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MODERN AGE The Edwardian age Edward VII • The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 and the succession of her son, Edward, marked the start of a new century and the end of the Victorian era and starting the Edwardian age. • He became king as Edward VII(1901-1910) he lasts only 9 years. • He embodied this new culture :  in the way he modernized the monarchy  brought new life and a sense of fun to a royal court  redecorated Buckingham Palace ,where he held balls and session of court. • In 1904 he signed an agreement with France , in the so-called Entente cordiale. o It established a mutual agreement that Britain could pursue its interest in Egypt, and France in Morocco. o The Britain was helped by the king’s diplomacy to establish itself in a new alignment of European countries: Britain would count on France and Russia in any conflict with Germany Austria or Italy • In 1906 the Liberals gained supremacy in the election and the situation changed. • Liberals were divided into two groups: o Those who supported the Traditional Liberal Values of laissez-faire and self-help o Those who supported New Liberalism. => among the new liberals was :  Winston Churchill(1874-1965) was the prime minister.  David Lloyd George (1863-1945) was Chancellor of Exchequer in charge of the country’s finances and had the money and the power to carry the reforms. => He believed that the government had the responsibility to look after the poor and he started what is called Welfare state with some reforms: 1.The children’s charter (1906-08) was a series of laws helping children because they received free meals, regular medical inspection in school and were banned from public houses and not allowed to beg. 2.The Old Age Pensions Act(1908) =>The old age was one of the main causes of poverty and so many old person went into workhouses. The poverty was improved partially with the introduction of the old age pension for person with an annual income of under £21 a year. =>Another cause of poverty was unemployment but in 1909 minimum wages were fixed, and in 1911 workers had benefits such as free medical treatment and sickness benefit. • The House of Lords supported the Conservative Party and rejected George’s budget because in this way its members would pay increased taxes. • The liberals decided that the house of lords needed to be reformed but with the Parliament Act (1911) made impossible to they to reject a bill about money and also it stated that general election would be at least every five years. This type of system still operates now. • The women  In 1900 were still second class citizens who had not the right to vote in the election for Parliament and even had not the right to become MPs.  In 1903 Emmeline Pankurst and her daughter Christabel founded “The Women’s Social and Political Union “ 1  The WSPU was an group of “Suffragettes” who wanted that the women have the right to vote .  They believed in “DEEDS NOT WORDS”  they held large marches in London, chained themselves to railings, broke windows, hit and spit at policemen.  Women aged 30 and over would gain the vote in 1918. • The appearance of popular newspapers was one of the most striking social changes of this period. • Universal education had created a reading public which could not afford to buy papers like ''the times'' and the ''daily telegraph'', and which did not have sufficient knowledge of or interest in politics to appreciate the long reports of parliamentary debates to be found in traditional newspapers. • “Daily mail” was launched in 1896. =>This paper differed from all other dailies because:  it cost only a halfpenny,  the articles were short,  the vocabulary simple and the layout attractive. • The transport change during the age because ; in London the underground railway was electrified and considerably extended after 1905, with the result that working class people were able to live in new estates on the edges of the town and could be transported cheaply to work in the city centre. • The Edwardian age still relied mainly on the horse and for long distances, on the railway. Britain and World War I George V • When Edward VII died in 1910 his young son became king in Westminster Abbey in 1911 until 1936. • During his reign was the World War I ,which broke out in 1914. • Europe was divided into two rival camps:  The Triple alliance of Germany, Austria, Italy  The Triple entente between Britain, France , Russia • The war broke out because:  Russia and Austria were in conflict over the Slavic state of Slovenia  And the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914. • Russia was forced to defend Serbia ,while Germany take the part of Austro –Hungarian empire. • Britain declared war to Germany in august 1914 because this marched through Belgium (neutral territory) in order to attack France • In Britain there was great patriotic enthusiasm for the war because  Many people thought it was right for reaching freedom and democracy  And maybe because had romantic ideas that it would be a