Autori dell'età vittoriana, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Autori dell'età vittoriana e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! AUTORI IN PIÚ George Gordon Byron  (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824),  George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron, better known as Lord Byron RS was a British nobleman, poet and politician. Regarded by many as one of the greatest British poets, Byron was a prominent man in British culture during the Second Romanticism, of which he was the most representative along with John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley.  He was an English romantic poet . He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the greatest of English poets. Among his best- known works are the lengthy narratives Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular.  The most flamboyant and notorious of the major English Romantic poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable poet of the early 1800s. He created an immensely popular Romantic hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many, he seemed the model. He is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the era’s poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin; a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence. His faceted personality found expression in satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric, speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose. In his dynamism, sexuality, self- revelation, and demands for freedom for oppressed people everywhere, Byron captivated the Western mind and heart as few writers have, stamping upon 19th-century letters, arts, politics, even clothing styles, his image and name as the embodiment of Romanticism. Mary Shelley  Mary Shelley (born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin; 30 August 1797 - 1 February 1851) was a British writer, essayist and philosopher. The daughter of philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, the forerunner of feminism, and philosopher and politician William Godwin, she declared herself to Percy Bysshe Shelley at the age of 16, and they fled to Europe. At the age of 18 he wrote what is considered the first Gothic science fiction novel, Frankenstein (Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus), published in 1818. She was editor of several posthumous publications of her husband, which helped to make known and understand.  Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus) is a Gothic, horror, and science fiction novel written by Mary Shelley between 1816 and 1817. [2] It was published in 1818 and edited by the author for a second edition in 1831. This is the novel with which the literary figures of Doctor Victor Frankenstein and his creature, often remembered as a monster of Frankenstein, was also the title of one of the books published by her husband Percy in 1820. George Bernard Shaw  George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856, Dublin - 2 November 1950, Ayot St Lawrence) was an Irish writer, playwright, linguist and music critic.  In 1925 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature Oscar Wilde  Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie[N 1] Wills Wilde, known as Oscar Wilde (Dublin, 16 October 1854 - Paris, 30 November 1900), was an Irish writer, aphorist, poet, playwright, journalist, essayist, and literary critic, exponent of British decadence and aestheticism.  Author from the seemingly simple and spontaneous writing with a sometimes lashing and impertinent style he wanted to awaken the attention of his readers and invite them to reflection.  No name is more inextricably bound to the aesthetic movement of the 1880s and 1890s in England than that of Oscar Wilde. This connection results as much from the lurid details of his life as from his considerable contributions to English literature. His lasting literary fame resides primarily in four or five plays, one of which—The Importance of Being Earnest, first produced in 1895—is a classic of comic theater. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is flawed as a work of art, but gained him much of his notoriety.  This book gives a particularly 1890s perspective on the timeless theme of sin and punishment. Wilde published a volume of poems early in his career as a writer. Some of these poems were successful, but his only enduring work in this genre is The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1896). On a curious but productive tangent to his more serious work, Wilde produced two volumes of fairy tales that are delightful in themselves and provide insight into some of his serious social and artistic concerns. His significant literary contributions are rounded off by his critical essays, most notably in Intentions (1891), and his long soul-searching letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis, written in 1897 from Reading Gaol.  Imprisonment for homosexuality was a particularly tragic end for an artist who believed that style—in life as well as art—was of utmost importance. That Wilde became a literary artist in the first place is not so surprising since, as H. Montgomery Hyde reported in Oscar Wilde: A Biography, his mother was a poet and Irish revolutionary who published under the name “Speranza,” and his father a successful eye and ear surgeon in Dublin and “author of a work which remained the standard textbook on aural surgery for many years.” Though his background was literary and professional, it was anything but stable. His mother doted on him as a child and, according to Hyde, “insisted on dressing him in girl’s clothes.” Dr. William Wilde was a notorious philanderer, and, in an ironic foreshadowing of his son’s famous trials, suffered public condemnation when a libel case disclosed his sexual indiscretions with a young woman named Mary Travers.  The Picture of Dorian Gray is a philosophical novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical Lippincott's Monthly Magazine.[1][2] The novel- length version was published in April 189  The story revolves around a portrait of Dorian Gray painted by Basil Hallward, a friend of Dorian's and an artist infatuated with Dorian's beauty. Through Basil, Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton and is soon enthralled by the aristocrat's hedonistic worldview: that beauty and sensual fulfillment are the only things worth pursuing in life. Newly understanding that his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a libertine life of varied amoral experiences while staying young and beautiful; all the while, his portrait ages and visually records every one of Dorian's sins.[3]  Wilde's only novel, it was subject to much controversy and criticism in its time but has come to be recognized as a classic of gothic literature.  The work, like many others, appears to be inspired in part by the myth of Doctor Faust, limited to the general theme of the conflict between aesthetic-hedonistic pleasure and morality.  