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schemi e riassunti d'inglese con mappe
Typology: Schemes and Mind Maps
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The Victorian Age began in 1832 with the First Reform Act, but it officially started with the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837 and it ended in 1901 with her death. She is the second long-lived Queen in British history with 63 years of reign. The Royal Family provided a model of respectability for the entire British Empire. Indeed, the Queen embodied the concepts of family, motherhood and propriety. The Victorian Era was focused on the values of morality and duty. The Victorian Era was characterised by many social reforms which focused on aspects such as labour, education and voting rights. Under Victoria’s guidance the British Empire soon became the biggest empire in the world, counting more than 370 million subjects. By the mid-1800s Great Britain was the largest importer and exporter of goods. REFORMS
Pros ■ The factory system emerged. Industrial towns started growing. ■ Machines became steam operated. The steam engine marked the beginning of the age of railway Cons ■ Overpopulation: epidemics, cholera, “The Great Stink”, squalor. ■ Pollution. ■ Exploitation. In short, while the industrial Middle Classes saw industrial development as a source of prosperity and wealth, the rest of the nation lived in squalor and was facing social conflicts. In its early stages, the industrial revolution worsened social injustices. ● Manufacturing was transferred to mass production factories in areas where iron and coal could be easily found (Northern England). ● Cities and towns grew enormously and the lack of a housing plan caused the accumulation of slums where people lived in miserable conditions. ● Disastrous consequences on health (“The Great Stink”) WORKHOUSES The Victorian Workhouse was an institution that was intended to provide work and shelter for poor people who had no means to support themselves. With the advent of the Poor Law system, workhouses, became prison systems detaining the most vulnerable in society. Workhouses became known for its terrible conditions, forced child labour, long hours, malnutrition, beatings and neglect. Firstly Charles Dickens denounced in his works these terible conditions. Another fundamental issue was the exploitation of workers and children. Children had no access to education until the Elementary Education Act in 1870. The industrial revolution also caused unemployment because the machines substituted human workers. As a consequence, factory owners could pay low wages and exploit workers. This gave rise to social unrest which found expression in several movements of protest. Among workers’ requests there were equal electoral districts, universal malesuffrage, and annually elected Parliaments. Nevertheless, scientific progress was highly celebrated, as shown by the Great
Exhibition of 1851. It was held at the Crystal Palace which was built for the occasion.
He was forced to work in a factory at the age of 12 because of his father’s debts After his father was released he was sent to school in London. He was able to see with his own eyes the working conditions of the factories. He started working as a shorthand reporter of parliamentary debates and in 1832 he began working for a newspaper, publishing for the first time in 1833. He adopted the pen name “Boz” and started publishing articles and tales which described London’s people and scenes. Everything was published in instalments and Dickens’ satirical qualities soon became evident. After the success of his Pickwick Papers his career as a novelist officially started. He was quite prolific as a novelist, and he kept publishing his articles as well. In 1837 he started writing Oliver Twist. It was published in instalments until 1839. NOVELS Dickens wrote 3 autobiographical novels: Oliver Twist (1837), David Copperfield (1850), Little Dorrit (1857) All of these tackle the issue of the exploitation of children, which faced the harsh realities of slums, workhouses and factories. The following tackle the issue of the conditions of the poor and of the working class: Hard Times (1854) and Great Expectations (1861) A Christmas Carol (1843), one of Dickens’ most popular Christmas novels, addresses the differences between the wealthy middle class and the working class. In 1853 Dickens started doing public readings of his novels. He was an amazing performer who brought to life his characters. Through his public readings he was able to have a direct relationship with the reader who was then able to give the author a feedback. According to Dickens his work needs to represent reality but it mustn’t be limited to a mere factual description of it. Indeed, reality needs to be elaborated through imagination.
