CONTESTO STORICO LETTERATURA EPOCA VITTORIANA, Sintesi del corso di Lingue e letterature classiche

Scarica CONTESTO STORICO LETTERATURA EPOCA VITTORIANA e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingue e letterature classiche solo su Docsity! THE TERM VICTORIAN The word 'Victorian' derives from Queen Victoria who ruled from 1837 to 1901 and became the symbol of the nation. However, the Victorian Age is considered to have begun in 1832 with a great social achievement, the First Reform Act (provvide alla ridistribuzione dei seggi parlamentari fra le varie unità amministrative, eliminando parte dei rotten boroughs o riducendo la loro rappresentanza in favore delle contee o degli altri boroughs prima sottorappresentati. In tal modo si permetteva una più ampia rappresentazione dei nuovi centri industriali e con l’abbassamento del censo elettorale si garantiva l’accesso al voto ai ceti borghesi. ) THE VICTORIAN AGE - It was a complex and contradictory era. • On the one hand it was the age of progress and inventions, stability and great social reforms — The Victorian Age was not a period of political revolution. This is perhaps surprising for this was the age which saw the rise of revolutionary socialism in Europe. Friedrich Engels' father was the owner of a la rge textile factory in Manchester • On the other hand, it was also characterized by poverty, injustice and social unrest. It was an age of extremes and contradictions under a veneer of balance and respectability_. Moreover there were considerable scientific and technological developments. Britain's leading industrial and economical position in the world was symbolised by the Great Exhibition of 1851 where goods from all countries of the Empire as well as from all parts of Britain were exhibited. THE URBAN HABITAT By the middle of the century Britain had become a nation of town dwellers The government promoted an effective campaign to clean up the towns and modern hospitals were built. Other services were also introduced such as water, gas and lighting, paved roads, places of entertainment Other Victorian institutions: prisons, boarding schools, town halls, police stations, The age witnessed the expansion of the British Empire all over the word. British power extended into Asia (Ceylon, India), Africa (Egypt, Kenya, Sudan, Rhodesia) Central America and Oceania. Most British citizens were extremely proud of their empire and regarded colonial expansion as a mission KEY IDEAS • Utilitarianism The theory, which had been first promulgated by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748- 1832). Bentham maintained that a good criterion for judging human behaviour and society was that of "the greatest happiness of the greatest number" Darwinism In the middle phase of the Victorian Age scientific discoveries began to question the belief in a universe which was both stable and transparent to the intellect. Moral and religious certainties were deeply shaken by Charles Darwin's work On the Origin of Species (1859): man is the result of a process of evolution and in the fight for life only the strongest species survive > Darwin discared the version of the creation given by the Bible. VICTORIAN VALUES The Victorians Were great moralisers and promoted a set of values that reflected the world as they wanted it to be, not as it really was, based on personal duty, hard work, respectability and charity. The idea of respectability distinguished the middle from the lower class. It was a mixture of both morality and hypocrisy, severity and conformity to social standards. It implied the possession of good manners, the ownership of a comfortable house with servants a nd a carriage, regular attendance at church and charitable activity. --- iPhilantrophy was a wide phenomenon The family was a patriarchal unity where the husband represented the authority and the key role of women regarded the education of children and the management of the house. Victorian education was deeply concerned with female chastity Sexuality was generally repressed in its public and private forms, and prudery in its most extreme manifestations led to the denunciation of nudity in art and the rejection of words with sexual connotations from everyday vocabulary. LITERARY GENRES • religious literature • fiction • enciclopedie • newspapers • political commentary • criticism ALFABETIZZAZIONE: da 80.000 nel 1790 a 6000000 nel 1840 Reforms Act Victoria's reign (1827-1901) was an age of important reforms in the political and social fields. The three Reform Acts: * (1832) First Act abolished rotten boroughs, redistributed seats on a more equitable basis in the counties, and extended the right to vote to any man owning a household worth £10. For many conservatives, the effect of this act was