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William Wordsworth
LIFE
MAIN WORKS
WHAT IS POETRY?
From the Preface to Lyrical Ballads
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origins from emotion
recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the
tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject
of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.
POETIC COMPOSITION
From the Preface to Lyrical Ballads
In this mood successful composition generally begins, and in a mood similar to this it is carried
on; but the emotion () from various causes is qualified by various pleasures, so that in
describing any passions whatsoever, which are voluntarily described, the mind will upon the
whole be in a state of enjoyment.
Emotion
Object
Memory
=
Recollection
In Tranquillity
Emotion
Reader
Poem
Kindred
emotion
Wordsworth exploited the sensibility of the eye and ear to perceive the beauty of nature.
He believed that the moral character develops during childhood influence of David
Hartley (1705-1757).
The sensations caused by physical experience lead to simple thoughts.
These simple thoughts later combine into complex and organised ideas.
Memory is a major force in the process of growth.
Shows men how to understand their feelings and improve their moral being.
Draws attention to the ordinary things of life where the deepest emotions are to be found.
WORDSWORTHS STYLE
Pantheism is a doctrine according to which all the souls of human beings are temporarily
separated fragments from the totality of creation with which they will be reunited in the end.
Wordsworth thought that only children (who had an important role in his poetry because during
childhood we mature our morality) had a very strong relationship with nature and could express
genuine feelings. Nature can help men, being a good friend and making him happy. All senses are
involved in the relationship with nature
In Wordsworths opinion, poetry doesnt come from the moment, but from the recollection of
emotions. Memory is a major force in the process of growth of the poets mind. Its memory that
allows the poet to write poetry.
Imagination is a great power which helps the poet when he writes. Imagination also involves al
five senses. The poet is able to communicate new feelings thanks to imagination. He has to make
poetry of everyday feelings and situations.
Daffodils by W. Wordsworth
In the first stanza the speaker describes a time when he meandered over the valleys and hills,
"lonely as a cloud." Finally, he came across a crowd of daffodils stretching out over almost
everything he could see, "fluttering and dancing in the breeze":
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
The daffodils reminded him of the Milky Way, because they seemed to be neverending.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkl on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
In the third stanza the speaker compares the waves of the lake to the waves of daffodils and
decides that even though the lake is "sparkling," the daffodils win because they have more "glee."
He then comments that he could not help but be happy "in such a jocund company."
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed--and gazed--but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
W he was lonely or feeling "pensive," he could remember the daffodils, seeing them with his
"inward eye," and be content:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
ANALYSIS
Daffodils takes place in the Lake District of Northern England. The area is famous for its hundreds
of lakes, gorgeous expanses of springtime daffodils, and for being home to the "Lakeland Poets":
William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, and Robert Southey.
This poem consists of four six-line stanzas, each of which follow an ABABCC rhyme scheme and are
written in iambic tetrameter, giving the poem a motion that recalls swaying daffodils.
By comparing himself to a cloud in the first line of the poem, the speaker signifies his identification
with the nature that surrounds him. He also demonstrates this connection by personifying the
daffodils several times.
Even though the speaker is unable to appreciate the memory he is creating as he stands in the
field, he later realizes the worth that it takes on in sad and lonely moments.
LIFE
MAIN WORKS
1798 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the first poem of the collection Lyrical Ballads.
1816 Christabel, an unfinished narrative poem.
1816 the dreamlike poem Kubla Khan, composed under the influence of opium.
1817 Biographia Literaria, a classic text of literary criticism and autobiography.
POETRY
Content: supernatural characters.
Aim: to give them a semblance of truth.
Style: archaic language rich in sound devices.
Main interest: the creative power of imagination.
IMAGINATION
PRIMARY: Creative, original, used unconsciously
Human individual power to produce images
The power to give chaos a certain order
SECONDARY: Poetic faculty, which gives shape and order to a given world and builds new
worlds.
FANCY
A kind of logical faculty: the mechanical ability the poet has to use devices, like metaphors,
alliterations in poetry in order to blend various ingredients into beautiful images.
NATURE
Unlike Wordsworth, it is not a moral guide or a source of consolation.
It represents the awareness of the presence of the ideal in the real.
Not identified with the divine.
STRUCTURE
CONTENT
LANGUAGE
STYLE
THEME
AIM
THE RIME
Mostly written in four-line
stanzas; a mixture of dialogue
and narration
A dramatic story in verse
Archaic; realistic in details
and imagery
Frequent repetitions, refrain;
alliteration and internal rhyme
Travel and wandering;
supernatural
Didactic
MEDIEVAL BALLADS
The same
The same
Archaic
Repetitions, refrain and
alliteration
Magic, love,
domestic tragedies
No aim
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stoppst thou me?
The Bridegrooms doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin ;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
Mayst hear the merry din.
He holds him with his skinny hand,
There was a ship, quoth he.
Hold off ! unhand me, grey-beard loon !
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
By filling his archaic ballad with elaborate symbolism that cannot be deciphered in any single,
definitive way and then framing that symbolism with side notes that pick at it and offer a highly
theoretical spiritual-scientific interpretation of its classifications, Coleridge creates tension
between the ambiguous poem and the unambiguous-but-ridiculous notes, exposing a gulf
between the old poem and the new attempt to understand it. The message would be that,
though certain moral lessons from the past are still comprehensiblehe liveth best who loveth
best is not hard to understand other aspects of its narratives are less easily grasped.
The Mariner kills the Albatross in bad faith, subjecting himself to the hostility of the forces that
govern the universe (the very un-Christian-seeming spirit beneath the sea and the horrible Life-inDeath). It is unclear how these forces are meant to relate to one anotherwhether the Life-inDeath is in league with the submerged spirit or whether their simultaneous appearance is simply a
coincidence.
After earning his curse, the Mariner is able to gain access to the favor of Godable to regain his
ability to prayonly by realizing that the monsters around him are beautiful in Gods eyes and
that he should love them as he should have loved the Albatross.
English
Romanticism
Coleridge
Byron
Shelley
Keats
a source of joy
inspiration and
knowledge
a mother and a
moral guide
a universal force
the
representation of
Gods will and
love
the companion
of his loneliness
the counterpart
of his stormy
feelings when it
was violently
upset
a source of
enjoyment and
inspiration
pervaded by a
guiding power
leading man to
love
the creative
mind benefits
from the beauty
of the natural
landscape
a kind of muse to
the poets
artistic quest
John Keats
LIFE
MAIN WORKS
1918: Endymion, a long, mythological poem
The Eve of St Agnes, characterised by romantic features.
La Belle Dame Sans Merci, a ballad which displayed a taste for medieval themes and form.
The great Odes.
1920: Hyperion, begun in 1818 and published in 1820.
HIS POETRY
His lyrical poems are not fragments of a spiritual autobiography, like the lyrics of Shelley
and Byron.
A personal experience is behind the odes of 1818 -> it is not their substance.
The pronoun I stands for a universal human being.
The common Romantic tendency to identify scenes and landscapes with subjective moods
and emotions is rarely present in his poetry
Scenery is fine but human nature is finer.
KEATS AND IMAGINATION
Keatss belief in the supreme value of imagination made him a Romantic poet. His imagination
takes two main forms:
1. the world of his poetry: imagined, artificial;
2. his poetry comes from imagination: his work is a vision of what he would like human life to
be like.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter
KEATSS BEAUTY
Beauty strikes his imagination and is perceived by the senses; all the senses are involved in this
process. Its perceived by the senses; all the senses, in fact, are involved in this process. The
physical beauty is caught in all the forms nature acquires. Physical beauty can also produce a
much deeper experience of joy, which introduces a sort of spiritual beauty that is the one of
love, friendship, poetry. These kinds of beauty are closely interwoven since the former, linked to
life, enjoyment, decay and death, is the expression of the latter, related to eternity.
The greater expression of beauty, in his opinion, is the Greek world and art, that he re-interpreted
with his own personality.
A thing for beauty is a joy forever
THE POETS TASK
The poet has what he called negative capability: refers to the capability the poet has to deny his
certainties and personality in order to identify himself with the object of his inspiration. When the
poet can rely on this negative capability, he is able to seek sensation, which is the basis of
knowledge since it leads to beauty and truth, and allows him to render it through poetry. A new
view of the poets task.
The only truth is in the sensation, when the poet is able to deny himself and identify himself with
the object of inspiration.