He created caricatural characters whose aim was to intrigue the reader: he exaggerated the character’s habits and language. The most important characters are usually children, who are often wiser than the adults. Children represent morality, they are the ones who are teaching moral values. By describing the realities of the poor, Dickens was educating the wealthier classes about the lower classes and their living conditions. He wanted to make the ruling classes aware. Dickens created a very graphic description of all of his works. Indeed, through a very effective use of language he was able to create a living image of his stories. London was the setting of most of his works and he knew how to depict its faults. Dickens succeeded in drawing popular attention to the injustices of the Victorian society by mingling terrible descriptions of London misery and crime with the most amusing sketches of metropolitan life. OLIVER TWIST Dickens began writing Oliver Twist after the adoption of the Poor Law of 1834, which halted government payments to the able-bodied poor unless they entered workhouses. Thus, Oliver Twist became a vehicle for social criticism aimed directly at the problem of poverty in 19th-century London. Oliver Twist was very popular when it was first published, partially because of its scandalous subject matter. It depicted crime and murder without holding back. Oliver Twist, was born in a workhouse in a small town near London in the early 1800s and he soon became an orphan after his mother’s death. Oliver commits an unpardonable offence, that is to say asking for more food because he is close to starvation. As a consequence, the parish official offers 5£ to anyone willing to take Oliver on as an apprentice. He is sold to his new master, but the violence he experienced made him run away to London. There he falls into the hands of a gang of young pick pocketers trained by Fagin, who runs a school for would-be thieves. Unfortunately, Oliver is immediately caught. Mr Brownlow, the victim, decides not to have him charged with theft because he is struck by Oliver’s appearance and he decides to take him home. However, Fagin’s gang finds him and forces him to commit a burglary, during which he is shot. Oliver is once again under the care of Mr Brownlow who adopts him, and discoveries are made about who Oliver really is: he has noble origins. The thieves and those who abused Oliver are all arrested. Although Oliver is born in the imaginary town of Mudfog , the story is set in the London , which is shown at three different social levels: The workhouses, run by the Parishes. Workhouses are run by the lower middle class who takes advantage of the poor that are forced to stay there.
The criminal world: poverty leads to crime and to violence. The Victorian middle class: respectable people who follow moral values and believe in human dignity. HARD TIMES This novel is set in an imaginary industrial town named Coketown. Thomas Gradgrind, an educator who believes in facts and statistics, has founded a school where his theories are taught, and he brings up his two children, Louisa and Tom, in the same way repressing their imagination and feelings. He marries his daughter to Josiah Bounderby, a rich banker, 30 years older than she is. The girl consents since she wishes to help her brother, who is given a job in Bounderby’s bank, but the marriage proves to be unhappy. Tom who is lazy and selfish, robs his employer. At first he succeeds in throwing the suspicion on an honest workman, but he is finally discovered an obliged to leave the country. In the end Mr. Gradgrind understands the demage he caused to his children and hives up his narrow-minded, materialistic philosophy. The novel is divided into three section: the sowing (louisa and Tom), the reaping ( the egoism of Tom, Louisa who marries a rich man to help her brother) and teh garnering (the criticism of ideals). The fictionary city of Coketown stands for a real industrial mill town in mid 19th-century Victorian England. It is a sort of brick jungle: the machines of factories are like mad elephants, and their smoke looks like snakes. → smoke stands for an hellish land, while snakes stands for a magical land. All the buildings are the same. people seem to be proud of the polluted air of Coketown. The philosophy of Utilitarianism comes through the actions of Mr. Gradgrind and his follower Bounderby: the first educated his children through facts, the latter treats the workers in a goal for his own self-interest. Mr Gradgrind believes that human nature can be measured, quantified and gverned entirely by reason. Humans were dishumanised. This novel uses its characters and stories to denounce the gap between the rich and the poor and to criticise the materialism and narrow-mindedness of utilitarianism. Hard times suggests that 19th- century England was turning human beings into machines by avoiding the development of their emotions and imagination.
Born in France, it reflected the reaction against materialism and the restrictive moral code of the bourgeoisie reaction to prevailing utilitarian social philosophies and to what was perceived as the ugliness of the industrial age. There was a need to redefine the role of art and to portray the sense of uncertainty of the artist. Gautier used the concept of Art for Art’s sake (l’Art pour l’Art): art needs no justification, it serves no end except its own. It doesn’t have anygoal. Movement of protest against the monotony of bourgeois life pursuing of excess, cultivation of art and beauty
Imported by James McNeill Whistler, but writers such as Keats, dedicated to the search for beauty and art in life. Walter Pater strongly influenced the movement. He argued that art was the only certainty in life and that life should be lived “in the spirit of art”. The artist was supposed to tell the sensations of the world. Life should copy art. The Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages Decadent became a term often used when talking about aestheticism because it referred to the decline of socially recognised values. Some features of the Aesthetic works are: ● Excessive attention to the self ● Sensuous attitude ● Perversity in subject matter ● Disenchantment with contemporary society ● Evocative use of language, music and images. ● Suggestion rather than statement.
