La letteratura vittoriana, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica La letteratura vittoriana e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! The dawn of the Victorian age Queen Victoria came to the throne at 18, in 1837. A long reign ‘till 1901 saw dramatic progress in science and economics, and important social reforms. In 1840 she married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. Their example of devoted family life with 9 children was a model of respectability. Albert became Prince Consort and Victoria main adviser. Social reforms in 1832 the First or Great Reform Act widened the right to vote to the middle classes the Factory Act in 1833 limited the working hours of children the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834 created workhouses, where the poor could live for free in return for work, but they were hated for their poor conditions. a Second Reform Act in 1867 widened the right to vote further, influenced in part by the Chartist Movement. (A group of radicals ...., demanding more rights. The movement failed but they succeeded at influencing) Workhouses: The poor who lived and worked there had to wear an uniform and their families where split. They thought that the awareness of such a awful life( due to the conditions they lived in) would inspire the poor to try to improve their own conditions. Famine A tragic potato famine in Ireland in 1845 brought many dead and a mass immigration to America, it also persuaded the British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel to abolish the corn laws in 1847. Exhibition/museum/underground In 1841 a great exhibition organized by Prince Albert showed the world Britain’s industrial and economic progress. It was held in the Cristal palace, a huge structure in glass and steel in Hide Park which hosted more that 15,000 exhibitors from all over the world. The money made was used to set up several museum in London( Natural history museum, science museum, Victoria and Albert museum). Construction work on the London underground began in 1860 and railways transformed the landscape and people’s life. The liberal and the conservative parties : When Prince Albert died from typhoid in 1861, Queen Victoria withdrew from society and spent the next 10 years in mourning. She still remained an important figure even though the political panorama was changing with the assembling of new parties. Victorian Age ( 1901 more) the conservative party, that had evolved from the Tories in 1830s and this party reaffirmed its position under the leadership of Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli government passed laws to improve housing and sanitation for the poor and a Factory Act limiting working hours. The liberal party included the former Whigs, some radicals and a large minority of businessmen and this party was led by William Gladstone. Gladstone reforming legislation focused on education. The 1870 education act started a national system by introducing board schools and by 1880 elementary education was compulsory. His government brought in the secret ballot and extended male voting rights. To protect the Opium Trade, Britain was involved in 2 Opium Wars agains China from 1839 to 1860. The result was that Britain gain access to 5 Chinese ports and control of Hong Kong. In India British troupes put down a rebellion in 1857, the Indian Mutiny and took more direct control Britain helped Italy to gain independence from the Austrians and supported Turkey against Russia. -This led to the Crimean War(1853-56)the first with direct journalistic coverage. It is also famous for Florence Nightingale’s nursing organization of the wounded. In Africa Britain competed with other European powers for control. In south africa, by the 70s, the British controlled two colonies, Cape Colony and Natal, while the Dutch settlers, the Boers, had the two republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. In 1877 when Britain took over Transvaal, theBoers rebelled and war explode. This war lasted from 1880 to 1902 and ended with British victory.-> Anglo Boers War In 1877 Queen Victoria became empress of India, but the empire was becoming increasingly difficult to control. The white-man’s burden was proving a difficult combination of the duty to spread christian civilization, encouraging toleration, while promoting commercial interests. Respectability and hypocrisy The Victorian Age was one of huge progress but also one of moral hypocrisy. Great poverty existed alongside great wealth, generous philanthropy next to openly indulged vice. This Victorian compromise meant that although religion and respectability were praised they sometimes covered poverty, injustice and hardship just below the surface. Readers and writers During the Victorian Age, for the first time, there was a communion of interests and opinions between writers and their readers. One reason for this close relationship was the enormous growth of the middle classes. Its members borrowed books from circulating libraries and read the abundant variety of periodicals. Moreover, Victorian writers themselves often belonged to the middle class. The publishing world A great deal of Victorian literature was first published in a serial form. Essays, verse