Civil war (1642-1648) and the English Bourgeois Revolution

Thomas Hardy (1840- 1928) In all his works there is a theme of fate; he came into defense of rural England and folk culture and traditions which were under the threat of extinction because of the development of capitalism. He divided his works into: novels of character and environment, romances and fantasies, novels of ingenuity. The most important works are “Tess of the D’ Urbervilles”, “Jude the Obscure”-“The Return of the Native” 1878, “Under the Greenwood Tree”1872.
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor. Mrs Gaskell's first novel, Mary Barton, was published anonymously in 1848. The best-known of her remaining novels are Cranford (1853), North and South (1854), and Wives and Daughters (1865). She became popular for her writing, especially her ghost stories, aided by Charles Dickens, who published her work in his magazine Household Words. Her ghost stories are in the "Gothic" vein, making them quite distinct from her "industrial" fiction.
Even though her writing conforms to Victorian conventions, she usually framed her stories as critiques of contemporary attitudes. Her early works focused on factory work in the Midlands. She usually emphasised the role of women, with complex narratives and dynamic female characters.
8. Aestheticism. O.Wild and his program. Neoromanticism and its representatives. R.Kipling, J.Conrad
Aestheticism – a movement in search of beauty. was prepared by the ideas of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (the group of English poets and artists who idealized the arts of the Middle Ages. “Art for Art’s Sake” was the motto of aesthetes and their basic principle. Behind this expression laid the intense desire of making art an end in itself and justifying the role of the artist. Aesthetes ('iːsθiːt) protested against vulgar reality, bourgeois pragmatism; concentrated their art on pure form; rejected moral and social function of art; try to lead readers away from the problems of the day into the world of dreams and beauty.
O.Wilde was born in the family of well-known Irish physician. Mother wrote poetry & was an Irish patriot. From his mother he inherited scornful attitude towards the hypocrisy of British bourgeois morals. He joined the Aestheticism movement & became the leading figure. He studied at Oxford. In 1881 the first volume of his poetry appeared. Problems: of Good & Evil; good qualities of the poor; hypocrisy in human relations; the endings are tragic; criticism of upper classes.
-The happy prince and other tales;The house of pomegranates;-The picture of Dorian Grey;An ideal husband(play). In his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde sharpened his pen to express his disillusion and sarcastic vision of the aristocracy.