Attended both Trinity College and Oxford. He soon became a disciple of Walter Pater and he adopted the theory of “art for art’s sake”. He soon became known for his eccentricity and his extraordinary wit. He began to build an image for himself that could be described as outrageously camp (using bright colours, loud sounds, unusual behaviour, etc.) His showy image was seen as immoral by society. He described the relationship between painting, sculpture and poetry as different forms of the same truth. Wilde wrote one novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), some short stories (The Canterville Ghost) and poetry, but he was first and foremost a playwright. His most successful plays were: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).. Oscar Wilde, in 1891,and his intimate association with the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas led to his trial on charges of homosexuality, then illegal in Britain. He was sentenced to two-years’ hard labour. He had always concealed his sexual orientation in fear of prosecution. When he was released, he went into exile in France, where he lived out his last years in poverty. He died in Paris in 1900. THE DANDY : ”My life is a work of art”
Life is meant for pleasure and pleasure is an indulgence in the beautiful. A dandy is a man who places particular importance upon physical appearance, refined language, and leisurely hobbies. A dandy could be a self-made man who strove to imitate an aristocratic lifestyle. WILDE // DICKENS He rejected didacticism // DICKENS: art for art’s sake vs educational purposes. He felt like the artist didn’t belong to a materialistic world. Art was a way to please himself, it didn’t have a purpose other than pleasure. Moral values are simply among the materials which an artist may use to create aesthetic effects, along with other elements. Despite his beliefs, Wilde does not deny the importance of moral rules. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1890) ● London, end of the 19th century ● Unobtrusive 3rd person narrator ● Internal perspective which allows a process of identification between reader/character The characters are described through what is said about them. It was first published in a magazine, in 1891 Wilde added 6 additional chapters when it was published in book form. The quote of the “Preface” was his response to those critics who had denounced the immorality of this story after its first appearance. However, for all its transgressive traits, The Picture of Dorian Gray could easily be read as a profoundly moral book, a tale against the dangers of vice. It is nonetheless a story that reflects Wilde’s own double life. Publication of the novel scandalized Victorian England. The protagonist is Dorian Gray, a young man whose beauty fascinates a painter, Basil Hallward, who decides to paint his portrait. Under the influence of the brilliant but corrupt Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian throws himself into a life of pleasure. While the young man’s desires are satisfied, including that of eternal youth, the signs of age, experience and vice appear not on Dorian but on the portrait. Dorian makes use of everybody.. When the painter sees the corrupted image of the portrait, Dorian kills him. Later Dorian wants to free himself of the portrait, witness to his spiritual corruption, and stabs it but, in doing so, he kills himself. In the very moment of Dorian’s death, the picture returns to its original purity, and Dorian’s face becomes ‘withered, wrinkled, and loathsome” ● Dorian Gray : idealisation of youth, beauty and innocence. He soon forgets his innocence and starts to look for a life of pleasure. The painting represents the degradation of his soul. ● Lord Wotton : intellectual, a brilliant talker, apparently superficial but extremely sharp in his criticism of institutions.
● Basil Hallward : is an intellectual who falls in love with Dorian’s beauty and innocence. He does not want to exhibit the picture, even if itis his best work, because he is afraid that it reflects the strange attraction he feels for Dorian. 19th century version of the legend of Faust , the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil so that all his desires might be satisfied. In the novel this soul is the picture, which records the signs of time, the corruption, the horror and the sins concealed under the mask of Dorian’s timeless beauty. The picture is not an autonomous self: it represents the dark side of Dorian’s personality, his double, which he tries to forget. The horrible, corrupted picture could be seen as a symbol of the immorality of the Victorian middle class, while Dorian and his pure, innocent appearance are symbols of bourgeois hypocrisy. Finally, the picture, restored to its original beauty, illustrates Wilde’s theory of art: art survives people, art is eternal. Dorian’s death is the final punishment.
