From the 17TH CENTURY to the 19TH CENTURY, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica From the 17TH CENTURY to the 19TH CENTURY e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! THE 17TH CENTURY The 17th century was a time of great religious and political conflict in England and religious themes were particularly important. The end of the century saw the subordination of literature of political ends, and the success of great verse satirists. The Restoration drama, in spite of being quite different from the Elizabethan, was alive and popular. The 17th century was characterized by a great emphasis on order and rules. The influence of the classical tradition led to a love of moderation and good taste. Very appropriately the first half of the century was called the “Neoclassical Period”, or the “Augustan Age”, referring to great literary output during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. Another name for the same period is also “The Age of Reason”, because the writers tended to reject imagination and exalted reason. Prose became increasingly important. The period saw a great development of the essay and the birth of the novel, which provided reading material for a rapidly expanding public. In the early 17th century, although there were poets who continued to follow the smooth and elegant tradition of the Elizabethans, others – the Metaphysical Poets – attempted a more serious, argumentative type of poetry. They wrote intellectual poems, full of imagery based on allusions to religion, philosophy and geography. LIBERALISM Liberalism is a political philosophy or worldview founded on ideas of liberty and equality Liberalism first became a distinct political movement during the Age of Enlightenment, when it became popular among philosophers and economists in the Western world. Liberalism rejected the notions, common at the time, of hereditary privilege, state religion, absolute monarchy, and the Divine Right of Kings. The 17th-century philosopher John Locke is often credited with founding liberalism as a distinct philosophical tradition. Locke argued that each man has a natural right to life, liberty and property, while adding that governments must not violate these rights based on the social contract. Liberals opposed traditional conservatism and sought to replace absolutism in government with representative democracy and the rule of law. Prominent revolutionaries in the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution used liberal philosophy to justify the armed overthrow of what they saw as tyrannical rule. Liberalism started to spread rapidly especially after the French Revolution. The 19th century saw liberal governments established in nations across Europe, South America, and North America. In this period, the dominant ideological opponent of classical liberalism was conservatism, but liberalism later survived major ideological challenges from new opponents, such as fascism and communism. During the 20th century, liberal ideas spread even further as liberal democracies found themselves on the winning side in both world wars. In Europe and North America, the establishment of social liberalism became a key component in the expansion of the welfare state. Today, liberal parties continue to wield power and influence throughout the world. Puritan Poetry The 17th century saw the powerful presence of a literary giant, John Milton, second only to Shakespeare as a poet. He had a very important role in political and religious life of his time, and his poetry was very much influenced by the historical events of his days. His most important work, Paradise Lost, is an epic poem in blank verse, based on the Bible: it begins with the Fall of the rebel angels, and continues with the temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden of Eden. Many critics have written that Satan is, in fact, the real hero of Paradise Lost for his indomitable spirit; a very important aspect of the poem is the dramatic conflict within the human division between good and evil. Theater FROM 1642 onward for eighteen years, the theaters of England remained nominally closed. There was of course evasion of the law; but whatever performances were offered had to be given in secrecy, before small companies in private houses, or in taverns located three or four miles out of town. NATURE OF RESTORATION COMEDY Restoration drama was far inferior to the Elizabethan. Where the earlier playwrights created powerful and original characters, the Restoration writers were content to portray repeatedly a few artificial types; where the former were imaginative, the latter were clever and ingenious. The Elizabethan dramatists were steeped in poetry, the later ones in the sophistication of the fashionable world. The heroes of the Restoration comedies were lively gentlemen of the city, with a strong tendency to make love to their neighbors' wives. Husbands and fathers were dull, stupid creatures. The heroines, for the most part, were lovely and pert, too frail for any purpose beyond the glittering tinsel in which they were clothed. Their companions were busybodies and gossips, amorous widows or jealous wives. Only rarely do these creatures betray the traits of sympathy, faithfulness, kindness, honesty, or loyalty. They follow a life of pleasure, bored, but yawning behind a delicate fan or a kerchief of lace. Everywhere in the Restoration plays are traces of European influence. The Plain Dealer of Wycherley was an English version of The Misanthrope of Molière; and there are many admirable qualities in the French play which are lacking in the English. Augustan Age In an age which cultivated the intellectual side of man’s nature and the control of the passions and the instincts, poetry had to express universal truths rather than personal emotion, and great emphasis was laid on formal perfection. The Augustan age saw the triumph of the so-called poetic diction, the main aspects of which were: the use of elevated and poetical words, archaic and Latinate words which conferred dignity and created an elevated tone, aimed at avoiding the direct mention of common, everyday things. The normal English word order was often inverted. Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the greatest poet of the age. He is best remembered for a brilliant mock-heroic poem, The Rape of the Lock (1712-1714), based on a quarrel between two families resulting from a gentleman’s clipping a lock of a young lady’s hair. From the middle of the century a number of poets began to abandon the Neoclassical norms and the limiting couplet verse form, and bridged the gap between the school of Pope and the great Romantic poets of the first decades of the 19th century. England in the Early 17th Century they lost. The Boston Tea Party was one of the main things that started the American Revolutionary War. - A new Augustan Age: 1702-1714 Literary life in England flourishes so impressively in the early years of the 18th century that contemporaries draw parallels with the heyday of Virgil, Horace and Ovid at the time of the emperor Augustus. The new Augustan Age becomes identified with the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14), though the spirit of the age extends well beyond her death. The oldest of the Augustan authors, Jonathan Swift, first makes his mark in 1704 with a literary theory and religious discord, which reveal that there is a new prose writer on the scene with lethal satirical powers. In the following year, 1709, Middle-class tastes were reflected in the growth of periodicals and newspapers, the best of which were the Tatler and the Spectator produced by Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele. Joseph Addison (1 May 1672 – 17 June 1719) was an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician. He wrote the libretto for Thomas Clayton's opera Rosamond, which had a disastrous premiere in London in 1707. In 1712, Addison wrote his most famous work of fiction, Cato, a Tragedy. Based on the last days of Marcus Porcius Cato Uticensis, it deals with such themes as individual liberty versus government tyranny, Republicanism versus Monarchism, logic versus emotion, and Cato's personal struggle to cleave to his beliefs in the face of death. It has a prologue written by Alexander Pope. The play was a success throughout Britain and its possessions in the New World, as well as Ireland. It continued to grow in popularity, especially in the American colonies, for several generations. Sir Richard Steele (bap. 12 March 1672 – 1 September 1729) was an Irish writer and politician. The Tatler, Steele's first journal, first came out on 12 April 1709. Steele wrote this periodical under the pseudonym Isaac Bickerstaff and gave Bickerstaff an entire, fully developed personality. The Tatler was closed down to avoid the complications of running a Whig publication that had come under Tory attack. Addison and Steele then founded The Spectator in 1711 and also the Guardian in 1713. The same year sees the debut of the youngest and most brilliant of this set of writers. The weapon of these authors is wit, waspish in tone. Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels: 1719-1726 Daniel Defoe, the author of Robinson Crusoe, travels widely as a semi-secret political agent, gathering material of use to those who pay him. Just as the plague documents stimulated a fictional journal, this real-life drama prompts Defoe to undertake the imagined autobiography of another such castaway, Robinson Crusoe (1719). Defoe imagines in extraordinary detail the practical difficulties involved in building a house and a boat, in domesticating the local animals, and in coping with unwelcome neighbors. This is a cannibal island. The native whom Crusoe rescues from their clutches on a Friday becomes his faithful servant, Man Friday. Defoe's interests seem to lie mainly in the theme of man's creation of society from primitive conditions, but meanwhile he almost unwittingly writes a gripping adventure story of survival. Robinson Crusoe is avidly read as such by all succeeding generations - and has a good claim to be considered the first English novel. Jonathan Swift, a man inspired by savage indignation at the ways of the world, writes Gulliver's Travels (1726) as a satire in which human behavior is viewed from four revealing angles. When Gulliver arrives in Liliput, he observes with patronizing condescension the habits of its tiny inhabitants. But in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, he is the midget. Gulliver's next stop, the flying island of Laputa, is run by philosophers and scientists; predictably they make a mess of things. Finally Gulliver visits a land ruled by intelligent horses. The hooligans here are brutal and oafish beasts in human shape, the Yahoos. The English novel: 1740-1749 During a quarter of a century, from 1740, the novel makes great advances in England, with notable achievements in several different styles. Defoe has laid a foundation with Robinson Crusoe, and has followed this up with The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders in 1722. Moll's story is more like a conventional novel than that of Robinson Crusoe, being set in the real world of low-life London and the plantations of Virginia. It is full of vitality and incident, but it is basically a sequence of fortunes and misfortunes for the heroine. This lack of focus is fully answered by Samuel Richardson, a novelist of much greater influence in his own time than today. Pamela, tells the story of Pamela Andrews trying to ward off the sexual advances of the young man of the house in which she is a maid. The narrative develops in the form of letters - most of them written by Pamela herself. The English novel: 1759-1766 The most original novel of the 18th century is published from 1759 by a clergyman. It is Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Sterne's blend of fantasy and