Breve riassunto sulla letteratura in età Vittoriana, Appunti di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Breve riassunto sulla letteratura in età Vittoriana e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Victorian Literature The English culture of the 19th century is in a phase of transition of history and culture and this causes the great complexity and contradictions of the Victorian society. When Victoria became queen, in 1837, English literature seemed to have entered upon a period of lean years, in marked contrast with the poetic fruitfulness of the Romantic age. Victorian writers wrote works with scenes of profound crisis that affected society, filled with doubt and fear of the unknown, in stark contrast to the development of industry, commerce and science. England entered upon a new free period, in which every form of literature, from pure romance to gross realism, struggled for expression. First, though the age produced many poets, nevertheless this is emphatically an age of prose. And since the number of readers has increased a thousand-fold with the spread of popular education, it is the age of the newspaper, the magazine, and the modern novel, and also the story of the world’s daily life, is the pleasantest form of literary entertainment, as well as our most successful method of presenting modern problems and ideals. Literature, both in prose and in poetry, seems to depart from the purely artistic standard, of art for art’s sake, and to be actuated by a definite moral purpose in Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle, Ruskin. It is spoken of also as an age lacking in great ideals. Tennyson’s work, like that of the minor poets, is sometimes in a doubtful or despairing strain. The great essayists, like Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin, and the great novelists, like Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, generally leave us with a larger charity and with a deeper faith in our humanity. In every case, the Victorian Age was, on the whole, the noblest and most inspiring in the history of the world. Social economic progress leads to an increase in the level of literacy and creates a higher demand for the use of culture. It increases the production of magazines that offer space to intellectuals who, in the form of articles or short essays, denounce the evils of society and monthly publications, but also weekly, where the serial novel is stated. This literary form offers the middle class a mirror in which it can reflect triumphantly and at the same time denounces the dysfunctions, with the aim of promoting the improvement of an accepted social structure. The intent of this type of literature is the programmatic entertainment summarized effectively in the formula "make'em laugh, make'em cry, make'em wait" devised by Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), considered the father of the detective novel. The Novel For the various conditions that favoured its diffusion and, at the same time, the attainment of a high artistic level, the novel was the most successful genre of Victorian literature, the genre in which the age is recognized. The rise of the bourgeoisie and the greater circulation of books, thanks to the libraries that hired the volumes at low prices, but also the publication of the novels in instalments in the most popular weekly magazines contributed to the dissemination of the novels. The novel breaks away from romantic influence, and first studies life as it is, and then points out what life may and ought to be. Whether we read the fun and sentiment of Dickens, the social miniatures of Thackeray, or the psychological studies of George Eliot, we find in almost every case a definite purpose to sweep away error and to reveal the underlying truth of human life. So, the novel sought to do for society in this age precisely what Lyell and Darwin sought to do for science, that is, to find the truth, and to show how it might be used to uplift humanity. Becoming the leading literary genre by the end of the era, the main aesthetic voice of the city, we can denote a multiform system of various subgenres: historical, psychological, social, philosophical, sentimental and adventurous. Born as a bourgeois genre in the eighteenth century, it naturally found in the Victorian society, dominated by the middle class, a fertile field of development, to which was added the important factor of the increase of readers, due to the publication of novels in episodes in magazines and newspapers, literacy, the increase in the number of libraries and the fact that the genre became economically advantageous for writers. The publication of stories with episodes of one or two chapters at a time in the various monthly or bi-monthly periodicals at the time, makes it accessible to large sections of the population, which adopts it as the privileged entertainment that offers fun, escape and consolation. In fact, the audience preferred stories that realistically portrayed life and at the same time constituted a possible escape from daily squalor. For their part, Victorian novelists shared the same values, principles and vision of the world of their audience. When writers criticized this society, it was never directly against the institutions but against individuals, thus leaving always the conviction of a possible solution, with the "salvation" of the good and the "punishment" of the bad. It makes then, its debut above all on the sensational element and on the suspense on which every serial publication is based, with a declared didactic intent aimed at imparting the moral of good feelings and irreproachable life which the whole nation, including the novelist, recognizes. It turns out to be an instrument of enormous success and a ductile narrative machine that bends the "realism" of the representation to the different needs of the authors: it appears humorous, sentimental and grotesque, while preserving the provocation of social novel in Dickens; becomes a comedy of costume in Thackeray, it mixes with gothic in the Brontë sisters, becomes voice of ethical teaching and exploration of the relationship between man and society, appearing, even if timidly, to the world of memory and interiority, in