Greek myths become the foundation of most19th century English novels.
Greek myths are alluded to in many 19th century English novels but the novels shape themselves.
Greek myths are alluded in many novels, but they are only allusions to clarify a scene or character.
There is no relationship at all between Greek myths and the 19th century English novel.
peter L speakith what i thinkith.
i'd add that post grecian novels shape themselves not bc the writer has something different to say than the greeks but bc the writer has simply created a new way to say the same thing. style is creativity and vice versa
sorta late in the school year for a paper, no?
The problem, is that realist novels try to ignore any mythological structuring - despite being built on cultural myths that are even older than the Greek tradition. Frankenstein is clearly a sort of reinterpretation of Prometheus, mixed with Miltonic influences, but most of the other "good" novels tend not to be. It all depends really - the 19th century early novels, for instance, were quite boring, and the best ones are hardly representative of the whole, and quite often, were hardly popular in their time. The later novels, tended to be within a realist vein, with George Eliot, and Dickens being the best of the lot, and generally mask any sort of structuring pattern.
Ultimately, the main structures come from The Bible more than Greek traditions, but the concepts of Greek narrative still pervade. The tyrannically teleological endings on all the books, for instance, are a continuation of the trends started in Greek Drama, with the notion of order needing to be restored, and catharsis achieved.
On the whole though, I would say the shift headed more toward Gothic attributes, that seem a product of the late 18th century, with influences heading back to the Middle Ages. Realism, the playing off of fiction as a true reflection of society, and the Gothic, are not particularly indebted directly to Greek myth, I would argue.
That being said, looking across the Ocean, perhaps you'd find more mixes in American literature - I wouldn't know, I'm no expert on Early American Literature, and my knowledge doesn't bend past the major writers of the time. Certainly though, the Gothic, and the Biblical again seem the most dominant, in addition to a blending of an indigenous national mythology.
Hawthorne uses greek myths, he even wrote a short stories re-writing for kids of greek myths (I think the correct is roman myths, since it seems drawn from Ovid, but then, so most stuff are). Poe have his lots of references as well.
The problem is the question, Greek myths are so archetypical that we barelly can avoid them. Shakespeare, The Bible, 1001 Nights are the usual opitions (but then, they are also under the influence of greeks), in the end the question can only be answered by the individual works.
Back in those days that came long before cable television, movies, radio, and the internet, people spent a lot of time on Greek and Roman subjects. There probably wasn't that much else to do, so those topics got lots more attention back then than they get now that we have more diversions.
I don't really know enough to vote, since I never realized that Greek mythology had such a monopolistic influence on English literature. All I know (or think I know) is that the folks of the 18th and 19th centuries were a lot more up-to-speed on Greek and Roman matters than we are today, and they used that knowledge frequently.
Last edited by DickZ; 05-28-2009 at 01:59 PM.
Thanks to everyone. I guess Novelistic is a little shyon getting on here. But I think you all helped out considerably.
Like I say in my post on the subject, I fail to see how myths really infleuenced 19th century novels, but you guys mostly think otherwise. I will have to look closer and see if I see what you're seeing.
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Yes, but keep in mind, these are novels. Poetry certainly was influenced by these forms, but for the most part, I am rather unable to make the connection to the English novel. Keats' Endymion clearly is rooted in Greek mythology, but Walter Scott's work? Austen"s, Dickens's, Eliot's? Not really. The romance comes closer, perhaps, but even that doesn't seem particularly Greek - it seems rooted in a mythology apart from all that.Originally Posted by JCamilo
Faust is clearly a Greek-heavy text, but I wouldn't say Dorian Gray particularly is. Perhaps one could argue that conceptions of existence were Greek influenced, but even that seems a stretch when applied to the English novel.
The most dominant thing building the diegesis of 19th century English novels seems to be concepts of English life - history, domestic culture, architecture, marriage, and the changing environment.
Essentially though, at the beginning of the 19th century, the novel as this form was generally viewed as "women's literature", unfit for the educated minds of the male elite, but fit for women as an innocent distraction.
In a sense, this concept of the novel as women's fiction still holds - certainly the greatest readers of novels have, and still are women (women read staggeringly more novels than men do in the major English speaking countries) and the form was crafted with that in mind. The original romances, popularized by Gaskell and Scott generally were designed with that in mind, and content seems built around distraction within an idealized romantic sphere, not much different than our modern conception of The Romance Novel.
Of course, Dickens, Hardy, and others really broke this, but behind most of them, with the exception of perhaps Hardy, there seems to always be a didactic moral element, that must correspond with the teleology at the end. Either some lesson is learned from the death of the characters, or from the marriage of the characters, but ultimately the moral is present, in virtually every text.
But Greek content, ultimately, was used, it would seem, at this time as structuring for a set of structures within poetic frames - poetry at this point being generally limited to the male bourgeoisie, with a little bit of exposure of the popular poets, notably Tennyson, and so forth, to bourgeois women. The series of myths then, would be familiar, and therefore would work better, whereas the novel, being aimed generally at less educated people - people who didn't go to school and study the classics - doesn't seem to use those structures openly.