mock-learning owes much to Rabelais, but he adds an easy playfulness, a friendly teasing of the reader, which his contemporaries find immediately attractive. Tristram Shandy - with its amused interest in the relationship between writer and reader, and in the nature of narrative - seems two centuries ahead of its time, resembling a modern demolition of the very idea of the novel. Introduction 19th century During the 19th century Britain was transformed by the industrial revolution. Furthermore in 1801 the majority of the population still worked in agriculture or related industries. Most goods were made by hand and very many craftsmen worked on their own with perhaps a laborer and an apprentice. By the late 19th century factories were common and most goods were made by machine. Political Reform In 1822 a Tory government was formed which introduced some reforms. From 1828 to 1830 the Duke of Wellington (1769-1852) was prime minister. He introduced the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829). Since the Reformation Catholics had been unable to become MPs or to hold public office. The Act restored those rights to them. However Wellington was strongly opposed to any change to the electoral system. At that time there were two types of constituency, country areas and towns or boroughs. In the countryside only the landowners could vote. In boroughs the franchise varied but was usually limited. However in 1830 the Whigs formed a government and they tried to introduce reform. The House of Commons eventually voted for a reform bill but the House of Lords rejected it. The King, William IV, warned that he would create more peers, who favored the bill unless the Lords agreed to accept it. Eventually the House of Lords backed down and passed the Great Reform Bill. It received the royal assent on 7 June 1832. The Factory Acts The industrial revolution created an unprecedented demand for female and child labor. Children had always worked alongside their parents but before the 19th century they usually worked part time. In the new textile factories women and children were often made to work very long hours (often 12 hours a day or even longer). By the 1860s the 10 hour day was common, but not universal. In 'sweated industries' such as making matchboxes and lace people were paid piece rates (i.e. they were paid so much for each one they made). People often worked in their own homes and very often they had to work from dawn to dusk to make a living. 19th Century Housing In the early 19th century much working class housing was appalling. It was overcrowded and unsanitary. Of course, poor people's housing had always been bad. However things grew much worse when vast numbers of people lived together in a small area. Furthermore towns had been dirty and unsanitary for centuries. At first the industrial revolution did cause much suffering to some people. However in the end it made a much higher standard of living possible for ordinary people. In the 18th century when goods were made by hand they were scarce and therefore expensive. Machines meant that goods could be mass produced and so they became much cheaper. It is true that in the early 19th century many people worked very long hours and they lived in appalling conditions in overcrowded towns. However by the late 19th century housing for most people was better than in the 18th century. Romanticism - Gothic Novel The end of the 18th century brought the so-called “Gothic novel” to popularity. The interest in such novels was extraordinary and common to all social classes also thanks to circulating libraries. The term “gothic” was originally a disparaging term applied to a style of medieval architecture (Gothic architecture) and art (Gothic art). The term “gothic” came to be applied to the literary genre precisely because the genre dealt with such emotional extremes and dark themes. The Gothic novel was a reaction against the realism of 18th century writers, such as Fielding and Richardson. Since it aimed at thrilling the readers instead of amusing or educating them, its plots were set in an imaginary past time, usually the Middle Ages, and in strange, unfamiliar countries, with horrible murders, extraordinary situations and supernatural events happening in haunted castles, prisons, convents. The Gothic novelists discovered the charm of horror and the power of sensation, connected with the grotesque and the supernatural. Their characters were stereotypes (the villain, the persecuted maidens), however they introduced visions, dreams and terrors into fiction, as opposed to Augustan rationalism. Mary Shelley: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1816) Plot: Victor Frankenstein, a Swiss scientist, manages to create a human being by joining parts selected from corpses. Despite careful preparation, the result of the experiment is ugly and revolting: the Monster becomes a murderer and in the end destroys his creator, then he commits suicide. The story is not told chronologically, but it is introduced by a series of letters written by Robert Walton, an explorer on a voyage of expedition to the North Pole, to his sister Margaret Walton Saville. Written in epistolary form, in a simple, unsophisticated language, the story may appear confusing and at times even improbable or absurd. It is traditionally considered as a Gothic novel, but it does not share all the characteristics typical of the genre. It has no historical setting, no castles or dungeons, no ghosts or supernatural events. The only ghostly places are the graveyard, the charnel house and Frankenstein’s laboratory. Everything is dominated by reason and by a logical sequence of cause and effect. As a “modern Prometheus”, Frankenstein manipulates nature, but his creature soon gets out of his control. The science theme is interwoven with Rousseau’s conception of man as originally good, whose innate goodness is violated and destroyed by laws and social conventions. The monster, in fact,