and even novels made their first appearance in instalments in the pages of periodicals. This allowed the writer to feel he was in constant contact with his public. He could always alter the story, according to its success or failure. Reviewers also had a strong influence on the reception of literary works and on the shaping of public opinion. The Victorians’ interest in prose The Victorians showed a marked interest in prose, and the greatest literary achievement of the age is to be found in the novel. The spread of scientific knowledge made the novel realistic and analytical, the spread of democracy made it social and humanitarian, while the spirit of moral unrest made it inquisitive and critical. The novelist’s aim Early Victorian novelists felt they had a moral and social responsibility to fulfil. They wanted to reflect the social changes that had been in progress for a long time, such as the Industrial Revolution, the struggle for democracy and the growth of towns and cities. The novelists described society as they saw it, and, with the exception of those sentiments which offended current morals, particularly regarding sex, nothing escaped their scrutiny. They were aware of the evils of their society, such as the terrible conditions of manual workers and the exploitation of children. Didacticism was one of the main features of Victorian novels, because novelists also conceived literature as a vehicle to correct the vices and weaknesses of the age. The narrative technique The voice of the omniscient narrator provided a comment on the plot and erected a rigid barrier between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ behaviours, light and darkness. Retribution and punishment were to be found in the final chapter of the novel, where the whole texture of events, adventures and incidents had to be explained and justified. Setting and characters The setting chosen by most Victorian novelists was the city, which was the main symbol of the industrial civilisation as well as the expression of anonymous lives and lost indentities. Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of realistic characters the public could easily identify with, in terms of comedy – especially Dickens’s charactersv– or dramatic passion – the Brontë sisters’ heroines. Women writers It is important to underline that a great number of novels published during the mid- Victorian period, up to 1870-80, were written by women such as Charlotte and Emily Brontë and George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans). This output is surprising considering the state of subjection of Victorian women. It is less surprising if one remembers that the majority of novel- buyers and readers were women. Middle-class women had more time to spend at home than men and could devote part of the day to reading. However, it was not easy to get published, and some women used a male pseudonym in order to see their work in print. Victorian Novel Types of novels The novel of manners. It kept close to the original 19th-century models. It dealt with economic and social problems and described a particular class or situation. A master of this genre was William M. Thackeray (1811-63). The humanitarian novel. Charles Dickens’s novels are mostly admired for their tone, combining humor with a sentimental request for reform for the less fortunate. They constitute the bulk of what is generally called the ‘humanitarian novel’ or the ‘novel of purpose’. The novel of formation. The Bildungsroman (novel of formation or education) became very popular after the publication of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Dickens’s David Copperfield. These novels dealt with one character’s development from early youth to some sort of maturity. Literary nonsense. A particular aspect of Victorian literature is what is called ‘nonsense’, created by Edward Lear (1812- 88) and Lewis Carroll, with his famous novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The realistic novel The late Victorian novel mirrored a society linked to a growing crisis in the moral and religious fields. Darwin’s evolution theory influenced the structure and the organization of the realistic novel, which started to follow an evolutionist pattern. Coincidences were fully exploited to solve the intricacies of the plot, and chance played a Darwinian role. The best representatives of the realistic novel were Thomas Hardy and George Eliot. Hardy’s protagonists are also defined by their native regions and, at the same time, painfully alienated by them. The psychological novel Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde tried to capture the monstrous, illogical aspects of life and described the double nature of Victorian society. Stevenson seems to be concerned not only with the duality present in every individual but also in Victorian society as a whole, where aristocracy was only superficially kind and refined, but hid dark secrets in their beautiful houses. The names Jekyll and Hyde have become synonymous with multiple personality disorder. Colonial literature The obvious influence of colonialism on Victorian literature can be found in the works of Rudyard Kipling. Kipling exalted the British imperial power as a sacred duty in the poem The White Man’s Burden. Here he legitimised the belief that it was the task of the white man, and in particular of the British, to carry civilisation and progress to the savages. Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood, his father was imprisoned for debt and at the age of 12 he was put to work in a factory. When his family finances got better, he was sent to a school in London and he started working for a lawyer. By 1832 he become a very successful shorthand reporter of parliamentary debates in the House of Commons’, and began to work as a reporter for a newspaper. In 1836 he adopted the pen name ‘Boz’, publishing Sketches by Boz, a collection of articles and tales describing London’s people and different scenes, written for the periodical Monthly Magazine. He married Catherine Hogarth in April 1836 He started a full-time career as a novelist but he also continued his journalistic and editorial activities. Although he was a republican, Dickens took strongly against the United States when he visited the country in 1842. He died in Kent in 1870, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. He was the creator of characters and caricatures who live immortally in the English imagination like Mr Pickwick, scrooge or others. His purpose was to provoke the reader’s interest by exaggerating his characters’ habits as well as the language of the middle and lower classes. He was always on the side of the poor, the social outcast and also the working class. Some examples of these themes are Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854) and Great Expectations (1861). His aim (with his work) was to make the ruling classes aware of the social problems. In his novels often the most important characters are the children. The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1850) and Little Doritos (1857), became the symbols of an exploited childhood confronted with the bitter realities of slums and factories. Dickens employed the most effective language and accomplished the most graphic and powerful descriptions of life and characters ever attempted by any novelist. He did so with his careful choice od adjectives, repetitions of different words and structures. In fact, he is considered as the greatest novelist in the English language. Characters, aim and style Hard Times I Ells (novel of formation / progress through social reform , education and art → criticized Utilitarianism) The Picture of Dorian Gray It first appeared in a magazine in 1890, it reflects Oscar Wilde‘s personality in the three main characters it also reflects the ideals of the aesthetic movement about art. The Victorian public received date as immoral and perverted. The novel is set in London at the end of the 19th century. -The painter Basil Hallward, he made this portrait of this beautiful young man (of a beauty that is kind of immaculate, resemble a Ancient Greek statue, young hedonist). Works because he wants to produce beauty -> Oscar Wilde’s artistic side -Dorian Gray represents the idea of youths beauty and innocence -> what Oscar Wilde wanted to be -Lord Henry Wotton, cynical hedonist who talks Dorian into expressing the wish of remaining forever young, talk Dorian into the idea that he has to live life at the(its) fullest -> what people thought of Oscar Wilde The story revolves around the spell: when he sees the painting he makes a wish in front of it, influenced by Wottom , wishing that he could remain as young, as immaculate, as beautiful as the painting will always be while the painting aged instead of him. Indeed the portrait ages but also shows the marks of all the vices all the bad things (he doesn’t know any moral restriction). So Dorian lives only for pleasure, he’s a adonist. When the artist find out, Dorian kills him. Turning point: Dorian, who seemed not to have a conscience(since now), becomes aware that there is a dimension where he stores all his ugliness. He starts having nightmares, then he started feeling the need to look at the portrait(that he had hidden in an attic) all the time. One day, by looking at the picture, he cannot look at himself anymore and he stabbes the picture. The picture is restored to his form of beauty and he kills himself. Themes: -two faces of the self -immortal beauty of art The horrible, corrupted picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality and bad conscience of the Victorian middle class, while Dorian and his pure, innocent appearance are symbols of bourgeois hypocrisy. The picture restored to its original beauty, illustrate Wilde’s theory of art: art survives people, art is eternal. influence Dorian to look for a life of plasune the painting provided a visual rappresentation of the degradation of Dorian's soul The USA in the first half of the 20th century At the end of the 19 century the United States was the richest country in the world. It’s wealth came from agricultural prosperity ,massive industrial output, reach mineral resources and the rise of ‘trusts’, The huge corporations of firms in the same trade, which gradually came to dominate the market. The economic boom, however, brought desperate condition in the industrial areas of the north, where workers lived in dirty overcrowded slums, and toilet long hours for low