Jane Austen
9
LIFE
MAIN WORKS
Northanger Abbey, written in 1798 but published posthumously.
Sense and Sensibility (1811).
Pride and Prejudice (1813).
Mansfield Park (1814).
Emma (1816).
Persuasion (1818, after her death).
THE DEBT TO THE 18th CENTURY NOVEL
From the 18th-century novelists she learnt:
the insight into the psychology of the characters;
the subtleties of the ordinary events of life balls, walks, tea-parties and visits;
the omniscient narrator;
the technique of dialogue;
the use of verbal and situational irony.
THE NATIONAL MARRIAGE MARKET
Austens values: property, decorum, money and marriage.
Austens England: based on the possession of land, parks and country houses.
Marriage: result of the growing social mobility.
The marriage market takes place in London, Bath and some seaside resorts.
Gossip, flirtations, seductions, adulteries happen in these places.
The marriage market produces a range of villains: unscrupulous relatives, seducers and
social climbers.
In Austens novels
No place for great passion.
Concern with analysis of character and conduct.
Romantic element of happy ending marriage between the hero and heroine.
Focus on the steps through which the hero / heroine reaches this stage.
THE NOVEL OF MANNERS
Jane Austen is the undisputed master of the novel of manners.
Premise
Main features
Set in upper- and middle-class society.
Influence of class distinctions on character.
Visits, balls, teas as occasions for joining up.
Main themes: marriage, the complications of love and friendship.
Third-person narrator.
Dialogue: the main narrative mode.
Passions and emotions not expressed directly.
Use of irony.
SENSE AND SENSIBILITY
Contrast between love and common sense.
Two sisters: Marianne, the irrational one, and Elinor, the rational, concrete, sensitive.
Historical context
French Revolution
War of American Indipendence
Start of Industrial Revolution
1st revolution of Romantic poets
Napoleonic wars
Social satire
Exposes and criticizes the limitations of women during 19 th century England:
- No chance for high education
- Not directly involved in politics
- No professions
- Couldnt own property
They had to rely on marriage to secure social positions and financial stability for the future.
CHARACTERISTICS OF HER WORKS
Social assimilation and upward mobility is a major theme in many of Austens works.
Most of Austens works were published posthumously.
LIMITATIONS
No violence, no political problems
No one dies on stage
Few descriptions of internal thoughts and emotion of male characters
No physical descriptions
Not describing closely lovers embraces and endearments
The places for her novels are very restricted
Elinor
Practical, rational, sensible
Family and friends more than herself
Polite to everybody
Feels sad but keeps it to herself
Surprises, but does not express it
Sense will always have attraction for me
19 years old
Marianne
Sensitive, emotional, compassionate
Emotion of herself than what other think
Expresses her dislike
Exclaims her sadness with words
Suffers to die
17 years old
Willoughby and Marianne, from Sense and Sensibility (Chapter 28), by Jane Austen
They had not remained in this manner long, before Elinor perceived Willoughby, standing within a
few yards of them, in earnest12 conversation with a very fashionable looking young woman. She soon
caught his eye, and he immediately bowed13, but without attempting14 to speak to her, or to
approach15 Marianne, though he could not but see her16; and then continued his discourse with the
same lady. Elinor turned involuntarily to Marianne, to see whether it could be unobserved by her. At
that moment she first perceived him, and her whole countenance glowing with sudden delight 17, she
would have moved towards him instantly, had not her sister caught hold of her18.
"Good heavens!19" she exclaimed, "he is there - he is there - Oh! why does he not look at me? why
cannot I speak to him?"
"Pray, pray be composed," cried Elinor, "and do not betray20 what you feel to every body present.
Perhaps he has not observed you yet."
This however was more than she could believe herself; and to be composed at such a moment was
not only beyond the reach21 of Marianne, it was beyond her wish. She sat in an agony of impatience,
which affected22 every feature.
At last he turned round again, and regarded them both; she started up23, and pronouncing his name
in a tone of affection, held out her hand to him. He approached, and addressing himself rather to Elinor
than Marianne, as if wishing to avoid her eye, and determined not to observe her attitude, inquired in a
hurried manner after24 Mrs. Dashwood, and asked how long they had been in town. Elinor was robbed
of all presence of mind25 by such an address, and was unable to say a word. But the feelings of her
sister were instantly expressed. Her face was crimsoned over26, and she exclaimed in a voice of the
greatest emotion, "Good God! Willoughby, what is the meaning of this? Have you not received my
letters? Will you not shake hands with me?"
He could not then avoid it, but her touch seemed painful to him, and he held her hand only for a
moment. During all this time he was evidently struggling for composure27. Elinor watched his
countenance and saw its expression becoming more tranquil. After a moment's pause, he spoke with
calmness.
"I did myself the honour of calling28 in Berkeley-street last Tuesday, and very much regretted29 that I
was not fortunate enough to find yourselves and Mrs. Jennings at home. My card was not lost, I hope."
"But have you not received my notes?" cried Marianne in the wildest anxiety. "Here is some mistake
I am sure - some dreadful30 mistake. What can be the meaning of it? Tell me, Willoughby; for heaven's
sake31 tell me, what is the matter?"
12
Sincera, ardente.
Fece un inchino
14
Senza cercare
15
Avvicinarsi a
16
Sebbene non potesse fare a meno di notarla
17
Volto animato da un improvviso piacere
18
Se sua sorella non lavesse trattenuta
19
Santo Cielo!
20
Tradire, rivelare
21
Al di sopra delle capacit
22
Influenzava
23
Trasal
24
Chiese frettolosamente notizie di
25
Fu privata di tutta la presenza di spirito
26
Si fece tutta rossa
27
Si sforzava di mantenersi calmo
28
Di far visita
29
Mi spiacque
30
Terribile
13
He made no reply; his complexion32 changed and all his embarrassment returned; but as if, on
catching the eye of the young lady with whom he had been previously talking, he felt the necessity of
instant exertion33, he recovered himself again, and after saying, "Yes, I had the pleasure of receiving the
information of your arrival in town, which you were so good as to send me," turned hastily 34 away with
a slight bow and joined his friend.
Marianne, now looking dreadfully white, and unable to stand, sunk into her chair, and Elinor,
expecting every moment to see her faint, tried to screen35 her from the observation of others, while
reviving her with lavender water.
"Go to him, Elinor," she cried, as soon as she could speak, "and force him to come to me. Tell him I
must see him again - must speak to him instantly. - I cannot rest - I shall not have a moment's peace till
this is explained - some dreadful misapprehension36 or other. - Oh go to him this moment."
"How can that be done? No, my dearest Marianne, you must wait. This is not the place for
explanations. Wait only till to-morrow."
With difficulty however could she prevent her from37 following him herself; and to persuade her to
check38 her agitation, to wait, at least, with the appearance of composure, till she might speak to him
with more privacy and more effect, was impossible; for39 Marianne continued incessantly to give way40
in a low voice to the misery of her feelings, by exclamations of wretchedness 41. In a short time Elinor
saw Willoughby quit42 the room by the door towards the staircase, and telling Marianne that he was
gone, urged43 the impossibility of speaking to him again that evening, as a fresh argument for her to be
calm. She instantly begged44 her sister would entreat45 Lady Middleton to take them home, as she was
too miserable to stay a minute longer.
31
increasing power
of the middle
classes
expansion of
industry and
trade
scientific and
technological
developments
RAILWAYS
In 1804 Richard Trevithick opened up the possibility of making a steam engine move itself.
In 1825 Stephenson created a proper steam locomotive pulling wagons for the first time:
he is considered the father of the railways.
Railway Mania: in 1845, 240 acts were passed. This led to the construction of 4600 miles
of track.
NEW CURRENTS OF THOUGHT
Evangelicalism
strict code of behaviour
dedication to humanitarian causes and social reforms
base of Victorian emphasis upon moral conduct
Utilitarianism
neglected human and cultural values
any problem could be overcome by reason
Great Britain imported raw materials such as cotton and silk and exported finished goods to
countries around the world.
By the mid-1800s, Great Britain was the largest exporter and importer of goods in the world. It was
the primary manufacturer of goods and the wealthiest country in the world.
Because of Englands success, the British felt it was their duty to bring English values, laws,
customs, and religion to the savage races around the world.
Economical progress: Britain became the greatest economical power in the world; in 1901 the USA
became the leader, but Britain remained the first in manufacturing.
It was made of iron and glass, exhibited hydraulic presses, locomotives, machine tools, power
looms, power reapers and steamboat engines.
This expression was used to describe the terrible smell in London, coming from the Thames.
The Miasmas, exhalations from decaying matter, poisoned the air.
VICTORIAN LONDON
Victorians often revived previous styles.
Classical forms were preferred for civic and public buildings, like government offices, town
halls.
Gothic ones for ecclesiastical and domestic works
After 1855 the Gothic revival prevailed over the classical faction.
The political parties had regrouped themselves: they became the Liberals (ex-Whigs,
represented by William Gladstone) and the Conservative (ex-Tories, represented by
Benjamin Disraeli).
They tried to solve problems as various as urban health, the rights of the trades unions,
state education.
In South Africa, the British eventually won a bitter struggle against the Dutch settlers, the
Boers. In 1877 Queen Victoria obtained the title of Empress of India.
However, the Empire was becoming more difficult to control. There was a growing sense of
the white mans burden.
The Third Reform Act (1884) granted the right to vote to all male householders. The secret
ballot and payment of MPs stopped corruption and opened a career in politics to less
privileged men.
Working men turned to trades unions, which were legalized with the Trade Union Act in
1871.
After the epidemics of cholera and typhoid, the municipal authorities became organised to
provide clean water and sanitation (Public Health Act, 1875).
Victorian cities had now gas lighting and rubbish collection; there were many public
buildings, such as town halls, railway stations, libraries and museums, music halls, boarding
schools and hospitals, police stations and prisons.
Although Britain still considered itself to be the workshop of the world, new materials
were being developed, such as rubber, aluminium, petroleum and celluloid, in which they
would not be the world leaders.
Industrialisation had made literacy and economic necessity and the state education system
provided this with the Elementary Education Act of 1870.
The Victorians were great moralisers -> they supported: personal duty, hard work,
decorum, respectability, chastity.
Victorian, synonymous with prude, stood for extreme repression; even furniture legs had
to be concealed under heavy cloth not to be suggestive.
The middle-class was obsessed with gentility, respectability, decorum.
Respectability distinguished the middle from the lower class.
Decorum meant:
Victorian private lives dominated by an authoritarian father.
Women were subject to male authority; they were expected to marry and make home a
refuge for their husbands.
The most persistently advocated notion throughout the 19 th century was the need to work
hard: it seemed natural to believe that material progress would emerge from hard work.
Good deeds marked out a woman or man as a person of standing in a community;
charitable work was listed alongside a Victorians varied accomplishments and qualities:
many activists believed they could save the dissolute, raise up fallen women, and instil
industry and self-help where it was most needed.
Patriotism was influenced by ideas of racial superiority: the British had come to accept
that, in the racial hierarchy of the mankind, they stood supreme.
Middle of the 19th century in America -> period of economic expansion, social change,
scientific discovery and literary expression
The North was undergoing steady industrialisation; in the South economy was still based
on the plantations of tobacco and cotton, and on slavery
Huge difference in density of population: in the North the white population increased due
to the immigrants from Europe; in the South there were about 3,500,000 black slaves
There was pressure on the Southern States to abolish slavery
The abolitionists attacked the exploitation of slaves, the cruelty and the separation from
their family they suffered; the supporters held that it was an institution which gave the
black employment, protection and taught them the principles of Christian faith
The anti-slavery cause explained in Uncle Toms Cabin had a strong impact on people
Northern abolitionists also included writers, intellectuals and religious associations
From the Whig Party arose the Republican Party, which was also inspired by the
abolitionist cause
In 1860 Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, won the presidential election
After that eleven Southern states formed the Confederate States of America, under the
presidency of Jefferson Davis
The Civil War broke in 1861 and lasted four years, when the blue Northern troops defeated
the grey Confederates led by Robert Lee
The abolition of slavery didnt grant blacks equality and security: some of them migrated to
the industrial cities of the North, others remained with their old masters who could not
afford to pay wages due to the war
The racist Ku Klux Klan embodied a wave of resentment and violence
During the war the Northern factories had increased; financial empires were created by
men like Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Rockefeller
The myth of the self-made man embodied a new version of the American dream
The discovery of gold in California in 1848 led to the gold rush; the migration westwards
had two main consequences: the extermination of buffaloes and the starvation of the Red
Indians, who were subjugated, mass-deported or brutally exterminated
The second half of the century was characterised by important inventions such as the
electric telegraph, the typewriter, the telephone, the phonograph, the electric lamp, the
adding machine, the movie camera, the cash register. New railroads joined the Atlantic to
the Pacific.
The voice of the omniscient narrator provided a comment on the plot and erected a rigid
barrier between right and wrong, light and darkness.
The setting chosen by most Victorian novelists was the city, which was the main symbol of
the industrial civilisation as well as the expression of anonymous lives and lost identities.
Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of characters and achieved deeper analysis
of the characters inner life.
Retribution and punishment were to be found in the final chapter, where the whole
texture of events, adventures, incidents had to be explained and justified.
There was a communion of interests and opinions between the writers and their readers.
The Victorians were avid consumers of literature. They borrowed books from circulating libraries
and read various periodicals.
Novels made their first appearance in instalments on the pages of periodicals.
The voice of the omniscient narrator provided a comment on the plot and erected a rigid barrier
between right and wrong, light and darkness.
The setting chosen by most Victorian novelists was the town.
Victorian writers concentrated on the creation of characters and achieved a deeper analysis of their
inner life.
Types of novels
Art
Charles Dickens
LIFE
Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth in 1812. He had an unhappy childhood since his
father was imprisoned for debts and he was put to work in a factory.
He was sent to a school in London and found then and employment as an office boy and
studied shorthand. He began to work as a reporter for a newspaper with the pen name
Boz.
He married Catherine Hogarth and became editor of Bentleys Miscellany. He started then
his full time career as a novelist.
Dickens went to Canada and the United States where he advocated international copyright
and the abolition of slavery.
He died in London in 1870.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Oliver Twist (1837-1839)
Nickolas Nickleby (1838-1839)
A Christmas Carol (1843)
David Copperfield (1849-1850)
Little Dorrit (1855-1857)
Hard Times (1853)
Great Expectations (1860-1861)
DICKENSS CHARACTERS
Dickens described the characters, habits and language of the middle and lower classes in
London.
He was always on the side of the poor.
The most important characters are mainly children, which are good and wise; Dickens
made them the moral teachers, the examples instead of the imitators.
OLIVER TWIST
This Bildungsroman (an education novel) appeared in instalments in 1837.
It fictionalises the humiliations Dickens experienced during his childhood.
The protagonist, Oliver Twist, is always innocent and pure and remains incorruptible
throughout the novel.
At the end he is saved from a life of villainy by a well-to-do family.
The setting is London.
Dickens attacked:
a) the social evils of his times such as poor houses, unjust courts and the underworld.
b) the world of the workhouses founded upon the idea that poverty was a consequence of
laziness.
c) the officials of the workhouses because they abused the rights of the poor as individuals
and caused them further misery.
HARD TIMES
It is a denunciation novel, a powerful accusation of some of the negative effects of
industrial society.
The setting is Coketown, an imaginary industrialised town.
The characters are people living and working in Coketown, like the protagonist Thomas
Gradgrind, an educator who believes in facts and statistics.
The themes are:
a) a critic of materialism and Utilitarianism.
b) a denunciation of the ugliness and squalor of the new industrial age.
c) the gap between the rich and the poor.
The aim is to to illustrate the dangers of allowing people to become like machines.
A CHRISTMAS CAROL (1843)
It celebrates Christmas Eve and Christmas.
The protagonists are:
Scrooge, an old, greedy man;
the ghost Christmas past;
the ghost Christmas present;
the ghost Christmas future;
Bob Cratchit, Scrooges long-suffering clerk;
Tiny Tim, Bobs crippled son;
Fred, Scrooges nephew.
The ghosts shows Scrooge the evils of his existence.
Its main themes:
Redemption and transformation: Scrooge turns from a selfish man to a generous one who
understands the importance in taking notice of the people living around us.
The children of the poor.
As sex was the only affordable pleasure for the poor, at that time, the results was thousands of
children living in appalling poverty, fifth and disease.
This novel developed the joy of Christmas both in Britain and America.
EDINBURGH
The New Town
The Old Town = crime
Symbolism
The two facades of Jekylls house are symbolically the faces of two opposite sides of the
same man: the attractive front contrasts with the sinister rear used by Hyde.
Most of the scenes take place at night. Theres no natural daylight but only the artificial
lighting of Jekylls house and the street lamps.
There are no women, no wives and the only relationships between people are professional
ones. All men belong to the same respectable world (one is a lawyer and to are doctors).
The narrative technique
The novel has a complex structure. There are four narrators:
1. Mr. Utterson, a lawyer whose clients include Mr. Jekyll. He is a neutral or repressed
character who seems to exist in symbiosis with the disreputable individuals who visit his
practice. He has the role of a detective and recalls Arthur Conan Doyles Sherlock Holmes
since he follows clues and develops hypotheses.
2. Enfield, a distant relative of Utterson.
3. Lanyon, a friend and colleague of Jekyll, whose curiosity allows him to be tempted by
forbidden knowledge and in the end he dies, as Jekyll.
4. Jekyll himself, whose narrative and final confession takes up the best chapter.
Good and evil
The novel is a portrayal of good and evil and its characters, Jekyll and Hyde, are the stereotypes of
people who are good and evil. Jekyll has spent a virtuous life, he is handsome, well-shaped
and his body is more harmoniously proportioned than Hydes. Hyde s pale and dwarfish, his hands
are dark and he gives the impression of deformity, but throughout the novel he begins to grow in
stature and the original balance of good and evil in Jekylls nature disappears.
Influences and interpretation
Darwins studies about mans kinship to the animal world can be observed in Hydes description.
Hyde can be both the primitive, the evolutionary forerunner of civilised man and the symbol of
repressed psychology. Jekyll, by projecting his hidden pleasures onto Hyde, is as guilty as Mr.Hyde.
Thus, Jekyll is a kind of Victorian Faust and his awareness is a sort of pact with an interior evil
that controls him in the end.
Jekylls experiment, from The Strange Case of Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde by R.L. Stevenson
I, for my part, from the nature of my life, advanced infallibly in one direction and in one direction only. It was on the
moral side, and in my own person, that I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of
the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only
because I was radically both; and from an early date, even before the course of my scientific discoveries had begun to
suggest the most naked possibility of such a miracle, I had learned to dwell with pleasure, as a beloved daydream, on
the thought of the separation of these elements. If each, I told myself, could but be housed in separate identities, life
would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse
of his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and securely on his upward path, doing the good things in
which he found his pleasure, and no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence by the hands of this extraneous evil. It
was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together - that in the agonized womb of
consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling. How, then, were they dissociated? []
I purchased at once, from a firm of wholesale chemists, a large quantity of a particular salt, which I knew, from my
experiments, to be the last ingredient required; and, late one accursed night, I compounded the elements, watched
them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank
off the potion.
The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be
exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a
great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new and, from its very novelty,
incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of
disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but
not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more
wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine. I
stretched out my hands, exulting in the freshness of `these sensations; and in the act, I was suddenly aware that I had
lost in stature.
There was no mirror, at that date, in my room; that which stands beside me as I write was brought there later on, and
for the very purpose of those transformations. The night, however, was far gone into the morning - the morning, black
as it was, was nearly ripe for the conception of the day - the inmates of my house were locked in the most rigorous
hours of slumber; and I determined, flushed as I was with hope and triumph, to venture in my new shape as far as to
my bedroom. I crossed the yard, wherein the constellations looked down upon me, I could have thought, with wonder,
the first creature of that sort that their unsleeping vigilance had yet disclosed to them; I stole through the corridors, a
stranger in my own house; and coming to my room, I saw for the first time the appearance of Edward Hyde. []
And yet when I looked upon that ugly idol in the glass, I was conscious of no repugnance, rather of a leap of welcome.
This, too, was myself. It seemed natural and human. In my eyes it bore a livelier image of the spirit, it seemed more
express and single, than the imperfect and divided countenance I had been hitherto accustomed to call mine. And in so
far I was doubtless right. I have observed that when I wore the semblance of Edward Hyde, none could come near to
me at first without a visible misgiving of the flesh. This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them,
are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.
I lingered but a moment at the mirror: the second and conclusive experiment had yet to be attempted; it yet remained
to be seen if I had lost my identity beyond redemption and must flee before daylight from a house that was no longer
mine; and hurrying back to my cabinet, I once more prepared and drank the cup, once more suffered the pangs of
dissolution, and came to myself once more with the character, the stature, and the face of Henry Jekyll. []
At that time my virtue slumbered; my evil, kept awake by ambition, was alert and swift to seize the occasion; and the
thing that was projected was Edward Hyde. Hence, although I had now two characters as well as two appearances,
one was wholly evil, and the other was still the old Henry Jekyll, that incongruous compound of whose reformation and
improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse.
Oscar Wilde
LIFE
WORKS
Poetry:
Fairy tales:
Novel:
Plays:
Poems, 1891
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898
The Happy Prince and other Tales, 1888
The House of Pomegranates, 1891
The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891
Lady Windermeres Fan, 1892
A Woman of no Importance, 1893
The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895
Salom, 1893 (tragedy written in French)
WILDES AESTHETICISM
Oscar Wilde adopted the aesthetical ideal: he affirmed my life is like a work of art.
His aestheticism clashed with the didacticism of Victorian novels.
The artist = the creator of beautiful things.
Art used only to celebrate beauty and the sensorial pleasures.
Virtue and vice employed by the artist as raw material in his art: No artist has
ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of
style. (from The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray)
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
1890 first appeared in a magazine.
1891 revised and extended.
It reflects Oscar Wildes personality.
It was considered immoral by the Victorian public
Plot
WIDER INVOLVEMENT
Soldiers from the British Empire from Canada, Australia and New Zealand volunteered.
War at the sea initiated US involvement:
Americans initially supplied both the Allies and the Central Powers
Germans used their submarines the u-boats and killed 1,000 Americans
Americans entered the war on the side of the Allies in April 1917
Allies blockaded Germany causing a shortage of food that led the country to ask for an
armistice. On November 1918 the war ended.
Shell shock was the term used by doctors to refer to the shell explosions they blamed for
the frequent cases of psychological disorders among surviving soldiers. They suffered from
various forms of obsession in which the terror, anguish and the immobility of combat led
to a variety of physical and emotional symptoms.
During the war Irish volunteers had organised a rebellion on Easter Monday 1916 and
proclaimed an Irish republic.
In the 1918 election the Sinn Fein party (Ourselves alone) won nearly all the seats except
in Ulster, but instead of going to Westminster, they set up a Parliament in Dublin, the Dail.
In 1919 the Irish volunteers became the IRA (Irish Republican Army) and prepared for the
civil war (1920).
In 1921 the Irish Free State was established under the leadership of Eamon de Valera.
The Protestant counties of Ulster remained part of the UK with their own parliament in
Belfast.
The official proclamation of the Republic of Ireland took place in 1949.
After WWI the Labour Party rose rapidly and the trade unions became more active in trying
to get better pay and condition by holding strikes.
The disputes between the coal miners and the owners led to the General Strike of 1926.
All over Europe and America a serious crisis, known as the Great Depression, was taking
place. During the 2nd half of the decade the economy recovered, mostly because of the
boom owing to rearmament for the impending war against Germany.
The year 1936 was one of crisis, with the abdication of King Edward VIII (due to the
opposition of all the parties against his decision of marrying a divorced American woman)
and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.
The Spanish War was won by the rebel General Francisco Franco with the assistance of
Mussolini and Hitler; many committed intellectuals like Auden, Orwell and Hemingway
joined the anti-fascist International Brigade.
Fewer people lived in the centres of towns: professionals moved out to suburbs.
ID
EGO
SUPEREGO
PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME
Internal
Subjective
Measured by the relative emotional intensity of
a moment
Modernism
A powerful international movement reaching through Western cultures gave shape to the
modern consciousness and expressed the desire to break with established forms and subjects.
Common features:
The intentional distortion of shapes.
The breaking down of limitations in space and time.
Emphasis on subjectivity, on how perception takes place, rather than on what is perceived.
New literary techniques such as the stream-of-consciousness.
The use of allusive language and the development of the multiple association of words.
The importance given to the sound of words as conveying the music of ideas.
The intensity of the isolated moment or image to provide a true insight into the nature
of things.
The substitution of the mythical for a realistic method and the parallelism between the
contemporary and antiquity.
The importance of unconscious as well as conscious life.
The need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life in an artistic form.
A rejection of the distinction between high and low or popular culture, both in the
choice of materials used to produce art and in the methods of displaying, distributing and
consuming art.
Modern Poetry
TRADITION AND EXPERIMENTATION
The first decades of the 20th century a period of extraordinary originality and vitality in poetry.
A variety of trends and currents expressed the nature of modern experience:
The Georgian Poets
The War Poets
Imagist Poets
Symbolist Poets
Oxford Poets
New Romantics
THE GEORGIAN POETS
influenced by the Victorian Romantic tradition. They were Rupert Brooke (18871915), Walter
de la Mare (18731956), and Edward Thomas (18781917). They:
employed the conventions of diction;
felt sympathy for English elements, such as the countryside as an idyllic place;
remained indifferent or hostile to the revolution in sensibility and technique started by
the Symbolists
THE WAR POETS
It was T.S. Eliot who developed the new poetic theory and practice. In his essay Tradition and the
Individual Talent (1917), he stated that poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape
from emotion; it is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.
According to T.S. Eliot the poet:
was the explorer of experience.
used language to create rich patterns of meaning that were not easy for the superficial
reader.
recorded the collapse of Western civilisation and the culture and spiritual waste of the
beginning of the century.
OXFORD POETS
The 1930s were characterised by a group of poets that joined together as undergraduates at
Oxford. The four most famous names were W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Louis Macneice and
Cecil Day-Lewis. They:
concerned themselves with social and political aspects of human life, such as
unemployment, Nazism and Fascism
belonged to a generation which had been encouraged by its teachers to develop a social
conscience
turned away from Eliots complexity and allusiveness
used slang and jazz rhythms
drew their images from the world of technology
NEW ROMANTICS
In the 1940s a group of young poets reacted against the intellectualism and commitment of
Audens poetry and his contemporaries, appealing to emotions and rediscovering individual
themes such as love, birth, death and even sex. For this reason they were labelled as the new
Romantics. Their greatest representative was Dylan Thomas.
1865: born in Dublin, Ireland, into a middle-class family belonging to a Protestant minority
His father was a free thinker with an anti-clerical attitude
As a student, Yeats was attracted to mystical doctrines and magic
1889: met Maud Gonne, an actress and a patriot who led him into politics of the Irish
Republican Brotherhood
1890s: met Lady Gregory, who supported his project of the Abbey Theatre, a literary
theatre to fight the commercial one
1893: published a series of essays, The Celtic Twilight, to promote an Irish renaissance
1922: he was a member of the Irish Senate from 1922 to 1928
1923: in December he was the first Irish author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature
1939: he died in France
The later period covers the years of maturity, when a new and passionate intensity flew
into his major works, in particular A Vision, in which he described his philosophy.
YEATSS THEMES
Faith in the beauty and eternity of art.
The relationship between the poet and the Irish people and tradition.
Death: unlike an animal which simply dies man dies many times before his death. In his
opinion, every defeats, such as the unhappy experiences of love, but also every victory, are
a series of deaths and rebirths prefiguring the end of life.
The heroic individual: loneliness characterises his heroes because their superior qualities
distinguish them from the common man. Such heroes, by their deeds and deaths, enter a
mythical world.
YEATSS SYMBOLISM
1. To Yeats the symbol has a visionary dimension, it offers revelation
2. It has an effective role in shaping both the individual and the collective consciousness
3. It is not only a device he uses to present his themes. It is a theme itself, in which truths are
embodied in all their complexity.
Byzantium symbolises the Unity of Being, in which religious, aesthetic and practical life are one.
The swan symbolises a violent divine force (Leda and the Swan) or the unchanging, flawless ideal
The Wild Swan at Coole).
The falcon stands for violent and cruel rapacity which has broken free from control.
THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE: T.S. ELIOT AND MONTALE
For Eliot, the objective correlative is a pattern of objects, events, actions, or a situation that can
serve effectively to awaken in the reader an emotional response without being a direct statement
of that subjective emotion.
James Joyce
LIFE
Born in Dublin in 1882, one of a large family. He was educated at Jesuit schools, then
University College, Dublin. Here he studied French, Italian and German languages.
A rebel among rebels.
Contrast with Yeats and the other literary contemporaries who tried to rediscover the Irish
Celtic identity. He believed that the only way to increase Irelands awareness was by
offering a realistic portrait of its life from a European, cosmopolitan viewpoint.
In June 1904 he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a twenty-year-old girl who was
working as a chambermaid in a hotel. They had their first date on 16 June, which was to
become the Bloomsday of Ulysses. They had two children, Giorgio and Lucia.
He left Dublin at the age of twenty-two and he settled for some time in Paris, then in
Rome, Trieste (in which he had financial problems), where he made friends with Italo
Svevo, and Zurich, where he died in January 1941.
DUBLIN
He set all his works in Ireland and mostly in the city of Dublin.
His achievement was to give a realistic portrait of the life of ordinary people doing ordinary
things and living ordinary lives.
By portraying these ordinary Dubliners, he represented the whole of mans mental,
emotional and biological reality and fused it with the cultural heritage of modern
civilisation and with the reality of the natural world around him.
The Dublin represented by Joyce is not fixed and static, it is the revolutionary montage of
Dublins through a range of historical juxtapositions and varied styles.
The 15 stories of the Dubliners, though set in the same city, are not united by their
geography: each story has a singular location.
DUBLINERS
Published in 1914 on a newspaper with the pseudonym Stephen Dedalus.
Its a collection of short stories all about Dublin and Dublins life.
Dubliners are described as afflicted people.
All the stories are set in Dublin: The city seemed to me the centre of paralysis, Joyce
stated.
Structure and Style
- Childhood: The Sisters, An Encounter, Araby
- Adolescence: After the Race, The Boarding House, Eveline, The Gallants
- Mature Life: A Little Cloud, Clay, Counterparts, A Painful Case
- Public Life: Ivy Day in the Committee Room, A Mother, Grace, The Dead
Narrative technique and themes
- Naturalistic, concise, detailed descriptions
- Naturalism combined with symbolism: double meaning of details
- Each story opens in medias res and is mostly told from the perspective of a character
- Use of free direct speech and free direct thought: direct presentation of the characters
thought
- Different linguistic registers: the language suits the age, the social class and the role of the
characters
- Use of epiphany: the sudden spiritual manifestation of an interior reality
- Themes: paralisys and escape
- Absence of a didactic and moral aim because of the impersonality of the artist
Epiphany
- Understanding the epiphany in each story is the key to the story itself
- It is the special moment in which a trivial gesture, an external object or a banal situation or
an episode lead the character to a sudden self-realisation about himself/herself or about
the reality surrounding him/her
Paralysics
The main of Dubliners: paralysis. The physical paralysis is caused by external forces. The moral
paralysis is linked to religion, politics and culture.
- The climax of the stories: the coming to awareness by the characters of their own paralysis
- Alternative paralysis: escape which leads to failure
Eveline
- Eveline = passive, influenced by her familys mentality
- Her father = a violent and strict man
- Frank = a very kind, open-hearted and brave boy
- Antithesis between Evelines house and her new one in Buenos Aires: Paralysis/Escape
- The story opens in medias res: She sat at the window watching the evening invade the
avenue
- Third-person narrator but Evelines point of view.
- Subjective perception of time.
- Epiphany: a street organ which reminds Eveline of the promise she made to her dying
mother.
- Symbolic words = dust = decay, paralysis; sea = action, escape
- Themes: paralysis and the failure to find a way out of it, struggle between ones happines
and ones responsibility, action and inactivity, dream vs. reality
ULYSSES
The whole novel takes place on Thursday, June 16, 1904, the day in which Nora Barnacle,
Joyces future wife, made her fondness clear to him.
During the course of this day, three main characters wake up, have various encounters in
Dublin, and go to sleep eighteen hours later.
Characters
- The central character, Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged advertising canvasser and nonpracticing Jew, is Joyces common man. He leaves his home at 8 oclock to buy his
breakfast and returns finally at 2 the following morning; in the hours in-between, he turns
up in many streets, attends a funeral, endures misadventures and delight.
- During his wanderings, Bloom meets Stephen Dedalus (A Portrait of an Artist as a Young
Man), who becomes, momentarily, his adopted son: the alienated common man rescues
the alienated artist from a brothel, and takes him home where the paralysis of their
fatigue prevents them from achieving a personal communion.
- Finally theres Blooms wife, Molly, a voluptuous singer who is planning an afternoon of
adultery with her music director.
The relation to Odyssey
- As its title suggests, Ulysses is related to Homers great epic Odyssey, the taleof Odysses
and his travels after the Trojan War.
- Joyce used Odyssey as a framework for his book, arranging its characters and events
around Homers heroic model, with Bloom as Ulysses, Stephen as Telemachus and Molly as
the faithful Penelope.
- Ulysses is divided into three parts and eighteen episodes, as its chapters are usually called:
Telemachiad, Odyssey, Nostos.
- Each chapter is additionally organized around a different hour, a colour, an organ of the
body, a sense, a symbol, a narrative technique suitable for the subject-matter.
The setting
- Ulysses is the climax of Joyces creativity and sums up the themes and techniques he had
developed in his previous works.
It was designed as a detailed account of ordinary life on an ordinary Dublin day and Joyce
planned each movement of each character on each street.
He placed them in houses he knew, drinking in pubs he had frequented.
He made the very air of Dublin, the atmosphere, the feeling, the place, almost
indistinguishable, inseparable, from his human characters.
Dublin becomes itself a character of the novel.
46
Leaned: appoggiata
Dusty cretonne: cretonne polveroso
48
Clacking pavement: risuonare sul marciapiede di cemento
49
Crunching path: cigolare sul sentiero di detriti
50
The cripple: lo storpio
51
Hunt field: cacciarli fuori dal campo
52
Blackthorn stick: bastone di pruno
53
Used nix: faceva da palo
54
Broken harmonium: armonium rotto
55
Blessed Alacoque: Beata Margherita Maria Alacoque
56
Tried to weigh: cercava di valutare
57
The Stores: il negozio in cui Eveline lavorava
58
Say: avrebbero detto
59
Would up: sarebbe stato rimpiazzato
60
She her: laveva sempre presa di punta
47
61
noticed; he would miss her. Sometimes he could be very nice. Not long before, when she had been laid up for a day, he
had read her out a ghost story and made toast for her at the fire. Another day, when their mother was alive, they had
all gone for a picnic to the Hill of Howth. She remembered her father putting on her mothers bonnet to make the
children laugh.
Her time was running out but she continued to sit by the window, leaning her head against the window curtain,
inhaling the odour of dusty cretonne. Down far in the avenue she could hear a street organ playing. She knew the air
Strange that it should come that very night to remind her of the promise to her mother, her promise to keep the home
together as long as she could. She remembered the last night of her mothers illness; she was again in the close dark
room at the other side of the hall and outside she heard a melancholy air of Italy. The organ-player had been ordered
to go away and given sixpence. She remembered her father strutting back into the sickroom saying:
Damned Italians! coming over here!
As she mused the pitiful vision of her mothers life laid its spell on the very quick of her being that life of
commonplace sacrifices closing in final craziness. She trembled as she heard again her mothers voice saying constantly
with foolish insistence:
Derevaun Seraun! Derevaun Seraun!
She stood up in a sudden impulse of terror. Escape! She must escape! Frank would save her. He would give her
life, perhaps love, too. But she wanted to live. Why should she be unhappy? She had a right to happiness. Frank would
take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her.
She stood among the swaying crowd in the station at the North Wall. He held her hand and she knew that he
was speaking to her, saying something about the passage over and over again. The station was full of soldiers with
brown baggages. Through the wide doors of the sheds she caught a glimpse of the black mass of the boat, lying in
beside the quay wall, with illumined portholes. She answered nothing. She felt her cheek pale and cold and, out of a
maze of distress, she prayed to God to direct her, to show her what was her duty. The boat blew a long mournful
whistle into the mist. If she went, tomorrow she would be on the sea with Frank, steaming towards Buenos Ayres. Their
passage had been booked. Could she still draw back after all he had done for her? Her distress awoke a nausea in her
body and she kept moving her lips in silent fervent prayer.
A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:
Come!
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She
gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
Come!
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.
Eveline! Evvy!
He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her.
She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or
recognition.
Virginia Woolf
LIFE
LITERARY CAREER
The Bloomsbury Group In 1904 she moved to Bloomsbury and became a member of the
Bloomsbury Group. This meant the rejection of traditional morality and artistic
convention.
Experimentation best known as one of the great experimental novelists during the
modernist period.
WORKS
Evolution of her style in her main novels
The Voyage Out (1915) (Traditional narratives)
Night and Day (1917) (Traditional narratives)
Jacobs room (1922) (Narrative experimentation with the novel)
Mrs Dalloway (1925) (A more completely developed stream-of-consciousness technique)
To the Lighthouse (1927) (A more completely developed stream-of-consciousness
technique)
A feminist writer the themes of androgyny, women and writing
Mrs Dalloway (1925): Describes Clarissa Dalloway and Sally Setons relationship as young
women
Orlando (1928): Deals with androgyny
A Room of Ones Own (1929): Shows Woolfs concern with the questions of womens
subjugation and the relationship between women and writing
A MODERNIST NOVELIST
Main aim to give voice to the complex inner world of feeling and memory.
The human personality a continuous shift of impressions and emotions.
Narrator disappearance of the omniscient narrator.
Point of view shifted inside the characters minds through flashbacks, associations of
ideas, momentary impressions presented as a continuous flux.
Stream-of-consciousness technique
The action or plot is revealed through the
mental process of the character
Character development is achieved through
revelation of extremely personal thoughts
Traditional technique
through the commentary of the omniscient
narrator
through dialogue or the narrators
description
WOOLFS STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: never lets her characters thoughts flow withouth control;
mantains logical and grammatical organisation.
JOYCES STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: characters show their thoughts directly through interior
monologue, sometimes in an incoherent and syntactically unorthodox way.
MOMENTS OF BEING: rare moments of insight during the characters daily life when they can see
reality behind apparances.
EPIPHANIES: The sudden spiritual manifestation cause by a trivial gesture, an external objects; the
character is led to a self-realisation about himself/herself.
MRS DALLOWAY (1925)
The main character, Clarissa Dalloway, is a wealthy London hostess. She spends her day
preparing for her evening party. She recalls her life before WWI, before her marriage to
Richard Dalloway, and her relationship with Peter Walsh.
Septimus Smith is a shell-shocked veteran, one of the first Englishman to enlist in the war.
He is married to Lucrezia, an italian woman.
The climax is Clarissas party: it gathers all the people Clarissa thinks of during the day. It is
at the party that Dr. Bradshaw, the nerve specialist, speaks about Septimuss suicide.
Setting
Takes place on a single ordinary day in June 1923.
Follows the protagonist through a very small area of London.
The characters enjoy the sights and sounds of London, its parks, its changing life.
Through what Woolf defined as tunnelling technique, she allows the reader to experience
the characters recollection of their past sense of their background and personal history.
George Orwell
LIFE
Born Eric Blair in India in 1903, he was the son of a minor colonial official.
Orwell was educated at Eton, in England where he began to develop an independentminded personality, indifference to accepted values, and professed atheism and socialism.
On leaving college, he started to work for the Indian Imperial Police in Burma (1922-1927).
He hated working in Burma and returned to England on sick-leave.
Back in London, he started a social experiment: wearing second-hand clothes, he spent
short periods living in common lodging-houses in the East End, seeking the company of
down-and-outs. In this way he directly experienced poverty and learned how institutions
for the poor, such as hostels, prisons, lodging-houses and hospitals, worked.
After a period in Paris where he worked as a dishwasher in a hotel, he decided to begin
publishing his works with the pseudonym of George (typical English name) Orwell (river he
loved).
WORKS
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) a non-fiction narrative in which he described
his experience among the poor.
Burmese Days (1934) based on his experiences in the colonial service.
The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) a report on the conditions of miners in the industrial
North.
Homage to Catalonia (1938) based on his experience during the Spanish Civil War.
Animal Farm (1945) made him internationally known and financially secure.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) his most original novel.
THE ARTISTS DEVELOPMENT
Rejection of his English background he accepted new ideas and impressions.
Conflict between middle-class education and emotional identification with the working
class.
The role of the artist to inform, to reveal facts and draw conclusions from them (social
function).
SOCIAL THEMES
Influence of Dickens in the choice of:
social themes
realistic language
misery caused by poverty
depravation of society
Criticism of totalitarianism, the violation of liberty and tyranny in all its forms.
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
Subject
Life in a big totalitarian system, Oceania (North America, South Africa, Australia).
Airstrip One, a future England, is an outpost of Oceania.
Structure
Introduction of the protagonist, Winston Smith, in this oppressive world.
Winston & Julias love happiness.
Winstons imprisonment and torture
Setting
London, in the mythical country of Oceania, 1984 (in the future).
London: a desolated city governed by terror and the constant control of BIG BROTHER.
Ranking order in Oceania
Oceania is a huge country ruled by The Party.
The Inner Party (1% of population) controls the country.
The Outer Party (18% of population) is controlled by the Inner Party.
The Proles (81% of population) are the labour power who lives in poverty.
The Brotherhood is an underground rebel organization led by Emmanuel Goldstein.
A dystopian novel
A frightening picture of the future. The Party controls everything:
Ministry of Truth, Ministry of Love
Slogan freedom is slavery (Chapter 1)
No privacy: TELESCREEN [] an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror. The telescreen received
and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound [] would be picked by it (Chapter 1)
The Ministry of Truth (where Winston works) changes history, facts, and memories to
promote Doublethink historical reference to Stalins will to change history.
that he was hungry. He began swallowing spoonfuls of the stew, which, in among its general sloppiness, had cubes of
spongy pinkish stuff which was probably a preparation of meat. Neither of them spoke again till they had emptied their
pannikins. From the table at Winstons left, a little behind his back, someone was talking rapidly and continuously, a
harsh gabble almost like the quacking of a duck, which pierced the general uproar of the room.
How is the Dictionary getting on? said Winston, raising his voice to overcome the noise.
Slowly, said Syme. Im on the adjectives. Its fascinating.
He had brightened up immediately at the mention of Newspeak. He pushed his pannikin aside, took up his hunk
of bread in one delicate hand and his cheese in the other, and leaned across the table so as to be able to speak without
shouting.
The Eleventh Edition is the definitive edition, he said. Were getting the language into its final shape the
shape its going to have when nobody speaks anything else. When weve finished with it, people like you will have to
learn it all over again. You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! Were
destroying words scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. Were cutting the language down to the bone. The
Eleventh Edition wont contain a single word that will become obsolete before the year 2050.
He bit hungrily into his bread and swallowed a couple of mouthfuls, then continued speaking, with a sort of
pedants passion. His thin dark face had become animated, his eyes had lost their mocking expression and grown
almost dreamy.
Its a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but
there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isnt only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms.
After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its
opposite in itself. Take good, for instance. If you have a word like good, what need is there for a word like bad?
Ungood will do just as well better, because its an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a
stronger version of good, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like excellent and
splendid and all the rest of them? Plusgood covers the meaning, or doubleplusgood if you want something
stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak therell be nothing else. In the
end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words in reality, only one word. Dont you
see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.s idea originally, of course, he added as an afterthought.
A sort of vapid eagerness flitted across Winstons face at the mention of Big Brother. Nevertheless Syme
immediately detected a certain lack of enthusiasm.
You havent a real appreciation of Newspeak, Winston, he said almost sadly. Even when you write it youre still
thinking in Oldspeak. Ive read some of those pieces that you write in The Times occasionally. Theyre good enough,
but theyre translations. In your heart youd prefer to stick to Oldspeak, with all its vagueness and its useless shades of
meaning. You dont grasp the beauty of the destruction of words. Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in
the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?
Winston did know that, of course. He smiled, sympathetically he hoped, not trusting himself to speak. Syme bit
off another fragment of the dark-coloured bread, chewed it briefly, and went on:
Dont you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make
thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be
needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed
out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, were not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing
long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little
smaller. Even now, of course, theres no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. Its merely a question of selfdiscipline, reality-control. But in the end there wont be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when
the language is perfect. Newspeak is Ingsoc and Ingsoc is Newspeak, he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.
Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive
who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
Except began Winston doubtfully, and he stopped.
It had been on the tip of his tongue to say Except the proles, but he checked himself, not feeling fully certain
that this remark was not in some way unorthodox. Syme, however, had divined what he was about to say.
The proles are not human beings, he said carelessly. By 2050 earlier, probably all real knowledge of
Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Byron theyll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually
changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the
slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like freedom is slavery when the concept of freedom has been
abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now.
Orthodoxy means not thinking not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent.
He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written
in his face.
The general election of July 1945 was won by the Labour Party under the leadership of
Clement Attlee.
Thanks to the US Marshall Aid Programm (1947) Britain had received large US loans and
was able to recover quickly from the war.
The Labour Party offered new policies which focused on the new role of the government in
looking after the interests and welfare of everyone. This new kind of state became known
as the Welfare State.
The phrase welfare state came into use during the war in contrast with Hitlers warfare
state.
The most urgent of the problems to cope with was that of income or social security; the
second problem was that of the provision of medical services; bad housing was the third
problem; the fourth problem regarded a decent education.
The National Health Service Act passed into law in 1946: medical treatment was entirely
open to everyone and free.
The National Assistance Act of 1948 provided an increase of the benefits for the old, the ill,
the unemplyed and the poor.
Then, the Labour government took over the control of power, some industry, transport
and credit.
Nationalization was a major issue between the Labour and the Conservative parties in the
general election campaigns of 1950 and 1951. Conservatives won in 1951, but the
consensus appeared to be shattered by the Suez Crisis.
Another crucial issue stole the scene in 1955 after the testing of the hydrogen bomb. One
third of the British public was against nuclear weapons.
When George VI died, there was a widespread sense of loss and shock. At least 2 million
people turned out on the streets to watch the coronation of his daughter Elizabeth II in
1953; it was watched on TV by 56% of the adult population.
The early television programmes were, in accordance with the BBCs general aims, a
mixture of information, education and entertainment.
The 1979 General Election was won by the Conservative Party led by Margaret Thatcher.
Industries were denationalized; the Conservatives believed that industry would be more
efficient and competitive in private hands.
Margaret Thatcher wet out her plan to build a society where people would have a private
health service, private schools and private pensions.
Young people were encouraged to buy rather than rent but many fell behind their
mortgage repayments, had their house repossessed and were evicted.
The vulnerable, those unemplyed, elderly or disabled, were the victims of an individualistic
society because they could not repspond to an enterprise culture.
Professional choices changed: teaching and any career in the social services were not
considered sufficiently well-paid.
The ambitious urban professionals, whose main interests were high-earning professions
and the acquisition of impressive status symbols, became a social phenomenon known as
yuppies (Young Urban Professionals).
Margaret Thatchers strong will and determination, which won her the nickname of the
Iron Lady, were clearly revealed by two events: the Falklands War and the miners strike.
In 1982 Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands; the British response was immediate: a Task
Force was sent to reclaim the islands, and after a two-month campaign Argentina
surrendered.
In 1984 the miners protested against the proposed closure of many pits. After a year the
miners admitted defeat and Thatcher won.
In 1987 Thatcher introduced the unpopular poll tax (a tax on persons rather than
properties): poorer people considered this tax extremely unfair.
In April 1990 her reputation for invincibility was shaken by a London poll-tax
demonstration that degenerated into a riot.
However, Thatcher won the elections again: she is the only conservative Prime Minister in
British history to have been elected three times. She resigned in November 1990.
Samuel Beckett
LIFE
He was born in 1906 in Dublin, into a Protestant middle-class family.
He was educated at a boardning school, where he was a brilliant sudent, and then at Trinity
College, in Dublin, where he took his B. A. degree in French and Italian.
He then moved to Paris, where he became associated with the Irish novelist James Joyce
and his circle, and he settled permanently in the city in 1937.
He wrote most of his works first in French.
He began his literary career as a short-story writer and a novelist, but his reputation was
established by his plays: in fact, he was one of a group of dramatists who developed the socalled Theatre of the Absurd.
Their common basic belief was that mans life appears to be meaningless and purposeless
and that human beings cannot communicate and understand each other.
His first play in this style is Waiting for Godot.
Becketts further plays develop the character of the naked, helpless, static being, by
introducing a kind of desperate clowning and mimic language.
