riassunto dell'epoca sul contesto storico sociale, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica riassunto dell'epoca sul contesto storico sociale e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! PLEASE NOTE: The following text is compiled from materials taken from The Norton Anthology of English Literature website ( http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/). Specific addresses are given at the beginning of each section. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ http://www2.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/welcome.htm The Victorian Age In 1897 Mark Twain was visiting London during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations honoring the sixtieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's coming to the throne. "British history is two thousand years old," Twain observed, "and yet in a good many ways the world has moved farther ahead since the Queen was born than it moved in all the rest of the two thousand put together." Twain's comment captures the sense of dizzying change that characterized the Victorian period. Perhaps most important was the shift from a way of life based on ownership of land to a modern urban economy based on trade and manufacturing. By the beginning of the Victorian period, the Industrial Revolution, as this shift was called, had created profound economic and social changes, including a mass migration of workers to industrial towns, where they lived in new urban slums. But the changes arising out of the Industrial Revolution were just one subset of the radical changes taking place in mid- and late-nineteenth-century Britain — among others were the democratization resulting from extension of the franchise; challenges to religious faith, in part based on the advances of scientific knowledge, particularly of evolution; and changes in the role of women. All of these issues, and the controversies attending them, informed Victorian literature. In part because of the expansion of newspapers and the periodical press, debate about political and social issues played an important role in the experience of the reading public. The Victorian novel, with its emphasis on the realistic portrayal of social life, represented many Victorian issues in the stories of its characters. Moreover, debates about political representation involved in expansion both of the franchise and of the rights of women affected literary representation, as writers gave voice to those who had been voiceless. The section in The Norton Anthology of English Literature entitled "Victorian Issues" (NAEL 8, 2.1538–1606) contains texts dealing with four controversies that concerned the Victorians: evolution, industrialism, what the Victorians called "The Woman Question", and Great Britain's identity as an imperial power. Norton Topics Online provides further texts on three of these topics: the debate about the benefits and evils of the Industrial Revolution, the debate about the nature and role of women, and the myriad issues that arose as British forces worked to expand their global influence. The debates on both industrialization and women's roles in society reflected profound social change: the formation of a new class of workers — men, women, and children — who had migrated to cities, particularly in the industrial North, in huge numbers, to take jobs in factories, and the growing demand for expanded liberties for women. The changes were related; the hardships that the Industrial Revolution and all its attendant social developments created put women into roles that challenged traditional ideas about women's nature. Moreover, the rate of change the Victorians experienced, caused to a large degree by advances in manufacturing, created new opportunities and challenges for women. They became writers, teachers, and social reformers, and they claimed an expanded set of rights. In the debates about industrialism and about the Woman Question, voices came into print that had not been heard before. Not only did women writers play a major role in shaping the terms of the debate about the Woman Question, but also women from the working classes found opportunities to describe the conditions of their lives. Similarly, factory workers described their working and living conditions, in reports to parliamentary commissions, in the encyclopedic set of interviews journalist Henry Mayhew later collected as London Labor and the London Poor, and in letters to the editor that workers themselves wrote. The world of print became more inclusive and democratic. At the PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16 same time, novelists and even poets sought ways of representing these new voices. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote her first novel, Mary Barton, in order to give voice to Manchester's poor, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning tried to find ways in poetry of giving voice to the poor and oppressed. The third section of this Web site, "The Painterly Image in Victorian Poetry," investigates the rich connection in the Victorian period between visual art and literature. Much Victorian aesthetic theory makes the eye the most authoritative sense and the clearest indicator of truth. Victorian poetry and the Victorian novel both value visual description as a way of portraying their subjects. This emphasis on the visual creates a particularly close connection between poetry and painting. Books of fiction and poetry were illustrated, and the illustrations amplified and intensified the effects of the text. The texts, engravings, and paintings collected here provide insight into the connection between the verbal and the visual so central to Victorian aesthetics. Britain’s identity as an imperial power with considerable global influence is explored more comprehensively in the fourth topic section. For Britain, the Victorian period witnessed a renewed interest in the empire’s overseas holdings. British opinions on the methods and justification of imperialist missions overseas varied, with some like author Joseph Conrad throwing into sharp relief the brutal tactics and cold calculations involved in these missions, while others like politician Joseph Chamberlain considered the British to be the “great governing race” with a moral obligation to expand its influence around the globe. Social evolutionists, such as Benjamin Kidd, likewise supported the British dominion through their beliefs about the inherent developmental inferiority of the subject peoples, thus suggesting that Europeans had a greater capacity for ruling—a suggestion that many took as complete justification of British actions overseas. Regardless of dissenting voices, British expansion pushed forward at an unprecedented rate, ushering in a new era of cultural exchange that irreversibly altered the British worldview. http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/topic_1/welcome.htm The Victorian Age PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16 exploration, especially Henry Stanley's best-selling account of his travels through Africa, Through the Dark Continent (1879). Booth hoped to solve the problem of urban poverty by developing work colonies in Great Britain and abroad. Part I. — The Darkness. Chapter I. Why "Darkest England"? This summer the attention of the civilized world has been arrested by the story which Mr. Stanley has told of "Darkest Africa" and his journeyings across the heart of the Lost Continent. In all that spirited narrative of heroic endeavor, nothing has so much impressed the imagination, as his description of the immense forest, which offered an almost impenetrable barrier to his advance. The intrepid explorer, in his own phrase, "marched, tore, ploughed, and cut his way for one hundred and sixty days through this inner womb of the true tropical forest." The mind of man with difficulty endeavors to realize this immensity of wooded wilderness, covering a territory half as large again as the whole of France, where the rays of the sun never penetrate, where in the dark, dank air, filled with the steam of the heated morass, human beings dwarfed into pygmies and brutalized into cannibals lurk and live and die. Mr. Stanley vainly endeavors to ring home to us the full horror of that awful gloom. * * * It is a terrible picture, and one that has engraved itself deep on the heart of civilization. But while brooding over the awful presentation of life as it exists in the vast African forest, it seemed to me only too vivid a picture of many parts of our own land. As there is a darkest Africa is there not also a darkest England? Civilization, which can breed its own barbarians, does it not also breed its own pygmies? May we not find a parallel at our own doors, and discover within a stone's throw of our cathedrals and palaces similar horrors to those which Stanley has found existing in the great Equatorial forest? The more the mind dwells upon the subject, the closer the analogy appears. The ivory raiders who brutally traffic in the unfortunate denizens of the forest glades, what are they but the publicans who flourish on the weakness of our poor? The two tribes of savages, the human baboon and the handsome dwarf, who will not speak lest it impede him in his task, may be accepted as the two varieties who are continually present with us — the vicious, lazy lout, and the toiling slave. They, too, have lost all faith of life being other than it is and has been. As in Africa, it is all trees, trees, trees with no other world conceivable; so is it here — it is all vice and poverty and crime. To many the world is all slum, with the Workhouse as an intermediate purgatory before the grave. And just as Mr. Stanley's Zanzibaris lost faith, and could only be induced to plod on in brooding sullenness of dull despair, so the most of our social reformers, no matter how cheerily they may have started off, with forty pioneers swinging blithely their axes as they force their way into the wood, soon become depressed and despairing. Who can battle against the ten thousand million trees? Who can hope to make headway against the innumerable adverse conditions which doom the dweller in Darkest England to eternal and immutable misery? * * * The Equatorial Forest traversed by Stanley resembles that Darkest England of which I have to speak, alike in its vast extent — both stretch, in Stanley's phrase, "as far as from Plymouth to Peterhead"; its monotonous darkness, its malaria and its gloom, its dwarfish de-humanized inhabitants, the slavery to which they are subjected, their privations and their misery. That which sickens the stoutest heart, and causes many of our bravest and best to fold their hands in despair, is the apparent impossibility of doing more than merely to peck at the outside of the endless tangle of monotonous undergrowth, to let light