Drama was a declining genre. Those who dared write plays usually wrote comedies or melodramas which were stereotypical and very similar. The most famous plays at the time were produced by the French drama, and they were the most imitated. In particular, the most imitated playwrights were Eugéne Scribe and Victorien Sardou. The story always followed the same outlines: there was an explanation of the opening situation, complications were introduced, the action reached the climax and finally everything was cleared up. He firmly believed that the primary purpose of the theatre was entertainment, not teaching. The theatre was a place where people could escape from their life’s problems. WILDE’S PLAYWRIGHTS Wilde’s plays certainly belong, in terms of technique, to the school of Scribe and Sardou. Wilde turned to writing for the London theatre in the last decade of the 19th century because he hoped that he would be able to make a lot of money. He was not interested in introducing innovations in form, language and characterization. It was his intention to write popular plays and therefore he took as his model those plays which seemed to have wide audience appeal. In Wilde’s dramas we find some standard ingredients: complex situations, vital secrets, compromising letters which fall into the wrong hands, intrigues and coincidences. His playsare read and acted even nowadays thanks to his use of satire. Wilde’s wit and ironic humour aims at ridiculing the conventional morality of his characters. He usually
introduces one or two characters who speak as Wilde himself did, who show his ability to inject absurdities into the conventional conversations of the characters that are in his plays. His plays are extremely interesting and they are not completely detached from the period and the social context of his time. In Wilde’s plays there are in fact several satirical references to the Victorian society, with its false and hypocritical notions of respectability and appearance. THE STYLE 1 - MISAPPLIED LOGIC → dialogue that sounds reasonable but is actually nonsensical. In “The Importance of being Earnest” we have, at the beginning of the play, the conversation between Jack and Algernon. While talking, Algernon eats cucumber sandwiches all the time. But when Jack is about to eat one of these sandwiches himself, Algernon restrains him, saying that the cucumber sandwiches are reserved for his aunt Augusta who is about to arrive. Jack points out that Algernon has been eating them all the time. Algernon then points out with questionable logic that Lady Augusta is his aunt. 2- PARADOX or UPSIDE-DOWN CONVERSATION A paradox is a concept expressed in a very logic way so as to seem reasonable but it goes against common sense, the traditional view and it is opposite to what we might expect. They contradict themselves but these contradictions reveal a deeper kind of truth about them, which Wilde uses to criticize the world of false appearances they live in. In “The Importance of being Earnest” there are several examples of paradox. In the first scene of the play, for example, Lane (the butler) confides to Algernon that he doesn’t know much about marriage: he has only been married once. He doesn’t think about it very much because it is not an interesting subject. Algernon comments that if the lower classes do not set a good moral example. It is the upper classes to be supposed to set a good moral example to the lower classes. Another amusing scene with the upside-down/paradoxical conversation is the one between Lady Augusta and Jack, who would marry Gwendolen. Jack admits that he smokes and Lady Augusta is glad to hear it, because a man should have some occupation. Jack also admits that he knows nothing and she approves saying that nothing should tamper with ignorance, delicate exotic fruit, touch it and the bloom is gone, like innocence. Normally, it is “innocence“ to be associated to a delicate exotic fruit that can be spoiled by touching. At a certain point Lady Augusta asks Jack if she excepted to live in city with Gwendolen, in a simple and unspoiled nature. This is an example of paradox because, in reality, girls with a simple and unspoiled nature are of course usually expected to live in the country. The entire scene of the interview is also a fine example of satire. Lady Augusta is a caricature of all the tough-minded mothers who are busy at finding the proper husbands for their daughters. The proper husband has certain criteria. So she takes out a pad and a pencil with which she makes notes during the interview. Her
behaviour is very funny but behind the absurdity there is sharp criticism: marriages are arranged for financial and social reasons. THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST (1895) It is Wilde’s most famous play. Earnest is an adjective which is pronounced the same as proper name Ernest. The title is a pun. As seen in the play, no character is actually earnest, instead they are the representation of Victorian prudery and seriousness. The play is about the troubles of two pairs of young lovers:
Cecily, Jack’s ward, and between them it is love at first sight. At this point in the play both the girls believe they are engaged to a man called Ernest. This causes various misunderstandings. THIRD ACT The setting is again Jack’s country house. The two men announce that they are going to be christened with the name of Ernest in the afternoon, so that the reconciliation with the two girls is possible. Unfortunately Lady Bracknell arrives unexpectedly, forbidding any marriage. At this point, however, an unexpected event in the play makes possible the classical happy ending with the solution of all the contrasts and oppositions. The turning point is when Lady Bracknell recognises Miss Prism, Cecily’s governess: she had been her dead sister’s governess and years before she had disappeared with her sister’s baby. Miss Prism confesses that she had accidentally put the baby in a handbag which she had then left in Victoria Station. On hearing this, Jack, startled, leaves the room and comes back with the handbag in which he had been found as a baby. It is the same bag, Miss Prism is sure, so he is the baby she lost: as a consequence he is also Lady Bracknell’s nephew and Algernon’s brother. Moreover, it is found out that his original name is indeed Ernest. All is well in the end and the two couples can finally marry. CHARACTERS Oscar Wilde conceived his characters in pairs, creating three main couples:
Innocence is presented through a group of adults who behave as children: their dialogues and behaviors are silly, nonsensical and absurd but however they are totally harmless. For example, both Algy and Jack have two identities, having invented an imaginary person. They finally “kill” them but, since Bunbury and Ernest are fictitious identities, their murder is actually unreal and therefore harmless. The general atmosphere of innocence in the play is reinforced by the nonsensical dialogue and behaviors of the various characters: “The Importance of being Earnest” is fundamentally a nonsense play and this idea is connected with the world of childlike innocence. Marriage as a social status: this theme is presented through Lady Bracknell. This character is interested only in people’s social rank and economic conditions and her main concern during the play is to find a socially suitable husband for her daughter.
