Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Romantic Literary Tradition: A Comparative Analysis - Prof. , Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Coleridge, Wordsworth and the Romantic Literary Tradition: A Comparative Analysis - Prof. e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Manca riassunto cap. 6! CAP. 6 THE LITERATURE OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD 1780-1830 Romanticism was a movement that was born as a rebellion against the Enlightment (Age of Reason), so it was a reaction against the rationalism of the eighteenth 18th century. As a historical phase of literature, English Romanticism extends from 1780 (American Rebellion) to 1830 (First Reform Bill- 1832). The romantic period also coincided with the French Revolution, that was seen as a political enactment of the ideas of Romanticism, which involved breaking out of the models of the past. Romanticism so developed a different aesthetic of freedom from the formal rules of neoclassicism. A variety of ways of thinking and writing co-exist especially in this particular period. From Enlightment to Romanticism. In his “The decline and fall of Roman Empire”, the historical and Enlightment follower Gibbon (1737-94) gives a nostalgic picture/description of ancient Rome. His history looked back to a lost era of civic duty (dovere civico), whose the cause (of this loss) was due to the Christianity (Cristianesimo), and in particular to Christianity’s idea of a life beyond death. The consequence to his standpoint (punto di vista) is the refuse of French Revolution as future social innovation. Burke (1729-97) was a parliamentary: Although he was a Whig member (vs Tory- conservators), representing liberals, he was not a radical (pro Revolution in France; pro immediate and total innovation). In his “Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1790) he showed to be in favor of a “regulated liberty”: (that is) he believed that only Government (like the British one) could have balanced civil society and human passion. As great claimer (sostenitore) of British Constitution, he could not have accepted the idea of freedom of revolutionary reform, because in his opinion it would have brought only political disorder. Paine, Godwin and the “Jacobin” Novelists. In contrast to Burke and the other opponents of Revolution Society, was the radical Paine (1737-1809). Because of his sympathy with the Revolution, he was appreciated in France and hated at home. He criticized Burke in his book “The Rights of Man” (1791), which suggests (propone) that the whole humanity has the same rights, doesn’t mind the quantity of money he has. In his pamphlet “The Age of Reason” (1794- wrote while he was in jails, because of Robespierre) he promoted reason and freethinking, and refused all kinds of institutionalized religion (Christian doctrine in particular), proclaimed instead his faith in an egalitarian morality. Godwin (1756-1836) was an English journalist and novelist. He is considered one of the first proponents of anarchism. He is famous for two books: • “Enquiry concerning political Justice” (1793) views the human happiness as the sole purpose of existence, that can be achieved (realizzata, raggiunta) through the abolition of all government and the adoption of radical anarchy. • “Things as they are or, the adventures of Caleb Williams” (1794) attacks aristocratic privilege. It tells the story of a servant (Caleb) who finds out a secret about his aristocratic master, Falkland, and this is reason he is imprisoned (he says: Is that a country of liberty? ... visit the scenes of our prisons). The protagonist of Godwin fails, but he refuses his failure, he isn’t a passive victim. His escape (fuga) gives the novel something of an adventure story, but the reader can easily note/observe the implicit critic to an ill society in which there is not equality. In Godwin’s opinion in an anarchic society will be the reason that will lead the man to happiness. Mary Wollstonecraft was his wife and Mary Shelley was his daughter. Gothic Fiction. Gothic Fiction is a genre of literature that is born in England in the second half of 18th century (seconda metà ‘700). It combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothic Fiction is related to Burke’s concept of SUBLIME. Burke indeed suggests that sublime is in contrast to the classical notion of the aesthetic quality of beauty as a pleasurable experience. In his opinion pain and terror are capable of producing delight: this delight is more intense than positive pleasure, because of the awareness that the subject is safe from danger. Therefore fear that we feel for example in seeing a stormy sea is delightful because we know are not in peril. So English Gothic writers set their novels in the lOMoARcPSD|1322377 Medieval era and in medieval buildings, because they associate these places with a dark and terrifying period, characterized by torture and superstitious rituals. Prominent FEATURES of Gothic fiction include terror, mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, hereditary curses. The CHARACTERS are often tyrants, bandits, maniacs, vampires and monsters, or girls in peril. THEMES are a “lost love”, death, etc... Horace Walpole (1717-94) is considered the precursor of the Gothic Fiction because of his “The Castle Of Otranto”, a sort of “translation” of an old Italian tale. This novel is inspired to Clara Reeve’s tale “The Old English Baron” (1777). Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) distinguishes between terror and horror : in her opinion terror is characterized by “obscurity” in its treatment (trattamento) of potentially horrible events this obscurity leads the reader toward the sublime. “Terror awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”. (Anxious feeling of fear that precedes the horrifying experience”. Horror, instead, annihilates the reader’s responsive capacity with its atrocity. (Being shocked after the experience). It’s terror the protagonist of her fictional sublime. In all her works (“The Mysteries Of Udolpho”;”The Italian”), CHARACTERS lack individuality and all her heroines are girls persecuted by someone, but at the end they marry the men of their choice. [ideal of the novel of sensibilitythe heroine that wins on the villain]. Gregory Lewis (1775-1818) “The Monk” (Il Monaco, 1796) tells the adventures of the monk Ambrosio, who is falling away from his popular reputation as a saintly preacher. The novel lacks any real psychological depth in its investigation of a tormented soul, but it is rich of frenetic action. Mary Shelley (1797-1851, Radical)- daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and W. Godwin, wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her most famous work is “Frankeinstein, or the Modern Prometheus”, conceived because of challenge in a Switzerland circle with her husband and Byron: they had to write a terrifying “ghost story”. The protagonist is the eccentric scientist Victor Frankenstein, who creates a grotesque creature in a scientific experiment: and for this reason the novel is considered one of the earliest examples of Science Fiction (although it has elements of Gothic Novel and Romantic movement). FORM: frame story, that starts with Captain R. Walton writing letters to his sister. In contrast to Radcliffe and Lewis, Shelley examines the psychology of her characters, indeed the Creature becomes dangerous after noting “he” is different and society rejects “him”(Creature=example of sublime, of different that, for this reason, causes terror). Examining “Frankenstein”, we find an analogy with the legendary Prometheus, because –as Prometheus is punished by heaven – dr. Frankenstein is punished by his creature that doesn’t obey to him. Another analogy we can find is between the “creature” and Adam: they both feel themselves alone and unhappy. The frozen polar landscape where the novel begins and ends, represents a place which purifies human aberrations represented by Frankenstein’s experiment. Charlotte Smith (1749-1806) was mainly a poet, but she wrote some novels. She begins to write to make money to support her children (miserable marriage), so – like her- her heroines are not passive victims. Main THEMES are often money, inheritance and the country houses. Her novels are autobiographical (for ex. “Emmeline”). In “The Old Manor House” and “Desmond” she supports ideals of the French Revolution but her disillusion with its bloody progress emerges in her long poem (poesia) “The Emigrants” (1793), in which the reader can observe her sympathy for French refugees in England. Fanny (Frances) Burney (1752-1840) was never in favor of the Revolution (she is the wife of a French emigrant general). She emphasizes the passivity of female protagonists. Her heroines enter society in unfavorable circumstances and they are obliged to learn through mistakes, but they are allowed to enjoy the love of an upright suitor (spasimante) and to have an happy marriage (“Evelina” for example). In “Camilla” the author wants to emphasize its moral message about the importance of Good Conduct (Condotta virtuosa). Her heroines reflect the ideal of the novel of sensibility but are also its contrary, because they deal with (affrontano) the obstacles of life. 2 BREVE ANALISI. The Rime of the ancient mariner is written in the form of a medieval ballad . The poem creates a universe where realistic and supernatural events coexists. The landscape is mysterious . LANGUAGE is characterised by use of sound effects (similes, alliteration, repetitions and personifications). Coleridge's language is often archaic and takes inspiration from old ballads. The poem is real for travel, marriage, storm and fantastic for albatross , ghost ship, life and the life of death. In this poem the alternation of real and unreal elements confers a degree of credibility on the narrative without weakening the sense of horror and supernatural mystery it conveys (apporta) to the reader. One of the most interesting aspects of the poem is the fact that the mariner's reasons for killing the albatross remain a mystery (typical of Coleridge’s poetry), and is radically separated from the logical chain of cause and effect present in the whole poem The poem is highly SYMBOLIC: - the poem might be simply a dream induced by opium. - it is an allegory of life where the crew represents mankind, the albatross the pact of love that should unite all God’s creatures and the ship a microcosm. - the sea-voyage might represent the moral parable of man, from his original sin, through punishment, repentance and penitence, to his final redemption “Kubla Khan” (1797) is a poem that is born from a vision in a dream interrupted by a caller, this is reason why the poem remains a fragment. (Exotic imagery). Another fragment is the poem “Christabel”, excluded for this reason from Lyrical ballads by Wordsworth. It is similar to The rime of ancient mariner because it appears to link the Christabel’s experience to that of the Mariner. In 1802 Coleridge admits in “Dejection, an Ode” to have lost the poetic inspiration, because his “spirit of Imagination” response no more to external stimuli. He announces his decision to dedicate himself to his critical theory. It will be in the essay “Biographia Literaria” (1817) that he will present his distinction between Fancy and Imagination: Fancy is the faculty by which we perceived the world around us. It works through our senses and is common it all human beings. It is unconscious; Imagination instead can unify and mould (modella) images that fancy only perceive. It is the faculty that a poet has to “unify” images, enriching them with supernatural. It is voluntary. Wordsworth vs Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge are the two most important poets of the first English romantic period. They worked together to create the collection “Lyrical Ballads”, and they have some different point of view about poetry, nature and imagination. Imagination: 1. Wordsworth believes that imagination is used to enrich simple ideas in tranquillity. Men have these faculties before the birth and they lost it growing up; 2. Coleridge divides it into primary and secondary (fancy and imagination), and it is the capacity of perceive the world around us (common to all people) and then the capacity of order those memories and enrich them with supernatural. Nature: 1. Wordsworth feels nature as full of life, as it would be a part of us, in order to a Pantheistic vision; nature is opposed to town, it is a source of feelings and it is pervaded by an active force; 2. Coleridge, instead, sees the nature as the One Life (a divine power), and all his description of landscapes or natural elements, are endowed (dotate) with a strong symbolic meaning. Poetry: 1. Wordsworth says the poetry is a spontaneous expression of feelings; it is “emotion recollected in tranquility”. The poet takes inspiration from rustic life, and then, he combines the memory of those emotions, with the use of imagination. 2.Coleridge believes that poetry is a product of unconscious and it creates a kind of ecstasy, reproduced with the use of memory and the adding of supernatural elements. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 Robert Southey (1774- 1843) is known – with Coleridge and Wordsworth – as a Lake Poet (pejorative). His works lack Coleridge originality (for ex: “Sir Thomas More” 1829 and “The Book of the Church” 1825). As his two friends, Southey’s radical phase was short-lived. Works belonging to this period are “Joan of Arc” and the plays “The fall of Robespierre” and “Wat Tyler”. Southey’s poetry results flat and banal. George Crabbe (1775-1832) was a priest of humble origins. Differently from Wordsworth, he never was in favor of the Revolution, but – on the contrary (anzi) – he showed his conservatism also in his works, in which he described the life of the working-class society and the rural environment. His conservatism is evident also in his narrative style, through (attraverso) the use of the rhyming couplet form. In “The Village” (1783) and “The Borough”(1810) he reveals his anti-pastoralism, because of his intention to represent “the Real picture of the Poor” (he wants to represent the reality, not an imaginary world). > in “The Village” the village life is “a life of pain”. In “the Parish Register” (il registro della parrocchia) the narrator is a country parson (parroco) who comments on his parishioners’ (parrocchiani) births, marriages and deaths. The “nature” that he describes, is that of the reality, but maybe for this reason he was considered without imagination. Jane Austen (1775-1817) contributed to what has been called as the Novel Of Manners, a kind of fiction focused on everyday routine life and events: : moral rules are seen as necessary in Jane Austen’s novels, as well as good manners, which must be sustained by a sense of duty (dovere). She lacked a vision of the historical and social events of her time. (She was not worried with the contemporary literary movements either). The world of her novels is restricted to provincial England and to the upper-middle-class world. Her novels are all, more or less, love stories, taking place in the little world of a village which included only three or four families of the upper middle class. They (the novels) all have a happy ending: they all end in the marriage of hero and heroine. What makes her novels interesting is the psychological analysis and growth of the characters, that at the end achieve (raggiungono) the maturity. In “Emma” (1816) for example, we follow the heroine in her misapprehensions and at the end we see her that finally learnt to respect and use the rules of society. “Mansfield Park”: a novel centred on a heroine suffering from what she admits are “faults of ignorance and timidity”. “Persuasion” emphasizes the importance of the process of learning and judging through which (ciò) all her heroines pass. “Clarissa” that in Richardson was a passive victim of the events, here becomes aware/conscious of her values. In “Pride and Prejudice” (1813) first impressions, illusions and subjective opinions give way (danno spazio) to a final, humiliating, reassessment (rivalutazione). Mere cleverness is never allowed to triumph without being linked to a moral assurance. STYLE. Omniscient Narrator and the Use Of The Dialogue To Reveal The Character. Her style was also characterized by the use of verbal and situational irony instead of open interpretation. “Regional” Novel. In this type of novel a particular region, it’s geographic paint, social and religious customs, people and manners are highlighted with a faithful description. Some of the authors belonging to this genre are: • Susan Ferrier (1782-1854), Scottish writer that writes in Scottish dialect. “The Marriage” – “The Inheritance”. • John Galt (1779-1839) was Scottish, too. To have a more extended audience, he doesn’t write only in vernacular. In his works he tells the transfer from the regretted (rimpianta) rural society to the industrial society. “Annals of the Parish” – “The Provost”. • Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) is an Irish writer that was educated in England. Her early work “Letters to Literary Ladies” reveals radical feminist concern (apprehension) with the inadequacy of contemporary women’s education. Her Irish novels all suggest the changing complexion of Ireland in the years of the Act of Union of 1801 and all explore the historic rifts (fratture) in Irish society. “Castle Rackrent” is probably the first novel to 6 represent society in a specific region and in a given historical period. She inspired – with her picture of society – Sir Walter Scott. Sir Walter Scott and the Historical Novel. The Scottish Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is considered the founder (fondatore) of the Historical Novel, a narrative work set (ambientata) in a historic period that is antecedent to that of the author. It describes the story of characters that have really existed, but it presents some invented elements. Scott’s historical works have been influenced by changes that France Revolution had provoked: it was the first time in which common people had a fundamental rule in the history of its nation. Scott moved the British novel towards a new seriousness (authors begin leaving the Romantic elements). Scott begins his career writing poems, that give him the reputation as best-selling new poet of his age. Is this the period of the collection of ballads “Minstrelsy of the Scottish Boarder” (1802-3) and “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” (1805), that recounts the story of a family feud in the 16th century, replete (riempita) with sorcery (magia) and metaphysical intervention. These poems achieved an immediate celebrity, but they were soon replaced (rimpiazzate) with Byron’s works. At this point Scott decided to dedicate himself to novels (less appreciated than poetry, at his time > for this reason he published them anonymously). His first novels are linked by Scottish affairs and by the involvement of an outsider observer (often an English gentleman exposed (esposto) to an alien culture): is this the case of “Waverley” (1814) and “Rob Roy”. In these novels Scott represents a Scotland that is divided by factions (Jacobines, Unionists, etc...), so he exposes his protagonists to conflicting ways of thinking and acting. STYLE. The success of his novels his due to the deep psychological analysis of his characters, that was possible also thanks to the use of the dialogue. CHARACTERS. Scott didn’t choose a hero (as extraordinary personality) for his novels, because he wants that his hero represents common people. THEMES: the explanation of the evolution of the past into the present. - “Ivanhoe” (1820); - “The Talisman” & “The Betrothed” (both 1825) form a continuous discourse which questions the usefulness of the medieval code of chivalry and military honour into the age of the French Revolution. - His finest later work is “Redgauntlet” (1824), that tells about Scottish Jacobitism seen from the different perspective of two heroes: the phlegmatic (apatico) Alan Fairford and the romantic Darsie Latimer. Lord Byron (George Gordon; 1788-1824; 36 anni ) was a satirical outsider, he looked amused by the anomalies of his own time and culture. Unsatisfied with his contemporary writers (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey), after doing a European tour, publishes in 1812 the first two cantos of “Childe Harold” (giovane Aroldo), who gave him an immediate celebrity. It is a sort of diary (written in verse) that tells about the trip of Byron-Harold through Mediterranean lands/nations. He added two further (ulteriori) cantos in 1816 and 1818. STYLE: he easily moves between different modes of telling (polemic, melancholic, comic...), so he wants a verse that allow for (dà spazio a) a variety of expressions. During his exile in Venice, he finds the ideal verse in the eight line, eleven-syllable (Ottava rima) of Tasso and Ariosto, that he rearranges (riadatta) to English purposes by shortening the verse line to ten syllables. CHARACTERS: Byron’s hero is sullen (tetro), it looks like all society had conspired to complicate his destiny. “Don Juan” (1819-24) introduces a new kind of central character, who is more vivacious. It tells the adventures and misadventures of the young Spanish Don Juan (don Giovanni). > The last cantos represent the critic to the amorously frivolous world of aristocratic London society from which Byron had attempted to distance himself. Byron’s poetry emerges not from a determining philosophy or from a desire to improve the society, but only from the impulse of his mind. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 as a radical hero, champion of progress, who was the subject af a biography: Liber Amoris: the New Pygmalion. He wrote also a lot of essays about English Drama, in particular he was a critic of Shakespeare indeed he wrote in 1818 “Characters of Shakespear’s Plays”. He preferred Shakespeare’s Tragedies to his Comedies. In the essay “The Spirit of The Age” (1825) he instead criticized his literary and political contemporaries. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) can be considered the founder of the autobiographic essay. He appreciated the classic English Drama (Elizabethan drama) in the anthology “Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare”. With the pseudonym of “Elia” he was the author of a series of essays that contributed to the London Magazine. Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859). His most celebrated work was “The Confessions of an English Opium Eater”, a study of the induction of the dreams as much as (come) the impossibility of forgetting a personal past. This work preconfigured Freudian theories. De Quincey’s journalism is often marked by humour, derived from the study in black comedy. Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) is the creator of the Novel of the Talk (Romanzo-Conversazione). His novels, often satiric, are modelled on parodies of Socratic dialogues (ex. Maid Marian). Victorian (the 1830’s) preoccupations seems to replace the concerns (preoccupazioni) of the 1820s. The argument over the parliamentary and social reform replaced the involvement or the distaste (disgust) for revolutionary politics (politica) (though the fact of the French Revolution continued to haunt – tormentare- all Victorian political thinking). Political situation. Constitutional stability served to enhance the reputation of a monarchy against the foreign principles of republicanism. Critics defined the 19th century as a period of readjustment. It was also a century of technological growth, due – above all- to the industrialization. John Clare (1793-1864) was a rural writer precursor of this period of reassestment. He wrote about the countryside (campagna): for this reason his “Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery” (1820) are written in vernacular. In his opinion, indeed, “putting the correct language of the gentlemen into the mouth of a simple shepherd is far from natural”. “The Parish” examines village society. Clare desires a lost Eden, a world of agricultural co-operation and mutual (reciproco) respect [vs (opposed to) urban-based prejudices and snobberies]. “The Shepherd’s Calendar” stirs (stimola) the memory of a real community in a lost world. William Cobbett (1763-1835) criticized the “unnatural” advance of the machine, because of his faith in the collaborative relationship between those who owned the land and those who worked it. He propagated his way of thinking through the newspaper “Political Register”. In his “Rural Rides” (viaggi) he revealed himself as arrogant and intolerant, but also as an intelligent good observer. He observes the agricultural lands of the Southern Lands BUT he makes them a vehicle for criticism of society. In his “Protestant Reformation” he attempts to demonstrate that “the greatest country Europe had ever seen” had fallen victim to the reforming predators. 