revolutionary. * (1867) Reform Act extended the right to vote to all settled male tenants (the electors were two millions in England and Wales) and to all workers in towns and cities * (1884) The Act and the 1885 Redistribution Act tripled the electorate again, giving the right to vote to most agricultural labourers. Women weren't granted voting rights until the Act of 1918, which enfranchised all men over 21 and women over 30. This discrimination was eliminated in 1928 by the Equal Franchise Act which granted the right to vote to all adult women. The factory act reducing property qualification for the vote; 1869 1870 Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy published John Stuart Mill's On the Subjection of Women published Education Act makes elementary education available to all children in England and Wales First Married Women's Property Act: women gain right to their own wages earned after marriage Death of Charles Dickens 1871 ) Trade unions legalized Charles Darwin's Descent of Man published George Eliot's Middlemarch begins serial publication (volume publication 1872) 1880 Elementary education made compulsory from age seven to ten Death of GE 1900 1901 British Labour Party founded Victoria dies; Edward VII ascends to the throne Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last appointed scullery maid. We have them in our library, our drawing-rooms, our bed-rooms, our kitchens - and in our nurseries. Anthony Trollope, 18701 L'anno 1837 segna l'inizio ufficiale del genere Victorian Novel, proprio come l'anno della sua morte il 1800 1901 segna la fine di esso. Durante gli anni ciò che si sono chiesti gli autori era riguardo la natura morale estetica del novel. Se dovessero insegnare delle lezioni morali o educare i lettori curiosi riguardo una società che stava cambiando sempre di più oppure puntate ha una singolarità narrativa che poteva fornire una correlazione estetica per il realismo domestico che dominava la forma per il resto del periodo. Quello che noi identifichiamo con il termine Victorian riguarda la repressione sessuale la vita di famiglia delle middle-class è la vita delle donne Una delle riprese più importanti riguardante la novel è fatta da Henry James con la sua domanda provocativa: "What do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean}" nonostante Lui si lamentasse che mancava una forma estetica unificante lo stesso mostra va nelle sue opere la presenza di un'area di realtà la stessa che sarà ripresa da George Eliot in Adam Bede ad esempio producing an "illusion of life," George Eliot's narrator in Adam Bede (1859) vows "to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind . . . I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath. By monstrous James meant something imperfect, irregular, de-formed from an ideal shape or pattern. Facendo riferimento piu al contenuto che alla forma; i temi principali erano le condizioni di lavoro disumane l'uso del corpo della donna la manipolazione da parte degli uomini della fragilità femminile tutte cose che delle delineano delle deformazioni da un comportamento umano decente Il racconto Vittoriano manca di una certa economia parla di talmente tante cose: politica Provinciale problemi ecclesiastici squalore delle città sessualità repressa soldi perdere soldi avventure Imperiale angeli del focolare nuove donne che fanno paura sfide scientifiche che mette in discussione il credo religioso il valore e l'importanza della vita estetica in una società materialistica. Rise of Prose: Poetry gets left behind The premature death of the second generation of great Romantic poets-Keats in 1821, Shelley in 1822, Byron in 1824--only helped to produce such a situation. gli anni post romantici tra 1820s and 1830s diventarono una pausa nella letteratura inglese. It was a period which was bequeathed a Romantic model of feeling-in particular, the childhood love of nature rooted in the countryside-increasingly inappropriate to the changed social, industrial, and urban conditions of the later nineteenth century. Questi scrittori portarono nella prosa una nuova capacità di for personal voice, confessionale e conversazionale, che prima solo la poesia aveva to offer expression. Together these two attributes-voice and context-were to make for the dual language of the novel: --NUOVI CONTESTI E REALTA’: la prosa offriva un apolide writer al posto di essere cittadino del mondo romantico, un background ALTERNATIVO of a ldi una LINGUA PIU BASSA E CIRCOSTANZIALE CHE ESPRIMEVA the emotional experience amidst new context and changing condition The National Review (January (1859), W. R. Greg complained that the novel induced a comparative passivity of the brain by the addictive surrender to an ever ongoing mass of material. PASSIVITA DELLA MENTE RISPETTO A UNA MASSA DI