He had poor health.He was in conflict with the Victorian world; he was eccentric, he was one of the first examples of bohemians in England. After his graduation, he decided to start writing. He became famous thanks to “ The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde ”. He traveled a lot and his journeys influenced his work “Treasure Island”, which brought him to fame. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde The story takes place in London in 1870s. At that time London had a “double” nature and reflected the hypocrisy of Victorian society (poverty-respectability). Most scenes of the novel take place at night. The most important events are wrapped up in darkness and fog. The novel has a multi-narrative structure and a complex series of points of view is presented. There are four narrators: Utterson (detective), Jekyll, Enfield and Dr Lanyon (Dr Jekyll’s colleague → the first one to see his friend's transformation in Mr Hyde). This novel had its origin in a dream. Stevenson drew inspiration from Darwin’s studies about man’s kinship to the animal world. The novel is the portrayal of good and evil, and its characters, Jekyll and Hyde, are the stereotypes of people who are “good” and “evil”. Jekyll→ virtuous life Hyde→ pure hate and evil. Mr Hyde is Jekyll’s alter ego. The smaller Hyde begins to grow in stature and the original balance of good and evil in Jekyll’s nature is threatened with being permanently overthrown.
The 18th and 19th centuries were generally marked by an optimistic faith in progress and science and this mood was also reflected in the literary field. It is true that several writers were extremely critical towards their contemporary society and showed social awareness and concern for the problems of their time (Dickens, for example, often denounced in his novels the exploitation of infant labour in the factories and raised the problem of the inhuman working and living conditions of the new labour class). Although some writers might criticize or wish to reform their society, they never truly questioned the reality they lived in and so their attitude was generally confident on the future of mankind (in Dickens’ novels the protagonist, usually a poor victim of society, after several sufferings is finally rewarded and the happy ending triumphs). Another typical aspect of the novel of those centuries was the fact that the world described was rather simple. Since the very beginning of the story the reader was able to recognize, for example, the good and evil characters: this was possible thanks to the presence of an omniscient narrator who, being a sort of God, could direct and guide the reader in understanding the fictional world. As far as the themes were concerned, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries the novel was closely linked to the representation of the social reality. Since the English novel had its origins in the Middle Classes, a very common theme was that of the individual wish to get a better social position and very often the novelists built their novels in terms of gain or loss of social status or fortune. Starting from the last decades of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century the widespread optimism and the positivistic idea of progress and science which had marked the previous age began to be put into question. In general we can see a loss of confidence, an increasing feeling of frustration and isolation, the awareness of living in a much more complex world than the one described previously: people lost their faith as nothing seemed to be certain any more so that a new pessimistic view towards men and the world started to grow.
