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Essay Archive - Victorian Literature
Victorian Literature
The first decades (1830s to 1860s) of Queen Victoria's reign
produced a vigorous and varied body of literature that attempted to come to
terms with the current transformations of English society, but writers in
the latter decades (1870s to 1900) withdrew into AESTHETICISM, a
preoccupation with sensation as an end in itself. Confronted by the shift
from an agricultural to an industrial urban society and troubled by the
erosion of traditional religious beliefs, the early Victorian writers held
to a moral aesthetic, a belief that literature should provide bo....
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