MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE:

INTRODUCTION. THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH.

PARTS OF THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH:

The Roman conquest and occupation of Britain (England and Wales) produced virtually no
effect on English literature.
For over 300 years, from the first century A.D. to the beginning of the fifth cent., the island
was a Roman province, with Latin as the language of the ruling class of Roman Immigrants,
who introduced Roman civilization and later on Christianity, to the Britons of the towns and
plains.

>> THE ANGLO-SAXON CONQUEST AND SETTLEMENT

The process by which Britain became England was a part of the long agony which
transformed the Roman Empire into modern Europe. In the 4th century A.D., the Angles,
Saxons and Jutes began to harry the southern and eastern shores of Britain, where the Romans
were obliged to maintain a special military establishment against them.
But early in the 5th century the Romans, hard-pressed even in Italy by other barbarian invaders,
withdrew all their troops and completely abandoned Britain.
Not long thereafter, and probably before the date of 449, the Jutes, Angles and Saxons began to
come in large bands with the deliberate purpose of permanent settlement.

>> OLD ENGLISH (450 – 1100 A.D.)

The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain developed into what we
now call Old English. Old English did not sound or look like English today.
Native English speakers now would have great difficulty understanding Old English.
Nevertheless, about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English
roots. The words “be, strong and water”, for example, derive from Old English.
Old English was spoken until around 1100.

1
The Anglo-Saxons doubtless brought with them from the Continent the rude beginnings of
poetry. It consisted largely of brief magical charms and of rough “popular ballads” (ballads of
the people). The charms explain themselves as an inevitable product of primitive superstition
(mundo sobrenatural); the ballads probably first sprang up and developed, among all races, in
much the following way.
>>> Lo sobrenatural es la base para la creación de la literatura. Gran parte de la literatura es
sobrenatural.

Not much Anglo-Saxon poetry of the pagan period has come down to us. By far the most
important remaining example is the epic “Beowulf”, of about three thousand lines (versos). This
poem seems to have originated on the Continent, but when and where are not now to be known.
It may have been carried to England in the form of ballads by the Anglo-Saxons; or it may be
Scandinavian material, later brought in by Danish or Norwegian pirates.
“Beowulf” presents an interesting though very incomplete picture of the life of the upper,
warrior, caste among the northern Germanic tribes during their later period of barbarism on the
Continent and in England, a life more highly developed than that of the Anglo-Saxons before
their conquest of the island. This epic poem of the 8th century is in Anglo-Saxon, now more
usually described as Old English. It is incomprehensible to a reader familiar only with modern
English.

>> MIDDLE AGES. MIDDLE ENGLISH (1100-1500)

In 1066 William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy (part of modern France),
invaded and conquered England.
The New conquerors (called the Normans) brought with them a kind of French, which became
the language of the Royal Court, and the ruling and business classes. For a period, there was a
kind of linguistic class division, where the lower classes spoke English and the upper classes
spoke French.
In the 14th century English became dominant in Britain again, but with many French words
added. This language is called Middle English. It was the language of the great poet Chaucer
(c1340-1400), but it would still be difficult for native English speakers to understand today.

One of the most striking general facts in the later Middle Ages is the uniformity of like in many
of its aspects throughout all Western Europe. It was only during this period that the modern

2
nations, acquiring national consciousness, began to shape themselves out of the chaos which had
followed the fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Church, firmly established in every corner
of every land, was the actual inheritor of much of the unifying power of the Roman government,
and the feudal system everywhere gave society the same political organization and ideals. In a
truer sense, perhaps, Western Europe was one great brotherhood, thinking much the same
thoughts, speaking in part the same speech, and actuated by the same beliefs.

At least, the literature of the period, largely composed and copied by the great army of monks,
exhibits a thorough uniformity in types and ideas. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. This is
the brief and carefully constructed work of an unknown but very real poetic artist, who lived
probably a little earlier than Chaucer. French and Germanic influences subsequently compete for
the mainstream role in English literature. Both traditions achieved a magnificent flowering in
England in the late 14th century, towards the end of the Middle English period.
Of the century and a half, from 1350 to 1500, which forms our third period, the most important
part for literature was the first fifty years, which constitutes the age of Chaucer.
Chaucer experimented with the numerous lyric forms which the French poets had brought to
perfection. The great work of the period, however, and the crowning achievement of Chaucer’s
life, is “The Canterbury Tales”.

*DOCUMENTARY: “The birth of a language” HISTORY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE

PERIODS OF ENGLISH LITERATURE:

- Middle Ages (ca 500 A.D. - 1500)

- Anglo-Saxon or Old English (500 A.D. to the 12th century): the greatest literary achievement
of the age is the epic Beowulf.

- Middle English literature (from the end of the 12th century to 1500): a new period begins with
the Norman Conquest (1066). The greatest poet of this period is Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343 –
1400).

3
- Renaissance: this period covers the 16th and 17th centuries in England; in Italy the Renaissance
started as early as the 14th century. The most famous English authors in this period are Sir
Thomas More (“Utopia”), Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, John Donne, John Milton.
The monarchy of Queen Elizabeth (1558 - 1603) is usually considered to be a high point of the
English Renaissance and is often referred to as the Elizabethan era.

- The Restoration and the 18th century (1660-1800): This period is considered as Neo-Classical
in its aesthetic attitude (especially the Augustan age (1660 –1740)) and rationalistic in its
outlook. This is the reason why this era is also often referred to as the Age of Reason or the
Enlightenment (La Ilustración).
*Se llamaba “Age of Reason” porque tenían que dar una explicación científica a
todo para darle sentido.
Pensamiento racional >> necesidad de pruebas para poder constatar algo.

The most important authors are John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Jonhathan Swift,
Samuel Johnson. The 18th century also saw the rise of the English novel. The most
important English novelists of the period were Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry
Fielding, Lawrence Sterne.

*Defoe– Robinson Crusoe (1719), 18th century.

*Jonathan Swift– Gulliver’s travels (1726).

ROMANTIC AND VICTORIAN PERIOD (19TH CENTURY):

Romanticism (1789 – 1832) probably started earlier in England than in any other European
country. The most important genre of that time was poetry: William Blake, William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John
Keats. In America, this period is mirrored in the Transcendental Period from about 1830 – 1850.
Transcendentalists include Emerson and Thoreau.
Gothic writings (1790 – 1890), overlap with the Romantic and Victorian periods. Writers of
Gothic novels (the precursor to horror novels) include Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and Victorians
like Bram Stoker in Britain. In America, Gothic writers include Edgar Allan Poe and Hawthorne.

4
The Victorian period covers the years of Queen Victoria´s monarchy (1837-1901). One of the
most important poets was Alfred Tennyson, more or less a continuation of the traditions of
English Romanticism.
The Victorian novel had numerous writers such as Charles Dickens (Christmas carol, Hard
Times, Oliver Twist), the Brontë Sisters (Wuthering heights, Jane Eyre) William Thackeray,
George Eliot or Thomas Hardy; they all wrote their masterpieces in this period.

The end of the Victorian period is marked by the intellectual movement of Aestheticism.
In his writings, Oscar Wilde explains what Aestheticism is and his concept of beauty, sublime.
His self –portrait is important to see which attitude he had, how he understood life.
We can see that his attitude is that he doesn't care about anything but about beauty. Their novels
are also gothic writings.

20TH CENTURY:

-PRE-WORLD WAR II:

Perhaps the most characteristic literary achievement ofBritish literature before 1945 is
Modernism. Henry James, Joseph Conrad, T.S Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, etc. It is
characterized by experimental form and style and breaking away from established rules and
conventions. In America, the Modernist period includes Robert- Host and Flannery o'Connor as
well as the famous writers of The Lost Generation or The Jazz Age (1914-1924) such as
Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), and Faulkner.

-POST-WAR LITERATURE:
It is also known as postmodernism and it is very difficult to define because there is no clear
dividing line between modernism and postmodernism. The post-war period, however, produced
experimental techniques in all genres, such as the theatre of the Absurd, associated with Samuel
Beckett and Harold Pinter, and new modes in poetry and fiction too.
Some outstanding authors in English literature are Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Salman Rushdie,
Ishiguro and Tom Stoppard. Multiculturalism leads to increasing canonization of non-caucasian
writers such as Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros (hispanic literature >> The house on Mango
Street), and Zora Neal Husrton.

5
H.G. WELLS (1866 – 1946):

Humanist, author of The Stolen Bacillus and Other incidents. He wrote a lot of books, he wrote
about several issues and was concerned about politics, humanity, economics and fictions.
He is an author, but he is also considered as a futurist, essayist, historian, socialist and teacher.
He wrote his most popular novel “The War of Worlds” in 1898. But he is also the author of “The
Time Machine” (1895): a parody of English class division and one of the first modern science
fiction (but that name appeared 40 years after) stories; and “The Invisible Man” (1897). All these
novels were way ahead of their time.

Wells is often known, along with Jules Verne (1828-1905) >> Journey to the Center of the Earth
(1864) as being one of the fathers of modern science fiction.
Wells’s socialism in this period of his career asked for the abolition of class barriers but also free
competition between individuals, in society regardless of their social background.

Wells’s ideal society is set out in a Modern Utopia (1905) where a highly regulated world state
all property is owned by the state. Also, he proposes the equality of sexes. Man is the unnatural
animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and
fitful hand that reared him.
He considered that the political form that was implicit in modern sciences was a Socialism
World State. “A great world order that was foreshadowed by scientific and industrial progress”
(that is why he was a visionary, he believed in science and progress).

He also engaged with other key struggles of this time, such as the campaign for female suffrage
of this time, such as the campaign for female suffrage portrayed in Ann Veronica (1909), vote
for women. He thought that men deserved something better and that the division of classes was
unnecessary.
The film director Orson Wells, on the night of Halloween of 1937 (40 years after The War of the
Worlds) with the on-radio broadcast of the novel, caused widespread panic in NY.

The Fabian society was a group of socialist intellectuals, but Wells showed his disagreement in
the 1880´s. Nevertheless, he joined the Fabian society in 1903.

6
After a while “he thought the society was a talking shop for middle class socialist” that did not
pursue a “real change”. The turning point was when he advocated the payment of mothers, and
when in 1908, the Fabian Society refused to adopt his policy, he finally resigned.

During the Second World War he drafted a “Universal Rights of Man” that was published in a
letter to the Times. This document helped a lot to develop the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in 1948.
Wells began studies in biology and Darwinism under Thomas Henry Huxley, Aldous Huxley's
grandfather.
“The Island of Doctor Moreau” (1896) another of Wells´s many stories to inspire movie
adaptations, deals with themes of eugenics (the ethics of science experimentation) Darwin's
theories and religion.

