Mary Wollstonecraft e l'età vittoriana, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Mary Wollstonecraft e l'età vittoriana e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! MARYWOLLSTONECRAFT (1759 - 1797) Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer and a passionate fighter for the educational and social equality of women and men. She was born in London on 27 April 1759. She became a school teacher and a governess, and these experiences inspired her views in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, Her most important work on women’s place in society is A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, where she argues for equal educational opportunities for women. In 1792 she went to Paris to observe the French Revolution and here she had a daughter, Fanny. She then returned to London in 1795 and became part of an influential radical group which included Blake and Wordsworth. She got married in 1797 and had her second daughter, Mary Shelley, but died 11 days later. A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OFWOMAN (1792) This is one of the most important works of feminism; Wollstonecraft attacked the educational system of the period, which kept women in a state of ignorance and dependence, training them to be incapable. She asked for an educational system that offered girls the same advantages as boys, thing that could result in making women exceptional wives and mothers and good workers in many professions. She didn’t wish women to have power over men though, but that women should have power over themselves. This work was unique at that time for her idea that the situation of women could be improved through political and educational reforms, but it caused many controversies and she was attacked by politicians and writers. HISTORY (1837-1866) -Early Victorian Age- Queen Victoria rose to the throne in 1837 after William IV, the first 4 decades of her reign were a period of prosperity and marked the restoration of the monarchy. With the Industrial Revolution the nation saw an era of prosperity, but it was accompanied by social injustice. For this reason the petition “The People’s Charter” asked for a suffrage and parliamentary reform, that was completely accomplished with the Reform Bill of 1884. Other important reforms were the Factory Act(that regulated the work sector) and the Education Act(that made elementary education compulsory). In addition the Corn Law, that led to a strong poverty, was abolished thanks to the working and middle class, whose request for free trade marked the beginning of the economic boom. During the Victorian Age the Whigs became the Liberal Party(Gladstone) and the Tories evolved into the Conservative Party(whose leader Disraeli was responsible for the 2nd Reform Bill and the title of Empress of India given to Victoria). -Industrial and Technological Advance- Thanks to the many innovations, such as the locomotive and the opening of the Metropolitan Railway, the improvement in the shipbuilding industry, and the invention of the telegraph and the penny postal system, this century was a period of wealth for the upper and middle class, who saw the economic status as a indicator of moral value. Obviously there were many problems, like the heavy air, the increase of population and the amount of sewage, but the situation got better with the improvement of services, and the rise of crime was fought by Peel’s Metropolitan Police Force. Jeremy Bentham founded the philosophy of Utilitarianism, that stated that only what is useful is good and that all political, social and artistic action should aim to the greatest good for the greatest number of people. The ideas of the utilitarians were criticized because they avoided emotions and spiritual fulfillment. -Late Victorian Age- Victoria’s reign saw an economic and military success with the greatest expansion of the British Empire and its market. Poverty led to a massive emigration to the colonies, also increased by the desire of exporting British culture in the “uncivilised” lands. The pride in the british industrial progress made Prince Albert create, in the Crystal Palace, the Great Exhibition of Works and Industry, that displayed 100.000 exhibits and was a huge success. -The Expanding Empire- In 1840 the Chinese government attempted to end the East India Company’s exportation of opium from India to China and the First Opium War broke out, Britain won it. The Second Opium War was just a continuation of the first. Despite Gladstone’s effort Ireland was not given “home rule” and the nation was starving because of the failure of the potato crop; the hunger led to a massive emigration from Ireland to the Americas and Australia. Britain and France allied to stop the advance of the Russian Empire, which was threatening the Turkish and the Strait of the Dardanelles. Britain won the Crimean War but at a terrible cost in human lives. The destruction of the Indian cotton industry made by the EIC exploded in a rebellion of the sepoys in 1857, called the Indian Mutiny, but it was quickly suppressed. The great British Empire included the