MATERIALE IN CONTINUO SVILUPPO; The long novel offered a world of its own sufficiently close to the real world as to be, almost unthinkingly, a replacement for it. T E M I Dare voce e espressio ne in un nuovo contesto Questo perche la novel poteva fare cio che solo la poesia passata era stata capace di fare: nascondere la sua natura fittizia e creare mondi reali (hegel-- the novel produceva una prosa che non credeva piu nella poeticita dell universo ) La prosa non aveva un ordine innato o misure...mingle clay with gold Dickens univa comico al serio creando un nuovo sentimento: master della serializzazione A slower and more orchestrated way of reading a novel compared with the form in which we have the same novel nowadays as a ready whole, to be read in any size chunks His aim try to make a secure family out of the whole nation, an emotional state in which all the people felt the same thing at the same time. RISE OF REALISM--hugh miller 'Literature of the People (Essays, 1862), the rise of realism meant that the lower classes were no longer portrayed in literature as buffoons but were now treated with imaginative sym pathy. For two oppo site but mutually linked tendencies were going on at the same time, profession and even an industry; on the other, within those forms, a counter-tendency which internally recommitted art-in its content, in its urgency-to the service of the world outside. The dual responsibilities of art both to what it stood for in itself and to its external subject matter left Victorian writing in conscience-ridden occupa tion of an indeterminate area where the competing claims of life were held in tension. That tension found expression in a continuous variety of competing languages, of which the class issue was but one. Another, in which the issue could be rearticulated, lay in the defence of the provincial and the regional as against the central and cosmopolitan Dal punto di vista storico e demografico la popolazione inglese crebbe da 8.9 ha 32. 5 milioni Questo dipende da dove e come vivevano le persone: in molti lasciarono le aree rurali per spostarsi nella parte Nord e nelle Midlands che erano centri di industrializzazione. Le classi di lavoratori cominciare una battersi per il suffragio universale attraverso ladesione al movimento chartist. Questo e le depressioni economiche degli anni 30 degli anni 40 e le paure delle classi medie che la rivoluzione continentale potesse attraversare il canale portò a un dibattito Nazionale riguardo ciò che Thomas carlyle definì come the condition of England → Thomas Carlyle, Chartism del 38, si pone il problema delle working classes ignorata dalle classi più alte: prende spunto da quest opera la CONDITION OF ENGLAND NOVEL, Early victorian condition of england cercarono di essere un repertorio di coscienza sociale un ability to emphasize with unbearable social iniquities and injustices; arouse sympathies La letterat ura come arma di cambia mento vs come arte in se any purpose at all . . . help being modified by the ideas that pass through our minds."3 It was this belief, or rather the fear that, for some people, accompanied La censura era diventata meno pesante. Il grande successo del romanzo era dovuto a fattori economici infatti la crescita delle città poteva portare un mercato concentrato, lo sviluppo di lettori nelle colonie, i costi di produzione meno alti sia per la carta che per la stampa e anche una migliore promozione e advertising. Nel 1900 la percentuale dei letterati era 97,2% uomini e 96, 8% donne. C'era anche da dire che la maggior parte dei lavori adesso gli chiedeva una qualche abilità nel leggere e c'erano molti testi a basso costo che servivano ha piacere a coloro che avevano dei gusti poco sofisticati può avvenire letti ad alta voce. Il romanzo rappresentava anche un modo di svago dopo la giornata lavorativa Infatti lettore tutto ciò che chiedeva era di essere divertito. Fino alla fine del secolo i vittoriani non comprarono il loro romazo serio appena veniva pubblicato ma lo prendeva in prestito da librerie circulating. Per la maggior parte del secolo un romanzo costavano 31 scellini. charles edward Munie e le sue circolating libraries: 1852 si stablisice a oxford e chiede una guinea per 1 volume alla volta. Free public libraries were just beginning to multiply following the passing of the Edwart Act in 1850, and by 1850 there were 610 mechanics' institute libraries holding almost 700,000 volumes, circulating 1,820,000 a year. In addition, for one guinea a year Mudie's circulating library would allow subscribers to take out one volume at a time without limit. Questo fatto di far pagare per volume più che per titolo fu un fattore molto importante e mantenere il dominio del three Decker Fino a fine secolo Altro fattore importante era la ristampa di