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

Literature of the 20th century

Edwardian novel

The Edwardian era or Edwardian period in the United Kingdom is the period covering the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910, and is sometimes extended beyond Edward's death to include years leading up to World War I. The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 and the succession of her son Edward marked the end of the Victorian era.

Arnold Bennett

He is known as a novelist, but he also worked in other fields such as journalism, propaganda and film. From 1900 he devoted himself full-time to writing, giving up the editorship. He continued to write journalism despite the success of his career as a novelist. In 1902, Anna of the Five Towns, the first of a succession of stories that detailed life in the Potteries, the industrial area where he was born, appeared. The novel tells of Anna's struggle for freedom and independence against her father's restraints, and her inward battle between wanting to please her father and wanting to help Willie Price whose father, Titus Price, commits suicide after falling into bankruptcy and debt. Social concerns are also present in his masterpiece, The Old Wives' Tale, which deals with the lives of two very different sisters, Constance and Sophia Baines, following their stories from their youth, working in their mother's draper's shop, into old age. It is generally regarded as one of Bennett's finest works. It covers a period of about 70 years. Bennett's production was voluminous, but much of it was mediocre. The Clayhanger Trilogy is a series of novels that follow the life of Edwin Clayhanger as he leaves school, takes over the family business and falls in love. As his other works, this work is set in the "5 towns" of the Potteries.

Herbert George Wells

Herbert George Wells was an English writer, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing textbooks and rules for war games. Wells is sometimes called "The Father of Science Fiction." His most notable science fiction works include The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The Invisible Man and The Island of Doctor Moreau. As a novelist Wells made his debut with The Time Machine, a parody of English class division. The narrator is Hillyer, who discusses with his friends about theories of time travel. A week later their host has an incredible story to tell in a late Victorian smoking-room - he has returned from the year 802701. The Time Traveler had found two people: the Eloi, weak and little, who live above ground in a seemingly Edenic paradise, and the Morlocks, bestial creatures that live below ground, who eat the Eloi. He returns horrified back to the present. The Time Machine was followed by The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a mad scientist transforms animals into human creatures. A man named Edward Prendick, who ends up on a remote island controlled by Dr. Moreau, a notorious vivisectionist, tells the story in flashback. Moreau experiments with animals in his laboratory, and has created Beast People. At the end, Moreau is killed by Puma-Woman and Prendick escapes from the island, and returns to London. The Invisible Man was the story of a scientist who has tampered with nature in pursuit of superhuman powers, and The War of the Worlds, a novel of an invasion of Martians. Wells was also from an early date an outspoken socialist, often sympathizing with pacifist views. His later works became increasingly political and didactic, and he sometimes indicated on official documents that his profession was that of "Journalist". Most of his later novels were not science fiction. Some described lower-middle class life, leading him to be touted as a worthy successor to Charles Dickens. Novels such as Mr Lewisham, Kipps and Tono-Bungay analyze the culture of the time and criticize British society. His The New Machiavelli, purports to be written in the first person by its protagonist, Richard "Dick" Remington, who has a lifelong passion for "statecraft" and who dreams of recasting the social and political form of the English nation. Remington is a brilliant student at Cambridge, writes several books on political themes, marries a wealthy heiress, and enters parliament as a Liberal influenced by the socialism of a couple easily recognizable as the Webbs, only to go over to the Conservatives. Remington undertakes the editing of an influential political weekly and is returned to parliament on a platform advocating the state endowment of mothers, but his career is wrecked by his love affair with a brilliant young Oxford graduate, Isabel Rivers. When rumors of their affair begin to circulate, Remington tries to break off the affair, but then resolves to abandon wife, career, party, and country and live abroad in Italy.

May Sinclair

May Sinclair became an active fighter for women's suffrage in 1908 and her fiction provided a useful vehicle for the expression of contemporary women's private and public aspirations. As an early reader of the theories of Sigmund Freud and his disciples, and as an admirer of what she recognized as the 'stream of consciousness' technique employed by Dorothy Richardson in her long sequence of novels Pilgrimage, Sinclair also investigated the new possibilities of women's 'psychological' fiction. The Three Sisters (1914) loosely parallels the story of the Brontë sisters but moves the period forward to the late nineteenth century and allows for amatory and marital complexities beyond that of a factual biography. Escape from the limiting life of a country parsonage also becomes a major thematic idea. A far more detailed study of individual repression and expression is provided in Mary Olivier: A Life (1919), a novel that traces the expanding consciousness of a middle-class girl, the youngest child in a family of boys. The opening of the story, which introduces the sharp sensory perceptions of a baby, bears a striking similarity to the technique used by Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-15). Mary Olivier deals subtly with the parent-child relationship, and especially with a daughter's strained love for her clinging, intellectually limited mother. It also movingly describes the slowly burgeoning career and reputation of a woman writer in literary London in the early years of the century.

