Letteratura inglese 3

SARA CREWE

She shows the female strength of character. She reads a lots of books and is interested in completing her education. She is very generous. When she is poor, she is really starving, but there is an episode where she decides to give her food to another starving girl. Compassion. The adjective queer is recurrent. It implies that she is different from other girls. She is not beautiful, but she has other qualities. She also has the gift of the imagination. She is a story teller. Her name echoes that of the matriarch of the Old Testament. In Hebrew it means princess.

RAM DASS

A princess is also a colonial master or mistress. In this perspective, it seems that colonial people existed to pay reverence to their mistresses. Ram Dass serves Sara as a sort of fairy tale helper. This figure implies oriental tales and fairy tales. At a certain point, he brings Sara good things in the attic where she lives. He brings them anonymously. The Indian servant enters Sara's room through the

skylight on Mr. Carrisford's roof. He is described as a kind of exotic servant. There is just an external description. We have never the opportunity of knowing him from the inside. This servant owns a monkey that has an important role because it connects Sara and Ram.

PLACES-London is the place. Here, Sara is brought to a school of young ladies, not located in fashionable London. Sara does not like the look of this place. She implies that she is a soldier and that her time at school is a battle (a male activity). Other places are the cab, domestic and closed places (school, attic), the attic (transformed from a shabby place into a comfortable home. It resembles a kind of nest. Here Sara comes into contact with the rat and the monkey that escaped from Ram). Windows are important.

METAPHORS OF BLACKNESS-They are recurrent. Since the beginning, England seems colorless and unwelcoming. Black is also referred to Indians.

MAGIC-What is magic is the power of imagination. Sara imagines and

transforms the attic through imagination, then it is really transformed by Ram Dass, so magic is real. Magic can transform our life. The setting and action are realistic. In the context of A Little Princess magic is the power of the imagination to transform reality. Sara imagines the attic room changed from the cold, miserable dreary place as it is into a warm, comfortable and elegant room only to find such a transformation into a reality – overnight. The Magic infuses the world with wonder. It transforms life if we give it a chance.

Lezione 11 10 ottobre 2019 little princess "A develops the role of female characters, especially the one of the girl who has grown up as Sara. It is a simple text with many interesting issues as the attention and the reassuring vision of the empire or the idea of storytelling and metafiction, which is the most important one. The princess theme is developed, so also the links to being rich and having a noble heart. The role of dolls is interesting;

particularly in the relationship of Sara with Emily. There is a remarkable episode where she considers the doll as a living creature and then she realizes that she is only an unresponsive toy, so she starts to lose her temper and becomes a sort of savage ("she lifted her little savage hand and knocked Emily off the chair"). There is an happy ending with the role of a minor character (Anne) that represents the alter ego, the double of the little princess. She is transforming her identity as Sara does. The role of storytelling is important because Sara is always starving and hungry for books, and not only for food. The role of books and reading books is crucial for the construction of the protagonist because through them Sara can develop her fantasy and dreams. Sara approaches the whole world as if it was a narrative and she is able to construct fictional worlds with her imagination. Romance is a word never used in the text that is connected to Sara's idea of the story. Shesurvived thanks to her imagination and her ability to imagine and build stories. That is the real power of storytelling. The verb "to pretend" is important because Sara and her friends pretend to be prisoners, to have a feast, to play in order to transform her life into something beautiful. Metafiction means texts that include the process of writing and reflect on what writing implies; Sara embodies the writer and transforms her experience into a story. The last quotation "everything is a story, you are a story, I am a story, Miss Minchin is a story" shows that the text could be expanded and interpreted as a metafictional text and not only as a book for children. UNITA' B The world is changing as literature is trying to have a transformation from the previous years and centuries. "The centre cannot hold" is a quotation coming from the end of the century (fin de siècle) - the period of passage, the transitional moment of the turning of the century.

century) that expresses the image of what is happening in the world: the progress, the empire, the omniscient narration, all elements that implies control and centrality. The role of gothic and fantastic is really strong in the texts “The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” by Stevenson, based on the trick of the double and wilderness, crime and poverty opposed to science and progress; as well as “Dracula” by Stocker, which implies a contrast between the traditions and the superstitions and the new world. In fact, the motto of the modernists was “make it new”, a decision that implied also degeneration, apocalypse and hybridity.

