1901

Summary

• The Edwardian era, was a period of luxury, abundance, adultery, and travel for the upper/middle class; while the rest lived just enough to make ends meat.

• The sun never set on the British Empire.

• Many tried to sew the gap (like the labor party) between the rich and the poor.

• Writers during this period attempted to shake the status quo through fiction, and others entertained children to help them cope with the struggles of life.

A Piece of Chalk

By G.K. Chesterton

To: Period 5 Ap Lang

The Edwardian era

Premise: The reality of life's objects, their beauty, and the importance of creation. Specific traits of a persons character, or essence, determines ones view of life and their sense of purpose.

Tone: Romantic, poetic, unconventional , and appreciative of all God's creation.

Genre: Non-Fiction/Romantic

Manor House

Rhetorical Strategies

Imagery

Metaphor

"Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright-coloured chalk or tow you can pick out points of fire in it,sparks of gold, and blood-red, and sea-green,like the first fierce stars that sprang out of divine darkness (paragraph 2)."

"So I drew the soul; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all beasts (Paragraph 3)."

"They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day...The greenness of a thousand green leaves lusted into the live green figure of Robin Hood.The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the Virgin.The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo (Paragraph4)."

Pathos

Chiasmus

"They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills: but they sat on the great hills to write it (paragraph 5)."

Tries to invoke emotion by defining moral and religious significance of the color white.

" In a word, God paints in many colours; but he never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white."

"One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black."

Major Authors

• H.G. Wells
• George Bernard Shaw
• Rudyard Kipling

H.G. Wells

• Is accredited as one of the fathers of science-fiction, who had a great influence on our vision of the future.
• The Time Machine
• War of the Worlds

• But he also wrote utopian and dystopian short stories, travel sketches, histories, but most importantly socio-political literature .

Other Influential Authors

Rudyard Kipling

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• Sherlock Holmes
• J.M.Barrie
• Peter Pan
• Beatrix Potter
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit
• Edith Nesbit
• The Railway Children
• William Butler Yeats
• A Cradle Song
• G.K. Chesterton

Impact/Influence

Because there was a large gap between the rich and the poor, Wells used literature to attack social injustice and the selfishness of the upper classes with books such as:

• Ann Veronica
• Kipps
• Anticipations

George Bernard Shaw

• Born in Burma, he was a child of English imperialism, which was reflected in his witting.
• The Jungle Book
• The White Man's Burden

• He was called the "Prophet of British Imperialism"

• English playwright who used plays to illustrate his criticism of the English system.
• Widower's Houses
• Mrs. Warren's Profession
• Arms and the Man

• He also received a Noble Peace prize in literature in 1925.

Influence/Impact

Kipling was an interpreter of how the English imperialism was experienced through an Englishman brought up in India.

His writings brought attention to the British Empire all over the world.

Influence/Impact

His plays engendered controversy on the English social classes.

Shaw transformed Edwardian theater, bringing topics of the time (marriage,politics, and war) to the stage.

Literary Characteristics

Period Overview

• Works displayed a strong reaction against the conservatism of the Victorian Age.

• Writings showed distrust of authority,religion,politics, art.

• Literature was no longer written for the upper class, but now included popular fiction for the masses.

• The period laid the ground work for future poetic/literary movements such as:
• Futurism
• Imagism
• Lost Generation
• Ernest Hemingway & F. Scott Fitzgerald

• The Edwardian era began with the coronation of King Edward VII in 1901.

• The era spans from 1901-1914 (even though Edward VII died in 1910).

• The U.K was at its height and the wealthy lived lives of materialistic luxury. However, four fifths of the English population lived in squalor; creating a substantial gap between the rich and the poor.

• The Edwardian era took not only the name of the monarch, but also his character.
• Adultery, traveling, gambling, social events, and loving the luxuries of life.

Hope you enjoyed the presentation,

and I wish you luck on the test.

From,

KS