Autori e movimenti letterari tra fine Settecento e Ottocento

Nascita e influenze di Wordsworth

He was born in the Lake District in 1770, and graduated in Cambridge. Thanks to the French revolution he developed democratic ideals, and after the war between France and Britain he got a breakdown. In 1795 he met Coleridge, together they produced a collection of poems called Lyrical ballads, which contained the Preface (the manifesto of the English romanticism). He died in 1850. In the Preface he dealt with nature, men and everyday things, in fact he wrote about everyday situations, the language was simple and objects called with ordinary names. He shared Rousseau's thoughts about the goodness of nature in the child, and that if the man cultivated his senses and feelings he could achieve that good. During childhood we develop moral character as a result of the pleasure and pain caused by our physical experiences.Simple thoughts combine in more complex ideas. His poetry shows the interaction between men and nature. The main focus of interest is the poet’s response to the object described, he believed that man and nature are inseparable, so he had a pantheistic view. Nature in fact was something that includes inanimate and human nature, which are a part of the same whole, nature is a source of joy, comforts man in sorrow and teaches him how to love. Nature was also a sense perceptions, especially the ones from eyes and ears. Memory is like a major force, in the process of the poet's growth. The poet has the ability to see the heart of things, and with the power of imagination he can communicate his knowledge, as a matter of fact he is a teacher who teaches how to improve the moral being. In Daffodils he went for a walk with his sister, in the lake district and here he conveys his love for nature.

Coleridge e la ballata del vecchio marinaio

He was influenced by French revolutionary ideals, which made him an enthusiastic republican, he started an important collaboration with Wordsworth and in 1800 he wrote The Rime of the ancient mariner. He produced in 1817 Biographia lIteraria where he explained his task in the lyrical ballads. The ballad of the ancient mariner is made up of seven parts and is set in the wide sea, with days of hot sun and nights lit by the moon. It is introduced by an argument, that is a summary of the poem and has two narratives, some captions and the poem itself.

His contemplation of nature was accompanied by the awareness of the ideal and real. But due to his cristian faith he could not identify nature with the divine. Nature had an essential role in poetic creativity , and the poet could find natural symbols to reflect his emotions. The themes are travel, wandering and supernatural elements, it is romantic because of the moral at the end. This poem could be the description of a dream, which allows the poet to relate the less conscious part of hi psyche to a familiar experienceIt could also be an allegory of the life of the soul from sin to redemption or a description of the poetic journey of romanticism (the marin is the poet enchanted by a song that derives from guilt he is caused by the industrial revolution).

Bohemien e teatro britannico

It began in France and reflected the artist's reaction against the materialism and the restrictive morals of the bourgeoisie. In France bohemien pursued excess, cultivating beauty, they also believed in Art for art’s sake. In their works they gave excessive attention to the self, had a sensual attitude, disenchantment with contemporary society and used an evocative language.

In Britain with Congreve, in London many theaters had been built but were smaller. The stage directions were longer and more detailed than the previous ones, because they described the gestures and the personality of the characters. Very popular were melodramas with sensational plots: they concerned a heroine, villain and ended with the triumph of love.

Stevenson e il doppio

He was born in 1850 in Edimbourgh, and had poor health so spent his life traveling around the world, searching for a friendlier climate. He wrote Treasure Islands, Kidnapped and short stories as worthy as the ones by Edgar Allan Poe. His masterpiece is The strange Case of dr.Jekyll and mr. Hide, Dr. Jekyll is a great friend of the lawyer Mr. Utterson, the main character has created a potion able to release his devil side, Mr. Hide, who achieves the domination over dr. Jekyll and the only way to get rid of it is to eliminate Hide by killing him. In the story there is a double nature of the city, which reflects the hypocrisy of Victorina age, the respectable West End in contrast to the poverty of the slums. Most scenes take place at night, so there is artificial light and the atmosphere is foggy. This novel had its origin in dream, since Stevenson dreamed about a man in a laboratory who had swallowed a drug and turned into a different being. There is a gothic aspect, and it was influenced by the Calvinism of the stevenson family. The novel has multi-narrative structure, there are four narrators:

Utterson, is like a detective, follows clues and draws hypothesis;

Enfield, takes long walks with Utterson;

Dr. Lanyon, the first person to see the transformation of Dr. Jekyll;

Jekyll himself, in the last chapter.