As the general mood of that period was of spiritual loss, alienation and frustration, the first decades of the 20th century were defined as the Age of Anxiety. Several factors seem to have been of the utmost importance in bringing about the change. The first blow at the rationalistic self-confidence was struck by the 1st World War which created a total disruption of the old social, moral and intellectual values. The war, in which almost a million of British soldiers died, left the country in a disillusioned mood and the sense of loss and desperation grew in the post-war years, when people had to face and solve several material and social problems. The main consequence of the first World War was that men became more and more individualistic. In Britain, the increasing feeling of frustration was also due to the slow dissolution of the Empire into the Commonwealth. For centuries Great Britain had had a leading role in the world, becoming the most powerful country. Now its leading role was contrasted by the rise in power of other countries, mainly Germany and the United States that were dangerously undermining Great Britain’s primacy. As a result of these events, isolation, the impossibility of communication because the individuals are prisoners of their private self and the feeling of alienation became the main themes in the literary production of this period. (The term alienation is used to refer to a sense of isolation and frustration, a feeling of loss of control over one’s life, a sense of estrangement from society or even from oneself. This concept was developed by the German philosopher Karl Marx who employed it to describe and criticize the conditions developing among workers in capitalistic societies. The behaviour resulting from alienation is usually the detachment and isolation from society.) The first World War can be considered as the point of departure of modern literature but several other factors influenced the rise of untraditional forms of writing and the treatment of new themes. An important factor was the development in psychology and especially the advent of Freud’s psychoanalysis, which upset, completely, current ideas about the nature and inner life of man. Freud drew attention towards the irrational, showing how the unconscious part of man’s mind affects his behaviour: in short, he emphasized the power of the unconscious on man’s actions, decisions, life. One of his most famous and influential works was “The Interpretation of Dreams”. Here he provided a new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of free association of ideas which deeply influenced the writers of modernism. Both Joyce an V. Woolf were deeply influenced by Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. They agreed that the task of the novelist was to represent life but they denied that life could be found in a traditional novel with a plot organized according to a chronological order. Unlike the past, the world and human personality appear to be very complex. It is no longer possible, for example, to know how a person is at first sight because any person may have several personalities and show different faces according to different situations. Another great impulse to the development of new trends in literature was given by the French philosopher Bergson, who developed a new conception of time. According to him, time could no longer be seen as a series of points in an objective chronological sequence, but as a flux of subjective consciousness in which present, past and future co-existed. So he made a distinction between chronological time (that is the time of the clock) and psychological time. While the former, which refers to the time taken by external events (movements, actions, etc...), is linear, objective and measurable by the hands of the clock, the latter, referring to the time covered by recollected events, is internal, subjective, inside each person and therefore it cannot be measured objectively. Bergson made this distinction because a specific moment in the life of different people has got the same length as regards the time from a chronological point of view but its duration, from a psychological point of view, may vary considerably. The traditional idea of time was questioned also by the introduction of relativity in science. Albert Einstein showed that space and time are relative to the point of view of the observer, that they
don’t exist as absolute phenomena. Time and space are subjective dimensions so he questioned the idea of objective reality. The theory of relativity favoured the growing crisis of confidence: nothing seemed to be right or certain, even science. MODERNISM The search for innovative modes to represent the new perception of reality found expression in a broad European and American movement known as Modernism, which developed towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Modernism was characterized by several cultural movements and it affected not only literature but also art and music. Its main aim was to break away from traditional canons and express new forms, styles and techniques in order to reproduce man’s consciousness. It rejected Naturalism and Decadence and was characterized by some common features:
The main characteristic was an abstract style in painting and the break with figurative tradition. In other words people and things were no longer painted as they appeared in reality but through distorted images and shapes. Cubism was the most influential mode of painting of the 20th century and it was inaugurated by Picasso and Braque. This movement marked a revolution in the artist’s approach to space and its organization. Picasso fragmented natural objects into abstract geometrical forms and attempted to represent an object using a shifting viewpoint, which moved around it. The result was a flat image of the object seen from many sides at once, a sort of simultaneous vision of the world. In his works he also challenged the artistic criteria of beauty and truth and for example the female body was painted using angular shapes. The turning point between the art of the past and modern art is represented by Picasso’s painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, exhibited for the firs time in 1916. This picture was unlike anything seen before and so it was really puzzling and shocking. Starting from the 15th century and the Renaissance, art had imitated nature. A good painting was the one that gave a realistic representation of what was known to exist in the natural world. In “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” Picasso abandoned such idea. He created a picture which was the result not of his visual perception but of his mental perception. For centuries artists had painted from a single point of view. Picasso started a new stylistic technique which enabled him too have various views of a figure into a single image. There is a relation between Picasso’s attempt in visual art to show a simultaneous vision of the world and Joyce. Joyce’s purpose was to make people aware of reality through their own subjective perception. Unlike traditional writers, he didn’t want to explain the meaning and the values of the world he was describing. What he wanted to do was to give the reader all the separate elements of the picture, but it was the reader who had to draw his own conclusions. A work of art must not carry a message from the writer, so he adopted different points of view because only in this way it was possible to create the fragmented picture of reality and convey the subjective dimension of experience.
