College aantekeningen 19th century literature realism
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Course
19th century literature realism
Institution
Universiteit Antwerpen (UA)
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Nineteenth century literature
LES 14/02: introduction realism
Painting: stonebreakers Gustave Courbet
First painting called realism. Move away from romanticism. Realism
came from France. Real life as it actually is. Fiction is easier to write
than to write about people like us (ordinary people). Clothes ripped:
harsher lifestyle, rough (details add reality effect). Almost as if
camera took picture. Child labour (left)
Painting: Luc Fildes the widower
Life of ordinary people living daily life
Life was hard
This semester
Realism came late to the US because of the civil war (slavery)
1. The Victorian era (1837-1901) and its discontents
Painting: The Great Exhibition 1851
o In Christel Palace (May-Nov)
o Inventions were on display
o Exhibition of progress, projection of the future
o Massive event (more 6 million people attended
it)
o More and more people started reading (large
audiences from all classes)
o You can’t longer resist you have to adapt, make
use of the inventions and started writing about it
o Urbanization move from country to cities (more than half the population
lived in cities)
o People will get richer and the richest people got also even richer
o Most trees looked black (factories)
o Trains changed everything (became topic in fiction)
Symbol of rapid acceleration
Age of transition
Unprecedented growth – progress and ideal in itself
o Shift from land ownership to manufacturing economy
Henry Ford: build cars
o Urban, industrial (London, Manchester, Liverpool)
London centre of world in Victorian Era
o Accelerated rate of change
o BUT: unregulated – unevenly distributed (slums, child labour)
Fantasy: more money for the rich → more money for the poor
o Expansion – Britain becomes world banker
Colonialism – cf. 1858: India, 1880s: the scramble for Africa
1890: British empire ¼ of the world
25% of world’s population was British subject
, Centre of influence from Paris to London
o Dominant philosophy: utilitarianism
Use value of things
Actions are right if they do a good thing for the biggest amount of
people
o Science and reason
1830-33: Charles Lyell Principles of Geology
Geology coming up
1872-6 Challenger Expedition oceanography
There is more of us (other species)
1846: George Eliot’s translation of D.F. Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu
People changed the way they believed (in church)
Waning spirituality (though unlike 20 th century)
o Photo in 1874: people on board of challenger expedition
o Quote book: On the origin of Species (1859)
Whole complex world with all its beauty came from simple laws of
gravity
Inspiration from Lyell because he was the first one to use evolution
Darwin’s plots: book
1. The civil war and post 1865 US and the Gilded Age
Slavery 1862-3: emancipation proclamation
Period of massive disruption
620000 deaths half of war causalities in US history
Reconstruction in the South, corruption in North
The Gilded Age (right after civil war)
o Term by Mark Twain
o Looks gold from outside but isn’t
o Only small amount of people benefits from this age
Regionalism (Mark Twain)
o Written after civil war, set in South before the war
o Meaning term: effort to represent a certain place at a certain time as real
as possible
Psychological realism (Henry James) – closer to modernism, workings of mind
1. The realist era
break with Romanticism?
o beauty in literature
o literature as part of well-rounded education
o literature and the market—new: serialization
o subjectivity vs. objectivity—consciousness representation
BUT emphasis on “common sense”
o link with early photography—“daguerreotype”
o link with science—Auguste Comte’s “positivism”
o “Realism” as new literary term
o novel becomes the dominant literary form
LES 21/02: The realist novel: George Eliot
,Painting
portrait Eliot
was a woman
translated books
knew and studied Darwin
Painting
One of the earliest photographs taken (1838)
Daguerre
First that has a human being in it (standing still for several
minutes)
Paris: Boulevard de Temple
When everything is already shown trough photography, the
magic of seeing something for the first time is gone
Painting 1857: Peasant life (realistic depiction)
1. Realist era (1850-1900) came via France
Jules Champfleury (1821-1889)
o Started writing about link between painting Courbet and literature
o He wrote what realism and literature should be
o We need to have confidence in language as a way of representing reality
realistically
“What I see enters my head, descends into my pen, and becomes what I
have seen”
A bit naïve thought, the one who is writing is biased (a selection of what
to write)
o But always conflict between objectivity vs. subjectivity
“The reproduction of nature will never be a reproduction nor an
imitation, it will always be an interpretation”
Goes even for photographs (angle)
o Solution: sincerity
We should try to display the world as sincerely as possible
Roland Barthes: l’effet de réel (1966)
o Reality effect: elements in a text that are not necessarily relevant for the plot
o Because they are there the text seems more realistic
o Example: barometer in a living room
1. George Eliot’s literary program (1819-1880)
Mary Evans real name
It is probably not for the reason because woman weren’t good writers because they were
already a lot of female writers (example: Uncle Toms cabin)
The reason why she chose another name is that there already existed a George Henry
Lewis
o George Henry Lewis became her man (he was still married)
o Choose a man to not devote any more attention
After Middlemarch people knew she was Mary Evans
Brought realism literature to English literature
Essayist, translator, critic, novelist – intellectual, humanist
o David Strauss’ The life of Jesus, Critically examined (translation)
o Feuerbach’s The essence of Christianity (translation)
, o Spinoza’s Ethics (translation)
Avid reader of Darwin
Journalist – met leading intellectuals before writing fiction (Spencer, Emerson)
1851-54: assistant editor of Westminster review
o Natural history of German life and Silly novels by lady novelists
Wrote very long novels
o All of them were published in chapters over a longer period of time
o Every chapter a cliff hanger
Write letters to editors complaining about stories in realism
The Natural history of German life (1856)
o First it was book review published in Germany
o A book about peasant life: in praise of Riehl’s representation of common folk in
Land und Leute (1854) and Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft (1851)
o BUT also an occasion for Eliot’s literary program
o P 1: “How little the real characteristics of the working classes are known to those
who are outside them […] is sufficiently disclosed by our Art”
We don’t know how ordinary people their lives are because we never
write about them
o P 2: “The notion that peasants are joyous […] are prejudices difficult to dislodge
from the artistic mind, which looks for its subjects into literature instead of life”
Said that peasants are joyous
When you read a novel they actually don’t know anything
o P 3: “To make men moral something more is requisite than to turn them out to
grass.”
Dangerous fantasy
Need to do something more than simply assume that these people are
happy
John Ruskin is right: we need to be more faithful to how this people lived
their life
o P3
Ideas from defence of poetry
Literature allows us to understand and empathize
We understand lives of people who are not like us
Art can represent that life
Don’t represent stereotypes, but represent realistically
o Empathy and the novel from Suzanne Keen
Link between empathy and the novel
Good idea, but also kind of dangerous
Talks about George Eliot
Not said before realism, because everyone read poetry, not
novels (quotes)
o P 5:
Novelists can do more than journalists for ex. because a novel allows us
to empathize with people who are not like us
Experience lives directly
Silly novels by lady novelists (1856)
o Criticizes sentimental fiction written by woman she found it boring
o Novels of the mind and millinery species (dull, boring) two exceptions Gaskell
and Bell (Bell is Charlotte Brontë)
o It is not the fault of woman, it is because of what society expects of woman
o So a plea for reform and sympathy
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