Stevenson took inspiration from Darwin’s theory of the jinship between man and aninalem, Hide is deformed, primitive and the forerunner of civilized man. Jekyll projects his hidden pleasures onto Hide, and is like a Faust. We can also find a reflection of art itself, as a psychological research and a journey into unexplored regions of the mind.

He was born in Dublin in 1854, attended the Trinity college and then the university in Oxford. He became a disciple of Wakter Pater accepting the theory of Arts for Art sake and dressed like a dandy. He published Poems (collectio) and when he arrived in New York told that Aestheticism was a search for beauty and there was a relationship between painting and poetry. He published The happy prince and some short tales, the Picture of Dorin Gray, The importance of Being Earnest (drama). In 1891 his relationship with Bosie led to trial on charges of homosexuality , and so he was sentenced to 2 years of hard labor, during this time he wrote The profundis (letters to Bosie), and before dying in France published The Ballad of reading gaol. For Wilde his life was like a work of art, and he lived as a rebel and a dandy; the elegance was a symbol of the superiority of the spirit. Life was meant to be a pleasure. In the preface of his novel he wrote that there is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book, since he rejected didacticism.

The picture of Dorian Gray is set in London at the end of 1800.Basil Hallward (falls in love with Dorian's beauty and innocence) paints Dorian Gray, under the influence of Lord Henry Watton. The main character satisfies every desire, while any signs of age appear on his body, but the portrait changes. Dorian kills the painter and kills himself to get free, at this moment Dorian's face becomes wrinkled and the portarrit comes back to purity. There is an unobtrusive third person narrator, the perspective is internal and the settings are described with words appealing to senses.

He was born in Long Island in 1819, had a little formal education, and started to work as a printer's apprentice. He began to work as a journalist to support radical democratic causes. He traveled to New Orleans and acquired a self-taught culture, including the Bible, Homer and Dante. In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass, the first version included 12 poems, and the other nine editions that followed increased with poems. In 1860 he was accused for obscenity and homosexuality. In 1865 he wroteDrum-Taps, where the lyrics gave voice to his enthusiasm about the abolition of the slavery and democracy promoted by Lincoln, in the same year he published the sequel of Drum-Taps, and both are included in the fourth version of Leaves of Grass. He died in 1892.

Leaves of grass, including all of his poetry, the first edition showed a picture of a working man wearing a brown hat with a long beard. It could be regarded as a life long poem, this implies a process of development and expansion resulting from a trascendsl sense of the unity of all things. The poet treated the natural world as the body of the earth, a material entity that attracted the poet's curiosity. While the human body was continuous with nature, and Whitman discovered in himself the same energies and materials that brought the earth to life. His collection is written in free verse, the author rejected rhymes and regular lines, in favor of long lines where rhythm is determined by the emotions expressed, using participle verbs, mixing common language with a scientific one.

La prima guerra mondiale e la disillusione

The first world war left Britain in a disillusioned and cynical mood, some soldiers searched for pleasure, others had a sense of guilt. Some writers warned about totalitarianism, and new views of man and the world emerged. For example Freud in The interpretation of the dreams emphasized the power of the unconscious, his theory also gave importance to the demands of the libido. Especially those manifested in the Oedipus phase: the relationship between parents and children was altered. He also investigated the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of free associations. For him man was a part of nature. Einstein discarde the concept of time and space with the introduction of relativity, this carried to a rebellion against perspective in art.

For Bergson there is an historical time, linear, measured in terms of spatial distance, while the psychological time is internal, subjective and measured by the relative emotional intensity of a moment.

Most of the young volunteers regarded the conflict as an adventure undertaken for novel ends, this feeling was replaced by disillusionment. Life in trenches was hell, and common soldiers improvised verses, The poets managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic way.

Joyce e il monologo interiore

He was born in 1887 and was familiar with literary circles. He joined up at the beginning of the war as a volunteer since his conflict with an idea of cleansing,these values are introduced in his poems. But died in April 1915. He was traditional in form and showed a sentimental attitude, his death inspired during the Great War and he became a young romantic hero.

He was born in 1893, was a teacher in England but in France visited some hospitals and decided to enlist. After being injured he returned to the front, in 1918 he had been killed in a German gun attack. His poems are accurate accounts of gas casualties, and here he uses some technical innovation (pararhymes), the same consonants but different vowels, which makes his poems suitable for any situation which includes sorrow and death.

