Literary Analysis: Influential British Authors and Their Works, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica Literary Analysis: Influential British Authors and Their Works e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Inglese -Charles Dickens 1812-1870 •Charles Dickens was part of the realist current ,he depicted the living condition of life of the poor and the oppressed and also denounced the problems related to industrialisation, it's injustices and iniquities like the exportation of children,the cruelty of the workhouses and the evils of the Industrial Revolution. •His aim was to arouse the reader's interest by exaggerating his characters' habits and the language of the London middle and lower classes. •One of his most famous novels is Oliver Twist(1837-39): Oliver is an orphan who works in a workhouse. One day he asks for more food and this provokes a furious reaction,the parish official offers five pounds to anyone takes Oliver as an apprentice. After being sent away to work as an apprentice , Oliver runs to London,where he becomes part of a group of thieves.After a series of difficulties, Oliver finds his half brother and receives a share of his father’s fortune.  •This novel was written to attack the cruelty of institutions,like the workhouse, and of individuals towards poor children, who are presented as either innocent or corrupted by adults. -Robert Louis Stevenson 1850-1894 •His masterpiece is: The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde(1886). This novel is set in London and the protagonist is a man with two identities: the first is that of Dr Jekyll, with a rational and moral character. The second identity is that of Mr Hyde, who is dominated by instincts and sensuality and is the depraved, irrational and evil character. •The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" is a psychological novel exploring the theme of duality in human nature, particularly the presence of good and evil in Victorian society. •The protagonist, Dr Jekyll, develops a potion to separate his dual identities. Over time, he becomes addicted to the potion, and his evil alter ego, Mr Hyde, gains control. Faced with remorse, Jekyll has two choices: a life of crime or his own demise. He ultimately chooses to end his life to halt the havoc caused by Hyde.(The story ends with Mr Hyde’s suicide.) -Oscar Wilde 1854-1900 •He believed in “Art for Art’s sake” and he adopted the figure of the Dandy , he also believes in Aestheticism: the research of beauty through painting art ect… He was imprisoned for being homosexual and after prison he was a broken man and spent his la years of life in exile in France. He believed his life was a work of art. •The picture of Dorian Gray: The novel is set in London. The protagonist is Dorian Gray, a young rich man whose beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to paint his portrait. He makes a pledge: he will sacrifice his soul if he can maintain his youth and beauty forever. Dorian leads a hedonistic life of pleasure,sin,crime and corruption . While the young man’s desires are satisfied ,the signs of age appear not on Dorian but on the portrait.The painter discovers Dorian’s secret and he is killed by him. Dorian wants to get free from the portrait, (witness his spiritual corruption), and stabs it but he kills himself. At the very moment of Dorian’s death, the picture returns to its original purity, and Dorian’s face becomes wrinkled. ~The Picture of Dorian Gray explores the themes of: •Cult of beauty and art • Theme of the double: the picture represents the dark side of Dorian, his soul, his bad consciousness. • The contrast between good and evil  • The constant between appearance and reality. -The war poets: When the First World War broke out, thousands of young men volunteered for military service => most of them regarded the conflict as an adventure undertaken for noble ends => it was until the Battle of the Somme (the bloodiest battle in British history) in 1916 this sense of pride was replaced by doubt and disillusionment =› life in the trenches was hell. The war poets => are a group of poets who enlisted and actually experienced the fight=> they managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic and unconventional way, awakening the conscience of the readers back home to the horrors of the war=› it's a modernist poetry as its subject matter could not be conveyed in the 19th century poetic conventions and forced them to find new modes of expressions. -James Joyce 1882-1941  •He was born in Dublin (Ireland) in 1882 and studied at university college. He moved to Italy (Trieste) and was Italo Svevo's English teacher and they were also friends. At the outbreak of WW1, he had to leave Italy because Italy and Britain were enemies, so he went to Switzerland. He died blind and poor. As regards fiction, he's considered as the greatest representative of Modernism. James Joyce is the master of the direct interior monologue (nothing is filtered by the narrator, there's a direct revelation of the character's thoughts).  •Dubliners is a 15 short stories collection written in 1900 in Dublin and published in 1914 in Trieste. The stories revolve around the lives of 15 inhabitants of Dublin. The collection is divided in three categories: childhood, adulthood, private and public life.The techniques used are the opening in media res, the perspective of a character, free direct speech and different linquistic registers according to the characters. The city of Dublin is emblematic and it represents an static and provincial town, without any cosmopolitan atmosphere typical of the European capitals.The inhabitants feel imprisoned in a city that can't give them the chance to grow. The physical and spiritual paralysis that the characters suffer is what brings all of them under the common nature of failure. One way to escape this condition is the epiphany a revelation to the character that makes them realize their condition of paralysis. •Joyce’s characters behave in two different ways: some characters see a way to go out but they're not brave enough to take that road and they prefer to stay in their comfort zone. Others as a consequence of the paralysis try to escape but they fail and are not successful. •ULYSSES(1922) In Joyce's masterpiece nothing happens. The story develops during a single day June 16th, 1904. It deals with the life of three Dubliners, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom and Stephan Dedalus. 1 Stephan Dedalus:Leopold Bloom is a Jewish advertising agent, who goes out at 8 o'clock on a Thursday morning in June, leaving his wife asleep in bed, and wanders around Dublin, drops in various people along the way, including the young writer Stephan Dedalus, and finally returns at 2 o'clock the following morning. 