colonies of settlement, that were the first ones to obtain dominion(Canada in 1867, Australia and New Zealand in 1907), and the African colonies. The African colonies were taken during the “scramble for Africa”, a race made by the European nations to take over Africa, and England conquered Egypt, Uganda, Rhodesia, Kenya and Niger. -The End of Optimism- The growing cost of the empire led to a trade depression in the 1870-80. and it affected mostly the working class, who found a solution in the socialist theories of Marx; this resulted in the creation of the Fabian Society in 1884, that would eventually help the organization of the Labour Party. In the first half of the Victorian Age women were still educated to be housewives and mothers, but in the late 800s the first feminists began to have a voice, asking for a better education and especially the vote. -America: An Expanding Nation- In the early 19th century, the American Republic looked to conquer new territories towards the west, precisely the US gained Texas, California and New Mexico. While the northern states were modern and were based on the industry, the south still was centered on large plantations and slavery. In this period -Victorian Poetry- Victorian poetry isn’t as rich of authors as the prose scene, but we remember Tennyson and Browning, masters of the dramatic monologue, a long composition where a single character speaks about his own life. Tennyson writes Ulysses(42), a monologue revolving around the themes of heroism and knowledge, and Browning writes poems taking inspiration from the italian renaissance, with characters that speak like actors. During this period we see the birth of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, that included Dante Rossetti, Christina Rossetti and Morris; they took inspiration from the medieval art style before the revolution made by Raphael, with the themes of mysticism, sensuality and nostalgia. American poetry was dominated by two main authors:Whitman, who wrote Leaves of Grass(55), a collection of 300 poems about the individual, society, love and sex, and Dickison, who wrote more than 1800 poems, mostly about flowers and plants used to make reflections on life, death and religion, like Because I could not Stop for Death(90), a meditation on human destiny. -Victorian Drama- The Victorian Age marked the beginning of modern british drama with two irish authors: Oscar Wilde and George Shaw.Wilde’s production was composed of comedies such as The Importance of Being Earnest(95), characterised by witty and ironic dialogues but still containing universal themes and social criticism. Moral awareness and social criticism were also important in the work of Shaw who, with works like Mrs Warren’s Profession(93), forced the audience to reflect on unpleasant social issues like prostitution, poverty and the contradictions of Victorian society. EMILY BRONTE (1818 - 1848) Emily Bronte was born in 1818 and grew up with her aunt in Haworth(Yorkshire) and lived there for most of her life with her sibling. With two of her sisters, Anne and Charlotte, she spent her time writing poems that were later published under male pseudonyms, but they received a terrible response from the public. She then wrote her masterpiece,Wuthering Heights, published in 1847, just one year before her death in 1848. We know very little of her life and personality, but she was known to be a retiring person and the most talented among her sisters. We also know her for her bond with the landscape and nature, probably because of the village she grew up in. WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847) Wuthering Heights tells the story of two households:Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. The first one is the house of Mr Earnshaw, who finds a homeless gipsy boy named Heathcliff and adopts him. The boy will then fall in love with the daughter of his adoptive dad, Catherine, who grows attached to him. Unfortunately the girl marries the rich Edgar Linton from Thrushcross Grange, and in full anger Heathcliff runs and comes back time later to take revenge on the couple. Even the death of Catherine cannot free him from his pain, and her ghost will haunt him until his death, when they are said to rejoin and walk together eternally. Wuthering Heights is a romantic and gothic novel, extremely passionate and without a clear moral message, and for this reason it wasn’t well received at that time, but it’s now one of the classicals. Modern readers appreciate the complex structure and brilliant characterisation, and they love even more the use of flashbacks, indeed the novel begins at the end of the story and then it goes backwards and forwards as Nelly tells the story to Lockwood. CHARLOTTE BRONTE (1816 - 1855) Charlotte was born on 21 April 1816. Playing at home with her brother Cronwell’s toy soldiers they, together with Anne and Emily, became storytellers and invented an imaginary world called Angria. She attended Clergy Daughters’ School, where she got ill because of the harsh living conditions that later inspired the orphanage Jane Eyre attended during her