English Literature : Reflected Attitudes In 19th Century Literature

The world today consists of children roaming the streets, technology taking over the world, and being able to work wherever you'd like but, could you imagine a life without all these things? Believe it or not there was a time in life where these things were very uncommon to see. This would be known as the victorian era. This time period was between 1837 and 1901. Daily life was very different from now. Health, social classes, and fashion are just three examples of how daily life was different in the victorian era.

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is truly a satire. In The Importance of Being Ernest, Wilde mocks the society in Britain, and the rules it followed in the 1800s. He uses satire in the description of every character and other themes like marriage, intelligence, morality, and lifestyle primarily aimed at the upper class of the time. At the turn of every page the use of satire proves again and again to be ideal when questioning the morals and values of people.

Soft moonlight lit the land and sea kindly, almost as if it were giving gentle kisses. It kissed the sea and the waves it formed, it kissed the drowsy ship which laid on said water, it kissed the sand the waves lapped at, it kissed the grassy cliff above the shore, and it kissed the girl who slept on said cliff.

Since the view of childhood changes in the nineteenth century, the potential of children’s literature becomes evident. With the reference to the sources of children’s literature, they can be traced back to alterations in translation and in the literature for adults, where a child or childhood are essential concepts; moreover folk literature is concerned to be a wide source for this literary genre. According to Peter Hunt

In the years between 1837-1901, people had a completely new viewpoint separate from the previous era. During this frivolous era, people stressed respect, seriousness, and decency. Although one may think there is nothing wrong with these practices, he or she may not comprehend how intensely the individuals followed their new current traditions. Author Oscar Wilde thoroughly displays just how people during this time period acted in his play The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde pokes fun at various elements of the Victorian society. To better understand how Wilde’s play made fun of the Victorian society, one must look at the following elements: manners, triviality and immaturity

Reading was a very popular thing to do back during the 1920’s. Before radio and television existed almost all people gained knowledge of the wider world and current events through books and literature. Literature contributed to society a lot more in the 1920’s than it did today. Many authors contributed to the learning and shaping of minds young and old by writing books that would define the time period. Some of these authors were F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and T.S. Elliot. They defined and shaped the 1920’s by their writings and literature.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," says the Declaration of Independence. This phrase encompasses three major values shown throughout early American literature. The strong belief in religion, freedom, and a strong will for a better life. Each piece had one or more of these themes within them.

Literature in the 1920's reflected the uncertainty of the period. Literature in the 1920's reflected the uncertainty of the period in two major ways. This major ways are that the writers reflected society's concerns and thinkers reacted to the uncertainties.

In the play by Oscar Wilde “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Wilde takes a comedic stance on a melodrama, portraying the duplicity of Victorian traditions and social values as the modernism of the twentieth century begins to emerge. The idea of the play revolves around its title of the characters discovering the importance of being earnest to their individual preferences. The author uses the traditional efforts of finding a marriage partner to illustrate the conflicting pressure of Victorian values and the changing presence of modern thought.

American literature 1865-1914 is an American literary time period that began in 1865 and ended in 1914. This time period was flourished by three distinct features and the first of these features is: The Aftermath of the Civil War. It is estimated that a total of 620,000 Americans were killed in the Civil War, and for what? At the time, we were an America that was divided by one huge issue that ran supreme and it was slavery and the unequal treatment of African Americans. At this time the nation needed to figure a way to unite the North who were against slavery and the South who were for slavery. As Abraham Lincoln says in our Bedford Anthology of American Literature: “No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man, we simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements,” (4). He is saying that we must not start a new, but rather we need to start from what we had and mould and shape our country into one. Prior to the Civil War, America was not a whole, it was ruled by states’ rights and was divided on countless issues, and when referring to America, people said the United States are… It wasn’t until under President Lincoln, and concluding the Civil War that the United States began to be referred to as the United States is.. Honest Abe, brought our nation together as one, but the racial tension that remained was something one man can never fix. The literature around this time period was dominated by ideas and feelings circled

