Riassunto esame Letteratura inglese, prof. Cavone, libro consigliato The Short Oxford English Literature, Sanders

Stephen takes religion seriously, and considers entering a seminary, but then also rejects Roman

Catholicism. At the end Stephen resolves to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter "the reality of

experience". He wants to establish himself as a writer. In 1907 Joyce published a collection of

poems, Chamber Music. The poems have with their open vowels and repetitions such musical

quality that many of them have been made into songs. In Zürich Joyce started to develop the early

chapters of Ulysses, which represented for narrative what The Waste Land signified for poetry.

Homer’s poem is an obvious point of reference, starting with the figures of the three protagonists,

Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and Stephen Dedalus (the protagonist of Portrait), who correspond

to the three protagonist of Homer’s poem. However, the several years of Ulysses’ voyages and

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adventures are here replaced by a single day, the 16 of June 1904, with Bloom’s small journeys

around the streets and locals in the city of Dublin. On the one hand, there is a conviction that the

modest material offered by the contemporary world can be elaborated across an epic dimension.

The novel is divided into three parts, embodying the 3 characters and the 3 parts of Odyssey. Each

of the 18 chapters is organized around a different hour, a color, an organ of the body, a sense or a

symbol. Each character represents two aspects of human nature: Stephen is pure intellect and

embodies every young man seeking maturity; Molly stands for flesh and sexuality; Leopold, uniting

the extremes, is the whole of humanity. Ulysses is famous for its very complex structure: Joyce

combined several methods such as stream of consciousness, dramatic dialogue, flashbacks,

juxtaposition of events, verbal cocktails and wordplay, creating what he called “collage technique”.

The language is full of puns, images, false clues, paradoxes, interruptions and foreign words.

Finnegans Wake was the last and most revolutionary work of the author, partly based on Freud's

dream psychology. The novel presents the thoughts and dreams of the Earwicker family, as they lie

asleep at night. The book is written in an idiosyncratic language, consisting of a mixture of

standard English lexical items and multilingual puns, which many critics believe attempts to

recreate the experience of dreams and sleep. Plus, we find stream of consciousness, literary

allusions, free dreams associations and the abandon of the conventions of plot and character

construction: for these reasons it appears incomprehensible and it remains largely unread by the

general public.

William Maugham. British novelist, playwright, short-story writer, highest paid author in the world

in the 1930s. Maugham lived in Paris for ten years as a struggling young author. In 1897 appeared

his first novel, Liza of Lambeth, which he wrote while working as a doctor at a hospital in Lambeth

and drew on his experiences of attending women in childbirth. Maugham's breakthrough novel was

the semi-autobiographical Of Human Bondage, which is usually considered his outstanding

achievement. The story follows the childhood, youth, and early manhood of Philip Carey, who is

born with a clubfoot. Philip never knew his father and his mother only for a brief space. He is raised

by a religious aunt and uncle. A waitress of a teashop becomes his great love, which nearly

destroys him. Philip neglects his studies, and gives her gifts he cannot afford. She becomes a

prostitute, Philip meets her again, she has contracted veneral disease and he buys her medicine.

Above all, Maugham was an absolute master of the short story form. Ashenden; or, the British

Agent is a collection of six short stories set in Switzerland, France, Russia, and Italy. It was partly

based on the author's own experiences. It can be credited with inventing the genre of the modern

spy novel. The most famous of his stories is Rain, inspired by a missionary and prostitute among

his fellow passengers on a trip to Pago Pago. Maughan was also a playwright, worth mentioning

are The Circle, a satire of social life, Our Betters (1923), about Americans in Europe, and The

Constant Wife (1927), about a wife who takes revenge on her unfaithful husband. Cakes and Ale

was social satire on a famous novelist modelled on Thomas Hardy.

Malcolm Lowry. He spent time in Spain, Paris, New York and Mexico before settling in Canada.

During his lifetime he published only a small proportion of his work. Mexico became the setting for

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his Under the Volcano, one of the masterworks of the 20 century English literature. It is the story

of the British Consul in Mexico, a permanent drunk who dies murdered by Fascists. The entire

story takes place of 2 November 1938, a single day as in Ulysses. Lowry’s writing picks up many

aspects of the Modernism: multiple points of view, interior monologue, stream of consciousness,

and a temporal dimension at the same time limited and dilated. It’s not a political novel, it is in fact

a modernist novel, full of erudite references and echoes of mythology and the classics. During his

last years Lowry planned a modern, "drunken Divine Comedy," a sequence of seven novels built

around Under the Volcano, titled The Voyage That Never Ends. He had already written the

"Purgatory" part, "Paradise" had been destroyed in the fire. Lowry's alcoholism and mental

disorders shadowed much of his writing career and starting a new novel was for him very difficult.

