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LITERATURA INGLESA II
Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Class content:
The Brontë Sisters 
overview of the main features of Realism in the works of Charlotte and Emily Brontë.
•Realism in the works of Charles Dickens. .
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Reaction to Romanticism, a stress on reason and positivism, and a faith in the power of the artist to show reality. 
REALISM
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Realism was the literary movement that started in the 1850s as a reaction against Romanticism and aimed at showing "life as it was" in literature all over Europe. 
The concept of Realism is questioned by some critics 
General spirit of the second half of the 19th century 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Realism is the creation of the effect of the representation of the concrete, historical nature of human life. Lilian Furst comments in her book Realism that "As an artistic movement realism is the product and expression of the dominant mood of its time [the mid- to late 19th century]: a pervasive rationalist epistemology that turned its back on the fantasies of Romanticism and was shaped instead by the impact of the political and social changes as well as the scientific and industrial advances of its day." In Realism the details of environment, of motivation, of circumstance, and of temporality with its cause and effect, become the context for the exploration of human values and fate. The emphasis of Realism tends to be on the individual, in her social environment. 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Realism is the representation of the common life:
in an age in which the human was seen as, most fundamentally, a secular being, or at the least, a being living in a world which was not transformed by or informed by spiritual presence.
in an age of mechanism, empirical thought and materialism, when what was important was coming to be defined as what works, and what was real was what could be demonstrated physically.
in an age when the 'rights of the individual' had been theorized, with a consequent focus on the located self as the object of moral and political importance and concern.
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
particularly at a time of rapid sociological change, when the conventions and character of 'everyday life' and of the formation of the individual ceased to be a taken-for-granted backdrop and became the site of significant meaning and action.
at a time when the economic consciousness is becoming dominated by the ideology of capitalism: materialism, the commodification of so many aspects of human life, the rightness of that obsession with property and its distribution which marks capitalist society, the primacy of the individual over the communal.
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
There have been a number of theorists, for instance the Marxist critic Georg Lukacs, who have held that through the methodology of realism literature reflects a social reality whose phenomena serve as a model for the work of art -- the realist gives a complete and correct account of observed social reality, and thus is able to uncover the driving forces of history, the principles governing social change. 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
The advantages of realism
Realism is faithful to our experience of life lived in a physical and social environment, and governed by causes and effects. The most powerful argument for realism is that it represents life as we live it -- sequential, contextualized, rooted in the concrete. It can be argued that realism is to be found everywhere in literature, especially when the high mimetic forms such as the epic give way to a feel for the life of the common person. Realism brings us close to the physical, to our material existence, and so is less likely than other forms of representation to be distorted by ideology or mystification. It is responsible directly to the life we recognize that we live.
The language we speak in our ordinary life -- our explanations, our accounts, our vocabulary -- is the same kind of language-use that one finds in realism.
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Generally speaking, some of the features of Realism include:
Reality being rendered closely and in detail. It is described selectively with an emphasis on verisimilitude;
Characters being more important than the action or the plot and often having to deal with complex and ethical choices; they appear in their real complexity of temperament and motive and are in inexplicable relation to nature, to each other, to their social class, to their own past;
Social issues portraying different social classes; the novel served the interest and aspirations of a rising middle-class;
Plot dealing with plausible events which avoid the sensational and dramatic elements of naturalistic novels;
Language being natural, not poetic; being a real representation of the way people really spoke.
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
The Brontë Sisters 
Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), 
Anne Brontë (1820-1849)
Emily Brontë (1818-1848) 
Villette (1853), Jane Eyre (1847) 
Wuthering Heights (1847) 
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë 
Major Themes
Family 
Religion
Social position
Gender inequality
Fire and Ice
External beauty versus internal beauty
Other features in Jane Eyre include:
depiction of feminist ideals (women being responsible for her own destiny, equal rights in marriage for love) which would shock the Victorian society;rejection of the catholic doctrine of self-sacrifice; and,a desire to indulge in a few earthly pleasures.
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Bronte writes about individual experiences with strong feelings of evocative images.  Bronte's strength is her ability to describe and make the reader feel what is happening.  
ability to provide subjective portraits of her heroines limits the portrayal of her secondary characters.  Only through the heroine is the reader given a portrait of the other characters. 
