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| Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) |
- P&P
- Extended Chapel today
- NOT GUM: "The Victorian Age made one or two mistakes, but they were mistakes that were really useful; that is, mistakes that were really mistaken. They thought that commerce outside a country must extend peace: it has certainly often extended war. They thought that commerce inside a country must certainly promote prosperity; it has largely promoted poverty. But for them these were experiments; for us they ought to be lessons. If we continue the capitalist use of the populace — if we continue the capitalist use of external arms, it will lie heavy on the living. The dishonour will not be on the dead." — G. K. Chesterton
- Intro to The Victorian Period (see Notability for Brit Lit - Historical Contexts pg. 67).
- Learning the context by teaching: Break into eight groups. Read your assigned section(s) listed below, and write down what you believe to be the three most important facts/quotes/statistics to share with the class . . . IN YOUR OWN WORDS.
- Groups
- "Peace and Economic Growth" and "The Idea of Progress"
- "The Hungry Forties"
- "The Movement for Reform"
- "Decorum and Authority"
- "Intellectual Progress"
- "Questions and Doubts"
- "From Trust to Skepticism and Denial"
- "Revealing Reality"
- Copy new Nails, Lit terms, and Vocab
- Comedy of Manners - A comic drama consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality.
- e.g. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest
- Hyperbole - Calculated overstatement, exaggeration
- e.g. "I'm so hungry I could eat a ________"
- e.g. "He ate everything in the house."
- Understatement - Says less than is intended
- e.g. "Adolf Hitler was a naughty man."
- e.g. "I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?" (Oscar Wilde)
- Paradox - Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level.
- e.g. "Without laws, we can have no freedom."
- e.g. "If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life." (Oscar Wilde)
- e.g. "The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me." (Oscar Wilde)
- Epigram - a short, witty, often paradoxical--sometimes satirical--statement designed to surprise the audience
- e.g. "Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing /
Should certain people die before they sing!" (Coleridge) - e.g. "What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, /
Its body brevity, and wit its soul" (Coleridge) - e.g. "Forty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin and forty years of marriage make her look like a public building" (Oscar Wilde).
- e.g. "God made women beautiful so that men would love them; and he made them stupid so that they could love men" (attributed to La Belle Otero).
