An Imitative Narrative in Mathew Arnold’s Work as a Reflection of Victorian Thought and Beliefs.
Ramsha Ashraf
Proses
19 October 2012 An Imitative Narrative in Mathew Arnold’s Work as a Reflection of
Victorian thought and beliefs.
The main streams constituting modern European and American thought, as imperialism, empiricism, rationalism, utilitarianism, racism and pragmatism, commenced from the Enlightenment and the prodigious series of changes following French and American Revolutions, and also ongoing Industrial Revolution. Historians as Thomas Hobsbawm has remarked that nineteenth-century debate in theology, politics, philosophy, economics and science were ultimately inseparable from an implied stance toward the bourgeois revolutionary ideals. Hence nineteenth-century thinkers could be seen as divided along the border line of obstruction and adherence to the interest of bourgeois class. Economic liberalists such as Smith, Richardo and Malthus and those advocating utilitarianism, such as John Staurt Mill and Jeremy Bentham, made their arguments on political and philosophical foundations given by the thinkers of bourgeois Enlightenment, such as Rousseau, Lock and Hume. Colossal theorists standing in the row of ‘opposition’ including almost the entire constellation of Romantic writers, anarchists and the French symbolists, Christian and Utopian socialists, and eventually the Victorian writers Carlyle, Ruskin, William Morris and Mathew Arnold. An important strand of thought inherited by writers was “Hetrological or alternative tradition (Habib, A History OF Literary Criticism, p503). This tradition exhibits some of historical continuity with the Romantics, the symbolists, and decadents as well as several afflictions with humanists such as Irving Babbit in America and Mathew Arnold in England, both of whom deplored the effects of French Revolution. Mathew Arnold was not only a religious and cultural critic but also a poet and an educator. He had the fine susceptibility of the scholar, and his mind and deeply impregnated with all the
Proses
19 October 2012 An Imitative Narrative in Mathew Arnold’s Work as a Reflection of
Victorian thought and beliefs.
The main streams constituting modern European and American thought, as imperialism, empiricism, rationalism, utilitarianism, racism and pragmatism, commenced from the Enlightenment and the prodigious series of changes following French and American Revolutions, and also ongoing Industrial Revolution. Historians as Thomas Hobsbawm has remarked that nineteenth-century debate in theology, politics, philosophy, economics and science were ultimately inseparable from an implied stance toward the bourgeois revolutionary ideals. Hence nineteenth-century thinkers could be seen as divided along the border line of obstruction and adherence to the interest of bourgeois class. Economic liberalists such as Smith, Richardo and Malthus and those advocating utilitarianism, such as John Staurt Mill and Jeremy Bentham, made their arguments on political and philosophical foundations given by the thinkers of bourgeois Enlightenment, such as Rousseau, Lock and Hume. Colossal theorists standing in the row of ‘opposition’ including almost the entire constellation of Romantic writers, anarchists and the French symbolists, Christian and Utopian socialists, and eventually the Victorian writers Carlyle, Ruskin, William Morris and Mathew Arnold. An important strand of thought inherited by writers was “Hetrological or alternative tradition (Habib, A History OF Literary Criticism, p503). This tradition exhibits some of historical continuity with the Romantics, the symbolists, and decadents as well as several afflictions with humanists such as Irving Babbit in America and Mathew Arnold in England, both of whom deplored the effects of French Revolution. Mathew Arnold was not only a religious and cultural critic but also a poet and an educator. He had the fine susceptibility of the scholar, and his mind and deeply impregnated with all the