In 1929 the american stock market collapsed , causing massive panic and in October Wall street crashed, this led to the Great Depression, which began a worldwide crisis. In this period the Great Plains was devastated by drought, so many farmers had to migrate to California. In 1932 Franklin D. Roosevelt became presifdnt and promised reformrs to recovery from the crisis. World War II gave an impulse to American factories, when the United States joined the conflict aimed to win; they spent a thousand million dollars to produce the first atomic bomb (Manhattan Project).

This term refers to an international movement that started after the first world war, which gave a sense of disillusionment and fragmentation to the society. The modernist expressed their desire to break with the past and find new fields of investigation, such as technology and speed. It contributed to express the nature of modern experience through creative forms of experimentation. Features:

• intentional distortion of shapes (cubism);
• breaking down limitation of time and space;
• emphasis on subjectivity, n hao perception takes place (stream of consciousness);
• development of the multiple association of words;
• importance of unconscious;
• need to reflect the complexity of modern life in artistic form.

Novelists drew inspiration from classical and new cultures creating a new subjective mythology. They regarded the past as a source that they could reshape in a personal way.

The Georgian poets, like Ruper Brooke, felt sympathy for English elements such as the countryside as an idyllic place, but were hostile to the Symbolists techniques. Imagism is a modern movement (1912-1917), the name was invented by Ezra Pound, but T.E. Hulme was the theorist. The main principles are:

• free choice of any subject matter;
• short poems without moral comment;
• hard images;
• use of a free metrical rhythm;
• The aim is to achieve the exact curve of things.

Symbolism born in France with Charles baudeleaire, the style is marked by:

• indirect statements;
• use of language and images to evoke;
• importance to the sound of words;
• free verses;

The social urge to change, forced novelists into a position of moral and psychological uncertainty, he had to mediate between the solid values of the past and the confused present, highlighting the complexity of the unconscious. This new realism was influenced by Proust, tended to the individual, as a limited creteure whose moral progress was inferior to the advanced in technologies. New concept of time and new theory of unconsciousness introduced by Freud. The novelist rejected omniscient narration, experimented with new methods to portray the individual consciousness; the view point shifted from the external to the internal world of the character's mind. The analysis was influenced by the theory about different levels of consciousness, the past experience coexisting with the present influence the personality of the human being.

Time was subjective and internal: if the distinction between past and present was meaningless, there should not be a chronological sequence of events. Novelist employed the stream of consciousness, defined by William James as a continuous flow of thoughts and sensations that characterize the human mind, the interior monologue is the verbal expression of this psychic phenomenon. There were 3 groups of novelist:

• psychological novelist, focused on development of the characters mind and on human relationship;
• novelists who experimented with subjective narrative techniques, exploring the mind of one or more characters giving voice to their thoughts; like James Koice and Virginia Woolf;
• novelists committed to social and political problems of the 1930s, their attention was focused on the society around them, Orweel was dystopian novelist who attacked ottalinarism.

Introspection was already present in novels by Defoe and Swift, but modern writers gave more importance to subjective consciousness and adopted the interior monologue to represent the unspoken activity of the mind before it is ordered to speech.

It is the verbal expression of the stream of consciousness, it doesn’t follow a chronological order and lacks punctuation, the action takes place in the character's mind, in the interior monologue the mind of the character is allowed to wander freely among associations of ideas.

indirect interior monologue, the narrator controls the flow of thought of the character, maintaining logical prganistauom and he gives descriptions and explanations. The character is fixed in space, while his consciousness moves freely, everything happens in the present. Inner time is irregular and disrupted compared to the conventional conception of time; while external time shows the relativism of a subjective experience.

direct interior monologue, Ulysses by Joyce, the narrator do not exist, Joyce used two different kinds of direct interior monologue. One with an external narration to the characters mind and one internal. It is characterized by a mix of third person narration linked to an external time and and interior narration linked to the concept of inner time. The extreme interior monologue was used by Joyce in Finnegans Wake, ehre the narration takes place in his mind while he is dreaming.

He was born in DUblin in 1882 and got educated in a Jesuit college school, before enrolling at University College in dublin. His interest was for european culture, he believed that tho increase Ireland awareness was crucial a realistic portrait of life from europe, cosmopolitan viewpoint. He spent some time in Parsi, but in 1903 came back to Dublic due to an illness of his mother and began writing, so he published Sisters and the Evening Telegraph. In 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, their first date (16 june 1904) is the blooms day of Ulysses.

