Literary terms, age and movements notes

Aestheticism is the late-nineteenth-century claim that art exists for beauty, not for a moral lesson, a sermon, or a social use. Abrams: art is an autonomous end; the artist’s job is to make a beautiful object, not to improve the reader. The French tag is l’art pour l’art — art for art’s sake. Walter Pater’s gem-like flame (intensity of sensation) is the English critical voice; Oscar Wilde is the set name on this paper. The opposite climate is mid-Victorian earnestness in Houghton: duty, work, the useful book. Aestheticism is a revolt inside the same century, not a different country.

The set book is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91). The Preface states the doctrine in exam-ready sentences: there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, only well written or badly written; all art is quite useless. Dorian treats a face, a portrait and a life as things to be made exquisite. Lord Henry talks as if beauty were the only law. The plot then tests the doctrine: the portrait carries the moral stain the beautiful face refuses. Unit 4 will walk chapters. Unit 1 only needs the genre-claim: this novel is the paper’s exhibit of aestheticism, and also of its cost.

Keep three neighbours apart. Pre-Raphaelitism (later in this unit) still wants truth to nature and often a medieval moral subject; aestheticism drops the sermon and keeps the cult of beauty. Utilitarianism judges an act by use and happiness; aestheticism refuses use as a test of art. Hopkins’s inscape is exact looking, but it is sacramental — the pattern is God’s, not “art for art.” Do not call In Memoriam aesthetic: Tennyson is arguing faith, grief and good, not the uselessness of art. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is visionary terror, not a beauty-cult. If a question says aestheticism, start with Wilde’s Preface and the portrait, not with Tennyson’s island.

A dramatic monologue is a poem spoken by one person who is not the poet, at a revealing moment, to a listener who stays silent on the page. Abrams’s tests are four: a single speaker; a situation (not a floating song); an auditor whose presence shapes what is said; and a character who gives himself away, often without meaning to. Irony is the usual engine: we know more than the speaker knows about himself. It is not a soliloquy (a stage speech with nobody addressed). It is not the poet’s own lyric “I” in grief or prayer.

The set masterpiece is Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842). The Duke of Ferrara shows a painted duchess to an envoy who has come to settle the next marriage. He never names his jealousy as a sin. He names a spot of joy, a courtesy that was too easily given, a nine-hundred-years-old name, then “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” The envoy is in the room: that is why the Duke can point to the curtain, walk toward the stairs, and mention a bronze Neptune as if they were still talking of art. The rhyme is pentameter couplets, but enjambment hides the snap, so the voice sounds like polished talk. Unit 2 will walk the fifty-six lines. Here the term is enough: one speaker, one silent guest, one self-portrait in crime.

Do not dump every Unit 2 poem into this box. Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” is a choric lyric: mariners speak as “we,” after a narrator lands them; there is no one silent envoy being bargained with. In Memoriam lyrics 7 and 54 are the poet’s own grief and trust — elegiac lyric, not a mask. Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is a speaker to a beloved (“Ah, love, let us be true”), closer to lyric address than to Browning’s ironic Duke. Hopkins speaks as a knowing adult to a child, Margaret; the voice is close to the poet, not a criminal persona. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” has no auditor in a room; it is a vision. If the question is dramatic monologue, Browning is the answer. Name the silent envoy, or you have only said “a speech.”

A short story is brief prose fiction, tight in time, place and cast, aimed at one pressure or revelation rather than a multi-plot social world. Abrams: a short work of prose fiction, more concentrated than a novel; often a single action and a close. It is not an essay (argument or memory without a plotted event). It is not a play (bodies and acts meant for a stage). It is not a novel chapter torn out.

The set short story is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.” An old physician calls four aged friends; a withered rose drinks the same water they will drink; they grow young, repeat the same vanities and quarrels, smash the vase, and age again. The Fountain of Youth is the one device; the moral shock is that a second youth would not teach them. That is short-story method: one room, one test, one irony at the end. Hawthorne is American nineteenth-century fiction, not a British Victorian three-volume novel. Use him for the term short story. Do not call him the Victorian novel.