Wells also joined the socialist Fabian Society and met playwright George Shaw.
(Wells was a futurist, he thought that with a bacteria he could destroy the world).
“The Stolen Bacillus” asked Victorian readers to consider what kind of people are responsible
for containing these newly discovered life forms. Wells himself was a late-Victorian figure.
It is interesting to notice the description of the foreigner in the text suggesting that he is perhaps
Eastern in origin. This shows the anxiety the population was feeling at the“fin de siècle”: the
foreigner is “pale” and possesses a “limp white hand”.

The story conflates political, biological, and foreign threats to social order, suggesting that
British technological developments are perhaps becoming as much a danger for the safety of the
empire.

7
“NEWS FROM NOWHERE”. WILLIAM MORRIS (1890):

Utopia could be an imaginary place or government in which political and social perfection has
been reached in the material world as opposed to some spiritual afterlife as discussed in the
Bible.

In literature, the characters of such utopias are typically clear, virtuous, healthy, and happy. The
utopian society is one that has cured all social ills.
In Greek, eu + topos means “good” and “place”.

Utopia would suggest the search for a perfect society and an impossible one.
Utopian literature is a term/genre for any text that presents the reader with (or explored the idea
of) a perfect society in the physical world, as opposed to a perfect society existing in an afterlife.

Critics establish that the first literary utopia was Plato’s ideal commonwealth in The Republic
(400, BCE), in which a group of debating philosophers seeking to define justice end up as a
mental exercise creating a hypothetical perfect “polis”, or self- governing city of about 8000
citizens.

In this utopian society, philosophers are the rulers, but goods and women are communally
owned, and slavery is taken for granted. Artists, actors, and poets are largely exiled.

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia opened the genre in 1516 and his name for the imaginary kingdom
became the term used in reference to the genre more generally William Morris’s “News from
Nowhere” or H.G. Wells’s “A Modern Utopia” (1905) are two important examples of utopian
literature.

“News from Nowhere” by William Morris (1890) tells a story of an Englishman of 1890 that
wakes up to find himself in a post-revolutionary and post-industrial 21st century England.

This new and ideal country is organized on an ideal communism with no money, no private
property and perfect equality. Labour is shared equally and is considered a pleasure rather than a
necessary tool, in some way, industrialism and science has been abandoned in favour of low-tech
crafts.

8
The main character in the text is named “Guest” and he soon learns that:
1. Money has been abolished.
2. Craftwork has pushed aside “wage slavery” (esclavitud de los salarios).
3. Contracts of marriage have been replaced by flexible bonds of affection (los
matrimonios ya no se veían como contratos, no hacía falta ninguna firma).
4. Parliamentary democracy has given way to informal patterns of cooperation (forma de auto-
gobierno).
*1909>> Filippo di Marinetti, escribe el manifiesto futurista, movimiento futurista.

Human beings fall too quickly from hope and idealism to cynicism and despair, a fall that signals
our transition from innocence to death. The cynical attitude is the resort of those who are too
lazy to struggle for more growth. Some studies regarding the critical approach to “News from
Nowhere” state that this work would provide the antidote; it would inspire us to strive towards
the restoration of paradise.
Morris’s generation responded to the pessimism of the age by embracing art over
religion.

He advocates that we all must live our lives as artists. This is the final conclusion by Morris’s
dreamer at the end of “News from Nowhere”.
>>La conclusión de Morris: abrazar al arte.

“I lay in my bed at dingy Hammersmith… trying to consider if I was overwhelmed by despair at

finding I had been dreaming a dream; and strange to say, I found that I was not despairing… if
others have seen it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream”.
- Do you know which is the nature of hope and change?
- Why are some dreams considered credible and others considered incredible?

9
Here we have five of Morris’s envisioned transformations that readers will likely dismiss as
incredible, as naïve dreams too impossible to ever realize:

1) Who can believe that fellowship might ever replace self-interest, that the principle of self-
sacrifice for the good of the community might ever replace the practice of self-assertion of the
individual, so that the communal valves of socialism may turn to a mass movement like a
worldwide religion?

2) Who can believe that healthy, beautiful people will replace our corrupt (dirty) social order?

3) That the sunshine will change our dreary weather?

4) That clean fish will renew our polluted rivers?

5) That good people will enjoy working without the rewards that distinguish
workers from loafers?

Morris first raised these five issues in News from Nowhere, and some of these ideal dreams have
become seriously credible as achievable goals.
He challenges us to change the world by starting with the most profound of philosophical
questions: what would it be like to live in heaven, to live a heavenly life on earth.

Morris dares us to consider this as a practical question that every responsible adult should pursue
rather than dismiss as a childish dream.

It is considered that he wrote News from Nowhere as a revolutionary response to this

fundamental question about the way we live our lives.
The subtext of Morris’s narrative romance is not so much whether or not a heavenly could ever
become a reality.
Morris is horrified that we no longer even wish for it to happen.

10
In a lecture on How I Became a Socialist, Morris explains how the capitalist system has “reduced
the workman to such a skinny and pitiful existence, that he scarcely knows how to frame a desire
for any life much better.

Morris believes in the potential of ART.

Art provides the answer: “It is the province of art to set the true ideal of a full and reasonable life
before him, a life to which the perception and creation of beauty, the enjoyment of real pleasure
that is, shall be felt to be as necessary as his daily bread”.

The first and last chapters of “News from Nowhere” frame the desire for this utopian ideal, as
the narrator’s friend repeats his anxious wish to envision “what would happen on the Morrow of
the Revolution”.

