Te wa aroha; Te wa Victorian; Te rau tau 19
“Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.”
– Sam Levenson
te ao Māori principles
There are five key principals that we, as an English Department, consider important as part of a holistic study at school. Please read through these and know that we will come back to them as we begin looking at texts.
- Mana – The prestige and authority of the writer. Writers can build mana through impactful stories that uplift readers.
- Whanaungatanga – The connections and relationships between characters, writers, and readers. Literature brings people together.
- Kaitiakitanga – Guardianship and protection of stories, language, and knowledge. Writers have a duty to share stories responsibly.
- Wairuatanga – The spirituality and deeper meanings conveyed through literature. Stories can be profound and moving.
- Mauri – The essential life force or vitality of the writer coming through in their work. Writing with purpose and energy.
- Aroha – The empathy, compassion, and love writers show through their words. Literature builds understanding between people.
- Tikanga – The customs, protocols and values upheld through storytelling. Writers adhere to cultural principles.
Key Terms
| Romantic | a literary movement that was characterised by a celebration of nature and the common man |
| Victorian | a major movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church |
| 19th Century | a European intellectual movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries emphasizing reason and individualism rather than tradition. |
| Literature | written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit. |
| Era | a long and distinct period of history. |
| Period | belonging to or characteristic of a past historical time, especially in style or design. |
| Canon | the list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality. |
Learning Objectives
- To identify the key conventions of the era.
- To recognise the major literary works attributed to this time frame.
Exercises
Spelling
| book | books | berry | berries | activity |
| activities | city | cities | fly | flies |
| box | boxes | dish | dishes | branch |
| branches | brush | brushes | potato | potatoes |
Summary Builder
Below is a piece of writing that you should attempt to summarise into around 100 words.
This text is one person’s explanation of what being a motivational speaker involves.
A motivational speaker, also known as an inspirational speaker, is someone who delivers speeches with the intention of motivating or inspiring the people in the audience. Typically, a motivational speaker has a reputation as an expert on the subject being discussed and will encourage the audience to look at things from a different perspective and to make the most of their own talents and abilities.
The ultimate goal of a motivational speaker is to affect people profoundly on an emotional or mental level to help them make some kind of significant personal change in their lives.
People naturally tend to focus on all their problems, and the motivational speaker will help an audience to focus on the many opportunities instead, by using any number of persuasive speech tactics.
Some motivational speakers may be hired to speak as special guests or to present online to an invited audience with particular interests. Others perform a planned programme of live or virtual talks for the wider public, selling tickets for each event.
Highly successful speakers are in demand and present at important conferences, often travelling to events all over the world, resulting in irregular working hours. Popular and famous motivational speakers become celebrities: writing books, recording videos or podcasts and appearing on television.
There is a huge demand for motivational speakers. I’ve resisted the attempts to cash into this ‘lucrative’ industry, though I’m often asked whether I know of any ‘good’ motivational speaker I could recommend. Many motivational stories that are clustered out there follow the same predictable storylines – the rags-to-riches story along the lines of: ‘I was poor; I came from nothing, and here I am, outrageously successful.’
Eras of the English Literary Canon
era o te pukapuka reo Ingarihi canon
Romantic Period
(1790 – 1830 CE)
Romantic poets wrote about nature, imagination, and individuality in England. Some Romantics include Coleridge, Blake, Keats, and Shelley in Britain and Johann von Goethe in Germany. Jane Austen also wrote at this time, though she is typically not categorized with the male Romantic poets. In America, this period is mirrored in the Transcendental Period from about 1830-1850. Transcendentalists include Emerson and Thoreau.
Gothic writings (c. 1790-1890) overlap with the Romantic and Victorian periods. Writers of Gothic novels (the precursor to horror novels) include Radcliffe, “Monk” Lewis, and Victorians like Bram Stoker in Britain. In America, Gothic writers include Poe and Hawthorne.
The term Romanticism does not stem directly from the concept of love, but rather from the French word romaunt (a romantic story told in verse). Romanticism focused on emotions and the inner life of the writer, and often used autobiographical material to inform the work or even provide a template for it, unlike traditional literature at the time.
Romanticism celebrated the primitive and elevated “regular people” as being deserving of celebration, which was an innovation at the time. Romanticism also fixated on nature as a primordial force and encouraged the concept of isolation as necessary for spiritual and artistic development.
Characteristics of Romanticism
Romantic literature is marked by six primary characteristics:
- celebration of nature,
- focus on the individual and spirituality,
- celebration of isolation and melancholy,
- interest in the common man,
- idealisation of women, and
- personification and pathetic fallacy.
Celebration of Nature
Romantic writers saw nature as a teacher and a source of infinite beauty. One of the most famous works of Romanticism is John Keats’ To Autumn (1820):
Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
Keats personifies the season and follows its progression from the initial arrival after summer, through the harvest season, and finally to autumn’s end as winter takes its place.
Focus on the Individual and Spirituality
Romantic writers turned inward, valuing the individual experience above all else. This in turn led to heightened sense of spirituality in Romantic work, and the addition of occult and supernatural elements.
The work of Edgar Allan Poe exemplifies this aspect of the movement; for example, The Raven tells the story of a man grieving for his dead love (an idealised woman in the Romantic tradition) when a seemingly sentient Raven arrives and torments him, which can be interpreted literally or seen as a manifestation of his mental instability.
Celebration of Isolation and Melancholy
Ralph Waldo Emerson was a very influential writer in Romanticism; his books of essays explored many of the themes of the literary movement and codified them. His 1841 essay Self-Reliance is a seminal work of Romantic writing in which he exhorts the value of looking inward and determining your own path, and relying on only your own resources.
Related to the insistence on isolation, melancholy is a key feature of many works of Romanticism, usually seen as a reaction to inevitable failure—writers wished to express the pure beauty they perceived and failure to do so adequately resulted in despair like the sort expressed by Percy Bysshe Shelley in A Lament:
O world! O life! O time!
On whose last steps I climb.
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more—Oh, never more!
Interest in the Common Man
William Wordsworth was one of the first poets to embrace the concept of writing that could be read, enjoyed, and understood by anyone. He eschewed overly stylized language and references to classical works in favor of emotional imagery conveyed in simple, elegant language, as in his most famous poem I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud:
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.
Idealization of Women
In works such as Poe’s The Raven, women were always presented as idealized love interests, pure and beautiful, but usually without anything else to offer. Ironically, the most notable novels of the period were written by women (Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Mary Shelley, for example), but had to be initially published under male pseudonyms because of these attitudes. Much Romantic literature is infused with the concept of women being perfect innocent beings to be adored, mourned, and respected—but never touched or relied upon.
Personification and Pathetic Fallacy
Romantic literature’s fixation on nature is characterized by the heavy use of both personification and pathetic fallacy. Mary Shelley used these techniques to great effect in Frankenstein:
Its fair lakes reflect a blue and gentle sky; and, when troubled by the winds, their tumult is but as the play of a lively infant, when compared to the roarings of the giant ocean.
Romanticism continues to influence literature today; Stephenie Meyers’ Twilight novels are clear descendants of the movement, incorporating most of the characteristics of classic Romanticism despite being published a century and half after the end of the movement’s active life.
The following video is a great help to assist in your understanding of this time frame. One thing you will notice straight away is that there are some differences in dates – don’t be too worried about this, there are always overlaps between eras as society tends to be more grey than black and white with dates.
Ko te reo te tuakiri | Language is my identity.
Ko te reo tōku ahurei | Language is my uniqueness.
Ko te reo te ora. | Language is life.