Keep the Unit 3 and Unit 4 pages in their genres. Stevenson’s “On Walking Tours,” Huxley’s “Selected Snobberies,” Belloc’s “In Praise of Ignorance,” Chesterton’s essay on no longer being very young — these are essays, not short stories. Chekhov’s The Seagull is a play. Wilde’s Dorian Gray is a novel. If a question asks you to illustrate “short story” from this paper, Hawthorne is the honest exhibit. A student who writes “Chekhov wrote short stories” may be right in literary history and still wrong for this paper’s set list: the prescribed Chekhov text is a drama.

Inscape and instress are Gerard Manley Hopkins’s own pair, not old rhetorical names like metaphor. Abrams records them as Hopkins’s terms. Inscape is the inner distinctive design that makes a thing this thing and not another — the pattern, the thisness. Two ash trees may share a species and still each have an inscape. Instress is the force that holds that pattern in being, and the stress by which the pattern strikes a beholder. In Hopkins the energy is finally God’s: to see the inscape truly is to feel creation holding. Do not translate inscape as “scenery” or instress as “stress of exams.”

The set poem is “Spring and Fall.” Margaret grieves over Goldengrove unleaving. The grove’s inscape, in this lyric, is mortality made visible as falling gold. The instress is what hits the child’s heart before she has the word death. The adult speaker reads the pattern across: the same blight man was born for; “It is Margaret you mourn for.” Leaves are not a decoration. They are the unique shape of a loss that already belongs to her. Unit 2 will walk the lines. Here the pair is enough: inscape = the grove’s (and the girl’s) distinctive pattern of dying; instress = the pressure of that pattern on feeling.

Keep sprung rhythm in the next lesson: that is metre, how the line is counted. Inscape is seeing, not counting. Tennyson’s lotos island is rich in imagery (Unit 2 will quote the stream and the sunset); it is not Hopkins’s inscape-doctrine. Arnold’s sea is a symbol of faith withdrawing; symbol is not inscape. Wilde’s portrait is a moral-aesthetic double, not a Hopkins inscape. If the question names inscape or instress, Hopkins is the only set poet who owns the words. Quote Goldengrove and the last line, then split the pair.

Sprung rhythm is Hopkins’s metre. Abrams: the line is measured by stresses, not by a fixed syllable-count. A foot has one stress, usually on the first sound, and may carry from one to four syllables (sometimes more slack for an effect). Neighbouring stresses can stand together; the line then “springs.” Ordinary iambic pentameter waits da-DUM da-DUM and fills ten syllables. Sprung rhythm counts the blows, like a hammer, and lets weak syllables crowd or vanish. It is not free verse: the stresses are still numbered. It is not rhyme (rhyme may sit on top of it).

“Spring and Fall” is the set exhibit. The opening is already four lifts packed into a short line: Már-ga-rét, áre you gríev-ing — the name itself is sprung. “Goldengrove unleaving” loads compounds so the ear hits grove and leave. Later “It ís the blight man was born for” forces a stress on is (Hopkins even marks it) against ordinary speech. You need not scan every foot in the exam. You need: counted stresses, variable slack, and this poem as the page.

Contrast the rest of Unit 2 so the word stays exact. Tennyson’s In Memoriam lyrics use a closed quatrain, iambic tetrameter, rhyme ABBA — four regular beats, not sprung. “The Lotos-Eaters” opens in Spenserian stanzas, then a choric song of longer lyric lines; still not Hopkins’s stress-metre. Browning’s Duchess is iambic pentameter couplets, hidden by run-on. Arnold’s “Dover Beach” varies line-length and is irregular, but it is not sprung rhythm: it does not claim Hopkins’s foot-law. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is largely loose pentameter. If the question is sprung rhythm, do not say “irregular poetry.” Say Hopkins, stresses not syllables, “Spring and Fall.”