“If I could but see a day of it; If I could but see it”.
By the last chapter, his despair has turned to an affirmation of hope: “Yes, surely! And If others
can see it as I have seen it, then it may be called a vision rather than a dream.”
News from Nowhere is not an escapist utopian fantasy, but a political act.

The opening lines are a reference to the debate about Anarchism that took place in the Socialist
League in 1889 and 1890.

News from Nowhere contains different criticisms of some political tendencies in the emerging
English revolutionary movements of the 1890s, particularly those of the Anarchists.

A debate about Anarchism took place within the Socialist League in 1889 and eventually it
destroyed the league. Morris’s voice dominated the columns of the Commonweal from its first
issues until just before the serialization of News from Nowhere.

Commonweal addressed two audiences:

1. those not yet converted to socialism and used as a vehicle for propaganda of the cause.
2. as an instrument for the publications of the debates among members of the socialist league.

11
Morris lost control of the league in 1890. The political background of News is placed among the
last convulsions of the socialist league.

OSCAR WILDE (1854-1900)

*The preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: ART FOR THE ARTS SAKE*

>>What is beauty (for you)?

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.
That is all.
The 19th century’s dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in glass.

The picture of Dorian Gray first appeared in 1890 and it was very controversial because of its
references of homosexuality. Wilde had to mend the text and a “toned-down” version of the
book was published in April 1891. It is this sweetened and adulterated version that we read
today.

This novel was used against Wilde in two of the trials because English society considered him
guilty of sodomy.
For many people Oscar Wilde, the artist– with his notorious public persona and his private life
– and his novel and its duplicitous central character (Dorian Gray) mirrored each other from the
start.

*double: personaje doble de Dorian Gray. Es una sola persona con un doble (una parte oscura).

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is also an excellent example of late – Victorian Gothic
fiction. It ranks alongside Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
(1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as a representation of how fin-de-siècle literature
explored the darkest aspects of Victorian society and the blatant hypocrisy so very common at
that time. This novel also portrays the relationship between art and reality, between ethics and
aesthetics, as well as the link between any artist and the result of his/her work of art (portrait).

12
The picture of Dorian Gray explores the idea of the beautiful– the novel’s opening paragraph
describes the pleasure we get from the scent of roses and lilacs. How can we interpret that?

>> importance of the pleasure we get from the senses

As Wilde states in the preface to the novel ‘there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book.
Books are well written or badly written. That is all’. So, any moral issue or pleasure derived
from the book reflects more upon us as readers than it does on the novel itself.

Scholars agree that the book is pure fiction. It is we, the readers, who force it to bear the weight
of a moral dimension.

>> French symbolism: baudelaire, valéry, etc.

Aestheticism was something controversial and fashionable at the turn of the century. Its main
goal was that art should be judged purely by its beauty and form rather than by any underlying
moral message (art for art’s sake). This is exemplified in the novel by the dandyish Lord Henry
Wotton.

Lord Henry advocates the hedonistic pursuit of new experiences as the prime objective in life.
In his view, ‘one could never pay too high a price for any sensation’ (ch.4).
Dorian is increasingly interested in the moral consequences of his behaviour. He stands before
his decaying portrait, comparing the moral degradation as depicted in oil with his unblemished
innocence as reflected by the mirror. The contrast gives him a thrill of pleasure: ‘he grew more
and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own
soul’ (ch.11)

Wilde rejected Victorian morals and solemnity. He was born in Dublin in 1854. He made a
great success of his studies at Trinity College, and won a scholarship to go to Oxford. He
graduated in classics and won a prize for poetry. While he was at Oxford, he joined up with
many aristocratic young men who helped him gain an entrée into London society.

13
He was delightful to be with, witty, and good-natured. He was also known for his dandyism
and great talking.

>> dandyism: a literary and artistic style of the latter part of the 19th century marked by
artificiality and excessive refinement
A man who affects extreme elegance in clothes and manners.

He loved literary paradoxes. The preface to his book, The Picture of Dorian Gray in the 1890s
is full of short aphorisms, but they are all contradictory to the social and literary standards of
the time:
“No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable
mannerism of style”

The preface is a reflection on art, the artist, and the utility of both. “All art is quite useless”. In
this one sentence, Wilde encapsulates the complete principles of the aesthetic movement
popular in Victorian England. That is to say, real art takes no part in molding the social or
moral identities of society, nor should it. Art should be beautiful and pleasure for its observer,
but to imply further-reaching influence would be a mistake.

The explosion of aesthetic philosophy in fin-de-siècle English society, as exemplified by Oscar

Wilde, was not confined to merely art. Aesthetes extended it to life itself. Aestheticism seeks to
maximize the beauty and happiness in one's life, in the tradition of hedonism. To the aesthete,
the ideal life mimics art; it is beautiful, but quite useless beyond its beauty, concerned only
with the individual living it.

Paintings often play a sinister role in Gothic fiction. The first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto (1764), includes a figure stepping from a painting and into reality while
Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), written by Oscar Wilde’s great-uncle Charles Maturin,
describes the haunting gaze of a portrait as it follows the viewer around a room. ‘Beneath every
face are the latent faces of ancestors, beneath every character their characters’. This idea
already seems present in much Gothic fiction, including Wilde’s novel.

14
For centuries, Gothic fiction has provided authors with imaginative ways to address
contemporary fears. As a result, the nature of Gothic novels has altered considerably from one
generation to the next. Early Gothic novels, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto
(1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) were set in exotic landscapes and
distant times; for example, the action took place in crumbling castles and torch-lit monasteries.

>> Late victorians were v v anxious. (immigration was a grave concern).

Later, in the early Victorian period, authors such as Charles Dickens borrowed typically gothic
motifs– the innocent abandoned in a threatening environment, or the mysterious stranger with
secrets to hide– and transplanted them to contemporary Britain to highlight modern concerns.

For example, Oliver Twist (1838) and Bleak House (1853) used gothic imagery as a means of
drawing attention to the social ills afflicting the poor in modern London.

Urban slums with their dark, narrow streets and dirty areas full of vice supplanted ivy-clad
castles and catacombs as the settings for gothic terror. In the Victorian fin-de-siècle, the gothic
develops: it is no longer the physical landscape that provides the location for gothic stories, but
rather it becomes the human body itself >>Darwinism

Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); Oscar Wilde’s The
Picture of Dorian Gray (1891); H.G Wells’ The Time Machine (1895) and Bram Stoker’s
Dracula (1897) all explore the theme of the human mind and body changing and developing,
mutating, corrupting and decaying, and all do so in response to evolutionary, social and
medical theories that were emerging at the time.

Late Victorian society was haunted by the implications of Darwinism. The ideas outlined in
Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) had by the
1880s and 1890s been assimilated, initially by the scientific community and then by much of
the general public.

15
The balance between faith and doubt was kind of difficult, and questions about the origins,
nature and destiny of humankind had become matters for science, rather than theology to
address.

Darwin concluded that the physical world had been and still was subject to continuous change
through the action of natural forces, and man is the product of these forces. No book has so
profoundly affected the modern view of man than Darwin’s On The Origin of the Species.

His doctrine of “survival of the fittest” treats the world as an incessant struggle for survival. It
is a sinister world where everybody “fights” against everybody, but “survival of the fittest”
does not literally mean fighting better, making more money, or dominating others thanks to
one’s higher intelligence. Instead, it refers only to reproductive fitness: whichever group or
individual reproduces more successfully is most fit.

Darwin’s Origin of the Species denied a divine hand in creation. In consequence, those who
read it inferred that no absolute good or absolute evil exists >>Relativism
Moral norms, which had seemed universal, proved to be relative and dependent on the societies
which had created them at a definite time in history. Moral norms were thus man-made
constructs and not universal truths. On this view, man began to feel more lonely and isolated in
an infinite and indifferent universe.

>>Religion vs. Science

Evolutionary theory provoked in Victorian letters a wave of pessimism about the human
condition.

Many Victorian writers dramatically modified their opinions about man’s origins and the
physical aspect of man’s existence.

Darwin’s works provoked a continuing moral and existential debate which also found
expression in English literature.

16
Gothic imagery, given its fantastical and supernatural nature, allowed authors to explore in an
indirect fashion themes that were not necessarily acceptable subjects for discussion in
respectable society. Count Dracula, for example, is feared for his ability to move unnoticed
through the crowds of London, potentially afflicting all in his path with the stain of vampirism.

This can be read as a fear of “foreign immigrants” moving unnoticed through London,
spreading crime and disease.

Vampirism itself is often read in Dracula (1897) as an analogy for syphilis– a subject that was
not fit for discussion in a novel published in England at the time.

Gothic fiction has always possessed the ability to adapt to its environment.
It mutates to reflect the times in which it lives, and the Victorian fin-de-siècle, with its
aesthetes and dandies and New Women >> Shaw; its fears as the implications of Darwinism
worked themselves through; its theories on the criminal classes and the consequences of old,
decayed Europe haunting new Britain in the form of immigration; all these allowed gothic
fiction to reach new heights of imagination and terror.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW:

The Irish born playwright is known in English literature for using satire/irony on political and
social topics.
These topics include social class, war, or feminism in plays such as Arms and the Man (1894),
Major Barbara (1905), and Pygmalion (1913).

Shaw developed an intellectual comedy of manners (comedia costumbrista), and Mrs. Warren’s
profession is an example of this.

Like Oscar Wilde, Shaw wrote about hypocrisy in Victorian English society as one of his major
themes.
>> “the fallen woman”, “the angel in the house”, “the new woman”.

17
He left Ireland for England as a young man in 1876 and, like many other modern dramatists, he
started writing novels and criticism before turning to the theatre.

Shaw has inspired countless authors and poets and he became one of the most popular
playwrights of his time. Wit and irony were his main literary resources.
He wrote fifty plays, many of which are still in production today. He was also a brilliant
photographer, social reformer, women’s right activist, satirist, popular public speaker, among
many other things.

>> While Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw deal with similar topics, they do so in very
different ways. Shaw isn’t as concerned with beauty and form as Wilde is, he’s more interested
in the controversial topics themselves, like prostitution, for example.

Although Shaw could get a job at 16, he found it boring. He noticed the disparity among the
social classes, at the same time he managed to go to the theatre, read literature, and immerse
himself in the poetry of Lord Byron and William Blake.

Many critics during his lifetime and after his death would come to criticize Shaw’s
humanitarian politics and sometimes contradictory but often controversial opinions.
>>“Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to
another shoulder” (the Revolutionist’s handbook and pocket companion, 1903)

Shaw was a socialist and a member of the Fabian Society, which he joined in 1884. This
Fabian Society was a revolutionary group whose main objective was to protect the interests of
the poorer classes against what they perceived to be exploitative, capitalist society. His political
interests led him, in 1893, to build the Independent Labour Party.