The portrait of Dorian Gray is an excellent masterpiece of English literature and a true celebration of the cult of beauty. A 'profession of faith' that Wilde tends to make his own and pursue throughout his life, both through his artistic production and through his conduct decidedly anti-Victorian and anti-conformist, contemptuous of common sense and the canons of bourgeois morality.  For Wilde, life is in fact a successful work of art. Wilde then opts for the reversal of the principle that it is art that  Gerard Manley Hopkins is considered to be one of the greatest poets of the Victorian era. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I. Hopkins’s family encouraged his artistic talents when he was a youth in Essex, England. However, Hopkins became estranged from his Protestant family when he converted to Roman Catholicism. Upon deciding to become a priest, he burned all of his poems and did not write again for many years. His work was not published until 30 years after his death when his friend Robert Bridges edited the volume Poems  According to John Bayley, "All his life Hopkins was haunted by the sense of personal bankruptcy and impotence, the straining of 'time's eunuch' with no more to 'spend'... " a sense of inadequacy, graphically expressed in his last sonnets.  Hopkins was a supporter of linguistic purism in English.He uses many archaic and dialect words but also coins new words. One example of this is twindles, which seems from its context in Inversnaid to mean a combination of twines and dwindles. He often creates compound adjectives, sometimes with a hyphen (such as dapple-dawn- drawn falcon) but often without, as in rolling level underneath him steady air. This use of compound adjectives, similar to the Old English use of compound nouns via kennings, concentrates his images, communicating to his readers the instress of the poet's perceptions of an inscape.  Much of Hopkins's historical importance has to do with the changes he brought to the form of poetry, which ran contrary to conventional ideas of metre. Hopkins called his own rhythmic structure sprung rhythm. Sprung rhythm is structured around feet with a variable number of syllables, generally between one and four syllables per foot, with the stress always falling on the first syllable in a foot. It is similar to the "rolling stresses" of Robinson Jeffers, another poet who rejected conventional metre. Hopkins saw sprung rhythm as a way to escape the constraints of running rhythm, which he said inevitably pushed poetry written in it to become "same and tame". In this way, Hopkins sprung rhythm can be seen as anticipating much of free verse. His work has no great affinity with either of the contemporary Pre-Raphaelite and neo-romanticism schools, although he does share their descriptive love of nature and he is often seen as a precursor to modernist poetry, or as a bridge between the two poetic eras. Christina Georgina Rossetti  (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was an English writer of romantic, devotional and children's poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember". She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Darke and other composers. She was a sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings.  Goblin Market and Other Poems is Christina Rossetti's first volume of poetry, published by Macmillan in 1862. It contains her famous poem "Goblin Market" and others such as "Up-hill", "The Convent Threshold", and "Maude Clare." It also includes the poem 'In the Round Tower at Jhansi, 8 June 1857', in which a British army officer takes his wife's life and his own so that they do not have to face a horrific and dishonourable death at the hands of the rebelling sepoys, commemorating the Jhokan Bagh massacre at Jhansi. Christina's brother, founding Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood member Dante Gabriel Rossetti, designed the frontispiece and title page illustrations in the first edition, as well as the minimal blue binding. Christina was aware that her brother's "commercial savvy and artistic skill" helped make her first volume of poetry a success. Jane Austin  Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism.[2][b] Her use of biting irony, along with her realism and social commentary, have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.  With the publication of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814), support the others, which is a motivation that drives the plot.  Pride and Prejudice has consistently appeared near the top of lists of "most-loved books" among literary scholars and the reading public. It has become one of the most popular novels in English literature, with over 20 million copies sold, and has inspired many derivatives in modern literature.  Main themes: -Marriage: This sets marriage as a motif and a problem in the novel. Readers are poised to question whether or not these single men need a wife, or if the need is dictated by the "neighbourhood" families and their daughters who require a "good fortune".Marriage is a complex social activity that takes political and financial economy into account. -Wealth: Money plays a fundamental role in the marriage market, for the young ladies seeking a well-off husband and for men who wish to marry a woman of means. Marrying a woman of a rich family also ensured a linkage to a higher- class family. -Class: austen might be known now for her "romances" but the marriages in her novels engage with economics and class distinction. Pride and Prejudice is hardly the exception. When Darcy proposes to Elizabeth, he cites their economic and social differences as an obstacle his excessive love has had to overcome, though he still anxiously harps on the problems it poses for him within his social circle. William Makepeace Thackeray  William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811, Kolkata - 24 December 1863, London) was a Victorian British writer, best known for his satirical works, notably The Vanity Fair, which outlines British society. He is also known for authoring the novel The Memories of Barry Lyndon.  The Vanity Fair is a novel by English author William Makepeace Thackeray, first appeared in twenty monthly installments between 1847 and 1848, then published as a single work in 1848.The characteristic that makes the work one of the most important novels in the history of English literature of the nineteenth century is the presence of a protagonist no longer all virtue or vice but a naked everyday reality in which common sense is worth more than a vacuous sentimentalism  The Memories of Barry Lyndon is a picaresque novel by William Makepeace Thackeray, originally serialized as The Luck of Barry Lyndon: A Romance of the Last Century by Fitz-Boodle in Fraser’s Magazine in 1844, dealing with the adventures of a member of the Irish Gentry (petty nobility) in an attempt to get co-opted into the English aristocracy. George Eliot  George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Anne (Marian) Evans, married Cross (22 November 1819, Arbury - 22 December 1880, London), was a British writer, one of the most important writers of the Victorian era.  