The early novels, I would argue, more so than anything else try to aestheticize and over-dramatize the mundane and the ordinary - domestic life, marriage and love - in order to create a super-real world to attract women. Later, the form altered itself to try and create a radicalized seemingly "realistic" projection of reality (which was rarely realistic) in order to project a didactic message within the changing cultural environment. In here, the mythological - the metaphorical structures - of the Greeks could not particularly exist, unless as a comparative form, as mentioned in the Medusa reference in Eliot's novel.
As I remember it Long 18th C and 19 C novels I read didnt really link to classics as such, not the ways say Joyce's Ulysess did. Or some of the modern scifi etc.
BUt there is a strong sense of - especially in the Long 18thc male writers as I recall, background knowledge of the classics, so the odd line of greek or latin pops up. the odd allsuion to a mmoral from a whats it called not myth or legend the other thing?
But I am more up on the long 18th really.
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JBI says it very well there in post #21. That is basically what I was thinking. I just didn't have the patience to flesh it all out as he does.
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Agreed, and archetypical seems a good word to describe many plots in Greco-Roman works, whether we speak of poetry or plays, derived by oral traditions or not. Who can say that the heroic deeds of Odysseus, Achilles, and Aeneas did not make an eternal imprint upon literature to follow? The greed and domination of King Agamemnon? The inevitability of fate Sophocles wrote of in Oedipus? The relentless sadness of Electra? The countless tales of Greek mythology?
Along the same lines of this discussion, whether we speak of 19th century Western literature or not, I think we can say a lot as to how widely we continue to read Greco-Roman literature; we have even gone so far as to form common phrases originating from such works - we describe our weaknesses as our "Achilles heel," intense waters even in modern art will sometimes show a Poseidon/Neptune-like figure, though Roman, many allusions to Bacchus still exist among winos and pleasure-seekers, and some will still remark of someone especially attractive having a "face that could launch a thousand ships." In essence, we have created a bit of an elementary oral tradition ourselves of Greco-Roman literature, whether we know of their origins or not. As stated in my previous post, I think many Romantic and Realist poets and playwrights (as JBI mentioned Goethe's Faust, I regret forgetting this fact) alluded to Greek literature more than novelists, and I have no doubt that they did quite a bit of "homework" to display these allusions with such accuracy as far as to almost continue certain Greek tales. As many writers during the 19th century wrote rather universally (wrote poetry, novels, plays, essays, etc.), I would think it unfit to say that strictly novelists did not study all previous literature, too, including that of the Greeks and Romans, but Keats or Shelley, for one, clearly referenced the Greeks with more frequency and strength than Dickens or Chopin.
Indeed, some poets referenced Greek literature and mythology more than others, though I feel a bit more familiar with Keats than Scott. Austen, Dickens, Eliot? I agree, nothing really to speak of comes to mind, though the first two read more like brain candy than anything else, compared to other 19the century writers, explaining why they seem easily Hollywood-ized, but that has a whole different, unrelated discussion to it.
As to The Picture of Dorian Gray, speaking of far stretches, I might say that it has some reference to Narcissus in Ovid's Metamorphoses, but any art seems certainly bound to different interpretations. As you compared Faust with Wilde's novel, Goethe very obviously wins in who alludes to Greek literature and mythology more, even going so far as to include Helen of Troy in the majority of the second act, but Dorian Gray may have enough narcissistic qualities to claim that Wilde may have done a bit of studying in Greco-Roman literature and thrown a few of its ingredients.
I think a lot of the writers may have imitated certain writers ie. Milton, whose work sometimes made references to greek mythology. But, I think in a lot of cases the use of greek symbolism, where it is seen, in the 19th century is more coincidence than pure reference.
So my answer would be that the novels shaped themselves, in a way.
i wish i had more to say on the subject, but i feel like my vote pretty much concludes how i feel. They are allusions. But the novels are not DIRECTLY affected by greek mythology.
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I agree a little with all. Specifically, I believe that authors, in part, may have a basis for their stories, but in the end everyone ends up giving the story its own flavor, very much depending on the authors' views of the world, and such views may or may not have a contact with Classical Literature. I think the most accurate option would be number two.
The Vote has Ended.
I would like to thank Virgil, for his helping.
Also, I express my gratitude to all who have contributed in voting.
Thank you so much for all. And I am so sorry; I cannot replay on the all comments because I am under a strong pressure.
I think that Greek myths have influence on literature as a whole not only on the 19th century literature for they are the first stories in humanity & they where the first literature that had influence on literature as a whole...
Personally, I've read more 19th-century poetry than novels. JBI made a point that Greek influence shows up all the time in poetry, and I agree. Tennyson is my favorite and he definitely loved his Classics, but I think he was more the exception than the rule. From what I've seen, there's less Classical influence in the novels of the time period.
Yes, I agree that the Greeks wrote a human condition that is pretty much universal, but that does not mean that we should give all the credit to the Greeks. It could simply be that great writers of all cultural mileaus ultimately write on these themes.
For instance, I'm reading a book that argues that in its early days Christianity took on many aspects of other cultures (including Classical archetypes) - to make "pagans'" conversion easier. In that sense, it could be argued that even predominantly Christian texts have Classical roots. It all depends on how deeply you want to read and how much you want to say such-and-such archetype is distinctly Greek.
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