SUMMER EXAMINATIONS 2010 LIT102910N

Transcription

1 SUMMER EXAMINATIONS 2010 LIT102910N MODULE TITLE LEVEL TIME ALLOWED Nineteenth-Century Literature: Romance and Revolution Four Two Hours Instructions to students: Please enter your student number NOT your name on all scripts. Answer TWO questions: You MUST answer the COMPULSORY question from Section A and ONE question from Section B. You should divide your time equally between Section A and Section B. Questions are weighted as follows: Section A: 50% (25% for each extract) Section B: 50% You should not make substantial reference to material used in other assignments for LIT1029. The same material should not constitute a substantial part of more than one question. Begin each answer in a separate booklet; label each booklet clearly with the number of the question you are answering. Neither books nor notes may be taken into the examination. No. of Pages 7 No. of Questions 9 Page 1 of 7

2 Instructions to Candidates: You should answer TWO questions. You must answer the Compulsory Question in Section A and choose ONE question from Section B. Credit will be given to answers that: Refer closely to nineteenth-century texts Refer to a range of texts from the period Demonstrate an awareness of critical thinking Demonstrate an awareness of the social and cultural contexts of nineteenthcentury literature Are well written and carefully organized Please note: You should not make substantial reference to material used in other assignments for LIT Section A (1 Hour) Compulsory Question 1. Choose TWO of the following extracts and write a critical commentary on each. You should consider the following in your response: Where the extract occurs in the novel, poem or play where relevant The primary themes and concerns of the extract and the significance of these for the novel or poem as a whole The significance of the extract in terms of the wider social and cultural context of the nineteenth century Any stylistic features or technical devices used by the author and the effects they achieve Please note: You should divide your time equally between the two extracts EXTRACT 1 FOLLOWS OVERLEAF Page 2 of 7

3 Extract 1 If I was astonished with my sight of the river banks, I was no less astonished at my waterman, now that I had time to look at him and see him with my head and eyes clear. He was a handsome young fellow, with a peculiarly pleasant and friendly look about his eyes, an expression which was quite new to me then, though I soon became familiar with it. For the rest, he was dark-haired and berry-brown of skin, well-knit and strong, and obviously used to exercising his muscles, but with nothing rough or coarse about him, and clean as might be. His dress was not like any modern work-a-day clothes I had seen, but would have served very well as a costume for a picture of fourteenth century life: it was of dark blue cloth, simple enough, but of fine web, and without a stain on it. He had a brown leather belt round his waist, and I noticed that its clasp was of damascened steel beautifully wrought. In short, he seemed to be like some specially manly and refined young gentleman, playing waterman for a spree, and I concluded that this was the case. I felt that I must make some conversation; so I pointed to the Surrey bank, where I noticed some light plank stages running down the foreshore, with windlasses at the landward end of them, and said, What are they doing with those things here? If we were on the Tay, I should have said that they were for drawing the salmon nets; but here Well, said he, smiling, of course that is what they are for. Where there are salmon, there are likely to be salmon-nets, Tay or Thames; but of course they are not always in use; we don t want salmon every day of the season. I was going to say, But is this the Thames? but held my peace in my wonder, and turned my bewildered eyes eastward to look at the bridge again, and thence to the shores of the London river; and surely there was enough to astonish me. For though there was a bridge across the stream and houses on its banks, how all was changed from last night! The soap-works with their smoke-vomiting chimneys were gone; the engineer s works gone; the lead-works gone; and no sound of rivetting and hammering came down the west wind from Thorneycroft s. Then the bridge! I had perhaps dreamed of such a bridge, but never seen such an one out of an illuminated manuscript; for not even the Ponte Vecchio at Florence came anywhere near it. It was of stone arches, splendidly solid, and as graceful as they were strong; high enough also to let ordinary river traffic through easily. Over the parapet showed quaint and fanciful little buildings, which I supposed to be booths or shops, beset with painted and gilded vanes and spirelets. The stone was a little weathered, but showed no marks of the grimy sootiness which I was used to on every London building more than a year old. In short, to me a wonder of a bridge. William Morris. News from Nowhere. Chapter 2. EXTRACT 2 FOLLOWS OVERLEAF Page 3 of 7

4 Extract 2 LVI So careful of the type? but no. From scarped cliff and quarried stone She cries, A thousand types are gone: I care for nothing, all shall go. Thou makest thine appeal to me: I bring to life, I bring to death: The spirit does but mean the breath: I know no more. And he, shall he, Man, her last work, who seem d so fair, Such splendid purpose in his eyes, Who roll d the psalm to wintry skies, Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer, Who trusted God was love indeed And love Creation s final law Tho Nature, red in tooth and claw With ravine, shriek d against his creed Who loved, who suffer d countless ills, Who battled for the True, the Just, Be blown about the desert dust, Or seal d within the iron hills? No more? A monster then, a dream, A discord. Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime, Were mellow music match d with him. O life as futile, then, as frail! O for thy voice to soothe and bless! What hope of answer, or redress? Behind the veil, behind the veil. Alfred Tennyson. In Memorium. Section LVI. EXTRACT 3 FOLLOWS OVERLEAF Page 4 of 7

5 Extract 3 Coketown, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing our tune. It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with illsmelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these. You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there - as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done - they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it. The solitary exception was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs. All the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial. The M'Choakumchild school was all fact, and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn't state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen. Charles Dickens. Hard Times. Chapter 5. END OF SECTION A SECTION B FOLLOWS OVERLEAF Page 5 of 7

6 Section B (1 Hour) Answer ONE of the following questions: 2. Discuss the representation and significance of the family in any TWO OR MORE nineteenth-century texts. 3. James Eli Adams claims that the Victorians set morality in collision with sexuality. In what ways are morality and sexuality in conflict in any TWO OR MORE nineteenth-century texts? 4. Robert Gilmour agues that religion is a problematic presence in nineteenthcentury literature. Compare the treatment of religious faith AND/OR doubt in any TWO OR MORE nineteenth-century texts. 5. Once victim, always victim that s the law! (Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D Urbervilles). In what ways are social class AND/OR gender presented as the basis of victimization in any TWO OR MORE nineteenth-century texts? 6. Discuss the relationship between form and content in any TWO OR MORE nineteenth-century novels. 7. Robert Langbaum notes how, in his Dramatic Monologues, Browning delighted in making a case for the apparently immoral position. Discuss how successfully Browning does this with reference to at least TWO Dramatic Monologues. SECTION B CONTINUES OVERLEAF Page 6 of 7

7 8. If utopias and dystopias hold up a mirror to the fears and aspirations of the time in which they were written (Barbara Goodwin), what do William Morris s News from Nowhere and H.G. Wells s The Time Machine tell us about the fears and aspirations of the late nineteenth century? 9. In what ways are nineteenth-century concerns about decadence AND/OR degeneration addressed in any TWO OR MORE texts of the period? END OF PAPER Page 7 of 7