George Eliot, the tones of a relentless determinism and an aura of Greek tragedy in Hardy, but also cultivates the mystery, the fantastic and the ambiguity. The publication of novels in England from the Mid-Nineteenth century until the beginning of the Twentieth century, was undoubtedly a costly undertaking, too expensive for all budget of ordinary people. The circulating libraries of the "Mudie's Select Library" remedied to this difficulty: almost a third of the volumes in the library included novels. Most of the subscribers came from the bourgeoisie, since the cost of the subscription was relevant. In addition to the publication in three volumes, there were other types of disclosure of the novel: more affordable forms that were serialized weekly at the cost of a penny (known the case of Charles Dickens who chose a mode of publication monthly; Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope followed the Dickens path). After the first edition in three volumes, the novel could come out with a much lower price. The wide-readership became increasingly. There was a decrease in illiteracy. Reading novels became more and more a shared need, as a way of escape and refuge from an often-oppressive reality. Thus, the desire to control, censor and "guide" readers was manifested. Meredith, Hardy, Gissing, More, met with Mudie's censorship. Lytton advised Dickens to change the original conclusion of Great Expectations; Hardy found himself in the same difficulty with the audience that will be the research for a poem of experimentation and maximum objectivity through the form of the dramatic monologue, in which a character speaks to an alleged listener who never intervenes, dumb but essential. Browning's dramatic monologues represent a historical personality who defines himself through the self-discovery of the character, making him talk in a dialogue without ever recovering the answer. His poetry opened up new perspectives to English poetry, psychologically delving into characters without falling into hypocrisy. His most famous work was The Ring and The Book (1869). The idea came to him when in Florence he found on a stand a file (Old Yellow Book), which reported the procedural documents relating to two murders that took place in Rome in 1600. The grim story suggested to Browning the interpretation of the various protagonists. With the concealment of the poetic ego, he achieves his most complete expression. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning is remembered above all for her romantic wedding with escape in Italy with her husband Robert Browning. Her poetry is endowed with a strong emotion. She gave her sentimental support to humanitarian causes, denouncing the sufferings suffered by children in the industrial society. She also extolled the cause of Italian freedom and in the Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) talks about the love story between her and her husband, written in the form of a sonnet, with education of both the mind and the emotions. The Poets of the Doubt In the verses of Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) speaks the voice of the Victorian intellectual, restless and sensitive, absorbed in his own doubts and in reflection on the crisis of faith and on the meaning of human existence. The dominant theme of his poetry is desolation in the face of the void of modern life. He had a romantic attraction for folk tales and legends, and above all an inclination for solitary meditations in evocative landscapes where every anguish finds a momentary stillness, born from the contemplation of nocturnal calm. Like Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861), represents the type of the Victorian intellectual tormented and tending to the vain search for absolute moral and metaphysical certainties, with irony and anarchy of the system. His figure and work are more interesting for the history of ideas than literature. In James Thomson (1834-1882), on the other hand, poetry arises from the personal experiences of an unhappy and troubled life, marked by vice and poverty. In his The City of Dreadful Night (1874) dominates the melancholy, the emblem of despair, and an expression of bleak pessimism in an alienating urban environment. Pre-Raphaelite poets The Pre-Raphaelites originally were a group of painters. Subsequently they were a group of poets (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) a hinge between the post-romantic period or Victorianism, and the successive one of the Aestheticism of the second half of the nineteenth century. Their poetry is based on anguish and restlessness, as well as criticism of industrialism. It professed his faith in the simplicity and accuracy of details with ties of painting and poetry, and Dante's readings and of the first Italians lyrical. The poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) belonging to the first phase of his production in fact, was often approached to the compositions of the first Italian lyricists and especially to Dante Alighieri. Over the years Rossetti seems more inspired by Renaissance and Medieval portraits. The female figure becomes the privileged subject of the poems as in the paintings, especially the face, creating a plot in which life is dominated by art and art has the place of life. In reality, both the two arts are born from the same inspiration, from a restless personality, interweaving between matter and spirit, love and death. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) sister of Dante Gabriel, in all his work, was crossed by a deep religious faith and awareness of the fleetingness of existence, from an expectation of death and an aspiration to detach herself from the things of the world. William Morris (1834-1896) was characterized for his versatility and the many interests that extend from art to politics and society. Passionate about the Middle Ages and Arthurian legends, he also was inspired the Nordic sagas in The Earthly Paradise (1870 with homage to Chaucer). He identified the unmissable aspiration to beauty with medieval art in contrast to the horrors of industrial civilization. He is also considered one of the founding fathers of English socialism. Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909), a close friend of Rossetti, rebellious nature, has many ties with the Pre-Raphaelites but also with all the complex cultural currents of his time that influenced his entire literary production. He had a passion for the Elizabethan theatre and for Greek dramatists and lyricists, as well as for avant-garde French literature. Swinburne imposed himself with poems considered immoral, almost blasphemous and erotic. His poetry, of rare rhythmic and metric virtuosity, is nevertheless considered lacking in content, but some of his lyrics are among the best in English literature. Swinburne was very versatile and prolific, his vast production includes also drama, literary criticism, a novel and a series of works considered pornographic and therefore subjected to censorship, as "dangerous for public morality”. His production of works on political subjects is also vast, given his impatience with every constraint and the urgency to challenge the prejudices of his time, for example in the A Song for Italy (1867 with Mazzini's ideals). Poets of the Religious Crisis (The Movement of Oxford) The Oxford Movement or "Tractarian Movement" was nothing more than the theological parallel of the Pre-Raphaelites, and supported the need to strengthen that part of the Anglican church closer to Roman Catholicism, indicating an institution of divine origin in the church. Among these poets was Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), precursor of Twentieth century poetry. Converted to Catholicism, his poetry was marked by the conflict between aesthetic aspirations and rigorous religious faith, affirmed and professed. He can be considered one of the most daringly experimental and innovative poets of the Anglo-Saxon literature and has been fully recognized as a great experimenter and innovator of poetic language and metric. The last Victorians Man of his time George Meredith (1828-1909) is best known as a novelist as a poet. He had a predilection for the satirical themes, or the despair and the sense of loss suffered by man, thanks to the acute analysis of moods. Robert Bridges (1844-1930) was attracted to Greek mythology. His poetry was elegiac and meditative traversed by the joy of living. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) as Meredith, is more famous as a novelist than a poet. Known even today by a large audience thanks to the transposition of its novels in the cinema, it is pervaded by a gloomy pessimism even in poetry. Victorian Theatre The Nineteenth century is a turning point thanks to a huge increase in spectators and the spread of a large number of spectacular genres: from melodrama, extravagance, to the music hall, which transformed the theatrical performance into a real mass culture phenomenon. A further turning point was then represented by the promulgation in 1843 of the Theater Licensing Act, which gave greater autonomy to the local authorities free to grant licenses. Victorian theatrical production, although many writers have ventured there, however appears rather insignificant. Authors continued to revisit Shakespeare, to translate French dramas, and to put on stage pièces marked by bourgeois drama or popular melodrama and operettas, some very successful. Victorian London witnessed a progressive proliferation of theatres. To embody this important phenomenon was Queen Victoria herself who, thanks to her passion for theatre, undertook to support it throughout her long reign. Successful authors in this period are Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Melodrama and pantomime One of the most representative genres of the English 1800 was melodrama. During the Victorian period, it used the stereotypes of the hero and heroine and schematically opposed vice and virtue, rewarding good with evil, without any doubt it had the merit of being able to entertain the bourgeois spectator and provide the exponent. of the working class a moralistic representation of reality. Melodrama was always accompanied by music. Among the many popular genres we can also remember burlesque, a sort of comic play that used to play games and dramas of the wealthy classes, or pantomimes, mixed prose shows, music, dance and fabulous stage effects. Alongside their own true theatres, the so-called music halls proliferated exponentially, born as public places for men only where they drank wine standing near the counter. After the deregulation of 1843 they became real halls built next to the bar even if they remained always strictly popular. The theatre of ideas is a new type of theatre that had to renew the old schemes of the previous Victorian theatre and be a guide for the conscience, an armour against stupidity and an elevation of man. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) is an authoritative representative, he departed from the observation of the crisis of the English theatre of the second half of 1800 and the need to give it a new function, working on an innovation such as moving the centre of the drama in the debate ideas that aimed to engage and develop the viewer's awareness. He made a dramaturgy literarily researched and ideologically provocative, and he had a vision of a new theatre that placed the problems of bourgeois society at the centre, commenting and criticizing them. The theatre in substance could no longer be entertainment or evasion, but denounces the contradictions of the conventional and hypocritical values of the English society of the time, placing the importance of the subject matter at the centre of public attention. In its second collection, Shaw dealt with the theme of "romantic follies", that is the false ideals that prevent individuals from understanding the real values of life. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) wrote brilliant plays. His theatre expresses a precise ideological position. Being above all a great, profound observer of life, ruthless towards the conventional conventions and lies of the modern world, which especially in his time, dominated British society, apparently in harmony with the society drama, had a decisive weight in breaking the patterns of Victorian England. In fact, he inserts the social polemic through ironic jokes, the wit, more paradoxical