wages. The social problems and corruption in government were publicized by investigative journalist called ‘muckrakers’. Their reports shocked the Americans, Who ordered the government to take action through reform. Progressivism was led by republican Theodore Roosevelt, Who became the 26th president of the USA. He strengthened the Navy, regulated trusts and carried out a moderate program of social legislation. The USA had bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. It had defeated Spain in the Spanish American war. It acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. It’s also annexed Hawaii and supported the Panama’s fight for independence from Columbia. The territory it gained there was used to built the Panama Canal, connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans. Imperialism was regarded as contrary to American democratic values and all the minions gained independence except for Cuba, where Guantánamo Bay was kept for a naval base. When world war one broke out, at first America remained neutral. The attacks German submarines were making to American ships were the main reasons that caused America to declare war on Germany in 1917. In the 1920s the economy continued to grow, though large areas like the south western mining towns, The farmers of the Midwest and the urban industrial workers remained untouched by the new wealth. The 20s saw a growth in reactionary attitudes like the ‘red scare’, that is the fear of socialism. Political activist with radical old labor backgrounds where imprisoned and persecuted. They open door immigration policy was replaced with restrictions and the segregation of minorities in to see if he slams like Harlem in New York. Prohibition was introduced to fight alcohol addiction among the poor, but in the reality it encourage the illegal traffic of bootleggers and increased the phenomenon of gangsterism. In 1929 the American stock market collapsed. The Wall Street crash marked the beginning of a worldwide economic crisis known as the Great Depression. Thounds of businessman and million of common people found themselves facing debt and ruin. Factories and banks shut down, 8million Americans were unemployed, spending hours in bread lines for free food. The Great Plains region was devasted by drought and the consequent Dust Bowl conditions forced 60 percent of the farmers to migrate to California. In 1932 Franklin D Roosvelt became president and promised the Americans a new deal of “relief, recovery, reform” Billions of dollars were spent on relief for the unemployed, on public works and the conservation of natural resources. Farm rehabilitation was promoted with techniques to regenerate the soil. American factories received a new impulse from the Second World War. At the outbreak of WW 2 , the US maintained neutrality but after joining the war in 1941, resources were focused on winning, including funding for the Manhattan project to produce and test the first atomic bomb. Daisy represents the enchanted object of desire, the great American dream, she is the light attracting Gatsby to her. She is very moody, theatrical and impulsive. She seems to enjoy staging provocative little scenes without expecting any negative consequences. She is characterised by meanness of spirit, carelessness and absence of loyalty. Thus the tragedy of the novel lies in the fact that Gatsby's dream is founded on a terrible misunderstanding of her inner character and worth. Style Nick Carraway is the narrator from whose point of view all the events and characters of the story are presented. Nick is a retrospective narrator who, after going through an experience, looks back on it with a better understanding. Fitzgerald uses the fragmentation of time and frequent flashbacks to represent the inner world of his characters. Gatsby's personality, therefore, is not developed through explicit statement but rather through implication, in the footsteps of Nick's own experience. Fitzgerald's style is characterised by frequent appeals to the senses, by the suggestive use of colours, and poetic devices such as repetition, simile and metaphor. The language also blends realism and symbolism. Symbolic images The description of the society of the jazz age is extremely detailed and it is scattered with symbolic images, like the car, which stands for the destructive power of modern society and money. Gatsby's house too is at the same time real and symbolic: carefully described in its various rooms and acres of garden, it celebrates the protagonist's luck and success during the parties, but embodies his melancholy and loneliness when it is empty. The green light at the end of Daisy's dock is the symbol of Gatsby's hopes and dreams. Blindness is another central image: most of the characters in the novel do not wish to see. They seek out blindness in the form of drunkenness, like Daisy and the guests at Gatsby's parties; Jordan, Daisy, Tom and many others drive carelessly; they remain blind to danger, so caught up are they with the selfish pursuit of pleasure. Only Nick truly sees. He is Fitzgerald's spokesman in his representation of the decay of his generation. Ernest Hemingway Ernest Hemingway was born in Illinois in 1899. During his childhood he came close to nature, thanks