The English Novel and Its Influential Authors: Defoe and Swift, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica The English Novel and Its Influential Authors: Defoe and Swift e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! English Literature: from James I to the Industrial Revolution History. ☼ John Donne (first half of the 17th century): religious poetry, composed a collection of poems called the Holy Sonnet. ☼ John Milton (beginning of the 17th century): poet, protestant, wrote two very long epic and religious poems about biblical events and characters: Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. THE 17TH CENTURY. ☂ James I: first Stuart king of England. He believed in the theory of being king by divine right and that as a monarch, he was the representative of God on earth (Jacobite). He governed upon two kingdoms (Scotland and England), but never united them under the same parliament (no United Kingdom). Under his reign happened the Gunpowder Plot, a plot led by Catholics to blow up the Parliament. The plotters were found and executed before. ☂ 1620: the Pilgrim Fathers, religious dissenters who had first taken shelter in Holland, left England for America on the Mayflower and founded Plymouth in Massachusetts. ☂ Charles I: > Civil War > Royal Army VS Cavaliers (Parliament’s Army, puritans (progressive people with strict ideas)). The royal army lose. > Monarchy was abolished and the king was sent to prison and executed (1649) ☂ England becomes a republic: Cromwell became the leader of the new republic, called Commonwealth Cromwell called himself the “Lord Protector” (protectorate), but he was more of a tyran. He was supported by his party, the Cavaliers. As a puritan with strict values, he closed all the theatres because they were considered immoral ☂ In 1660 Charles II restored the monarchy. He was called the “Merry Monarch”. We can say he was a reaction after the restrictions of the Puritans Age. But his reign hasn’t been very lucky: > 1665: the plague > 1666: the Great Fire of London > The Royal Society was found and patronized by the king himself > Was built the St. Paul Scafiro Cathedral, the Dome of London from the architect Cristopher Wren, member of the Royal Society, who was personally patronized by the king ☂ James II. The last Catholic king, divine right. He prosecuted the protestants and was hated by most of the people. ☂ So the Parliament called William D’Orange, James’s protestant daughter, Mary, husband, half Dutch and half British, to take the throne. As he came with his army, he encountered no resistance, and took the throne with the Glorious blood-less Revolution. ☂ William D’Orange: > Bill of Rights (1689): gives more rights to the Parliament; now the Parliament prevents over the king > Not king by divine right, but by Parliament’s choice ☂ Queen Anne: > The last Stuart > In 1707 with the ACT OF UNION merged England and Scotland together under the same Parliament of Westminster, birth of the United Kingdom of Britain > Battles against the French for the expansion of trades. > Many miscarriages > Died in 1714 with no heir ☂ George I: > Didn’t speak english > Lived in GB very little, while he was away Sir Robert Walpole governed on his behalf (was very criticized by Swift and Defoe) ☂ Coffee Houses: There, for the price of a cup of coffee, you could read the latest pamphlets, catch up on news and gossip, attend scientific lectures, strike business deals, or chat with likeminded people about literature or politics. The coffee houses that sprang up across Europe, starting around 1650, functioned as information exchanges for writers, politicians, businessmen and scientists. Coffee houses were centres of scientific education, literary and philosophical speculation, commercial innovation and, sometimes, political fermentation. As with modern websites, the coffee houses you went to depended on your interests. Discussions in coffee houses inspired a new, more colloquial and less ponderous prose style, conversational in tone and clearly visible in the journalism of the day. Plus, middle-class people were not illiterate anymore. THE 18TH CENTURY.  Golden or Augustan age -> the art of pleasing (simplicity and moderation)  Deliberate rejection of extremism in all its forms  Newspapers/periodicals: The Review (Defoe), The Spectator  Optimistic view of the natural world  Enlightenment:  Diderot’s Encyclopédie  Characterized by faith in reason in order to achieve happiness  Important people: John Locke and Isaac Newton  Enlightened thinkers aimed at discovering the original natural state, since what is natural is also rational Interest in exotic civilisation -> encouraged explorations  Experimental method -> new discoveries in science thanks to the rationalistic and scientific spirit Isaac Newton: member of the Royal Society (that carried out very strange experiments), discovered the gravitational force and the laws of gravitation and motion of planets. John Locke: member of the Royal Society, concept of Tabula Rasa (a blank state on which morals, values and beliefs are defined by environment and experience, NOT INHERITED.  Restoration of theatres  The comedy of manner= excited laughter by making fun of the manners and absurdities of an artificial, highly sophisticated society. Theme of marriage and extramarital affairs, devoid of any feelings, but mainly linked to sex and money (superficial issues).  