Here are a few highlights of English literature - and their social context.
Wordsworth:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud - Wikipedia
The title puts emphasis of the effects of nature on mankind. It can be interpreted as man is lost and lonely without nature/spirituality, but can be found. It is ironic how the poem exaggerates the poet's loneliness. Even though the daffodils (spirituality) bring him happiness, the happiness is not always there.I Wandered lonely as a Cloud by Sarah Donley
Blake
Songs of
Innocence and Songs of Experience
The Tiger/The Lamb
Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?The Tyger - Wikipedia
The Songs of Innocence and of Experience were intended by Blake to show ‘the two contrary states of the human soul’. The Tyger is the contrary poem to The Lamb in the Songs of Innocence. The Lamb is about a kindly God who ‘calls himself a Lamb’ and is himself meek and mild. The tiger, by contrast, is a terrifying animal ‘burning’ with fire in its eyes. The poet therefore finds it hard to believe that the same God who created the gentle lamb would also make the ‘dread’ tiger. If the lamb represents Divine love, what might the tiger represent?
William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience | Tate
Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
"By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Published jointly by Coleridge and William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads set out to achieve a triumph of the imagination over the dull poverty of the mind. Coleridge's project was a wild and truly imaginative universe, where seemingly impossible things happen.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was the first poem in the volume; it was inspired by British explorations of the polar regions and combined vivid nature imagery with the supernatural in a perplexing allegorical tale of redemption that has fascinated readers to the present day.The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - New World Encyclopedia
Mary Shelly
Frankenstein
You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
Frankenstein is a frame story written in epistolary form. It documents a fictional correspondence between Captain Robert Walton and his sister, Margaret Walton Saville.
Though Frankenstein is infused with elements of the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement, Brian Aldiss has argued for regarding it as the first true science-fiction story. In contrast to previous stories with fantastical elements resembling those of later science fiction, Aldiss states, the central character "makes a deliberate decision" and "turns to modern experiments in the laboratory" to achieve fantastic results.[7] The novel has had a considerable influence on literature and on popular culture; it has spawned a complete genre of horror stories, films, and plays.Frankenstein - Wikipedia
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
Austen is known to use irony throughout the novel especially from viewpoint of the character of Elizabeth Bennet. She conveys the "oppressive rules of femininity that actually dominate her life and work, and are covered by her beautifully carved trojan horse of ironic distance."
Pride and Prejudice - Wikipedia
Romanticism started to reach its complex, and had strong influence on people's lives, but Austen chose to reject the tenets of that movement. Romanticism emphasized on the power of feeling, but Austen supported rationalism instead.Romanticism In Jane Austen's Pride And Prejudice | ipl.org
Dickens
Oliver Twist
Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.Chapter 1: Treats of the Place Where Oliver Twist was Born and of the Circumstances Attending His Birth. | Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens | Lit2Go ETC
Oliver Twist unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century.[2] The alternative title, The Parish Boy's Progress, alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, as well as the 18th-century caricature series by painter William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress.[3]
In an early example of the social novel, Dickens satirises child labour, domestic violence, the recruitment of children as criminals, and the presence of street children. The novel may have been inspired by the story of Robert Blincoe, an orphan whose account of working as a child labourer in a cotton mill was widely read in the 1830s. It is likely that Dickens's own experiences as a youth contributed as well.[4]Oliver Twist - Wikipedia
Stevenson
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of the most famous pieces of English literature, and is considered to be a defining book of the gothic horror genre. The novella has also had a sizable impact on popular culture, with the phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" being used in vernacular to refer to people with an outwardly good but sometimes shockingly evil nature.[5][6]Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Wikipedia
Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde
Wilde's only novel, it was subject to much controversy and criticism in its time but has come to be recognized as a classic of gothic literature.The Picture of Dorian Gray - Wikipedia
a perfect example of where art and literature intertwine.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (Spoiler Alert!) | Daily Art Magazine | Art History
Kipling
"The White Man's Burden"
Take up the White Man's burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;
A poem about the Philippine–American War (1899–1902) that exhorts the United States to assume colonial control of the Filipino people and their country.[1] Originally written to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria (22 June 1897), the jingoistic poem was replaced with the sombre "Recessional" (1897), also a Kipling poem about empire.
In "The White Man's Burden", Kipling encouraged the American annexation and colonization of the Philippine Islands, a Pacific Ocean archipelago conquered in the three-month Spanish–American War (1898).[1] As an imperialist poet, Kipling exhorts the American reader and listener to take up the enterprise of empire, yet warns about the personal costs faced, endured, and paid in building an empire;[1] nonetheless, American imperialists understood the phrase "the white man’s burden" to justify imperial conquest as a mission-of-civilisation that is ideologically related to the continental-expansion philosophy of manifest destiny of the early 19th century.[2][3][4][5] ...
Kipling positively represents imperialism as the moral burden of the white race, who are divinely destined to "civilise" the brutish, non-white Other who inhabits the barbarous parts of the world; to wit, the seventh and eighth lines of the first stanza misrepresent the Filipinos as "new-caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child."[14] Despite the chauvinistic nationalism that supported Western imperialism in the 19th century, public moral opposition to Kipling's racialist misrepresentation of the colonial exploitation of labour in "The White Man's Burden" produced the satirical essay "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" (1901), by Mark Twain, which catalogues the Western military atrocities of revenge committed against the Chinese people for their anti-colonial Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) against abusive Western businessmen and Christian missionaries.[15] It was first published in 1904 by the journal Irish Homestead[1] and later featured in his 1914 collection of short stories Dubliners. It tells the story of Eveline, a teenager who plans to leave Dublin for Argentina with her lover.Like other tales in Dubliners, such as "Araby", "Eveline" features a circular journey, where a character decides to go back to where their journey began and where the result of their journey is disappointment and reluctance to travel.[3]
Eveline (short story) - Wikipedia
Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories by James Joyce, first published in 1914.[1] It presents a naturalistic depiction of Irish middle class life in and around Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
The stories were written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, and a search for a national identity and purpose was raging; at a crossroads of history and culture, Ireland was jolted by various converging ideas and influences. They centre on Joyce's idea of an epiphany (a moment where a character experiences a life-changing self-understanding or illumination) and the theme of paralysis (Joyce felt Irish nationalism stagnated cultural progression, placing Dublin at the heart of a regressive movement).Dubliners - Wikipedia
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