WAITING FOR GODOT
Plot
The play is divided into two acts and starts in medias res.
In Act I two tramps, Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) are waiting on a country road for a
certain Godot, who eventually sends a boy to inform them he will surely come on the
following day.
They are contrinually aware of col, hunger and pain, and they think about separation and
even suicide, yet remain dependent on each other and never do anything.
Pozzo and Lucky make continuous purposeless journeys to fill their existence.
The play ends with the two tramps still waiting for Godot.
Absence of a traditional structure
No development in time (no past or future, just a repetitive present)
No setting but a country road and a bare tree (the inner world of the characters)
No plot (does not tell a story)
No characters in the traditional sense (no personality)
No action (only situation described: waiting)
No dialogue in the conventional sense (no communication)
The symmetric structure
The stage is divided into two halves by the tree
Two human races: Didi and Gogo
Then four: Didi-Gogo and Pozzo-Lucky
After the boys arrival, two again: mankind and Godot
Characters actions: Estragon tries to take off one of his boots, Vladimir takes off his hat;
the tramps need to take off the hat to think, Lucky and Pozzo need to to the opposite
Characters
Vladimir and Estragon are never described as tramps: they are two human beings
concerned about the nature of the self, world and God.
They are complementary, since they are different aspects of a single whole.
Vladimir usually speaks as mind, and Estragon speaks as body.
Estragon eats and sleeps, whereas Vladimir ponders spiritual salvation.
Vladimir is the more eloquent, Estragon relies on pantomime.
Estragon cannot remember anything about his past, Vladimir distrusts what he remembers.
Pozzo and Lucky are physically linked to each other by a rope as well as by a tyrannical
relationship of master and servant: Lucky is slavish and stands for the power of the mind.
Godot is the result of adding the French suffix ot, meaning little, to the English God: this
my justify a religious interpretation of the play.
The meaninglessness of time
Time is meaningless
Vladimir and Estragon return to the same place each day to wait for Godot and experience
the same general events with variations each time
It is not known for how long they have been doing this, or for how long they will countinue
to do it
Human life is characterised by suffering, but Beckett doesnt offer solutions
The fundamental question is: is there a God?
The comic and the tragic
A grotesque humour pervades the daily routine of the two tramps
Becketts pessimism is intensified by his perception of the meaningless of human life
The language
Informal
Does not serve the purpose of communication
Dialogue sketched
Para-verbal languaged (pauses, silences, gags, clichs)
Senseless repetition
VLADIMIR: Tell him (he hesitates) tell him you saw me and that (he hesitates) that you saw me.
(Pause. Vladimir advances, the Boy recoils. Vladimir halts, the Boy halts. With sudden violence.)
You're sure you saw me, you won't come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!
Silence. Vladimir makes a sudden spring forward, the Boy avoids him and exits running. Silence.
The sun sets, the moon rises. As in Act 1. Vladimir stands motionless and bowed. Estragon wakes,
takes off his boots, gets up with one in each hand and goes and puts them down center front, then
goes towards Vladimir.
ESTRAGON: What's wrong with you?
VLADIMIR: Nothing.
ESTRAGON: I'm going.
VLADIMIR: So am I.
ESTRAGON: Was I long asleep?
VLADIMIR: I don't know.
Silence.
ESTRAGON: Where shall we go?
VLADIMIR: Not far.
ESTRAGON: Oh yes, let's go far away from here.
VLADIMIR: We can't.
ESTRAGON: Why not?
VLADIMIR: We have to come back tomorrow.
ESTRAGON: What for?
VLADIMIR: To wait for Godot.
ESTRAGON: Ah! (Silence.) He didn't come?
VLADIMIR: No.
ESTRAGON: And now it's too late.
VLADIMIR: Yes, now it's night.
ESTRAGON: And if we dropped him? (Pause.) If we dropped him?
VLADIMIR: He'd punish us. (Silence. He looks at the tree.) Everything's dead but the tree.
ESTRAGON: (looking at the tree). What is it?
VLADIMIR: It's the tree.
ESTRAGON: Yes, but what kind?
VLADIMIR: I don't know. A willow.
Estragon draws Vladimir towards the tree. They stand motionless before it. Silence.
ESTRAGON: Why don't we hang ourselves?
VLADIMIR: With what?
ESTRAGON: You haven't got a bit of rope?
VLADIMIR: No.
ESTRAGON: Then we can't.
Silence.
VLADIMIR: Let's go.
ESTRAGON: Wait, there's my belt.
VLADIMIR: It's too short.
John Osborne
THE THEATRE OF ANGER AND JOHN OSBORNE
The 1950s: the
upheaval of traditional
values
Post-war drama
The Theatre of
Anger
THE 1950s
This decade was characterised by:
the destruction of the certainties and basic assumptions of the Victorian Age, swept away
by two world wars;
the decline of religious belief;
the mistrust in rationalism as a means to explain reality.
the disillusionment with socialist ideals, brought about by totalitarianism;
the materialism and consumerism of contemporary society;
the cultural and moral independence of the young from their elders.
POST-WAR DRAMA
Modern drama inadequate to express the social revolution and changing values of
Britain in the 1950s.
The attempt to overcome apathy caused a real revolution in British drama.
There were two main trends in the 1950s drama:
1. The Theatre of the Absurd expressed metaphysical anguish, rootlessness, the lack of
purpose and inaction.
2. The Theatre of Anger criticised establishment values.
THE THEATRE OF ANGER
use of a realistic setting
logical, easy-to-follow plot
outspoken language
presence of a thoughtful working-class hero, like the rebel Jimmy Porter
open criticism of establishment values
the discontent and social alienation of certain sections of British society in the 1950s
the pain of being alive
the study of existential failure
The language is:
revolutionary, crude and violent
spontaneous and vital
full of colloquialisms and slang expressions
BECKETT VS OSBORNE
BECKETT
OSBORNE
PLOT
Obscure,
inconsequential
True-to-life, consequential
SETTING
Symbolic, bare
Realistic, related
to the working class
THEME
Meaninglessness
of human experience
STAGE
DIRECTION
Repetitive, frequent
LANGUAGE
Everyday,
meaningless
ABSURD vs
Long silences from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
VLADIMIR: What do they say?
ESTRAGON: They talk about their lives.
VLADIMIR: To have lived is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON: They have to talk about it.
VLADIMIR: To be dead is not enough for them.
ESTRAGON: It is not sufficient.
Silence.
VLADIMIR: They make a noise like feathers.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
VLADIMIR: Likes ashes.
ESTRAGON: Like leaves.
Long silence.
VLADIMIR: Say something!
ESTRAGON: I'm trying.
Long silence.
VLADIMIR: (in anguish). Say anything at all!
ESTRAGON: What do we do now?
VLADIMIR: Wait for Godot.
ESTRAGON: Ah!
Silence.
VLADIMIR: This is awful!
ESTRAGON: Sing something.
VLADIMIR: No no! (He reflects.) We could start all over again perhaps.
ANGER
Jimmys anger from Look Back in Anger by John Osborne
She [Alison] crosses to the table, and sits down C. He leans forward, and addresses her again.
JIMMY: I didnt ask you what was the matter with you. I asked you where you were going.
HELENA (steadily): Shes going to church [].
JIMMY: Youre doing what?
Silence
JIMMY: Have you gone out of your mind or something? (To Helena) Youre determined to win her,
arent you? So its come to this now! How feeble can you get (His rage mounting within) When I
thin of what I did, what I endured, to get you out
ALISON (recognising an onslaught on the way, starts to panic): Oh yes, we all know what you did
for me! You rescued me from the wicked clutches of my family, and all my friends! Id still be
rotting away at home, if you hadnt ridden up on your charger, and carried me off!
The wild note in her voice has re-assured him. His anger cools and hardens. His voice is quite calm
when he speaks.
JIMMY: The funny thing is, you know, I really did have to ride up on a white charger off white,
really. Mummy locked her up in their eight bedroomed castle, didnt she? There is no limit to what
the middle-aged mummy will do in the holy crusade against ruffians like me. Mummy and I took
one quick look at each other, and, from then on, the age of chivalry was dead. I knew that, to
protect her innocent young, she wouldnt hesitate to cheat, lie, bully and blackmail. Threatened
with me, a young man without money, background or even looks, shed bellow like a rhinoceros in
labour enough to make every male rhino for miles turn white, and pledge himself to celibacy.