Brought up by mom (open-minded) and his paternal-aunt (strongly evangelical) → duality open minded mom and evangelical aunt can be seen in his works. Forster can be considered as a bridge between Victorian age and modern age. He follows his inclinations of the uniqueness of the individual =/ individuality of the Victorian Age → skepticism of the crisis of values of the modern age. He focuses on the individual and his features. He adopted some themes of the Victorian Age: he associated an intricate and elaborate narration to a colloquial and modern age style. His focus was the society and the culture and how two cultures have influence on individuals and society. He studied and described the middle classes. In his “Comedy of manners”, there’s his critique on the society where the author lives. Forster wasn’t materialistic, for him it was more important the connection with others. During WWII he went to Alexandria and India. After the war and his voyages his themes change with the sense of uncertainty of the Modern Age. “Maurice”, a novel about his homosexuality, it is a novel about him, his partner and his active part for the homosexual community. He is invested in the impact of the individual. He employs an omniscient narrator (In the Modern Age it wasn’t used because the narrator couldn't know everything). It is applied irony in order to dismount the goodery of the Victorian Age. Irony is applied in order to show the disillusion of the 1920s ideals. Key-words are connection, personal relationship
between individual and his society, English way of life of upper classes. He focuses on English upper classes and compares that with others. He described how characters can build transformative connotations. Passage to India It takes place in Chandrapore, in the Indian landscape during the British domination. The town is divided into the old Indian quarter and the British Civil Station. Mrs Moore meets a Muslim doctor, Aziz, at the mosque. They soon became friends and he invites Mrs Moore to Marabar Caves. In the caves Mrs Moore suffers a nervous breakdown and loses the will to go on living. She experiences a terrifying sense of emptiness. When Mrs Moore emerges in the sunlight again, she is utterly puzzled and accuses Aziz of physical assault. Aziz is arrested and a trial follows. Cyril Fielding, the headmaster of the local college, sides with the Indians because he believes Aziz is innocent. Mrs Moore is surrounded by the formal concern of the British community. Finally she declares she made a mistake. Aziz is assolved and Mrs Moore is rejected by her own people. In the novel is highlighted the influence of English over Indians. The Indians seems to not develop personal culture. We could also sees the theories of the white man's burden of the Victorian Age, in fact English try to change Indian's culture. The title is inspired by the Walt Whitman's poem. Moreover the novel was published when the Suez Canal was opened to celebrate the opening between Europe and India. The setting is in continuous change. Marabar Caves have a central role because they represent the whomb of the subconscious. It is the sign of the human présence. In the caves Mrs Moore has a traumatic experience. The novel is divided in 3 parts: Mosque, Caves, Temple
The anti-utopian literary production started to develop in the second half of the 19th century. Anti-utopian-novels, also called dystopias, contrast deeply with the utopian tradition. One of the most famous utopian works was Utopia (1516), a political essay written in Latin by the English philosopher and humanist Thomas More (1477-1535). In his work the author launched a harsh attack against the social and political abuses in his contemporary England, during the reign of Henry VIII. Utopia, (whose title comes from ancient Greek and means “nowhere”) is divided into two books. In the first one the narrator, an imaginary Portuguese sailor called Raphael, talks about his adventures and travels and describes England as a land dominated by poverty, crime and other social problems. In the second book he describes Utopia (the island he has discovered during one of his travels) as the symbol of a perfect and ideal state, a place completely unique in the world. In fact, this imaginary society is ruled according to principles of perfection, harmony and justice so that, for example, there is complete freedom of thought and every religion is tolerated, private property has been replaced by communal ownership and people work only six hours a day. Unlike the utopian tradition, in the anti-utopian novel we have the representation of a nightmarish world: the evil aspects of the writer’s contemporary society are projected into imaginary lands or into the future and they are distorted in such a way that the worlds which are described turn out to be even more threatening than reality. Anti-utopian production can be divided into two main groups:
Orwell is often described as a writer endowed with limited imagination but great critical faculties and these allowed him to have a great impact on the cultural and political life of his time.
