Part 4: Romantic and (Post)Modernist Culture

4.101: postmodern and 21st century literature in america, postmodernity/postmodernism.

Our current period in history has been called by many the postmodern age (or “postmodernity”) and many contemporary critics are understandably interested in making sense of the time in which they live. Although an admirable endeavor, such critics inevitably run into difficulties given the sheer complexity of living in history: we do not yet know which elements in our culture will win out and we do not always recognize the subtle but insistent ways that changes in our society affect our ways of thinking and being in the world. One symptom of the present’s complexity is just how divided critics are on the question of postmodern culture, with a number of critics celebrating our liberation and a number of others lamenting our enslavement….

One of the problems in dealing with postmodernism is in distinguishing it from modernism. In many ways, postmodern artists and theorists continue the sorts of experimentation that we can also find in modernist works, including the use of self-consciousness, parody, irony, fragmentation, generic mixing, ambiguity, simultaneity, and the breakdown between high and low forms of expression. In this way, postmodern artistic forms can be seen as an extension of modernist experimentation; however, others prefer to represent the move into postmodernism as a more radical break, one that is a result of new ways of representing the world including television, film (especially after the introduction of color and sound), and the computer. Many date postmodernity from the sixties when we witnessed the rise of postmodern architecture; however, some critics prefer to see WWII as the radical break from modernity, since the horrors of Nazism (and of other modernist revolutions like communism and Maoism) were made evident at this time. The very term “postmodern” was, in fact, coined in the forties by the historian, Arnold Toynbee. ( Click this link for more about the aforementioned aspects of postmodernism.)

Postmodernist Literature

Postmodernism is difficult to define. Don DeLillo is recognized as one of America’s premier postmodernist novelists, yet he rejects the term entirely. “If I had to classify myself,” he explains in a 2010 interview in the  Saint Louis Beacon , “it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model.”

introduction about 21st century literature

DeLillo in New York City, 2011

Literally, the term postmodernism refers to culture that comes after Modernism, referring specifically to works of art created in the decades following the 1950s. The term’s most precise definition comes from architecture, where it refers to a contemporary style of building that rejects the austerity and minimalism of modernist architecture’s glass boxes and towers; postmodernist architects retain the functionalist core of the modernist building but then decorate their boxes and towers with playful colors, forms, and ornaments that reference disparate historical eras. Indeed, play with media and materials, and with forms, styles, and content is one of the chief characteristics of postmodernist art.

While postmodernist architects play with the material of their buildings, postmodernist writers play with the material that their poems and stories are made of, namely language and the book. Postmodernist writers freely use all the challenging experimental literary techniques developed by the modernists earlier in the twentieth century as well as new, even more experimental techniques of their own invention. In fiction, many postmodernist authors adopt the self-referential style of “ metafiction ,” a story that is just as much about the process of telling a story as it is about describing characters and events. Donald Barthelme’s postmodernist short story, “The School,” contains metafictional elements that comment on the process of storytelling and meaning-making, as when the narrator describes how the “lesson plan called for tropical fish input” even though all the students in the schoolroom knew the fish would soon die. Who is telling this story? Bartheleme? The unnamed narrator? The lesson plan? The stories that make up history itself are often a playground for postmodernist authors, as they take material found in history books and weave it into new tales that reveal secret histories and dimly perceived conspiracies. David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Consider the Lobster,” is a good example of the narrative excess found in postmodern literature. In this essay written for  Gourmet  magazine, Wallace uses his visit to the Maine Lobster Festival to tell a history of the lobster since the Jurassic period that eventually turns against the organizers of the festival themselves, who may or may not be covering up the truth about how much lobsters suffer in their cooking pots. The form of the essay cannot even contain Wallace’s ideas, which spill over into twenty excessively long footnotes, many of which are little essays in themselves. In addition to playing with the form of literature and the notion of authorship, postmodernist writers also often play with popular sub-genres such as the detective story, horror, and science fiction. For example, in her poem “Diving into the Wreck,” Adrienne Rich evokes both the detective story and science fiction as she imagines a futuristic diver visiting a deep sea wreck in order to solve the mystery of why literature and history have been mostly about men and not women.

Not all works of postmodernist literature are stylistically experimental or playful. Rather, their authors explore the meaning and value of postmodernity as a cultural condition. Several philosophers and literary critics many of whose names have become synonymous with postmodernism itself have helped us understand what the postmodern condition may be. “Poststructuralist” philosophers such as Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard have argued that words and texts do not reflect the world but instead exist as their own self-referential systems, containing and even creating the world they describe. When we perceive the world, Derrida’s philosophy of “deconstruction” claims, we see not things but “signs” that can be understood only through their relation to other signs. “There is no outside the text,” Derrida famously claimed in his book  Of Grammatology  (1967). In this way, words and books and texts are powerful things, for in them our world itself is created an insight that many postmodernist creative writers share. Baudrillard, in turn, argues in his book,  Simulacra and Simulation  (1981), that the real world has been filled up with and even replaced by simulations that we now treat as reality: simulacra. These postmodern sensibilities are reflected in both Allen Ginsberg’s poem, “A Supermarket in California,” and our selection from DeLillo’s  White Noise . In Ginsberg’s poem, food has become “brilliant stacks of cans” knowable only by their similarity to each other. The “neon fruit supermarket” is not even a simulation of a real farm but instead is a simulacra full of families who have probably never even seen a farm. In DeLillo’s novel, we find the insight that the collected photographs of “the most photographed barn in America” are more real than the physical barn being photographed. Nobody knows why this particular barn is the most photographed barn in America. The barn is famous simply because it is a much-copied text, valued more as a sign in relation to other signs (all those photos of the same thing) than as a thing in itself with a specific history and a particular use. In his book  Postmodernism  (1991), the leftist critic Frederic Jameson chastises postmodernism for being the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” which for him is a culture that erases the real meanings and relations of things such as the most photographed barn in America, replacing true history with nostalgic simulacra.

Read this excerpt about “the most photographed barn in America” from DeLillo’s  White Noise  (1985):

Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides — pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.

“No one sees the barn,” he said finally.

A long silence followed.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.”

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.”

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

“Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.”

Another silence ensued.

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures,” he said.

He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film.

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?” he said. “What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?”

The culture of postmodernism in general exhibits a skepticism towards the grand truth claims and unifying narratives that have organized culture since the time of the Enlightenment. In postmodern culture, history becomes a field of competing histories and the self becomes a hybrid being with multiple, partial identities. In his provocative study,  The Postmodern Condition  (1979), the philosopher Jean Francois Lyotard argues that what defines the present postmodern historical era is the collapse of “grand narratives” that explain all experience, faiths, and truths, such as those found in science, politics, and religion; in place of all-explaining master narratives, he argues, we now know the world through smaller micro-narratives that don’t all fit together into a greater coherent whole.

These insights are thoroughly explored in the confessional, feminist, and multicultural American literature of this era, whose authors write from their subjective points of view rather than presuming to represent the sum total of all American experiences, and whose works show us that American history has been far from the same experience for all Americans. For example, both Sylvia Plath and Theodore Roethke have poems about their fathers, but their appreciation of their respective fathers is shaped by both their genders and their own personal histories. Roethke feels a kinship with his father. Plath, however, sees her father as an enemy. The Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko tells her story specifically from the point of view of a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, whose members use old stories about the Yellow Woman and the ka’tsina spirit to understand their tribe’s relationship to the rest of America. In the works of African-American literature in this section, we find similar explorations of cultural identity.

