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The Victorian Age: 1832-1901
Nothing characterizes Victorian society so much as its quest for self-definition. The sixty-three years of Victoria’s reign were marked by momentous and intimidating social changes, startling inventions, prodigious energies; the rapid succession of events produced wild prosperity and unthinkable poverty, humane reforms and flagrant exploitation, immense ambitions and devastating doubts. Between 1800 and 1850 the population doubled from nine to eighteen million, and Britain became the richest country on earth, the first urban industrial society in history. For some, it was a period of great achievement, deep faith, indisputable progress. For others, it was “an age of destruction,” religious collapse, vicious profiteering. To almost everyone it was apparent that, as Sir Henry Holland put it in 1858, “we are living in an age of transition.”
VICTORIA AND THE VICTORIANS
In an unpredictable, tumultuous era, the stern, staid figure of Queen Victoria came to represent stability and continuity. The adjective “Victorian” was first used in 1851 to celebrate the nation’s mounting pride in its institutions and commercial success. That year, the global predominance of British industry had emerged incontestably at the original “world’s fair” in London, the “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” which Prince Albert helped organize. Arrayed for the world to see in a vast “Crystal Palace” of iron and glass, the marvels of British manufacture achieved a regal stature of their own and cast their allure upon the monarchy in turn. In the congratulatory rhetoric that surrounded the event, the conservative, retiring queen emerged as the durable symbol of her dynamic, aggressively businesslike realm.
In succeeding decades, the official portraits of Queen Victoria, gradually aging, reflected her country's sense of its own maturation as a society and world power. Represented as a fairy-tale teenaged queen at her coronation in 1837, reclusive after Albert died in 1861, as the aged, venerated Widow of Windsor, she became a universal icon, prompting spectacles of the Golden and Diamond Jubilees. Victoria died in 1901, after the longest reign in English history.
The Victorians have left us a contradictory picture of themselves. On the one hand, they were phenomenally energetic, dedicated to the Gospel of Work and driven by a solemn sense of duty to the Public Good. In matters of character, Victorians prized respectability, earnestness, a sense of duty and public service, not only to material recompense, but to heavenly rewards as well. Much of the era's social conservatism, may be traced to the fear of change. They struggled to dominate the present moment in order to keep an uncertain future at bay. Few questioned that tremendous advances were taking place, but each new idea or discover seemed to have unexpected, distressing repercussions.
The following pages introduce the Victorian period by looking at several key issues: the era's energy and invention, its doubts about religion and industrialism, its far-reaching social reforms, its conflicted fascination with Empire, the commercialization and expansion of the reading public, and the period's vigorous self-scrutiny in the mirror of literature.
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Subjects
English literature, Literary collections, Collections & anthologies of various literary forms, Literary studies: general, Literary Criticism, Literature - Classics / Criticism, Textbooks, English, British Isles, English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Literary Criticism & Collections / General, Great Britain, English literature (collections)Places
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 1A, The Middle Ages
February 3, 2006, Longman
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in English
- 3rd Edition
0321333918 9780321333919
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2
The Longman anthology of British literature
2006, Pearson Longman
in English
- 3rd ed.
0321333918 9780321333919
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3
The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1B: The Early Modern Period (Longman Anthology of British Literature)
February 2, 2006, Longman
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- 3rd edition
0321333926 9780321333926
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Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 1C: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, The (3rd Edition) (Longman Anthology of British Literature)
February 12, 2006, Longman
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- 3 edition
0321333934 9780321333933
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 2A, The Romantics and Their Contemporaries
December 28, 2005, Pearson Education, Inc.
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0321333942 9780321333940
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature: Volume 2B, The Victorian Age
December 28, 2005, Pearson Education, Inc.
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in English
- 3rd Edition, Longman's Student Edition
0321333950 9780321333957
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The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2C: The Twentieth Century
December 29, 2005, Longman
Paperback
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- 3rd edition
0321333969 9780321333964
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"This item is out of print and has been replaced with Longman Anthology of British Literature, Volume 2B, The: The Victorian Age, 4th Edition" - https://www.pearson.com/us/higher-education/product/Damrosch-Longman-Anthology-of-British-Literature-Volume-2-B-The-Victorian-Age-The-3rd-Edition/9780321333957.html?tab=contents
Boxed review copy - ISBN 0321366115
Audio CD for British Literature, 3/E: ISBN-10: 0321364759 | ISBN-13: 9780321364753
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Literature has a double life. Born in one time and place and read in another, literary works are at once products of their age and independent creations, able to live on long after their original world has disappeared. The goal of this anthology is to present a wealth of poetry, prose, and drama from the full sweep of the literary history of Great Britain and its empire, and to do so in ways that will bring out both the works’ original cultural contexts and their lasting aesthetic power. These aspects are, in fact, closely related: Form and content, verbal music and social meanings, go hand in hand. This double life makes literature, as Aristotle said, “the most philosophical” of all the arts, intimately connected to ideas and to realities that the writer transforms into moving patterns of words.
The challenge is to show these works in the contexts in which, and for which, they were written, while at the same time not trapping them within those contexts. The warm response this anthology has received from the hundreds of teachers who have adopted it in its first two editions reflects the growing consensus that we do not have to accept an “either/or” choice between the literature’s aesthetic and cultural dimensions. Our users’ responses have now guided us in seeing how we can improve our anthology further, so as to be most pleasurable and stimulating to students, most useful to teachers, and most responsive to ongoing developments in literary studies.
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