Want to create interactive content? It’s easy in Genially!

Get started free

The victorian novel

alessia.franciosa

Created on November 24, 2023

Start designing with a free template

Discover more than 1500 professional designs like these:

Vaporwave presentation

Animated Sketch Presentation

Memories Presentation

Pechakucha Presentation

Decades Presentation

Color and Shapes Presentation

Historical Presentation

Transcript

The victorian

Novel

A presentation made by Alessia Franciosa, Cristina Urgesi, Giulia Frijio, Maria Lucrezia Sardone and Matilde Magnani

Start

The publishing world

Essays, verse and even novels made their first appearance in the pages of periodicals. The writer could always alter the story, according to its success or failure.

Readers and writers

During the Victorian Age there was a communion of interests and opinions between writers and their readers. One reason for this close relationship was the enormous growth of the middle classes. Its members borrowed books from circulating libraries.

The Victorians' interest in prose

The Victorians showed a marked interest in prose. The spread of scientific knowledge made the novel realistic and analytical, the spread of democracy made it social and humanitarian, while the spirit of moral unrest made it inquisitive and critical.

The novelist's aim

Early Victorian novelists felt they had a moral and social responsibility to fulfil. They wanted to reflect the social changes that had been in progress for a long time. The novelists described society as they saw it. They were aware of the evils of their society, such as the terrible conditions of manual workers and the exploitation of children.

The narrative technique

The voice of the omniscient narrator provided a comment on the plot. Retribution and punishment were to be found in the final chapter of the novel, where the whole texture of events, adventures and incidents had to be explained and justified.

Late Victorian novelist

The late Victorian novelist represented crisis on the moral religious values, which formed the base of Victorian ideas about society. Furthermore for the writer, society sees human nature as a crime.

  • Thomas Hardy describes a tragic view of world.
  • Henry James art can be considered as a moral force which reveals new possibilities of life.
  • Lewis Carroll is a writer of children’s books in which he explores the paradoxes of language and its limits in representing the world.

Setting and characters

The setting chosen by most Victorian novelists was the city, which was the main symbol of the industrial civilisation. Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of realistic characters the public could easily identify with.

Women writers

A great number of novels published during the mid-Victorian period were written by women. Middle-class women had more time to spend at home than men and could devote part of the day to reading. However, it was not easy to get published, and some women used a male pseudonym in order to see their work in print.

Types of novels

It dealt with economic and social problems and described a particular class or situation.

The novel of manners

It combines humour with a sentimental request for reform for the less fortunate.

The humanitarian novel

These novels dealt with one character's development from early youth to some sort of maturity.

The novel of formation

Created by Edward Lear (1812- 88) and Lewis Carroll, with his famous novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

Literary nonsense

Women were considered as “an angel in the home”, and for this reason they had rights extremely restricted. In addition to this type of literature develops the spearhead of the English novel. The "comedy of manners" is a genre intended for the "upper class". Many women stayied at home longer time than men, and these fortunate circumstances encouraged female literature.

Women’s voices

  • Differently by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters' novels were Romantic in spirit.
  • The novel of Elizabeth Gaskell was a condemnation of the ostracism of women who had been seduced and abandoned by their employers.
  • The novels of George Eliot addressed many of the social problems.

The realistic novel

Types of novels

The late Victorian novel mirrored a society linked to a growing crisis in the moral and religious fields. These novels started to follow an evolutionist pattern.

Colonial literature

The obvious influence of colonialism on Victorian literature can be found in the works of Rudyard Kipling. He exalted the British imperial power in the poem “The White Man's Burden”.

The psychological novel

Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde tried to capture the illogical aspects of life. Stevenson seems to be concerned not only with the duality present in every individual but also in Victorian society as a whole.

Interactive Question n.1

Interactive Question N.2

Interactive Question N.3

Interactive Question N.5

Interactive Question N.4

Thank you !