to his passion for hunting and fishing, and also boxing and playing rugby. In 1917 he started working as a reporter As soon as America decided to enter World War I, Hemingway tried to join the army but fail the medical examination due to poor eyesight. He was able to join the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in 1918. He always tried to get as close to combat as possible. He was wounded by a mortar fragment in Italy. The Italian government later presented him with a medal for dragging a wounded Italian soldier to safety in spite of his own injuries. Back in the USA he got a job as a foreign correspondent and in 1922 he was sent to Paris, where he joined a group of expatriate writers called the lost generation. In his works he showed his love of exotic settings and extreme situations where violent actions reveal the most important manly virtues: courage, comradeship and endurance. In 1929 he published A Farewell to Arms, a love story sets among the horrors and sufferings of the war. In 1933 he was able to buy her house in Africa, here he went on many Safari which led him to write many stories about Africa. During the Spanish Civil War he was correspondent for an American news agency In 1954 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature Due to his physical and mental condition at the end of his life, he committed suicide in 1961. Style For Hemingway, writing was a means of reaching and understanding his own identity since he projected his life experiences into his prose. Because of this he created a dry, essential style characterized by a simple syntax, colloquial, concise dialogue and brief descriptions. his characters are mainly revealed through dialogue and descriptive passages. There is very little introspection, or analysis of personal feelings and sensations. A Farewell to Arms This novel is the story of an American ambulance driver, Lieutenant Frederick Henry, on the Italian front during World War One. He falls in love with a beautiful English nurse, Catherine Barkley, whose he meets again in a Milan Hospital where he is sent after being wounded. On his return to the front he finds himself in the middle of the retreat of the Italian army after the German attack at Caporetto. Eventually Frederick decides to desert the army, since all he wants is to be with Catherine. She is pregnant so the two escape across lake Maggiore to Switzerland where she finally dies after giving birth to a dead child. The protagonist Frederick Henry is the protagonist of the novel. He is an American who volunteers for the Italian ambulance service before the United States joins the war. Henry is the classic Hemingway hero: he does his duty without complaint and thinks that men should be free from passion. Yet he undergoes an extraordinary transformation in the course of the novel. At the beginning he thinks that war is dreadful but necessary and has a lust for adventure, drinking and women. When he returns to the front, Italian troops are retreating, and he becomes intensely pessimistic about the war; so he understands that his love for Catherine is the only thing he is ready to commit himself to. He is full of noble ideals when he joins the army, but his experience during the war shakes his beliefs in Church, State, patriotism and love. Themes A Farewell to Arms deals primarily with war, namely the process by which the protagonist removes himself from it and leaves it behind. Most of the characters remain ambivalent about war: they are resentful of the terrible destruction it causes and doubtful about the glory it supposedly brings. The novel offers vivid descriptions of the brutality of war and the violent chaos: the description of the Italian army's retreat remains one of the most profound evocations of war in American literature. As the neat columns of men begin to crumble, so do the soldiers' nerves, minds, and capacity for rational thought and moral judgement. Nevertheless, the novel cannot be said to condemn war, which is presented as something inevitable, the product of a cruel world, which refuses to recognise and preserve true love. Against the backdrop of war, Hemingway offers a profound meditation on the nature of love. Henry and Catherine find temporary happiness and relief from suffering in each other. The lieutenant's understanding of how meaningful his love for Catherine is overwhelms any consideration about abstract ideals such as honour, enabling him to escape from the war and return to her. The tragedy of the novel rests in the fact that their love can only be temporary in this world. The notions of loyalty and desertion can be applied both to love and war. The novel, however, suggests that loyalty is linked more to a personal need of love and friendship than to the grand political causes and abstract philosophies of battling nations. Style Hemingway employs the technique of the first-person narrator: it is the protagonist who tells his story, gradually discovering meaning in the events he experiences. The language employed is straightforward and simple but requires the active participation of the reader for a true understanding, since the meaning of the story is revealed through suggestions, omissions and frequent use of free direct speech. TESTO PAG 409