Evolution of English Novel: From Bourgeois Origins to Psychological Exploration, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Evolution of English Novel: From Bourgeois Origins to Psychological Exploration e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! ➜ The origins of the English novel were essentially bourgeois, as we know that middle-class women started reading in this period or became women writers. ➜ Throughout the 18th and the 19th centuries the novel was deeply connected to society, with the gain or loss of social status as its recurring theme. ➜ The novelist was a mediator between the characters and the reader relating significant events and incidents in chronological order in a more or less objective way. The characters tell their feelings to readers. ➜ The shift from the Victorian to the modern novel was caused by a gradual transformation of British society and mentality, there was a break with tradition → at the beginning of the 20th century, the urgency for social change and the pressing need for different forms of expression forced novelists into a position of moral and psychological uncertainty. Other factors that contributed to producing the modern novel were the new concept of time and the new theory of the unconscious which derived from the Freudian influence. The psychological aspect of the unconscious started determining actions and thoughts of people; the present is confused. ➜ The modern novelists rejected the omniscient/external narrator. They experimented with new methods to portray the individual consciousness, such as the interior monologue and the viewpoint shifted from the external world to the internal world of a character's mind. Also, the past experiences determine the whole personality of each human being and in the stories, there is a simultaneous existence of different levels of consciousness and subconsciousness → importance of subjective consciousness. ➜ In this period, there are no shared values in society, so the individual reaction to life and society was the focus of modern novelists → it was impossible to reproduce the complexity of the human mind using just the traditional techniques. ➜ The unconscious has a great impact on our lives and perception of reality, so is the way we react to it that matters, not the events. ➜ There’s a different perception of time → subjective time ≠ chronological time ➜ The narrative technique that modern novelists employed was the “stream of consciousness” which is defined as the continuous flow of thoughts and sensations that characterise the human mind. The interior monologue is the verbal expression of the psychic phenomenon. ➜ The story in modern novels is irrelevant → there is interest in what goes on in the mind of characters → there is absence of a well-structured plot with chronological events. ➜ James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were the most experimental writers→ they used the interior monologue to represent the unspoken activity of the mind (stream of consciousness) and the subjective perception of the world → the start and the end of their novel were paramount