Victorian literature

Question

Hi i am really interested in English literature.
Lately i have started to read a book named "classic American short stories".
its not hard to understand and its fun and i have noticed that gradually its getting simpler for me as i approach to the end of the book.i am sure its because stories have been sorted by they creation date.
from Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-64) to Ernest Hemingway (1898-1961).
i tried to read some stories or even poems of Victorian era but they were very Incomprehensible for me most of the time.while i was able to read and understand stories that are written in same era in America.
how are stories at 18s classified?are they Victorian?

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

The movement roughly comprises the years from 1830 to 1900, though there is ample disagreement regarding even this simple point.

Major Writers of the Victorian Period:

Arnold, Matthew (1822-1888)
Brontë, Charlotte (1816-1855)
Brontë, Emily (1818-1848)
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861)
Browning, Robert (1812-1889)
Carroll, Lewis (1832-1898)
Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881)
Dickens, Charles (1812-1870)
Doyle, Arthur Conan (1859-1930)
Eliot, George (1819-1880)
Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928)
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-1889)
Housman, A. E. (1859-1936)
Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936)
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth (1802-1838)
Rossetti, Christina (1830-1894)
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1828-1882)
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-1894)
Swinburne, Algernon Charles (1837-1909)
Tennyson, Alfred (Lord) (1809-1892)
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811-1863)
Wells, H.G. (1866-1946)
Wilde, Oscar (1854-1900)
Yeats, William Butler (1865-1939)

More here: http://www.online-literature.com/periods/victorian.php

AlpheccaStars · Answer

MIGi have noticed that gradually its getting simpler for me as i approach to the end of the book.i am sure its because stories have been sorted by they creation date.

Please punctuate your sentences correctly when you post here.

Yes, English has changed a lot over the past 150 years. Victorian writers tended to use more flowery language, oblique speech and longer sentences than modern writers. Hemingway wrote very simply, but very profoundly.

Here is one sentence from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, which is fairly typical of his style:
In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf—but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood—at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass—here, with a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious edifice of brick.

Here is a passage with nine sentences from Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. It is also fairly typical of his style:
“You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with ***. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.

MIG · Answer

Thank you Mister and Alphecca Stars.

Please punctuate your sentences correctly when you post here.

Sorry , I will try.
Thanks again.

Victorian literature

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