CONTENTS

1. General introduction

2. Introductory Lecture I: The Profile of the Age

3. Introductory Lecture II: Understanding Victorianism in Broader Cultural Terms  

4. Victorian Fiction I. Charles Dickens and William Makepiece Thackeray’s Garrulousness Compared

4.1.   Introductory: Methodological Assumptions from the Perspective of  Historical and Archetypal Criticism and  Narratological Tools for the Practica Criticism of Victorian Fiction

4.2.   The Victorian Realistic Taste, its Roots and Different Manifestations in Dickens’s  and Thackeray’s Novels                  

4.3.   The Quality of Dickens’s Imagination

5. Victorian Poetry I: Lord Alfred Tennyson, the Paramount Victorian Poet. Followed by a Brief Comparison between Tennyson’s and Matthew  Arnold’s Poetry in General -

5.1. Introduction: The Victorian Zeitgeist . Mannerism and the Post-Romantic Heritage                      

5.2. Applying the General Features of Victorian Poetry to Tennyson’s Poems 
     

5.2.1. Tennyson the Lyrical Poet     

5.2.2. The Public Poet Tennyson

5.3. A Brief Comparison between Matthew Arnold’s Poetry and Tennyson’s

6. The Victorian Essay I: Thomas Carlyle – A Fundamentalist Thinker

7. Victorian Fiction II: Victorian Realism Comes into Its Own in the Intensely Structured Work of the Three Memorable Women Writers: Charlotte Brontë,  Emily Brontë and George Eliot.

                             

7.1.   Characteristics Shared by the Three Feminine Novels as Low-Mimetic and Realistic Fiction                               

7.2.   Forms of Confrontation between Opposites and the Forms of Plots in the Three Novels Studied. Romance Functions and Archetypal Associations

7.3.   The Structurality of the Women Novelists’ Narrative Structures

8. Victorian Poetry II: The Action of Robert Browning’s Verse

8.1. Discovering Browning

8.2.1. Irony and the Dramatic Monologue

8.2.2. The Significance and Targeted Effects of the Dramatic  Transposition of Ethical and Existential Judgments that Browning’s Poetry Sets in Remotely Historical Times and Places

9. The Victorian Essay II: Cultural Liberalism in the 19^th Century Essays: John  Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, Thomas Henry Huxley

9.1.    Terminological Clarifications

9.2.    Liberal Intellectualism and Liberal Constructivism  - Their Application to Civic Education, College Learning and Higher, University Education. The General Form of the Liberal Discourse  

9.3.    John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Discourse of Civic Legitimation

9.4.    John Henry Newman’s Discourses at the Opening of the Catholic University of Dublin                 

9.5 .   ”The Education of the Majority of Mankind” in Matthew Arnold’s and Thomas Henry Huxley’s Liberal Debates      

9.5.1. Education and Humanism

9.5.2. Education Targets and Curricula.The Battle Between the Idea(l) and the Useful  

                     

10. The Last Phase of the Victorian Novel: Thomas Hardy as a Prototype of the Realistic Novel’s Self-Alienation at the End of the Victorian Age

10.1.     Towards the General Characterisation of the Phase via the Case Study of Hardy’s Fiction
                              
10.2.     Meaning and Form in the Victorian Fiction of the Last Phase (a Comparative Narratological Analysis of  Several Novels )

11. Gerard Manley Hopkins the Priest - Poet and His Archaically Original Modern Verse

                             

11.1.     Was Hopkins a Victorian?  Why was he Modern?

11.2.     The Analysis of ”The Windhover”

11.3.     Classifications of Hopkins’s Poems

11.4.     Hopkins the Critic and Art Theorist

12. The Victorian Essay  III: Fundamentalism and Liberalism in Confrontation for Legitimating the New Normative Disciplines in Humanism (cultural and literary criticism, aesthetic criticism and aestheticism). Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and Walter Pater

12.1.     The Historical and Typological Perspective on the Disciplines

12.2.     Matthew Arnold’s Criticism as a Proof of the Intellectual Confrontation between the Old and the New in 19^th Century Thinking

12.3.     Two Similarly Inaugurated Disciplines: Literary and Aesthetic Criticism       

12.4.     The change of faith and change of manner in Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Criticism                

 12.5       Aestheticism

Appendix: Bio-Bibliography

Bibliography of Source Texts