classici inglesi La disponibilità di romanzi popolari è uno dei fattori che mise pressione ai publishers a cambiare i loro prezzi: la gente ora voleva della letteratura buona a basso prezzo. Non tutti i nostri autori pubblicavano sotto forma di volumi ma attraverso dei seriali Dickens è un esempio di ciò Lewes pickwick papers- "even the common people, both in town and country, are equally intense in their admiration. But Dickens was symptomatic as a fiction publisher in another way. Editing two magazines - Household Words and All the Year Round - in which he published not just Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and Great Expectations (1860-61), but works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and others, Dickens facilitated a mode of publication which implicitly encouraged the reading of novels alongside other forms of writing. These different modes of publication exerted particular pressures on novelists, extending their stories in order to fill three volume s ; cutting and compressing in order to meet the space constraints of a magazine column; But in general, reading fiction was associated, above all, with the domestic Nuove forme I giornali Come modo Di far Conoscere le opere environment. THREE DECKER E MAGAZINES The demand for a happy ending, particularly one which was based on romance, endured throughout the nineteenth century. current vogue for "New Woman" fiction This is not a very dissimilar set of cliches to those against which George Eliot had protested forty years earlier in her 1856 Westminster Review article, "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." In what she characterises as the "mind-and-millinery species," "the heroine is usually an heiress, probably a peeress in her own right, with perhaps a vicious baronet, an amiable duke, and an irresistible younger son of a marquis as lovers in the foreground, a clergyman and a poet sighing for her in the middle distance, and a crowd of undefined adorers dimly indicated beyond."25 Such a heroine is intelligent, witty, eloquent, beautiful, and with an undefinable but surefire capacity of bewitching men. Increasingly, Eliot's own novels were structured to refuse her readers the kind of satisfaction promised by the works she attacks here. la fiction come un ESCAPISM: il romace was not the only type of escapism that fiction could offer. Other types of fiction developed which offered very different possibilities for readers to project themselves into a life more exciting than that which they actually inhabited. Throughout the period, there was a strong market for adventure fiction ostensibly aimed at a boys' market I readers potevano esplorare i mondi esotici delle colonie, ma non solo: The industrial fictions of Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, contain strong internal suggestions that here is a narrator familiar with the northern urban context which it is her task to present to the uninitiated. LA FICTION COME IDENTIFICAZIONE. si scherniva il bovarismo ma allo stesso tempo novels, can encourage forms of identification which are empowering, especially to women: allowing them to feel at the centre of their own lives. Reading is a curious activity. It is simultaneously a shared experience, and a highly private one. Whilst Victorians might discuss their reading with family or friends, join a reading circle based on the ideal of self-improvement, read literature according to syllabi prescribed by schools or, by the end of the century, by universities ,>POTEVA CONSOLIDARE IL SENSO DI APPARTENEZA A UN S ETTORE DELLA SOCIETA >RAFFORZARE NORME DI GENERE E RELIGIOSE rafforzava il legame con la vita di tutti i giorni : which could, in other words, confirm one's belief in the Avventura, nuovi luoghi Vivere come un romanzo security, Tightness, and communality of the life one led. On the other hand, >PERMETTEVA DI ESPLORARE IL RPOPRIO IO INTERIORE, >APRIRE LA MENTE A NUOVE ESPERIENZE, nel privato LA CRITICA LETTERARIA:The issue of taste and consumption, which necessarily is suggested by sales figures, was discussed in more depth in magazine articles. When books were few,' wrote Mill, 'to get through one was a work of time and labour. Now everything was speeded up, and reading matter itself became more ephemeral. Once newspaper tax had been reduced to a penny stamp in 1836, it was the production of newspapers and periodicals that drove the presses faster and faster. The mass entertainment industry in general began to boom: day trips by rail, theatre and music hall, pubs and pleasure gardens. The consumption of newspapers, periodicals, and books was part of that increase in leisure pursuits. The percentage of fiction amidst major books published rose from 16 per cent in the period from 1814 to 846 to nearly 25 per