Pam Morris, Realism
Realism - novel form, comes out of materialist/secular understanding of the world as opposed to ideal, associations of not shying away from sordid details of life, but it is still highly selective (unlike say a photograph or mirror)
Isobel Armstrong's overall argument on Victorian Poetry
-Victorian sense of modernism (as opposed to Modernist modernism) is not a break from history, but a sense of history coming into crisis after many years of economic and cultural change
-From this comes an awareness of teleological insecurity which means Victorian poetry might be the last theological poetry to be read
-Victorians were starting to think of art as separate from "practical experience" but that art still mediates "practical experience"
-The poets theorized new conceptions between the self and "other" (where the other might mean society, labor, nature, language, or love)
-Modernism modernism is anxious about Victorians striving to reject celebratory self-reflexivity. Victorians strove to give content to problems of representation, fiction, and language
-Style/Formal features of Victorian poetry = awareness of language's verbalness, materiality: Armstrong describes Tennyson's "arcane artifices," Browning's "sputtering speech," C. Rossetti's "limpid economy," and Swinburne's "swamping rhythms," and Hopkins's "muscle bound syntax" as examples.
-Signification was moving beyond immediate control of the author/writer, and so the representational instability of language called attention to (Armstrong mentions Carlyle's theorizing of "movable type")
-Double poems such as the dramatic monologue struggle with the alienation of words from author. There is a secondariness which highlights epistemology rather than ontology.
-The dramatic monologue specifically reorganizes lyric expression as drama, thus expression becomes both subject and object (of analysis by the reader) at once. Therefore, Victorian poem might be considered dialogic.
-Another example of dialogism (need not be just dramatic monologues) is "Love Among the Ruins" with long and short lines representing a power struggle between expressions of love and of history as these expressions ironize each other and struggle for ascendancy against each other
-Ultimately Victorian poems should not be seen as on the way to deconstruction but a resistance to it.
Chapple - Science and Literature
-speculates on scientific efforts to write imaginatively about fact to appeal to mass audiences
Booth - Theater (1837-1901)
-Popular forms of Victorian theater: farce, pantomime, melodrama, comedy, opera, Shakespeare
-History of management rather than of taste
-Schism between East End popular entertainment and middle class theater didn't really happen until the end of the century, when the West End turned towards society and problem dramas
-1843 Theater Regulation Act abolished the crown patent monopoly of Drury Lane and Covent Garden which meant more local theater with strong working class and lower middle class patronage
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950
-Williams influential work which is credited with beginning the project of cultural studies
-Traces changing meanings of words like industry, democracy, class, and art in relation to the larger change of the word "culture" in this period
-industry goes from being a human attribute to becoming an economic institution
-democracy becomes a political term, often inflected with associations of mob mentality, mass ideologies
-"class" as a social designation originates in this period
-art becomes the practices of a special person with special imaginative capacities, less a set of skills acquired (as in the case of an artisan)
-Above all, culture went from meaning the growth/cultivation to a more formalized notion of training and finally, "a whole way of life, material, intellectual, and spiritual" in this period
-The book is an account of this development in the perception of "culture" in relation to the other terms to chart a major change in modernizing society as to how people were conceiving of themselves and consequently living their lives
Joseph Bristow - Fin de Siecle poem
Yopie Prins on Meynell
-Meynell's metrics: intervals, pauses might signify diurnal life rhythms like orbit of the sun, pangs of motherhood, reappearance of disease, recovery from disease