The Victorian Age is the reign of Queen Victoria, 1837–1901. This paper’s objectives split it into Early (1837–1851), Middle (1851–1870) and Late (1870–1901). Houghton’s “frame of mind” for the middle decades is earnestness: work, duty, the home, a public moral language, and, beside them, a growing doubt. Sanders’s short history treats the same years as the age when the novel and a public poetry had to live with reform bills, empire, city crowds and science. It is not “the nineteenth century” as a blank: the Romantics of the last paper (Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge) belong to an earlier climate. Yeats’s “The Second Coming” (1919) is prescribed in Unit 2 but is not a Victorian poem; keep it as a late hinge toward the next paper.

The Industrial Revolution is the long economic shift Ashton dates, in the classic sense, about 1760–1830: machines, factories, coal, cotton, a new speed of production. Victorian literature lives in the consequences. Thompson’s working class is already made; railways and steam shrink distance; towns swallow villages; clock-time disciplines labour. 1851, the Great Exhibition, is the syllabus’s hinge into Middle Victorian confidence — glass, iron, the world’s goods on show in London. The same decades produce smoke, slums, and a religious question: if nature and society are engines, where is Providence? You do not have a Dickens novel on this list. You still need the machine-age as the ground under Arnold’s grating world and Tennyson’s tired mariners.

How the set pages touch this climate. “The Lotos-Eaters”: sailors refuse toil and wandering; the island is a dream of rest against labour — the Victorian work-ethic seen from the side that wants to stop. In Memoriam lyric 7: a dark house on a bald street in drizzle — grief in a modern town, not a Romantic lake. Lyric 54: trust that good is the goal of ill, including “taints of blood” — a mind trying to keep faith while nature looks pitiless. “Dover Beach”: the Sea of Faith was once full; now a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar; the last picture is a darkling plain and ignorant armies — Houghton’s doubt in one lyric. Wilde’s late-Victorian London is luxury and a studio, not a mill, but it is still the city the century built. Do not call the Industrial Revolution a literary school. Call it the material weather. Then name one poem that breathes it.

Victorian poetry in Armstrong’s sense is not “weaker Romanticism.” It is public speech under pressure: the poet as laureate and as doubter, the dramatic mask, the long elegy, the lyric of culture against a machine world. Form stays often regular (Tennyson’s ABBA stanza, Browning’s couplets) even when faith does not. Late in the reign Hopkins breaks the ear with sprung rhythm; later still Yeats, on this paper, has already crossed into modern apocalypse. Name Victorian poetry as a climate with several voices, not as one smooth style.

Map the set lyrics onto jobs. Tennyson, Poet Laureate from 1850: “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832, revised 1842) — choric wish to cease from labour; In Memoriam (1850), lyrics 7 and 54 — private grief in a street, then a willed trust that good is the goal of ill. Browning: the dramatic monologue as character and power (“My Last Duchess,” 1842). Arnold: “Dover Beach” (published 1867) — faith as a receding sea, love as the last shore. Hopkins: “Spring and Fall” (1880) — inscape of mortality in a child’s grove, sprung line. Yeats: “The Second Coming” (1919) — not Victorian reassurance; the centre cannot hold. Armstrong’s politics are here in different keys: idle mariners against work; a Duke’s command over a wife’s smile; armies on a darkling plain; a rough beast slouching toward birth.

Contrast with last semester so labels do not slide. Romantic poetry trusted imagination, nature as teacher, the lyric I. Victorian poetry still uses landscape (lotos island, Dover shingle, Goldengrove), but the question has changed: can meaning survive factory, geology, and the death of a friend? Do not call “Dover Beach” a Romantic nature ode because it has a sea. Do not call “The Lotos-Eaters” Pre-Raphaelite because it is lush. Do not call Yeats Victorian because he sits in Unit 2. If the question is “Victorian poetry,” lead with Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, and Hopkins; use Yeats only as the paper’s last, already modern, contrast.

The Victorian novel is the age’s great prose form: long (often serial) fiction of social life, class, money, marriage, work and conscience. Sanders: the novel becomes the central English kind of the mid-century. Houghton’s earnestness is at home here — a plot that educates, a narrator who judges, a world of houses and streets that claims to be the real England. It is realism as a public contract, not a romance of knights. Women writing, which the course objectives ask you to notice, is part of that rise (the Brontës, Eliot, Gaskell in the history books). This paper does not set Dickens, Eliot or a Brontë. Still the heading is in Unit 1 because the age is the novel’s age, and because the one set novel answers that age from the other end.