7. HIGH VICTORIAN LITERATURE NOVELS - The condition of England - Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881): he is Scottish. He is defined as “an intellectual force to be reckoned with the borders of Scotland”. His writing is very powerful due to the classical rationality of the 18th Century Scottish philosophy, but also because of his debt to the prophetic utterance of the Bible. He was well read in modern German thought. He influenced an important group of early midVictorian writers, such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley… • Sartor Resartus: it combines a theorizing German central character with a mediating and English editor. The work conveys the central precepts of his philosophy: energy, earnestness and duty. The style in which it is written intermixes German and English, by echoing earlier literature and by playing games with meanings; it works through a process of amalgamation and assimilation. Important message “Everlasting Yea”, which solves all contradiction and demands a submission to the will of God, contrasted to the “Everlasting No”, the name for the spirit of unbelief in God. 10 • Chartism: essay in which he confronted the growing threat of class war posed by its new political articulacy of industrial workers. This essay begins by offering definitions of what Carlyle styles “The condition of England Question”, definitions which derive from the observation of the state of nation attempting to come to terms with its parliamentary and social reforms aimed at deflecting revolution. • On heroes – Worship and the Heroic in History: he underlines that the hero was a challenger of convention and a reformer of the empty. “The History of the world is the biography of a Great Man” • Past and Present: juxtaposes the past with the confusions and contradictions of the present. The form supports the Victorian Medievalist idea of a securer social past and challenges it by acknowledging that modern industrialization and historical progress have altered the nature of the society. There is no place for sentimentalism and nostalgia. • The French Revolution: The history opens with the death of Louis XV and the deficiencies of French government and institutions and it ends with Napoleon’s bid for power as the Revolution declines. The book is much more than a history tribute: it is a complex demonstration of the biographical approach to the writing of history. There is a multiplicity of witnessing or interpreting voices, all moved forward by a dominant didactic narrator. There are biographical and autobiographical sources and words, slogans in French, English and Latin are played and replayed. French Revolution implicitly warns Victorian England of the nature, causes and progress of civil disruption and it has an obstreperous didacticism. - Charles Dickens (1812-1870): a disciple of Carlyle. He wrote revolutionary novels because he directed his fiction to a questioning of social inequalities, to a distrust of institutions and to a pressing appeal for action and earnestness. He took up issues and he campaigned against them using fiction as his vehicle. He is associated with social abuses because he was the most persuasive and influential voice. He was faithful to the teaching of Christianity as a moral basis for his thought and writing. There was something wrong with the society and this became the nature of his fiction, which was multifarious, digressive and generous: it reflects the nature of Victorian urban society with all its conflicts and disharmonies, its eccentricities and its constrictions. • Sketches by “Boz”: They are his own first experiments and they reveal an acute ear for speech and an acute observation of gesture, habits and misery of London interiors. The Sketches are anecdotal and descriptive • The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club: series of anecdotal stories concerning the members of a London club. The characters move around England and make various comic encounters. • Oliver Twist: it is the reflection of the darker side of Dicken’s imagination. He attacks the effects of the workhouse system in the opening chapters, but he succeeded in damning workhouse abuses in the popular imagination and even in eliminating them from reality. A contrast of scene, mood and narrative style describe the opposition of the insecurities of criminal life middle-class respectability. • Nicholas Nickleby: Dickens took the exploitation of unwanted children in a Yorkshire school as the focus of this story, but he attacked also the aristocracy, the inefficiency of Parliament and the aggression of market capitalism. Its strengths are its comedy and its characters. Dickens was the dominant novelist of his time. He had an intimate relationship with his readers and in the earlier fiction he readily responded to the evident popularity of his novels and characters. • The Old Curiosity Shop • Barnaby Rudge: Dickens’s most neglected work. It is a historical novel set in 1780s. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 • David Copperfield: there is a use of semi-biographical material and the first-person narrator. The novel is central in Dickens’s career chronologically but also from the novelist’s acute awareness of his own boyhood reverse. Its detailed observation and its description of the “discipling” of the heart allow the transmutation of tragedy. • Bleak House: the use of a double narrative, one narrator employing the present and the other the past tense, helps to create a sort of confusion and mystery. The main object of the novel is satire. • Hard Times: it describes the modern condition of England out of London and there is a bitter satire on the effects of the Industrial Revolution in northern England. • A Tale of Two Cities: there is the description of two different prisons, Newgate and Bastille and it is set in London and Paris during the 1770 and 1780s. It has Dickens’s most constructed plot. • Great Expectations: Pip is manipulated, gentrified and left empty. It uses a confessional first person narrator. Pip is of a lower social class than David Copperfield and lacks is ebullience. • Our Mutual Friends: London is described as dusty and dreary and in the four character’s independence any hope appears to rest. It contains some of Dickens’s most fluently inventive dialogue. • The Mystery of Edwin Drood: it an unfinished, unfinishable, obsessive, mystery story with a tantalizing narrative. Dickens can’t be properly defined as a realist. He recognized the relationship between character and environment, moulding them into a fictional world. London is the centre of his work and his major source of inspiration. - Harriet Martineau (1802-1876): she was a highly educated and independent woman with a refined social conscience and a Utilitarian philosophy. • Illustrations of Political Economy: 23 didactic stories • Autobiography: it is one of the classics of Victorian women’s writing. It is confident and selfjustifying. - Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865): she is generally associated with industrial Manchester (defined as the urban phenomenon of that age and a prophetic city) • Mary Barton: First “Tale of Manchester Life” and dramatizes the urban ills of the late 1840s, an era marked by industrial conflict, enforced employment and growing classconsciousness. Its strengths are its detailing, its observations and its establishment of contrasted ways of living, working and perceiving. • North and South: Second Manchester novel. It views class-conflict from a new politically optimistic viewpoint. It contrasts the snobberies of the country gentry of the South of England with the anti- gentlemanly world of North England. The novel also points to the independence of the industrial workers. • Ruth: she treats the problems of an unmarried mother - Charles Kingsley (1819-1875): he is a priest of the Church of England and tended to use fiction as an extension of his secular and religious missions. In the 1840s he became involved in the Christian Socialist Movement to wean Chartist away from the anti-clerical Socialism. • Yeast: A Problem: it describes rural degradation with narrative discourse • Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet: it is the autobiography of a working man, who joined the Chartist protest but then he was finally persuaded by the Christian Socialist cause. NOVELS WITH HISTORICAL SETTING: 12 ~ Algernon Charles Swinburne: formed part of Rossetti’s group in Chelsea, dedicated to extending the frontiers of art and experience. He had an attraction to the cause of Italian Unification and was in acquaintance with Giuseppe Mazzini ~ William Morris: he revolutionized English design but his poetry is lifeless, derivative, and he saw it as a natural enhancement of the quality of life. ~ Christina Rossetti: her earliest poetry was published in an escapist mode appeared in the first number of The Germ • Goblin Market and Other Poems: collection in which is clearly heard her female voice. • She wrote also for children, in a direct simplicity. • Her devotional poetry derives much from the powerful influence of Dante. - Elizabeth Browning (): hers is a love-poetry. She started with the translation of Aeschylus. First she didn’t reach success because her husband Robert Browning overshadowed her. As the couple decided to live in Italy, Elizabeth responded to the history, the tradition and the politics of that Nation and she confronted contemporary issues. • Sonnets from the Portuguese • Aurora Leigh: A Poem in Nine Books: her most substantial poem - Robert Browning (1812-1889): he had the reputation of a major poet, his characteristic is the dramatic monologue. His most important volumes suggest the nature of drama and the characters of dramas and they help the distinction of Browning’s writing. The characters of his poetry don’t necessarily have to interact with others, but there are truth-telling soliloquy. The truth can be objective and subjective, external and experiential. Each of the speaking voices is given an individual articulation, an emphasis which serves to identify them. • The Ring and the Book • Dramatic Lyrics, Dramatic Romances… • Strafford: it is a tragedy DRAMA Important actors: Macready, Kean, Irving. - From Bulwer-Lytton to Swinburne, playwrights attempted to evolve a modern equivalent of Shakespeare’s plays, but his works tended to smother all serious imitations. - The Victorian theatre evolved a more fluid and invented comic style than it did a tragic one. - Charles Dickens: the convention that he transforms in his fiction remain conventional in the stageworks and the dialogues are stilted and contrived. - Douglas Jerrold: writer of comedy - Dion Boucicault: the only mid-Victorian dramatist to have found favour with the 20 th Century audience. His most important works are an admixture of comedy, crime, nationalist politics and loveinterest. - Thomas William Robertson: he wrote realistic domestic comedies. His last plays rejected bombast in favour of delicacy, observation and anti-sentimental presentation of love. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 MELODRAMA The excesses of Victorian melodrama are associated with bombast. Many melodramas centre on the characters of heroines and the influence of Shakespeare is considerable. Melodramas are seen as cheap fiction and cheap theatre. Many important novels were adapted and dramatized, such as the novels of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. - Charles Reade: social and historical novelist and playwright. - William Wilkie Collins: he possessed an extraordinary narrative gift. His novels were included in the Sensation Fiction (stories centred on theft, deception or murder and that revealed the nature of crime). This sensationalism can be related to the popular taste for melodrama and to the influence of criminal fiction. Collins remains the first and the greatest English master of the detective story. - Mary Elizabeth Braddon: her first and most important novel is Lady Audley’s Secret and it is the story of an ambitious murderess intent on covering her crimes and her career. - Philip Meadows Taylor: he wrote about the thuggism in British India. THE NEW FICTION OF THE 1860s - George Meredith (1828-1909): his first novel was banned for its supposed moral offence and his famous novel Modern Love regard the disintegration of a marriage. He said that it is a “Comic Spirit” that generally rules his novels, a comedy that informs his representation of human discourse and his analysis of characters. - George Eliot (1819-1880): George Eliot is the pseudonym used by Marian Evans, because she wanted her works to be taken seriously and she finally won respect as a writer on the merits of her work alone. What she learned during her self-education touched her fiction, providing her narratorial reflections and shaping the nature and arguments of her novels. The narrative voice of Eliot advocates a slow and gradual evolution. Also Charles Dickens wanted her to write a novel for him and for serialization. Eliot has an acute sense of historical conditioning and of progressive development. • Adam Bede: it sustains the values of an old-fashioned England and it explores a society in the edge of change. • The Mill on the Floss: it shows provincial English society, which reinforces family values and serves to stifle aspiration. The heroin Maggie is both an aspirer and a victim. • Middlemarch: it is the apogee of Eliot’s studies of provincial life. It has a delineation of aspects of contemporary economic, social, artistic, scientific and religious life. The novel undermines epic by stressing that women are constricted and silenced by the social conditioning inherited. The only true feminist that Eliot created is Romola de Bardi. • Daniel Deronda: it represents the new themes of the late 1870s, with the Darwinism theories and the ideological prospects opening for European civilization. There is the view of an inevitable and not always welcome progress into an uncertain future. THE STRANGE CASE OF MODERN LIFE - poets From the late 1860s the threats of revolutionary upheaval and of the collapse of the institutions had receded, so too had the economic optimism and the spirit of compromise. In 1859 there is the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which presented answers to beliefs about humankind and its creation. A stream of pessimism emerged, the theory of natural selection shook the religious faith of the susceptible and opened the way to new experimentations. - John Stuart Mill (1806-1873): he is the leading philosopher of liberalism and had been a supporter of the second Reform Bill of 1867 and of the extension of democracy. He came from a narrow Utilitarian background 16 and he had a strict education, which influenced all his life: he was obliged to learn Greek since he was 3 and this leads him to be untouched by religion and unaware of the Romantic Imagination. • On Liberty: his greatest essay that defines for a middle-class democracy, the principles of mutual