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! LATE VICTORIAN AGE During the reign of Queen Victoria, Great Britain ruled over a wide and powerful empire that brought the British in contact with various cultures. What size did the British Empire reach during Victoria's reign? In the last decades of the 1gt century, the British Empire occupied an area of 4 million square miles and more than 400 million people were ruled over by the British, although through the use or varying practices When may Britain's imperial activity be said to have begun? A It may be said to have begun during the second half of the 16th century. This was the time when Queen Elizabeth I, and later James I, encouraged 'plantations' - the settling of English and Scottish people in Ireland on land forcibly taken from the native Irish. In 1600, Elizabeth I also chartered the British East India Company, a trading concern that was eventually to rule over much of today's India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. What happened after the 1857 Indian Mutiny? A India came under direct rule by Britain, and Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India by the British prime minister. What other territories did the British occupy during the Victorian age: A The British also occupied Australia and New Zealand, seized parts of China - including Hong Kong in 1841 - and expanded their possessions in Africa and Southeast Asia - annexing Burma, for example, in 1886. Did they also expand in Africa? A Expansionist activity reached a crescendo with the "'scramble for Africa' in the 1880s and 1890s. This was a race among European powers to establish territorial rights to those parts of the continent as yet unclaimed. Britain took over Egypt to protect its routes to India through the Suez Canal in 1882 and then Sudan in 1884. From 1899 to 1902, Britain was at war in South Africa against the Dutch settlers, the Boers, over control of gold and diamond mines. British eventually won but with great difficulty. What kind of empire did Britain create? (A Because the British came into contact with and subdued vastly different areas at different times, they were able to shape imperial and colonial policy gradually, adapting to different realities and producing an empire united in name but varied in fact. DARWIN In the second half of the 19th century, Britain reached the peak of its power abroad; however some ideological conflicts were beginning to undermine the self-confident attitude that had characterised the first part of Victoria's reign. Changes regarded several fields, especially scientific achievements, industrialization, sexuality and religion, and a growing pessimism began to affect intellectuals and artists, who expressed in different ways their sense of doubt about the stability of Victorian society. In 1859, Charles Darwin (1809-82) published his theory of evolution in On the Origin of Species. Although evolutionary ideas were not new to the Victorians (the work of Charles Lyell in 1830-33 and Robert Chambers in 1844 both held that organisms evolved from an original being created by God), Darwin's radical contribution was his theory of natural selection' and his stress on the godless element of chance involved in evolutionary variation. While Darwin's theory discarded the version of creation given by the Bible, it also seemed to show that the strongest survived and the weakest deserved to be defeated. The philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) applied Darwin's ideas to social life, arguing that economic competition was the same as natural selection and that the poor and oppressed did not deserve compassion. ALICE IN WONDERLAND THE CHILD VS THE ADULT WORLD The main themes of the novel are the child's struggle to survive in the adults' world and growing up. In Wonderland, Alice gets to know a way of living and reasoning that is quite different from her own. In this nonsensical world, the roles are reversed: it is Alice who teaches the adults about manners, rudeness and madness. The adults are unreliable, illogical and somewhat insane. Carroll uses his narrative to mock the Victorian education system. In the end, Alice loses most of her childlike imagination: she has grown up and cannot stay in Wonderland, the world of children, any longer. She wakes up back in the real world, that of adults. The theme of education is widely developed in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The book both shows respect for and mocks learning. The things children learn at school are usually parodied in the book as impractical for real life. Alice listens to different lessons but has trouble understanding their real applications. Her knowledge seems to consist mainly of maxims and morals about obedience and safety, which are turned into nonsensical rules by Carroll. The duchess sums things up rather well when speaking to Alice, saying: 'Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.' Carroll' rejection of typical Victorian education supports his idea that a child's imagination is really important. (Mr.Rochester daughter, the education of Jane like Alice) Stevenson The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) captured the mood of change of the last decades of the 1g' century and expressed the moral dichotomy between good and evil in his classic psychological novel The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), in which hypocrisy is embodied by the double. (As Oscar Wilde) The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Mr Utterson is a respectable London lawyer and friend to a well-known scientist, Dr Henry Jekyll. He is out for a walk with a distant relative called Mr Enfield when they pass a strange-looking door. Enfield recalls a disturbing story involving the door. A man, identified as Mr Hyde, trampled over a little girl and paid off her family with a cheque from Henry Jekyll. The situation is made even stranger when Utterson, who is the executor of Jekyll's will, explains that this has recently been changed. In the event of Jekyll's death or disappearance, all his possessions are to go to a Mr Hyde. A year later, Mr Hyde attacks someone else and as Utterson knows the victim, he is involved in the police investigation. One night Jekyll's butler goes to see Utterson because he is afraid that Hyde has murdered Jekyll. Utterson finds Hyde in his laboratory lying dead in Jekyll's clothing. He then finds a letter where Jekyll explains the mystery of his double identity. He had created a potion able to release his evil side, Mr Hyde, but Hyde had gradually achieved domination over Jekyll. Eventually Jekyll began turning into Hyde in his sleep and his ability to change back into Jekyll slowly vanished, so he killed himself. SETTING The novel takes place in the London of the late Victorian Age. Stevenson uses London's double nature to show the hypocrisy of Victorian society. On the one hand, there is Jekyll's respectable West End; on the other hand, there is Hyde's appalling poverty of the East End slums, considered the location of evildoers. This ambivalence is reinforced by Jekyll's residence: the doctor's official house has a respectable and handsome façade and its interior is expressive of wealth and comfort. His house, however, has a back door used by Hyde which leads to a small yard in a sinister, mysterious block of buildings without any windows. Most scenes of the novel take place at night. There is no daylight, but only the artificial lighting of Jekyll's house and of the nightmarish street lamps. Hardy's deterministic view