General Characteristic Values of Victorian Literature

1. Literature of this age tends to come closer to daily life which reflects its practical problems and interests. It becomes a powerful instrument for human progress.

2. Moral Purpose: The Victorian literature seems to deviate from "art for art's sake" and asserts its moral purpose. Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin - all were the teachers of England with the faith in their moral message to instruct the world.

3. Idealism: It is often considered as an age of doubt and pessimism. The influence of science is felt here. The whole age seems to be caught in the conception of man in relation to the universe with the idea of evolution.

4. Though, the age is characterized as practical and materialistic, most of the writers exalt a purely ideal life. It is an idealistic age where the great ideals like truth, justice, love, brotherhood are emphasized by poets, essayists and novelists of the age.

Modernism

What I benefit from our last lecture which was about modernism that its a great revolution against the victorian age, which began on the first half of the 2oth century and lasted from 1910-1930 to dominate the arts and culture of that period. It brought down much of the structure of pre-twentieth-century practice in music, painting, literature, and architecture.



Also we took about some of the important characterisics of the litrary modernism practised by some of it's writers (Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot) include the following:



1. Emphasises on subjectivity (how we see rather than what we see).

2. A way from objectivity.

3. Clear in its distinctions between genres.

4. Has a new linking for fragmented forms.

5. Has a tendency towards reflexivity ( the genre talks about itself)

Structuralism

Structuralism and some of it's Prominent Figurs

structuralism is a theory that uses culturally interconnected signs to reconstruct systems of relationships rather than studying isolated, material things in themselves. This method found wide use from the early 20th cent. in a variety of fields, especially linguistics, particularly as formulated by Ferdinand de Saussure. Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used structuralism to study the kinship systems of different societies. No single element in such a system has meaning except as an integral part of a set of structural connections. These interconnections are said to be binary in nature and are viewed as the permanent, organizational categories of experience. Structuralism has been influential in literary criticism and history, as with the work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. In France after 1968 this search for the deep structure of the mind was criticized by such "poststructuralists" as Jacques Derrida, who abandoned the goal of reconstructing reality scientifically in favor of "deconstructing" the illusions of metaphysics.



Structuralism is more than a Linguistic Exercise

There is a homology, a structural relationship, between the way language cuts up the world of meaning, and the way literature and literary genres do. There is an analogy between literature and linguistics not only because they are both involved in language but because both deal with:
1.the relation between forms and meanings,
2.the way reality is culturally defined by the segmentation and identification of experience,
3.the cultural perception of reality, and
4.the systemic relationships of signs which underlie those cultural perceptions.