19th Century Literatue

Literature

Main article: 19th century in literature

Charles Dickens

Mark Twain in 1894

Jane Austen

Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan PoeOn the literary front the new century opens with Romanticism, a movement that spread throughout Europe in reaction to 18th-century rationalism, and it develops more or less along the lines of the Industrial Revolution, with a design to react against the dramatic changes wrought on nature by the steam engine and the railway. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge are considered the initiators of the new school in England, while in the continent the German Sturm und Drang spreads its influence as far as Italy and Spain.

French arts had been hampered by the Napoleonic Wars but subsequently developed rapidly. Modernism began.

The Goncourts and Emile Zola in France and Giovanni Verga in Italy produce some of the finest naturalist novels. Italian naturalist novels are especially important in that they give a social map of the new unified Italy to a people that until then had been scarcely aware of its ethnic and cultural diversity. On February 21, 1848, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published the Communist Manifesto.

There was a huge literary output during the 19th century. Some of the most famous writers included the Russians Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekov and Fyodor Dostoevsky; the English Charles Dickens, John Keats, and Jane Austen; the Irish Oscar Wilde; the Americans Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain; and the French Victor Hugo, Honorй de Balzac, Jules Verne and Charles Baudelaire. Some others of note included:

Charlotte Brontл

Emily Brontл

Lord Byron

Franзois-Renй de Chateaubriand

Kate Chopin

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Emily Dickinson

Alexandre Dumas, pиre (1802-1870)

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Gustave