Victorian novel features

1. Omniscient narrator provided a comment on the plot and erect a rigid barrier between right and wrong (didactic aim)
2. The setting s the city (symbol of industrial civilization, anonymous lives and lost identity)
3. Long and complicated plot
4. Creation of character and deep analysis of their lives
5. Retribution or punishment in the final chapter

Dickens - a town of red bricks
The description of the modern city is depressing and repetitive. The city is rational, based on fact but the quality of the life is not good. Ten hospitals but no instrument for happiness. The life is boring, always the same, the life in the city swallow with lives in it. Irony in the description.
A part of the society lives in a different way from the Victorian’s canons:
Miserable, emarginated. Didactic aim: he creates characters, he describes their habits, he is always on the side of the poor and the working class. Children always the most important characters.
Poe
He thinks that art was the only way to penetrate in the empirical world searching for order.
Human divided in: intellect (truth), conscience (duty), soul (beauty).
Poetry is a mean to find beauty, it has nothing to do with truth and duty.
He wrote stories were the world of imagination co-exist with the analytic spirit. The novel:

1. Brevity is the most important features: the story should be red all at once, in order to not be distracted by other from the unity of the work
2. The character must be shown in a moment of crisis rather then while he is maturating or developing
3. The setting was often simplified, often a small closed space, and the reader must render the atmosphere

Tales of ratiocination or detection: tales in which knowledge is based on the deductive method that will inspire Doyle and Christie.
Tales of imagination: tales where gothic elements are used to g beyond the gothic tradition, creating a kind of  horror that does not come from the outside but from the inner self man obscurity. An important theme is the perversion the impulse of annihilation that rules the dark side of human nature, what is always hidden in Poe’s novel.
Morality in Poe’s stories is the wall between rightfulness and darkness.
Poe’s characters are always put in condition of be isolated from common everyday life, this is linked with the idea of madness, that in Poe’s opinion was almost an aspect of higher awareness , the exceptional acuteness of senses, makes them lose their sanity , because of an expanded consciousness. They lose the reality and they creates a new own world.
The tales are narrated in first person in longs monologues that describes moods and sensation: sadness, sense of guilty, deviation, fear, desire. All this gives a shaped psychological description.
Often fusion of death and beauty, creation and destruction.
The tell tale heart

1. coexistence of madness and rationality
2. Fears: silence, feeling shared
3. Detailed description
4. All the attention is concentrated on the perception
5. It is not madness at all, perception and sensation are not normal, the stronger sensation and perception comes inside the body and melts with the soul. The narrator punishment is brought about by the incessant beating of the heart of the men killed.
6. In the first part the narrator works in silence, then he starts to talk and talk.