Riassunto esame Letteratura Inglese, Prof. Cavone, libro consigliato Inglese Manuale per prove scritte e orali, Edises; English Literature: from the beginning to contemporary literature

FEATURES:

• An unprecedented rate of industrialization and its discontents ( the most important values

were duty, hard work, respectability and charity). The first years of Victoria’s reign also saw

the emergence of a powerful and extensive working-class movement, Chartism, protesting

against the injustices of the industrial system and demanding a radical reform of

Parliament. The Chartist petition was rejected in Parliament and so there were a series of

struggles.

• Imperial expansion: there was an increasing power of the middle class, the expansion of

trade and industry. Britain’ s leading industrial and economical position in the world was

symbolized by the Great Exhibition of 1851 where goods coming from all the countries of

the Empire were exhibited.

• Demographic boom

• Social reform and labour struggles – Chartism (1832: The First Reform Act that granted the

vote to almost all male members of middle classes, while in 1884 the Third Reform Act

granted the right to vote to all male members of the working classes)

• Debates on the nature of culture, society, morals

• Advances in science and medicine

• Religious revivalism and crises (patriotism, evangelicalism, utilitarianism, empiricism,

Darwinism). We should also mention Darwin with his On The Origin Of Species that

contains his revolutionary theory of the evolution of the species achieved through the

competition of individuals of the same species and the survival of the fittest.

• Pruderie, decorum, respectability – the Victorian Compromise: it consisted in covering all

the negative aspects of society under a veil of respectability. In fact Victorian society was

deeply concerned with female chastity and single women with a child suffered because

they were emarginated. Moreover sexuality was repressed in its public and private forms,

and prudery in its most extreme manifestations led to the denunciation of nudity in all arts.

The most important literary movements of the Victorian Age are:

- Late Romanticism which was a clear motivation of the previous movement;

- Realism which affirmed that art should depict reality faithfully;

- Naturalism: Naturalist and realist writers share the same conception of art. However

naturalist writers were influenced by the evolutionary ideas of Darwin, they believed that

one’s heredity and social environment determine one’s personality. In other words, while

realist writers described reality as it was, naturalist writers also tried to analyze the

underlying forces conditioning the actions of people.

- Aestheticism and Decadentism: they developed in the last decades of the Victorian Age as

a form of reaction to Victorian values. They were influenced by the doctrine of “Art for Art’s

Sake”. They rejected the idea that art should have any moral or didactic purpose.

THE VICTORIAN NOVEL : The Victorian age was the age of the novel. Its development is

connected to some factors:

• The representative, but still developing genre

• Expanding, predominantly middle-class, readership

• Modes of production and consumption influenced its form

• Entertainment, didactic purposes, propaganda, discussion

• A unique relationship to the reading public

From a structural point of view it is possible to divide Victorian novels into three groups:

-the Early-Victorian novel, whose main representative was Charles Dickens, dealt with social

and humanitarian themes;

-the Mid-Victorian novel was linked to the persistence of gothic traditions, and to a

psychological vein if we consider the works by the Bronte Sisters and Stevenson.

-the Late-Victorian novel was nearer to the European development of Naturalism, Oscar Wilde

and Thomas Hardy.

FEATURES:

- The voice of the omniscient narrator provided a comment on the plot;

- The setting was the city that was the symbol of industrial revolution civilization;

- The plot was long and often complicated by sub-plots,

- Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of characters and achieved a deeper analysis

of the characters’ inner lives.

In the final chapter there were retribution and punishment.

The High Victorian Novel

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Works:

• The Pickwick Papers – March 1836-October 1837

• Oliver Twist – February 1837-April 1838

• Martin Chuzzlewit –1843-1844

• David Copperfield – 1849-1850

• Bleak House – 1852-1853

• Hard Times – 1854

• Little Dorrit – 1855-1857

• Great Expectations – 1860-1861

• Our Mutual Friend – 1864-1865

He was born in 1812 and had an unhappy childhood since his father was imprisoned for debt.

Then his father managed to rescue his child from that fate because he was forced to work in a

factory in order to survive.

The most important theme he faced in his works is surely the childhood, in particular he dealt with

the terrible conditions in which children had to live, they were forced to work in awful conditions in

order to survive. However he didn’t want to give a solution to this situation because he didn’t have

the possibility but his aim was to spread the knowledge of the conditions in which children lived.

