Context Flashcards
Mrs Dalloway
Written in 23, published 1925
Tess of the D’urbervilles
Published 1891, serial publication
- Horace Moule (model for Angel) was a parson’s son- introduced him to the work of contemporary humanist philosophers
- Hardy moved to London in 1862, modern cosmopolitan culture questioned old religious and scientific certainties
- Pastoralism: genre which usually refers to a piece of prose set in an idealised nature in which shepherds and shepherdesses lead a simple rustic life, and offered a vehicle for moral and social criticism
- Realism: literary genre popular in 19th century France, America and Britain, focus on lower classes. Naturalism is a form of realism is where realism is presented in a way such that writers explore the ways in which characters are controlled by external forces they can neither understand nor control.
- Tragedy: hamartia, hubris, peripeteia, Tess as a modern tragedy, social tragedy, but not of significance to the natural world; Fates used by Shakespeare were replaced by Darwinian sexual selection and heredity
- The Fallen Woman: Evangelical fervour, royal disgust, stifling adherence to etiquette, and a repressive patriarchy contributed to sexual hypocrisy, genesis myth as the crime of a woman
- Religious Issues: Hellenism vs Hebraism, pagan world contrasted with repressive Christian world, influenced by writing of political philosopher John Stuart Mill
- Country life: Rural lifestyle upended by machines and industrialisation, Brazil as a reprieve for English farmers and labourers, acts as a mechanism for Angel’s acceptance of Tess
- Heredity: Hardy influenced by his reading of Essays on Heredity by the German neo-Darwinian August Weismann- inherited traits and impulses across generations; Tess’s Trump card
- Narrative technique- narrative intervention/ serial publication/ landscapes and setting/ evolution of dialect/ point of view
