The 19th Century

This blog I made for completing the assignment of Literature on 3rd Semester. Hope it could be useful knowledge to you know. Enjoy it, artist =)

19^th CENTURY

The 19th century (January 1, 1801 – December 31, 1900) was a period in history marked by the collapse of the Spanish, First and Second French, Chinese, Holy Roman and Mughal empires. This paved the way for the growing influence of the British Empire, Russian Empire, German Empire, the United States and the Empire of Japan, spurring military conflicts but also advances in science and exploration.

After the defeat of the French Empire and its allies in the Napoleonic Wars, the British Empire became the world's leading power, controlling one quarter of the world's population and one fifth of the total land area. It enforced a Pax Britannica, encouraged trade, and battled rampant piracy. The 19th century was an era of invention and discovery, with significant developments in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, electricity, and metallurgy that laid the groundwork for the technological advances of the 20th century. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain. The Victorian era was notorious for the employment of young children in factories and mines, as well as strict moral values involving modesty and gender roles. Japan embarked on a program of rapid modernization following the Meiji Restoration, before defeating China, under the Qing Dynasty, in the First Sino-Japanese War.

Advances in medicine and the understanding of human anatomy and disease prevention took place in the 19th century, and were partly responsible for rapidly accelerating population growth in the western world. Europe's population doubled during the 19th century, from roughly 200 million to more than 400 million. The introduction of railroads provided the first major advancement in land transportation for centuries, changing the way people lived and obtained goods, and fueling major urbanization movements in countries across the globe. Numerous cities worldwide surpassed populations of a million or more during this century. London was transformed into the world's largest city and capital of the British Empire. Its population expanded from 1 million in 1800 to 6.7 million a century later. The last remaining undiscovered landmasses of Earth, including vast expanses of interior Africa and Asia, were discovered during this century, and with the exception of the extreme zones of the Arctic and Antarctic, accurate and detailed maps of the globe were available by the 1890s. Liberalism became the preeminent reform movement in Europe

The 19th century was remarkable in the widespread formation of new settlement foundations which were particularly prevalent across North America and Australasia, with a significant proportion of the two continents' largest cities being founded at some point in the century. In the 19th century approximately 70 million people left Europe.

The 19th century also saw the rapid creation, development and codification of many sports, particularly in Britain and the United States. Association football, rugby union, baseball and many other sports were developed during the 19th century, while the British Empire facilitated the rapid spread of sports such as cricket to many different parts of the world.

It also marks the fall of the Ottoman occupation of the Balkans which led to the creation of Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Romania as a result of the second Russo-Turkish War, which in itself followed the great Crimean War.

LITERATURE

On the literary front the new century opens with romanticism, a movement that spread throughout Europe in reaction to 18th-century rationalism, and it develops more or less along the lines of the Industrial Revolution, with a design to react against the dramatic changes wrought on nature by the steam engine and the railway. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are considered the initiators of the new school in England, while in the continent the German Sturm und Drang spreads its influence as far as Italy and Spain.

French arts had been hampered by the Napoleonic Wars but subsequently developed rapidly. Modernism began.

The Goncourts and Émile Zola in France and Giovanni Verga in Italy produce some of the finest naturalist novels. Italian naturalist novels are especially important in that they give a social map of the new unified Italy to a people that until then had been scarcely aware of its ethnic and cultural diversity. On February 21, 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto.

There was a huge literary output during the 19th century. Some of the most famous writers included the Russians Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the English Charles Dickens, John Keats, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Jane Austen; the Scottish Sir Walter Scott; the Irish Oscar Wilde; the Americans Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Mark Twain; and the French Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas and Charles Baudelaire. Some other important writers of note included:

• Leopoldo Alas
• Louisa May Alcott
• Hans Christian Andersen
• Machado de Assis
• Jane Austen
• Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda
• Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
• Elizabeth Barret Browning
• Anne Brontë
• Charlotte Brontë
• Emily Brontë
• Georg Büchner
• Ivan Bunin
• Lord Byron
• Rosalía de Castro
• François-René de Chateaubriand
• Anton Chekhov
• Kate Chopin
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• James Fenimore Cooper
• Stephen Crane
• Eduard Douwes Dekker
• Emily Dickinson
• Charles Dickens
• Arthur Conan Doyle
• Alexandre Dumas, père (1802–1870)
• José Maria Eça de Queirós
• José Echegaray
• George Eliot
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Gustave Flaubert
• Margaret Fuller
• Elizabeth Gaskell
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Nikolai Gogol
• Manuel González Prada
• Juana Manuela Gorriti
• Brothers Grimm
• Henry Rider Haggard
• Ida Gräfin Hahn-Hahn (1805–1880)
• Thomas Hardy
• Francis Bret Harte
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Friedrich Hölderlin
• Heinrich Heine
• Henrik Ibsen
• Washington Irving
• Henry James
• John Keats
• Caroline Kirkland
• Jules Laforgue
• Giacomo Leopardi
• Mikhail Lermontov
• Stéphane Mallarmé
• Alessandro Manzoni
• José Martí
• Clorinda Matto de Turner
• Herman Melville
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• José María de Pereda
• Benito Pérez Galdós
• Marcel Proust
• Aleksandr Pushkin
• Fritz Reuter (1810–1874)
• Arthur Rimbaud
• John Ruskin
• George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin)
• Mary Shelley
• Percy Shelley
• Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle)
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Bram Stoker
• Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Leo Tolstoy
• Ivan Turgenev
• Mark Twain
• Juan Valera y Alcalá-Galiano
• Paul Verlaine
• Jules Verne
• Lew Wallace
• HG Wells
• Walt Whitman
• Oscar Wilde
• William Wordsworth
• Émile Zola
• José Zorrilla

