11th grade

English
Literature
From the 18th to the early 20th century

Overview: literary movements

1. The novel in the 18th century
2. English Romanticism
3. American Romanticism
4. Gothic Romanticism
5. Transcendentalism
6. The Victorian period
7. American realist prose
8. 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)

Truth found in human

emotions, not reason
(inner genius)

Romantic poets used

fantastic imagery to
connect nature and man

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 TellTale 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

Charlotte Bronte's Jane

Eyre as a bildungsroman
with gothic elements

Utilitarianism
"The woman's question"
Psychoanalysis

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