Letteratura Inglese programma quarto anno sintesi, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica Letteratura Inglese programma quarto anno sintesi e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FROM THE DEATH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH I TO THE HANNOVER DYNASTY On the death of Elizabeth I, the Tudor dynasty ended. James I of Scotland became king of Scotland and England. James based his rule on the DIVINE RIGHT of kings, because he believed he represented God on earth (Elizabeth based her rule on the love of her people, she considered herself the bride of her country). James I called parliament to ask for money, and members refused to impose taxes unless the money was needed for the war. Since under Elizabeth's reign religion was the most urgent problem: 1) Catholics were excluded from public life 2) extreme Protestants, the Puritans, disapproved of the rites and bishops of the Church of England. They had a sense of duty and morality. Many of them, the Pilgrim Fathers, left England to move to America aboard the Mayflower. King James authorized a new translation of the Bible and scholars worked on it for 7 years. This version would be heard and read by the laity. In 1605, some radical Catholics, headed by Guy Fawkes, intended to blow up the king in the Houses of Parliament. For this reason, on November 5, the failure of the “Gunpowder Plot” is still commemorated in England. Charles I succeeded his father James I in 1625. The Puritans had given birth to a social and political movement which holds the majority in Parliament. The Puritans were extreme Protestants within the Church of England. They wanted to delete their church from Catholic influence and they wanted to purify themselves and society. The Puritans wanted a balance of power between the king and parliament, but Charles I believed in the divine power of the monarch, as his father. During this period there were constant conflicts with the parliament. Eventually the parliament asked the king to give up command of the armed forces, he refused and civil war broke out. The forces were divided into "royalists", who supported the king, and "parliamentarians", supported the parliament led by Oliver Cromwell. The royalists had long hair and were known as Cavaliers; instead parliamentarians were called Roundheads because they considered hair a sin and cut their hair short. London, the Navy, small landowners, artisans and Puritans sided with Parliament; the clergy and nobles sided with the king. The king was imprisoned and Cromwell took control of London and arrested more than 100 members of parliament. The other members (called the Rump Parliament) voted for the king's execution. After that, the monarchy was abolished and there was a republic, called the Commonwealth. Cromwell became Lord Protector, but upon his death the Commonwealth Parliament collapsed and in 1660 Parliament invited Charles II (son of Charles I, who lived in exile in France) to return to Great Britain. The return of the monarchy was good, because the British felt oppressed by the rules of the Puritans. The country, under the reign of Charles II, suffered: the plague (1665), which killed more than 100,000 people, and the Great Fire of London (1666), which destroyed much of medieval London. James II was the successor of his brother Charles II. He was a Protestant, had 2 daughters by his first wife (Mary and Ann), and on his death he married a Catholic princess and converted to Catholicism. He had a son by the princess, and a group of Protestant nobles, fearing being ruled by a new Catholic king, offered the crown to William of Orange for fear of a new Catholic government. James II was forced to leave Great Britain. This historical event was called Bloodless or Glorious Revolution because it happened without bloodshed. William and Mary reigned with the support of parliament. It was a time of economic progress for England and London was becoming the financial capital of the world. The "Bill of Rights" of 1689 (which prevented the king from raising taxes or maintaining an army without parliamentary agreement) represented the victory of a parliamentary or constitutional monarchy. With "The Act of Settlement", Queen Anne Stuart succeeded the death of her brother-in-law in 1702. During her reign, Scotland joined England with the "Act of Union". The British parliament was characterized by two political parties, the "Whigs" (industrial and commercial classes) and the "Tories" (who maintained the alliance between the crown and the nobility). The first Prime Minister in British history was Whig Sir Robert Walpole. There were no foreign conflicts, trade advanced and taxes were reduced. Upon the death of Queen Anne (childless) the Stuart dynasty was succeeded by the Hanoverian dynasty, with George I who didn’t speak English and wasn’t loved by his new country. Prime Minister Walpole and his government (albeit accused of corruption) survived a change of monarch when George II became king upon the death of his father, George I. The new king relied more and more on Walpole and gave him a house in Westminster, 10 Downing Street, which is still the Prime Minister's official residence today. In 1766 William Pitt (Whig) became prime minister. With him, England became economically powerful and had the opportunity to expand into India, North America and the Caribbean. The English Civil War When James I died in 1625, his son Charles I became king of England (1625-1649). Charles I took his divine right (the power to rule without Parliament and to reject his laws) for granted. But he was becoming unbearable. England was changing: the nation’s wealth had shifted from nobility to landed nobility and the professionals