Victorian Literature Questions
Bring on the tough stuff. There's not just one right answer.
- The Victorian era technically begins with Queen Victoria taking the throne, and it abruptly ends when she dies. But does it make sense to define a literary period by the person on the throne?
- Some critics divide up the Romantic period by generation: the "first generation Romantics" (Wordsworth and Coleridge) vs. the "second generation Romantics" (Keats and Shelley). Are Victorians just third-generation Romantics? Or is their lit doing something so different that they need their own category?
- Victorians loved their Romantic poetry. If they were so interested in the previous generation's poetry, does it still make sense to separate the two groups?
- Romantic poetry gets tons of attention, but Victorian poets also had some big inventions, like Robert Browning's dramatic monologue. If you had to sum it up, how is Victorian poetry different from Romantic poetry?
- If we were defining Victorian lit by its major works instead of by Queen Victoria's life, which texts would you choose? Which work would kick things off, and which would signal it was all over?
- If we picked up a Victorian novel that didn't have a back cover or a copyright date, would we still find some distinctive things that marked its age?
- Are there Victorian authors that just don't fit in with the concerns and styles of the period? Would you group them with a different time or set of authors?
- The 19th-century novel is all about fads—from the Newgate novel detailing the grimy details of criminal life in London to the suspense-ridden sensation novel (check out "Serialization" under Characteristics). Do we still have such clear trends in popular novels? And if so, what are they?