Read these excerpts from  Almanac of the Dead  (1991) by Leslie Marmon Silko:

James Baldwin uses the African-American music of the blues and jazz to describe the relationship between the two brothers in his story, “Sonny’s Blues.” Ralph Ellison, in the first chapter from his novel  Invisible Man  (1952), writes about the experience of attending a segregated school that keeps black Americans separate from white Americans. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, in their stories, explore the hybrid nature of African-American identity itself, showing us the tensions that arise when one’s identity is both American and black.

The varied, playful, experimental literature of postmodernism, the critic Brian McHale helpfully observes in his book  Constructing Postmodernism  (1993), presents readers not with many ways to know our one world but instead with many knowable worlds created within many disparate works in many different ways. Modernist authors all strove to devise new techniques with which to accurately represent the world, McHale observes. Postmodernist authors, however, are no longer concerned with representing one knowable world but instead with creating many literary worlds that represent a diversity of experiences. Thus, much as the American literature of the contemporary era presents us with a record of how the nation has known, questioned, and even redefined itself, so too does the literature of postmodernism present us with a record of how writers have known, questioned, and even redefined what literature is.

Literature in the 21st Century

In many ways, the literature of this century is still postmodern, as it challenges grand narratives, monolithic constructions of identity, and many traditions and techniques of literature of the past. (And if it is not, there is no term for what is post-postmodern!) One motif that has persisted and proliferated during this century revolves around the impact of technology on the topics postmodern writers addressed in the latter part of the 21st century. Cyberpunk , which dealt with the “down and out” struggling to survive or transform a dystopian setting in which technology both empowers and enslaves, and which rose to prominence in the 1980s with authors such as William Gibson, Pat Cadagin, and Bruce Sterling, set the groundwork for this genre.

introduction about 21st century literature

William Gibson at a 2007 reading from his new book Spook Country at Bolen Books in Victoria BC Canada.

Fiction writers such as Alaya Dawn Johnson continue to question essentializing of sexual identity and practice, and a patriarchal, if not-so-dystopian society in a work such as The Summer Prince . Larissa Lai considers the same kind of topics with the integration and, at times, through the lens of Chinese mythology. The Circle by David Eggers confronts the loss of privacy and authentic selfhood via technology, and the question of if progress or self-definition is more important in an ever speeding up world. And M.T. Anderson’s Feed calls into question the supposed utopia of a world proming instant gratification at the expense of destroying the environment, dumbing down the citizenry, and a general loss of humanity.

introduction about 21st century literature

Johnson in 2013

In drama Jennifer Haley has written plays suggesting there today exists a blurring of the material and digital in relation to video games ( Neighborhood 3: Requisition of Doom ) and virtual reality ( The Nether ). And Jordan Harrison’s play Marjorie Prime addresses the possibilities and limitations of technology for filling the gap of losing a loved one and preserving one’s “existence” after death.

What this era is and will be known as is still unclear, and the dominance of visual and aural narrative forms is likely pushing the written narrative to a less pervasive and influential role than anytime before the emergence of the alphabet. But, then again, what constitutes literature is also changing with the times, as everything from video games to websites have been analyzed as forms of literature this century. So, maybe this is a transformational time for literature and we will just have to wait to see how the changes play out.

  • Postmodernism. Authored by : Amy Berke, et al.. Provided by : LibreTexts. Located at : https://human.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Literature_and_Literacy/Book%3A_Writing_the_Nation_-_A_Concise_Introduction_to_American_Literature_1865_to_Present_(Berke%2C_Bleil_and_Cofer)/06%3A_American_Literature_Since_1945_(1945_-_Present)/6.06%3A_Postmodernism . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
  • Authored by : Thousand Robots. Provided by : Wikimedia Commons. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_DeLillo#/media/File:Don_delillo_nyc_02-cropped.jpg . License : CC BY: Attribution
  • Uncle Gibby. Authored by : Dylan Parker . Provided by : Wikimedia Commons. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson#/media/File:Uncle_Gibby.jpg . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
  • Johnson in 2013. Authored by : Luigi Novi. Provided by : Wikimedia Commons. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaya_Dawn_Johnson#/media/File:6.30.13AlayaJohnsonByLuigiNovi1.jpg . License : CC BY: Attribution
  • General Introduction to the Postmodern. Authored by : Dino Franco Felluga. Provided by : Purdue University. Located at : https://cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism/modules/introduction.html . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright
  • The Most Photographed Barn in America Exerpts from White Noise by Don DeLillo. Authored by : Benjamin Mako Hill. Provided by : WordPress. Located at : https://mako.cc/copyrighteous/extra/most_photographed_barn_in_america.html . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
  • Contending Worldviews in Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Authored by : Theresa Delgadillo. Provided by : WordPress. Located at : https://library.osu.edu/site/mujerestalk/2014/08/12/contending-worldviews-in-leslie-marmon-silkos-almanac-of-the-dead/ . License : CC0: No Rights Reserved
  • Literature in the 21st Century and Conclusion. Authored by : Steven Hymowech. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-fmcc-hum140/chapter/4-101-postmodern-literature/ . License : Public Domain: No Known Copyright
  • New Media for Art. Provided by : Lumen Learning. Located at : https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-arthistory/chapter/new-media-for-art/ . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike

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Why Literature Matters in the 21st Century

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1 Introduction

  • Published: November 2004
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This chapter introduces the problems that literature and the arts and humanities face in a period of technological innovation and transformation. Unlike science and technology, the value of the arts and humanities is not as obvious, and any attempt to justify their value must take note of their universal purpose and their specific role in a given age. Because of the nature of today's culture, the prospects of humanity are under the influence of technology, which represents a mode of means-ends thinking. The chapter thus introduces the challenge of technology and the crisis for legitimacy of the arts and humanities, particularly literature. The chapter also outlines the value that literature and literary criticism offer: such as the question of moral justification, and the often focused-upon fields of historical and sociological issues.

The arts and humanities, including literature and literary criticism, concern themselves with the fate and prospects of humankind. These fields have been placed under increasing pressure to give an account of themselves—partly because unlike science and technology the value of the arts and the humanities is not immediately apparent, partly because states and universities have suffered harshly competitive fiscal demands, and partly because increased criticism has been lodged against the arts and humanities from both within and beyond the academy. Any attempt to justify the arts and humanities must account for their universal purpose and their specific role in a given age. Today the fate and prospects of humanity are under the influence of technology—the technological transformation of the world was the defining feature of the twentieth century, both in the strict sense of the harnessing and transformation of nature and the creation and application of tools, machines, and information and in the broad sense of an elevation of means-ends rationality.

The Challenge of Technology and the Crisis of Legitimacy

Technology represents a mode of means-ends thinking that allows us to manipulate material for a given end. We can be said to live in an age of technology when four conditions have been met: first, our daily living presupposes constant interaction with the products of technology, such that we have as steady a relation to these products as we do to nature or to other persons; second, the most dramatic events of our era are defined by technology, in this case new inventions that change our lives dramatically, for better and for worse; third, our mode of thinking is very much driven by the paradigm of technology, by which I mean above all technical rationality; and fourth, technology takes on a life of its own, becoming not just a means to a higher goal but its own end—such that, for example, the products of technology elicit new needs as much as satisfy intrinsic needs. These conditions apply to the contemporary age and have increasingly defined the modern world since the first industrial revolution. In the words of the Swiss dramatist Friedrich Dürrenmatt, “Technology is the thought of our age in visible, pictorial terms” (26.63).

