Introduction to Victorian and Twentieth‐Century Literature; Chronology 1800–2006

Abstract

Medieval, Early Modern, and Long Eighteenth Century – the current one attempts to cover at least two distinct periods: the Victorian and the Twentieth Century. To make matters more difficult, the second of these hardly counts as a single period; it is less an epoch than a placeholder. In terms of periodization, the Victorian era is succeeded – or some might say, overthrown – by the Modern. But modernism is not capacious enough to encompass the various kinds of literary art that emerged in Britain following World War II, the postmodern and the postcolonial, for example. We could follow the lead of recent scholars and expand the modernist period beyond the “high” to include the “late” and arguably the “post” as well. But this conceptual as well as temporal expansion does not take in the vital British literature written from the 1970s onward, an historical era distinct from the “postwar” that critics refer to, for now, as the “contemporary” (see English 2006). Of course, all periods are designated after they have finished, including the Victorian, which was very much a modernist creation. Yet it is unlikely we will come to call the period stretching from the middle of the last century to the early decades of the new millennium, from the breakup of Britain’s empire to the devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, “Elizabethan.” And this despite the Victorian longevity of the Windsor monarch’s reign. The queen is one and the same, but the national culture is anything but. It is difficult imagining the contemporary equivalent of Eminent Victorians (1918) emerging in the next few years. Who would the emblematic figures of this “period” be? The Beatles, Maggie Thatcher, Salman Rushdie, and David Beckham, perhaps? But this selection – or any selection, even a tendentious one like Strachey’s – would probably not provide fodder for a cultural gestalt in the way that Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon did. Introduction to Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature