceptions and arguments and the plethora of information of his late fiction are all controlled and disciplined within his evolved verse forms. His poetry moves away from the personal, dictating 'I' and the pressing need to be literal or to offer explanation. He describes love recalled as a love lost and his perception is frequently accompanied by a process of disillusion. Lovers meet ecstatically and part in misunderstanding or are sundered by uncomprehending time. He wrote nearly a thousand poems which reveal an extraordinary metrical inventiveness and a technical mastery of a variety of forms. His style is mostly plain, yet his poems shifting in time. YEATS His poetry was rooted in a 19th century tradition different to Hardy's. If Hardy frequently dwelled on the disillusion of an informed agnostic and on the lost, but uncertain rapture of an elderly lover, then Yeats attempted to assert the power of a mystical vision and a passionate sexuality and sensuality. Yeats was a seeker of redefinitions, verbal and intellectual. Where Hardy sought philosophical detachment, Yeats pressed for commitment, political and spiritual. Where Hardy is austere, Yeats implodes conflicting traditions and indicates the thoughts of a new system of thought and perception. He considered himself as one of the last romantics who chose a theme of traditional sanctity and loveliness, projecting the mysticism of Blake and symbolism of the pre-Raphaelites (Rosetti) into a newly suggestive poetry. He claimed to desire creating a little world out of the beautiful, pleasant and significant things of the marred and clumsy world. He mixed Celticism with his aestheticism which was both nationalistic and escapist. Celtic legend offered an alternative way of seeing and representing the world, a non-classical, anti-urban, anti-mechanical and anti-material mixture of the physical and the metaphysical, sensual and spiritual. According to Yeats, his romantic philosophy and ideals was not well received by his fellow poet-friends and he realised that he was the survivor of an otherwise doomed generation and the one member whose art and ideas had developed and flourished out of his club. Although he rejected much of the new philosophy of the centuries through which his life spanned: the agnostic materialism, the psychology, physics and the revolutionism; his later poetry proclaims the independence of the artist who creates and expounds a new spirituality. He was famously detached from the British cause and sympathies during WWI. Unlike many of his brethren, he felt no moral obligation to be a combatant. When he was asked to write a war poem, he replied that in times like those, it's better for a poet to be silent. HOUSMAN He only published two volumes of verse in his lifetime (and 94 poems posthumously). His poetry was closely related to the form of the tragic or elegiac mood of the traditional ballad.He maintained that he was working under the influence of Shakespeare. His poems were various in subject, setting and speaker but they were linked by repeated themes of country wooing and events related with soldiering. Throughout his work, there is also a poignant sense of loss and lost illusions. It's not only nostalgic as the love-making is interrupted by suicide, murder, death in battle or by public execution. All kinds of emotional or sexual commitment is left unfulfilled or ambiguous. He was a Professor of Classics at London University, rusticising and Anglicising his subjects and sources, giving an English voice to a Roman poet. BROOKE His poetry had an immediate popular impact, reinforced by his untimely death in the Mediterranean and by the iconic status accorded to his physical beauty. His pre-war poetry has a jesting nostalgia about it.

The idealization of the Victorian home

Passion was confined to the home and marriage; all other kinds of love were lust. This kind of conception is a blend of Protestant earnestness and Romantic enthusiasm with an assist from chivalric literature as a source for women worship. Family was the centre of Victorian life. The household gathered for family prayers, church on Sunday mornings, reading aloud in evening and for annual family vacations. Gentlemen of the previous century frequented coffee houses, where they had an aristocratic evening, but the Victorian era brought along with it a domestic life for men. Before, their pleasures were among men, but now the turn of opinion against the rough amusements and the feeling of duty turned their attention toward home as women's education allowed them to be the man's new companions. Families got larger as well because of the improvements of medical knowledge and standards of sanitation and thus, infant mortality reduced. Men were required to give more attention to the business of the family as they grew bigger. They had to get their sons to the best colleges and marry their daughters to gentlemen of birth. Home was seen as a source of virtues and emotions which were found nowhere else, which made it a place radically different from the surrounding world. Home was where the desires of the heart and virtues could be preserved as it was a place of Peace, a shelter from the anxieties of modern life, a sacred temple. Most institutions were unstable during these times; compared to them, the home was a God-given Paradise. It was an idealised pastoral landscape where life is kind and duty natural, where the soul could be at peace. The modern businessman felt insecure and faithless in the industrial scheme where everyone was the same. Domestic family and relationships were binding and stable and offered an escape from the cruel business world, which was alien. The Victorian home was a sacred place as well, a temple for Christians as a God-given place and a secular temple for the agnostics. Home was the source of the altruistic emotions they relied upon to take the place of the Christian ethic. There they learnt attachment, fellowship, reverence of those who teach us and the love which urges to protect, help and cherish the family. Therefore home was a storehouse of moral and spiritual values and an answer to the increasing commercialism and declining religion.

