19th century in literature  

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"By the mid-nineteenth century cheaper editions and improved access to reading material through subscriptions and in France, through reading rooms, pushed sales of a popular novel as high as 10,000 copies. Although critics continued to function as the arbiters of taste, the critical elite could no longer claim literature to be their exclusive property." -- Resa L. Dudovitz

The 19th century was perhaps the most literary of all centuries, because not only were the forms of novel, short story and magazine serial all in existence side-by-side with theatre and opera, but since film, radio and television did not yet exist, the popularity of the written word and its direct enactment were at their height. Major trends included Romanticism, the Decadent movement, Naturalism, Realism and Symbolist literature.

Contents

Short overview

Literature of the 19th century refers to world literature produced during the 19th century. The range of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature written from (roughly) 1799 to 1900. Many of the developments in literature in this period parallel changes in the visual arts and other aspects of 19th century culture.

In Germany, the Sturm und Drang period of the late 18th century merges into a Classicist and Romantic period, epitomized by the long era of Goethe's activity, covering the first third of the century. The conservative Biedermeier style conflicts with the radical Vormärz in the turbulent period separating the end of the Napoleonic wars from the Revolutions of 1848.

In Britain, the 19th century is dominated by the Victorian era, characterized by Romanticism, with Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Lord Byron or Samuel Taylor Coleridge and genres such as the gothic novel and the fashionable novel.

In the later 19th century, Romanticism is countered by Realism and Naturalism. The late 19th century, known as the Belle Époque, with its Fin de siècle retrospectively appeared as a "golden age" of European culture, cut short by the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

Titles

The Crimes of Love (1800) - The Devil's Elixir (1815/16) - The Sandman (1817) - Frankenstein (1818) - Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) - The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) - Le Rouge et le Noir (1831) - Gamiani (1833 - Viy (1835) - Histoires extraordinaires (1840s) - Bartleby the Scrivener (1853) - Les Fleurs du mal (1857) - Madame Bovary (1857) - On Wine and Hashish (1851) - Artificial Paradises (1860) - Salammbô (1862) - The Painter of Modern Life (1863) - Notes from Underground (1864) - Le Spleen de Paris (1869) - Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) - Venus in Furs (1870) - Carmilla (1872) - The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874) - Les Diaboliques (The She-Devils) (1874) - Anna Karenina (1877) - Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1877) - Flatland (1884) - À rebours (1884) - The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) - Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) - The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) - La Bête humaine (1890) - Hunger (1890) - New Grub Street (1891) - The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) - Jude the Obscure (1895) - The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) - Dracula (1897) - The She Devils (1898) - Torture Garden (1899)

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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "19th century in literature" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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