In 1895 he was one of the founders of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
>> he was told that this wasn’t the role of a writer, and that literature and politics should be
separate.

18
Shaw was an ardent supporter of social reforms, and was an activist in campaigns that ranged
from the movement to reform English spelling to women’s rights, to the abolition of private
property.

Prostitution in Britain was like any other form of commerce; it was very lucrative to the great
city estates in London as well as to the Church of England through rents of houses in which it
was practiced. The Lancet (medical journal) in 1857 estimated that 1 house in every 60 in
London was a brothel, and 1 female in every 16 (of all ages) was a prostitute. It is calculated
6.000 brothels in London and 80.000 prostitutes. (prostitution has been v profitable, then and
nowadays = it’s still very profitable)
>> In his plays, Shaw tries to portray as realistically/faithfully as possible the reality of the
society he lived in.

Prostitution flourished as well in London’s music-halls, notoriously in the Empire, Leicester

Square, a whoremarket patronized by young blades and military cadets. And the press
capitalized on prostitution, too. Mrs. Warren’s Profession could be on stage only once in New
York in 1905 before being closed down by the police. The New York Herald called for the
suppression of the play because it was “morally rotten… and degenerate” or “the play is an
insult to decency”, but ironically, this newspaper had a “personal column” profitably running
every day which most men in the city identified as the “whores’ daily guide and compendium”
calling for “massage parlours” run by “chic parisian ladies with cozy suites”.

>> We must note the hypocrisy in Victorian English society in regards to prostitution.

In the play, Kitty Warren decides to join her sister in capitalizing prostitution after the painful
experience of a young half-sister who died of poisoning after working in a factory 12 hours a
day for 9 shillings a week. In 1855 and 1856, the House of Commons was offered a bill to
regulate the labour in bleaching factories where preteen girls worked eighteen to twenty hours a
day in a temperature mounting to 130 degrees fahrenheit (about 54º celsius). The House
rejected the bill. In 1860 Lord Brougham (former Lord Chamberlain) informed the House of
Lords that in these same factories youngsters of seven or eight were working for as many as
four consecutive days and nights without sleep. Again, no action was taken.

19
In the play, the cities of Vienna, Brussels and Budapest are mentioned. English girls were
procured from their families on one pretext or another sent to foreign cities to slave as
prostitutes until their health or youth gave away. A favourite device for the procurer was to sign
the girl up for a career on the stage and to send her abroad for “training and to get experience”.

Shaw’s plays were written to shock audiences and teach new social and moral values (different
from Victorian values). He used paradoxes and reversed the common patterns of judgement (ie.
the conventional hero becomes the villain, and vice versa).

>> How is Mrs Warren characterized in the play, and how is Vivi Warren characterized in the
play? What are the main features of these characters? (observe and read the descriptions in
between the dialogues)

Even Shaw’s lighter work contained a socio-political dimension. Pygmalion (1913), for
example, which exposes the class divisions in British society, is a mixture of comedy and social
observation.

In play after play, Shaw presents us with different combinations of the traditional figure of
women, and even when he creates a woman who has broken out of a traditional “female” role,
he tends to draw on another literary type – the emancipated woman. >> “The New Woman”

>> Would both Mrs Warren and Vivi Warren be emancipated women?

QUESTIONS ACT 3:
How does Frank characterize his father to Mr. Praed? Mrs Warren?
On what basis does Vivie reject Crofts’ proposal?
Why does Crofts reveal the truth to Vivie?
To where does Vivie flee? What has she resolved to do?

QUESTIONS ACT 4:
What future does Vivie propose for herself?
What future relationship does Frank expect he and Vivie will have?
What justification does Mrs Warren give for continuing as a brothel manager?

20
What flaw does Vivie accuse her mother of?
Does this seem in fact to have been Mrs Warren's flaw?

The Women’s social and political union (WSPU) was founded in 1903 to campaign for
women's right to vote. Members of this movement, the “suffragettes”, were outspoken and
some employed violent tactics.
The WSPU aimed to “wake up the nation” to the case of women’s suffrage through “deeds not
words”.
This was the beginning of the suffragette movement as we know it.
During those years the Pankhurst took an important role in the militant campaign for the vote.
In 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst and others, frustrated by the lack of progress, founded the WSPU
with the motto “deeds not words”.

Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928) became involved in women’s suffrage in 1880. She was a
founding member of the WSPU in 1903 and led it until it disbanded in 1918. Under her
leadership the WSPU was a highly organized group and like other members she was
imprisoned and went on hunger strike protests.

Membership of the WSPU was limited to women only. WSPU members were determined to
obtain the right to vote for women by any means and campaigned tirelessly and sometimes
violently to achieve this aim.

They felt that the impact of peaceful tactics seemed to have been exhausted and a different,
more radical approach was needed.

The term “suffragette” is usually applied to the members of the WSPU.

>> it’s important to remember that this movement started before WW1.

The WSPU was founded by Pankhurst and a small group of socialist women actively
campaigned for the parliamentary vote for women.

21
In 1906, the WSPU relocated their headquarters to London. This transformed the suffrage
movement, and for the next 8 years, the suffragettes’ fight to win the vote became a highly
public and, at times, confrontational struggle.
Both salaried and volunteer office staff at the WSPU organized fundraising events,
demonstrations and produced the weekly newspaper Votes for Women to raise awareness of
the suffrage cause.
The WSPU had 90 branches across the UK, but London remained the chief area of support with
34 local offices.

