Susanne George Bloomfield

English 352B

LITERARY PERIODS

ROMANTICISM (1760-1850)

** Emphasizes FEELING and emotions, not reason. True Knowledge comes from the heart, not the head. Value of inner, rather than outer experience. Romanticism attempted to humanize mankind after the rigidity of the Neoclassic period. Obsessed with the importance of love.

** LIBERATION from tradition, authority. Suspicion of social institutions. Freedom from formal rules of literature.

** CHILDREN have superior insight and wisdom. Innocence, not experience has the greatest value. Nostalgia for a simpler way of being.

** Importance of INDIVIDUAL. The greatest authority was within the self, rather than society. What all human beings share was uniqueness. Enthusiasm for ordinary people or the common man. The "alienated hero."

** High value attached to CREATIVE IMAGINATION and originality. Newness has more importance. Faith in genius.

** Look to NATURE for Truth. Emphasis on simple, commonplace, natural. Nature was not only intrinsically beautiful, but serves as a spiritual source.

SENTIMENTALISM

** The most influential expression of beliefs that shaped American life in the years before the Civil War. The combined sales of ALL works by Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman in the 1850s did not equal the sales of ONE of the more popular sentimental novels.

** Sentimentalism was written for edification's sake, not for art, and had a mission: instruction and the implantation of virtue.

** Also called DOMESTIC FICTION, it was obsessed with the nature of POWER. Women had to remain subservient for they lacked the material means of escape or opposition. Powerlessness became a source of strength (the meek will inherit the earth).

** COMPASSION was the primary emotional goal of sentimental narration, and it existed in relation to suffering, making that the primary subject matter of sentimental fiction.

** One charge leveled against sentimental fiction was that it was escapist and divorced from human experience, yet these works never offer escape, but teach readers that the only way to overcome tyranny is through self-discipline and overcoming the desire to rebel. Often tears and prayers are the heroine's only recourse to injustice.

** Another charge against Domestic Fiction is its concern with TRIVIALITIES; however, women writers of the 19th century governed only one small corner of the universe and had to use this as the basis for their fulfillment. Thus, the making of tea was not a household task, but a religious ceremony like holy communion.

** Sentimentalism employed many common CONVENTIONS and MOTIFS: seduction and/or persecuted innocence; melancholy, mourning, and death; an intense concern with marriage; a belief in the primacy of the family; letters as a narrative device; tears, swoons, and fainting; in interest in mesmerism and spiritualism; suicide; orphanhood; garden and woodland settings; humanitarianism.

REALISM (1830-1890)

** Concerned with a faithful representation of life.

** Believed in the MIMETIC THEORY, convinced that if they reflected the surface of life accurately, they would also reflect it truthfully. However, they turned away from models of the past and embraced examples of the present. Many consider it the ultimate middle-class art, for it finds its subject matter in bourgeois life and manners, with surface details and common actions constituting the chief subject matter.

** Realism was a direct reaction against romantic fantasy and its heightened passion, a coming down to earth from the clouds and the acceptance of all of human experience as subject matter.

** VERISIMILITUDE (the appearance or semblance of truth and actuality) of detail derived from first-hand observation and documentation.

** The Realists chose a single life as a subject because it was REPRESENTATIVE of mankind. They had a great concern for the effect of action on character and a tendency to explore the psychology of their protagonists. The democratic ideals of the realists tended to make them also value the individual and praise characterization as the center of the novel.

** An OBJECTIVE rather than subjective or idealistic view of human nature and experience. The DOCTRINE OF OBJECTIVITY of the Realists asserted that the artist should base his writing on careful and unbiased first-hand observation. The ideal POINT OF VIEW for the realist was the "completely withdrawn third-person narrator, one who may be unobtrusively omniscient" and omnipresent. ** Thematically, the Realists opposed the IDEAL and the REAL. They denied the idealism of the Romantic age and placed their belief in something more immediately verified by the senses. Other themes included the contrasts of INNOCENCE and EXPERIENCE as well as APPEARANCE and REALITY.

NATURALISM

** A literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Naturalism was an extension of Realism.

** The Naturalists were similar to realists in their fidelity to the details of contemporary life, honest and objective, even documentary, in the presentation of his material.

** However, the Naturalists differed in their choice of which realistic details to select and in their ATTITUDE toward them. The Naturalistic view of mankind was that of animals in the natural world, responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives over which they had no control or even a full understanding. Their works tended to emphasize either a BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM (an emphasis on the animal nature of human beings, particularly their heredity, portraying them as animals engaged in the endless and brutal struggle for survival) or a SOCIOECONOMICAL DETERMINISM (portraying them as victims of environmental forces and the products of social and economic factors). Occasionally, Chance played a major part and mankind was seen as the victim of "destiny" or "Fate." Therefore, man was considered largely DEVOID OF FREE WILL AND OF MORAL CHOICE. Many saw the naturalists as pessimistic about human capabilities. Life, the naturalists believed, was a vicious trap, a cruel game.

