The Impact of Modernity on Culture

Lecture 2

Magritte, The Human Condition (1933)

The Age of Reason

Newspapers

• New forms of expression– Political Commentary & Satire

– The Rise of the Novel

• Break with ‘The Great Chain of Being’

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,

• Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759-67)

Robinson Crusoe (1719)Moll Flanders (1722)

• 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

• (Wordsworth and Coleridge)• (Keats)

• Blake

• Byron and Shelley

• Walter Scott

William Blake (1757-1827)

NewtonThe Ancient of Days

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

• 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)

• Thackeray

• Dickens

• Trollope

• The Brontë Sisters

• George EliotCharles Dickens

The Victorians (2)

• Butler – Erewhon– The Way of all Flesh

• Meredith– The Tragic Comedians

• Hardy– Tess of the d’Urbervilles– Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy

• Robert Tressel, - The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

Modernism

• George Bernard Shaw, Plays Pleasant and Unpleasant

• James Joyce, Ulysses

• T. S. Eliot Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Some characteristics

…in Art

Gertrude Stein

Magritte, The Treachery of Images (1931)

The War Poets

• Siegfried Sassoon

• Wilfred Owen

• Robert Graves

• Rupert Brooke If I should die, think only this of meThat there’s some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England

Lost poets

• Isaac Rosenberg

Dystopians

• 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

• Arnold Wesker

• Stan Barstow

• John Wain

• John Braine

• Shelagh Delaney

• Alan Sillitoe

• Kingsley Amis

Feminism

• Germaine Greer (Australian)

• Erica Jong (American)

• Margaret Drabble

• Fay Weldon • Doris Lessing

• Margaret Forster

• Mary Wollstonecraft