The set novel is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. It uses the century’s city, studio, dinner table and “new woman” edges of fashion, but it inverts the moral-education plot. A Victorian three-decker would usually punish vice and reward duty in the open. Wilde’s Preface denies that a book is moral or immoral; the portrait then hides the punishment in the attic. Call Dorian Gray a late-Victorian novel of aestheticism, not a textbook “Condition-of-England” novel. Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” is a short story, American, one sitting: related only as nineteenth-century prose fiction, not as the Victorian novel. Chekhov’s Seagull is drama.

Exam trap: “Victorian novel” in a definition question wants the social-moral long form (serial, class, earnest plot). “Victorian novel on this paper” wants Wilde, with the warning that he is the revolt. Do not invent a Dickens plot to fill the heading. Do not call an essay by Stevenson or Chesterton a novel. If you need a bridge sentence: the form the age trusted was the moral novel; the book this paper actually sets is the aesthetic novel that refuses that trust and then, in the portrait, cannot quite escape a moral.

The Oxford Movement (also Tractarianism) is a church movement, not first a school of metres. It begins in Oxford in the 1830s — conventionally with John Keble’s 1833 sermon on national apostasy — and gathers John Henry Newman, E. B. Pusey and the Tracts for the Times. The claim: the Church of England is apostolic, sacramental, catholic in the old sense; it is not a department of the state and not a useful moral club. Against liberal Protestant thinning, and against a utilitarian measuring of religion by social happiness, the Tractarians restore ritual, tradition, and the authority of the early Church. Newman’s conversion to Rome in 1845 is the crisis everyone names; the movement’s heat remains in Anglican ritualism after him.

Why a literature paper lists it. Houghton’s Victorian mind is religious even when it doubts; the Oxford Movement is one strong religious answer, as utilitarianism and later Darwinism are others. On this paper the poet closest to a sacramental seeing is Hopkins — convert, Jesuit, writer of inscape as God’s pattern in things. He is not a Tractarian pamphleteer, and “Spring and Fall” is not a tract. Still, the Catholic-sacramental eye that finds a grove’s thisness is unimaginable without the century’s recovered seriousness about sacrament. Arnold is the other pole: son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, who opposed the Tractarians; “Dover Beach” is liberal-agnostic melancholy, a withdrawing sea of faith, not a return to the altar.

Do not call Tennyson a Tractarian because In Memoriam prays. His trust in lyric 54 is a private theodicy, not Oxford’s apostolic church. Do not call Wilde Oxford Movement: aestheticism is another late religion, of beauty. Browning’s Duke is a Renaissance Catholic surface in a dramatic poem, not a Victorian tract. If the question is the Oxford Movement, define the 1830s church campaign, name Newman–Keble–Pusey, then, for this paper, contrast Hopkins’s sacramental inscape with Arnold’s receding faith. That contrast is the literary use of the heading.

Utilitarianism is the moral theory that the right act is the one that produces the greatest happiness for the greatest number. This paper names Mill’s Utilitarianism in the recommended list. Jeremy Bentham had already made “use” and a pleasure-calculus public language (even a child’s game could rank with poetry if it gave equal pleasure). Mill keeps the greatest-happiness test but argues for higher and lower pleasures: poetry is not the same as a pin-game. In Victorian debate the word also names a whole temper: measure schools, laws, even churches, by results. Houghton’s earnest reformers often speak this language. Carlyle, Ruskin and Arnold (culture against “machinery”) attack it. Aestheticism attacks it from the other side: art is useless, and should be.

On this paper the clearest imaginative refusal of useful labour is Tennyson’s choric song in “The Lotos-Eaters.” The mariners will not wander, will not toil; the island offers rest as an end. Victorian work-ethic (the gospel of labour Houghton describes) is exactly what they put down. You need not call the poem a treatise against Mill. You need the collision: a philosophy that sanctifies useful happiness, and a lyric that blesses refusal. Wilde’s Preface — “All art is quite useless” — is the aesthetic rebuke to the same test applied to books. Arnold’s “Dover Beach” is not a utilitarian argument; it is what a mind sounds like when machinery and struggle have not produced a happy shore — only ignorant armies.

