Storia dell'Inghilterra: dalla Rivoluzione Americana alla poesia romantica, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Storia dell'Inghilterra: dalla Rivoluzione Americana alla poesia romantica e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! BRITAIN AND AMERICA GEORGE III George III came to the throne in 1760. His reign lasted 60 years and is one of the longest in English history. To reduce the public debt due to the Seven Years’ War, the king introduced new duties on corn, paper and tea, which caused the opposition of the American colonies. The English Parliament responded by repealing some of them. By the 1770s many colonists had become resentful of British rule, which imposed a strict control on trade. THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE At the Boston Tea Party in 1773 some rebels, threw the British tea coming from another part of the British Empire into the harbour. The rebels maintained that the taxes were unjust, as the colonies had no political power. In England, the philosopher Edmund Burke recognised the justice of their cause and Thomas Paine’s Common Sense stimulated the desire for a republic. The Americans were divided into Patriots, who wanted independence, and Loyalists, who wanted to remain part of Britain, and the War of Independence began in 1775. The Americans set up an army to face the stronger and better British army. On 4th July 1776 in Philadelphia, the Congress, made by the representatives from 13 of the colonies, signed the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson. It stated that the colonies were a new nation, that all men had a natural right to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. But, it also stated that governments can only claim the right to rule if they have the approval of those they govern, that is, ‘the consent of the governed’. In 1781, at the Battle of Yorktown, the British army was defeated and Britain recognised the independence of the colonies with the Treaty of Versailles in 1783. America became the symbol of a ‘new start’, where people from all European countries could melt into a new race. The new republic of the United States of America adopted a federal constitution in 1787 and George Washington became the first President in 1789. WILLIAM PITT THE YOUNGER George III in 1783 asked William Pitt the Younger to become Prime Minister. Pitt won a majority at an election, the following year. He was in office for 18 years, during which he tried to reduce the national debt, promoted profitable trade and finance and supported Adam Smith’s theory of laissez-faire, illustrated in The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith encouraged free trade and economic self-interest, and stressed the division of labour. THE NEW UNITED KINGDOM In Ireland, in 1791, a group of Catholics and Protestants founded the Society of United Irishmen who aimed at forming their own republic. In 1798 they organised an uprising that was crushed by the British troops. To prevent other rebellions, Pitt allowed Irish representatives to sit at Westminster. In 1801 the Act of Union joined Ireland and Britain to form the new United Kingdom. The Irish flag was added to create the Union Jack that is still used today. THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ECONOMIC CHANGE At the end of the 18th century, economic changes took place in England that would transform the country from an agricultural to an industrialised nation. The origins of the economic transformation can be traced back to the 1500s and 1600s, when the population increased and agriculture was intensified. First, open fields were enclosed into smaller portions of land to make more efficient arable farms. Moreover, the soil was drained and made more fertile. Finally, animals were bred selectively. Mass consumption of machine-made started, which marked the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Cotton was the leading sector of industrialisation. TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION During the 18th century there was a succession of technological innovations that transformed and improved the productivity of workers. Thomas Newcomen invented a steam engine in 1712, which made pumping water out of coal mines possible; James Hargreaves’s Spinning Jenny increased spinning efficiency; in 1769 James Watt patented a steam engine that was more powerful. Edmund Cartwright’s loom linked cloth manufacture to water and steam power. This changed the geography of the country, concentrating the new industrial activity near the coalfields of the Midlands and the North. People shifted from the rural South to the North and the Midlands. THE WORKERS’ LIFE Industrial cities lacked elementary public services; the air and the water were polluted by smoke and filth; the houses were overcrowded. Women and children were highly prized by employers because they could be paid less. Besides, the fact that the children were so small meant for example that they could move more easily in mines. Long working hours, about 65-70 a week, discipline, routine and monotony marked the work of industrial labourers. Food prices rose, diet and health deteriorated with an increase in the mortality rate. WHY DID THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION START IN BRITAIN? By the end of the 19th century, Britain controlled the largest empire in the history of the world because the Industrial Revolution started in Britain and gave it an enormous commercial and technological advantage. The changes in agricultural production and farming methods had resulted in increased food production and an increased population. More and more people were moving from the countryside into towns as machines replaced manual labour in farming. A wage- earning population demanded for more products, which led to increased production. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN AUGUSTAN POETRY AND EARLY ROMANTIC POETRY THE GOTHIC NOVEL NEW INTERESTS IN FICTION In the second half of the 18th century, there was an increasing in fiction. It was marked by a taste for the strange and the mysterious, by an impulse for freedom and escape from the ugly world, and by the fear of the triumph of evil and chaos over good and order. The interest in this kind of novel, called ‘Gothic novel’, was common to all social classes. Today’s ghost and horror novels and films, are a direct descendent of the 18th -century Gothic novel. The adjective ‘Gothic’ was first applied to architecture before it connoted literature. The writer Horace Walpole was the first to establish a link between the two; his obsession with his miniature castle at Strawberry Hill was the inspiration for “The Castle of Otranto”, and its subtitle, “A Gothic Story”, marks the first time that the term was used in a literary context. FEATURES OF THE GOTHIC NOVEL The setting of Gothic novels was influenced by the concept of the sublime; it includes ancient settings, like isolated castles, mysterious abbeys and convents. The most important events take place during the night because darkness is a powerful element used to create an atmosphere of gloom, oppression and mystery. The Gothic hero is usually isolated and the heroine is persecuted by a villain, who is the embodiment of evil. The plots are complicated, with supernatural beings, like monsters, vampires, ghosts and witches which increase the suspense and mystery. The first novel of this kind, The Castle of Otranto, was followed by The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk and Frankenstein. GOTHIC TO MODERN GOTHIC Gothic novels have been scaring us for about 250 years. ‘Terror’ and ‘horror’ are the words used by Ann Radcliffe in her essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry” to describe the emotional responses caused by the Gothic novel in the reader. Terror is characterised by obscurity or the indefinite use of threatening events; it ‘expands the soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life’. Horror, on the other hand, almost destroys the reader’s mental ability by means of an explicit exposition to atrocities. The difference between terror and horror is that terror creates an atmosphere of superstitious suspense, while horror crudely presents the physical revolting macabre in an atmosphere of spiritual despair. The typical features of the Gothic genre are still preserved in modern and contemporary descendants of this genre, in the works of writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Robert Louis Stevenson or Stephen King. ROMANTIC POETRY THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, English Romanticism saw the prevalence of poetry, which best suited the need to give expression to emotional experience and individual feelings. Thanks to the imagination, Romantic poets could see beyond surface reality and discover a truth beyond the powers of reason. Also imagination allowed the poet to re-create and modify the external world of experience. The poet was seen as a visionary prophet or as a teacher whose task was to mediate between man and nature and to give voice to the ideals of freedom, beauty and truth. THE FIGURE OF THE CHILD To the Augustan Age, a child was important only in so far and childhood was considered a temporary state, a necessary stage in the process leading to adulthood. To a Romantic, a child was purer than an adult because he was unspoilt by civilisation. He was even closer to God and therefore childhood was a state to be admired and cultivated. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL The Augustans had seen man as a social animal, in his relationship with his fellows. The Romantics, instead, saw him essentially in a solitary state, and stressed the special qualities of each individual’s mind. The current of thought represented by Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated that the conventions of civilisation represented intolerable restrictions on the individual personality and produced every kind of corruption and evil. Therefore ‘natural’ behaviour, that is unrestrained and impulsive, is good, in contrast to behavior which is governed by reason and by the rules and customs of society. THE CULT OF THE EXOTIC Rousseau’s theories also influenced the ‘cult of the exotic’, that is, the veneration of what is far away both in space and in time. Not only did the Romantic poets welcome the picturesque in scenery, but also the remote and the unfamiliar in custom and social outlook. THE VIEW OF NATURE The Romantic poets also regarded nature as a living force and as the expression of God in the universe. Nature became a main source of inspiration, a stimulus to thought, a source of comfort and joy, and a means to convey moral truths. POETIC TECHNIQUE The Romantic poets searched for a new, individual style through the choice of a language and subject suitable to poetry. The problem of poetic diction was a central issue in Romantic aesthetics. More vivid and familiar words were introduced and symbols and images assumed a vital role as the vehicles of the inner visionary perceptions. TWO GENERATIONS OF POETS The great English Romantic poets are usually grouped into two generations. The poets of the first generation, like Wordsworth or Coleridge, were characterised by the attempt to theorise about poetry. They agreed that Wordsworth would write on the beauty of nature and ordinary things with the aim of making them interesting for the reader; Coleridge, instead, should deal with visionary topics, the supernatural and mystery. The poets of the second generation, like Byron, Shelley and Keats, experienced political disillusionment which is reflected, in the clash between the ideal and the real. Individualism and escapism were stronger in this generation and found expression in the different attitudes of the three poets: the anti-conformist, rebellious and cynical attitude of the ‘Byronic hero’; the revolutionary spirit and stubborn hope of Shelley’s Prometheus, and finally, Keats’s escape into the world of classical beauty. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MAN AND NATURE The relationship between man and nature is an important characteristic of the Romantic Age. Edmund Burke, said that the sublime is not a feature of nature, but a particular way of perceiving and interpreting it. The ideas of German Idealism, where the concept of nature implied a gradual passage from the inorganic to the organic state, influenced the literary production of Romanticism in which nature can also be dramatic, mysterious and reflect the poet’s mood. Primitive, wild