Eighteenth century literature and culture

Technology & society in English literature float

The impact of science and technology in literary discourse: analysis of the works of Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Tennyson

With the development of industrialization and capitalism in the 19th century, the world of literature took a central focus on the significance of humanity and its achievement in the modern world. Because of the numerous changes happening in human society, such as the rapid modernization of technology, shifts in everyday activities, and gradual changes in values and traditions, people had become centered on intellectual and social development. People sought intellectual achievement and social progress at the expense and detriment of systems of morality and the environment. Thus, with the onset of modernism, there occurred moral degeneration and environmental degradation.

These themes of moral degeneration and environmental degradation were highlighted in the literary works of William Wordsworth, Alfred Tennyson, and Thomas Carlyle. The authors' literary discourses included contemplative thought on the effects that modernization, specifically the dawn of intellectual and technological developments, had on human society. The analysis of each author's work brought into fore the realization that modern society was gradually changing to become a morally degenerate (Tennyson and Carlyle) society, not to mention the environmental degradation that happened with the prevalence of industrial technologies (Wordsworth).

In the poem entitled, "Michael (a pastoral poem)," poet Wordsworth narrated the history of humanity through an exemplar, which was Michael's life and the changes that happened in it as his society moved towards modernization. As a pastoral poem, Wordsworth emphasized on the interplay between humanity and the elements of nature and how the former benefited from nature. Michael, as the protagonist of the poem, was an example of an individual who realized the detriment modernity had caused him and his family, as he was compulsorily asked to sell his land for development. The poem explicitly expressed the issue of environment degradation, when the protagonist exclaimed, (upon learning that he was to give up the land he tilled for many years), "These fields were burthened when they came to me...It looks as if it never could endure Another Master."

Apart from the theme of environmental degradation, moral degeneration was especially explicit in the works of Tennyson and Carlyle, who discussed the importance of morality in the midst of humanity's success in attaining higher levels of intellectual development and knowledge about the nature of things (living or non-living), in this world. "In Memoriam," Tennyson's religious explication, presented humanity as incapable of achieving further development in life without spiritual guidance. This humble realization showed humanity's intellectual development as a gift from God, not solely based on human capacity and faculties alone: "...we cannot know, for knowledge is of things we see and yet we trust it comes from thee..."