HISTORY OF MODERN LITERATURE

The history of literature in the Modern period in Europe begins with the Age of Enlightenment and the conclusion of the Baroque period in the 18th century, succeeding the Renaissance and Early Modern periods.

In the classical literary cultures outside of Europe, the Modern period begins later, in Ottoman Turkey with the Tanzimat reforms (1820s), in Qajar Persia under Nasser al-Din Shah (1830s), the century is also synonymous with end of the Mughal era and the establishment of the British Raj (1850s) in India, in Japan with the Meiji restoration (1860s), in China with the New Culture Movement (1910s).

The 19th century was perhaps the most literary of all centuries, because not only were the forms of novel, short story and magazine serial all in existence side-by-side with theatre and opera, but since film, radio and television did not yet exist, the popularity of the written word and its direct enactment were at their height.

The early part of the century

The romantic movement was well under way and along with it developed the splintering of fiction writing into genres and the rise of speculative fiction. There was a romantic tendency toward the exploration of folk traditions and old legends. In 1802 Sir Walter Scott published Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Amelia Opie, another romantic, was publishing poetry in the early 19th century and was an active anti-war campaigner. Anne Bannerman (1765–1829) reworked legends of King Arthur and Merlin. William Blake worked in words and pictures to share his visions and mysticism. In 1807 Thomas Moore published Irish Melodies. Lord Byron produced many influential poems during this period. In 1808 Goethe published part one of Faust. In 1810 Sir Walter Scott published Lady of the Lake. Percy Shelley published a gothic novel: Zastrozzi. The term "Gothic" had, by this time, come to mean a desire for a romantic return to the times before the renaissance. Percy Shelley also published a gothic novella: St. Irvyne in 1811.

North Americans who would later produce great literature were being born in the first third of the century. In 1803 the great American poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson was born (May 25) in Boston and in 1804 Nathaniel Hawthorne. In 1807 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and then Edgar Allan Poe in 1809. Phillipe-Ignace François Aubert du Gaspe, author of the first French Canadian novel was born in 1814 followed by Henry David Thoreau in 1817 and Herman Melville in 1819. Canadian poets Octave Crémazie and James McIntyre were both born in 1827. In 1830 was the birth of Emily Dickinson and, just over a third of the way through the century, in 1835 Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) arrived in this world. Before all of them was Washington Irving, said to be the first American "Literary Lion" and mentor to several other American writers. Washington Irving wrote "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (a short story contained in his collection The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.) while he was living in Birmingham, England and it was first published in 1819.

The middle of the century

In the mid-19th century magazines publishing short stories and serials began to be popular. Some of them were more respectable, while others were referred to by the derogatory name of penny dreadfuls. In 1844 Alexandre Dumas, père published a novel The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires) and wrote The Count of Monte Cristo which was published in installments over the next two years. William Makepeace Thackeray published The Luck of Barry Lyndon. In Britain Charles Dickens published several of his books in installments in magazines: The Pickwick Papers, followed, in the next few years, by Oliver Twist (1837–1839), Nicholas Nickleby (1838–1839), The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–1841), Barnaby Rudge (1841), A Christmas Carol (1843) and Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–1844). In America a version of the penny dreadful became popularly known as a dime novel. In the dime novels the reputations of gunfighters and other wild west heroes or villains were created or exaggerated. The western genre came into existence. James Fenimore Cooper began a series of stories featuring the characters Hawkeye and Chingachgook. These stories were not only "westerns" but also historical novels, the earliest setting being approximately 100 years earlier than the year James Fenimore Cooper was writing it. The series was called the Leatherstocking Tales and comprised five volumes: The Deerslayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840), The Pioneers (1823), The Prairie (1827).

The late 19th century

In 1863 Jules Verne published Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon). (Verne's Paris au XXe siècle (Paris in the 20th Century) was written, but was not published until 1994). Voyage au centre de la Terre (Journey to the Center of the Earth) came out in 1864 and De la Terre à la Lune (From the Earth to the Moon) in 1865. Verne had by then fully established the "scientific romance" as a genre. Charles Dickens published Our Mutual Friend in installments from 1864 to 1865. Literature by this time was becoming increasingly popular. The European and North American middle-classes were better educated than ever before and more reading was done. At the same time the styles of writing were tending more and more toward plainer language and more broadly understood themes. People were reading about detectives, ghosts, machines, wonders, adventures, tricky situations, unusual turns of fate and romances. Love stories and grudges, explorations and wars, ideas based on scientific positivism and ideas based on nonsense and gibberish were all being published and enjoyed by a readership which could now be termed "the masses".