The Oxford Movement, already in this unit, refuses a church judged by social utility. Hopkins’s inscape is not “what the grove is for”; it is what the grove is. Browning’s Duke treats a wife as a useful object in a collection; that is not Mill’s ethics, but it is a dramatic picture of persons reduced to use. If the question is utilitarianism, start with Mill’s greatest happiness, then choose one collision: lotos-rest against work, or Wilde’s useless art against the useful book. Do not write “Victorians were practical” and stop.

Darwinism in Bowler’s sense is the biological theory associated with Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859): species change; natural selection favours traits that survive; human beings belong inside that nature, not on a separate throne. The syllabus wants the shock to faith and to design: if nature is not a finished moral picture, Houghton’s Providence is harder to hold. Distinguish Darwin’s biology from later “social Darwinism” (competition treated as an ethic). The set poems feel the first shock; they do not lecture that later misuse.

Dates on this paper must stay honest. In Memoriam is 1850, nine years before Origin. Lyric 54 is already a theodicy: “Oh yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill,” including “pangs of nature” and “taints of blood.” Victorian readers after 1859 reread that trust beside evolution. You may say the age pairs Tennyson with Darwin; you may not say lyric 54 quotes the Origin. “Dover Beach” (1867) is the set lyric that lives in the post-Origin air: the Sea of Faith withdraws; the world has neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude; ignorant armies clash by night. Hopkins, writing “Spring and Fall” in 1880, still reads a grove as meaningful inscape, not as blind selection — a religious counter-reading of nature, not a biology essay.

If the question is Darwinism, define natural selection and the 1859 shock, then use Arnold as the set post-Origin lyric, and Tennyson 54 as the trust the age kept rereading. Do not invent Darwin as a character in the poems.

Pre-Raphaelitism begins as a painters’ brotherhood in 1848: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB). Prettejohn: they reject the academic smoothness associated with Raphael’s High Renaissance followers — brown shadows, generalised bodies, studio convention. They want brilliant colour, sharp natural detail, and often medieval or biblical subjects taken seriously, not as costume. Bullen reads the Pre-Raphaelite body as desire and fear, not only as “pretty medievalism.” A journal, The Germ, carried poems as well as pictures. The literary wing (the Rossettis, Morris, sometimes Swinburne) is real in the history books. None of those poets is set on this paper.

So why is the heading here? Because it is a named Victorian movement in the syllabus, and because two later Unit 1 words grow out of it. Exact looking at a leaf or a woman’s hair feeds the cult of the beautiful object that aestheticism will push further — but the PRB still usually wants a moral or sacred story in the frame; Wilde’s Preface drops that story. Hopkins’s hunger for the inscape of a thing (the grove as this grove) shares the PRB refusal of a vague general tree, though his end is Jesuit, not brotherhood painting. Tennyson’s lotos island is lush and Homeric; do not stamp it PRB because the fruit is heavy. Browning’s Fra Pandolf is an Italian painter in a dramatic poem, not Millais.

Write the exam paragraph as: 1848 painters; before Raphael’s polish; nature and the Middle Ages, in detail; poetry as a sister art. Then tell the truth about this paper: no Rossetti lyric is prescribed; the heading explains the age; the set pages it illuminates are the later beauty-cult in Dorian Gray and, by analogy of exact seeing, Hopkins. If you cannot name Hunt, Millais, Rossetti and 1848, you have not yet defined the movement.

The paper’s title is 19th Century Literature; Unit 1’s official movements are Victorian. Hawthorne (American short story) and Chekhov (Russian play, 1896) are nineteenth-century in date but not British-Victorian headings. Yeats is the one set poet you must not swallow into 1837–1901. Realism as a novel-mode sits inside “Victorian novel”; it is not a separate monarch. Industrial Revolution is the ground, not a sixth poetic school. In a Section B or C answer, pick one term or one movement, define it from Abrams or from the named history book, then staple it to one set page. A list of all twelve headings is not an essay.