cent in the 1870s and 188os. By 188o approximately 380 new novels were appearing each year. The expanding market for reading matter DOVUTA A described as the middle class, TRA LA MIDDLE CLASS (of merchants and bankers, large employers of labour, and the higher professions such as law) and the ranks of working-class unskilled labour, therearose a particular section of the NUOVA middle class which doubled over thirty years. the professions-physicians, teachers, civil servants, and other professional or commercial white-collar workers- The largest increases were among those engaged in education, literature, and science (in partic ular, writers); in commerce; and at the lower end of this fluid and amorphous middle class) in trade. Some estimates indicate that during the second half of the century the average lower middle-class income may have risen in real terms by over 70 per cent. Skilled workers small shopkeepers and domestic servants added to the growth of demand for reading matter. PIU SOLDI—PIU DIVERTIMENTI—ESPANSIONE DEL MARKET DEI LIBRI But the new mass development that enlarged the market, or provided a second market, was the sale of the three-decker novel initially either in monthly shilling parts or serialized in the periodicals of the 185os and 186os. Nuove professio ni nella mid class ulterior purposes of premeditating how to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready- made judgments and watchwords'. • LA CULTURA Non OBBLIGAVA I LETTORI DELLE CLASSI BASSE A PENSARE IN UN CERTO MODO: LI AIUTAVA A PENSARE DA SE. Instead culture seeks to do away with classes', to make universally available the best that has been known and thought in the world'; for genuine literature, unlike dogma or ideology, seeks to find its way freely into the minds of what are thus individuals and not target groups • NON HA COME TARGET UN GRUPPO, MA INDIVIDUI This is the true social idea', he concludes, and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality' (ch. 1). Evangelicals, Utili tarians, and radical journalists in the first half of the century were often suspicious of literature. But it was the Arnoldian idea of liberal >self-education that became ever-increasingly throughout the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the inspiration of working class efforts at cultural betterment and >mental independence. As Arnold put it in his preface to Literature and Dogma (1873), culture means getting the power through reading, to estimate the proportion and relation in what we read. If we read but very little, we naturally want to press it all, it we read a great deal, we are willing not to press the whole of what we read.' Culture here is not Carlyle's single-minded hero-worship; it is instead, in its sheer width and flexibility of experience, the subtler capacity for what Arnold called 'returning upon oneself. In other words, • VOLEVA CREARE UNA CRITICAL MIND CHE POTEVA VOLTASI VERSO SE STESSA, VEDERE I PROPRI LIMI NEL MENTRE LEGGE E AMMIRA a criti cal mind could bear to turn round upon itself and see limitations in the midst of what it admires, as well as possibilities within what it might otherwise instinctively reject. EDUCATION SISTEM: >LE SCUOLE SECONDARIE, taking education beyond the elementary stage and leading onto university levelSOLO PER UNA MINORITA, were for the fee-paying middle and upper classes and were E SENZA AIUTO STATALE O REGOLAZIONE. >But the only state-aided schools in the nineteenth century were 'elementary' schools, offering bare training in the basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic to the children of the labouring poor for at most six years, before they commenced work at an age between to and 13. Rudimentary institutions for teacher-training were established in the 1830s. >DAL 1870 ANDARE A SCUOLA DIVENNE OBBLIGATORIO after Forster's national Education Act of 1870. I t was the second Reform Act of 1867 with its increased momentum towards universal democracy that finally prompted >the national educational reforms of the 1870s, >Introduzione di lett. Inglese nel syllabus elementari: come centro di interesse Dal letterato vate di Carlyle al potere della cultura Trench( study of words) Words are living powers, he helped Bronte with her writing. >1859 English entra come subject ---------------------------------------------------------- New WOMAN WRITER:'Millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows', cries Charlotte Bronte's protagonist, "how many rebellions besides political rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth' (Jane Eyre (1847), premessa: L’ascesa della classe borghese aveva consentito sin dagli anni antecedenti all’incoronazione della regina Vittoria alla “middle class” di dare un’educazione di buon livello alla propria prole. Le