The influence of technology on modernity places new tasks before both literature and literary criticism, and a legitimation of these spheres must reflect on these new tasks. Accordingly, I analyze the moral aspects of literature and literary criticism in general, discuss prominent categories of the technological age and the influence of technology on literature, and address what great literature and literary criticism should be specifically in this age. The topic is innovative in at least two respects. First, the question of a moral justification of literature and literary criticism tends to be neglected—both by philosophers, who have increasingly retreated into the narrow confines of their own subdisciplines, and by literary critics, who despite their attention to issues of self-reflection have focused more on historical and sociological issues, pragmatic concerns, and questions of ideology or interpretation than on the fundamental principles of their profession, including the value of literature and literary criticism. Exceptions, such as Sven Birkerts, are few and far between and surface for the most part outside the mainstream of the academy. Conferences on the profession of literary criticism tend to address its history and sociology, the descriptive not the normative sphere. When the future is thematized, one tends to speak of pragmatic concerns, such as there being either too many students (in graduate programs) or too few students (in undergraduate programs) and in the latter case, how we might enroll more students. Sometimes the suggestion made is to become more interdisciplinary, which need not mean—but unfortunately often does mean—that beyond expanding our horizon, we should also abandon the teaching of literature as literature. We rarely ask why we should read literature and why we should pursue literary criticism, nor generally is the question asked, What are our specific obligations as literary scholars in an age marked by technology and increasingly threatened by ecological crisis? 1 Close This inattention to the ethical challenges of modernity is one of the central reasons for the contemporary crisis in literary criticism, and the emphasis on the how at the expense of the why is—as we shall see below—simply another expression of technological consciousness.

Second, although the philosophy of technology is a burgeoning field, few philosophers of technology reflect at any length on art, even those, such as Hans Jonas and Karl-Otto Apel, who address ethics and technology. Here, too, the exceptions are few; one thinks above all of Walter Benjamin's well-known contribution The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Although philosophers of technology have tended to neglect literature and literary criticism, one can integrate their insights by asking not only what arguments and categories these thinkers introduce and to what extent they are valid but also what relevance their ideas have for the study of literature in the technological age. In this sense I attempt to extend such thinkers as Jonas and Apel beyond their immediate claims. Some attention has been given by literary critics to the thematic study of technology in literature, and much can be gained from the few analyses available. Nonetheless, literature seems to be ahead of literary criticism, as there are seemingly more works, including anthologies of literary works, that thematize technology than literary-critical studies of the topic. 2 Close

In contrast to the modern tendency to place in opposition to one another two dominant spheres of knowledge, science and technology over against the humanities and the arts, the Greek notion of techne suggests that technique and art need not be viewed as exclusive poles. Techne means both art (e.g., literature) and craft (i.e., technique). As such it differs from episteme , which signifies pure knowledge or science. For the Greeks the artist was a craftsman, shoemaking was an art, and sculpture was a technique. For Plato no distinction existed between the fine and the mechanical arts. This connection between technique and art is widely characteristic of the premodern world. It is prominent, for example, in drawing and painting, where perspective, anatomy, and geometrical proportions assumed great significance; thus, for Leonardo da Vinci art and science were one and the same. Nonetheless, a shift occurs beginning in isolated cases already in the sixteenth century and, bolstered by the scientific revolution of the seventeenth, becoming widespread by the end of the eighteenth (Kristeller 507–27). Art and technique no longer serve the same purpose but develop independently and autonomously. The artes liberales and artes mechanicae diverge, and technology becomes aligned with science and industry, while art develops stronger ties to the humanities.

In Man in the Age of Technology Arnold Gehlen, one of Germany's earliest philosophers of technology, recognized that the emergence of the technological age was sped by the congruence of science, technology, and capitalism (11–13). Rapid scientific advances accelerate the development of new technologies, both of which require the investment of capital. Also, technical inventions make the market that much more efficient, improving infrastructure, commerce, and the number of desirable goods. In turn, the competitive nature of the market economy hastens the already quick developments of science and industry. 3 Close Science and technique have become so intertwined that systematic reflection on technique has become integral to the techniques themselves, and so many diverse techniques function in such close cooperation that today one speaks simply of “technology” even when describing the object sphere. Technical breakthroughs in the modern era were not isolated phenomena but “came in clusters, interacting with each other in a process of increasing returns” (Castells 1.37). In this way isolated techniques were transformed into the mass phenomenon of technology. Today, with so many technical innovations converging into shared enterprises and cooperative endeavors, the sense of technology as a single entity is accentuated daily. The complexity of modern technology, in its intersection with science and capitalism, represents not simply a quantitative break from the techniques of earlier eras, it is qualitatively different. In the premodern era, the poet frequently drew metaphors from the world of technique; Homer, like the medieval poets after him, was still close to the life worlds in which techniques, such as plowing or weaving, played roles. In contrast, the modern poet rarely employs metaphors from today's technology, the jet engine or the nuclear reactor, for example. The complexity of modern technology and our distance from its inner workings further this break and its effect on poetics. Not surprisingly, Dürrenmatt speaks of “the technology that has become impenetrable” (“Ich bin” 34).

Given the complexity of modern technology, literature and technology seem to have become separate and unbridgeable spheres. Half a century ago C. P. Snow advanced the thesis that natural scientists and literary intellectuals live in separate worlds. With increasing specialization in both realms, along with postmodern critiques of reason arising in the humanities and the prestige of traditional humanistic study diminishing among many scientists, Snow's claim has lost little of its relevance. Rare is the person who crosses these borders. Yet such crossings are to be encouraged, and the connections between literature and technology may be greater in principle than they appear at first glance. Technology is creative, and literature follows certain laws. Commonalities exist between them, as ancient and medieval thinkers believed, and the spheres are enriched when interaction and reflection surface in both directions. Certainly the differences between traditional techniques and modern technology will render any contemporary crossing of these spheres qualitatively different from, and immensely more difficult than, those of earlier eras.

Nonetheless, already with the emergence of photography and later with film, we again see both the need and the opportunity to bridge art and technique. Some of today's most avant-garde artists have returned to this original union by using technology to create great art, as, for example, in the computer graphic art of Charles Csuri. One is also reminded of Edgar Allen Poe's description of the poetic craft as involving, in his metaphor, “wheels and pinions” (289) or of his construction of “The Raven” as proceeding “step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem” (290). One thinks as well of Gottfried Benn's statement that “a poem very rarely comes into being—a poem is made” (1059) or Dürrenmatt's description of himself as a “craftsman” (Bienek 108). So, too, can we consider the integration of art and technology in such spheres as sculpture, graphics, and film, or the architect's necessary engagement with both spheres, which reached a high point in the integrative efforts of the Bauhaus. Not only do we see occasional integration, we see actual inversions, whereby a bridge, for example, may evidence a certain beauty and elegance, and a painting may be distinguished by its jarring negation of beauty. 4 Close In any age the artist must execute well in his or her chosen medium. A goal of this book is to suggest that on many levels art can respond to technology's positive and negative moments in as yet unexplored ways. Technology is an imaginative enterprise, and much of the wisdom contained in it has a poetic dimension, but it nonetheless seems to lack certain aspects privileged when we speak of art as opposed to technology. This book attempts to define these features.

Not only does a scientific technology emerge that differs from the techniques of art, both art and technology become autonomous vis-à-vis morality. For centuries art was created within an overarching moral universe. The link between art and the sacred is obvious to anyone who reflects on the history of the visual arts or music. Carl Dahlhaus has shown in The Idea of Absolute Music that the connection between music and text and the development of music within a functional context, a paradigm that was prominent from antiquity to the seventeenth century, dissolved in the modern era. Music increasingly developed what was unique to itself, a purely independent instrumental music without concept, object, or purpose, which became known as absolute music. Also in literature we see the dissolution of a tradition that encompassed virtually all literary activity through the end of the eighteenth century and viewed literature as serving a moral purpose and as embedded within a broader moral frame.