La Belle Époque is another definition of the period between the 1890s and the outbreak of the first World War in 1914, a moment of peace from one century to the other, when the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age remained unimpaired (a kind of Golden Age) in contrast with the horrors of the Great War.

In 1912, the so-called unsinkable Titanic went down on its maiden voyage into the Atlantic Ocean, a crucial event that had a great impact on the public opinion, a kind of anticipation of the future tragedies of the war. This event marks the end of the progress and the peaceful era and had a big impact also because of media's works.

In 1901, Queen Victoria died and this long period ended creating many anxieties. After the kingdom of Edward VII, George V, the first monarch of the House of Windsor, succeeded him. There were economic and social tensions in Britain in the industrial sector up to the start of the Great War in 1914. The five-year conflict caused the death of millions of people, above all soldiers on the Western Front. An entire generation of young men were killed; the suffering and the slaughter brought about by the Great War left a profound emotional scar in Europe and Britain.

Virginia Woolf gave a literary quotation ("In or about December 1910 human character...")

changed”) about the change ofthe human behaviour and of the experience/perception of the world in 1910, probably referring to specific eventshappened at the end of that year. For example, the first post-impressionist exhibition with works of Cézanne, Matisseand Van Gogh or the question of Ireland. While Lawrence noted that in 1915 the old world ended with the collapse ofLondon, leaving some space to a new world where the capital became not just a mixture but also a vortex (importantfigured image for modernists’ art) of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears ad horrors (“It was in 1915 the old worldended. In the winter 1915-1916 the spirit of the old London collapsed; the city, in some way, perished, perished frombeing a part of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors”).Modern is a word that comes from Latin modo, meaning current, implying now in opposition to the past of a tradition. Itis a word implying innovation,

experimentation and distancing from the past. The term has been used to refer to the XX century, though the Second World War period is called contemporary. The noun modern is associated with modernization, connected not only to the values of humanism and enlightenment, but also to those of colonialism and imperialism as the modernization of the West spreads around the world. Modernity is considered a way of living and experiencing life with the changes wrought by industrialization, secularization and urbanization. Its characteristics are disintegration, reformation, fragmentation, rapid change and insecurity. It involves new understandings of time and space and all the concerning issues as mobility, speed, communication, travel, dynamism, chaos and cultural revolution as well as increased division of labour in modern production. Marshall Berman divides modernity in three phases: 1500/1800, 1800s (from the American and French revolutions) and 1900s process of modernization. This idea ofmodernity according to Berman involves also that "all that is solid melts in the air" while Bauman calls this new phase of history "the liquid world". So both try to express the society of modernity as a place characterised by no centre and problems of melting stability and solidity. What is common in the interpretations of modernists and post-modernists critics is the theme of liquidity. Modernism is connected to art and literature and used to describe certain trends in art, writing, criticism and philosophy that had a powerful impact on the development and experience from the last decades of the XIX century to the beginning of the Second World War. Modernism can be seen as an aesthetic and cultural reaction to modernity and modernization. It is not a period in itself but it describes a very wide range of textual phenomena in different arts that exerted a profound influence on the way we all think and experience our world today. Modernism is really the crucial moment.

of history.Modernism was a reaction to the increasing sense of social and cultural upheaval in early XX century, as well as to thequestioned (previously unshakable) faith in rationality, control and progress established in the XIX century. Literarymodernism was characterised by a progressive break with traditional styles through experimentation and work.Modernists' writers experimented with literary form and expression, adhering to Pound's modernist manifesto "make itnew". There is something old that needs to be changed into something new and original.The new sensibilities imply the idea of new literature and new ways of writing. The modernist literary movement wasdriven by a conscious desire to overturn traditional modes of representation and express these new sensibilities of thetime. Freud questioned the rationality of humankind proposing a new kind of reality with studies on instinct andsubjectivity (what happens inside the personalities of men, the stream

of consciousness and the idea of the unconscious).

The end of the strictly moral Victorian period, coinciding with the embarrassment of the difficulties in subjecting a few African farmers to English control in the Boer War, resulted in a rea