ROMANTIC LITERATURE

Late 18th to early 19th Century

The rise of the novel
 DEFINING ROMANTICISM

• Intellectual and artistic movement

• Took ideas from 17th century Gothicism
• Challenged the values of the Enlightenment such as the social, political
and economic changes
• Valued emotions and intuition, the importance of the individual and the
exploration of the natural wilderness
• Characterised by imagination, individualism, idealism, humanity (especially
childhood), nature classified by supernatural or sublime features and
freedom of the spirit.
• “a new heaven is begun” - William Blake
• “The world’s great age begins anew” – Percy Shelley
• “These, these will give the world another heart, / And other pulses” – John Keats
 THE BROTHERS GRIMM

“In the olden days when wishing still worked”

(1812 - 1822)
• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
• Scholars, cultural researchers, linguists
and lexicographers
• Folklore collections synthesised into
one single written text
• Interest in folklore was inspired by rise
in nationalism and cultural pride
• Initially written for adult audience
• W H Auden declared the collection: “among the few
common-property books upon which Western culture
can be founded”
JANE AUSTEN

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not

pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid”
(1775 - 1817)
• Key works: Pride and Prejudice, Sense
and Sensibility, Emma, Persuasion…
• Austen was part of a movement
branching away from excess emotions of
tradition romantic texts, focusing more
on manners and social structures
• Works of this genre were often
dominated by women and sometimes
dismissed as trivial
• Gently satirises social mores of the
English country gentry:
• The importance of rank; the stigma of social inferiority;
system of patronage
 FRANKENSTEIN

“Beware, for I am fearless and therefore powerful”

(1818)
• Mary Shelly
• Daughter of feminist author Mary
Wollstonecraft
• Samples features of the Gothic genre
• Inspired while sharing ghost stories with
Lord Byron and Percy Shelley
• An alienated individual in the modern
world:
• Scientist, Frankenstein, creates a being out of body parts
but then panics when he invigorates the being using
electrical currents: “the demoniacal corpse to which I had
so miserably given life”
• Deals with persecution, threat, monstrosity, vanity
THE LADY OF SHALOTT

“I am half sick of shadows” (1833)

• Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Was the Poet Laureate of England for
more than 40 years
• LoS written before fame – based on
Arthurian legend
• Dramatic ballad – forged the way for
the form as part of folklore
• Lady is cursed with imprisonment in a tower and
only a mirror to observe the outside world
• Deals with isolation, gender roles, man versus nature
THE BRONTE SISTERS

“Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing

animosity, or registering wrongs” (1816-1885)
• Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–
1848) and Anne (1820–1849)
• All with separate acclaim for their novels
but often examined as a collective
• Often left alone together in their isolated
home and all began to write stories at an
early age
• Father was an Anglican Clergyman
• Branwell (brother) Emily and Anne died
of tuberculosis
• During the 19th C women were linked to
the home – a recurrent theme in all of
their texts – claustrophobic entrapment,
gender roles, dominance and submission
 CHARLES DICKENS

“No one is useless in this world who lightens the

burdens of another” (1812 - 1870)
• Son of a clerk in the Navy
• Received intermittent schooling and
indifferent care from his parents - were
once obliged to take up residence in
Marshalsea prison for debt
• Feat.: Oliver Twist
• Paints a bold depiction of social underclass in
Victorian England
• Social protest novel published serially to keep
readers interested
• Oliver flees an orphanage and workhouse to join a
criminal gang to survive
• Other works: Great Expectations, David
Copperfield, A Christmas Carol
MODERNIST LITERATURE

1900 – 1950
Breaking with tradition
 MODERNIST LITERATURE

• The new century was characterised by move away from gritty realism or
symbolist expression portray in the previous ‘Realism era’ in texts such as:
• Darwin’s “On the species by Means of Natural Selection (1859)

• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (1832)

• Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865)

• Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869)

• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)

• OR The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1891)

• Modernists stretched the conventions of prose and verse

• Were heavily influences by existentialist philosophy and psychology
• Most notable is the “stream of consciousness” novel and the unreliable
narrator
 ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but

talent instantly recognizes genius” (1859 - 1930)
• Scottish writer
• Epitome of detective fiction
• Feat.: Hound of the Baskervilles
• Centres on murder mystery – Charles
Baskerville apparently terrified to death on
his own property but a ghost hound
• Conventions: suspects, sleuth, investigation,
solution through logical deduction
• Themes: reason triumphs over evil and the
supernatural/superstition
THE GREAT GATSBY

“So we beat on, boats against the current” (1925)

• F Scott Fitzgerald
• Social commentary on life in the USA
during the Jazz Age
• Served in the Army under Eisenhower but never
served overseas
• Influenced by “the lost generation”, described
by Hemmingway
• Generation of ‘lost’ veterans came back restless,
cynical and searching for meaningful experience
through love, alcohol and hedonism
• Gatsby explored “new money, new values” post war
prosperity – era offered class mobility
 ERNEST HEMINGWAY

“What if I fall? Oh but my darling, what if you fly?”