His career can be divided into two parts: in the first one, including Oliver Twist, David Copperfield

and Little Dorrit, he wrote about children in order to commove or move the reader’s emotions. In

the second part, including Hard Times and Great Expectations, he puts out in evidence the social

issue. Dickens isn’t realistic, he was more interested in representing the dramatic.

The most important features of Dickens’ fictions are:

- Episodic writing-style: he published his novels in monthly and weekly instalments in

journals;

- Social criticism;

- Autobiographical elements;

- Characterization: Dickens was a master in the portrayal of characters. he used physical

description or even names to indicate the characters’ moral and spiritual virtues or vices.

He also associated his characters to their surroundings, to the way they speak and act;

- Description of the environment;

- Style: Dickens put together fantasy and reality, humour and sentimentalism, comic and

tragic elements. This is reflected in his style, made up of colourful adjectives, often used in

pairs, repetition of words and sentence structures.

Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist is a poor boy of unknown parents; he is brought up in a workhouse in an inhuman way.

He is later sold to an undertaker as an apprentice, but the cruelty and the unhappiness he

experiences with his new master force him to run away to London. There he falls into the hands of

a nasty gang young pickpockets, who try to make a thief out of him, but the boy is helped by and

old gentleman. Oliver is eventually kidnapped by the gang and forced to commit burglary; during

the job he is shot and wounded. It is a middle-class family that adopts Oliver and shows kindness

and affection towards him, at last. Some investigations are made about who the boy is and it is

discovered he has noble origins. The gang of pickpockets and Oliver’s half-brother, who paid the

thieves in order to ruin Oliver and have their father’s property all for himself, are arrested in the

end.

From the plot of this novel, it is possible to understand that the writer describes the middle-class as

a helpful class, while in the second part of his production he criticizes the middle-class. In particular

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in “Hard Times” he suggests that 19 -century England was turning human beings into machines by

avoiding the development of their emotions and imaginations.

Hard Times

This novel is set in an imaginary industrial town called Coketown. Thomas Gradgrind has founded

a school where his theories are taught and he brings up his two children in the same way

repressing their imagination and feelings. Hard Times focuses on the differences between the rich

and poor, or factory owners and workers, who were forced to work long hours for low pay in dirty

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and dangerous factories. This work suggests that 19 -century England was turning human beings

into machines by avoiding the development on their emotions and imaginations.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863): He was born in India but after his father’s death

and his mother’s remarriage he moved to England and was educated at Trinity College,

Cambridge. He later studied law in London, without graduating, and even considered a career in

painting.

The most important features and themes of Thackeray’s fiction are:

- Deception of middle and upper classes with all their vices and defects;

- His anti-sentimentalism and anti-romanticism because he doesn’t emphasize the

characters’ feelings and inner emotions, nor does he employ melodramatic plots or

exaggerated characterization.

- Satire because satire is his best instrument to denounce and fight against hypocrisy and

vanity.

While Dickens’s pages often have a distinctly theatrical quality, Thackeray’s, on the other hand,

read more like dialogues. His critical social concern is at the root of his masterpiece Vanity Fair,

title that indicates the place where titles and honors are sold. The novel focuses on the destinies of

two women, one sweet, docile and trusting, and on the other hand her friend, an orphan, poor,

amoral and socially ambitious. They find a lot of ways of rising up the social scale by exploiting

their beauty.

He wrote:

• The Luck of Barry Lyndon – 1844

• The Book of Snobs – 1848

• The History of Henry Esmond –1852

• Vanity Fair – 1848

Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

He was born in London in 1815. His mother took her children to America to contribute to the

building of a utopian community which soon failed, so they returned to London, where she started

to write. Among his novels, Orley Farm (1862) and The Way We Live Now (1875) are his best

achievements. Today he is still appreciated for his detailed description of social life including its

manners, morals and bad habits; for the vivid psychological portraits of his characters, who are

middle and upper class people, with all their vices and virtues and for his humor and gentle satire.

The Bronte Sisters

Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte were born at Thornton but they lived in Haworth, a village on the

Yorkshire moors.

Charlotte Brontë (1816-55)

• Jane Eyre: An Autobiography – 1847

• Shirley – 1849

• Villette – 1853

Anne Brontë (1820-49)

• Agnes Grey – 1847

• The Tenant of Wildfell Hall – 1848

Emily Brontë (1818-1848)

• Wuthering Heights – 1847

Wuthering Heights: The novel takes place in two houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross

Grange. This work did not have immediate success because readers were disappointed by the

lack of moral purpose and shocked by the cruel details. Actually the novel explores human<