Growing interest in reading, but books were expensive and a luxury the lower classes couldn’t afford.  Encouraging rise of the prose and poetry becomes less important.  Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson are regarded as the fathers of the English novel. Richardson’s «Pamela or Virtue Rewarded»: epistolary novel. The book is about a servant who fights against a nobleman’s sex assaults. He kidnaps her. She remains virgin the entire book until the end, when she falls in love with the rapist and marries him (stocholm syndrome). completed and that he has made a considerable fortune. After donating a portion to the widow and his sisters, Crusoe is restless and considers returning to Brazil, but he is dissuaded by the thought that he would have to become Catholic. He marries, and his wife dies. Crusoe finally departs for the East Indies as a trader in 1694. He revisits his island, finding that the Spaniards are governing it well and that it has become a prosperous colony. Riassunto del libro. The main character in Defoe’s novel is Robinson Kreutznaer, anglicised Crusoe, born in York in 1632of a German father and an English mother. At the age of 19 he decides to leave his home, his family and the prospect of a comfortable life as a member of the trading middle class in order to travel around the world and make his fortune. His first voyage leads him to Guinea and then back to England. During his second voyage he is captured by Moorish pirates but manages to escape; he is finally rescued by a Portuguese ship and brought to Brazil. There he becomes the owner of a plantation and, needing more labour, sets out on a voyage to Africa to get more slaves. During this journey he is shipwrecked on a desert island where he will remain for 28 years. The rest of the novel tells how he gradually re-builds the same kind of society as exists in his country. He writes a diary where he records his experiences and debates contemporary ideas addressing himself, the reader and even God. After 12 years of solitude he finds a human footprint on the shore. As time goes by, he also finds some human bones and flesh left by cannibals. Once Robinson decides to attack them: they escape and leave one of their captives, whom he calls Friday, after the day of his rescue. When other cannibals land on the island, Robinson and Friday attack them and free two of their prisoners, one of whom turns out to be Friday’s father. The novel ends with Robinson’s return to England and his discovery that his plantation in Brazil has prospered and made him very rich. The travels:  1st trip: he his shipwrecked by a storm but manages to go back to London;  2nd trip: London ---> Guinea ---> London  3rd trip: London ---> Morocco ---> Brazil The second voyage does not prove as fortunate: the ship is seized by Moorish pirates, and Crusoe is enslaved to a potentate in the North African town of Sallee. While on a fishing expedition, he and a slave boy break free and sail down the African coast. A kindly Portuguese captain picks them up, buys the slave boy from Crusoe, and takes Crusoe to Brazil. A kindly Portuguese captain picks them up, buys the slave boy from Crusoe, and takes Crusoe to Brazil. In Brazil, Crusoe establishes himself as a plantation owner and soon becomes successful.  4th trip: Brazil ---> Africa ---> island eager for slave labor and its economic advantages, he embarks on a slave-gathering expedition to West Africa but ends up shipwrecked off of the coast of Trinidad. He will remain on the island 28 years. Robinson’s character: The hero, Robinson, belongs to the middle class, he is restless and wants to find his own identity as an alternative to the model provided by his father. Robinson has a pragmatic and individualistic outlook. His objective and rational approach to reality is demonstrated by his journal-keeping. > Friday represents the colonised. Religion: Robinson Crusoe is full of religious references to God and can be read as a spiritual autobiography: conflict between spiritual salvation and economic motivations. I was born of a good family, pag. 203. 1. What is the name of the narrator? Is that his real name? It is Robinson Crusoe. No, his real name is Robinson Kreutznaer, turned into Crusoe because of the English ‘corruption of words’. 2. What are the place and time references like? They are realistic and detailed. 3. Focus on the hero. A What education did he receive? A ‘competent share of learning’; his father wanted him to become a lawyer. B What were his real interests? Going to sea and travelling. C Did his father approve of them? Why? No, he did not, because he had the chance to improve his social condition by application and work. He also thought that the ‘middle state’ was the best of all. 4. What perspective does the first-person narration introduce? It introduces a biographical perspective. 5. How would you define Defoe’s style? It is simple and matter-of-fact. 6. Can you perceive the writer’s aim in this first page of the novel? He wants to exalt the middleclass man: « He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprize, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me, or too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life, which he had found by long experience was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings, of the mechanick part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by one thing, viz of life which all other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable consequences of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this as the just standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches » Jonathan Swift.  