Literary History: Victorian Notes

Name______Date______Class ______

Victorian Literature 1837-1901

Literary History: Victorian Notes

Essential Questions /

Realism sought to capture ______life as it really was lived.
Realism focused on the effects of the ______Revolution, which often brought ______.
______focused on the inner realities of the mind.

Viewed nature and society as forces ______to human suffering.
Naturalism created characters who are ______of their environment and internal drives beyond their control.
It is an extreme and ______offshoot of realism that believes everything is explainable by natural and physical causes.

Summary
Essential Questions /

______was the era’s most popular storyteller. He wrote entertaining novels with farfetched plots that nevertheless exposed real ______problems.
The Bronte sisters wrote ______plots with Byronic heroes set against real and wild British landscapes.
Popular writers created a pleasing sense of ______and worked to inspire change or ______behavior.

Summary
Essential Questions /

Novels were VERY ______and often published as a series in magazines for the growing ______class.
Victorian emphasis on family life created a popularity in ______literature like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.
Sir Author Doyle created detective Sherlock Holmes.
Rudyard Kipling made the ______story popular with his tales of British Imperialism in India.

Poetry ______during the Victorian age.
Lord Alfred Tennyson became poet laureate with musical public verse.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning produced a bestseller with a volume ______poems to her husband.
Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Dante Rossetti and his sister Christina wrote against Victorian ______and worked to bring back the clarity of medieval ______style.
Later in the era, Thomas Hardy and A.E. Houseman wrote with ______while Gerald Manley Hopkins experimented with rhythm.

The Victorian Era is not known for its drama.
Oscar Wilde wrote ______in the late 1890’s often associated with the time and its middle class.
Most popular stage works of the period are really ______that ridicule social pretense.

Summary of Victorian Literature

1. The ______was compared to the Internet as a new medium of ______that could benefit society.

2. English writers began to see the novel as a form of ______that had the ability to affect the lives of people from all works of life.

3. At one time, the novel was viewed primarily as a form of ______.

4. In the mid-18th century, the novel saw the development of both ______and ______.

5. The Victorian period is also called “ the ______”.

6. Victorians wanted to document the lives and the ______.

7. The novel became a tool for exposing ______.

8. ______works detailed the troubling state of England’s lower classes.------

19th Century’s sub-genres

1. Historical Novels: combined historical facts with ______to re-create the spirit of a past age.

2. ______was based on historical accounts of the ______.

3. Gothic Novels: horror tales became ______in England near the turn of the 19th century.

4. ______represents the best example of ______.

5. Detective Novels: mystery is a major ingredient of ______.

6. ______was the world’s most famous detective.

7. Newgate Novels: stories that focused on ______and their motives.

8. These novels explored the nature of crime and ______.

9. ______was about the effects of ______unrest and riot on the lives of a host of characters.

10. Naturalism replaced ______in or around 1880.

11. Naturalistic writing attempted to depict the human condition as objectively as ______depicted the process of nature.

12. Thomas Hardy portrayed a hostile world in which only the “______”.