childhood. In 1842 she went to Brussels with Emily to study languages, and here she fell in love with the headmaster of the school, but he was married and their love wasn’t possible.She then returned to her family town and tried to create a school with her sisters, but the project failed. Charlotte discovered the poems written by Emily and attempted to publish a collection of theirs and Anne’s poems using the pen-names of the brothers Bell; they didn’t get success but didn’t give up and wrote one novel each: Charlotte The professor, EmilyWuthering Heights and Anne Agnes Grey. Emily’s and Anne’s works were accepted but Charlotte’s was rejected. She then wrote another novel, Jane Eyre and published it in 1847. The Bell pseudonym made the public suspect that all of these works could have been written by a single man, so the sisters revealed their true identities in 1848. The success was followed by a tragedy, because in the span of two years, 1848 and 1849, Branwell, Emily and Anne died. She got married in 1854 and was expecting a baby in 1855, but she fell ill and died during the pregnancy. JANE EYRE (1847) Jane is a poor orphan girl and her rebellious behavior leads to her being sent to an orphanage, where she grows up in a harsh environment. She then becomes a teacher at the same school and then the governess of the daughter of Mr Rochester. Jane is not a beautiful girl but her intelligence charmes the man, who falls in love with her. The two plan to marry but the day before the wedding Jane discovers that Rochester is already married and that his wife is prisoner in a room of their house. She runs away and stays at Reverend River’s home, they are about to marry but the girl during one night hears the voice of Rochester calling her, so she returns to his house and finds out that it was burned down by his wife and he was blinded during the fire, but they eventually get married and live a happy life. Charlotte’s tale of Jane’s journey from poverty and hardship to the condition of a happily-married woman touches the themes of horror, passion and dreams typical of the Gothic genre. The setting is gothic: an old mansion that hides the secret of Rochester’s past, and there are supernatural situations, like the calling of Jane during the night. Rochester and Jane are themselves gothic heroes, he is an intelligent and cultured man and she is a passionate and dreaming woman. At the same time the novel is the realistic story of the development of a woman from childhood to adulthood, with a strong critique of the role of women in Victorian society: her belief in the primary importance of intelligence and independence for women challenges the Victorian prejudice against them. Being poor, Jane has to live the hardships of the Victorian school made for the children of the poor, and even as an adult she has to accept the humiliations of a society divided into classes. But being an independent woman she succeeds to create a spot for herself without losing her dignity. CHARLES DICKENS (1812 - 1870) He was born in 1812 in Portsmouth. When he was a kid his father was imprisoned for debts and was joined by his family; there Charles was forced to work 10 hours a day in a blacking factory. For this reason he suffered loneliness and hardship but these experiences gave him material to write his works. He began as a journalist for the Morning Chronicle, writing Sketches by Boz starting from 1833. He then married Catherine Hogarth in 1836 and in the same year he published his first novel, Pickwick Papers. The immense number of novels was first published as installments in magazines and then as books. He travelled to America for a lecture against slavery and to Italy. He left his wife for Ellen Ternan in 1858 and died in 1870. His novels were both full of humour and emotions. His sympathy for the working class and his battle against social injustice made him the most significant voice of the Victorian Age. ● Pickwick Papers is a series of tales connected by the protagonist Mr. Pickwick and his three friends, who go on a tour of scientific investigation through England. ● Oliver Twist(1837-1839) marks the beginning of social criticism with the story of an orphan that goes through exploitation and problems with his society. ● A Christmas Carol(1843) is a ghost story of the conversion of a miser to the spirit of Christmas ● Dombey and Son(1846) attacks the greed for money and power ● David Copperfield(1850) is similar to an autobiography ● Bleak House(1853) is a satire on the English justice ● Hard Times(1854) is focused on the education and the hardships of the working class ● Great Expectations(1860) is about the influence of sudden wealth on a young man’s moral Dickens wrote under the pressure of money and his publishers. The fact that he wrote his stories in publications marked his plots as every episode had to have a dramatic turn of events at the ending to keep the suspense and convince the reader to buy the next chapter. His characters are caricatures and embody vices and virtues and they are among the most memorable in English literature(Scrooge→uncle Scrooge, Fagin→ thief, Micawber→ optimistic). His influence on english is also shown in the daily language, indeed he brought back unknown words(boredom) and made slang expressions more common(butter-fingers). His novels focused on social criticism: he focused on the consequences of the Industrial Revolution on the poor, the working conditions, education, child labour and crime. This is because he believed in the ethical potential of literature, challenging the Victorian common belief that poor conditions led to being more likely to commit crimes and being sinful. OLIVER TWIST (1837-39) Oliver Twist is an orphan born in a workhouse, where the living conditions are terrible, and indeed when he tries to ask for some food he gets expelled. The boy runs to London where he joins the gang of Fagin and starts his life as a pickpocket, but he gets arrested, then rescued by Mr Brownlow, then the gang captures him and forces him to take part in a burglary where he gets shot and he’s finally taken in by Mrs Maylie. Nancy, a member of the gang, finds out that Monks is Oliver’s half brother and wants to kill him to get all of their father’s fortune. It turns out that the majority of the gang gets killed and Oliver can live a peaceful life in the countryside. In the story Oliver can’t be seen as a young criminal, because he has a pure heart and his happy ending confirms the result of the discovery of his true identity. The story comes from a condition that Dickens experienced, because he saw the effects of the Poor Law of 1834(poor could only receive assistance in the workhouses) on the poor, which strengthened the idea that connected poverty and sin, because the only alternative was crime and prostitution. OSCARWILDE (1854 - 1900) Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland, son of a wealthy doctor. He was an excellent student, he indeed studied at Trinity College, Ireland’s most prestigious college, and then at Oxford, where he studied Classics. He left for London at the age of 27 and then he sailed for a lecture tour of his first collection in America, England and Ireland, creating a name for himself as a leading figure in the aesthetic movement. Oscar was indeed the embodiment of the dandy, an elegant man who paid attention to his appearance, clothes and style. The dandy used his spirit to shock other people and unmask the absurdities of Victorian society, believing that life should be lived as a “work of art”. He married Constance, who gave him two sons. In 1888 he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of stories for children, and in 1879 he published his only novel and masterpiece, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that was attacked as an immoral work, but Wilde defended himself in a preface stating that “vice and virtue are to the artist material for an art”, outlining his philosophy of art based on the principles of Aestheticism: art is neither moral nor immoral, it has no moral purpose, because beauty in itself is a supreme value. After his first play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, he started writing a series of successful comedies, including his theatrical masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest(1895). Sadly in a moment of huge success Wilde became involved in a legal case that later led to his ruin: he had an affair with the young Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father accused him of homosexuality, which was a crime at the time. Wilde decided to accuse the father of libel and took him to court, but the lawyers brought evidence of Wilde and Douglas’ relationship and Wilde was imprisoned for two years. When he came out he was a broken man, many of his friends left him, including Lord Alfred, so he lived in exile in France, where he died in 1900, at just 46 years old. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890) The Picture of Dorian Gray tells the story of a rich, beautiful young man who has his portrait painted by Basil Hallward. At Basil’s studio Dorian meets Lord Henry and the man talks about the vanity of youth and beauty; Dorian is haunted by those words so he makes a sacrifice: his soul for eternal youth and beauty, while the portrait will show the signs of time. Under Lord Henry’s influence Dorian lives a life of pleasure, sin and crime, all hidden by his innocent aspect, while the portrait becomes old and ugly and shows the signs of his sins. At the end of the story Dorian is responsible for the death of an actress and he also kills Basil in a rage of anger because the artist finds out about his secret. Dorian decides to stab the portrait and this kills himself, leaving his horrible old man body on the ground beside the portrait, which returned to its original beauty. When the novel was published in 1890 it created a shock for most Victorian readers, who believed that the purpose of art was education and moral enlightenment; The Picture of Dorian Gray on the other hand proclaimed beauty as the unique purpose of art and life. However the novel does teach a moral lesson in the end, because Dorian’s sins led to his own destruction. The point is