Riassunto dettagliato di opere di Dickens, Stevenson, Oscar wilde, Victorian compromise, aesthetic movement, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica Riassunto dettagliato di opere di Dickens, Stevenson, Oscar wilde, Victorian compromise, aesthetic movement e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! CHARLES DICKENS -OLIVER TWIST The novel begins in the early 1800s. A young woman arrives at a workhouse in a small town north of London; here she gives birth to a boy. His name is Oliver Twist and is put into a workhouse orphanage until the age of nine. Here the children as Oliver were mistread and so Oliver decided to run away and he meets a group of guys that teach him to steal and he is horrified to see them pick the pocket of an old gentleman and runs away. He is arrested but the pickpocket's victim is convinced of his innocence of Oliver and takes him to his house. Here Oliver, is treated with compasion and benevolence. But the gang of thieves kidnap him and oblige him to burgle a house but during the robbery he cries out to warn the people living there. Oliver is wounded and the owner of the house take care of him. Meanwhile, a mysterious man named Monks turns out to be Oliver's brother. Monks wanted to discredit Oliver's reputation in order to exclude him from their deceased father's rich inheritance. Moreover, it is also discovered that Oliver's dead mother and Rose Maylie were sisters. Oliver is finally adopted by Mr Brownloe, while the thieves are brought to justice and Monks receives his share of the inheritance, goes to America and becomes bankrupt, falls into crime and dies in jail. The poverty drives them to crime and they use the violence. The people of the Victorian middle class show a regard for moral values and believe the principle of human dignity. The workhouses was managed by parishes and the conditions were appalling. Families were separated and rationd of food and clothing were scarce and this conditions would inspire the poor to get better their own conditions but the workhouse did not provide any means for social and economic improvement. Infact, as Dickens points out, the workhouse instead of allievating the sufferings of the poor, they caused only misery. -HARD TIMES Hard times is a novel of social protest which attacks utilitariaism, Bentham's theory which only considered the practical aspects of happiness and ignored emotional, spiritual and moral values. The novel is set in an imagery industrial town in northern England. Thomas Gradgrind is a retired businessman who runs a school and he was an educator who believes only in facts and figures, brings up his two children, Louisa and Tom, in the same way, repressing their immagination and feelings, crushing any imaginative impulses they might have. His friend is Josiah Bounderby, a banker. The two of them decide that Sissy Jupe, one of the students, must be expelled from the school because , being an emotional and imaginative child, she has a bad influence on the other students. But when they learn that Sissy's father seems to have abandoned his daughter, Gradgrind decides to let her live in his home. She becomes like a sister to Grandgrind's daughter Louisa, an unhappy teenager whose imagination and emotions cannot find expression. As Louisa grows older, she decided to marry Bounderby, only to help her brother Tom. Louisa is unhappy because she is trapped in a marriage and she becomes vulnerable to the seduction of a young politician, James Harthouse. But Louisa returns to her father's house and Sissy meets Harthouse and tells him that he will never see Louisa again. In the meantime it is discovered that the bank has been robbed and the blame falls on Stephen Blackpool, an honest worker who has left Coketown. He returns to prove his innocence but he dies in the mine. Before long it comes out that Tom is the robber and he is arrested but manages to escape abroad where he dies. Gradgrind is devastated when he realises that he was ruined his daughter's life and that his son is a criminal. Bounderby loses his reputation and he will die of a stroke five years later. Louisa finds comfort in Sissy's happy marriage and Gradgrind, who is a good man, asks forgiveness of his daughter. This novel uses its characters and stories to denounce the gap between the rich and the poor and to criticize the materialism and the novel suggests us that 19 century England was turning human beings into machines. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON -THE STRANGE CASE OF A DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE This short novel, set in Victorian London, can be read as science fiction, a thriller, a Gothic tale, or an allegory of the dualism of human nature. A London lawyer, Mr Utterson, hears from a cousin of a strange episode of cruelty performed by a man called Hyde. To his surprise, the lawyer finds that this man seems to be protected by one of his clients, the honest and respectable Dr Jekyll. So, he contacts a friend of Jekyll, Dr Lanyon but the two scientists are no longer in contact. Suddenly, one night a old gentleman is murdered and a witness identifies the criminal as Hyde. Jekyll is suspected of hiding him and the doctor seems upset and he begins to live in seclusion. On another dark and foggy night, Jekyll's servant goes to the lawyer's house to ask for help because his master refuses to open the door of the laboratory and his voice seems strange. The town men go into the laboratory and see a man on the floor, who dies, in agony, after a few moments. They don't find Jekyll but they find a large envelope addressed to Mr Utterson. This means that the doctor was alive but he must have gone away. There are other papers, one written by Dr Lanyon and one written by Jekyll himself. In his paper Lanyon relates how devastated he was when he witnessed a shocking experiment. The other narrative, written by Jekyll, is a sort of spiritual autobiography and gives a complete solution of the mystery. He was born into a respectable middle class family and his principles were so high that he could not indulge himself and accept his evil inclinations. He felt the presence of a good side and a bad side. He studied and investigated the phenomenon of the dualism of human beings. His aim was to separate the two elements and finally he managed the compound a potion which removed the supremacy of the spiritual powers and substituted for them a second form, the lower elements. He drank the potion and he was transformed into a deformed, smaller man. He then found that if he drank the potion a second time he changed back into Jekyll. For a period he enjoyed the possibility of being transformed into a new person but when he realised that he could not control his experiments and the change of self became automatic, he realised that he could no longer stand the situation and decided to act. Jekyll and Hyde are the stereotypes who people who are good and evil. Jekyll has a virtuous life, her face is beautiful and her body proportioned while Hyde is pale and his hands are dark and hairy. Jekyll has projected his hidden pleasures into Hyde. INTERPRETATIONS Jekyll's discovery may symbolise the artist's journey into the unexplored regions of the human psyche. -Gothic: the story of the man of science who tries to separate the good in himself from the evil. -Science fiction: like M. Shelley's Frankestein there is a scientist who works alone in his lab on his experiments. -Detective fiction: mystery and suspense that surrounds the unsolved crimes.