In 1905 they settled in Trieste, where Joyce made friends with Svevo and the couple had 2 children. These years had been difficult, filled with financial problems, in 1914 he published Dubliners a collection of short stories all about Dublin and its life, the book caught the attention of the american Ezra pound who helped him print A Portrait of the Artist as a young Man (autobiographical novel). In 1915 with his family he moved to Zurich, he continued writing Ulysses thanks to a donation baut in 1920 had to suspend it because he was accused of obscenity. In Paris he published Ulysses ( experiences of Mr.leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and the poet Stephen Dedalus on 16 june 1904 in Dublin). In 1939 he published Finnegan Wake, and the year after moved to Zurich.

His effort was to give a realistic portrait of the ordinary life of common people. Joyce challenged catholicism, his hostility was the revolt of the artist-eretic against the official doctrine. His style influenced the Symbolists, he believed in the impersonality of the artist, and his task was to render life objectively to give the readers a true image of it. He developed the interior monologue with two levels of narration. The extreme came when he rejected punctuation and grammatical connections; and reality became the place of psychological projection of cultural knowledge.

Dubliners consists of 15 short stories which lack action, and lead to a moral, social revelation; they all take place in Dublin, a place where true feelings do not exist, and selfishness lies below the surface. The city is presented in different aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life. The characters are from the lower middle class and they all seem to be caught up from an endless web of despair, even when they want to escape, for them it is impossible because they are spiritually weak. The description is realistic, mixed with symbolism, since external details have a deeper meaning and names are carefully chosen. For example the “street organ”, or “harmonium” in Evelyne in contrast to the everyday names about the furniture. Points out the disharmony of Evelynes family, her mother was a victim of the aggressive father and Evelyne will have the same destiny. There are also references to religion and color that represent the paralysis. The epiphany is the spiritual manifestation caused by an external object or a banal situation, which reveals the character's inner truth. The style in Dubliners is characterized by the interior monologue and the chiasmus (repetition of images). In the childhood section Joyce employs a first person narrator who describes the events in the point of view of a young boy. For the other 12 stories there is a third person narrator, who shares a particular character's perspective and reflects the language of the person described. He tends to disappear in the interior monologue (free direct speech). The language is simple and adapted to the characters.

Teatro dell'assurdo e Beckett

In the 1950s a real revolution took place in British drama. There were 2 trends (absurd and anger), the theater of the absurd was born from a group of dramatist

s who emerged in the ‘50 (Beckett and Ionesco), whose works were named absurds by the critic Martin Esklin. Ionesco defined absurd the condition of man who is lost without values, and whose actions became senseless. The main representatives are Beckett and Pinter, the subject matter is the absence of a plot, the metaphysical anguish and the absurdity of the man condition. What happens on the stage is often contradicted by the absurdity of the character. The aim is to express the anguish of modern men; the starting point is the performance “Waiting for Godot” in Paris in 1953 and in London in 1955. The thtar of anger had as subject matter the frustration and everyday life, it was written in a conventional way, with an outspoken language, its aim was to reject the establishment of that period.

Aspettando Godot e il teatro dell'assurdo

He was born in 1906 in Dublin, and went to the Trinity cWaiting for godot achieved immense success. His other plays are Endgame, Krapp's last Tape and Happy days, he died in 1989. The two-act play is a circular and pointless repetition. In act 1 two trumps (Vladimir and Estragon) are waiting for Godot, at the beginning they are aware of hunger and pain but they dont do anything and want to commit suicide, they are depend on each other and do not react. Pozzo and Lucky are opposed to them and are doing a purposeless journey to fill their existence. There is no development in time (no past or future), just a repetitive meaningless present , the place is set in a country road with a bare tree. The two acts are symmetrically built. The stage is divided into halves by a tree, also characters actions are symmetrical (both tramps need to take off their hat to think, while for pozzo and luche is the opposite). Vladimir is more practical, Estragon is a dreamer, always complaining about people who beat him during the night. Both are concerned about questions about gOd and nature of the self. Vladimir distrusts what he remembers, while he tells Estragon who does not remember the past; Vladimir establishes Estragon identity by remembering for him. Pozzo and Lucky are linked to each other by a rope and with a tyrannical relationship of master and servant that will change. Due to the increasing amount of the knowledge men are aware of the uselessness of their learning (meaningless of human life). The language is informal , the dialogue is sketched and the characters are unable to provide each other about their present situation. There is also a para verbal language by the use of pauses, silences and gasps. Repetition and relentless low time inherent in human condition.