she has a literary clumsiness in which her imagination can lead to a turbid flow of words clouding her meaning.  She is also susceptible to implausible plots devoid of verisimilitude, 
Bronte is a gifted storyteller, displaying "an exceptional mastery of the art of awaking suspense."  She will introduce an incident and leave it unexplained until a few pages later, such as when Lucy stares at Dr. John only to reveal later that she recognizes him as her childhood friend Graham.  It is an engaging style that adds twists to the plot. 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Charlotte Bronte's style of writing is distinctively her own. In her novel Jane Eyre, she writes in a style that is extraordinarily powerful and expresses quite accurately the meaning she wishes to convey. Her style of writing is characterized by a command of language, by spontaneity, by a chaste simplicity and by a felicity in the choice of words and in combing them into phrases, clauses and sentences.She uses a great deal of dialogue and has an excellent ear for the "idioms of class and age." She disliked ornamentation and the use of too many words and her style is therefore straightforward. It is, above all things, exact. 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Emily Brontë and Wuthering Heights 
Major themes
Class
Love and Passion
Nature and Civilization
Revenge and Repetition 
Masculinity and Femininity
Gothic Literature and the Supernatural
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Some of the Realistic elements in the novel include:
Social classes: the main characters belong to the middle and lower class with clear cut lines drawn e.g. between haves (Lintons) vs. have nots (Earnshaws, peasants);
“Domestic" subjects focused on key stages, relationships, conflicts, socio-economic factors that characterize and affect ordinary human life (e.g. birth, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, death; family relations, love, courtship & marriage; money, class, social status, security, etc);
Cultural geography featured and chronology of family history are carefully worked out; 
Regional descriptive detail accumulates to realistically particularize the time, place, culture of the setting
   
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Plot: Despite incursions of irrational excess in some characters and super-natural elements, the plot and conflicts of the novel advance by plausibly logical chain of cause-effect events traceable to the characters' natures, choices/decisions, interactions, and their consequences;
Narrative Frame structure of Double Narrators (Lockwood & Nelly Dean):  the narrative frame structure helps monitoring readers "suspend disbelief" by providing a plausible scenario for the telling of the story; besides Nelly’s character is conventional, down-to earth, and ruled by common sense.
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Charles Dickens
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Charles John Huffam Dickens was born on the 7th of February 1812. Dickens attended private school for a time, after the family relocated to Camden Town, London. Unfortunately for the young Dickens, this time would come to an abrupt end, after his father was sent to debtor’s prison.His family joined him there, except Charles, who started working at Warren’s Blacking Warehouse. He earned six shillings a week and worked 10-hour days. Some have wondered if the time Dickens spent there may have provided insights for Oliver Twist. In 1827 Dickens entered a career in law, working as a Clerk. These experiences would provide more insights for future novels such as Nicholas Nickleby and Bleak House. In 1829, aged 17, Dickens took a job as a court stenographer. In 1834 Dickens would start writing political journalism, using the pen-name  
 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Charles Dickens Major Works 
The Pickwick Papers (1837)  Oliver Twist (1839)  The Old Curiosity Shop (1841)  Barnaby Rudge (1841)  A Christmas Carol (1843)   Dombey and Son (1848)  Hard Times (1854)  Little Dorrit (1857)  A Tale of Two Cities (1859)  Great Expectations (1861)  Our Mutual Friend (1865)  The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
David Copperfield (1850)vBleak House (1853) 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Tracing themes and motifs across Charles Dickens‘s novels can give insight into his personal and societal preoccupations. Following is a list of some recurring motifs that appear in several of Dickens's books.
Debt
Hypocrisy
Hidden/Secret Identities
Marital Mismatches
Older Man/Younger Woman Pairings
Social Climbing
Child Labor
Ineffective Government and Bureaucracy
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Dickens loved the style of 18th century Gothic romance,although it had already become a target for parody. One "character" vividly drawn throughout his novels is London itself. From the coaching inns on the outskirts of the city to the lower reaches of the Thames, all aspects of the capital are described over the course of his body of work.
His writing style is florid and poetic, with a strong comic touch. His satires of British aristocratic snobberys. Comparing orphans to stocks and shares, people to tug boats, or dinner-party guests to furniture are just some of Dickens's acclaimed flights of fancy. Many of his characters' names provide the reader with a hint as to the roles played in advancing the storyline. His literary style is also a mixture of fantasy and realism.
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Dickens is famed for his depiction of the hardships of the working class, his intricate plots, and his sense of humour. But he is perhaps most famed for the characters he created. His novels were heralded early in his career for their ability to capture the everyday man and thus create characters to whom readers could relate. Dickens wrote numerous novels, each uniquely filled with believable personalities and vivid physical descriptions. Dickens's friend and biographer, John Forster, said that Dickens made "characters real existences, not by describing them but by letting them describe themselves."
Dickensian characters are among the most memorable in English literature. The likes of Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Jacob Marley,Oliver Twist, Pip, David Copperfield,Samuel Pickwick,and many others are so well known. Often these characters were based on people he knew. 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Autobiographical elements - All authors might be said to incorporate autobiographical elements in their fiction, but with Dickens this is very noticeable. David Copperfield is one of the most clearly autobiographical 
Episodic writing - Most of Dickens's major novels were first written in monthly or weekly instalments in journals such as Master Humphrey's Clock and Household Words, later reprinted in book form. These instalments made the stories cheap, accessible and the series of regular cliff-hangers made each new episode widely anticipated. American fans even waited at the docks in New York, shouting out to the crew of an incoming ship, "Is little Nell dead?" Part of Dickens's great talent was to incorporate this episodic writing style but still end up with a coherent novel at the end. 
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
Social commentary
Dickens's novels were, among other things, works of social commentary. He was a fierce critic of the poverty and social stratification of Victorian society. Dickens's second novel, Oliver Twist (1839), shocked readers with its images of poverty and crime and was responsible for the clearing of the actual London slum. With the character of the tragic prostitute, Nancy, Dickens "humanised" such women for the reading public; women who were regarded as "unfortunates", inherently immoral casualties of the Victorian class/economic system. Bleak House andLittle Dorrit elaborated expansive critiques of the Victorian institutional apparatus.
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Lesson 5: Realism - The Brontë Sisters & Charles Dickens
LITERATURA INGLESA II
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