La letteratura inglese dell'età vittoriana e moderna, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica La letteratura inglese dell'età vittoriana e moderna e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE VICTORIAN AGE -LITERARY BACKGROUND- One of the most productive, rich and controversial periods of English literature. Two main trends: • Victorian compromise: beliefs in the goodness of scientific process, of human nature and social and economic development. Aimed to instruct and entertain readers -> moral aim • Anti-Victorian reaction: writer and artists criticized the values of their era and exposed all of its contradictions -> influenced by positivism. Reasons of the triumph of novels: More people could read and afford books, “circulating libraries”, research of entertaining and realistic plots, novels often published in instalments in newspapers (reduction of the cost). Novel’s characteristics: Reflect on the world in which they lived in, clear and moral aim, represented human conditions, plot were complex and rich in characters and unexpected events, usually strusctured in 3 volumes (triple- deckers). Role of the Victorian writer [Autobiography- Anthony Trollope]. The writer must please and teach a lesson of virtue with the same purpose as a clergyman does with his sermons. Must have his own system of ethics. THE MODERN AGE AGE OF ANXIETY The First World War left Britain in a disillusioned and cynical mood: some soldiers celebrated their return home with a frantic search for pleasure; others were haunted by a sense of guilt for the horrors of trench warfare, or missed the sense of purpose the war years had given them. The gap between the generation of the young and the older one, regarded as responsible for the terrible waste of lives during the war, grew wider and wider. An increasing feeling of rootlessness and frustration, due to the slow dissolution of theEmpire into the Commonwealth, led to a transformation of the notions of imperialhegemony and white superiority. Freud's influence The first set of new ideas had been introduced by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) in his essay “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900). Freud's view of the developing psyche emphasised the power of the unconscious to affect behaviour; The discovery that man's action could be motivated by irrational forces of which he might know nothing was very disturbing. His theory also placed enormous importance on the demands of the libido, particularly those manifested in the Oedipus phase, in which the child sees the father as a rival for his mother's affections. The effects in the sphere of family life were deep: the relationship between parents and children was altered; the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality focused attention on the importance of early development, and childhood regained a status it had only in the pages of Rousseau; the conventional models of relationship between the sexes were readjusted, also thanks to the movement for women's suffrage. Freud also provided a new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of 'free association' (his patients were invited to speak about whatever entered their mind at the moment), which deeply influenced the writers of the Modern Age. THE INTER-WAR YEARS COMMONWEALTH (1926) An imperial confernce created a new entity from the dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. THE IRISH WAR OF INDIPENDENCE In the 1918 election in Ireland, the Sinn Fin party won almost all the seats except in the province of Ulster, but instead of going to Westminster, it set up an independent Parliament in Dublin - the Dáil - in 1919. The Irish Volunteers, a militant nationalist organisation founded in 1913, became the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and they declared open war on Britain in 1920, under the leadership of Michael Collins (1890-1922). The IRA terrorist attacks were brutally met by Black and Tan' police auxiliaries, culminating with 'Bloody Sunday' in 1920, when the Black and Tans' shot 12 dead at a football match in Dublin. In 1921 an Anglo-Irish Treaty established the Irish Free State, under the leadership of Eamon de Valera (1882-1975), as an independent State within the British Commonwealth. Only six counties centred on Protestant Ulster remained a self-governing province of the United Kingdom. In 1922 a civil war broke out in Ireland between those who accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty and those who were against it. In 1923 the anti-Treaty faction, who wanted the inclusion of the six counties of Ulster in the Republican Ireland, was defeated. THE MODERN NOVEL The shift from the Victorian to the modern novel was caused by a gradual but substantial transformation of British society which in a few years passed from the comfortable, prosperous world of the Victorians and Edwardians to the inter-war years, which were marked by unrest and ferment. The urgency for social change and, from a literary point of view, the pressing need for different forms of expression, forced novelists into a position of moral and psychological uncertainty. The novelist had a new role, which consisted in mediating between the solid and unquestioned values of the past and the confused present, highlighting the complexity of the unconscious. This new realism', influenced by French and Russian writers. Two other factors contributed to the development of the modern novel: the new concept of time and the new theory of the unconscious which derived from the Freudian influence. New methods to portray the individual consciousness; the viewpoint shifted from the external world to the internal world of a character's mind. The analysis of a character's consciousness was influenced by the theories about the simultaneous existence of different levels of consciousness and subconsciousness. The narrative technique that modern novelists mainly employed was the so-called stream of consciousness. William James coined the phrase 'stream of consciousness' to define the continuous flow of thoughts and sensation that characterise the human mind. This definition was applied by literary critics to the kind of 20th-century fiction which focused on this inner process. The interior monologue is the verbal expression of this psychic phenomenon. Three groups of novelists: • Psychological novelists, who focused on the development of the character's mind and on human relationships; • Novelists who experimented with subjective narrative techniques, exploring the mind of one or more characters and giving voice to their thoughts; • Social and political problems of the 1930s. The writers' attention focused on the society around them. Many British intellectuals had Marxist sympathies