that Dorian doesn’t show his sinful life, he hides it behind his beautiful appearance, and this double life is a sign of hypocrisy: he uses his innocent face to be accepted in society but also to fulfill his desires without paying the consequences, a theme already present in Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, indeed both explore Vicotrian society and the forbidden desires behind the acceptable public faces, and in this sens Wilde’s is a highly moral novel. The novel combines the supernatural elements of the gothic novel withFrench decadent fiction. It is told by an unobtrusive third person narrator and Wilde uses dialogues to reveal his character’s personalities. RUDYARD KIPLING (1865 - 1936) Kipling was born in Bombay(Mumbai), India, in 1865 but at the age of six he was sent to England to get an education. Here he lived a deeply unhappy life, and he found his refuge in the art of writing. In 1882 he returned to India where he worked as a journalist, collecting a lot of material that was then used as a background of his later books: indian villages, colonial militars, jungles. He published a collection of poems which explored the moral problems of the Anglo-Indians in their relationship with the colonized. When he returned to England he was already acclaimed as the most brilliant writer of the British Empire in India. His most famous works are The Jungle Books(1894-95), a collection of stories for children, and his only novel, Kim(1901), about the adventures of an orphan traveling through India. Because of these works he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He died in 1936. Kipling is best remembered as a short story writer, especially for the Jungle Books, but he also wrote successful poems describing the difficult lives of the British soldiers in the Indian Empire, and this success comes mainly for the language he used, simple and often coming from the colloquial language, understandable also by the soldiers and the middle class. One of the main themes of his work is “the white man’s burden”, used as a positive expression of the duty of a “superior civilization” to educate and improve people perceived as “inferior”. Later he was criticized for being a defender of British Imperialism, because he considered it a humanitarian mission, a burden white men take to help less fortunate people; the problem tho is in the fact that these unfortunate people are considered racially inferior and not able to rule themselves, just like animals, so the white men had to take part in these “savage wars of peace” to bring civilization to non-white people. WALTERWHITMAN (1819 - 1892) Walt Whitman was born in New York in 1819 in a poor family, and he was indeed forced to leave school at 11 to help gain money. He firstly worked as a teacher but he wasn’t happy about it, however he later accomplished his ambition and became a journalist. He was a man of strong opinions and had radical positions on subjects like women’s rights and immigration. At the age of 30 he went to New Orlans, where he worked as an editor for a journal and was brought face to face with slavery for the first time, and when he returned to New York he started a newspaper called Brooklyn Freeman, through which he took part in the debate about slavery. In 1855 he published his first collection of poems with a preface titled Leaves of Grass, even though it contained only 12 poems; it was not a commercial success but he didn’t give up and one year later he published a second edition containing 32 works. His life took a wrong turn because he had to support his family: two of his brothers were alcoholics and another was handicapped. Another edition of Leaves of Grass came out in 1860 but the publisher became bankrupt and Whitman found himself in a difficult financial situation. He then moved to Washington where he started spending his free time helping wounded soldiers, and their stories became the column of a new collection called Drum-Taps(1865), that indeed told the terrible experiences of soldiers in the war and contained a final elegy for the death of Abraham Lincoln, assassinated the same year. Whitman’s last twenty years brought him international success, especially for Leaves of Grass, which contained 300 poems in its final edition, and one year before dying(1892) he published his final work: Good-Bye, My Fancy. LEAVES OF GRASS (1855-1856-1860-1871-1892) Whitman was one of the first voices to give America a high recognition. His work was controversial in his own time because of his political positions and his honest treatment of delicate questions like love and sex. The purpose of his work was massive: he dealt with the “self”, the concept of individuality, with society, with his concept of democracy and his admiration for his land, the USA. The poems describe the variety, size and energy of the nation, seen as a collective force made of the individual voices brought together. Whitman indeed never forgot that the whole is made up of single voices, and each single voice is equally important, because it is the single who builds democracy. This inclusive vision of