the penguin book of the british short story, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica the penguin book of the british short story e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Solid Objects, Virginia Woolf Two young men, Charles and John, are walking on a beach. They are presented in a positive manner and they are almost caricatures of masculinity.When they sit down for a while Charles skims pieces of slate (=raccogliepezzi di ardesia) across the sea and John digs up (=d isseppelisce) a piece of glass out of the sand, marvelling at its possible provenance.For the man itisn’t only a piece of glass, it could be a precious stone, a gem, something worn by a dark Princess or the oak sides of a sunk (=affondata) Elizabethan treasure-chest (cassa del Tesoro).The piece of glass becomes a paperweight on his mantelpiece where he keeps papers relating to his parliamentary ambitions, and he begins to look out for more objects of its kind. In a few months he had collected four or five specimens that took their place upon the mantelpiece. One day, for example, he discovers a star shaped fragment of china (=porcellana)in one of those little borders of grass and misses an important appointment because of it. The contrast between the glass and the china fascinated him and he asked himself how the two came exist in the same world. One day he finds a piece of iron and he thinks that it is origined in one of the dead stars or it is a piece of moon. He begins to frequent rubbish dumps and plots (=appezzamenti) of waste ground in his pursuit (=ricerca) of objects, and in doing so neglects all his professional duties.He suffers disappointments and derision, but is sustained by the belief that his searches will one day be rewarded (=premiate). He grows older and retreats (=siritira) from society in general.His old friend Charles visits him and realises that John has lost touch with reality and leaves him – forever. The Toys of Peace, Saki Eleanor Bope reads on a London paper of the 19th of March one article about children’s toys. It reports that the Peace Council makes an alternative suggestion to parents in the shape (=modo) of an exhibition of “peace toys”. She calls his brother Harvey and asks him tobringsthat “special totoys” at Easter as gifts to his nephews. Eric is not eleven yet and Bertie is only nine-and-a-half, so they are really at most impressionable age. Harvey thought is thifferent from his doughter’s because he thinks that there are primitive instinct and hereditary tendencies (one of their grat-uncles fought at Inkerman =guerra di Crimea) to be taken into consideration. Anyway the uncle gifts to his nephews a miniature of municipal dust-bin (pattumieracomunale),a model of Manchester branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association, of municipal wash-house (=lavatoio) and of sanitary bakehouse (=panificio): a small town to play. With that there are also John Stuart Mill, who was an important authority and political man, Robert Raikes, the founder of Sunday school, Rowland Hill, who introduced the systemof penny postage and the astrologer Sir John Herschel. The children don’t know how to play with them and they are disappointed. The purpose of the toys of peace was to foster (=incoraggiare) interests in things other than war, buttwo boys prefer to study battles to playing with the toys. Harvey tells his sister that they've started this much too late to have any effect on the boys. A widow’s quilt (= trapunta), Sylvia Townsend Warner Charlotte's story begins with her first visit to the American Museum at Claverton with her sister Helena and her niece Emma. Here she sees a black and white widow's quilt. It has squares cut from a white wedding dress and drab (= scialbo) black serge (=è untessuto). The colors, pattern (= modello)and size (narrow (= piccolo), for a single bed) all signify a woman mourning (=in lutto)her marital state.Charlotte, too, is mourning her marital state. She rushes (=corre) home from the museum to begin a widow's quilt of her own - even though her husband is still alive. When she is on the train she starts to think about the construction of her quilt and the materials she have to get.The widow’s quilt shaped itself to her mind’s eye: the centre, a doubled, even a trebled ring of black velvet(=velluto) hexagons massively (= massiccio) enclosing the primal hexagon of white wedding-dress brocade (= broccato, è un tipo di tessuto). Next morning, as soon as Everard left for his office (he is a partner in a firm that sold rare postage stamps), Charlotte go to buy the materials she needs. She don’t want to make any other kind of quilt. This is her only, her nonpareil (=unico), her one assertion of a life of her own. When Everard sees her working on the quilt, she tell him it was a “magpie” (=gazza) quilt, like the black and white birds. She is stitching away (cucire) at Everard's demise (=decesso)- every hexagon brought it a step nearer.With each stitch she dreams of freedom. Ah, the places she will travel, the life she will lead when finally the boring, predictable postal employee she is married to has passed away. She gets so caught up in the sewing project that she begins to feel unwell. She gets dizzy (=pazza). She stabs(=punger) herself with the needle. She