L'età vittoriana in Inghilterra, Dispense di Inglese

Scarica L'età vittoriana in Inghilterra e più Dispense in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! QUEEN VICTORIA’S REIGN: Queen Victoria became queen of England in 1837. The nation identifies Victoria queen for her exemplary way of life, especially by the middle classes, who shared her moral and religious views. The most important aspects of Victoria’s reign are material progress, imperial expansion and political and social reform; the merits of these achievements partly belonged to the queen who she never overruled parliament and became a mediator above politics. There were two main political parties: liberals, that promoted a campaign for free trade and conservatives. Between 1838 and 1848 there were some working-class movements for social reform but it’s the demands were refused. > THE RIGHT TO WORK: Article 23,24 of Declaration of human rights and articolo 1,4,35,36,37,38,39,40 dalla costituzione italiana. First revolt started in 1388 with the peasant’s revolt fort better working conditions; later in 1833, the factory act; for that event they made the trade union: a labour union organized associations of worker originated in 19 th century in Great Britain (trade union act only in 1871). By the middle of 19th century, Britain had become a nation of town dwellers characterized by an industrial development; by the way, Victorian cities was famous for its squalor, disease and crime. “The common lodging houses” was passed to prevent the worst squalor and to clean the town devasted by cholera; medicine also underwent a radical change, were founded to regulate and control medial education. The Victoria age was an age characterized by contradiction was both an age of progress and social reform and an age of poverty. Victoria wants mask the truth with a code of values based on work hard to improve the society. THE BRITISH EMPIRE: During the reign of queen Victoria, Great Britain made up a powerful empire; the activity has begun during the second half of the 16th century and the last decades of 19th century. British occupied Australia and New Zealand, size part of China and expanded their possession in Africa; they also take India under they directly control; in 1877 queen Victoria was crowned empress of India, they were able to gradually adapt to different realities. Civil pride was deeply influenced by ideas of racial superiority and the word was divided by physical and intellectual differences. CHARLES DARWIN: In the second half of the 19th century, some ideological conflicts undermine the Victoria’s reign. In 1859, Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in the origin of species . The real contribution for scientific word became to his theory of natural selection. THE VICTORIAN NOVEL: During Victorian age there was a communion of interests and opinion between writers and their readers. One reason for this was the enormous growth of consumers of literature. They borrowed books from circulating libraries and various periodical; a great deal of Victorian literature was published in periodicals, later, the novel, became the most popular form of literature. The novelist felt they had a moral and social responsibility. A great part of novel was written by women under pseudonym. A novel is a literary genre written in prose, a tory long and complex about imaginary events that resembles the real. Novel came from “novella” which mean short story. In the novel we can find the story and the plot; a flashback or a flashforward; we know the setting and the character thanks to presentation that could be direct or indirect; the narrator is the voice that tell the story and the point of views are multiple. CHARLES DICKENS: Charles Dickens was born in 1812 (1870) in Portsmouth; he had an unhappy childhood because his father was imprisoned, and he was put to work in a factory. In 1832 he had become a very successful reporter of Parliamentary debates in the house of commons and began to work as a reporter. His first story appeared in 1836 still a newspaper reporter; after the success dickens started a full - time career as a novelist. In his works he treats the social issue such as a condition of the poor and the working class in general. Dickens introduced the theme of the education because he believed in a universal education; form him the best way fort teach was an “object lesson” based on children’s’ experience. THE DEFINITION OF A HORSE: the scene is set in a school; the main characters are Mr. Gradgrind and pupil number twenty. He asks her to tell the definition scientific of a horse, but the girl can’t give him this definition, so he calls another student. Mr. Grandgrind is a typically Victorian teacher, he thinks that imagination and creativity have nothing to do with education. COKETOWN: this passage is taken from Hard Time published in a weekly journal. The narrative is in third person and the narrator is omniscient. Coketown is an imaginary town that represent the many industrial town in England; this town is described as a town of red bricks, pervaded by smoke and full of machinery and habitants that do repetitive action. Everything is inseparable by work, everything is based on fact. OLIVER TWIST: this is a representation of a childhood in Victoria age, it was a cruel experience and children were obliged to work; literature describing this situation. Was published in 1837, Oliver is a child, and he lives in a workhouse, he flees to London to escape from horrors by a band of a pickpocket that he joint during his voyage; he was saved by a lord that, in the end, they turns that they are relatives. CHARLOTTE BRONTE: Charlotte Bronte was born in 1816 (1855) in a remote part of Yorkshire; she did not receive a formal education, apart some periods at school, she was self-educated from her father’s library and drawing inspiration from the local public library. She used a pseudonym to publish her novel “jane Eyre”. PUNISHMENT: this passage is taken from Jane Eyre; it was published in 1847 and it is considered an education novel. In this passage the protagonist is accused to having broken a slate, she is compelled to stand on the pedestal of infamy. At first, her reaction was paralysed with fear, but later, she shows courage in facing her punishment. Mr. Brocklehurst is the symbol of the hypocrisy and he think that the girl is a liar and the embodiment of evil. The woman who adopted her is afraid and didn’t talk about that, but another pupil helped jane to feel better. RUPERT BROOKE: Was born in 1887 (1915) into a wealthy family; he was educated at Rugby School and then to King’s college. He was also familiar with literary circles and came to know many important political literary and social figures before the war. Brooke’s reputation as a war poet rest on his five sonnets of 1914; he advanced the idea that the war is clean and cleansing, he tried to testify the safeness of the war in which the only thing that can suffer is the body; his poems show a sentimental attitude. THE SOLDIER: is a poem that