The catalysts for the disassociation of art from morality were multiple. First, modernity increasingly lost its belief in a religious or even simply a moral frame. The distinction between is and ought that Kant had emphasized and that elevated morality in the wake of the modern dissolution of religion loses all effectiveness if the normative sphere cannot be adequately grounded, and skepticism toward such grounds has consistently increased since the nineteenth century. Second, if the normative realm cannot be grounded, one turns to being, though no longer a realm of being that has implicit in it a normative claim, but sheer facticity. The social sciences, which emerge at this time, approach the descriptive sphere with new methodologies, and literature in some ways does the same, though with different means, analyzing the complexity of the modern psyche, our human relations, and our social world, including modern humanity's lament over a loss of orientation. Analyses of this broad and increasingly complex realm of reality become further and further divorced from the kind of thinking that focused on transcendental claims and, indeed, more and more removed from any moral sphere of evaluation. The recognition that many spheres of social reality had not been included in previous claims of synthesis and the discovery of alternative paradigms, bolstered by the emergence of historicism, also contributed to this erosion of the transcendental. Third, a central idea of modernity is that each sphere of life is fully autonomous. Art, business, law, politics, science—each develops according to the logic of its own subsystem, and each sphere is divorced from the moral realm.

This idea is imaginatively expressed in Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers , to which I return below, and has been prominent in the analyses of sociologists from Max Weber to Niklas Luhmann. The artist is slowly freed of having to work in harmony with other spheres. A concept of originality replaces the idea of contributing to our understanding of the cosmos, of God, or of human potential. This freedom unleashed an incredible range of options and led to some extraordinary aesthetic works. It also precipitated not only a divergence in spheres and a rejection of the ideal of holistic knowledge but also in some thinkers, such as Kierkegaard, who reflects on the aesthetic, ethical, and religious modes, a theoretical sharpening and an embrace of the distinctions, and in some writers, Oscar Wilde, for example, a deep antagonism between the aesthetic and the ethical: “The sphere of Art and the sphere of Ethics are absolutely distinct and separate” (1048; cf. 17). Indeed, in “The Decay of Lying” Wilde argues not only that art has intrinsic value and need not be viewed as subordinate to external ends but also that art cannot serve any external ends; if it does, it is no longer art (976).

We find ourselves today in a complex position. Artists and critics tend to bracket moral questions. Art increasingly becomes a sophisticated game devoid of moral value, or it is reduced to commercial entertainment and kitsch. In a climate in which the value of art is not part of a broader sphere and the dominant subsystem of modernity, the economic, determines value through an elevation of instrumental reason, not only society's but also the artist's recognition of the value of art begins to wane. We become further and further estranged from the questions of why art is legitimate and valuable and which art should be preferred. The predicament of the artist in such an age is difficult. Artists working in earlier eras knew to what ends they might develop their talents. They knew what themes were privileged and what higher purpose their creativity might serve. In a sense the artist's optimism was still evident during the early stages of aesthetic autonomy; charting new territory gave the artist an enabling sense of opportunity. Even in Dahlhaus's account of absolute music we recognize not only the development of music's autonomy but also the idea that music is expressive of the absolute, an idea that today seems entirely foreign. We have now reached a point where the modern artists who seek to articulate a vision cannot imitate the models of the past, which seem no longer to hold; yet if they continue simply to innovate, primarily by way of a negation of tradition, the public may remain cold to their work. Even the artist's bold sense of resistance to the status quo is dissolved when recognized in its fuller context. Insofar as art participates in the historical development of autonomous subsystems, the autonomous artist does not resist his or her age as much as participate in the general subsplintering of values: just as other spheres call for experts, so now are there specialists in art, removed from the broader sphere of life. The artist's would-be distance from society only fulfills the expectation that the artist operate within his or her autonomous sphere and have no impact on the larger world.

People are driven to become artists by their talents and their desire to develop and express them, but in an age when art no longer seems to serve a moral purpose, the question of the artist's role becomes increasingly unclear. The number of modern artists who suffer difficult lives and crises of identity increases, and these problems are related not only to the stresses of creation and the difficulties of reception but also to the unsettling idea that the artist's path may be devoid of higher purpose. We must have respect and compassion for artists who find themselves in this unenviable situation. Few authors have portrayed this complex predicament more insightfully than Thomas Mann in Doktor Faustus . Mann's hero, Adrian Leverkühn, is so eager to find a viable path that will allow his extraordinary talents to be fulfilled that he is willing to negotiate with the devil. The despair of isolation, intensified by his disengagement from the burden of tradition, which he can only mock, and his eventual capacity for expression, which presupposes a break with morality, leads to ruin. Leverkühn's plight shows the tragedy of the modern artist, who is overburdened with tradition and unable to work within a moral frame. Upon abandoning love and the moral sphere in order to break through as an artist, Leverkühn becomes a murderer and is damned. Nonetheless, we empathize with him even as we condemn him.

We understand how art has developed so as to have been divorced from morality and we sense the incredible burdens of being an artist in an age that tends no longer to see the value of art beyond its status as a commercial product or an idle game. Nonetheless, the idea that art has nothing or little to do with truth or goodness, that it must operate independently of a moral universe, is distinctly modern and may need to be viewed as a tendentious ideology, which after a short period of release may now actually be hindering the value and self-consciousness of the contemporary artist. What ultimately is wrong with this separation of art and morality? To suggest that art has only a formal value and that a determination of its quality is not subject to an evaluation of its content, which can be accomplished only from within a moral frame, not only leads to the artist's despair, it is also philosophically untenable. Morality is not one subsystem among the others, such that there is art, science, religion, business, politics, and so forth, alongside morality. Instead, morality is the guiding principle for all human endeavors. 5 Close This is not to say that great art cannot arise out of a culture in which art has become an autonomous subsystem, or that freedom from ethical considerations doesn't allow poets to create with a greater sense of experimentation and focus on form, but it does suggest that the modern autonomy of art is not in every respect welcome. This critique of autonomy has its analogy among those who argue, contrary to modern developments, that the economy cannot be fully divorced from ethics, or that science is subject to higher claims of moral legitimacy.

In modernity art has increasingly freed itself not only from artistic precepts but also from any reflection on its morality or relation to truth. I do not question the facticity of this development, which is simply a manifestation of the modern emergence of discrete subsystems of culture and leads to new insights and opportunities even as it gives rise to other problems. I do, however, problematize this development insofar as the quaestio iuris is concerned, and in doing so I do not differ from writers—from Ε. T. A. Hoffmann to Thomas Mann and beyond—who question their own artistic paradigms. To render art entirely autonomous is to say that morality, too, is only one sphere among many, and so would free one to remove morality from other spheres, such as religion or politics, which few advocates of aesthetic autonomy would likely endorse. Any reprehensible action could be justified by way of its autonomous sphere: it was for art, it was for war, it was for religion, it was for love, and so forth. Certainly, reprehensible actions also arise when individuals commit acts for allegedly moral purposes, but our recognition of an action as reprehensible presupposes that higher moral norms allow us to measure an allegedly moral stance as immoral. In this sense the superiority of the moral is not brought into question.

