Friday 25 April 2014

V... is for Victorian Literature

I spoke of the lofty thoughts and ideals of Romanticism earlier. This period was followed by the reign of Queen Victoria in Britain, from 1838 to 1901 and this period produced some very significant literary works that I'm required to study. While poetry was the most important form with the Romantics, the novel, as we now know it, became the leading literary genre in the Victorian times. Some of the noteworthy novelists of this period include Dickens, Eliot, the Bronte sisters, and Hardy. There were some great poets too - Browning, Yeats, and Tennyson.
From wiki, I have, "Victorian novels tend to be idealised portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed. There was a struggle to conquer the flaws of human beings with great virtues. It was a principle that those who struggle to attain morality would most probably achieve positive results in the end if not tortured by natural circumstances or evil vices."
Though this period produced a vast array of works, their common themes made them cluster together as the kind of things the reader at the time wished to read. My personal favourite is Dickens, I have read all of his novels barring a couple, and there is something about the way he writes that draws me to the novels.
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This is the twenty-second post for the April A-to-Z Blogging Challenge 2014.
Previously, Archaism, British literature, Critical Analysis, Drama, Edinburgh, Faust, Gothic Fiction, Humour, Interpretation, Journalling, Keats, Language, Metaphysical Poetry, Narration, Ode, Papillion(ed), Quatrain, Romanticism, Shakespeare, Tone, University

3 comments:

Tony Laplume said...

Personal favorite is Hardy's Jude the Obscure.

Notes Along the Way with Mary Montague Sikes said...

I enjoy reading the poetry from that era and also the work of the Bronte sisters. Thanks for a nice post.

Mary Montague Sikes

Timothy S. Brannan said...

I really enjoy the Victorian time period myself.

Terrible to actually live in that time, but the books are fantastic.

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Timothy S. Brannan
The Other Side, April Blog Challenge: The A to Z of Witches