11th grade English LiteratureFrom the 18th to the early 20th century

Overview: literary movements

1. The novel in the 18th century2. English Romanticism3. American Romanticism4. Gothic Romanticism5. Transcendentalism6. The Victorian period7. American realist prose8. British Aestheticism

1. The novel in the 18th century

Extended fictional prose narrative

Characters represented ordinary people

Social commentary; "a mirror walking along the highway"

Defoe's Moll Flanders (1722) as a picaresque novel

Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) as a novel of manners

2. English Romanticism

Middle class values (esp. worth of the individual, against tyranny/oppression)

Romantic poets used fantastic imagery to connect nature and man

Truth found in human emotions, not reason(inner genius)

Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" (1816) and Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819) as dreamlike romantic poems

American Romanticism

Romantic ideal of the Western frontier

London's "To Build a Fire" (1902) uses personification of the weather and animals to represent human traits

Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826) as a romantic view of the past

Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) as an allegory of morality and persecution

Gothic Romanticism

Obsession with doom, death, mystery and suspense

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as a classic scientific gothic horror story (science fiction)

Edgar Allen Poe as the father of the horror, detective story and science fiction genres

"The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" both use suspense and gothic imagery

Transcendentalism

Individual conscience valued above all, love of nature, rejection of conformity

Abolitionist movement; human nature as basically good

Henry David Thoreau wrote On Walden Pond (1854) to commune with Nature

"Civil Disobedience" (1849) as an essay on political participation, opposition to slavery

The Victorian Period

Industrial revolution and the rise of the middle class

Utilitarianism

"The woman's question"

Psychoanalysis

Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre as a bildungsroman with gothic elements

George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss as an autobiographical sketch, moral themes and hypocrisy

American Realist Prose

Socio-economic changes influenced Realism- Industrialization(The Gilded Age)

Folk heroes and "fish tales" exaggerated the truth for comic effect

Mark Twain's "Luck" as burlesque, based on real events

Kate Chopin's "A Pair of Silk Stockings" as local colour and challenge to female stereotypes

British Aestheticism

Aestheticism emerged in France, developed in England - rejection of Victorian values

Motto:"Art for art's sake"

End-of-century economic crisis; end of Victorian superiority

Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey (1890)represents the apathy of the age and the perils of hedonism