Every enterprise, especially those that receive public funding, should have moral legitimacy. One can legitimate the value of an activity either by pointing to its intrinsic value or by stressing its value for society. The question of the moral legitimacy of art should not be relegated to a nonquestion (which is in many ways the dominant liberal position) or a simplistic response (which is in many ways the dominant conservative stance). Several ambiguities lie in the term morality. Most commonly, it refers to questions of conduct and behavior. In this context moral art might be viewed as art that does not violate the moral customs of the age, for example, that it not contain frank depictions of sexuality. I mean something entirely different. My concern is the moral value of literature, whether it is worthy of our investment of time and if so, what it can and should be. To distinguish between “moral conventions,” that is, the moral claims and customs of a certain society at a given point in history, and “morality,” that is, the moral claims legitimated by reason after measuring and evaluating specific moral conventions, is important. Keeping this distinction in mind, we can recognize that the morality of some literary works might consist in breaking free of the moral conventions of a given age, which from a higher perspective are to be viewed as less than ideal.

Idealism As a Resource

Philosophy and the individual disciplines can intersect in either of two directions. On the one hand, philosophy can reach out to other disciplines and address the claims of those sciences instead of being simply philosophy for the sake of philosophy; and it is indeed imperative that philosophy do so if it is to remain relevant. On the other hand, philosophical questions can be raised from within the specific disciplines, whenever these disciplines address the fundamental questions of their enterprise. What is art? Why should we read literature, and which literature should we read? How might literary criticism enhance our experience of literature? One sign of the crisis of literary criticism is that such questions have for the most part been neglected or become taboo. To answer them presupposes a normative level, and we live in an age of normative paralysis.

Several ironies surface in this development. First, literature and literary criticism have never been doubted by the general public as much as they are today, and so the question of legitimacy is central to the future health of the discipline. Second, literary criticism has never been as self-reflective as it is today, yet the most central normative questions are consistently neglected. Third, even as literary critics have abandoned the idea of grounding any normative claims, literary criticism has itself become increasingly dogmatic, splintering into schools and subschools that speak their own language and criticize one another, often without addressing overarching questions of legitimacy. Fourth, and most ironic, in the past thirty to forty years literary critics have undertaken a desperate search for relevance. Relevance is indeed desirable, but in this search extra-aesthetic and ideological considerations have so fully replaced aesthetic ones that the question of why we should study literature has remained unanswered precisely by those who have sought to give moral relevance to the study of literature.

Many persons looking for orientation from the field of literary criticism are skeptical about its current state and are looking for alternative perspectives. Undoubtedly very few contemporaries would expect to find viable answers in the tradition of objective idealism, which argues that synthetic a priori knowledge exists and that this knowledge has ontological valence. Held by Plato and Hegel and currently given its strongest defense in the diverse writings of Vittorio Hösle, 6 Close the view that there is an ideal sphere that transcends nature and consciousness is foreign to what Stanley Fish would call “the going argument,” namely, that there are no foundational positions and that the only norms to which one can legitimately appeal are the professional norms practiced at any given time (“Anti-Foundationalism” 68; cf. Culler 45). When the distinction between is and ought is leveled, the power of the professions increases. Professional consensus is in principle no longer accountable to a higher purpose, and criticism of the reigning paradigm becomes increasingly difficult, as people have professional stakes in the status quo, which itself becomes the standard of judgment. Nonetheless, in a climate that fails to excite both practitioners and observers, alternative perspectives may be both welcome and invigorating.

At least two ways exist to show the validity of a position—to argue from first principles that are proven or to demonstrate a position's heuristic value. Since this book is not an effort to develop first principles and since few contemporaries would find an objective idealist framework a natural choice for the present age, I pursue the second path, attempting to present a framework that allows us to see the sphere of literary studies in unexpected ways. While many of my positions can be grounded within the book itself, others draw on a tradition of thought that is presupposed, and not proven, in this study. While presuppositions exist for all works of literary criticism, this book's presuppositions are not part of the consensus of the age. For many centuries the strongest defense of the arts and humanities derived from the idealist tradition. This tradition has vanished for the most part, and our contemporaries have considerable difficulties convincing others of the value of the arts and humanities. Certainly, insights into their value may derive from diverse complementary sources, and one voice, among others, might well draw on this tradition. If we are in agreement that the humanities, literary criticism in particular, are suffering from a crisis of legitimacy, we must be flexible and open in seeking solutions. Skeptics of a more traditional stance may wish to begin with my analyses of culture studies and deconstruction in chapter 4 . If the evaluation of contemporary currents seems sound, then the skeptical reader might return to the book's more logical opening and read the development of normative principles that motivate the later evaluation.

Suppose then, for the sake of argument, that even though few would accept the premises of idealism, we experiment with some of its positions and weigh whether or not it might allow us to see values and perspectives that might otherwise be hidden. In drawing on this tradition, I do not follow all of its claims; the reader will recognize specific points of disagreement with Plato and Hegel, which are highlighted in my reflections. In addition, any effort to reawaken some of the forgotten arguments of objective idealism needs to draw on the diverse advances in the individual sciences and arts since the last system of idealism was developed. Hösle, for example, employs the rich resources of the social sciences in developing his arguments on morals and politics, and in an earlier study, in which I developed Hegel's theories of tragedy and comedy for the contemporary age, I sought to integrate advances in the arts since the time of Hegel. In this book, I not only attempt to integrate post-Hegelian advances in literary criticism, I seek to bring the tradition of objective idealism into conversation with the challenges of the technological age.

The idealist thinker who engaged the moral value of literature more fervently than any other is Friedrich Schiller. Schiller takes his initial cues from Kant. Among Kant's main achievements in aesthetics are not only a rich account of aesthetic judgment but also a recognition of the intrinsic value of art and its relation to morality and an articulation of the connections between art and nature. Schiller, both poet and Kantian, challenges the philosopher in various ways, arguing, for example, that our motivations for moral action need not derive only from reason. But Schiller also develops a Kantian perspective; indeed, his importance in the history of aesthetics derives from his extraordinary ability to explore the seemingly contradictory path of art as autonomous and as moral. Schiller links the autonomy of art with its wholeness and harmony, which represent a counterimage to the fragmentation of reality; the experience of harmony has an effect on our souls and is viewed as a prerequisite for the moral regeneration of society. I return to this insight, but seek to supplement it in diverse ways. First, Schiller's efforts, not unlike Kant's, are highly formal, and an aesthetics that seeks to deepen Schiller's claims about the moral value of literature will need to integrate the historical perspective and concrete content characteristic of Hegel's aesthetics, even if on diverse points (such as whether philosophy makes art superfluous, I side with Schiller against Hegel). Second, any effort to return to a thinker like Schiller, whose aesthetic works are now two centuries old, must also be enriched by reflections on the developments of modernity—both in the object world, ranging from technology to politics and art, and in the scholarly world, encompassing advances in the natural sciences and the emergence of the social sciences. Above all, the ugly, which dominated aesthetic discussion immediately after the idealist period, needs to be fully integrated into art. Schiller can be valuable for the present, but we cannot be Schillerians.

My analysis of why literature matters in the twenty-first century has three parts. The book begins with a normative discussion of the value of literature and literary criticism. Despite my focus in this first part on more traditional questions and a more traditional aesthetics, I do not ignore contemporary developments: chapter 4 , for example, outlines strengths and weaknesses in contemporary literary criticism. Recent developments offer us new ways of viewing art, and these valuable horizons should not be lost. However, the question also arises of whether some valid questions have been forgotten. The historical transcendence of a theory is not one and the same as its philosophical refutation. A return to certain questions that have been neglected in modernity may in fact be the best way to open up new vistas for modernity. In the book's second part I turn to a descriptive account of the dominant categories of the technological age and their impact on aesthetics. I consider some of the intellectual-historical prerequisites of the technological age, especially those with a direct or indirect impact on aesthetics, and their manifestation in society and culture. I also reflect on the ways in which the specific technical innovations of the age have influenced not only society in general but also art and especially literature. Combining the normative and descriptive parts, I then turn in the third section to constructive suggestions concerning the possibilities of literature and literary criticism in the technological age, that is, a discussion of what great art and literary criticism should be today and the ways in which art can address some of the central categories and problems of the technological age. This triadic structure gives us insight into the universal value of literature and literary criticism and their specific possibilities and challenges in the twenty-first century.

