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THE VICTORIAN AGE Literary background - Coggle Diagram
THE VICTORIAN AGE
Literary background
LATE ROMANTICISM
Continuation of Romanticism: see poets like TENNYSON and novelists like the BRONTE sisters
TENNISON, BRONTE SISTERS
REALISM
Art should show reality faithfully. They describe reality as it is: see George ELIOT's "Middlemarch", a masterpiece of realist fiction
GEORGE ELIOT
NATURALISM
Art has to describe reality as it is (as realists), but naturalists are influenced by DARWIN's Evolutionary Theory: one's heredity and social environment determine one's personality. So naturalists try to analyse the underlying forces that influence people's actions. That's DETERMINISM that denies freewill: people cannot decide their lives because of nature, social conditions and even fate. Besides, naturalist writers were interested in the most sordid aspects of reality.
THOMAS HARDY
AESTHETISM AND DECADENTISM
Last decades of Victorian Age, as a form of reaction of Victorian values. "ART FOR ART'S SAKE": art shouldn't have a moral or didactic purpose, but art should exist only for its beauty and for the search for sensual pleasure (aesthets). Decadents take these principles to the extreme: the finest beauty is that of decaying or dying things. They lead immoral and dissolute lives.
OSCAR WILDE
It's the age of the NOVEL
Increasing importance of the middle class
It best represented Victorian world
Increase of the reading public
circulating libraries
cheaper printing
publication in serial instalments