The last ten years of his life he spent in and out of hospitals. In the unfinished novel Dark as the

Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (1968) the protagonist, Sigbjørn Wilderness, is Lowry's alter ego

- a writer unable to write, but whose voyage of self-destruction ends against all odds with a

possible happy ending. He thought the novel as part of a trilogy.

The 1930s were remarkable for a variety of delayed retrospects on the ‘Great’ War. These

retrospects were shaped as memoirs, as novels, as collections of verse, and as experimental

interfusions of verse and prose.

Robert Graves. He was an English poet, scholar/translator/writer of antiquity specializing in

Classical Greece and Rome, novelist and soldier in World War One. During his long life he

produced more than 140 works. Graves's poems—together with his translations and innovative

analysis and interpretations of the Greek myths, his memoir of his early life, including his role in the

First World War, Good-Bye to All That, and his speculative study of poetic inspiration, The White

Goddess—have never been out of print. His autobiography provided him a huge success. Later he

published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he

constructed a complex and compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale

extended in the sequel Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count

Belisarius, recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius. This White Goddess is a book-

length essay on the nature of poetic myth-making. He also turned to science-fiction with Seven

Days in New Crete.

David Jones. Although he had been trying to write about his wartime experiences for some time, it

was not until 1937 that Jones published his first literary effort, In Parenthesis. Based on Jones's

own experience as an infantryman, the epic poem narrates the experiences of English Private

John Ball in a mixed English-Welsh regiment starting with embarcation from England and ending

seven months later during the Battle of the Somme. The work employs a mixture of lyrical verse

and prose. It is in factdivided into seven parts, each of which intermixes and combines the various

registers of terse military commands, profane army slang, Welsh tags, cockney phrasing,

reportage, description, extended prose meditation, and the striking fragmentation of prose into a

dense and allusive poetry. His next book, The Anathemata, inspired in part by a visit to Palestine

during which he was struck by the historic parallels between the British and Roman occupations of

the region, draws on materials from early British history and mythology and the history and myths

of the Mediterranean region. NOVELISTS OF THE 1920s AND 1930s.

William Gerhardie. Gerhardie was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the

1920s. His first novel, Futility, was written while he was at Worcester College, Oxford and drew on

his experiences in Russia fighting the Bolsheviks, along with his childhood experiences visiting pre-

revolutionary Russia. Some say that it was the first work in English to fully explore the theme of

'waiting' later made famous by Samuel Beckett in Waiting for Godot. His next novel, The Polyglots,

is probably his masterpiece. Again it deals with Russia. Its setting moves panoramically from

Japan, to Harbin in Manchuria, to Shanghai before ending up in the drizzling rain of England. The

novel’s narrator, the capriciously named Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, is a polyglot

English outsider, detached both from the displaced and disparate collection of refugees from

Russia he encounters in the East and from the English with whom he is never properly at home.

Despite the confusion of tongues and manners that the novel implies, Diabologh accepts the

English language as his medium of communication.

Henry Green. Green's novels are often described as being among the most important works of

English modernist literature, along with those of Virginia Woolf. His best-regarded novels are

Living, Loving and Party Going. Living documents the lives of Birmingham factory workers in the

interwar boom years. Party Going tells the story of a group of wealthy people travelling by train to a

house party. Due to fog, however, the train is much delayed and the group takes rooms in the

adjacent large railway hotel. All the action of the story takes place in the hotel. Loving describes life

above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. His work was

praised in its time for its evocation of the rhythms, repetitions, and deprivations of industrial life

Gibbon (James Leslie Mitchell). Scottish writer, he attracted attention from his earliest attempts

at fiction, notably from H. G. Wells, but it was his trilogy entitled A Scots Quair, and in particular its

first book Sunset Song, with which he made his mark. A Scots Quair, with its combination of

stream-of-consciousness and lyrical use of dialect, is considered to be among the defining works of

20th century Scottish Renaissance. It tells the story of Chris Guthrie, a young woman growing up in

the north-east of Scotland in the early 20th century. Spartacus, a novel set in the famous slave

revolt, is his best-known full-length work outside this trilogy.

Ivy Compton-Burnett. Started her literary career with the relatively traditional novel Dolores, but

from Pastors and Masters onwards she developed a radically different novelistic technique: the

narrator more or less disappears and the entire story is entrusted to the dialogue between the

characters, a dialogue dictated by irony,