into it, to make a road clear through it, that shall not be immediately choked up by the ooze of the morass and the luxuriant parasitical growth of the forest PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16 — who dare hope for that? At present, alas, it would seem as though no one dares even to hope! It is the great Slough of Despond of our time. And what a slough it is no man can gauge who has not waded therein, as some of us have done, up to the very neck for long years. Talk about Dante's Hell, and all the horrors and cruelties of the torture-chamber of the lost! The man who walks with open eyes and with bleeding heart through the shambles of our civilization needs no such fantastic images of the poet to teach him horror. Often and often, when I have seen the young and the poor and the helpless go down before my eyes into the morass, trampled underfoot by beasts of prey in human shape that haunt these regions, it seemed as if God were no longer in His world, but that in His stead reigned a fiend, merciless as Hell, ruthless as the grave. Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley's pages of the slave-traders coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the capture of the inhabitants, the massacre of those who resist, and the violation of all the women; but the stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghastly devastation is covered, corpse-like, with the artificialities and hypocrisies of modern civilization. * * * http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/topic_2/welcome.htm The Victorian Age 2. The Woman Question Many of the historical changes that characterized the Victorian period motivated discussion and argument about the nature and role of woman — what the Victorians called "The Woman Question." The extension of the franchise by the Reform Bills of 1832 and 1867 stimulated discussion of women's political rights. Although women in England did not get the vote until 1918, petitions to Parliament advocating women's suffrage were introduced as early as the 1840s. Equally important was the agitation to allow married women to own and handle their own property, which culminated in the passing of the Married Women's Property Acts (1870–1908). PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16 The Industrial Revolution resulted in changes for women as well. The explosive growth of the textile industries brought hundreds of thousands of lower-class women into factory jobs with grueling working conditions. The new kinds of labor and poverty that arose with the Industrial Revolution presented a challenge to traditional ideas of woman's place. Middle-class voices also challenged conventional ideas about women. In A Woman's Thoughts About Women (NAEL 8, 2.1596–97), the novelist Dinah Maria Mulock compares the prospects of Tom, Dick, and Harry, who leave school and plunge into life, with those of "the girls," who "likewise finish their education, come home, and stay at home." They have, she laments, "literally nothing to do." Likewise in Cassandra (NAEL 8, 2.1598–1601), Florence Nightingale, who later became famous for organizing a contingent of nurses to take care of sick and wounded soldiers during the Crimean War, writes passionately of the costs for women of having no outlet for their heroic aspirations. Popular representations of Florence Nightingale, "The Lady with the Lamp," reflect the paradox of her achievement. While her organization of nurses was an important advance in hospital treatment, the image of her tending the wounded seems to reflect a traditional view of woman's mission. Even Queen Victoria herself represents a similar paradox. Though she was queen of the British Empire, paintings and photographs of her, such as Winterhalter's The Royal Family in 1846, represent her identity in conventional feminine postures and relationships. Texts in this topic address both the hardships faced by women forced into new kinds of labor and the competing visions of those who exalted domestic life and those who supported women's efforts to move beyond the home. Journalist Henry Mayhew's interviews with a seamstress and a fruit seller vividly portray the difficulties of their lives. In Of Queen's Gardens John Ruskin celebrates the "true wife," and Elizabeth Eastlake's "Lady Travellers" proposes her as a national ideal, while in The Girl of the Period Eliza Lynn Linton satirizes the modern woman. In contrast, two fictional characters, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and George Gissing's Miss Barfoot, from The Odd Women, speak passionately of the wish that their existence be "quickened with all of incident, life, fire, and feeling." All of these texts show how complex the debate was on what the Victorians called "The Woman Question." ---------------------------------------- The Woman Question_texts http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/topic_2/ruskin.htm John Ruskin, from Of Queen's Gardens John Ruskin was both the leading Victorian critic of art and an important critic of society. His essay Of Queen's Gardens (1865), published in Sesame and Lilies, has been taken as an eloquent statement of the conservative ideal of Victorian womanhood. However, the essay also urges women to abandon trivial feminine pursuits in order to act as a moral force in countering the ills of society. * * * Now their separate characters are briefly these. The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16 