1. May 2002 the Modern Language Association recognized the need to address the neglected question of the value of literature—as a result of pervasive concerns about a crisis of legitimacy. Despite some cogent and eloquent responses, such as that of Berman, the respondents devote as much space to reflection on the emergence of the question today as they do to its answer. See “Why Major in Literature?” For recent anthologies on the future of German studies, see McCarthy and Schneider, Van Cleve and Wilson, and Förster. Gerhard Kaiser's slim volume, written after a long and illustrious career, stands out as a partial exception to the rule. His focus is the relevance of literature for life. The specific question of the relevance of literature in the technological age is not part of his deliberations. The opposite strength and weakness are evident in another work written by a senior member of the profession: Jost Hermand admirably concludes his history of Germanics by calling for greater engagement with ecological issues, but his study contains no sustained reflection on the value of literature as literature, which would seem to be a necessary precondition if literature or literary criticism is to contribute meaningfully to this area.

For anthologies of German literary works on technology, see Bullivant and Ridley, Daniels, Dithmar, Krause, Minaty, Roehler, Sachsse, and Schneider. Each of these anthologies has the merit of drawing our attention to frequently overlooked literary works that thematize aspects of industrialization. The reduction of the truly aesthetic moment, which should not be ignored in such endeavors, comes to the fore, however, when works are selected independently of aesthetic considerations and in the form of brief excerpts, taken out of their organic contexts. A less central concern arises when such anthologies focus on the first and second industrial revolutions at the expense of the third industrial revolution, the transition to the information society; an irony arises, therefore, when they exemplify one of the problems associated with modern information, its frequent lack of organic meaning.

Although capitalism is an ideal engine for the development of technology, Gehlen's insight should not lead us to overlook the breadth of technology's impact; communism, too, had its “cult of technology” (Jonas 154), which was reinforced by the Marxist notion that the value of a product is defined by the labor put into it, not by its material basis (i.e., by nature).

4. Sedlmayr speaks, not unjustly, of the need for a third aesthetic category—along with the beauty of nature and the beauty of art—“the beauty of technology” ( Gefahr 36 ).

5. On the transcendence of morality vis-à-vis diverse subsystems, see Hösle, Moral und Politik 113–15 . For an analogous attempt by an analytic philosopher to argue that the moral sphere has a distinctive status and that “moral principles cannot be overridden by aesthetic principles,” see Beardsmore, esp. 23–30, who carefully shows that such a position is not at all incompatible with the idea that art has intrinsic value. The quotation is from page 23.

Useful as a first orientation to objective idealism, especially for those who immediately recognize the foreignness of the position, is Hösles essay on foundational issues of objective idealism, for it begins with an account and refutation of common perceptions that would make objective idealism seem wrong or musty or both.

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Humanities LibreTexts

2.1: Introduction to The Victorian Era

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Learning Objectives

  • Recognize and evaluate the influence that Queen Victoria and Prince Albert exerted on the last half of the 19th century.
  • Identify and explain the conflicts that defined the Victorian Era.
  • Assess the ways in which these conflicts influenced Victorian literature.
  • List, define, and give examples of typical forms of Victorian literature.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

The Victorian Age—the era when the sun never set on the British Empire, a time when the upper classes of Britain felt their society was the epitome of prosperity, progress, and virtue—Dickens’s words, however, could apply to his own Victorian age as well as they apply to the French Revolution setting of his novel. The Victorian Era was a time of contrasts—poverty as well as prosperity, degrading manual labor as well as technological progress, and depravity as well as virtue.

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Snow Hill, Holburn, London (Anonymous).

Queen Victoria

The last seventy years of the 19th century were named for the long-reigning  Queen Victoria . The beginning of the Victorian Era may be rounded off to 1830 although many scholars mark the beginning from the passage of the first  Reform Bill  in 1832 or Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837.

Victoria was only eighteen when her uncle William IV died and, having no surviving legitimate children, left the crown to his niece.

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Victoria receives the news that she is Queen. Engraved by Emery Walker (1851–1933), from the picture by Henry Tanworth Wells (1828–1903) at Buckingham Palace.

Although by the 19th century Britain was a constitutional monarchy and the queen held little governing power, Victoria set the moral and political tone of her century. She became a symbol of decency, decorum, and duty.

Three years into her reign, Victoria married Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, a region in what is now Germany.  Prince Albert  (given the title “Prince” by Victoria), although he had no actual power in the government, became one of Victoria’s chief advisors and a proponent of technological development in Britain. Together the couple had nine children who married into many of Europe’s royal and noble families. Victoria and Albert were considered the model of morality and respectable family life.

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Balmoral Castle, the royal residence in Scotland.

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Osborne House, the royal residence on the Isle of Wight.

When Prince Albert died in 1861, Victoria retired from public view, spending time in her Balmoral Castle in Scotland or Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Public opinion of the queen waned as years passed without her resuming her official duties. Even when she conceded to her advisors’ urging to return to London and to honor her public obligations, she continued to wear mourning until her own death. She also commissioned many public memorials to Prince Albert, including the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park (near the original location of the Crystal Palace), Royal Albert Hall, and the Victoria & Albert Museum.

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The Albert Memorial, Hyde Park, London.

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Royal Albert Hall, London.

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The ornamental dome on the Victoria & Albert Museum was modeled after Queen Victoria’s favorite crown, visible in the portrait below, now on display with the Crown Jewels at the Tower of London.

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Photograph by Alexander Bassano 1829–1913.

Queen Victoria reigned as Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India until her death in 1901.

Victorian Conflicts

The Victorian Era was, in many ways, paradoxically “the best times” and “the worst of times.”

Conflicts of Morality

Queen Victoria embodied ideals of virtue, modesty, and honor. In fact, the term  Victorian  has in the past been almost a synonym for prim, prudish behavior. At the same time, London and other British cities had countless gaming halls which provided venues not just for gambling but also  opium dens  and  prostitution . With the influx of population into the cities, desperate working class women turned to prostitution in attempts to support themselves and their children. Historian Judity Walkowitz reports that 19th century cities had 1 prostitute for every 12 adult males ( quoted in “The Great Social Evil”: Victorian Prostitution  by Prof. Christine Roth). Because of rampant sexually transmitted diseases among the British military, Parliament passed a series of  Contagious Diseases Acts  in the 1860s. These acts allowed police to detain any woman suspected of having a sexually transmitted disease and to force her to submit to exams that were considered humiliating for women at that time. Police needed little basis for such suspicions, often simply that a woman was poor.

Thomas Hardy’s poem “ The Ruined Maid ” reveals one reason many women turned to prostitution ( ruined  is a Victorian euphemism for an unmarried woman who has lost her virginity): in the poem, two young women converse. One woman, Melia, has left the farm to become a prostitute. When she meets a former friend, the contrast between the two women is pronounced: Melia is wearing fine clothes and is well fed and well cared for. The virtuous young woman, doing honest work on the farm, is wearing rags, digging potatoes by hand for subsistence, and suffering poor health. Hardy forces his readers to question what kind of society would reward prostitution while leaving the virtuous woman in abject poverty.