tolerance, of the freedom of the citizen. - Matthew Arnold (1822-1888): he criticized the culture and the institutions of his time and this emerges from a professional interest in education and from his own practice as a poet. Unfortunately he fatally ignores the real energy of the literature of his English contemporaries and he preferred the intellectual society of France and Germany. He actually sought to associate himself with the spirit of the times and then agonized over its defective joylessness. • Culture and Anarchy: he mixes irony and wit. He attempts to establish a notion of culture. The novel playfully divides English society into three classes: a “Barbarian” aristocracy, a “Philistine” bourgeoisie and an unlettered “Populace”. None of these classes sympathizes with a high culture; Arnolds cites idea from European cultural tradition. • Empedocles on Etna: his longest poem. - Arthur Hugh Clough (1819-1861): he accepted and exploited contradiction. He is a candid poet, rarely irritable, rarely confident. • Amours de Voyage: it is his greatest poem. He announces its prospective irresolution in four epigraphs, which suggest self-absorption, self-doubt, the elusiveness of love and the freedom of travel. The poems are set in the background of the disruptions of Italian politics, he is with the Italian Risorgimento. It is a poem about casual love-making and love-doubting. It has a fragmentary nature and a revolutionary setting that establish an awareness of arbitrary nature of human contact and experience. - John Ruskin (1819-1900): he was characterized by agnosticism, which consisted of a gradual rejection of the narrow Protestantism of his childhood and in discovery of the world outside. Ruskin himself in a bald simplicity. His basis was Christian, deriving his language from the parables of Jesus, but his definitions were intended to apply also to a modern society: his teaching was not to be confined by accepted dogmas. His concern with the problems of modern society is always implicit. He wrote lot of experimental essays. • Modern Painters: he wants to extensive the definitions of Truth, Beauty, Imagination, Representation and Nature. THE SECOND SPRING Despite the Darwinian accentuation and the so-called “crisis of faith”, the 19 th Century remained a profoundly religious age. Intellectuals and working classes were persuaded and converted to the numerous Nonconformist chapels. Only with Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot (the most scrupulous observer of the social impact of the Anglican Evangelical movement of the early 1800s) do the Nonconformist faithful find delineators. - Oxford Movement: it redirected an old-fashioned High Churchmanship into new channels of spirituality and reform. It stimulated a new generation of hymn writers and poets, such as John Keble, it encouraged the translation of Latin and Greek hymns, such as those of John Neale and Christina Rossetti, and also fiction, with Charlotte Mary Yonge. - John Henry Newman (1801-1890): the dominant leader of the Oxford Movement. His intelligence led him into the newly Roman Catholic Church. • Loss and Gain: it is the description of the process of conversion • Apologia Pro Vita Sua: it is his autobiographical work. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 MISTERY AND HISTORY Late 19th Century literature remained insular in its styles and preoccupations. Its concerns were with English society and its ills, with English religion and its development and with England’s position within the United Kingdom. Two contrasting movements developed: one outward to a wider world and one inwards to a new social self-awareness. The awareness that answers to domestic problems and social and spiritual ills, were not to be found in conventional Christian teaching, but in other religions, in scientific alternatives to religion. An obsession with crime, anarchy and decadence developed in the literature of crime in the late 19 th Century. - Conan Doyle (1859-1930): he is the creator of Sherlock Holmes. First he is introduced in his first story A Study in Scarlet, but his success dates from the series of short stories published from 1891 in the Strand Magazine. In this stories there is the representation of a foggy, disordered London. - Bram Stoker (1847-1912): he wrote Dracula, a masterpiece of horripilation. Is wrought narrative intermixes diaries, letters, journals and extracts from newspapers, suggesting a new kind of mythmaking. The novel is charged with sexuality and a sense of mental and spiritual disturbance. - Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894): he is the writer of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and it is a case in point. It is set in England and it centres on the horrid possession of a successful London physician dr Jekyll and his alter ego, Mr Hyde. It is an uncanny story, with the examination of the divided self and it is a story of disparate perceptions and actions, which leads to Jekyll’s suicide to release from Hyde. OUR COLONIAL EXPANSION - Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936): he wrote “The White Man’s Burden” and it is the noisiest apologist for the expansion of the British Empire. He was more stimulated by the idea of the British Imperial adventure in India than by the colonial hegemony over Africa. He became the first British Nobel Laureate. He was in many ways an outsider, his plain stories can seem flat beside the stylistic refinement of a Pater or a Wilde. He is not an apologist for the common man’s idea of Empire and colonial races: he is a writer that alert to subtleties, human weakness, manipulation, vulnerability and failure. India and its characteristics conditioned him and its cultures fascinate him: he tried to see India from inside. In his short stories, his greatest achievement, he demonstrates a variety and vitality of tone: he moves from ghost-stories to tales, from the fear of death to the waste of life and talent. He may have accepted the idea of Empire and India’s elite world, but he points to the merits and demerits of the colonial regime. - Joseph Conrad (1857-1924): born in Poland, in 1886 he became a British citizen. He worked as a sailor and this influenced all his literary career. Conrad deals with the intrusion and interference of Europeans in the Pacific, in the East Indies, in South America and Africa. Most of his colonizers are intolerant and uncomprehending. In his work colonialism emerges as both brutal and brutalizing and power is corrupting and opened to abuse. • Lord Jim • Heart of Darkness: apogee of imperialism. Imperialism is initially expounded as a variety of British idealism. • His Polish background influenced him a lot: he started to write about the Russia fe. Under Western Eyes OUR THEATRE IN THE 90s: LONDON AND DUBLIN - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900): He was a Dubliner and so he lived the question of Irish Home Rule in the 1880s. he studied in Oxford and r became famous in England and also in the USA. Underlying his life and works there 20 were a seriousness and an awareness that he was acting. He had an homosexual affair with Lord Douglas, which led him to prison. The contrived style of his prose, the excessive elaboration of his poetry and the paradoxical wit of his plays are all subversive: they reject midVictorian values in life and art in the name of aestheticism and they provoke a response to difference. Wilde always questions institutions, moral imperatives and social clichés; he enjoyed his chosen roles as an aesthete and an iconoclast. His central arguments derive from an awareness that art is more than an imitation of nature. • The Decay of Lying: it is a platonic dialogue, with Pater’s sentiments and Wilde’s lexical virtuosity. • The Picture of Dorian Gray: it is his most important work of fiction. In the preface there is the quote “All art is quite useless”. The narrative is melodramatic, a Faustian demonstration that art and morality are quite divorced. There ae lot of contradictions and qualifications: aestheticism is both damned and upheld; hedonism is both indulged and disdained. It is a tragedy with the subtext of a morality play. Its central character is both self-destructive and a suicide. • Salomé: it is his most powerful and influential tragedy. • The Importance of Being Earnest: his most popular comedy. - Arthur Wing Pinero (1855-1934): his dramatic challenges are based on convention. • Trelawny of the Wells: it is his retrospect on mid-Victorian stage and his admiration for traditions and the potential of his profession are displayed here. • The Second Mrs Tanqueray: Pinero received conventions of sexual morality and standard theatrical representation of conventions - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): the spirit of Ibsen is evident throughout his career. He created a strong- willed woman. Much of his own instinct for dramatic action derives not from a new Nordic precedent but from the traditions of musical theatre and the Mozartian and Wagnerian opera. The Wagnerian scheme informed by a reading of Marxian theory, shaped the criticism of his first play, Widowers’ Houses. He also reacts against tradition: his dramatic criticism demonstrates his repudiation of the styles of acting and production still popular with audience. Shaw clearly continued to aspire to a dramatic reflection of Dickens’s comic energy, social diversity, political observation and power to deflate pomposity. He remains the most inventively unpredictable playwright in the English tradition. His drama is not didactic and his arguments fuse elements of socialism, science and philosophy, his dialogue moves from comedy to anguish back to comedy and his settings and preoccupations may be those of the England turn to the 20 th century. • Mrs Warren’s Profession: he was banned by Lord Chamberlain’s censorship. It confronts two contemporary women’s issues: the future professional career of the educated women and the oldest profession, female prostitution. In the first years of the 20th Century, Shaw’s revolutionary imagination began to realize its ambition to create a “New Drama” on the stage. • Man and Superman: it introduced an on-stage motorcar. • Major Barbara: it explored the conflict and the ultimate assent of a strong-willed father and his strong-minded daughter. • Heartbreak House: written in wartime, it is described as a fantasia in the Russian Manner on English Themes. - Granville-Barker (1877-1946): he met some success with The Voysey Inheritance - John Galsworthy (1867-1933): his best plays, like The Forsyte Saga, are concerned with classconsciousness and class conflict. His later plays have one-word titles expression of their themes and examine their social conscience fe. Justice, Loyalties. He had an evident compassion for the victims of an uncaring society. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 - J.A. Barrie (1860-1937): he never separated from his Scottish Roots, but he also never seems to have aimed at evolving a national style. His most interesting stage works shifts in time and more radical changes of scene fe. The Admirable Crichton. His fascination with the power of myth and magic shaped his Mary Rose. - W.B. Yeats (1865-1939): His ambition was to achieve a political and legendary drama, which would have no realistic but only symbolic and decorative setting, it marks a turning away from common realities. He had a concept of theatre which might draw from Irish traditions, both Celtic and Christian, and might provide a focus for future national aspiration. The earlier plays have a stylization in which characters reflect abstract ideas and psychological realism is broken down, while then he wanted a freer symbolic and ritual drama. - Synge (1871-1909): he wrote more conventional shaped plays. He sought to minimize conventional action, but his stress fell less on ritual than on distinctive ways of speaking which echo the rhythms of the English Western Ireland. • The Playboy of the Western World: it is his masterpiece. It has an Iris comic form. The play rejects the joyless and pallid words of the modern realism of Zola and Ibsen, they turn to the examples of modern comedy of the 17th Century. THE EDWARDIAN AGE King Edward VII reigned from 1901 to 1910. Some people say that this was an era of international peace and internal security, with the conclusion of the South African War and the consolidation of Britain’s Imperial possessions. To some this period had symbolically closed with not with the death of the King, but with the disaster of the Titanic. Actually, Britain’s economic growth was stagnating, its naval supremacy was challenged by the expansion of the Imperial German Navy and the Irish question still festered. Women started to fight for the right to vote, so the “Women’s Social and Political Union” was formed in 1903 and the suffragette movement after WWI received the limited suffrage, expanded afterwards. The “golden age” of King Edward’s reign was not always an illusion, but it was a reality only for the privileged. THE EDWARDIAN NOVEL Religion doubts, reactions against Victorian repression and social and familiar oppression are marginalized. It remained a desire to give a voice to the silent social groups, to women above all. In the early 1900s, there are the Modernists, that looked to formal experiment, but also more traditional writers, that developed the “ordinary”. The most important of them are Bennet and Wells, who most speak about small capitalists, men in the modern industrial world. - Arnold Bennet (1867-1931): he says that the mind of the ideal novelist should be controlled by common sense. He can be an analyst f the motives behind thrift, hard work and public virtue: his models were the great French anti-middleclass writers (Flaubert, Zola). His work oscillates between the poles of provinciality and domesticity and a taste for the exotic. • Many of his novels contain a hotel: Grand Babylon Hotel • The Old Wives: it is his masterpiece. It traces the fortune of two sisters from the mid to the late 19th Century against the backgrounds of an unwillingly changing English industrial town and the turbulent Paris. His characters relate to the geography class and culture that surround them. - H.G. Wells (1866-1946): he is well read un modern science and in the scientific method. His science novels of the late 19th Century are alarmist prophecies of the following century. Wells’s English social fiction contrasts with the fantasies of fe. Frankenstein. He is a determined socialist. • Tono Bungay: the role is divided between the small apothecary uncle and the nephew who reestablishes the lost family fortune by building battleship. The narrator moves between three Englands. 