Mary Anne Evans used a male pseudonym from her first narrative, Scenes of Clerical Life, as was common at the time for writers (for example, the Brontë sisters). She did so for two reasons: on the one hand, as she herself said, to be taken seriously and to avoid that her novels were read with the preconception that it was only literature "for ladies", and therefore minor, not comparable to great literature; On the other hand, she wanted to keep her works safe from the social prejudice that affected her as the companion of a married man, the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for twenty years. It was only after having achieved a certain fame as a novelist that she came forward to claim her works, with the scandal of many readers; and despite the success, it still took her a long time to be accepted into good society. However, she continued to use the pseudonym under which she had become famous.  His novels are mostly set in Britain and are famous for their realistic style and psychological depth.  Throughout her career, Eliot wrote with a politically astute pen. From Adam Bede to The Mill on the Floss and Silas Marner, Eliot presented the cases of social outsiders and small-town persecution. Felix Holt, the Radical and The Legend of Jubal were overtly political, and political crisis is at the heart of Middlemarch, in which she presents the stories of a number of inhabitants of a small English town on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832; the novel is notable for its deep psychological insight and sophisticated character portraits. The roots of her realist philosophy can be found in her review of John Ruskin's Modern Painters in Westminster Review in 1856.  Readers in the Victorian era praised her novels for their depictions of rural society. Much of the material for her prose was drawn from her own experience. She shared with Wordsworth the belief that there was much value and  Hardy renounces the verbal means (monologues, dialogues...) to present the material in visual terms. Use overviews, fades, zooms and close-ups  Hardy’s work seems to trace a link between the Victorian period and twentieth-century modernism, whose pessimistic themes are anticipated. Hardy does not believe in a creator and good God, who cares about bringing justice, but in an immanent destiny of Schopenhauerian inspiration: the Immanent Will, which makes man lose all power, so small in the universe.  Hardy’s goal was to illustrate "the contrast between the ideal life desired by a man and the real and shabby life he was destined to have"; a hostile, malignant destiny, which ends with the annihilation of happiness and hope.  Nature is configured as an important character in the whole work of Hardy: a Nature indifferent to man, that fights it unnecessarily: is present in him the schopenhaueriana "will to live"the survival instinct that makes possible the continuation of the species despite the sufferings. All of Hardy’s novels are set in Wessex, a fictional name for the area south-west of England called Dorset in which he himself grew up, an agricultural area dotted with memories of the past: mounds, traces and ruins of Roman camps and fortresses. The study of architecture and being raised in those places make Hardy an excellent descriptor: from landscapes to rural traditions, every detail is accurate and realistic. The characters are generally simple country men and women, humble and rustic. Joseph Rudyard Kipling    Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936)[1] was an English novelist, short-story writer, poet, and journalist. He was born in British India, which inspired much of his work.  Kipling's works of fiction include the Jungle Book duology (The Jungle Book, 1894; The Second Jungle Book, 1895), Kim (1901), the Just So Stories (1902) and many short stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" (1888). His poems include "Mandalay" (1890), "Gunga Din" (1890), "The Gods of the Copybook Headings" (1919), "The White Man's Burden" (1899), and "If—" (1910). He is seen as an innovator in the art of the short story.His children's books are classics; one critic noted "a versatile and luminous narrative gift".  Kipling in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was among the United Kingdom's most popular writers. Henry James said "Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known."In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, as the first English-language writer to receive the prize, and at 41, its youngest recipient to date. [6] He was also sounded out for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both.Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poets' Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.  The Jungle Book (1894) is a collection of stories by the English author Rudyard Kipling. Most of the characters are animals such as Shere Khan the tiger and Baloo the bear, though a principal character is the boy or "man- cub" Mowgli, who is raised in the jungle by wolves. The stories are set in a forest in India; one place mentioned repeatedly is "Seonee" (Seoni), in the central state of Madhya Pradesh.  A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering, as in the life of Mowgli, echoing Kipling's own childhood. The theme is echoed in the triumph of protagonists including Rikki-Tikki-Tavi and The White Seal over their enemies, as well as Mowgli's. Another important theme is of law and freedom; the stories are not about animal behaviour, still less about the Darwinian struggle for survival, but about human archetypes in animal form. They teach respect for authority, obedience, and knowing one's place in society with "the law of the jungle", but the stories also illustrate the freedom to move between different worlds, such as when Mowgli moves between the jungle and the village. Critics have also noted the essential wildness and lawless energies in the stories, reflecting the irresponsible side of human nature. Critics such as Harry Ricketts have observed that Kipling returns repeatedly to the theme of the abandoned and fostered child, recalling his own childhood feelings of abandonment. The novelist Marghanita Laski argued that the purpose of the stories was not to teach about animals but to create human archetypes through the animal characters, with lessons of respect for authority.   The stories were first published in magazines in 1893–94. The original publications contain illustrations, some by the author's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Rudyard Kipling was born in India and spent the first six years of his childhood there. After about ten years in England, he went back to India and worked there for about six and a half years. These stories were written when Kipling lived in Naulakha, the