The Victorian Novel

1. The VictorianNovel Bidut Giulia , VB

2. THEMES

3. SETTING The expression of the Industrial Revolution Anonymous places where identities are lost THE CITY Extract from Charles Dickens, Hard Times : Coketown It was a town of red brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it (…) . It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever , and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the pistons of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contains several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went an and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements , to do the same work, and whom every day the same as yesterday and tomorrow (…) You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful.

4. Stilisticselements • Realism • use of language of sense impressions • speak about Victorian institutions and values. • Parody • Irony • Exaggeration of the tones • Hyperbole • Grotesque Purpose Purpose The reader can partly identify himself Entertain the reader Widely- read by (lower) middle class

5. The effectson the reader PATHOS Lets the reader consider himself superior Affects the reader provoking feeling of sadness and sympathy Victorian novel works an alibi because it gives the reader the possibility not to recognize his own image trough the distorting mirror of the novel. Philanthropy

6. The development of the novel • Victorian novel: • provides a photograph of Victorian society criticizing it; • has the effects of creating opinion; • the novel was published in installments creating expectation in the reading public  increase the demand; • it became a industrial production, an integral part of the system that it criticized.

7. Anti- VictorianReaction Hardy defied the moral conventions of the period: Victorian age values are overturned. Criticizes Victorian society in a way that is not approve Thomas Hardly Jude the Obscure • Narrative technique: • Realism prevails on parody; • The third person omniscient narrator remains but he does not involve the reader • Characters are not caricature so the aim is mainly instructive; • The setting is described trough fraimings