The Victorian Age维多利亚时期英国文学

The Victorian Age

Time: 1837-1901, the mid and late 19th century

Background:

Rapid growth in industry, commerce, science, culture and education.

Society crisis of faith in the mid 19th century

Reason:

The popularity of utilitarianism

Discoveries in biology, geology and astronomy other combined to shake the belief in

the creation myth given by Bible, which caused controversy between science and

religion.

Examples: Darwin’s theory of evolution work: On the Origin of Species

Freud’s study of sexuality

Representatives:

Poets:

Alfred Tennyson(1809-1892)

Works: The Lotus-Eaters (1833) Ulysses (1842) Tithonus (1860)

Robert Browning(1812-1889)

Works: My Last Duchess Andrea del Sarto The Bishop Orders his Tomb

Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)

Works: Dover Beach(1867)

Dramatic monologue（My Last Duchess）

A literary form in which a character, addressing a silent auditor at a critical moment,

reveals himself or herself and the dramatic situation.

Novelists:

Charles Dickens(1812-1870)

Works: Great Expectations(1860–61) Our Mutual Friend(1864–65)

A Tale of Two Cities(1854)

William Makepeace Thackeray(1811-1863)

Works: Vanity Fair(1847) Henry Esmond(1852) The Virginians(1859)

Thomas Hardy(1840–1928) A Victorian realist

Tess of the d'Urbervilles(1891) Jude the Obscure (1895)

Far from the Madding Crowd(1874)

Examples:

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; —on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

The poem begins with a naturalistic and detailed nightscape of the beach at Dover in

which auditory imagery plays a significant role ("Listen! you hear the grating roar")

Arnold looks at two aspects of this scene, its soundscape (in the first and second

stanzas) and the retreating action of the tide (in the third stanza). He hears the sound

of the sea as "the eternal note of sadness". Sophocles, a 5th-century BC Greek

playwright who wrote tragedies on fate and the will of the gods, also heard this sound

as he stood upon the shore of the Aegean Sea.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

Having examined the soundscape, Arnold turns to the action of the tide itself and sees

in its retreat a metaphor for the loss of faith in the modern age

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

The final stanza begins with an appeal to love, then moves on to the famous ending

metaphor. Critics have varied in their interpretation of the first two lines; one calls them a "perfunctory gesture ... swallowed up by the poem's powerfully dark picture",

while another sees in them "a stand against a world of broken faith". The metaphor

with which the poem ends

is most likely an allusion to

a passage

in Thucydides's

account of the Peloponnesian War. He describes an ancient battle that occurred on a

similar beach during the Athenian invasion of Sicily. The battle took place at night;

the attacking army became disoriented while fighting in the darkness and many of

their soldiers inadvertently killed each other.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

"The poem's discourse", Honan tells us, "shifts literally and symbolically from the

present, to Sophocles on the Aegean, from Medieval Europe back to the present—and

the auditory and visual images are dramatic and mimetic and didactic. Exploring the

dark terror that lies beneath his happiness in love, the speaker resolves to love—and

exigencies of history and the nexus between lovers are the poem's real issues. That