Ruskin and the Victorian Medieval Revival.

Ruskin was supposedly the greatest critic in the English language. He told the emergent nation what to look at how to look at it. He was also a romantic as he cast nature as a reflection of divine truth. He started paying attention to modern art and reject all kinds of classicality due to it being foreign. He also led the nation to the middle ages. He sought to revive the Gothic style in secular buildings as well. For him, art and morality werelinked and the commercial classes elevated a doctrine (laissez-faire) which opposed the first principles of religion. The Victorian age became one deeply moral and religious and thus Ruskin encouraged reviving the old Gothic style on social grounds as well. Up until then, there had been a battle of architectural styles, but Ruskin aimed to determine it with the Gothic. Industrialisation brought new buildings like gas stations, business offices, insurance companies, banks and factories which could all be built in the old style to look like Norman castles from afar. The Gothic style was driven forward by national identity. In 1834 the Palace of Westminster burnt down, which gave a chance to build in a style that reflects the newly enfranchised classes. Ruskin managed to bring along a revival in which a whole generation of architects suddenly abandoned the classical repertory and started rebuilding the middle ages. The new industrial cities like Manchester picked up this style universally. This architecture was proudly insular, patriotic and romantic and showed that one way to come to terms with the present was to live in the past as though nothing happened. The attitude also led to another great innovatory feature of the Victorians, the public park. The sooty cities were troubling people and people were told to take healthy, public walks in the park. In such parks, all classes of society could mix and it was hoped that middle-class values would also affect the working class values there. These parks were built in the 18th century 'Capability' Brown manner with a belt of trees around the walk, an irregular Georgian lake and undulating terrain dotted with clumps of trees. Parks were laid out all over Britain by anonymous municipal gardeners, who started the obsession of gardens in British urban dwellings. Gardening, once a preoccupation of the aristocracy, was adapted for the middle classes.

The Victorian woman worship

The best known conception of woman of the Victorian period was the submissive wife who's being relied on for love, honour and obeying her master and to manage his household and bring up his children. Then there were the women who demanded equal rights with men as their household jobs were replaced by maids. The most characteristic of the Victorian women were the ones in the middle position between conservative and radical thinking. They held that women are not men as they have their own function and nature in life, not inferior to that of man's, but entirely different. Ruskin argued that women should not serve men and that they have their own feminine mission to guide and uplift her more worldly and intellectual mate. They are not the ones to go to battle but the ones to council their men, who do go into battle, wisely. Women are the ones who make the home a temple and a school of virtue. Man is the one who goes through the peril of the world and guards the woman of this, who keeps the home virtuous, away from danger, temptation and error. The life of a businessman was degrading; the life of a woman was to keep him intellectually and spiritually fit. The angel in the house preserves the moral idealism in an age of selfish greed and competition. Feminists were seen as the radicals who degraded the moral values of women (even by intellectual women, who were conservative). Victorian women were hidden under many layers of wraps to resist temptation.

The late Victorian cultural scene.

The great boom years of the High Victorian age were over by 1870 and its cultural unity was beginning to diverge. Agriculture went into sharp depression and foreign powers emerged in the field of manufacture, like the newly-formed mighty German Empire, whose navy was equal to that of the British. At home there were militant trade unions eroding the security of the higher classes, with socialist ideas beginning to influence the educated middle classes. By the turn of the century, there was an active Labour Party and a lot of women demanding a new status in society. There was turbulence everywhere, below in the lower classes and also above in the dramatically eroding aristocracy, because of the economic disaster of the agricultural depression which severed the connection between the vote and property owning. Namely, the male working class got the main vote and due to this, a super-tax was imposed on the aristocrats and the House of Lords' right to veto on legislation was taken away. This was the final demise of the aristocratic political power after centuries and with it went the centuries of patronage of the arts. Many of the artists of the time were committed to socialism. Art was to become political and reformist in thecoming century of mass democracy. This was mainly seen in the revolt against industrialism in the Arts and Crafts Movement. Any design in factory production was said to find its roots from a craft basis. It became like a religious tract, heralding the crafts as the God of creation. Because of it art education was opened up at the turn of the century, the move effected a revolution in living style of the educated middle classes who became increasingly cultured. The home was now a temple of art, filled with artefacts from 'Old England'. This was all an illusion though as these items were mass produced in factories and the tastes of the educated masses were declared bad as they used machine made cheap crafts.

The major Edwardian novelists (Wells, Bennett, Forster).