(1899 - 1861)
• Served in WW1 in Italy as ambulance driver
• His books were burned in Berlin in 1933, "as
being a monument of modern decadence”
• Self describes writing as “Iceberg Theory”
• Died in 1961 of a self-inflicted gunshot to
the head
• Feat.: Old Man and the Sea (1952)
• An old Cuban fisherman and his supreme ordeal: a
relentless battle with a giant marlin
• Other works: For whom the bells toll
• Themes: death, nature, love, emasculation
POSTMODERN LITERATURE

Post WWII – late 20th

All truth is relative
 POSTMODERN LITERATURE

• Defined as a style which emerged in the post-World War II era

• Seen as a reaction against Enlightenment thinking and Modernist
approaches to literature (progress, science, communication, reason)
• Characterised by a heavy reliance on techniques such as fragmentation,
paradox, unreliable narrators
• Other conventions:
• Irony, black humour, pastiche, intertextuality, temporal distortion, hyperreality,
paranoia
SAMUEL BECKETT

“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on”

(1906 – 1989)
• Born on April 13, 1906, in Dublin, Ireland
• Seen as the father of “Theatre of the
Absurd” – subverted the norms of society
by entertaining the idea that any meaning in
the universe would always elude our
attempts to discover it
• Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1969
• Feat.: Waiting for Godot (1953)
• Dialogue between two tramps, Vladimir and
Estragon who are waiting for “Godot” who never
turns up. The action defies common sense.
• Themes: existentialism, nihilism,
consciousness, mortality
 THE CRUCIBLE

“I have given you my soul, now leave me my name”

(1953)
• Arthur Miller (USA) – at one point married
to Marilyn Monroe
• Depicts the 1692 “witch trials” in Salem,
Massachusetts
• An allegorical play criticising McCarthyism
and the “hunt for communists” – was
himself found guilty by Senate’s Un-
American Activities Committee
• Themes: reputation, hysteria, gang
mentality, deceit
• Features of Post-modernism: reflects
social issues/construction of power;
examination of moral absolutes;
dissatisfaction and social unrest
THE CRUCIBLE
CATCH 22 (1961)

“Anything worth dying for… is certainly worth living for”

• Joseph Heller (USA 1923-99)
• Satirical novel set in World War II
• Follows Captain Yossarian who serves on
bombing missions – tries to avoid missions by
feigning illness
• Stuck in a “Catch 22” – military code of practice
where they can apply for discharge on the
grounds of insanity, however claiming madness
using correct protocol proves their sanity
• Themes: personal integrity, bureaucracy,
passivity
• Features of Post-modernism: black humour
stemming from fear and horror highlighting the
futility of life; paradox; uncertainty; cyclical
reasoning
METAMODERN LITERATURE
 METAMODERN LITERATURE

• Closely linked with Generation Y

• Sometimes described by postmodernists as “uncreative writing”
• Style is sometimes referred to as ‘alt lit’ or ‘alt WTF’
• Reflects Avant-garde culture: people or works that are experimental,
radical, or unorthodox, with respect to art, culture, and society
• Generally shared via internet
• Most common text types: internet poetry and image macros
• Theorist Seth Abramson claims that “a metamodern poem tends to raise,
as one of its primary lines of inquiry, “Is this for real?”, and then,
secondarily, “What the hell?”
• Still being defined!!
INTERNET POETRY
INTERNET POETRY

“Poetry bombing the internet” – (2012)

• http://internetpoetry.co.uk/
• Collated by Michael Hessel-Mial (USA)
• submissions-based Tumblr
• Collaboratively explores and expands
on what poetry can be online
• Unconventional advertisements,
screenshots of poem drafts on phone,
visual and written combination
• Self-defined purpose: “avoid taking
the old poetics and just putting them
online”
 IMAGE MACROS

• The name "macros" derived from a

short bit of text a user could enter that
forum software would automatically
parse and expand into the code for a
pre-defined image; e.g. :) = 
• Were once clearly defined, as words
over images with a clear debt to meme
culture
• Combination of a layout of words in
relation to an image
• Trend currently is finding connections
between disjoined elements
“Image macros really hinge on how visual
• Features of metamodernism: early media can be poetry …Not all of the best
influences from Dadaism (focus on macros are going to have a lot of polish,
disjunction) anymore than the best poems are going to be in
an ‘elevated diction’ or something. ”
THE YOLO PAGES

“…to create writing that reflects a worldview where

such activism is celebrated or affirmed as part of the
status quo of that community”
• Anthology of texts that are “really good,
yet underappreciated”
• Features tweets, faux-articles, captioned
photos, and poems

• For example:
“I CAN’T COME TO DINNER MOM IM
SOLVING HOMOPHOBIA
ON THE INTERNET”

—Jos Charles
THE YOLO PAGES

Melissa Broder 2014

 TO CONCLUDE…

Write as though you are flowers from each period

(one sentence)!
For example:

Ancient: Are you the flower or the vase?

Medieval: For the lady, from her knight.
Renaissance: A rose by any other name…
Romantic: The flower encapsulates the human soul.
Modernist: The flowers have been killed by the folly of man.
Postmodernist: What flowers?
Metamodernist: Trapped in a vase of envy
 TO CONCLUDE…

What is your fashionable item of choice?

(one sentence)!
For example:

Ancient: A book.
Medieval: Suit of armour.
Renaissance: A castle.
Romantic: A house in the country.
Modernist: A pen.
Postmodernist: A bottle of nothing.
Metamodernist: Justin Beiber following me on Twitter.
ASSESSMENT