L'età Vittoriana: contesto storico, poesia e romanzo, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica L'età Vittoriana: contesto storico, poesia e romanzo e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Victorian age Contesto storico - Took his name from Queen Victoria, she came to the throne at the end of the first Industrial Revolution. The revolution brought a new economy of manufacturing industry and international trade. Britain is now the most powerful nation.A series of reforms and progressive policies took action to incorporate the working class in the society. - Upper and middle classes lived in wealth, while the poor people were forced to live in overcrowded slums; the few existing building regulations were ignored so they had to live in awful conditions. An other problem was the fact that they lived all close together so deadly disease were more probable to happen. To confront this conditions the government promoted a campaign to reassure basic living conditions. - After the French Revolution Britain had turned to a conservatives and violent politic: both tories and whigs didn’t want to expand the power to vote to the masses. First reform Bill (1832) excluded the working class and gave representation only to the middle class. This led to the rise of the Chartist Movement, the goal was to gain political rights for the working classes. The organization took his name from their petition: the people charter. The end of chartism was marked by many rejections of their petitions. But after some time all the Chartist demand, except that for an annually elected Parliament became law and with that the working class finally was able to vote. - During the Victorian age Britain expanded the empire all over the world, thanks to the need to protect trade routes to and from india. Queen Victoria was in fact declared Empress of India in 1877. Britain annexed a number of territories such as: south africa, Egypt, Suez canal, Burma, Malaysia and Afghanistan. The control of this routes was made difficult by the political instability (Crimean war-1850; Boer Wars- Africa). Moreover during the second half of 19th century both Germany and France became economic powers and began to rival Britain’s dominance in Africa. Another country that was part of the British empire was Australia, with had originally served as a prison colony where criminals and political agitators were transported. Later Australia began to develop on its own. - At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the cost of living was kept high by the Corn laws (1815-1846), with maintained the price of corn really high by taking imported corn. The corn laws were seen by ordinary people as a symbol of the aristocracy’s feudal power over them. In 1838 mill owners and some whigs joined the Anti-corn Law league, that fight against this measure. But only in 1846 the corn law was repealed by Robert Pell (tory prime minister). The most unjust law 1 that passed during this age is the Poor Law: it reflected the Victorian view that poverty was a moral problem. The law stated that everyone who wanted to receive money from the poor law authorities had to commit themselves to extremely hard and violent workhouses. Victorian poetry - Poetry became more concerned with social reality. Two type of poetry were developed: • Majestic poetry: linked to the myth and belief of the greatness of England • Poetry of anti-myth and disbelief: it had to solve the ethical problems raised by science and progress. - The poet was seen as a prophet and philosopher, they expected him to reconcile faith and progress. - The most popular poetic form was the dramatic monologue, characterized by: a narrative poem, the speaker is different from the poet himself, the tone is argumentative, there is a silent listener, the character is caught in a moment of crisis, deep interest in human psychology, different points of views. - Some outstanding poets were • Alfre Tennyson: the most popular Victorian poet that wrote dramatic monologues • Robert Browing: raised the dramatic monologue to new heights making it a vehicle for deep psychology studies • Elizabeth Barret Browning: she wrote love sonnets Victorian novel - There was a communion of interest and opinions between the writers and their readers - Victorians were avid consumers of literature, They used to borrow books from the library and read them periodically. - The Victorian reading public established the novel as the: dominant literary form of the age and the most distinctive and lasting literary achievement of Victorian literature. Even the poor could purchase them 2 - Dickens children are either innocent or corrupted by adults. Most of these children begin in negative environments and then rise to happy endings. Contradictions in their lives are created by adults Aims - He want to alleviate social sufferings by persuading the common intelligence of the county - He was a campaigning novelist an his book highlights all the Victoria controversies: the fault of the legal system (Oliver Twist, Bleak House); horror of factory employment (david copper field, Hard Times); scandals in private schools (david Copperfield); the appalling living conditions in the slums (black house) Style - His style is rich and original, he uses: • Long list of objects and people • Adjectives used in pair or in groups • Many details even if they’re not necessary • Repetitions of the same words and sentence structures • Same concepts are expressed more than once but with different words • He uses antithetical images to underline the characters • Exaggeration of characters fault • Suspense at the end of the episodes Robe che la Davola vorrà sentirsi dire - He invented the white Christmas - He was one of the first to describe the underclass and the poverty stricken in victorian London - His characters talks in a comic way - He was an important influence in the cinema development, he invented the parallele montage where two stories run alongside each other - Some of his characters have become so recognizable that they have entered the language as nouns - He inspired our current view of the law with his characters 5 Oliver twist - Appeared in 1837 as an installments - It fictionalize the humiliations Dickens experienced during his childhood - The protagonist, Oliver twist, is always innocent and pure throughout all the novel - The setting is in London - The plot Oliver twist is born in a housework, his mother dies after his birth and Oliver spend the first nine years in an orphan house. Than he’s transferred in a workhouse. The other boys in the house make Oliver ask for more soup and after that Mr Bumble offer five pound to anyone who will take the boy outside of the house. Oliver manages to escape and he decides to go to London. On his way to London he meets a boy of his age named Jack Dawkins who offers him place to stay at his benefactor house, Fagin. Fagin turns out to be a criminal who trains orphans to become pickpockets. After a training Oliver is sent on a mission with tho other boys but when he sees them stealing he’s horrified and runs away. Mr Brownlow, a man who was robbed by the boys, takes Oliver home with him. Oliver is happy in his household but he is soon captured by Bill Sikes, a criminal, and hi girlfriend Nancy. This two takes Oliver back to Fagin. Fagin sends Oliver on another mission with likes but he is shot by a servant and is then taken by the owner Mrs Maylie and her adopted niece rose. Oliver is happy again but Fagin wants to recapture him with the help of a mane named Monks. Meanwhile Monks find a gold lock that Oliver’s mother left him before passing away, and he destroys it. Nancy meets Rose secretly to inform her about Fagin’s plan but a man from his gang finds out about this and tells Fagin. When Sikes finds out about Nancy’s betrayal he murders her. The mayflies are able to reunite Oliver with Mr Brownlow and he decides to find Monks to find out about Oliver’s life. He learns that Monks is Oliver’s half-brother and that their father was married to a rich woman and that he had an affair with Oliver’s mom. This is the reason why Monks pursued Oliver, he want to ensure that Oliver is deprived of his inheritance- Mr Brownlow obliges Monks to give Oliver is share. He then finds out that Rose if Oliver’s mum sister. Mr brown low adopt Oliver and him and the Mayflies go to live in te country side. - The themes: The social Evils of his time such as poor houses, unjust courts; the world of the housework and the official of the houseworks that arises the right of the poor individuals 6 Hard times - Is a denunciation novel, a powerful accusation of some of the negative effects of the industrial society - Is located in Coketown, a fictional city that dickens modeled on the industrial city of Preston. - The plot: Thomas Gradgrind is a citizen of coketown and the school headmaster. He only believes in facts and figures. He bring up his two older children: Louisa and Tom crushing all their imaginative impulses they might have, he also suppresses the imaginations of the children in his school. Louisa marries Josiah Boundary, a factory owner thirty years older than her. Her motives are not entirely Cynical since her dear brother tom in employed by Bounderby’s firm. She’s not happy in her marriage. She’s distracted by a politician in Coketown, James Harthouse, when he tries to seduce her she goes to her father for protection and Gradgrind finally understands his rational world is very limited. Louisa separate from Boundary and meanwhile Tom Unwisely robs his employer and then tries to divert suspicion onto an innocent men, Stephen Blackpool. Tom will be discovered and he will leave the country. - The themes: • He critique the dehumanization that the industrial society brought • He critique the materialism and utilitarianism • Gap between rich and poor • His aim is to illustrate the dangers of allowing people to become like machines and to suggest that without compassion and imagination life sucks - Features: Dickens’s sense of humor; many scenes of hard times are conceived in a vivid, theatrical way; dickens’s descriptions provide a social and psychological map of the situation they depict - The character of them Gradgrind is probably based on the utilitarian leader James Mill. 7