Conflicts of Technology and Industry

As an advocate of Victorian progress in science and industry,  Prince Albert commissioned the Great Exhibition of 1851 , a type of world’s fair where all the countries in the British Empire had displays and Britain could show off its prosperity to the rest of the world. Albert had the  Crystal Palace , a huge, modern building of glass and iron, built in Hyde Park to house the exhibition. After the  Great Exhibition  ended, the building was dismantled and moved and in its new location was destroyed by fire in 1936.

Video Clip 1

The Albert Memorial Symbol of the Victorian Age

(click to see video)

View a video lecture about the Albert Memorial.

The Albert Memorial commemorated all the same things the Great Exhibition vaunted. The four arms extending from the main statue represent four continents on which the British Empire had holdings: Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas—the sun literally never set on the British Empire. The figures on the frieze are great painters, poets, sculptors, musicians, and architects, representatives of the world’s accomplishments which culminated in the British Victorian culture. The mosaics on the canopy represent manufacturing, commerce, agriculture, and engineering—the foundations of British prosperity. And, of course, in the center, is the gilded figure of Albert himself.

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Arm representing Africa.

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The Great Exhibition of 1851 held in the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London. Source: Exterior: from Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, 1854 interior: William Simpson (lithographer), Ackermann & Co. (publisher), 1851, V&A.

Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851 focused attention on the technological advances made during the Industrial Revolution. Although achievements such as the building of the railroad system and the implementation of mechanized factories produced great prosperity for some,  others suffered . Even before the Victorian Era, writers drew attention to these problems. Wordsworth’s “Michael,” for example, portrays a man whose family had made their living from their land for many generations. With the advent of machines to weave woolen cloth, their livelihood, their way of life, was lost. Blake’s “Chimney Sweeper” poems illustrate how  children suffered  in the industrial age.

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A girl pulling a coal tub in a mine. Source: Parliamentary Papers 1842.

In addition, working conditions in factories were deplorable. With no safety regulations and no laws limiting either the number of hours people could be required to work or the age of factory workers, some factory owners were willing to sacrifice the well-being of their employees for greater profit. Children as young as five worked in factories and mines. Shelley’s “Men of England” and Barrett Browning’s “The Cry of the Children” are two examples of poems written specifically to address these problems.

The  1833 Factory Act  outlawed the employment of people under age eighteen at night, from 8:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m. and limited the number of hours those under eighteen could work to twelve hours a day. For the first time, textile factory owners were forbidden to employ children under the age of nine. Children under age eleven could not work more than nine hours a day. The 1833 Factory Act also stipulated that children working in factories attend some type of school.

The Mines Act of 1842 prohibited females and boys under ten from working below ground in mines.

While these provisions hardly seem protective according to modern standards, the resulting conditions greatly improved  life for many children . Throughout Victoria’s reign, other parliamentary acts continued to alleviate working conditions in the ever-expanding Victorian industrial age.

Conflicts of Faith and Doubt

The scientific and technological advances celebrated at the Great Exhibition of 1851 led to another crisis in Victorian England: a crisis of faith and doubt. During the earlier part of the 19th century, the work of Charles Lyell and other geologists with their discoveries of fossilized remains of animals never seen before led to debates among scientists about the origins of these creatures. Debates about the age of the earth for some called into question the Genesis account of creation. In 1859, Charles Darwin published his  On the Origin of Species . Lyell and Darwin were among many who contributed to scientific theories that some saw as contradictory to established religious beliefs.

These scientific issues together with apparent lack of concern for appalling human conditions among the lower classes led some to doubt the presence of a divine being in the world and others to question the value of Christianity. Literature by writers such as Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold questions the presence of  religious faith  in the world.

At the same time, a conviction that Britain had a duty to spread Christianity around the world became one reason, or to some an excuse, for British imperialism.

Conflicts over Imperialism

A desire to expand industrial wealth and to have access to inexpensive raw materials led to the British occupation of countries around the globe. Although the United States and other European countries participated in this type of  imperialism , the  British Empire  was the largest and wealthiest of its time.

Along with their desire for material gain, many British saw the expansion of the British Empire as what  Rudyard Kipling referred to as “the white man’s burden,”  the responsibility of the British to bring their civilization and their way of life to what many considered inferior cultures. The result of this type of reasoning was often the destruction of local cultures and the oppression of local populations. In addition, a religious zeal to bring British religion to “heathen” peoples resulted in an influx of missionaries with the colonialists.

A backlash of protest against the concept of imperialism further divided a British nation already divided by class, religion, education, and wealth. While many British citizens sincerely desired to share their knowledge and beliefs with less developed nations, others found the movement a convenient excuse to expand their country’s, and their own, power and wealth.

Conflicts over Women’s Rights

“The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights,’ with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.” Queen Victoria, 1870

quoted in Lytton Strachey’s Queen Victoria)

Ironically, as seen in this passage from a letter written in the royal third person by Queen Victoria, even the Queen opposed women’s rights. Nonetheless, the Victorian Era did see advancement in women’s political rights. The Married Woman’s Property Act of 1870 gave married women the right to own property they earned or acquired by inheritance. The upper classes were, of course, primarily concerned with inheritances. Before the passage of this act, money or property left to a married woman immediately belonged to her husband. By the late 19th century, women had some rights to their children and the right to leave their husbands because of physical abuse.

Education for women also improved. The idea Mary Wollstonecraft expressed in her “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in 1792 very gradually, over more than 100 years, became a reality.

The first schools for the lower classes, girls or boys, were Sunday schools organized by churches to teach children basic literacy as well as religious lessons on the only day they were not working full time. Not until the  Education Act of 1870  were public schools in all areas of the country provided by law. Even then, attendance was not made compulsory for another ten years and then only for children aged five to ten.

Girls from the lower classes were included in the first public schools; however, girls from the upper classes continued to receive their basic education primarily in the home and in finishing schools for young ladies.  Cambridge University  and  Oxford University  established the first colleges for women in the latter half of the 19th century. Women were not allowed to attend the existing colleges for men and were not considered full members of the universities until the 20th century.

Although there was an active  woman’s suffrage  movement during the Victorian Era, women did not receive the right to vote until the 20th century.

Take the  Women’s Rights Quiz  on the BBC website to see how much you know about the rights of Victorian women.

The major change in the  English language during the 19th century  was the introduction of vocabulary to communicate new innovations, inventions, and concepts that resulted from the Industrial Age. Language mirrored class distinctions in both vocabulary and accents. The well educated upper classes were distinguished by their speech. Slang and an entirely differently accented English were the marks of the lower classes.

Forms of Literature

As noted in the Romantic Period introduction, a  novel , as defined in the Holman/Harmon  Handbook to Literature , is an “extended fictional prose narrative.” The  novel  was a dominant form in the Victorian Era. Many Victorian novelists—Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Wilke Collins, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson—wrote  serial novels , novels published in installments over a period of time.  Serial novels  appeared in newspapers or magazines or could be published in independently printed booklets. As larger portions of the population became literate, demand for reading material grew. The  inexpensive booklets , each containing a chapter or other small portion of a novel, were affordable entertainment for the middle classes.

As in the Romantic Period, lyric poetry was popular in the Victorian Era. In addition to the lyric, the  verse novel , a  long narrative poem , such as Barrett Browning’s  Aurora Leigh , Tennyson’s  Idylls of the King , and Browning’s  The Ring and the Book , also was a prevalent form. Browning popularized the  dramatic monologue , a form of poetry which presents a speaker in a dramatic situation.

Non-Fiction Prose

The many conflicts of the Victorian Era provided fertile subject matter for non-fiction prose writers such as  Matthew Arnold ,  Thomas Carlyle ,  John Stuart Mill ,  John Henry Newman ,  Walter Pater , and  John Ruskin .

