The Victorian Age: Novels as Mirrors of Society and the Role of Readers and Writers, Sintesi del corso di Inglese

Scarica The Victorian Age: Novels as Mirrors of Society and the Role of Readers and Writers e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! In the Victorian Age the dominating literary form was the novel, because it was a kind of mirror which reflected society and where a self-identification of the readers was possible. • readers and writers During this age, in fact, writers and readers shared mutual interests. One of the main reasons for this relationship is due to the growth of the middle classes, whose readers were the most important consumers, in particular women: they had the money to buy or to borrow books, they had plenty of free time to dedicate to reading. • the publishing world In order to improve the reading public, in this period, novels started to be published in instalments: every week, few pages of the novel (or a complete chapter) were included in one of the periodicals issued. This kind of publication had an important advantage on the price of the novel but more importantly, it was helpful to the writers: in this way they could check the reaction of their public to the plot and, if parts of it were not appreciated, they could decide to change it in accordance with the taste of readers. This happened because, if not satisfied, readers could stop buying the magazine determining the failure of the novel and therefore of its writer. • the novelists aim & narrative technique Victorian novelists felt they had a moral and social responsibility to comply. They wanted to reflect the society in which they lived, with all its social changes and advances. Therefore, they represented society as they saw it, and, being aware of the social problems of the time (such as exploitation of women and children, terrible living conditions etc..) they used their own voice in order to put in evidence these evils and to raise awareness among people. In this way, “didacticism”, a type of writing that is written for a particular purpose such as to teach a a moral, religious political or practical lesson, was the dominating aim of most of the novels of these years. As a consequence, the narrator is generally omniscient: he operates a marked division between good and evil characters, he judges people and actions, and he makes its stories finish with a wise distribution of “punishment” for the evil characters, and “retribution” for the good ones. • setting and characters