democracy explains his poetic, indeed he considered completely valid subject for poetry themes like everyday life, everyday people and their everyday language, and this is why he uses a free verse full of slang expressions and dialect words. In his poems we can find everyday life subjects such as mechanics, carpenters, woodcutters and shoemakers. EMILY DICKINSON (1830 - 1886) She was born in 1830 in Massachusetts and led a reclusive life in her family home, where she dedicated her life to writing poetry. She refused to see most people but she still maintained relationships through letters with few elected friends. She was deeply interested in the historical and cultural events of the time: the civil war, abolitionism and transcendentalism. Only 7 poems out of her 1775 were published. Her poems are characterized by an extreme economy of expressions and linguistic compression; in addition her punctuation is very personal, with the intense use of dashes instead of commas and full stops, and were used to emphasize meaning. Her language often refers to the natural world to express abstract meanings, she was indeed influenced by Transcendentalism, which looked for a personal and universal meaning in nature. Even though she was an original poet, she was influenced by the american culture, most of all Puritanism and the Bible were at the root of her preoccupation with death and eternity. Europe on 8 May 1945, followed by the defeat of Japan with the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. The Second World War was one of the most tragic events in human’s history, and it is mostly remembered for the decision of the Nazi to exterminate all Jews in Europe: this genocide is known as the Shoah or the Holocaust and it consisted in the systematic killing of 6 million jews, along with other millions of gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents. The killing programme took place in the death camps, where gas chambers were used to exterminate large groups of victims at a time. During the Nuremberg Trials between 1945 and 1949 many Nazi leaders were accused of crimes against humanity and some were sentenced to death. -The Situation of the USA- As the new century began the United States was developing into the world’s leading industrial power, mostly because of the millions of immigrant workers. Much of this progress however was achieved at the cost of exploitation of workers. President Roosevelt, elected in 1901, worked to reform and he limited the power of monopolies, established national parks to protect the environment, created amendments to regulate the tax system and took over the construction of the Panama Canal. President Wilson, elected in 1912, led the USA through the First World War. At the beginning he tried to keep the nation neutral, but after Germany bombed the American ships he had to declare war. American forces greatly contributed to the defeat of Germany, and after the war Wilson helped to negotiate and create a League of Nations to maintain the peace in the world. Wilson also won a Nobel prize for peace. -The Second World War, USA- The Second World War broke out in 1939 but the USA entered it in 1941 after the attack of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. Two decisive points occurred when the allied forces invaded Sicily in 1943 and when British and American troops landed on the Normandy Coast. The war ended in 1945 but Japan refused to surrender, so President Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on 6th August and of Nagasaki on 9th August; with the surrender of Japan the war came to a definitive end. The war brought prosperity in the USA because the industrial production and the scientific research accelerated to help provide technologies for the war. -After the War, USA- By the end of the war Europe was devastated, millions of people had been killed and both industry and agriculture were in ruins, and in addition the population was starving. In 1948 President Truman created the Marshall Plan, known as the European Recovery Program, that was intended to rebuild the economies of the continent and prevent the spread of communism. After the war the relationship between the USA and the URSS changed. The prospect of the communist expansion convinced the USA and 11 other western countries to create the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the NATO, in 1949, and the Soviet Union and the eastern countries founded a rival alliance, theWarsaw Pact, in 1955. This asset went on throughout the Cold War(1945-91), the nonviolent conflict that characterized the relationship between the USA and the URSS. MODERNISM -The Death Of Victorian Certainties- The beginning of the 20th century was marked by one of the most productive literary and artistic revolutions of all time. All the aspects that were associated with Victorian literature, like the third-person omniscient narrator, the presence of many characters, the realism and the general optimism, were swept away by the development of new theories: the spread of Einstein’s relativity destroyed the faith in object reality, the influence of