This emphasis in nineteenth-century aesthetic theory on seeing the object as it really is has a counterpart in the importance of illustrating literature, particularly novels. Dickens worked most frequently with two great illustrators, George Cruikshank and Phiz (the pseudonym of Hablot Knight Browne). William Makepeace Thackeray drew his own illustrations. In the works of these authors and others, the juxtaposition of text and picture creates a characteristic nineteenth-century style, which the critic Martin Meisel defines in his book Realizations as a union of pictorialism with narrative, creating richly detailed scenes that at once imply the stories that precede and follow and symbolize their meaning. At the same time, developments in visual technology made it possible to see more and in new ways. Nineteenth century optical devices, creating illusions of various sorts, were invented near the beginning of the century: the thaumatrope, the phenakistoscope, the zoetrope, the stroboscope, the kaleidoscope, the diorama, and the stereoscope. Other inventions — such as the camera lucida, the graphic telescope, the binocular telescope, the binocular microscope, the stereopticon, and the kinetoscope — projected, recorded, or magnified images. Most important, the photographic camera provided an entirely new way of recording objects and people and transformed many areas of life and work. The selections in this topic concentrate on one aspect of the Victorian visual imagination: the visual illustration of poetry through the accumulation of visual detail. In Mariana (NAEL 8, 2.1112–14), for example, Tennyson conveys Mariana's despair through the objects that surround her. In a review, Arthur Henry Hallam uses the term "picturesque" to describe Tennyson's first volume of poems. Contrasted with the descriptive, which gives an objective account of appearances, the picturesque presents objects through the medium of emotion. Such poetry lends itself to illustration, and nineteenth-century editions of poetry, such as Moxon's Illustrated Tennyson or Macmillan's 1862 edition of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and Other Poems, frequently contained illustrations, much as novels did. Illustration's importance in nineteenth-century literary theory created a particularly close connection between painting and poetry. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted portraits to illustrate his poems, such as The Blessed Damozel, and created pairs of poems and paintings such as Lilith, Sibylla Palmifera , and Astarte Syriaca. Poets also frequently took painting as the subject of their poetry, as in Robert Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi (NAEL 8, 2.1271–80) or Andrea del Sarto (NAEL 8, 2.1280–86). Similarly, a number of writers created prose descriptions of great paintings that were almost a kind of prose poetry, like John Ruskin's description of J. M. W. Turner's The Slave Ship (NAEL 8, 2.1321–22) or Walter Pater's description of Leonardo Da Vinci's La Gioconda (NAEL 8, 2.1510– 11). Nineteenth-century artists felt a kinship between picture-making with words and picture- making with images that linked the sister arts of poetry and painting in close relationship. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16 http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/topic_4/welcome.htm The Victorian Age 4. Victorian Imperialism Great Britain during Victoria's reign was not just a powerful island nation. It was the center of a global empire that fostered British contact with a wide variety of other cultures, though the exchange was usually an uneven one. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly one-quarter of the earth's land surface was part of the British Empire, and more than 400 million people were governed from Great Britain, however nominally. An incomplete list of British colonies and quasi- colonies in 1901 would include Australia, British Guiana (now Guyana), Brunei, Canada, Cyprus, Egypt, Gambia, the Gold Coast (Ghana), Hong Kong, British India (now Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka), Ireland, Kenya, Malawi, the Malay States (Malaysia), Malta, Mauritius, New Zealand, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Somaliland (Somalia), South Africa, the Sudan, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and Trinidad and Tobago. Queen Victoria's far-flung empire was a truly heterogenous entity, governed by heterogenous practices. It included Crown Colonies like Jamaica, ruled from Britain, and protectorates like Uganda, which had relinquished only partial sovereignty to Britain. Ireland was a sort of internal colony whose demands for home rule were alternately entertained and discounted. India had started the century under the control of the East India Company, but was directly ruled from Britain after the 1857 Indian Mutiny (the first Indian war of independence), and Victoria was crowned Empress of India in 1877. Colonies like Canada PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16 and Australia with substantial European populations had become virtually self-governing by the end of the century and were increasingly considered near-equal partners in the imperial project. By contrast, colonies and protectorates with large indigenous populations like Sierra Leone, or with large transplanted populations of ex-slaves and non-European laborers