heroic adventure • The government was able in persuading men to join up with the help (by using)  Propaganda (posters ,speeches newspaper advertisement )  and encouraging men from the same area or factory to form " Pals Battalions" =>was a group of men of the same area. • In 1915 many men were killed in the war and so they needed more recruits  and the government introduced conscription for all men aged 18-41 • Women replaced men in their civilian jobs with competence and reliability , thus effectively contributing to bring about women's suffrage • The Germans expected a brief conflict and they nearly defeated the allies in the first few weeks of war in 1914, since  it had better equipment, 2 In 1938 the Germany took over the part of Czechoslovakia inhabited by German population. When it tried to take over also the Poland, the England intervene. The Germany had many successes, poland , belgium holland and norway fell in 1940 and also france after Dunkirk. There reasons for German defeat were several: -it did not manage to get control of air over English Channel The decision to invade the USSR, where the german army was destroyed by the long Russian winter and by the resistance of Leningrad Moscow and Stalingrad when the Japan attacked Pearl Harbour, the USA joined the war and marked a turning point towards the final victory. On 6 June 1944 American, British and Canadian troops landed in Normandy (D-DAY) so German finally surrendered after Hitler’s suicide. The war ended when in 1945 President Truman ordered to drop the atomic bomb to Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Europe was weakened by the war and had to abandoned some colonies and for example India wanted independence from England as a reward to have fought for Britain THE UNITED STATES BETWEEN THE TWO WARS the USA became the richest country in the world, also thanks to agricultural prosperity and massive industrial output and huge mineral resources, and on the rise of the trust (corporations of the same trade), though it was characterized by an industrialized north and a rural south. In this period, national problems, like dirty and overcrowded slums in industrial areas like boston and new york, and corruption in the government, were brought to light by the muckrackers, scoop journalists, or investigative journalists. The 26th president of the USA Theodore Roosevelt introduced the progressivism, to resolve the problems of the society. He followed an expansionistic policy in fact the USA supported Cuba's rebellion against Spain. The Spain was defeated, and the USA acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other countries. But colonialism and imperialism was seen as contrary to the values of the American constitution, because once it was a colony and they fought to obtain the independence, and now they were the mother country. So they grant the independence to all their colonies except Cuba, maintaining the naval base at Guantanamo. In this period some phenomenon occurred: - red scare, fear of the Socialism: the most important case was the murder of Vanzetti and Sacco; - fear against the Afro-Americans; - bootleggers, that caused also the gangsterism: it was born from the institution of the 18 th amendment which forbade the consumption of alcohol. In 1929, the USA was crushed by the Wall Street Crash, which caused the ruin of thousands of people, and that introduced the period of Great Depression: millions of Americans received food in the so-called "bread lines". Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to resolve this crisis, introduced the New Deal, based upon relief, recovery, reform, in 1932. Before the crisis, in the USA the Jazz Age THE AGE OF ANXIETY In the last 2 decades of the 19th century the system of Victorian values come to the end. The positivistic faith in progress and science had led people to believe that all human misery would be swept away . - The first WW left the country in a disillusioned and cynical mood. Soldiers celebrated their return to home with a search for pleasure, other were haunted by a sense of guilty for the horror of the trenches —> increasing feelings of frustration —> slow dissolution of the Empire into the Commonwealth, led transformation: nothing seemed to be right, even science and 5 religion offer just little confort or security - Scientific and philosophers had new views of man and universe: 1. Sigmund Freud in “The interpretation of dreams” said that man’s action were motivated by irrational forces and that the superego could profoundly distort man’s behaviour. Also important the “libido”, particularly in the Oedipal phase in which the child sees the father as a rival for his mother affections. Freud provided a new method of investigation into the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of the “free association”, which influenced the writers of the modern age. 2. Carl Gustav Jung added to Freud concept the “collective unconscious”, a sort of cultural memory containing the universal myth, which operates on a symbolic level —> this meant that object of everyday had symbolic power and people responded to them unconsciously. 