Freud’s psychoanalysis gave a brand new concept of the unconscious and the First World War was the final event that completely destroyed Victorian optimism and inaugurated a new era of anxiety. -The Rising Movements- Modernism is a general term referring to the literary and artistic movements that violently reacted against the 19th century values. The main movements were: ● Futurism, which rebelled against the past and tried to create a sense of dynamism ● Cubism, which fragmented the subjects into geometrical and abstract shapes ● Expressionism, characterized by distorted forms to convey an idea of anxiety ● Surrealism, which gave importance to the world of the unconscious Even tho the works of the modernists were heterogeneous it’s possible to point out some common features: the revolution of the narrative point of view, the redefinition of the concepts of time and space which are now subjective, the rejection of traditional grammar and punctuation and a complex vocabulary In Britain the group of modernist writers included authors such as T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who experimented with literary forms and reflected on the capacity to represent the self and the world. The writers who were active in the 1930s were deeply influenced by the historical events happening, like the Spanish civil war, the economic depression and the expansion of the Nazi power. -The Precursors Of Modernism- The precursors of the Modernist movement were writers who greatly experimented with narrative techniques like Conrad, Lawrence and Henry James. James for example wrote his novels from the point of view of one single character, adopting the narrative consciousness technique, and Conrad on the other hand adopted the opposite, he used multiple points of view to give voice to the fragmented self of the characters, giving the readers disconnected images which gave them the idea that they couldn’t fully trust the narrator, and this drove the readers’ attention to the limits of writing and the impossibility of telling stories. These techniques come from the beginning of the underestimation of the idea that the self is stable and a fixed identity; the new theory of Freud indeed formalized the idea that consciousness is multi-layered and that reality exists only as it is perceived by the self. -The Stream Of Consciousness- Another influential personality was the philosopherWilliam James, who gave one of the most famous definitions of the self: he explained how consciousness doesn’t appear like something divided in parts like a “chain”, but it flows and the best way to describe it is using the metaphors “river” and “stream”, which give the best idea of its nature, in other words it cannot be organized in a rational way nor be described objectively. This idea of the “stream of consciousness” was immediately translated into fiction by writers like Virginia Woolf and Joyce, who made large use of different techniques to express the complex work of the human mind: the fragmentation of the character’s perspective, the overlapping of past and present events; Joyce for example used a direct interior monologue(it’s the direct revelation of the character’s thoughts without the filter of the author) andWoolf used an indirect interior monologue(same thing, but revealed by a non-obtrusive narrator). The work of the modernist writers attempted to express the instability that characterized the turn of the 20th century, when all the old certain concepts like the Christian faith, the stability of the self and the capacity of the novel to describe the world were put in doubt. -The War Poets- Half of the 20th century was dominated by the experience of the world wars, which inevitably put the base of the production of that time. The best example of this trend is a group of poets called the “War Poets'', men who wrote while they were fighting in the trenches of the First World War. They were soldiers who welcomed with enthusiasm the break of the war, but they were soon confronted with its inhumanity and described it as a terrible experience leading to death, suffering and alienation; we remember names like Owen, Brooke and Rosenberg, all died while fighting. -Imagism- Another important poetical movement was Imagism, which drew inspiration from both Symbolism, that broke the traditional metrical system, and the aesthetic philosophy, that believed in the importance of “raw images” as pure forms of expression. The main author is Ezra Pound, an intellectual who defined an image as something that produces and intellectual and emotional reaction in an instant of time. The Imagist movement started in 1914 with the publication of their manifesto which listed some of the aspects of their poetry: the use of common words, the free use of metrical forms, the preference for a concise and dry style and the avoidance of vague concepts in favor of concreteness. Imaginism centered its poetic on the thing and the avoidance of words that didn’t contribute to the presentation of a concept and it was vital for the birth of the personal style of T.S. Eliot and his masterpiece The Waste Land.