Riassunto esame Letteratura Inglese, Prof. Cavone, libro consigliato English literature, a short history, Bertinetti

CHARLES DICKENS

Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is surely one of the main representative novelists. He wrote:

• 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.

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

th

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

th

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):

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

THE BRONTE SISTERS (ANNE, EMILY, CHARLOTTE) (Wuthering Heights)

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

passions at different levels. The spirit of Romanticism and its concern with the human soul are still

present in Wuthering Heights in the correspondence between the violent passions of the

characters and the wild natural landscape. Moreover death is an important theme of the novel. It is

not the end, but a liberation of the spirit. On the one hand it is a Gothic novel that evocate the

atmosphere of German “Sturm und Drang” Romanticism and on the other hand it is a novel of

surprising modernity, both in the way it deals with relations between the sexes and in its narrative

technique.

LATE VICTORIANS:

Historical background :

• the ache of modernism

• a rift between the two generations

• political issues;

• scientific outlook;

• spiritual unrest;

• new morality

• Queen Victoria’s reign was a period of unprecedented material progress and it lasts a long

time because she reigned constitutionally, avoiding the storm of the revolution which spread

all over Europe in 1848.

GEORGE ELLIOT (MARY ANNE EVANS) (1818-1880)

• A learned and unconventional personality

• The provincial novel

• Psychologically probing

• Translator – see Ludwig Feuerbach’s The

Essence of Christianity (1854)

SOME REPRESENTATIVE WORKS:

• Adam Bede (1859)

• The Mill on the Floss (1860)

• Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

• Middlemarch (1871-2)

• Daniel Deronda (1876)

Mary Anne Evans was born in November 1819. She received an ordinary education and an

evangelical upbringing. In London she met many of the leading political figures of the day, including

George Lewes. Their friendship gradually developed into love. Though he was married, they

decided to live together. Lewes encouraged Anne to write fiction, which she did under the name of

George Eliot; she chose Eliot because it was easy to pronounce and George because it was the

name of his man.

MIDDLEMARCH:

It is a very long novel consisting in 8 books, which deal with 8 different stories. The two main

stories develop around the character of Dorothea Brooke, a young and rich country lady, who lives

with her uncle in Middlemarch. Dorothea is beautiful, religious and idealistic, she wants to do

something useful in her life. Driven by her intellectual ambitions, she decides to marry an old

scholar, even if everyone else in society doesn’t agree. During their honeymoon , she realizes she

has made a mistake but she decides not to leave her husband. After her husband’s death, she gets

involved and get married with her cousin.

Characters are presented through others’ opinions of them. Then the omniscient narrator organizes

these social opinions to present a unified vision both of the individual and of social interaction. The

style of the novel is realistic in its precise presentation and reflects the influence of the positivistic

theories in accounting for the smallest details, in clear analytical language.

The main theme of the novel is the relationship between the character and the environment in

which he lives. This does not mean that the environment determines the character: Eliot’s main

figures have the responsibility of their moral choices. Everything they do has consequences and

also affects other people’s lives.

A major theme in the novel is the role of women in the community. The female characters are

oppressed by social norms and expected to see to household.

THE FINAL CHAPTER OF MIDDLEMARCH:

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result

of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which

great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is

no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new

Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in

which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily

words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far

sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full

nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great

name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for

the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill

with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden

life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

THOMAS HARDY

Thomas Hardy was born of humble parents in June 1840. As a boy he always loved music and

dancing. Hardy’s works are about life, death, man and the universe; they express a deterministic

view, deprived of the consolation of Divine order. Hardy was largely influenced by the Oxford

movement, a spiritual movement involving extremely devout thinking and actions. His family

members were Christian and Hardy himself considered entering the clergy. Yet, he abandoned his

devout faith in God probably influenced by his reading both of classics and of contemporary

authors. From Greek tragedy he derived the notions of cruel Gods, indifferent nature and hostile

Fate. After reading Darwin’s THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES, he perceived the intellectual

consequences of that scientific theory and denied the existence of God [influence of Darwinism].

According to him human life was a purely tragic process upon which man had no power. Hardy

was not a total pessimist, however. Throughout all his works Hardy develops one main theme, that

is, the difficulty of being alive.[NATURE] Another important theme is Nature, presented as a co-

protagonist with characters and it is indifferent to man’s destiny. Moreover Hardy’s love of nature is

expressed and reflected through the use of metaphor, simile and personification. The language of

sense impressions plays an important ro