Scarica Aestheticism and Modernism: Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! OSCAR WILDE At the end of the 18th century the Victorian morals were being questioned by Aestheticism. According to Aestheticism, art should be produced to be beautiful, rather than to serve a moral purpose, a sentiment exemplified by the slogan "art for art's sake”. An important figure that express this ideal in his works is Oscar Wilde, an Irish author who is best known for his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. It revolves around the theme of the double through the portrait of Dorian Gray painted by Basil Hallward, an artist. Dorian expresses the desire to sell his soul, to ensure that the picture, rather than he, will age and fade. The wish is granted, and Dorian pursues a promiscuous life while his portrait ages and visually records every one of Dorian's sins. Indeed the discovery of the body of Dorian Gray as a ugly corpse at the end of the novel recalls the discovery of Jekyll/Hide in Stevenson’s novella. Therefore we can link this novel to the concept of cosmos and caos because Wilde describes the complex psyche of Dorian, filled by egoism , and when he finds out his beauty is not gonna stay permanently he tries to restore his mental disorder by conducting a life full of pleasure and vain illusions. So we can conclude by saying that “The Picture of Dorian Gray” he creates a split between the world of appearances and the inner world of mental and bodily passions. JAMES JOYCE James Joyce was an Irish novelist, who contributed to the development of Modernism, which was a movement that focused on the analysis of human mind. Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses (1922) is a landmark in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in a variety of literary styles, most famously stream of consciousness technique. Using this technique, he ignored orderly sentence structure and attempted to reproduce in words the rambling processes of the human mind. Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922, but its publication in England and the United States was prohibited because of its perceived obscenity. The action of the Ulysses starts on 16 June 1904 at 8 am and ends sometime after 2 am the following morning.The novel consists of 18 episodes, each covering roughly one hour of the day of Leopold Bloom using a unique literary style, influenced by the use of interior monologue. The three central characters are Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive and fatherless young man with literary ambition, Leopold Bloom ,a dubliner advertisement agent, and his wife, Molly Bloom—are intended to be modern counterparts of Telemachus, Ulysses, and Penelope.the various odysseys of Bloom,Stephen and Molly are voyages through the internal sea of their own consciousness. In conclusion we can said that Joyce uses the epic model to stress the lack of heroism and ideals of the modern man and to criticize his contemporary society. VIRGINIA WOLF Virginia Wolf was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Her most known novel is Mrs Dalloway, in which 6 lives are shown in a day in the Bond Street Area in London, similar to the plot of Ulysses.Mrs. Dalloway is essentially plotless; what action there is takes place mainly in the characters’ consciousness, that’s is why we can link this work to the concept of cosmos and caos or on the route of Ulysses. The novel addresses the nature of time in personal experience through multiple mixed stories, particularly that of Clarissa as she prepares for and hosts a party and that of the mentally damaged war veteran Septimus Warren Smith. The two characters can be seen as foils for each other.Moreover because of structural and stylistic similarities, Mrs Dalloway is commonly thought to be a response to James Joyce's Ulysses, a text that is often considered one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Both Joyce and Woolf use the narrative technique of the interior monologue, but there is a difference between the way in which it's used: in fact Joyce’s narrative technique is more experimental than the one used by Woolf, who maintains a sort of logical oder; in addition to that, Virginia Woolf wants to express character’s emotions rather than describing the character’s psyche as Joyce does. In conclusion we can said that both Joyce and Woolf are the most important writers of all time because they contributed to the study of the human mind.