G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton wrote around 80 books, several hundred poems, some 200 short stories, different essays, and several plays. The Napoleon of Notting Hill was Chesterton's first novel, a political fantasy. His best-known character is the priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared only in short stories, while The Man Who Was Thursday is arguably his best-known novel. The protagonist is a poet turned an employee of Scotland Yard, who reveals a vast conspiracy against civilization. The members of the secret anarchist gang are named for days of the week. Chesterton's writings consistently displayed wit and a sense of humour. He employed paradox, while making serious comments on the world, government, politics, economics, philosophy, theology and many other topics.

John Galsworthy

He emerged as an important novelist and dramatist, bringing to his activity a strong sense of social justice and a critique of the establishment. Galsworthy's first four books were published at his own expense under the pseudonym John Sinjohn. The Island Pharisees was the first book which came out under his own name. Galsworthy wrote it originally in the first person, then in the third, and revised it again. His wife inspired his novel The Man of Property, which began the novel sequence to be known as The Forsyte Saga and established Galsworthy's reputation as a major British writer. The saga follows the lives of three generations of the British middle-class before 1914. The idea behind the novel was to use the events surrounding the life of a single family in order to represent the crisis of a social class and its values. Galsworthy also gained recognition as a dramatist with his plays, that dealt directly with the unequal division of wealth and the unfair treatment of poor people. The Silver Box stated that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, Strife, depicted a mining strike, and Justice encouraged Winston Churchill in his program for prison reform.

Poetry

Edward Housman

He published only two volumes of verse in his lifetime. Most of Housman's poetry is closely related to the form and the often tragic or elegiac mood of the traditional ballad. Housman himself maintained that he was also working under the influence of Shakespeare. A Shropshire Lad is a collection of 63 poems pervaded by deep pessimism and preoccupation with death, without religious consolation. The poems are various in subject, setting, and speaker but they are linked by repeated themes. The mood is not simply nostalgic. Love-making is interrupted by suicide, by murder, by death in battle, even by public execution. His best unpublished poems were published in the collection Last Poems. These later poems, mostly written before 1910, show a greater variety of subject and form than those in A Shropshire Lad but lack the consistency of his previously published work.

Charlotte Mew

She was also troubled by images of unfulfilment, death, and burial. Although today she is best remembered for her poetry, she also wrote a number of short stories, including this first published in the new journal Yellow Book. Her first collection of poems is The Farmer's Bride. The narrative poem of the same title tells the story of a farmer and his young wife. The farmer is determined to win the love and affection of his hesitant bride, but instead, they become even more isolated from each other. The poem ends with none of the farmer's desires fulfilled, and he is left lonely. Her poems are varied: some of them are passionate discussions of faith and the possibility of belief in God; others are proto-modernist in form and atmosphere. Many of her poems are in the form of dramatic monologues, and she often wrote from the point of view of a male.

Thomas Hardy

He's an English writer of the older generation whose poetry seemed to chart quite new territory in the opening years of the twentieth century. Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels, including Far from the Madding Crowd and Jude the Obscure. Wessex Poems is a collection of poems written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and after the negative criticism that followed the publication of his novel Jude The Obscure, he decided to give up writing novels and to focus on writing poetry. In the twentieth century Hardy only published poetry. Thomas Hardy wrote in a great variety of poetic forms including lyrics, ballads, satire, dramatic monologues, and dialogue, as well as a three-volume epic closet drama The Dynasts. Many of Hardy's poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and life. Irony is also an important element in a number of Hardy's poems, including The Man he Killed and Are You Digging on My Grave. Incredibly influential on later poets as Auden or Larkin, he created a modern style close to the forms of tradition. His poetry is characterized by a pervasive fatalism, and he pays attention to sound, line and breath, the three musical aspects of language. Although his poems were initially not as well received as his novels had been, Hardy is now recognised as one of the greatest twentieth-century poets, and his verse has had a profound influence on later writers.

