Utilitarismo e letteratura vittoriana, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Utilitarismo e letteratura vittoriana e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! UTILITARIANISM The origins of Utilitarianism, based on Jeremy Bentham’s principles, can be traced back to the Greek philosopher Epicurus that leads to the study of ethics to pleasure and pain, thus denying the ethics of values. According to Utilitarianism, an action is morally right if it has consequences that lead to happiness, and wrong if it brings about the reverse. The goal of every moral activity and of every social action consists in the greatest possible happiness of the greatest possible number of people. Utilitarianism suited the interests of the middle class and contributed to the Victorian conviction that any problem could be overcome through reason. VICTORIAN LITERATURE POETRY: The poet was seen as a ‘prophet’ and a ‘philosopher’. He was expected to reconcile faith and progress. The most popular poetic form was the dramatic monologue: it was a narrative poem, there were different points of view, the speaker is different from the poet himself, the tone is argumentative, the character was caught in a moment of crisis and deep interest in human psychology. NOVEL: There was a communion of interests and opinions between the writers and their readers (one reason was the enormous growth of middle class). The Victorians were avid consumers of literature. They borrowed books from circulating libraries and read various periodicals. The Victorian reading public established the novel as the dominant literary form of the age; the most distinctive and lasting literary achievement of Victorian literature. Publication of a novel in monthly instalments on the pages of periodicals and it allows the poor to buy them. Victorian novelists described society as they saw it and expressed different kinds of emotion, love, humor, fear, except those sentiments which could offend current morals. They were aware of the evils of their society, such as the terrible conditions of manual workers and the exploitation of children. The novelists adopted a sort of didacticism aim because they conceived literature as a vehicle to correct the vices and weaknesses of the age. The voice of the omniscient narrator provided a comment on the plot and erected a rigid barrier between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, light and darkness. The setting chosen by most Victorian novelists was the town, which was the main symbol of industrial civilisation as well as the expression of anonymous lives and lost identities. Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of realistic characters. Types of novels: The most important themes developed were: - differences and the dramatic contrast between the lower and middle classes, between the rich and the poor, caused by the factory system; - children and their exploitation in boarding schools; - education; - women and their exploitation; - middle-class family life. WOMEN WRITERS In this period a great number of women novelists emerged, such as the Bronte sisters and George Eliot (the pen names of Mary Ann Evans). In fact they must adopted a pen name or male pseudonym to write. Middle-class women had more time to spend at home than men and could devote part of the day to reading. THE REALISTIC, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND COLONIAL NOVELS The late Victorian novel mirrored a society linked to a growing crisis in the moral and religious fields. They described the society as they saw it. Victorian novelists concentrated on the creation of realistic characters and achieved deeper analysis of the characters’ inner lives (for example with Stevenson’s the strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) and presented retribution and punishment in the final chapter, where the whole texture of events, adventures, incidents had to be explained and justified. Finally the obvious influence of english colonialism on Victorian literature can be found in the exotic novel with Kipling (adventure) CHARLES DICKENS LIFE AND WORKS Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. He had Unhappy childhood: he had to work in a factory at the age of 12 (his father went to prison for debts). He became a newspaper reporter with the pen name Boz. In 1836 Sketches by Boz, articles about London people and scenes, were published in instalments. After the success of The Pickwick Papers, Dickens started a full-time career as a novelist, although he also continued his journalistic and editorial activities. The protagonists of his autobiographical novels, Oliver Twist (1838), David Copperfield (1850) and Little Dorrit (1857), became the symbols of an exploited childhood confronted with the bitter realities of slums and factories. Other works include Bleak House (1853), Hard Times (1854) and Great Expectations (1861), which deal with the conditions of the poor and the working class in general. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. CHARACTERS He was the creator of realistic characters and caricatures who live immortally in the English imagination: Mr Pickwick, Mr Gradgrind, Scrooge and many others. His aim was to arouse the reader’s interest by exaggerating his characters’ habits as well as the language of the London middle and lower classes, like lodging-house keepers, shopkeepers and tradesmen, whose social peculiarities, vanity and ambition he ridiculed freely, though without sarcasm. He was always on the side of the poor, the outcast and also the working class. Children are often the most important characters in Dickens’s novels and become the moral teachers instead of the taught. A DIDACTIC AIM he had a didactic aim. He wanted to show to the nobles the critical poor’s lives without offending the middle-class readers. STYLE AND REPETITION Dickens employed the most effective language and accomplished the most graphic and powerful descriptions of life and character ever attempted by any novelist. He used repetition of words (the puns) and structures, hyperbolic and ironic remarks. He is considered as the greatest novelist in the English language. THEMES Family, childhood and poverty are the subjects to which he returned time and again. Dickens’s children are either innocent or corrupted by adults. Most of these children begin in negative circumstances and rise to happy endings which resolve the contradictions in their life created by the adult world. DICKENS’S NARRATIVE Dickens’s novels were influenced by the Bible, fairy tales, fables and nursery rhymes and by Gothic novels. London was the setting of most of his novels: he always seemed to have something new to say about it and showed an intimate knowledge of it. He gradually developed a more radical social view; the result was an increasingly critical attitude towards his society