Developing the inside versus outside tensions between England and Eastern Europe, Bram Stoker challenges Victorian social norms. This tension is particularly evident when understanding the spread of vampirism to be an invasion of England. Although this invasion is fantastical and not realistic, its targets the legitimate Victorian fear of invasion. As an island nation close to other significant European powers, England was able to escape many years of land invasions, but always had to remain wary of the threat of a naval invasion. This fear of invasion is realized when Dracula launches a small scale invasion of England. He enters by boat and proceeds to terrorize England through its women. This idea of subliminally addressing the fears and desires of England is effective because Stoker masks them in fantasy. Furthermore, this is effective because “individuals in a culture act out certain unconscious or repressed needs, or express in an overt and symbolic fashion certain latent motives which they must give expression to, but cannot face openly” (Cawelti, 11). Because this novel is a fantasy, Stoker is able to challenge the social norms of the period within a popular work. Therefore, aided by fantasy, Bram Stoker uses the contrast between Eastern and Western cultures to challenge Victorian ideals and reveal the changing nature of gender roles and sexuality in British society.

Prior to the twelfth century, European sources discussing Jewish populations predominantly focused on “…the relationship between Christianity and Judaism...” in ways that were openly anti-Semitic. The depiction of Jews as the murderers of Jesus Christ abounded, as did texts detailing often-erroneous Judaic belief in cannibalism and blood rituals. These pre-existing conventions were altered in the twelfth century, although scholars posit multiple directions in which this change may have occurred. In “Adgar’s Gracial and Christian images of Jews in twelfth-century vernacular literature,” Jennifer Shea argues that literary discussion of Jews became increasingly negative as extant trends were extended to a moral commentary and translated into

In focusing on literature and film from the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, Somerville demonstrates how “emerging models of homo- and heterosexuality at the turn of the twentieth century were embedded within discourses of race and racialization, particularly bifurcated constructions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies’” (175).  Noting that the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case, in which the government’s right to determine an individual’s racial identity was affirmed, emerged at the same time as the discourse of sexology, Somerville explains that “it was not merely a historical coincidence that the classification of bodies as either ‘homosexual’ or ‘heterosexual’ emerged at the same time that the United States was aggressively constructing and policing the boundary between ‘black’ and ‘white’ bodies” (3). Somerville argues that this new polarization of bodies and focus on desires reflected a similar, simultaneous shift in racial thinking. Over the same time period, the cultural figure of the mulatto gave way to a new vision of the races as natural opposites, and increasing numbers of legal and social mechanisms were put into place to prevent people of different races from having sex with one another. Thus the emergence of new sexual categories mirrored, and was profoundly influenced by, the hardening of the "color line," the stark division of Americans into strictly segregated categories of "black" and "white."

Before the 20th Century, literature was pretty straightforward; the narrators were reliable, the timelines were linear, and the perspective was clear, but then somebody got the idea to mix it up. This is how we got books such as The Great Gatsby and one of our class texts, Orlando. For some, this was a startling and uncomfortable transition from what used to be considered the, “normal” format which was very up front in terms of structure and voice. Others found it to be more exciting and, while it was still weird and unsettling for those people, it forced people to think more about what the books were trying to communicate, instead of just being handed the message; they had to work for it. This has become one of the leading reasons that societies are encouraged to read; if you read a book that forces you to think, your mind becomes stronger and this promotes an increase in intelligence and creativity.

Voltaire was a rebellious and radical thinker, whose sharp wit and pointed satire drew the ire of critics who say he disrespected the orthodoxy of church and state, and won the respect of a growing rationalist movement that had emerged out of the public sphere in Europe between the 17th and 18th centuries. Although Voltaire is known today for being a philosophical powerhouse, whose writing is the stuff of legend, for most of his life he only wrote plays, poems, and novels. It wasn’t until he was almost forty in 1733 that he published his first major philosophical work, “Letters Concerning the English Nation.” This was a series of letters that describe the customs, cultures and great men of England, and even though his praise for England, a country “where all the arts are honored and rewarded,” and where one could think “free and nobly without being held back by any servile fear,” may be overblown, they are important nonetheless, because it highlights the virtues that an Enlightened society should strive for. (114) In many ways these were not so much love letters to England, as much as they were a call for the rest of Europe to progress in the rationalist movement that England had set the tone for.