WELLS His works have many parallels with the 'ordinary' world of Bennett, but they are mainly written with a far more evident political edge and a perversely scientific programme. He was one of the few English writers to be well read in modern science and in the scientific method. He was also persuaded by the advantages of a socialist and scientifically planned future and of the anti-humanist values of scientific progress. His science-fiction novels still function as alarmist prophecies a century after their first publication. His Island of Dr Moreau (1896) is a chilling fable of genetic engineering. Moreau is a tyrannical exile on a Pacific island and a post-Darwinist Frankenstein, torturing and metamorphosing animals in his 'House of Pain' only to be destroyed by his brutal and horrid creations. Wells' social fiction contrasts starkly with the sci-fi, but even there science and men of science have leading roles. His questioning socialism runs through most of his stories. The narrator of Tono Bungay moves between three Englands, the defunct world of the country house, the narrow perspectives of the draper's shop and the heady exhilaration of market capitalism and invention. He finds all three wanting, but remains unpersuaded by and English socialism which has always been a little bit too human, set about with personalities and foolishness. In his social works, he sees the nation as ruled by stupidity, which no ideals can pierce. His last novels discuss marriage and women's rights, described from a male's perspective. In them, he supports women's suffrage and demands a free and fearless participation of women in the collective purpose of mankind. BENNETT His main aim was to delineate the ordinary. He wrote in his disappointingly unadventurous study of The Author's Craft (1914) that the mind of the ideal novelist should be permeated and controlled by common sense. His works largely outsold the works of his younger contemporaries whose self-propagandising had established modernist principles as the leading ideas of the new age. Bennett found a picture for the self-made, self-admiring small capitalists who were untrained, uncultured poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle. These men were generally despised by writers who rejected their enterprise, vulgarity and their belief in the virtue of work and reward. Bennett was a meticulous analyst of the motives behind thrift, solidity, hard work and public virtue. His work fluctuates between the poles of an insistent provinciality and domesticity and a taste for the exotic. Many of his novels describe a hotel, the temporary centre of a wanderer's life, the home from home that is never home. He describes the hotel as a no man's land of comfort, tidiness and impersonality. He loved to contrast between situation and aspiration, between enclosure and flight, between endurance and escape, security and insecurity. FORSTER His novels are almost exclusively concerned with Edwardian middle-class perceptions and imperceptions. He was concerned with the awakening of repressed sexuality, which was looked at from a heterosexual viewpoint in his first three novels, but later also in a homosexual novel, which was published only after his death. He wrote love stories shaped around contrasts of English emotional repression and the freedom of the spirit suggested by Beethoven's music and the freedoms allowed to the passions of the far more civilised Italians. His 'homosexual'Maurice (1914; 1971) offered a brave questioning of contemporary taboos which were no longer contemporary by the time the novel was actually published. It half-heartedly questioned class-prejudices, class-assumptions and local snobberies. He also wrote an ambitious novel about India in 1924, offering a distinctly less generous and complacent picture of the Raj and its British servants than Kipling had. The British form an elite, cut off by their sense of cultural, social and racial superiority from the natives of India, while maintaining the class-distinctions and snobberies of home. All the human connections fail, doomed by race, class, colonialism and religion.

The Victorian gospel of work and duty

Work was the second most popular word in the Victorian vocabulary after God. Work was the means and the virtue by which earnestness could be achieved. It did not matter what one worked at, it mattered that one worked. Because of this, idleness was inexcusable. The aristocracy was seen as the idle class, invalid, not working. One was allowed to relax, but only to strengthen one for the work to come. Work was glorified as the supreme virtue and idleness was scorned. These two ideas became the main theme of the prophets of idleness. Newman started his sermon with a question: Why were we sent into this world? Was it to live for ourselves, to live for the lust of the moment without any aim beyond one's life or was everyone's mission in life to work? Work for a Christian was a purpose and a duty to God. Everyone was made to feel that there was a work for them to do and this gave them happiness. People wanted to feel useful in life. Work was the safeguard against temptation; a busy and working man is saved from a number of sins. To work was also to keep up the Christian spirit to fight against the Devil and serve God. The main purpose of this was also to cure the aristocracy of their idleness, so in a way it was a revolution against the higher classes. Work was the ethic which could connect the opposing rich and poor. The Puritan tradition was the strongest in the middle class where the religious theory of work was commonplace. These were religious ideals which connected perfectly with the industrial society. Work, the development of the individual and the sense of a mission to serve the society and further the human race were valued both in business and Protestantism anyway. The rich were the parasites, living on the work of others. The virtue of duty also brought along the Puritan virtue of self-denial. Valuing hard work and despising indulgences drives a man to success. Self-indulgent people had no character, no morality and that was the point of evangelical Christianity. Everyone making a huge fortune felt that they were serving a larger cause. Everyone were working together to bring their society to higher stages. The Victorian gospel of work basically brought thenation together and evaded a crisis of faith and social values and leads the country toward progress. It was there to battle the incoming mood of ennui and despair which came with the loss of faith and thus work came to be an actual faith of the Victorians; people acquired faith pragmatically, by proving its truth in experience. Idleness was perpetual despair as it endlessly made the person question himself and doubt everything.

