College aantekeningen

College aantekeningen 19th century literature realism

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Universiteit Antwerpen (UA)

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Geupload op 28 maart 2024
Aantal pagina's 41
Geschreven in 2022/2023
Type College aantekeningen
Docent(en) Toon staes
Bevat Alle colleges

realist novel
dickens
eliot
hard times
victorian poetry
erewhon
american civil war
literature of slavery
huckleberry finn
regionalism

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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