Painting and architecture

Socialism

The Fabian Society

Morris

Wells

Political writing

George B. Shaw

Alfred Tennyson

CULTURAL LIFE DURING THE VICTORIAN AGE

LECTURE 07

Thatcher

Churchill

Gladstone

Disraeli

Leading political figures

Leading parties, etc.

Structure of the Parliament today

Suffrage

British political life in the XIX century and after.

6.4.1. Parliament = beginning + xix century

7.1. Cultural life: prose, poetry and drama.

7.1.1. During the last two-thirds of the 19th century, the Victorian era produced an amazing number of popular novelists and poets. This time period saw the rise of an increasingly urbanized, middle-class, and educated society that included a much larger reading audience. Many authors wrote about characters and situations well-known or easily comprehensible to their audience and became universally popular and in touch with their vast readership to a degree not matched in the 20th century. Perhaps the most famous author of this time was Charles Dickens, who portrayed the hardships of the working class while criticizing middle-class life.

7.1.2. Writers prominent during the heart of the Victorian period include William Makepeace Thackeray, who wrote humorous portrayals of middle- and upper-class life; the Brontë sisters — Charlotte, Emily, and Anne — whose novels tended to be autobiographical; and Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote children’s books, adventure stories, and poetry. The Victorian age was the time when Rudyard Kipling rose to literary stardom later becoming the first-ever British winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1907.

John Galsworthy

7.1.3. Poetry and drama

7.2.1. Many painters stood against Victorian middle-class materialism, with its concern for worldly objects. In 1848 several painters came together and founded a movement called the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. They sought to return to an earlier, simpler time, and their works exhibited the brightness, color, and purity of medieval and Renaissance painting done before the time of Italian artist Raphael. Artist and poet William Morris sought to return to medieval traditions in craftsmanship. He is credited with founding the Arts and Crafts movement, which became influential in furniture, decorative items, and textile designs.

7.2.2. Victorian architecture borrowed from a variety of styles, including classical, Gothic, and Renaissance. The most famous Victorian neo-Gothic building is Parliament, built between 1840 and 1870. The only truly original building of the Victorian era was the Crystal Palace. It was designed by English architect Joseph Paxton to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Spreading over 7,3 hectares (18 acres), the building consisted entirely of panels of glass set within iron frames. Paxton adapted two major features of the Industrial Revolution to the architecture of the Crystal Palace: mass production (in the manufactured glass panels and iron frames) and the use of iron rather than traditional masonry (stones or brick). Many things were done for the first time during that famous exhibition. For instance, the first constructions of dinosaurs were exhibited at the Crystal Palace, where their creator zoologist Richard Owen held a banquet inside the belly of the Iguanodon before its reconstruction was completed.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-07