never tell about the cruel of the war; it is made up in 14lines grouped in two stanzas, it is written in the form of the sonnet in the first person and reflect the feeling that led many young man, it has a patriotic message in the repetition of “England” and “English”, the main theme of the poem are death and love: the idea of death is romanticised and the final part of poem says that the soldier will find peace only in death. WILFRED OWEN: Was born in 1893 (1918); he was working as a teacher of English in France. In 1917 he was sent to France and saw his first action of FWW, in March he was injured and sent in a hospital in Edinburgh to recover from shell shock. His poems are painful in their accurate of gas casualties, man who have gone mad and man who are clinically alive and their bodies have been destroyed. He uses assonance and alliteration extensively that gave an haunting quality, a gravity and moral force. DULCE ET DECOURM EST: is a quotation from the Latin; the principal message in this poem is that “war means death”, “there is nothing noble and decorous in war: it is a lie, an old lie, that dying for the mother-country is sweet and honourable.” The poem can be divided in soldiers are retreating to the trenches and the scene of the dying friend returns in the poet’s dreams. WYSTAN HUGE AUDEN: Was born in 1907; he studied in Oxford and became familiar with modernist poetry; he was deeply committed to social and politic issue like, during general strike he worked for strikers and during the Spanish civil war served as an ambulance driver; about his homosexuality he was condemned for criminal offence. At the beginning Auden was influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis in reference to personal history, another influence was Karl Mark and his social view. “act as a public voice to support the causes for freedom against tyranny”. ANOTHER TIME: this is a collection of a poem important for the period of its composition. The work contains some of most famous poem; is characterized by intellectual rigor and social conscience in a mix of style. JAMES JOYCE: Was born in 1882 (1941) in Dublin; he was educated in a Jesuit school and after, in a university college in Dublin, French, German and Italian language and literature. He always considered himself a European and, when he finished his study (1902/1903), he leaved Ireland because he believed that it blocked his production and his artistic development. In June 1904 he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, they had first date in 16th June, which was to become the “bloomsday of Ulysses”. In October they moved in Italy where he become teacher of English and friend of Italo Svevo; this years in Trieste were difficult whit financial problems. In 1914 published Dubliners a collection of short stories all about Dublin and Dublin’s life; in 1916 published a portrait of the artist as a young man, his semi-autobiographical novel; Ulysses was finally published in Paris in 1922. In 1939 Hitler’s advances in Europe forced Joyces to flee from France to neutral Switzerland. For Joyce, the artist’s task was to render life objectively in order to give back to the readers a true image of it, this is the developed from the realism to modern novel. DUBLINERS (Eveline): is a collection of 15 short stories published in 1914; the stories are divided in 4 groups that corresponds to a phase in life (the last one is the summary of all collection). Joyce writes Dubliner for draw a realistic portrait of ordinary people living an ordinary life in Ireland. Eveline is a nineteen-year-old girl who can change her life eloping with a young man who can take her to another country, but she does not seize the opportunity because she is unable to leave her family in Dublin. There is no action: the story develops through the character’s thoughts and sensations. GEORGE ORWELL: Was born in 1903 (1950) in India because his father was serving the Britain’s empire; he was educated in a preparatory school and then at Eaton college; later he went in Burma for serving the imperial police, but they left them because he “escape from every form of man’s dominion over man”. In 1941 he moved in London where he started his social experiment: down and outs (si vestì come gli squattrinati e visse per un lasso di tempo con le loro possibilità); he wrote about his experience in 1933 in down and out in paris and London. In 1936 went in Catalonia for report the Spanish civil war; in 1941 he started work for BBC; in 1945 he published anima farm and his wife died; in 1949 he published nineteen eighty-four. (lui come dickens hanno lo stesso interesse per i temi sociali). NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: Winston Smith, the protagonist, buys a diary where he writes his thought that were oppressed in his city, he works at the ministry of truth as a rewriter of history; he met Julia and feel in love; then they met O’Brien a member of brotherhood and gives him a book of Goldstein. Winston is taken to the ministry of love and discovered that O’Brien is a spy. He was sent at the room 101 and he is compelled to confront his worst fear, later hi is definitively alienated. THE DYSTOPIAN NOVEL: It is a novel sub-genre in which events are set in dystopian society, a society where is not pleasant to live because human rights are denied (19th century); the opposite is utopia, the idea of a perfect world and a perfect society where there are no conflicts, a place where is good to live (20th century). Dystopia is the most negative and blackest aspects of modernity make it possible in the present of the authors. MODERNISM NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES: THE INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: consist in the exhibition of the thought passing through the mind’s characters. THE STREAM OF CONCIOUSNESS: in psychology consist in a mental process and in literary consists in throwing at the reader the thought and impression of characters as they are flowing. THE EPHIFANY: consists in a sudden revelation: characters suddenly understand something that is very important for them by something that could be irrelevant. SAMUEL BECKETT: Was born in 1906 in Dublin; he become familiar with James Joyce and, when he went in Paris, he composed most of his works. Representative of the theatre of the absurd based on the belief that people cannot communicate and understand each other. He also published Endgame, Krapp’s last tape, Breath and Happy Days. THE THEATRE OF THE ABSURD: Absurd means “out of tune”, “off”; the theatre of absurd was developed during the new Elizabethan age (1952) that was marked by euphoria and anxiety, people thought that the world was dangerous for totalitarianism and cold war. It is not based on a real story and space and time are vague, the value of the language is reduced and characterized by pause and silence. It is play in two acts, the main characters are Vladimir and Estragon and “Godot”; there is a symmetrical structure and the focus is on the impossibility of communication.