who made up the new middle classes, in support of Parliament. There was a continuous religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants (with Elizabeth, the Protestants had won). In 1628, a law known as “The Petition of Rights” was imposed on Charles, which limited his power and prevented him from raising taxes without parliamentary authorization. This was the first major confrontation between Parliament and the king. When the Parliament refused to give him money, Charles dissolved the Parliament and from 1629-40 he reigned as absolute monarch. There was a struggle for supremacy between supporters of the king and supporters of parliament. In 1642 a civil war broke out between these two factions: the Roundheads or Parliamentarians (led by Oliver Cromwell) and the Royalists or Cavaliers (supported the king). The parliamentarians were divided between: - the conservative group wanted to establish the power of their own possessing class - the Levellellers supported substantial reforms (extension of the right to vote, religious tolerance, equality before the law), which they included in a manifesto called “The People’s Agreement”. Oliver Cromwell tried to mediate between the demands of these two groups, but ultimately sided with the conservatives. Oliver Cromwell and the execution of a king After a series of battles, Oliver Cromwell took control of London and arrested over 100 Members of Parliament loyal to the king. The remaining members formed the so-called “Rump Parliament”, which voted to execute Charles In 1660 the monarchy was restored, ending the movement towards democracy of the English Revolution. Charles II became king, but the real power was transferred to Parliament. Two political parties were founded: the Tories (supporters of the king and the Church, formed by nobles) and the Whigs (supporters of the parliament, formed by the middle classes), and the English “two-party system” began. Science and the libertines In 1662 the Royal Society of London received the patronage of the king. It advised the government on problems that required scientific explanation, reflecting the rationalistic attitude of the time. In contrast to the Puritan period, men and women cultivated their looks with elaborate wigs and extravagant outfits. The Libertines are people that wanted to live a life of pleasure, but they wanted to experience the limits of individual freedom and their ideas are important in comedies and poetry. During the reign of Charles II, London was struck by two great calamities: the Plague of 1665 which killed 100,000 people, and then in 1666 the “Great Fire” which destroyed much of the city. The reign of James Il While Charles II was better able to manage relations with Parliament, his brother James II wanted to impose his religion on a Protestant country and attack the authority of Parliament. The two sides (the Tories and the Whigs) joined forces and invited James’s Protestant daughter, Mary, to take the throne, with her Dutch husband, William of Orange. There was “the Glorious Revolution”, ie the forced abdication of James II who was exiled. A new kind of monarchy In 1689, William and Mary were offered to the throne (becoming William II and Mary II): the first time where a contract was made between a monarch and Parliament. It was done under the Bill of Rights (which stipulated that the king could no longer raise taxes, form an army or suspend laws without the consent of Parliament). In the same year, the Toleration Act granted freedom of worship to Protestant dissidents. In 1701, with the Transaction Act, Parliament excluded the Catholic son of James from the succession. Maria II died in 1694 and when William II also died, (childless in 1702), Maria’s younger sister, Anna, became queen. During the reign of Queen Anne, England was involved in the war of the Spanish succession against France. When the war ended, the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain Minorca and Gibraltar, and granted it the monopoly of the slave trade from Africa to the Americas. Restoration Prose Writers often used prose as a vehicle for reason. In fact one of the aims of the Royal Society was to encourage the “virtue of intellectual clarity”. The most prominent philosophers of the Restoration are Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. Thomas Hobbes’ a famous work is The Leviathan, a work of pessimistic political philosophy. For him, if people were left alone, they would be undisciplined and profiteers. For him, the only solution was to control them with a strong state and with a single ruler, to scary people and make them stay disciplined. For him, life was “bad, brutal and short”. He had a strong theory of language and a contempt for the imagination. John Locke, on the other hand, has an optimistic view. His “Essay on Human Understanding” says that reason is the dominant faculty of man and that knowledge is acquired with experience. This work marks the beginning of British empiricism. The British Empiricism It's a philosophy developed in Great Britain, during the Age of Reason and the Age of Enlightenment (17th and 18th), with John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Empiricism is the idea that the origin of knowledge is experiences, especially sensory and a posteriori. It relies on inductive reasoning to have more complex knowledge. Modern science and the scientific method are to be considered methodologically empirical in nature, because they have an inductive methodology. The term empiricism has a double etymology, coming both from’ experience ‘and from’ empiric ‘which refers to a doctor whose ability comes from experience as opposed to theoretical one. Empiricism is opposed to rationalism, which says