The Impact of Modernity on Culture
Lecture 2
Magritte, The Human Condition (1933)
The Age of Reason
• Break with ‘The Great Chain of Being’
• New forms of expression
– Political Commentary & Satire
– The Rise of the Novel
Newspapers
From Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (1733)
Say first, of God above, or man below,
What can we reason, but from what we know?
Of man what see we, but his station here,
From which to reason, or to which refer?
Through worlds unnumber'd though the God be known,
'Tis ours to trace him only in our own.
He, <who ….(i. e. God)>,
May tell why Heav'n has made us as we are.
<…>
Is the great chain <….> upheld by God, or thee (i.e. Man)?
The Rise of the Novel
• Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver's Travels (1726)
• Daniel Defoe,
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Moll Flanders (1722)
• Laurence Sterne,
Tristram Shandy (1759-67)
• Henry Fielding,
Joseph Andrews (1742)
Tom Jones (1749)
• Tobias Smollett,
The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748)
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751)
Humphry Clinker (1771)
The Rise of the Novel
Frontispiece for
The Life and Opinions
of
Tristram Shandy,
Gentleman
Third ed., 1760.
The Romantics
• Blake
• (Wordsworth and Coleridge)
• (Keats)
• Byron and Shelley
• Walter Scott
William Blake (1757-1827)
The Ancient of Days
Newton
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
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The Revolt of Islam
Prometheus Unbound
Ode to the West Wind
Ode to Liberty
Song to the Men of
England
• The Masque of Anarchy
• The Triumph of Life
The Victorians (1)
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Thackeray
Dickens
Trollope
The Brontë Sisters
George Eliot
Charles Dickens
The Victorians (2)
• Butler
– Erewhon
– The Way of all Flesh
• Meredith
– The Tragic Comedians
• Hardy
– Tess of the d’Urbervilles
– Jude the Obscure
• Robert Tressel,
- The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Thomas Hardy
Modernism
Some characteristics
• T. S. Eliot
Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock
• George Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant
• James Joyce, Ulysses
…in Art
Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1931)
Gertrude Stein
The War Poets
Lost poets
• Siegfried Sassoon
• Wilfred Owen
• Rupert Brooke
• Robert Graves
• Isaac Rosenberg
If I should die, think only this of me
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England
Dystopians
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H. G. Wells, War of the Worlds
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
George Orwell, 1984; Animal Farm
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
John Le Carré [Collected works]
The Angry Young Men
• John Osborne
• John Braine
• Arnold Wesker
• Shelagh Delaney
• Stan Barstow
• Alan Sillitoe
• John Wain
• Kingsley Amis
Feminism
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Germaine Greer (Australian)
• Erica Jong (American)
• Margaret Drabble
• Margaret Forster
• Fay Weldon
• Doris Lessing