22 All the 19th century is characterized by the duplicity of life, explicated in Stevenson’s “The strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde”, and the falsity is the basic element in literature: in Wilde’s comedy “The importance of being Earnest” (1895), lies and false suppositions show and underline the hypocrisy of society through irony and fun contradictions. But the theme of double in literature is maybe an anticipation of the psychological research of Freud: a single person is composed of a part of consciousness and a part of unconsciousness. But if in Freud this aspect is natural and present in the human being, in the English costumes of the 19th century this is an attitude deliberately wanted, intended to hide the real – sometimes obscure – nature of human being. THE VICTORIAN COMPROMISE It is a compromise on the concept of respectability and the personal inclination of men which are limited. This is the reason of the story on the double that anticipates Freud theories. It was essential to present a morally respectable appearance, which wasn’t the mirror of the real essence of an individual. People belonging to upper and middle class had to conform to rigid social standards and to the principal ideals of ethic, morality and respectability, that most of the time kept the real interests and preferences of the people secret. THEMES AND DEVELOPMENT OF VICTORIAN AGE The Victorian Age coincides with the reign of the Queen Victoria, which lasts from 1837 to 1901 and so it is a huge period of time and its themes are various. It is divided into two parts, the high Victorian and the Late Victorian. The most important themes of the high Victorian are the condition of England and its social problems, the poor condition of the working class, the conditions of the industrial cities and the most important writers are Charles Dickens, Gaskell, Carlyle. Another important theme is the woman, their willing to revolutionize the masculine world in which they lived: a considerable writer is George Eliot, which is a pseudonym. The Victorian age is a religious period, we can note it through the novels of the Oxford Movement and Newman, which wanted new channel of spirituality and reforms, but the advent of the “On The Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection” brought a “crisis of faith”, with a good number of writers and poets who were agnostic, for example Thomas Hardy (late Victorian), Ruskin… The Non-Sense with Lewis Carrol. with the Late Victorian, the traditional Victorian values were challenged and changed: writers sought parallels analogue in the contemporary scientific thought. Science (Wells), the “New Woman” and the movement for woman rights, the question of Ireland and the extension of popular democracy influenced a lot literature. It starts an obsession for crime and mystery, with Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes), Bram Stocker (Dracula), but another important theme is the Double, with for example “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, but also “The picture of Dorian Gray” (the theme of the double can be related also with the Victorian Compromise). The theme of adventure and colonies, with Kipling, Conrad. At the end of the Victorian age we have the Decadentism and the Aestheticism of Wilde, influenced by Walter Pater (art’s for art sake). RICAPITOLANDO Novell of manner: Thackeray and Vanity Fair. Bildungsroman: Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield Realistic Novell: Thomas Hardy, George Eliot Gothic novel: Stevenson Non-Sense: Lewis Carol and verse of Lear POETRY Tennyson, problems of the society and religious problems, Pre-Raphaelite, who followed the norms of the artists before Raphael: Rossetti Dante e Christina and Morris lOMoARcPSD|1322377 Robert Browning, important for the dramatic monologue: nature of drama and characters of drama Elizabeth Browning Arnold criticizes the English culture and the institutions of the time and preferred the French and German ones. DRAMA Shaw and Oscar Wilde 9. MODERNISM (1901-1950) Important historical events: - WWI - WWII - Irish question: independence of Ireland 1922 - 1922: annus mirabilis. The Waste Land, Ulysses - 1937-38: Spanish civil war: English recruited. Modernism is an international artistic movement which goes from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the second World War. there are some key events which influenced the movement, that are the two World wars, the First postimpressionist exhibition in 1910, the changes after the death of king Edward VII (May 1910); the first decade of the century are years of political instability, we have the publication of Freud theories, Bergson (time as duration), the Irish question and the independence of Ireland in 1922, the Spanish Civil War in 1937-38. It is an experimental movement, it rejects Realism, optimism and in general the classic and traditional forms of writing. It implies a sense of alienation, loss and despair and an absence of past values. Authors have a new sense of time and space, multiple personalities. “make it new” is the motto created by Ezra Pound, it stresses the revolutionary aspect of modernism and the importance on novelty for the modernist movement. In fact according to him and his motto, in order to create something new the poets and writers had to try to use new forms of writing and painting. The “Annus mirabilis” of modernism is 1922, because in this year we have the production of Ulysses by Joyce; The Waste Land by Eliot, Jacob’s Room by Woolf. Characteristics of this movement are interior monologue, stream of consciousness, fragmentation, it prefers the concrete to the abstract, dramatic monologue, emphasis on a new importance of myth, a new conception of time that is not chronological but circular. important novelists of the period are James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. For the poetry we have T. S. Elliot and Ezra Pound WWI POETS For English poets WWI at first seemed an event to be embraced. Lot of young men joined the army to defend his homeland and the idea of the war was surrounded by enthusiasm. To the young men who fought in the trenches of the Western Front, the war offered a ready enough excuse for the marginalization of domestic political problems. 26 - Bertrand Russel (1872-1970): he had pacifist convictions. He had feeling against the circumstances of the war developed later than the poets on active service. - Edward Thomas (1878-1917): he had a passionate feeling for the landscapes of southern England and an acute observation of the suffering of the war. The landscapes of his poetry are often haunted by ghosts of past occupants and users and they contain the evidence of exploitation, work and decay. • A Tale • Digging - Rupert Brooke (1887-1915): he had an immediate popular impact. He celebrates the war and the national pride. • 1914 and Other Poems: published posthumously, the verse includes five enthusiastic war sonnets, including “The Soldier” … - Vera Brittain (1894-1970): she served as a nurse during the war. She recalls the ambitions and struggles of an educated woman, but also the tensions of waiting for news from the front. - Sassoon (1886-1967): his frustration and anger at the progress of the fighting is evident in his war poetry, which emphasizes the chasm between who make decisions and who suffer their consequences. He attacks the Generals, but also the uncomprehending noncombant civilians. He wrote also “A Soldier Declaration”, which affirms that the war was being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. - Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918): he had given indications of a radical poetic. His poems suggest a kind of fascination with the nature of war and with devastated men ad landscapes. He remains explorative in his interest in the imagery he found around him in the desolation of the trenches. - Wilfred Owen (1893-1918): he experimented with other inherited forms and devices, and rhyme which he developed through half-rhyme and para-rhyme. • Dulce et Decorum Est: the poem moves to a meeting of enemies and to a mystic postmortal reconciliation of two soldiers. • Futility BLOOMSBURY GROUP The origins of the Bloomsbury Group lay in male friendship in the late 19 th Century Cambridge and then in the early 20th century in the house of the children of Leslie Stephen in Bloomsbury. Only with the formation of the “Memoire Club” in 1920 that it loses the limits of a friendship. Members of this group were Leslie’s Stephens’ daughters Vanessa and Virginia, their husband Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, and their friends and neighbours Desmond and Molly MacCarthy, Duncan Grant, E.M. Foster, Roger Fry and Keynes. Their discussion combined tolerant agnosticism, with cultural dogmatism and progressive rationality, but they discuss also about new themes considered taboos. - Strachey (1880-1932): he wrote the first Bloomsbury’s text Eminent Victorians: it seemed to many readers an abandon of the false ideals and empty heroism of the 19 th Century. He doesn’t mock his subjects, but he works by means of the epigram. He wasn’t an historian or a great biographer: he was an iconoclast and a master of prose of elegant disenchantment. - Roger Fry: Vision and Design: the title avoids the words “form” and “significant”, which are present all along the essay. It is dedicated to reconsiderations of painting and sculpture, but there are also implication for the experimental fiction of Virginia Woolf. - Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): Modern Fiction: she discusses the revision of traditional modes of representation and she insists that each day the mind receives a lot of impressions and that the novelist is forced to recognize that if he could base his work upon his feelings and not convention there would be no plot, lOMoARcPSD|1322377 - Ezra Pound (1885-1972): he announced the existence of the imagists in 1912 by Ezra Pound. He arrived in London from the USA and he had a co-operative relationship with Lewis. “make it new” created by Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound point of reference of Modernism the motto ‘make it new’, stresses the revolutionary aspect of modernism and the value and the importance of novelty. In fact according to Ezra Pound and his motto, in order to create something new the poets and writers had to try to use new forms of writing, painting, dealing with architectural objects, etc…. Pound thought that the author must use his image because he sees or feels it, not because he thinks he can use it for some system of ethics. - Percy Wyndham Lewis: he is the co-editor of Blast, the Review of the Great English Vortex. He interests more on prose and paintings • Tarr: it is his most innovative novel, it is set in an art-dominated Paris and is written in a “jagged prose”. • The Art of Being Ruled: it is his most considered politic and artistic manifesto and it argues that society had been inevitably revolutionized by mechanical change and that the artist should embraced both change and revolution. It glances forward to a time when “Everyman” will be loosed from the chains of poverty by a new absolutist state. - Richard Aldington (1892-1962): his poems were published with brief note explaining that the Imagists were a group of Hellenists who are pursuing interesting experiments of free verse. He uses irregular rhythms of free verse principle of liberty. He was an assistant editor of The Egoist. • Death of a Hero: it was his first novel, which deals with the frustration of the pre-war English society and the false ideals of those who made the war burst. - Ford Madox Ford: he began his career with the biography of his grandfather, a painter. He developed his fictional style thanks to a close association with Joseph Conrad and he wrote a series of polemical essays on the state of the novel. He founded the English Review. • The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion: it is his masterpiece, made thanks to a development of James and Conrad’s techniques. - T.S. Eliot (1888-1965): he is the most important and influential English poet of his and other two generations. He is an American resident in London, and his is both an “American” and “British” literature. He studied at Harvard and in Paris attended lectures by Bergson. At the beginning, he is influenced by the poetry of Laforgue, which is ironic, clever, with the form of dramatic monologues, but this influence is transient. Actually, the one of Baudelaire and Dante are more lasting: to him Baudelaire is the inventor of modern poetry, his verse seem a complete renovation, while Dante is the medieval and spiritual authority. Eliot also affirmed that his own prose style was formed on the dissertation of Bradley, but he is also influenced by him: he emphasized the relationship of the subjective consciousness with the objective world and the notion of individual mind. • Tradition and the individual Talent: He is a mix of innovation and tradition. In fact he has more conscious of what came before him. On one hand there is the importance of tradition and on the other hand we have the challenge to change. No poet, no artist of any art has his complete meaning alone. In its relation to a larger tradition, poetry is not an expression of the emotion, but an escape from them. • The Physical Poets: he had an attraction to the intellectual and lexical dexterity of Metaphysical poetry and in this study he justifies the contortions of John Donne’s poetic thought. • The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: he showed it to Ezra Pound and he said tat he had found an American poet who trained and modernized himself on his own. The poems are specifically American and it sets the tone of the whole volume with its play with politeness and failures of comprehension, with despair. • Poems: the volume contained a monologue, four poems in French and seven short quatrain poems. The epigraph of Poems serves to alert the readers to Eliot’s fascination with order and fragmentation. 30 • The Waste Land: the poem remains fragmentary and ambiguous to many of its readers. Eliot delves into corruption of London. The effects of this poem are achieved through the play of juxtaposition, inconsistency of perception, multiplicity of narration and fluidity of time and place and these are all visual and lexical. • Four Quartets: his last major poem, containing four poems divided in five sections. It has a smoother narrative surface and each poem at the opening of the fifth section, ponders the meaning of words. • Murder in the Cathedral: it is the most successful of Eliot’s six-verse dramas. - Ronal Firbank: he and Edith Sitwell provoked the middle-class literary conventions and explored the creative potential of the impressionistic verbal mosaic. His last five completed novels show a cosmopolitan brevity and a camply decorative prose style. - Edith Sitwell: his masterpiece is Façade, a volume of poems for the musical entertainment. 18 lyrics were exercises in rhythm, rhyme, assonance, and disassonance, varied in style and mood. Her poems with their images of juvenescence and senescence, of dark and light, of the passion of Christ, are the product of an explorative feminine sensibility. - James Joyce (1882-1941): first, he didn’t find any publisher interested in publishing his works. In 1918 he found T.S. Eliot, who proclaimed him the best living prose writer. He didn’t want to live in Dublin, because he thought that it was the centre of paralysis and that it couldn’t e any innovation due to the power of the Church. He moved to Trieste, Zurich and Paris. He is the first major writer in English since the Reformation to have been supersatured in Roman Catholic teaching. • Dubliners: collection of 12 stories, divided into four groups: childhood, adolescence, mature life and public life. He had chosen Dublin not for its animation, but because he thought that it was the centre of paralysis. Its citizens are observed as incapable of judging and choosing, are disillusioned and graceless. Epiphany is a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or a memorable phase of the mind itself. These moments seem to transform the commonplace into the special. • Finnegans Wake • Exiles: it is set in Dublin, and is concerned in part with the conflicting emotions of his central character about his homeland. • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: the narrative moves Stephen forward from being the passive feeler, hearer and observer to being the doer, reader, writer and maker. It seeks to express the process of Stephen’s adolescent exploration of his personality and the flexibility of his mind. • Ulysses: composed in 3 different cities, Trieste, Zurich and Paris. It has a multiple face, Stephen, Leopold Bloom and his wife Molly, who are Telemachus, Ulysses and Penelope. Underneath the 18 episodes lies a Homeric precedent. Reading Ulysses is a process of familiarization with a variety of adapted styles, modes and techniques. It attempts to observe more precisely and intimately and it follows the vagaries of Bloom’s mind as he does things of everyday life. INTER-WAR DRAMA The innovation of Modernism touched the English theatrical mainstream only indirectly. - Sean O’Casey (1880-1964): his best known plays were shaped by the new Irish theatrical environment. He wrote about what he knew best of Dublin. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 • The Shadow of a Gunman • Juno and the Peacock • The Plough and the Stars O’Casey is nationalist, but in none of these plays he offers apologies for the troubles of Ireland. The poor are never seen as dumb victims, but as uncomprehending sufferers for someone else’s cause. All the three plays are characterized by their author as tragedies, but in all the reality of death is relieved by an irreverent wit. The play’s title is also ambiguous. - Noël Coward (1899-1973): he is in contrast with O’Casey. He combines the talents of actor, composer, librettist, playwright and his long career. • The Vortex: it explores the condition of a drug-addict tormented by his mother adulteries. • The Queen was in the Parlour, The Marquise, Bitter Sweet: they are his major plays and they look back to the enchantments of the Edwardian theatre. • Blithe Spirit: it is his last great success and it offered an escape from the preoccupations of the “Home Front” in the WWII. - J.B. Priestley (1894-1984): he is one of the most popular figures of propagandist entertainment during the WWII. • Time and the Conways, When We Are Married, An Inspector Calls: his most famous plays. - R.B. Sheriff: Journey’s End: it is the dramatic account of life in the trenches of the WWI. It combines realism with the kind of restraint which is far more than the heroics of idealized British officers. RETROSPECT AND HISTORICAL MEMORY The 1930s were remarkable for a variety of retrospects on the WWI, that were shaped as novels, verse and their interfusion. - Robert Graves (1895-1985): • Goodbye to All That: it is his autobiography. He describes a sense of alienation from postwar student life in Oxford, which he shared with his friend and fellow officer. It was through his Oxford acquaintance Lawrence, that Graves regnognized the fictional potential of feeling. • Claudius: it is a popular first-person historical novel, which is about the future Emperor of the Romans and the successful colonizer of Britain, Tiberius Claudius. - David Jones (1895-1974): he was Welsh from father and British from mother. He served as private soldier in the trenches of WWI. He entered in the Roman Catholic Church and this is the reason of the peculiarly Latinate reference of his poetry. • In Parenthesis: it is divided into 7 parts, each of which intermixes and combines the various registers of the military commands, army slang, reportage, description, extended prose meditation. There is also a fragmentation of prose into a dense poetry. His soldiers have inherited a line of the history of the Celtics and the Romans, whose ghosts haunted the world. • Anathemata: his longest poem. It is in part a tribute of London and interweaves the history of Britain with the prehistory of Europe. It has Modernist effects, Modernist fragmentation and Modernist difficulty, ordered by an artistic sensibility. - Powys: A Glastonbury Romance 32 - Stephen Spender (1909-1995): his early volumes intermix public, political and private verse. It is with the poems of the Spanish Civil War that he became famous. • Two Armies/Ultima Ratio Regum: he recognizes the erotic implications of the intimacy of sleeping soldiers. • The Still Centre: the poem captures his failure to convey a sense of heroic at the still centre both of the war and of the poet’s consciousness is Port Bou. There is a sense of inconclusiveness, that determines the mood of Spender’s poems of the WWII. His later work suggests his will to marry Liberalism and Marxism. - Cecil Day-Lewis: much of his most distinctive early verse is enthusiastic about the prospect of a Marxist transformation of society. • A Time to Dance: it is a volume, which moves from the heroic celebration of two pioneer airmen to a series of poems describing a depressed England. • Overtures to Death / Poems in Wartime: they are two volumes that showed that he had begun to retreat from confident Marxist analysis as the WWII begun. • Much of his later career he translated Virgil’s works. - Louis McNeice: he is a poet. He was a student and teacher of Greek and Roman literature. He was sided on the Left. He was Irish, and the geography and folklore of his motherland haunt his verse. His scepticism was determined by an intellectual exploration, which look beyond Irish confines: he fluctuated between a God of discipline and a God of liberty and between divided vocations to the ascetic. MacNeice recognized his ow contradictions as an artist in the external manifestations of the human history and his most important thematic emerges from a process of questioning and balancing those contradictions. • Eclogue: he wrote it at the beginning of his career and it is a series of verse dialogues. • Agamennon: it is a translation of Aeschylus’ work. • Neutrality: he wrote this poem as he returned to Ireland during wartime. He recognized a parallel between the geographical entity and the neutral island in the heart of a man. • His landscapes and townscapes poems provide a focus for his preoccupation with ambiguity and for his divided literary loyalty between Ireland and England. • Birmingham: it is a poem, which has feelings for incongruity and for urban unloveliness. It is made up of a series of fragmentary impressions of cars, cities and factories. - Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978): he is a Scottish poet, the finest and most original of the writers who revived and invigorated a Scottish poetry in the mid-20th Century. He became a founder member of the Scottish National-Party and a member of the Communist party. He was attached to Scotland and disparaging of England. The Scottish culture influenced him a lot and his most famous verse are written in a synthetic Scottish vocabulary and with archaisms. • A Drunk Man looks at the Thisle: the poem is written in a logic drunkenness within the framework of an extended dramatic monologue. • Lord in my Heart: sometimes his Scottish ideological enthusiasm may strike to the readers as provocative, but in this lyric the poet contemplates the state of Scotland. - Edward Upward: he had socialist ideals and he took part of the Communist Party, even if he had his doubts. • The Mind in Chains: fantasy implies a retreat from the real world into the world of imagination, but it is practicable and desirable in a more leisured age. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 • The Spiral Ascent: it is a thesis trilogy, which recount a series of ideological dilemmas and intellectual shufflings on the part of the socialist poet Sebrill and the theme is the long-term error of judgement that the hero makes. - Arthur Koestler (1905-1983): • Arrow in Blue: it is his autobiography and it speaks about his enter into Communism and his exit. • Spanish Testament: he wrote his experience during the Spanish Civil War, where he was a journalist and observer and where he was arrested and then released. • Darkness at Noon: it is set in a European dictatorship and it offers the most economical and intelligent analysis of Stalinist thought composed in England. It concerns with uses, structures and corruption of power. It seeks to free the individual from enforces fraternalism with masses. • Arrival and Departure / Thieves in the Night: they show the idea of a Promised Land. The former is set in a European dictatorship and shows the disillusion of a middle-class revolutionary and the latter is set in Palestine and shows the battle lines between Jew and Arab - George Orwell (1903-1950): it is the pen-name of Eric Arthur Blair. He has a firmly disillusion with Soviet Communism. He is an acute observer and generalizer. • Why I Write: in this essay, he insisted that every line he wrote since 1936 had been written directly or indirectly against totalitarism and for democratic socialism. His early novels offer fictional analyses of the narrowness of the British at home and abroad. • Down and Out in Paris and London: he wrote about his experience as a tramp. He lived making illpaid jobs and he slept in lodging-houses. The main subject is the uncomfortable and unfamiliar England. As he went to the north is repelled by the ugliness of industrialism. • Homage to Catalonia: he wrote this work after his experience in the Spanish Civil War, which was a personal discomfort and political disillusionment. • Animal Farm: it is the satire on the failure of Communist ideals in Russia. The fable may sentimentalize working-class strength and good nature and the pigs where probably chosen because they were associated with greed and laziness. • Nineteen Eighty-Four: written in 1949, it blends the Stalinist totalitarism, with Kafka’s dark fantasies of incomprehension and impersonal oppression, with Koestler’s nightmares of totalitarian logic and Huxley’s dystopian vision of a scientific future. In this book the political language of the Big Brother is distorted, designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. The Party’s Newspeak serves to narrow the range of thought and the Party’s aim is to create a world where there are no emotions except fear, rage and triumph, an intoxication of power. LOOKING AT BRITAIN AT WAR After the WWII there was the idea of a spring of hope succeeding a winter of destruction. In fact, the bombing raids of WWII enforces the idea of death and dissolution to what was known as the “Home Front” and so also the normal people had been part of this horrible war. The artists who confronted with the WWII were equipped with a post- Impressionist and post-Eliotic vocabulary. - Surrealist Movement: Themes of the Surrealist movement were the impression of a shifting relationship between objects and concepts and a Freudian stress on the meaning of the unconscious. In 1936 was held in London an international exhibition of the Surrealists, whose most works were British (there wasn’t Dali). Surrealism looked back to the work of Blake and Lewis Carrol and find a reflection to itself. Nightmares and daydreams, distortions and distensions, shoes and ships were part of a verbal and pictorial tradition. 36 - David Gascoyne: he is the most determined of the British apologists for the surreal experiment. • A Short Survey on Surrealism • Man’s Life is His Meat His wartime poems deviate into a certain kind of logical sense. - Dylan Thomas: he had begun to use an extravagant rhetorical style before he became aware of the Surrealist writing. He was influenced by the school of Donne and its difficulty and lyric intensity. • Death and Entrances: there is the citation of Donne. He addresses the idea of Death touching the Resurrection, in this volume the poems are explicitly Christian. • Fern Hill: it is the celebration of his youth and he repeated the words “green” and “golden” for this reason. • Do not go gentle: it is his most celebrated late poem, that deals with a personal and protesting anxiety. WAR POETS - Sidney Keyes: he is a war-poet died in war. His poems looked back to ancestral forms of refreshment. • Cerveres: it is about French owners of a cherry orchard ravaged by birds and threatened by an invader who will take more than cherries: the poem has a didactic expression of hope in itself. • Elegy for Mrs Virginia Woolf: Wordsworth became a single stream of consciousness with the watery element. • War Poet: there is the description of his calling on war in 1942. - Keith Douglas: he is a war-poet died in war. He felt that the weight of an earlier tradition tended to influence a new generation. He wrote poems with desert landscapes • Alamein to Zem Zem: it is Douglas’s posthumously published diary account of his service in the desert campaign. • Desert Flowers: it is in part a tribute to Isaac Rosenberg and he looks down from the angle of a pilot or an angel. • Gallantry: the colonel who jokes with troops may fail to see that the real jokers are the bullets that kill his men. - Alan Lewis (1915-1944): he was born and educated in Wales, but he rarely poses in his poetry as a Welsh poet-war. He is the most assertively civilian through the war poets. • Raiders’ Dawn: it is his first volume, in which he gives a tribute to another soldier, Edward Thomas and to the English landscape. • Ha! Ha! Among the Trumpets: this volume was published posthumously. There is a little of warhorse’s exhilaration in the poems. It is divided into three parts: the first describing a waiting England, the second describing the voyage to the East and the third India. - Joyce Cary (1888-1957): his novel The Horse’s Mouth is one of the most affirmative and original novels of the war years. The protagonist is an artist-hero who paints a mural of the Creation on a threatened wall. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 - Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): he was an English speaker Protestant Irishman, who later decided to live in Paris. His literate Bible reading and Irish background influenced a lot his work. He remained part of a polyglot world of literary innovation. His earliest publications had a Modernist approach and his trilogy of novels gave him respect and success, even if his reputation was cemented by the works for the theatre, for BBC television, for the radio and for the cinema. His use of drama was an extension of his interest in the gaps, the jumps, and the lurches, which characterized the human mind. Beckett’s dialogue is the most; energetic by any 20th century playwright and his comedy is amongst the most surprising. Timepresent in his plays is broken, incostintent and inconsequential. • Endgame: a notable play, whose set takes place in a bare interior. He uses blindness to suggest the force of alternative ways of perceiving. • Happy Days: a notable play, whose representation should be a maximum of simplicity and symmetry. • Waiting for Godot: It is his most important play and it contained echoes of an alternative British theatrical tradition of the music-hall comedy. In his hand, this tradition had been transformed by a sparse musicality and by a dialogue rich in literary resonance. The set requires the suggestion of a “country road” or a “tree”. • Film: it is a play written for the cinema. In the II Act he uses silence, to explore the value of new sensory and physical formulations. The principle on which he built his play and novels can be related to the critical ideas explored in the critical essay of Proust. His theatrical innovation was rooted in literary precedent and in Modernist statement. - John Osborne (1929-1994): his work was a response to an established theatrical tradition. The origins of his style don’t lie exclusively in the “legitimate theatre”, but also in the world of vaudeville. His debts to an inherited tradition of music-hall lie in his love of suggestive and loudmouthed repartee. • Look Back in Anger: it is the watershed of the new theatre. It introduced the noisiest of the “angry young men” to the theatre audiences. His hero, Jimmy Porter, was born out of his time. He is a revolutionary without revolution and a rebel without a case: he was against the authority of the Establishment values, his wife, his Member of Parliament brother-inlaw, English music and literature. • Luther: his historical novel about Martin Luther. THE NEW NOVELISTS OF THE 1950s - Samuel Beckett: his trilogy titled Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable is the most radically innovative fictional statement of the 1950s. his pre-war fiction had responded with confidence to the challenge of Joyce’s experimental “work in progress” Finnegans Wake. He was attempting to regenerate and re-energize the literary traditions of his native language. The fiction after the WWII were writing in French, rather than in English: he chose the fluid monologue, stream of consciousness. • Murphy: it is the most substantial of the pre-war novels. The title character is an Irishman in London placed in time and space. The novel is constructed around the rituals and repetitions of an inert life passed in a confined urban space. • The trilogy published in 1951, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable: each of their narrators contradicts himself through contortions of his syntax. Beginnings are subverted, tenses shift between past and present and what seems to be digressions assume to be vital momentum. - Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990): he responded to the idea of creating an avowedly Modernist fiction. Born in India, he found his spiritual home in the Mediterranean. He ws influenced by Lawrence and Miller. 40 • Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea): when he was posted to Alexandria in 1944 he wrote these four novels. • Avignon Quintet: attempts to break down preconceptions of time as much as it assaults inherited prejudices in favour of fictional realism. - William Golding (1911-1993): he emerged as a major successor to an established line of Modernist mythopoeists. He was not content with a reanimation of ancient myth: he was intent on overturning a variety of modern rationalist formulations replacing them with charged moral shapes. • Lord of the Flies is his first and most popular novel, which concerns with moral allegory. It is set on a desert island on which a marooned group of boys from an English cathedral choirschool gradually falls away from the civilization into barbarism and murder. The novel is shaped by Christian concept of original sin, a post-Darwinist and post-Wellsian pessimism. • Pincher Martin • Darkness Visible: it is an evocation of an intense fire-storm in the London Blitz, out of which walked a burned child. There develops an exploration of the polarities of redemptive saintliness and destructive malignity and of disinterested love. The four novels published after Darkness Visible have extended what can be seen as an established rhythm of contrasted sea-stories and land-stories: all of them are concerned with extremity and isolation. - Angus Wilson (1913-1991): he seems to have been interested on restoring Victorian narrative styles to English fiction in opposition to the errant experiments of the Modernists. He was a convinced realist who occasionally indulged in fantasy and comic writer who allowed for tragedy and cruelty, but the world of his own novels is that of the mid-20th century. He had a talent for creating scenes, set pieces and characters. His novels are essentially comedies of manners. • Study of Emile Zola: it is a means of emphasizing where his artistic loyalties lay. He published also an introduction to Dickens and an essay on Kipling. The two most traditional novels are his surest comments on the cultural, social and sexual tensions of a period of struggling with the conflicting claims of tradition and novelty: • Anglo-Saxon Attitude: it is adept in its panoramic movement from scene to scene. • The Middle Age of Mrs Eliot The last part of Wilson’s career was marked by an increasing experimentalism • Late Call: notable for its undercutting clichés. - Iris Murdoch (1919-1999): in the earlier part of her career, she used traditional fictional shapes. Her arguments derived from a scrupulous investigation of the problems posed by moral philosophy and by independent philosophical studies. Her novels are carefully patterned, though the nature of the choosing of these patterns seems broken by the freedom which she allows her characters. She had a fascination for outsiders and strangers. • Bruno’s Dream: it is the study of the conscious of an old man. • Under the Net: its male narrator resists and creates theoretical patterns with words, which constrain perceptions of a larger and expanding reality. • The Bell: the loss or fragmentation of objects seems to suggest why patterns between characters must be removed. It is set in a lay religious community, near to a convent of enclosed nuns and it begins with a fragmented marriage and gradually explores the emotional, sexual and moral tension which force the community to reform. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 • The Black Prince: it is her most experimental novel. The protagonist is a novelist who tells and actually is the story. It is a contrived intellectual thriller. - Muriel Spark: she is a Catholic convert. She has a commitment to moral issues and to their relation to fictional form. The ironic and disingenuous tone of her narrators helps her to create a sense of discordance between the aberrance of what happens and its precise delineation. • The Comforters: it is her first novel and it is concerned with a neurotic woman writer, who has to deal with her new-found Catholicism. • Curriculum Vitae: it is her autobiography. Her early novels marked new advances in the British exploration of the Gothic. Fe. • The Gothic of The Ballad of Peckham Rye that is quite distinct in its comic chill and it concerns with possession. • The Duchess of Malfi: it is Gothic in the traditional sense of the term. - L.P. Hartley (1895-1972): he was a social insider who chose to explore the vulnerability and the disillusionment of the outsiders, central characters of his novel. His novels offer a retrospect on an uneasy England from the point of view of the mid-century. • Eustace and Hilda: it is his trilogy that deals with the contiguous worlds of a brother and his elder sister as those worlds painfully diverge and contract again. • To Go-Between: it was with this novel that the unease with his century became manifest. The novel is narrated by a man who recalls the period of his 12 years old in the summer of 1900. - Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957): his masterpiece is Under the Volcano and it is set in Mexico on the festival of the “Day of the Dead”. The novel is place in the atmosphere of political restlessness of the 1930s and the imminence of the WWII. FIELDS WE DO NOT KNOW - Basil Bunting (1900-1985): he has Northumbrian roots and culture and he used northern words and speech. He was one of the most sophisticated openers up of English Modernism because of his literary forms and his non-native landscapes. He was one of the select group of inter-war writers approved by Ezra Pound. His work can be characterized by the idea of rediscovery. His poetry reexplores historical and personal pasts and bunting rejoices in his sexual identity. His detailing has reminded of Wordsworth, but the sensibility which determines that detailing is Modernist. • Redimiculum Matellarum: it is his first volume of poetry published in Milan. • Briggflatts: with this poem he attracted a wider audience - Philip Larkin (1922-1985): his work stands in contrast to that of Bunting. • Jill: it is set in an Oxford characterized by the make-do-and-mend mentality of the WWII. Important themes are the representation of an Oxford forced by egalitarianism by the war, the selfconsciousness of the provincial lower-middle class England and the mobility of grammar-school education. He was the most significant of a group of writers known in the early 1950s as “The Movement”, who dislike a typical product of wartime planning and the Welfare State. • The North Ship: his first volume of verse • His subsequent poetry was to bypass Modernist experiment in favour to a traditional metrical forms es. The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, point to the inflexions of his own age and the provocative frankness. 42 • Marat/Sade • US: it is a commentary on the Vietnam War. • A Midsummer Night’s Dream - John Arden: he was the typical of the new generation of playwrights of Royal Court: he is provocative, argumentative and brusque. • Live Like Pigs: it is a play about the resettlement of gypsies in a housing-estate, and it explores anti- social behaviour. • Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance: it is his most celebrated play, addresses its anti-militaristic theme with a combination of Brechtian exposition and music-hall routines and it develops through contemporary circumstances. - Arnold Wesker: he had shown himself capable of creating a virtuoso visual theatre. • Chips with Everything: it performed at the Royal Court and it was concerned with the National Service and actually, it is a fictional expansion on his own experience in the RAF. The play contains also remarkable moments of concerted physical action by the group of recruits. • Trilogy: it is his most substantial work. He manages to relate his intense respect for working-class community to a social, historical and political perspective stretching the anti-Fascist protests of the Jewish East End. In all three play, he conveys a sense of place by capturing distinctive ways of speaking and representing the distinctive rhythms of urban and rural domesticity. - Harold Pinter: he is the most original and challenging of the new dramatists of the late 1950s. all his lays suggest a sense of the dramatic effect of pacing and pausing. His early plays don’t deal with direct political engagement and comment: they open up a world of seeming inconsequentiality, dislocated relationships and undefined threats. His earlier work allowed indeterminacy and his latest work seems to want an insistent demand for moral definitions. His first four plays had a distinctive air of menace, which suggests the influence of Kafka and the patterning in their dialogue a influence of the early drama and patterning of Eliot. • The Birthday Party: it is the most polyphonic play. • The Homecoming. It was first performed at the Royal Shakespeare Company. It marked a turningpoint in his career. The play opens in an undistinguished room in a north London house and with a one-sided conversation, an indifferent exchange of insults and it goes away from the idea of the comedy. Everything in the play is unspecific. The play leaves a residual sense of sourness and negativity. The successors of The Homecoming (Old Times, No Man’s Land, Betrayal) extend his uncertainty and its advice of menace and ominousness. All of them are distinguished with the disjunctions of memory and with unstable human relationships. Since One for the Road his plays tended to a political drama. Language is seen as the means which power can be exercised and as something which can be manipulated and defined. In 1998 he published his own selection of non-dramatist work, that has helped to identify how, when and why the playwright has chosen his creativity and excitement. - Joe Orton (1933-1967): his plays suggest that he has a refined sense of the potential of the state, its institutions and its human instruments to oppress citizen, like Pinter. He was an active homosexual and he was murdered by his companion. He was also sent to prison and he fought against the authority with anarchy comedy and priapic energy. His comedy serves to expose the folly and the fool, the double standards of the hypocrite or the unbalanced humours of everyman and the disrupt the very status quo. His villains are no fools. His exploited, abused innocents are not wronged paragons. Innocence can ever be a defence. Orton exploit the traditional forms of comedy and he transforms them. lOMoARcPSD|1322377 • The five major comedies that Orton completed before his death were calculated to outrage. When he started to write to press and to the theatre, he was parodying the kind of bourgeois respectability against which he had long defined himself. • The Erpingham Camp: the camp’s owner may dream a vulgarian’s dream of a future England but Erpingham is in the business of social control and his camp is a metaphor for a revolutionary state. - Tom Stoppard: his comedy is implosive, symmetrical and logical. He takes a fresh delight in the kind of theatrical clockwork and he seems a deep intellectual pleasure in parallels, coincidences and convergences that extend beyond a theatrical relish. He has emerged as an almost exemplary artist in an age which has exhibited a fascination with the patternings of mathematics and metaphysical theory. His plays are plotted, logical mystery tours which find their ends in their beginnings. • Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: this is Hamlet reread according to Einsteinian laws, Eliotic negatives and Beckettian principles. Everything is rendered relative and the perspective is changed, time is fragmented. • Jumpers: a moral philosopher preparing a lecture on the existence of God and is confronted by the murder of an acrobat at his party. It is about the making of mental and moral jumps and the construction of a philosophical architecture. • Travests: his most inventive play. The play begins with a historical footnote and a historical coincidence (Joyce, Lenin and Tristan Tzara all refuge in Zurich for the WWI), but it develops into a complex extrapolation of political and literary history. He shapes his play around echoes, parodies and inversions of Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and of Joyce’s Ulysses. • Arcadia: his most allusive play. It is a brilliant fusion of complementary oppositions. The pay is set in a room in a country house and the language from an elegant Regency English to a casual modern register. • The Coast of Utopia: his complex and demanding trilogy. The three play move from an aristocratic estate in Russia, then to Moscow, to Germany, to Paris, to mid-Victorian England and to Switzerland. His subject is the influence of Romantic idealism on backward Russia and the erratic development f the revolutionary socialist ideas. - Edward Bond: he has always cultivated plainness in both expression and design. His career began at the Royal Court, with versions of plays by Brecht and to the radical German tradition he had remained faithful. He shows violence as a consequence of the brutalization of the working class in an uncaring industrial society. To him, the violence was a concept needed to be redefined as “a doctrine of natural aggression”, determined by an unjust society. • The Pope’s Wedding / Saved: the first plays to be performed, both concentrate on an inherited lexical and emotional poverty in English working-class life, which find a natural expression in violence. • Lear / Bingo / The Fool: anger and violence are seen as only means of self-expression open to the socially deprived. Lear is the most emotionally challenging of his plays: it re-engages with Shakespeare’s themes of blindness, madness and the exercise of power. His version is remarkable for its stilted language and its representation of violence. - Brenton: with Griffiths, Hare and Edgar they attempt to take a new type of polemic drama. Bourgeois ideology was indeed being challenged at its “point of consumption”, but it was only minimally disrupted. Much of the political drama of the 1970s and 1980s was founded on the fact that the capitalist society was on the brink of collapse and that there was a division between the ruler and the ruled. This perception of a divided society was accentuated after the coming to power of Margaret Thatcher. The early Thatcher years were remarkable for the uniformity of theatrical protest against Government policies, philosophies fe. The Party by Griffiths. The period worked from a basis of Marxist theory. 46 • Pravda: A Fleet Street Comedy: by Hare and Brenton, it is the parallel between the manipulation of information in the Soviet Union and the corrupt control of the British press by an unscrupulous newspaper. - Caryl Churchill: her work has been rooted in opposition to a social system based on exploitation. She has recognized an equation between the traditional power exercised by capitalists and the universal subjection of women. Her woman characters emerge as the victims of a society, which had conditioned them to submit to masculine social rules. Her plays reverse conventional representations of male and female behaviours. • Top Girls: she explores the superficial liberation of women in the Thatcherite 1980s. The women rarely seem to understand how much their circumstances and experience overlap. • Mad Forest: A Play from Romania: it is a remarkable play, that is set in the immediate aftermath of the Romanian revolution. It is a powerful study of competing truths and half-truth, perspectives and distortions, aspirations and disillusionments. - Shelagh Stephenson: she is the most distinctive new woman playwright to emerge in the late 1990s. her early work was broadcast as radio plays by the BBC. • The Memory of Water: it is her first stage play, which explores the tensions and the convergent memories of three sisters reunited in their mother’s seaside house on the eve of her funeral. - Brian Friel: he is the most intelligent, challenging of the political playwrights who established a reputation in the 1970s and 1980s. he is an Irishman who has written almost exclusively about and for Ireland. • Translations: it is his most remarkably revisionist play that opens in an Irish-speaking community in the 1830s. • Dancing at Lughnasa: it is his densest play and it deals with the altered perceptions of maturity. It is set in the time of the Spanish civil war which causes Irish Catholics to lean towards Franco. It also explores the Catholicized culture of rural Ireland to direct parallels with pagan Africa. - Alan Ayckbourn: his success has been based on his ear for ordinary conversation, vices, irrationalities and snobberies of the kind of people who come to see the plays and on his ability to amuse and provoke without giving offence. His work has reached a mass audience only through the medium of television. - In the 1980s the London stage was remarkable for adaptations of classic novels. The tradition of high quality adaptation had been kept alive in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s by the BBC and by commercial television companies. Television’s most solid contribution to artistic innovation has been through the evolution of a specific kind of drama shaped by the special resources of the medium and these innovations has been related to: - Alan Bennet: he remained also active with the theatre. • An Englishman Abroad / Talking Heads - Dennis Potter (1935-1994): he is more associated with television. • Alice - Ted Hughes (1930-1998): his poetry plays tender games with morality. His verse have a distinctive dialect of his native West Yorkshire. • The Hawk in the Rain / Lupercal: they are his first two volumes and express a fascination with animal energy and independence and an awareness of the affinities between animals and human life • Hawk Rosting: it is his most anthologized poem. He represents the consciousness of an animal. • Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow: it is a sequence, in which he has his earlier experiments with the violent meshes of animal and human sense. The poems redefine established ideas by means of brash declarations and stabs at meaning.