that the mind can learn directly, without using the senses. Rationalism asserted itself in continental Europe, in the same period, with the work of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza… Restoration poets Poetry also plays an important role, with John Dryden, one of the most famous poets. His poetic works are: Astraea Redux, in which he celebrated the restoration of the monarchy, Annus Mirabilis, describing the Great Fire of London; Absalom and Achitophel, The Medall and MacFlecknoe. Satire was an important genre of Restoration poetry. Samuel Butler became famous thanks to his satirical poem Hudibras, which ridicules the two main Puritan sects of the time (the Presbyterians and the Independents), and criticizes the “hypocritical” ideals of the Puritans. Another important satirical poet is John Wilmot, and in “A Satyr against Reason and Mankind” he shows the influence of Hobbes’ philosophy. Restoration comedy The abolition of Puritan laws led to a more decadent climate for the upper classes. The theaters were reopened in 1660 and became lighter. The emphasis shifted from tragedy to social comedy, called the “Comedy of good manners” due to its exaggerated descriptions of the upper class. Some of the most important were Molière’s French comedies, the Italian “commedia dell’arte” (popular comedy with absurd characters) and the Spanish playwright Calderón de la Barca. One difference from the Renaissance drama : • the type of audience. Shakespeare’s plays were for all social classes, the Restoration plays were for the upper classes only. • Another difference is the changes in production design and in the acting profession . • The theaters are covered, the sets have been painted and the stage has been illuminated. • Women could be assumed, (replacing boys who had played female roles in Shakespeare’s day). One of the greatest interpreters of comedies was William Congreve with “The Way of the World”: a reflection and a critique of the world of appearances. THE AUGUSTAN AGE The period after the Restoration is known as the Augustan Age, after the first Roman emperor “Augustus” who reigned with good political stability. The Augustan age is also characterized by the spirit of the European Enlightenment, which had a new way of thinking characterized by a philosophical, scientific and rational spirit, and by a general skepticism and freedom from superstition. The features of the Restauration are: • the influence of the growing bourgeoisie begins to be felt • The spirit of the Enlightenment: characterized by a philosophical, scientific and rational spirit. • Order, harmony and balance in art and architecture, and reflected the bourgeoisie of the time. • Pragmatism and realism of the growing middle classes: the new form of literary art – Il Romanzo – is important. • Architecture and art are based on harmony and balance It's an important moment in the creation of England, characterized by cultural innovation. The virtues of courtesy, moderation and rationality were praised. Man has an innate sense of right and wrong, but virtue lies in “good education”. There were two ideals: civilization and moderation. There were 2 opposite cultures: • The Gentlemen: characterized by morality, fashion, simplicity and emotional authenticity. • The Manly Culture: Rural social life was important, with sports such as boxing, racing and many others. The Age of Reason After the theories of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo; Isaac Newton made a coherent theory about the universe and explained the force of gravity. In those days, science was controlled by the ecclesiastical authorities, but in this period the church loses its cultural monopoly and science becomes more important. It's called the Age of Reason because there was a lot of belief in progress. The experimental method Proposed by Galileo and Kepler, it consists in the observation of the phenomenon – hypotheses – predictions based on hypotheses – clarifications of the theory. This new rationalist spirit was not seen as a challenge to religion, but as a means for a better understanding of the order and harmony of a universe created by God. In fact, all the great scientists of the time were men of faith and of science at the same time. The Journalism Journalism began to have more importance in the eighteenth century, also for the growing power of the bourgeoisie; but journalism spread both in Italy and in Europe. The most popular titles are: The Tatler, The Spectator and The Examiner. In Italy, the most famous is “II Caffè” inspired by The Spectator. The British newspapers were allied with one of the two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories, and talked about problems such as morals, fashion and foreign affairs, topical issues. The Journalism helped the novel to develop. In this period, many people and especially men, begin to frequent the Coffee Houses to read newspapers and exchange ideas and opinions. The role of women British women were active in social and cultural life, compared to the rest of the countries. They visited friends, went to theaters and cafes. Some began writing careers, such as Aphra Behn, who was a playwright and writer. Female readers and writers influenced the rise of the novel. The literature Augustan prose: the most important literary event of the eighteenth century is the birth of the novel. But prose writing were in other forms such as pamphleteering, journalism and essay. Augustan poetry: it was of secondary importance, characterized by mock-heroic poems. They are formed as a satire, in which an ordinary character is ridiculed, giving a heroic dimension. For example Alexander Pope and his “Rape of the lock”. (Mock-heroic - finto-eroico). Methodism