had works for weeks on it, when she begin to make mistakes. Her heart thumps(=battere) and her fingers swell (=gonfiarsi), but she wouldn't go to bed. One day, after buying more thread (=filo), she falls on the stairs to their apartment and have a heart attack. Everard was shocks and distraught. He asks Helena to take the quilt, because he was going to move and wouldn't have room for it. He tells Helena, “I'm sure she'd like you to have it. It meant a great deal to her.” Behind the Sade, Artur Morrison The story begins with the description of a small house built upon remnant (=avanzi) in East Enders, where ordinary man and woman live. The house has a green door with a well-blacked knocker (=battente) round the corner and in the lower window in front stood a “shade of fruit” - a cone of waxen (= di cera) grapes and apples under a glass cover -. Here the seal (=marchio) of respectability is set by the shad of fruit - a sign accepted in those parts. The Perkinses, only mother and doughter, live in that house. The father had a shipwright (=carpenteria navale) –when it was the aristocracy of the work-shop – and he worked a lot before he died. The two women keep a schoool for tradesman’s (=scuola di artigiani) little girls in a back room over the wash-house. One night a dweller (=cittadino) in Stidder’s Rent has vigorously punched (= prendere a pugni) her in face and the breast (=petto), kicks her and jumped on and lays her on the pavement. He mistaken her for his mother. The neighbours never see Mrs Perkins again and the school ceased. One day, a card appears in the widow, over the shade of fruit with the legend “Pianoforte Lessons”. It is not approvate by the street. Nobody wants take them but the relieving officer's daughter, and she pays sixpence a lesson, to see how she gets on, and leaves off in three weeks. Soon after the Perkinses ceases from shopping and any rate in that neighbourhood and it is said that the doughter is stingier (=più taccagna) than her mother. Infact Miss Perkins demeanour’s (=contegno) began to change for the worse: one day the deacon (= diacono) calls but he isn’t invited to enter in the house, he was very dudgeon (= risentito). Miss Perkins is saw in the street saeldom and only at night. In this occasions she carrys parcels of varying shape and wrapping. Mrs Webster, after seen Miss with a package trips on the broken sole (=suola) of one shoe in broad dayling (=piena luce del sole), decides to find whence the work came. Nobody notices that the parcels brought in are fewer than the parcels taken out. One morning the landlord (= proprietario di casa) calls for the rent, but Miss Perkins hasn’ t enought money, so ask him to return the following week. When he come back nobody open the door and he opens the sash-fastening (=serratura) with a kinife. The house is empy: every stick of furniture have sold to raise money for food. The women are dead, and only the dusted fruit remains in the windowas in the whole story . Two Doctors, M. R. James The narrator is founds a collection of papers in an old book he acquired. He is asking the readers if they also think there was some supernatural work at play. This papers belonged to a lawyer and they esorts with “the strangest case I have yet met”, and bears (=sostiene) initials (= la sigla), and address in Gray’s Inn. The scene is Islington in 1718, in June. Luke Jennet, a servant who had been with Dr Abell –a strange person- twenty years, is leaving his master because of the metter of the bedstaff in the dispensing room and the strain things that happened. One strange and recurring dream persecuts Dr Abell. In the nightmare he wakes during the night, dresses himself and he digs (=sava) in the garden with a shone (= vanga). He found a stuff of the size of a man and shaped like the crysalis of a moth (= falena) and, when it opens shows him his own face in a state of death. The servant knows the nightmare but he keeps the secret. The next master of Luke is Dr Quinn, who is a plain, honest beliver, not enquiring over closely into points of belief. Quinn not only gained the desired services of Abell’s former servant Jennett, but was also taking his patients. Quinn wasn’t doing it on purpose; they all just wanted to come to him. There was something about Abell that put these people ill at ease, including their rector. One nigth Dr Quinn died. All the servants are in his room, and Luke notices that the two ends of the pillow covers his face: he certainly died of suffocation. There are other strange things: the bolts (=viti) of the door were burst (=svitare) from their stanchions (appoggi) and marks upon the sill (=davanzale) or footprints below upon soft mould (= stampo morbido). Anyway since it has nothing but remarks upon the healty state of the larger organs and the coagulation of blood in various parts of the body, the verdict is “Death by the visitation of God”. The last paper the narator found is about the rifling of a mausoleum in Middlesex which stood in a park (now broken up). The outrage was not that of an ordinary resurrection man. The object, it seemed likely, was theft. The account is blunt and terrible. I shall not quote it. A dealer in the North of London suffered heavy penalties as a receiver of stolen goods in connexion with the affair.