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Contextualize The Text From A Historical and Cultural Point of View
Contextualize The Text From A Historical and Cultural Point of View
Contextualize The Text From A Historical and Cultural Point of View
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The Renaissance
Romanticism (1789-1832)
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from faith in reason to faith in senses, feelings, imagination. Poetry and
novels are the most common genres. All these reflected in the works of the
most prominent romantic writers, including.
The Victorian era was the great age of the English novelrealistic,
thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. It was the ideal form to
describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. They describe
life as people experienced it giving an impression of the life of the poor in
industrialized cities in England in the middle of the 19th century
Born at the end of the Civil war, the literary period in which
wrote, aimed to recreate reality in literature. The years following the war
symbolized a time of healing and rebuilding. In literature this was a time of
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upheaval. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the
increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism
and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a
relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment
for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture.
Realists are concerned with the effect of the work on their reader and
the reader's life, a pragmatic view. Pragmatism requires the reading of a
work to have some verifiable outcome for the reader that will lead to a better
life for the reader. This lends an ethical tendency to realism while focusing on
common actions and minor catastrophes of middle class society.
(J. Conrad, J. Joyce, G.B. Shaw, V. Woolf, F.S. Fitzgerald am, E. Hemingway am, E.
ONeill am, W. Faulkner am, T.S. Elliot am)
New technology and the horrifying events of both World Wars (but
specifically World War I) made many people question the future of humanity:
What was becoming of the world? Writers reacted to this question by turning
toward Modernist sentiments. Gone was the Romantic period that focused on
nature and being. Modernist fiction spoke of the inner self and
consciousness. Instead of progress, the Modernist writer saw a decline of
civilization. Instead of new technology, the Modernist writer saw cold
machinery and increased capitalism, which alienated the individual and led
to loneliness. To achieve the emotions described above, most Modernist
fiction was cast in first person. Whereas earlier, most literature had a clear
beginning, middle, and end (or introduction, conflict, and resolution), the
Modernist story was often more of a stream of consciousness, creating the
feeling that the story is going nowhere. Irony, satire, and comparisons were
often employed to point out society's ills.
(Golding 1954)