Popular forms of entertainment  such as the  music hall  and melodramas flourished during the Victorian Era as entertainment became divided along class lines. Popular music and musical plays, separated from legitimate theater in their own venues, provided leisure-time amusement for the middle classes. Robert Browning wrote  closet dramas , plays not actually intended for the stage.  Oscar Wilde  revived the comedy of manners with plays such as  Lady Windermere’s Fan  and  The Importance of Being Earnest .

Key Takeaways

  • Although Queen Victoria symbolized decency, decorum, and duty, Victorian society spanned a wide spectrum of prosperity and poverty, education and ignorance, progress and regression
  • Victorian society wrestled with conflicts of morality, technology and industry, faith and doubt, imperialism, and rights of women and ethnic minorities.
  • Many Victorian writers addressed both sides of these conflicts in many forms of literature.
  • Typical forms of Victorian literature include novels, serialized novels, lyric poetry, verse novels, dramatic monologues, non-fiction prose, and drama.

Victorianism

  • “ All Change in the Victorian Age .” Bruce Robinson. Britain’s Industrial Revolution. Victorians. BBC History.
  • “ Monuments and Dust: The Culture of Victorian London .” Michael Levenson, University of Virginia; David Trotter, University College London; Anthony Wohl, Vassar College. Institute for Advance Technology in the Humanities, University of Virginia; Department of English University College London; Cambridge University Press.
  • “ Movements and Currents in Nineteenth-Century British Thought .”  The Victorian Web . George P. Landow, Brown University.
  • “ Overview of the Victorian Era .”  History in Focus . Anne Shepherd. University of London.
  • “ Victorian and Victorianism .”  The Victorian Web . George P. Landow, Brown University.
  • “ Victorian Britain .” History Trails. BBC.
  • “ Victorian England: An Introduction .” Christine Roth, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.
  • “ The Victorian Period .” Dr. Robert M. Kirschen, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
  • “ Victorians 1837–1901 .” Liza Picard. The British Library.
  • “ Victorians 1850–1901 .”  The National Archives .
  • “ Queen Victoria .”  The Victorian Web . David Cody, Hartwick College.
  • “ Addiction in the Nineteenth Century .” Dr. Susan Zieger, Stanford University.
  • “ The Contagious Diseases Act .”  The Victorian Web .
  • “ The Great Social Evil”: Victorian Prostitution . Prof. Christine Roth, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.
  • “ Opium Dens and Opium Usage in Victorian England .”  Victorian History . Bruce Rosen, University of Tasmania.
  • “ 1832 Reform Act .” Taking Liberties: The Struggle for Britain’s Freedoms and Rights. The British Library.
  • “ The 1833 Factory Act [from Statutes of the Realm, 3 & 4 William IV, c. 103] .”  The Victorian Web . Dr. Marjie Bloy, National University of Singapore.
  • “ 19th Century Poor Law Union and Workhouse Records .”  The National Archives . brief explanation of 1834 Poor Law and images.
  • “ Child Labor .”  The Victorian Web . David Cody, Hartwick College.
  • “ Corn Laws .”  The Victorian Web . David Cody, Hartwick College.
  • “ The Crystal Palace Animation .” The Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities. University of Virginia.
  • “ The Crystal Palace, or The Great Exhibition of 1851: An Overview .”  The Victorian Web .
  • “ Great Exhibition .” Treasures.  The National Archives .
  • “ The Great Exhibition .” History, Periods & Styles Features. The Victoria & Albert Museum.
  • “ The Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace .”  Victoria Station .
  • “ The Life of the Industrial Worker in Nineteenth-Century England .”  The Victorian Web . Laura Del Col, West Virginia University.
  • “ The Reform Acts .”  The Victorian Web . Glenn Everett, University of Tennessee at Martin.
  • “ Testimony Gathered by Ashley’s Mines Commission .”  The Victorian Web . Laura Del Col, West Virginia University.
  • “ Victorian Science & Religion .”  The Victorian Web . Aileen Fyfe, National University of Ireland Galway and John van Wyhe, Cambridge University.

Conflict over Imperialism

  • “ The British Empire .”  The Victorian Web . David Cody, Hartwick College.
  • “ British Empire .”  The National Archives .
  • “ Kipling’s Imperialism .”  The Victorian Web . David Cody, Hartwick College.
  • “ The 1870 Education Act .” Living Heritage: Going to School.  www.parliament.uk .
  • “ Gender Ideology & Separate Spheres .” Gender, Health, Medicine & Sexuality in Victorian England. Victoria & Albert Museum.
  • “ Gender Matters .”  The Victorian Web .
  • “ The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies .”  The Victorian Web . Helena Wojtczak.
  • “‘ The Personal is Political’: Gender in Private & Public Life .” Gender, Health, Medicine & Sexuality in Victorian England. Victoria & Albert Museum.
  • “ The Suffragettes in Parliament .” History of Parliament Podcasts.  www.parliament.uk .
  • “ Suffragists .” Learning: Dreamers and Dissenters. The British Library.
  • “ Victorian Britain: A Divided Nation ?” Education.  The National Archives .
  • “ Women’s Status in Mid 19th-Century England: A Brief Overview .” Helena Wojtczak. Hastings Press.
  • “ Women’s Rights Quiz .” Major Events of Victoria’s Reign. Victorians. BBC History.
  • “ Women’s Work .” Prof. Pat Hudson, Cardiff University. Daily Life in Victorian Britain. Victorians. BBC History.

Victorian Language

  • “ The Development of the English Language Following the Industrial Revolution .”  The Victorian Web . Jessica Courtney, University of Brighton (UK).
  • “ The 19th Century Novel .”  Novels . Dr. Agatha Taormina, Extended Learning Institute of Northern Virginia Community College.
  • “ Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Difficulties of Victorian Poetry .”  The Victorian Web . George P. Landow, Brown University.
  • “ Justifying God’s Ways to Man (and Woman): The Victorian Long Poem .”  The Victorian Web . George P. Landow. Brown University.
  • “ Literary Genre, Mode, and Style .”  The Victorian Web .
  • “ Nineteenth Century Drama .”  Theatre Database .
  • “ Progress of Journalism in the Victorian Era .”  Bartleby.com . The Growth of Journalism. rpt. from  The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes  (1907–21). Vol. XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
  • “ Serial Publication .” Prof. Joel J. Brattin, Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Dickens. Life and Career.  PBS.org .
  • Some Questions to Use in Analyzing Novels . Prof. Stephen C. Behrendt, University of Nebraska, Lincoln.
  • “ Studies of Victorian Literature .” Dr. John P. Farrell, University of Texas at Austin.
  • “ Victorian Literature and Culture .” Prof. James Buzard.  MIT Open Courseware .
  • “ Victorian Serial Novels .” Digital Collections. University of Victoria Libraries.
  • “ Victorian Women Writers Project .” University of Indiana Digital Library Project.
  • “ Why Read the Serial Versions of Victorian Novels? ”  The Victorian Web . Philip V. Allingham, Lakehead University.
  • “ The Albert Memorial: Symbol of the Victorian Age .” Dr. Carol Lowe, McLennan Community College.
  • “ The Great Exhibition .” Victorians. The British Library.
  • “ The Rise of Technology and Industry .” Learning: Victorians. The British Library. images, slide shows, video, podcasts featuring all types of industry and technological advances in daily life, such as cooking and bathrooms.
  • “ A Visitor’s Guide to the Great Exhibition, from ‘The Illustrated Exhibitor .’” The Great Exhibition. Victorians. The British Library.

Lesson 1 - Introduction To 21st Century Literature

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