The Modernist revolution of the arts.

n 1910, the first exhibition of Post-Impressionist art opened in London, which had been selected by an art critic Roger Fry. The audience's reaction proved to be less than welcoming and the world of fashion flocked not to admire but to mock the works. They evoked laughter from both philistines and the visually sophisticated alike as the paintings looked like works done by a clumsy schoolboy. This showed the cultural isolation into which England had drifted in the Edwardian period as anything foreign was viewed with a mixture of suspicion and contempt. The four decades preceding WWI were times of arrogant cultural isolationism. The Empire was so large that Britain withdrew from the political and cultural need for contact with other nations. All of this came under siege after the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 as modernism began to erupt on to the cultural scene in full force. It was the greatest revolution in the arts since Romanticism as it ushered in atonalmusic, free verse in poetry and painting which withdrew form. The years 1870 to 1910 were ones of unparalleled change as the whole structure of the universe was questioned with the discovery of the quantum theory of energy in 1900. In 1905, Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity and Freud his The Interpretation of Dreamsin (1901). It resulted in a whole new movement of art, namely surrealism. With the period came the study of genetics, radioactivity and X-rays were discovered and in 1911 came the atom. All of those things that we now take for granted as essential to modern living came into being: telephone, cars, typewriters, aeroplanes, synthetics, the modern office and a little later, radio. The advances of technology also changed the nature of warfare radically from being a distant event into one which could wipe out the educated men of the middle and upper classes. The result of all this was that human nature was now seen to be indeterminate, elusive, contradictory and multiple, whereas the previous century was seen as one of universally recognised human values. With the human truth becoming many-faceted, there was no longer an absolute truth or universal norms for society as a whole and the collective values shifted dramatically to individual ones. Modernism set the artist free, but the outcome was aesthetic turbulence, disruption and a belief that western civilisation was in an apocalypse, which was strengthened by the horror of the War. Modernism brought a myriad of movements including post-impressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, vorticism, Dadaism, expressionism and surrealism, which all came and went. Their innovations were quickly spent, matching the obsolescence of 20th century consumer products as one year's model gave place to the next. Under the influence of Nietzsche, the era was cast as one in which all human values had to be rethought and traditional morality of Christianity was to be jettisoned. The wholesale demolition of the past and passion for everything new produced nothing coherent to replace it, which made it a century of fragmentation. All of the movements shared an opinion that the old world had ended though. There wasn't a revolution, but rather a break-up, a devolution and a dissolution. Most of the modernist pioneers were exiles, because of which there is an underlying unease to modernism as it posed a threat from an established and immutable native culture. The two world wars with Germany fuelled insularity and distrust of foreign culture even further. There was a steady depression in the arts as poverty increased and the aristocracy faded dramatically. Those who prospered were the middle classes. Artists were left devoid of work, and fascism and unemployment drove the artistic community ever leftwards towards an ideal Communism. Dictatorship was the death of modernism however as the works were destroyed by them. The nation's artistic past was to replace the repertory of religion and everything religious was dethroned and marginalised. Modernism and socialism aimed to usher in a new Utopia. The aim of the artists was to either deconstruct the old world or reconstruct the past as a means of reviving liberal values. There was also the third group, who drifted towards escape and withdrawal, creating private worlds for themselves. The leaders of the first group were the modernists Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Those who withdrew, escaped to country houses of Christie's crime stories, to decadent exotic fantasies or weird inward family feuds of Compton-Burnett. All of the groups were devoted to the cause of literature, art and equally to a new freedom in sexual relationships. The most notable of these groups was the Bloomsbury Group which sought to cling to the moral framework of Christianity but discard its doctrine, dogma and ritual. In the group, homosexuality loomed large and women were created equal to men. The Group's main aim was to demolish Victorian culture. The group was highly disliked by the society and intellectuals alike though. During these times a mass culture emerged as well, which was consumer-led, imported mostly from America through Hollywood and jazz. The piano was gradually replaced by the gramophone and radio at homes. The BBC helped to disseminate high culture with their popular broadcasts which declared public taste and it also helped to reinforce the insular mistrust of others.