Born in 1667 in Dublin from English Dissenters parents. The family returned to England.  Patron: Sir William Temple, who encouraged him to write his first satirical works  Most famous works: The Battle of the Books, A Tale of a Tub  His periodical: the Examiner, where he supported Tories and criticized kings and queens policies  Returns to Ireland and become an Anglican priest  Lived in Dublin for the next 30 years in indignant opposition to the Whig government in London, defending Ireland and the Church.  Then, changed his political views  Writes the Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, a provocative novel in which Swift suggested that the poverty of the Irish people should be relieved by the sale of their childern as food for the rich.  Decay of mental faculties: becomes mad. Dies in 1745. GULLIVER’S TRAVELS, Jonathan Swift. Riassiunto di Viola. Jonathan Swift was born of English parents in Dublin (Irish), he then lived in England and in 1713 became Dean of St. Patrick cathedral. He is well known for his satirical style which exposes the political, religious and moral issues of his time. His view is explained by the fact that between 1710 and 1714 he acted as public relations officer for the Tory administration of Robert Harley. As an editor he had written against Whigs policies and personalities, and when, after Queen Anne’s death, Whigs returned to power they prosecuted him for his public contributions to the Tory cause. “Gulliver’s Travels” was published for the first time as “travels into several remote nations of the world” in 1726. The book is narrated by Lemuel Gulliver in first person. He is a typical middle class European: he is well educated, honest, he runs his business carefully, he is a surgeon and a practical seaman and supports his nation. Through this character Swift implies that the moral transformation he has during his four trips is natural and doesn’t depend on his eventual extravagation. Book 1: On this voyage, Gulliver goes to the sea as a surgeon on the merchant ship, Antelope. The ship is destroyed during a heavy windstorm, and Gulliver, the only survivor, swims to a nearby island, Lilliput. Being exhausted, he falls asleep. Upon awakening he discovers that has been tied up by strings by the inhabitants of the island who are not more than 6 inches tall. They try to communicate with him and give him food and wine. When they understand that he has no intention to attack them, they decide to take him to the capital. At his arrive the king greats him and let him stay in a big unused temple. He learns the language and became friend of the imperator who tells him about this nation. During his stay Gulliver discovers that the Lilliputian political system is a monarchy ruled by an emperor, and the ministers who support him rise to power through their ability to perform complicated and dangerous rope dances. Swift's model for Flimnap, the most dexterous of the rope dancers, was Robert Walpole, the leader of the Whigs. In Lilliput, political affiliation splits between men who wear high-heeled shoes, the Tramecksans who support Lilliput's constitution and the Emperor, and men who wear low-heeled shoes, the Slamecksans who are in power. The Emperor will only put low heels into high office in his government, regardless of the abilities or qualifications of the high heels. And the Emperor's son wears one high and one low heel, so no one knows where he stands. The two Lilliputian parties stand for English political parties. The High Heels represent Tories; the Low Heels, Whigs. The king was sympathetic to the Whigs as the Lilliputian emperor, he wears low heels. Later George II, surrounded himself with members of both parties. As the emperor’s son who wears one high and one low heel. He also discovers that Lilliput from a couple of generations is fighting a war against Blefuscu about which end should be cracked of a boiled egg. The story goes that, apparently, when this Emperor's grandfather was a child, he cut himself when he cracked a boiled egg on its big end. Following this accident, the current Emperor's great-grandfather imposed that Lilliputians must crack the eggs at the little end. This change gave rise to rebellions and some Lilliputians took refuge in Blefuscu. Politically, Blefuscu stands for France and Lilliput for England. The war between the two over the religious question of egg-breaking symbolizes the long series of wars between Catholic France and Protestant England. Gulliver describes the general customs and practices of Lilliput in more detail, beginning by explaining that everything in Lilliput is sized in proportion to the Lilliputians. They are well educated, but their writing system is from one corner of the page to the other, “like the ladies in England.” The dead are buried with their heads pointing directly downward, because the Lilliputians believe that eventually the dead will rise again and that the Earth, which they think is flat, will turn upside down. Gulliver describes some of the other laws of Lilliput, such as a tradition by which anyone who falsely accuses someone else of a crime against the state is put to death. Deceit (=inganno) is considered worse than theft (=furto), because honest people are more vulnerable to liars than to