L'età vittoriana e la letteratura inglese, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica L'età vittoriana e la letteratura inglese e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The Victorian age Victoria ascended to the thrine in 1837 at the age of 18 on the death of her unvle William 4. She died in January 1901 after a reign lasting nearly 64 years. In 1837 there was the Industrial Revolution, a period with scientific, industrial and technological advances, but also there were problems of overcrowding, poverty and vice. The Reform Bill of 1832 had given the vote to the male middle class, but had done nothing for  the working class. The Chartist movement of 1838 was the first mass movement driven by the working class, and in 1839 presented in Parliament a petition: "The People's Charter'", demanding a universal male suffrags and Parliamentary reform. They obtained the Reform Bikl of 1867, which extended the suffrage to the workers in towns, and the Reform Bull of 1884, which extended the right to vote to the workers in mines and to agricultural workers. In the late Victorian Age (1870-1901) the costs of the Empire increased and this led to a trade depression  in 1878-80 which hit the working class. There was the socialism, propounded by Karl Marx (a german philosopher), and also the Fabian Society, a socislist organisation established in 1884, different from Marxism, that put faith in gradual reform rather than in revolution. Prostitution, gambling and the use if drugs were common in Victorian London but hidden unde the hypocrisy. The works os Stevenson and Wilde exposed the double standars of Vuctorian morality. A pessimistic view of human existence was also encouraged by Social Darwinism, a theory of natural selection that affirmed that the life of humans in society was a struggle for existence ruled by 'survival of the fittest'. The theory proposed by Herbert Spencer affirmed that inewuality and poverty were natural, determined by biology. This zcientific determinism had a huge imoact on the literature of the late 19° century, with Naturalism of Emile Zola and Verga. During the second half of the 19° century women began feminists, to get a better education for middle-class women and the vote. The most imoortsnt work of Victorian female writers is "Jane Eyre", by Charlotte Brontë. The age of fiction The novel was the most popular litersry genre of this period because: -more people were anle to read -the number of people who could afford to buy them increased -because of the entertaining and realistic plots -were published also in newspapers to reduce the costs, in episodes All the novels had common features: -novels tend to satisfy the need of their readers, thst wanted to be entertained. Because of this plots are complex, adventurous, rich in characters, with unexpected events and surprises -authors make their readers reflect on the incongruences of the world, with a moral aim, and represented the human conditions in a realistic way -stories are usually told by a 3rd person omniscient narrator, that judjes the characters and guides the reader to understand The most important novelists of this period were: Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Thokas Hardy and Henry James. They used prose to make a realistic potrait of society. Many novels of this period are set in London, representing the contraddiction of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike the Europen counterparts (such as French realistic writers Balzac and Flaubert) who criticised the evils of thr world, the Victorian Age's witers were less critical, and preferred to use literature to instruct their readers. This ambivalent attitude stands at the core of the "Victorian Compromise". Charles Dickens was born on 7 February 1812 in Portsmouth. He had a short formal education, and then was forced to work ten hours days in a blacking factory (making shoe polish). He suffered three years of terrible loneliness that affected most of his works. Dickens began his career as a journalist and became a famous writer after the publication of his "Pickwick Papers" (1836-37), a series of tales connected by the same character: Mr Pickeick. The novel expresses Dickens' humour, based on the creation of characters with some distinctive peculiaruty of speech, physicsl appearebce or gesture, and the creation of comic situations. He created whole world of characters, with his simoathy with the oppressed and his indignation against social injunstice. His novels were published first in magazines and then as comolete books. His masterpiece, such as "Oliver Twist" (1837-39) that tells the story of an orphaned boy, the explotation of children and the cruelty of the workhouses, "A Christmas Carol", a ghost story featurung the conversation of a miser to the spirit of Christmas,  "David Copperfield", "Hard Times", bearing on education and on thr hardships of the working class during the Industrial revolution, and "Great Expectations", another coming-of-age novel. He used a realistic narration to depict the living conditions of the poor in Victorian England and followed the life and adventures of a single character. Dickens' novels are tragicomic: in them the author denounced the evils of the Victorian Age, using a vomic tone which acquired the function of a strong demystifying instrument. Dickens' story generally have a happy ending, in which suffering redemption are solved through suprise appearances rather thsn through social reforms. He traveled to America and to Italy. He also wrote for the theatre and performed in front of Queen Victoria in 1851. He died on 9 June 1870 and was buried in Westminister Abbey. Dickens wrote very quickly under presssure from his publishers and through is own need for money. For the serial publications he needed tp mantain interest from one episode to another and ended each episode with a dramatic event, that provoked suspense in the reader. Dickens had also to answer his readers' tastes. Dickens' characters are potrayed as caricatutes embodying vices and virtues. For this reason his characters are the most memorable in English literature. He started social critisism, facing issues like the consequences of the Industrial Revolution on poor people, child labour, the legal system and crime. Dickens' purpose was to denounce the social evils of the time and to make his readers aware of them. He believed in the ethical and political potential of literature and challenged the popular Victorian idea that some people were