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)