** Characters were derived from the LOWER-MIDDLE or LOWER CLASSES--the poor, the uneducated, the unsophisticated--who populated a fictional world of the commonplace or unheroic. However, even the least significant human being could feel, strive and suffer powerfully.

** An underlying theme of most Naturalistic works is the TRAGIC INCOMPLETENESS OF LIFE, usually symbolized by a circular journey, with the protagonist returning to the starting point with little gained or understood despite his movement through time and space

** The SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES of the Industrial Revolution, with its rapid shift from a predominantly rural, agrarian lifestyle to an urban, industrial society, also formed a major influence on the Naturalists. The hardships of the working classes in the urban slums became favorite themes in analyzing the human condition. In place of middle class realities, the naturalists presented the fringes of society: the criminal, the fallen, the down-and-out.

** Naturalism was also a response to the revolution in thought of modern science and politics: Issac Newton--theory of mechanistic determinism, implying that nature's laws were not subject to God's intervention (theory of gravity); Charles Darwin--The Origin of the Species (theory of evolution); and Karl Marx--Communist Manifesto

** SLICE OF LIFE: A term used to describe the unselective and nonevaluative presentation of a segment of life in its unordered totality, which was considered one of the objectives of the naturalists.

** PESSIMISTIC DETERMINISM: Essence of naturalism that expresses resignation and despair at man's powerlessness against a mechanistic universe.

EXISTENTIALSIM

**Existentialism, usually associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, centers on the uniqueness and isolation of the individual in a universe indifferent and even hostile to man, regarding human existence as unexplainable, but emphasizing man's freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of his acts.

**Existentialists assume that man and things "exist," but that these things have no meaning for us until we act upon them to create meaning. Man is totally free, but he is wholly responsible for what he makes of himself. He cannot escape responsibility for his character or his deeds by claiming they are predetermined or beyond his control to resist, not can he justify what he does in terms of standards imposed upon him from without. Existentialists insist upon the individual as the source of all value and must choose for himself what he must do and what standards to accept or reject. Thus, people should not deceive themselves into thinking that they must act in a certain way or play certain roles.

**This emphasis on man's awareness of his situation often creates intense anxiety, discomfort, and loneliness. Man's mind cannot discern any meaning for his existence in the universe. When he abandons his illusions, he finds himself horrified by the absurdity of the human condition.

**Although existentialism often results in a belief that nothing exists or can be understood, resulting in feelings of hopelessness, it also asserts the possibility of improvement. Man's situation is subject to change if men can agree or if a single man acts with conviction in conradiction to accepted principles and makes alterations within himself. Existentialists give priority to sincerity and creativity in moral life, and sometimes appear to regard any decision as justified if it is made in perfect honesty and with absolute inner conviction. (Critics point out that this provides little guidance to practical choices.)

**The question of the existence of God, according to Sartre, is irrelevant, because even if He does exist, he does not reveal to man the meaning of their lives. Thus man must create his own morality. Honesty with oneself is the major ideal common to all existential thinking. Christian existentialists agree than man can never know God's purpose, but they affirm that it exists and man must make a "leap of faith."

MODERNISM

** Modernism is a term that includes a number of tendencies in the arts that were important in the first half of the twentieth century. (Existentialism, Symbolism, Imagism, Primitivism, Expressionism)

** In many respects, it reacted against the tenants of Realism and Naturalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

** Although scholars do not agree, most date the Modernist period from the beginning of the World War I (1914) until the end of World War II (1945) and includes the Roaring Twenties, the economic Depression of the Thirties as well as the catastrophic years of the two world wars. Others consider 1910 and 1965 as the inclusive dates.

** Preoccupation with the NATURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND PERCEPTION, centering on the experimental examination of the inner self.

** It elevates the INDIVIDUAL and the inner being over the social human being and prefers the unconscious to the self-conscious. The writers turned inward for their subject matter and expressed bitter cynicism reflecting a sense of ALIENATION, LOSS, AND DESPAIR.

** The psychology of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as well as the anthropology of Sir James Frazer influenced Modernist writers, especially in their awareness of and emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind.

** A quest for NEW FORMS and a strong, conscious break with traditional forms and techniques.

** Protested against the nature of modern society and a direct ATTACK UPON THE CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL ORDER and its fundamental institutions. The horror of a world war was an inescapable demonstration of this diminishment of individual identity, and the corruption and immorality in both public government and private enterprise further disillusioned them.

** A massive disillusionment and a spiritual confrontation with EMPTINESS.