donne appartenenti a tale ceto avevano la possibilità di apprendere a leggere e scrivere (per poter conversare), suonare il piano (per intrattenere gli ospiti) e imparare un po’ di francese (per eventuali viaggi). Il tempo libero veniva dedicato a leggere grazie anche alla possibilità di usufruire di volumi prestati dalle locali biblioteche o grazie ai romanzi pubblicati come inserto in quotidiani e riviste. La possibilità di “respirare” cultura consentì così a molte scrittrici di sviluppare il proprio talento letterario nonostante i numerosi veti imposti loro dalla società dell’epoca. The advent of female literature PROMETTEVA UN PUNTO DI VISTA FEMMINILE SULLA VITA, UN ESPERIENZA DI DONNA,' declared G. H. Lewes; 'In other words, UN NUOVO ELEMENTO' ('The Lady Novelists', Westminster Review, July 1852). Distincion of married and unmarried: When you are forty, and if you have a gift for being an authoress you will write ten times as good a novel as you could do now, just because you will have gone through so much more of the interests of a wife and a mother. That was why it was Mrs Gaskell, Mrs Oliphant: the realist novel came out of their being wives and mothers. It was domestic realism, its compromise and its uniqueness, in its privileging of experience in over abstract reason, that was the characteristic mode for the woman water who had found and made a home in the world By 1851 1 mil women remained unmarried It did not just concern women. The emotional capacity in all human beings, male and female, said Ruskin in Sesame and Lilies (1864), QUALCOSA DI PIU AMPIO LA LETTERATURA OFFRIVA UNA SOCIETA ALTERNATIVA and in thatUN MONDO INTERIORE a reader who read well would enter NON SOLO NEI PENSIERI DI UN QUALCHE GRANDE AUTORE authors but I SENTIMENTI LEGATI A QUEI PENSIERI, CONDIVIDENDO LE PROPRIE PASSIONI in order to know them fully: Passion or "sensation". with we do not execute, we mimic in the novel and on stage SYM PAT HY Yet it was not just a matter of the society of books. ERANO LE DONNE, said Ruskin, as the traditional biological guardians of human care, CHE AVREBBERO RIPORTARO LA REALTA DELLE SENSAZIONI UMANE IN INGHILTERRA E DELLE PASSIONI. Within the alternative inner society of their marriages, they were to act as agents of humanity, in critical relation to husbands all too often entangled in the ways of the world of business. The distinct but complementary characteristics of the sexes existed not just for the matching of two persons but to marry together the different sides of human nature itself in an ever revitalized whole. Yet to Ruskin's insistence that it was upon women that the human instincts of the nation now largely depended, John Stuart Mill retorted acidly, They are declared to be better than men; an empty compliment, which must provoke a bitter smile from every woman of spirit, since there is no other situation in life in which it is the established order, and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better should obey the worse' (The Subjection of Women (1869), ch. 3). To Mill it seemed that women were being asked to carry the burden of men's feelings, not their own. Literature itself shows Victorian women struggling with their so-called 'natural' guardian ship of love, in all the anxiety of either feeling too much or feeling too little. the nineteenth-century novel itself, with all its specificities, is nonetheless the great 'undefined' genre-in its capacity to contain all indefinites within its holding ground. There is no species of art which is so free from rigid requirements,' said George Eliot of the novel in 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists' (The Westminster Review, October 1856); 'Like crystalline masses, it may take any form. LA GOLDEN AGE DELLA WOMAN WRITER: With such openings and questionings, the Victorian age is of course the golden age, the renaissance, of the woman writer: to match Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Tennyson, and Robert Browning, there are George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, and the Brontës, as well as Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Paradossalmente, è stata la consapevolezza recentemente accresciuta degli svantaggi delle donne istruite della classe media che ha posto tali donne, come scrittrici, all'avanguardia della letteratura vittoriana. Questo era precisamente perché per le donne i problemi generali ottocenteschi del sentimento, della finalità e della ridondanza erano tanto più freschi e intimamente acuti, e perché il romanzo, la nuova forma letteraria per la loro espressione, era allo stesso tempo appropriato e disponibile per la scrittrice. . Dorothea Brooke struggling within the mundane context of Middle march by embodying thoughts and aspirations they could not