Unseen context 1880-1910

Question 1

1880-1910 period

Answer 1

Late Victorian/Edwardian era

Question 2

Fin de siecle

Answer 2

• transitional period to modernism
• Edwardian last dregs of aristocracy- more laws passed for the poor
• fragmentary culture- end of Victorian stability
• world-weariness

Question 3

Darwinism

Answer 3

• Origin of Species in 1859
• introduced fatalism- bleak punishment and treatment of sexuality

Question 4

Religion

Answer 4

• disrupted- now defined by relationship to animal kingdom not relationship to god
• muscular Christianity- influenced colonialism
• CofE in factions: rationalist thought destabilised religion, higher crticisms saw the bible as falliable

Question 5

Naturalism

Answer 5

• like realists but based on Darwinism
• human animal, devoid of moral choice
• pessimistic view
• influenced by poverty
• Hardy influence

Question 6

Science

Answer 6

• Edwardian age of optimism
• invention of telephones, typewriters, motorcars, planes

Question 7

Imperialism

Answer 7

• ‘scramble for Africa’- Boer wars 1880-1902
• questions raised about nationalism- Victoria’s death
• Jungle book by Kipling, HoD Conrad
• British farmers struggle to compete with empire imports

Question 8

Suffrage

Answer 8

• womens and mens became increasing important- schism between old and young
• ‘New woman’ controversy- fallen woman, sexual anarchy

Question 9

women

Answer 9

• more novels read and written by them- still male dominated
• shift from novels as jejune pastimes to political and masculine
• increased issue of prostitution

Question 10

Aestheticism

Answer 10

• asthetes are devoted to beauty in art
• rejection of morality as a form of social control
• glorification of immorality
• link to homosexuality
• epater le bourgeois- to shock the bourgeoise
• Rhymers club, Periodical The Yellow Book

Question 11

Literary conventions

Answer 11

• Mudie’s select library- accessible reading
  for increasingly educated middle class
• obsession with heroic individual
• melodramatic theatre
• press-printing, serialised Dickens

Question 12

Industry and poverty

Answer 12

• industrial revolution overwhelms the individual
• hungry forties, workhouse systems
• middle class ideas represent reality
• urban slums- naturalism
• Victorian pop. boom 2-6 mil
• political move for poor- reformers, corn laws