3. Introduction the “Theory of relativity” by Einstein, which discarded the concepts of time and space. World lost its solidity, there was the inability to arrive to a common idea of man: to Freud man was a part of nature; to Marx was the outcome of social and economic forces. 4. Nietzsche declared “God was dead”, and substituted Christian morality with a belief in human power —> more and more intellectual turn to a esoteric beliefs. English philosophy became analytical, focusing on the study of language —> rectify the knowledge possessed —> this led writers to views literature as a guide to the perplexities of an age of isolation, alienation and anxiety (impossibility to mastering the chaotic universe) - MODERNISM - First decades of 20th century, period of originality and vitality in the history of art, centred in Paris, but originally from Europe and America. - Modernism expressed the desire to break up with established forms and subjects: in the novel is explored the characters’ psyche through the intro monologue. Mixed slang with elevated language, free verse, obscure symbols and fragmented images. - MAIN IMAGES: modernist shred this common features: Distortion of shapes; Breaking down of limitations in space and time and the conventional verse; Our perception of reality is uncertainly, temporary and subject to change; the objectivity was brought by a third-person narrator, which fixed narrative point of view; Importance to the sound to create “the music of ideas”; A tendency toward self-consciousness about the production of the work of art; The need to reflect the complexity of modern urban 6 life; A rejection of elaborate formal aesthetic in favour of minimalist design; A rejection of the distinction between “high” and “low”. - TOWARDS A COSMOPOLITAN LITERATURE: writers and poets take inspiration from classical to create a new subjective mythology → past as something to recreate in an original way. - Eliot in The west Land explored much influences like Buddhism, metaphysical poets like Dante, Freud →modern English was becoming cosmopolitan, moving away from the uppermiddle- class. THE MODERN NOVEL The English novel was essentially bourgeois in its origin and throughout the 18th and the 19th centuries it was firmly anchored in a social world with the gain or loss of social status as its favourite theme. The novelist used to make digressions, adress the reader, comment on his own performance: he was expected to mediate between his characters and the reader, relating in a more or less objective way significant events and incidents in chronological order. Naturalism brought nothing new from this point of view and the structure of the novel remained basically unaltered till the second decade of the 20th century when there was the shift from the Victorian to the modern novel. This change was characterised by a gradual but substantial transformation of British society, which6 in a few years passed from the comfortable, prosperous world of the Victorians to the inter-war- years marked by unrest and ferment. This new “realism”, influenced by French and Russian writers (Marcel Proust, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy) tended to shift from society to man, regarded as a limited creature. Two other factors contributed to producing the modern novel: the new concept of time and the new theory of the unconscious deriving from the Freudian influence. The novelist rejected omniscient narration and experimented new methods to portray the individual consciousness. If the distinction between past and present was almost meaningless in psychological terms, then there was no use in building a well-structured plot, in leading a character through a well arranged chronological sequence of events. It was not necessarily the passing of time that revealed the truth about characters. It might unfold in the course of a single day, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses and in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, by observing the character performing a common action, or by what Joyce called ‘epiphany , that is the sudden revelation of an interior reality caused by the most trivial events of everyday life. The stream of consciousness technique or the interior monologue was introduced to reproduce the uninterrupted flow of thoughts, sensations,memories, associations and emotions in a flux of word, ideas and images quite similar to the mind’s activity. It is possible to distinguish at least 3 groups of novelists of the first decades of the present century. • The first group consists of the psychological novelists who concentrated their attention on the development of the character’s mind and on human relationships. The most important are: Joseph Conrad, whose novels try to go beyond the surface of external phenomena in order to record the mystery of human experience; D.H.Lawrence, who centred his work on the inner conflicts of working-class people, and the liberating function of sexuality. 7