like Trinidad, would not gain autonomy until the twentieth century. As Joseph Chamberlain notes in The True Conception of Empire, the catastrophic loss of the American colonies had given rise to a certain disenchantment with empire-building. But despite a relative lack of interest in the British imperial project during the early nineteenth century, the Empire continued to grow, acquiring a number of new territories as well as greatly expanding its colonies in Canada and Australia and steadily pushing its way across the Indian subcontinent. A far more rapid expansion took place between 1870 and 1900, three decades that witnessed a new attitude towards and practice of empire-building known as the new imperialism and which would continue until World War I. During this period Britain was involved in fierce competition for new territories with its European rivals, particularly in Africa. It was becoming increasingly invested, imaginatively and ideologically, in the idea of empire. It found itself more and more dependent on a global economy and committed to finding (and forcing) new trading partners, including what we might call virtual colonies, nations that were not officially part of the Empire but were economically in thrall to powerful Great Britain. All of these motives helped fuel the new imperialism. British expansion was not allowed to progress unchallenged — the Empire went to war with the Ashanti, the Zulus, and the Boers, to name a few, and critics like J. J. Thomas and John Atkinson Hobson (NAEL 8, 2.1632-34) denounced imperialism as a corrupt and debasing enterprise — but it progressed at an astonishing pace nonetheless. The distinction between imperialism and colonialism is difficult to pin down, because the two activities can seem indistinguishable at times. Roughly speaking, imperialism involves the claiming and exploiting of territories outside of ones own national boundaries for a variety of motives. For instance, Great Britain seized territories in order to increase its own holdings and enhance its prestige, to secure trade routes, to obtain raw materials such as sugar, spices, tea, tin, and rubber, and to procure a market for its own goods. Colonialism involves the settling of those territories and the transformation — the Victorians would have said reformation — of the social structure, culture, government, and economy of the people found there. Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Minute on Indian Education" gives us a good sense of this kind of interventionist colonialism at work. The Empire did not found colonies in all of its possessions, nor were colony populations necessarily interested in anglicizing the indigenous peoples they shared space with, as is clear from Anthony Trollope's dismissive assessment of the Australian aborigines. But in general Great Britain was able to justify its expansion into other peoples lands by claiming a civilizing mission based on its own moral, racial, and national superiority. As we see from the selections by Edward Tylor and Benjamin Kidd, late-Victorian science sought to prove that non-Europeans were less evolved, biologically and culturally, and thus unable properly to govern themselves or develop their own territories. Other writers like W. Winwood Reade and Richard Marsh described the imperfectly evolved colonial subjects as fearsome cannibals and beasts, hardly human at all. Thus they were patently in need of taming, and taking on this job was "The White Man's Burden" in Rudyard Kipling's famous phrase. ---------------------------------- Imperialism_texts http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/topic_4/tylor.htm PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16 Take up the White Man's burden-- The savage wars of peace-- Fill full the mouth of Famine And bid the sickness cease; And when your goal is nearest The end for others sought, Watch sloth and heathen Folly Bring all your hopes to nought. Take up the White Man's burden-- No tawdry rule of kings, But toil of serf and sweeper-- The tale of common things. The ports ye shall not enter, The roads ye shall not tread, Go mark them with your living, And mark them with your dead. Take up the White Man's burden-- And reap his old reward: The blame of those ye better, The hate of those ye guard-- The cry of hosts ye humour (Ah, slowly!) toward the light:-- "Why brought he us from bondage, Our loved Egyptian night?" Take up the White Man's burden-- Ye dare not stoop to less-- Nor call too loud on Freedom To cloke your weariness; By all ye cry or whisper, By all ye leave or do, The silent, sullen peoples Shall weigh your gods and you. Take up the White Man's burden-- Have done with childish days-- The lightly proferred laurel, The easy, ungrudged praise. Comes now, to search your manhood Through all the thankless years Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, The judgment of your peers! This text is part of the Internet Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history. Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright. Permission is granted for electronic copying, distribution in print form for educational purposes and personal use. PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16 If you do reduplicate the document, indicate the source. No permission is granted for commercial use of the Sourcebook. (c)Paul Halsall Aug 1997 halsall@murray.fordham.edu PAGE \* MERGEFORMAT 16