As the campaign became increasingly militant, over a thousand suffragettes, including

Emmeline Pankhurts and her daughters received prison sentences for their actions. Many
suffragettes were sent to Holloway Prison in North London where they protested against the
refusal to treat them as political prisoners by going on hunger strikes. In response, the
government introduced a policy of force-feeding.

The outbreak of WW1 brought an immediate suspension of militant action and public protest as
the suffragettes threw themselves into supporting the war effort. The end of militancy also
resulted in the release of all suffragette prisoners, and also the end of suffragette hunger
striking in Britain.

The WSPU had not succeeded in achieving the vote, but its campaigning style eased the way
for women to take a more active and public role in society during the war. It was this role that
was acknowledged with the granting of the parliamentary vote to a limited number of women
over the age of 30 in 1918.

22
ENGLISH MODERNISM
Just as authority has been undermined in religion and morals, so too in art. The old accepted
standards cannot satisfy a changing age…
The old fixed canons of taste have lost their validity… the novelist ignores the earlier
conventions of plot, vocabulary, literary structure, and orthodoxy of opinion…
The spirit of psychological analysis… this is “modernism”.
(R.A. SCOTT – JAMES, Modernism and Romance).

Narrative conventions WILL BE BROKEN in Modernism.

ART + LITERATURE = comunión en el Modernismo de las dos. No se pueden separar.

MODERNISM is a manyfold term, implying several –sometimes even contradictory– elements

including different trends and radical changes in literature, art, philosophy, politics,
economics, psychology and society.
It is a very innovative and explorationary period. It is also a global movement, it involves
various disciplines, not only literature.
The modernist movement is a reaction against the late victoria culture and aesthetic, which had
prevailed for most of the 19th century. >>Charles Dickens is a good example of the late
Victorian model.
There was a break with traditions and intellectuals and artists at the turn of the 20th century
believed the previous generation's way of doing things was a cultural dead end.

The 19th century, like the several centuries before it, was a time of privilege for wealthy
Caucasian males. Women, minorities, and the poor were marginalized to the point of utter
silence.

The very essence of modernism is its international character: although its aesthetic root can be
found in France (Proust, Flaubert, Valéry, Mallarmé, Baudelaire–the french symbolist poets
that were admired for the sophistication of their imagery), modernism spread in many
countries, mainly England (T.S Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson), and Ireland
(James Joyce, Yeats) but also in other countries, like Germany (Munch, Thomas Mann), Poland

23
(Franz Kafka), Spain (Valle Inclán, Ortega y Gasset, Buñuel, Picasso), and the US (Ezra Pound
>> “make it new”, W. Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, W.C. Williams).

>> French symbolist poets wanted to express hundreds of feelings, sensations, etc., through one
simple image.

>> Buñuel = “El perro andaluz” Película.

Ezra Pound = “Make it new!” Se trata de romper con lo anterior y lanzarse al vacío.
W.C.Williams = “The Red Wheelbarrow”, rompe la estructura al uso del poema.

When we speak of modernism, we refer to the first quarter of the 20th Century, with writers
such as Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, André Gide, but as to the exact chronology, there
is no unanimous response. Some modernist writers –who were all very well aware of their
modernity– tried to identify the crucial events around which modernism started.
>> Roger Fry, an art critic, brought to London the first post-impressionist art exhibition.
(London, Nov. 1910: Manet and the Post-impressionists)

>> experimentation.

Virginia Woolf argued that “on or about December 1910 human nature changed… all human
relations shifted”.
She mentioned that date maybe because it was the death of King Edward but also because it
was the first post-impressionist exhibition held in London, which caused a great deal of interest
and anxiety or controversy. For D.H Lawrence, modernism started in 1915, at the beginning of
WW1.
There is no definite answer as to when modernism started.
>>> even though both Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw seem very modern, they ARE
NOT modernist writers. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf ARE.

As a sociological phenomenon, modernism is connected with the Bohemian Paris of the 1920s,
a kind of art practiced by artists and writers who were outside the mainstream, outsiders, people
who rejected conventional art and its institutions. Joyce exiled himself; Lawrence’s social
background was working-class (which was exceptional); Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson,

24
Katherine Mansfield… being female writers, were automatically outside the conventional
(masculine) order, etc. And of course, their linguistic strategies –disruption of established uses
of language– made them agents of revolutionary change.

How can we define modernism? According to Ray Bradbury, modernism is “a self-conscious

art of high aesthetic value, usually non-representational and non-mimetic. It is an art which
turns from realistic and humanistic representation towards the problematics of language, style,
technique, form, in pursuit of deeper penetration of life”.

What defines the modern is a sense of openness to change, of detachment from place and time,
of social and geographical mobility, and a wish to welcome the new, even at the expense of
tradition and the past.

It is the proposition that there are no ends or purposes given “in nature”, that the individual, and
their self-realization is the new ideal and that one can remake one’s self and remake society in
an effort to achieve those individual goals.

A modernist attitude was “to do what has never been done before”. As Ezra Pound put it,
MAKE IT NEW!. But the first writer who coined the term “modernity” was Charles Baudelaire
in The Painter in Modern Life (1864). He showed a modern attitude toward value in art,
looking not to the ancient but to the ephemeral, the casual, the drifting.
Baudelaire also wanted to find the essences hidden in the fleeting junk of city life and the
school of poetry that seeks immaterial essences (symbolism). The idea was to seek meaning
only in the occult essences hidden in external objects (symbols). He was much inspired by
Edgar Allan Poe, the inventor of the hidden or “queer” things. Baudelaire hoped to find at the
edges of nature certain faint sensations provocative of beautiful feelings; hovering at the verge
of things is the great Eden of which the symbolist poet dreams. Realism tends to celebrate the
world as it is and symbolism concerns itself with the transcendental, the ideal.