William Butler Yeats

His biography is strictly connected to the history of Irish nationalism, which provided him the major themes for his poetry. His work can be divided in three periods:

• In the first period he was immersed in a late romantic atmosphere, and he was inspired by the legendary figures of ancient Ireland, by its folklore and by its natural beauty still uncontaminated by the modern world. His studies of the Irish legends and fables were collected in the children volume Irish Fairytales. The tone tended to be nostalgic and elegiac. Yeats was convinced that the role of the artist was the creation of a new culture based on Ireland's past. This hope on an Ireland renaissance found expression in his essays collected in The Celtic Twilight.
• In the middle period his style became more modern, inspired by Symbolism and Ezra Pound. He abandoned the mythical themes to focus on the present. His best known work of this period is the poem Easter 1916, describing his emotions towards the Easter rebellion staged in Ireland on 1916. In this poem, he abandoned the melancholic tone and turned to a more direct language made of words and accents of colloquial speech.
• The later period are the years of the maturity when a new and passionate intensity characterized his work. In this period, he published the collections The Tower and The Winding Stairs. The title poem of the first collection concerned with confronting the old age, while the title of the second volume refers to a staircase of the castle in which he lived with his family for some time. The volume includes the famous poem A Dialogue of Self and Soul, that depicts two aspects of Yeats' personality: his soul rejects mundane concerns in favor of metaphysical contemplation, while his self affirms the suffering of Yeats' life.

War poets of the IWW

Edward Thomas

He was an Anglo-Welsh poet and essayist. However, he was a poet only for the last two and a half years of his life. He is commonly considered a war poet, although few of his poems deal directly with his war experiences. Thomas's poems are noted for their attention to the English countryside and a certain colloquial style. The short poem In Memoriam exemplifies how his poetry blends the themes of war and the countryside.

Siegfried Sassoon

He is best remembered for his angry and compassionate poems of the First World War, which brought him public and critical acclaim. Avoiding the sentimentality and jingoism of many war poets, Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. His later poems, often concerned with religious themes, were less appreciated, but the autobiographical trilogy The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston won him two major awards. Counter-Attack and Other Poems collects some of Sassoon's best war poems, all of which are "harshly realistic laments or satires". The later collection The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon included 64 poems of the war, most written while Sassoon was in hospital recovering from his injuries. In his autobiographical trilogy he gave a fictionalized account, with little changes except names, of his wartime experiences, contrasting them with his nostalgic memories of country life before the war and recounting the growth of his pacifist feelings.

Isaac Rosenberg

Generally considered a war poet, his early works seem too deeply influenced by the romantics to reveal much of Rosenberg's own voice. In Night and Day, for example, Rosenberg's poems tend to ring with "poetical" sounding words, lending the verse a self-conscious, antique air. Rosenberg fought in World War I between 1915 and 1918, dying in the battle. During this period, his work reached a kind of early maturity; in this period he found a truly distinctive voice, one particularly indebted to the Old Testament. In many ways, Rosenberg's vision of the human relationship with God depends on his Jewish heritage and this is perhaps most apparent in his dramatic fragments, Moses and The Unicorn.

Wilfred Owen

He was an English poet and soldier, one of the leading poets of the First World War. His shocking, realistic war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was heavily influenced by his friend and mentor Siegfried Sassoon. The Romantic poets influenced much of Owen's early writing and poetry. Later his poetry changed: Owen's doctor encouraged him to translate his experiences, specifically the experiences he relived in his dreams, into poetry. Sassoon helped him doing this. Though he had plans for a volume of verse, for which he had written a "Preface", he never saw his own work published apart from those poems he included in The Hydra, the magazine he edited. Only four of Wilfred Owen's poems were published in his lifetime. His best known poems include The Parable of the Old Men and the Young. The poem compares the ascent of Abraham to Mount Moriah and his near-sacrifice of Isaac there with the start of World War I.

Rupert Brooke

Remembered for his war sonnets of the First World War, especially The Soldier. Traditional not only in the form, his poems show a sentimental attitude very different from the brutality of his contemporaries (Sassoon, Owen). The Soldier depicts the memories of a deceased soldier who declares his patriotism to his homeland by declaring that his sacrifice will be the eternal ownership of England of a small portion of land upon which he died.

Modernism

The first years of the 20th century (Edwardian Age) marked the peak of British imperial power. Nation's economic, industrial and military fortunes grew, but the working and living conditions of the lower classes remained inhuman. The bourgeoisie could think of itself as the protagonist of the world, at least until the IWW, which destroyed this illusion. The old world of the 19th century gave way to the new world, to "modernity". Modernism is in fact the name of the movement of these early years. At the beginning, modernism went hand in hand with the recovery of the tradition of European culture, the tradition which constituted the "golden treasury" of Europe, such as for example the Provençal poetry or Dante Alighieri. After the end of the IWW and the vertiginous changes that took place, the writers felt it was no longer easy to represent life in its completeness, and they chose to limit the matter of the narration to a few days or a few hours, giving space to the multiple reflections of consciousness. This is the so-called "stream of consciousness", that is the translation onto the page of the unconscious process of thoughts, associations and sensations passing.