2 Stephan Dedalus is a young writer Forced to wander the streets of Dublin in search of a new home, Stephan meets Bloom, who offers to take him into his home. Stephan is a young man with intellectual ambitions who con be considered a "martyr of art". In fact, he has the same name as the first Christian martyr. Stephan wants to spread art to the Irish, who nevertheless mistreat him as the first Christian martyr. His only solution is to escape from Dublin society. 3 Molly Bloom is Leopold's wife. She is a semi-professional singer who has had several lovers. While Leopold Bloom is out, her lover, the concert manager, comes to visit her. It is applied thanks to juxtaposition in order to make a contrast between past and present The fragmentation of this poem reflect the break down of the society of his time , destroyed by the war Eliot uses different quotes of different authors, like Dantes,Shakespeare,Baudelaire in their original language. He uses different quotes of different languages in order to highlight the fact that there is a lack of communication in modern society. •There is also another method used also by Montale ,called Objective correlative: Eliot believes in the objectivity of art , so he believes that poets should not describe the feelings and the emotion that the view of an object or an event provokes in him , but he has to present the object or the vent in such a way that such emotions, feeling should be arises in the reader. •The Burial of the Dead is the first of the five sections that make up The Waste Land. It opens with a speaker reversing the usual idea of April as a month that brings new hope because it’s commonly associated with the rebirth of nature.  On the contrary, the coming of spring in a sterile land is a cruel event, because it resuscitates memory and desire in a hopeless world. The section ends with a vision of modern London and it’s spiritually dead crowds of commuters, who are associated with the souls of those who were damned for living without praise or blame in Dante's Divine Comedy. The very last lines, spoken by one of the commuters, connect to the opening ones: the dead corpse, like the roots, seems to be reluctant to come back to a new life in a barren age. The last reference is to Baudelaire and is an appeal to the readers to look within themselves. - The theatre of the absurd During the 50s and 60s, in England, after the Second World War, a new movement was born, its called the "theatre of the absurd".The Theater of the Absurd is based on the philosophy of existentialism and expresses in its works the idea that life has no meaning and that human beings are unable to communicate with each other. In other words, try to highlight the impossibility of real communication. •The themes are:Dark view of life, the certitudes and basic assumptions of the past are no longer valid, senselessness of the human condition(pervading loneliness and fear), inadequacy of reason to give meaning to the world and the lack of communication. - Samuel Beckett  He was born in Ireland in a protestant family in 1906. He studied at Trinity College (Dublin) and graduated in French and Italian. After graduating he moved to Paris, where he met James Joyce. He then travelled in Britain, France and Germany.Beckett returned to Paris in 1937. He fought with the French Resistance until 1942, when members of his group were arrested by the Gestapo and he was obliged to flee. After the war Beckett was awarded the ‘Croix de Guerre’ for his bravery and settled in Paris. In 1969 he is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In his works he uses the stream of consciousness technique and the main structural features of Beckett's works are: • the absence of a traditional plot: Beckett's plays are usually circular and tend to have no real ending; • the mix of comedy and tragedy • the lack of an adequate "action": the actions of the characters are useless e nonsense; • the pervading sense of meaninglessness of life. Beckett's most important themes are: •the negation of time: Endless present, in which actions are obsessively repeated. •the perception: Fear of non-existence, the characters need to be 'perceived' in order to be sure that they actually exist. •the imprisonment: Life is like a prison and human beings are condemned to lead a boring and meaningless life. •the “theatre” itself: Reflection on the ability of theatre to represent life in a realistic way. •the language: Beckett questions the ability of language to convey meaning. -His masterpiece is Waiting for Godot, written in French and then translated into English . Is also an excellent example of the «Theatre of the Absurd». Waiting for Godot is a tragicomedy in two acts composed in 1952 with 4 characters: Vladimir, Estragon, Pozzo and Lucky.  •"Waiting for Godot" is a play that revolves around the conversations of two homeless men named Vladimir and Estragon, also known as Didi and Gogo. They find themselves waiting someone near a solitary tree on a country road, without any specific location or timeframe. Throughout two days, they engage in arguments, experience boredom, repeat their actions, contemplate suicide, and pass the time in anticipation. Rather than living in the present, they often dwell on past events or fantasize about a nonexistent future. On the other hand, the other characters in the play, Pozzo and Lucky, are physically connected by a rope and bound by a tyrannical master-servant relationship. They embark on meaningless journeys in an attempt to give purpose to their existence. The tramps, however, are waiting for a mysterious character named Godot, who ultimately never arrives. -•Godot represents the search for something spiritual, a divine entity; something or someone that can give answers, or a meaning to life. -•The characters interact but very little happen. There are many questions but there are no answers, and this is typical of the Theatre of the Absurd. -•Waiting for Godot has not real plot; it is extremely essential; it is obsessed with the idea of the passing of time and the meaning of life; its language is fragmented and broken. -•Among the possible interpretations about the real identity of Godot, one of the most common links Godot to ‘God’: from this viewpoint, Vladimir and Estragon become the symbols of humanity waiting for God to come to the world and save them or give their life a meaning. •Godot may represent an event, a person or a piece of news that we hope will change our life and will never come.