>>> poems don’t necessarily have to “be about something”, some poems just want to paint a
picture. (e.g The Red Wheelbarrow)

25
In an early essay, “Symbolism in Painting” (1898) Yeats suggests that anything can be made
symbolic simply by decontextualising it, making it spaceless and timeless.
*What do symbolists try to achieve? To transcend. To achieve perfection, infinite emotions
through said symbols.

The French philosopher Foucault believes that modernity is an attitude, rather than a period of
history. An attitude, a mode of relating to contemporary reality; a way of thinking and feeling,
kind of like what the Greeks called “ethos”. Modernity is often characterized in terms of
consciousness of the discontinuity of time, a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of
vertigo in the face of the passing moment.

>>> Virginia Woolf is known to be obsessed with the passing or the brevity of time.

There’s a set of characteristics or features which could be applied to the modern novel:

- Disruption of Aristotelian categories: modernist literature undermines the traditional

conventions of the novel, like a well-defined plot, linear development and characterisation, and
shifts from the realistic to the symbolic.
-One modernist issue is the realization that the SELF does not exist as a unified entity:
Lawrence, Woolf, Proust, Joyce rejected the notion of a central self, of a fixed and stable
identity, an idea of self that can be fully defined and fully analyzed.

If there is a plot in modernist novels, it should be called a “psychological plot” –their point of
interest being very likely in the dark places of the psychic.

Modernism introduced a new kind of narration to the novel, one that would fundamentally
change the entire essence of novel writing. The “unreliable” narrator supplanted the
omniscient, and readers were forced to question even the most basic assumptions about how the
novel should operate.
The “unreliable” replaces the omniscient narrator.

Modernism is incoherent, contradictory, fragmented.

26
The events of a novel are really the happenings of the mind, the goal of which is to translate as
well as possible the strange pathways of human consciousness. Ulysses by James Joyce is a
prime example of this.
James Joyce’s “Ulysses” is the prime example of a novel whose events are really the
happenings of the minds, the goal of which is to translate as well as possible the strange
pathways of human consciousness.
This new emphasis of inner life entails a reduction of action in modernist novels: when we read
them we often have the impression that little happens in them: actions and events never fully
materialize, and this absence of events reflects a contemporary sense of irony, a refusal to make
the event the motivation of reading.

>>> Conventions are there to be broken.

Time in modernist novels is less logical, more incoherent and fragmentary in our appreciation
of reality. Temporality is not a linear, progressive entity, but psychic, repetitive or cynical.

The traditional or absolute idea of beauty, truth and goodness is put aside. They are now
relative.

Modernist fiction is concerned with consciousness and the subconscious. That is why the
structure of the external events of traditional fiction is diminished or presented in an oblique
way. Instead we have introspective analysis, reflection, allusions, evocations, suggestions and
dreams. In consequence, the structure of time has to change, to adapt itself to the requirements
of the new focus of interests. They usually present a stream of experience. “A stream of
consciousness” and the end is usually open and ambiguous: it does not provide a final
resolution.
Temporality: narrative is avoidable and has to deal with time, but in modernist literature time
has to do again not with external reality but rather with the fluctuations of the inner life. It’s a
more creative notion of time, more appropriate to comprehend the complexity of modern
experience, which is less logical, more incoherent and fragmentary in our appreciations of
reality. For the nineteenth century novelists, time is the medium in which people grow or
develop.

27
It is a logical time: it implies that individual lives make coherent sense. In modernist writing,
however, the normal temporality (beginning, middle and end) is usually frustrated. Temporality
is not a linear, progressive, entity but psychic, repetitive or critical: modernist writers substitute
the logic of the traditional plot for the internal logic of metaphors, symbols and images.
Historical time is not completely absent, but it is combined with the time of subjectivity. What
modernism chose is to raise the notion not only of significant form but also of significant time,
which responds to the desire to reappraise the mind. This notion of temporality suggests the
idea that contemporary experience resists coherent temporal order. It also reflects the new
preoccupations of the age: the importance of the psychic and of the subconscious, which is
being underlined by Freud, Jung, Nietzsche, Kierkegardd.
If we take a look at contemporary thought , we can see how in the 20th century Western culture
has moved away from dogma, certainly, fixity and all absolutes towards a cultural climate of
relativism. All our non-literary sources of knowledge (natural and social sources and
epistemology) have led us to see truth, beauty and goodness as relative. As a result of this
ambivalent mood, there is a shift in the narrative voice. In modernist fiction, the author has not
“disappeared” in absolute terms (like in some postmodern narrative) but given him/herself a
fictional shape; he/she becomes one more character, therefore losing the authority of
traditionality.

Joyce’s narrator in “Ulysses” is a good example of this: he is a chameleon always adapting to

the situation, concealing himself, so that the narrative voice becomes “a voice without an
origin”. The questions “who is speaking?”, “Whose voice is this?” cannot be easily answered.
Sometimes we even have a multiplication of narrators, which is another sign of the decline of
“realism”: as narrators are multiplied or made suspect, evidence becomes hearsay; empiricism
becomes relativism, facts become interpretations. Also typical of the modern novel is the
exploitation of the unreliable witness which is also an aspect of the author’s desire to make the
reader participate in the work.

28