In his essay “Why I Write” (1947) Orwell says that his desire is to make political writing into art. He starts to write a book, he says, from “a sense of injustice” not from the idea that he is going to produce a great work of art. Although Orwell was a Socialist, he never adhered to a party line and always criticized the Left as well the Right since he came to the bitter conclusion that politics was nothing but a game for the gaining of power. A central idea in his political essays is the ambiguity of terms such as Left and Right, and the understanding that Communism and Fascism only apparently were different in ideology. In reality they represented the different sides of the same medal since their final purpose was to create totalitarian systems and to sweep off the essentials of democracy. It was after his experience in Spain that Orwell started to contrast the official position of the Left Wing. In “Inside the Whale” (1940), which is one of his most famous political essays, Orwell put himself in contrast with the main literary traditions of the 1920s and 1930s. He labels the experimental writers of the 1920s (for example Joyce and T.S. Eliot) as escapists. According to him these avant-garde writers were much interested in the subconscious but little involved in the social and political questions of their times. He also criticizes the Left-Wing literature of the 1930s (the Auden-Spender School). Although the writers belonging to this movement introduced a serious purpose into literature and were concerned with the political issues of their contemporary world, they refused to recognize the Russian reality, they never questioned Communism ( in spite of evidence of the Russian horrors under the Stalinist regime) only because Communism was opposed to Fascism. Failing to examine reality in a consistent way, also this kind of literature is defined as escapist. ANIMAL FARM: THE POLITICAL BACKGROUND Orwell believed that to make people conscious of what was happening outside their own small circle was one of the major problems and for this reason a new literary technique needed to be evolved. In writing Animal farm, he kept in mind these considerations. This novel, which belongs to the genre of the satiric fable, was written in clear and simple language so that it could be easily translated and it was short so that it could be sold cheaply and read quickly by a vast reading public. As a form the animal fable has a long tradition going back to Aesop’s fables to the animal stories of Kipling, such as The Jungle Book. Animal Farm belongs to this literary tradition. The main convention of the animal fable is that the animals behave like the human beings do. In other words the animal figures are humanized since they are imposed human behaviours and reactions. By using the animal fable Orwell had the possibility of simplifying human behaviour and, at the same time, clarifying it. Moreover, another reason which can explain why Orwell chose for Animal Farm the literary form of the animal fable is directly related to what Orwell considered his function as a writer to be: he wanted his readers to understand clearly what he wished to say. The animal fable had the advantage of simplifying and clarifying the issues raised. As it is well known, Orwell wrote Animal Farm primarily as an allegory of the Russian Revolution disguised as an animal fable. With this novel he aimed to hit the Soviet myth and to warn people against the dangers and the evils of Communism which, instead of changing Russia into a democratic country, had led to the creation of a totalitarian society, no better and perhaps worse than the one existing before the October Revolution. Orwell’s purpose, however, goes beyond the particular example of the Russian Revolution. In Animal Farm he criticizes something inherent in
all revolutions. Russia is the immediate example but the book “is intended as a satire of dictatorship in general”, as the name “Napoleon” (the leader of the revolution) shows. Animal Farm does not attack the original ideals of the Revolution but the ways in which they were betrayed. When Animal Farm was written, however, Orwell’s views were extremely unpopular. Orwell wrote Animal Farm between November 1943 and October 1944, so it was written at the height of the Second World War. He could not find a publisher for the book for some time and it was in fact rejected by three of London’s leading publishers. It was eventually published in August 1945 by Secker and Warburg, but not before Orwell had thought of publishing it at his own expense. T. S. Eliot, who was a director at Faber & Faber at the time, sums up the attitude of the publishers unwilling to take the book. Faber, he says, has “no conviction ... that this is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the present time”. Why, in the eyes of the three publishers was it “not the right point of view”? In 1939 Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, which had helped bring about Hitler’s invasion of Poland and so had been a cause of the war itself. The pact was however dissolved by Hitler a few years later, in 1941. After dissolving the pact with Stalin, Hitler began attacking on the Eastern front but he failed to take the crucial city of Stalingrad. The Russian defence of Stalingrad won the admiration of the British public. Besides, the offensive against Russia had diverted Hitler’s attention from England (1940 Battle of England) and the country was grateful for that. In short, in 1944, the year in which Animal Farm was written, Stalinist Russia was an ally in the war against Germany. There was a strong feeling of solidarity with the Russians who had deflected Hitler from England and it seemed like ingratitude, on Orwell’s part, to produce a fable which attempted to remind the British public that only five years before , in 1939, Stalin had been Hitler’s ally. LINKS BETWEEN MODERN RUSSIAN HISTORY AND ANIMAL FARM The main links between the plot of Animal Farm and modern Russian history can be set down as follows:
THE FIGURES IN THE FABLE The animals can be divided into two main groups: the pigs and the dogs on the one hand and the rest of the animals on the other. The first pig we are introduced to is Old Major, who stands for a mixture of Marx and Engels. At the beginning of the story, after the drunken owner of the farm, Mr. Jones, has gone to bed, he calls a meeting of all animals at the big barn. The doctrine he preaches, which is clearly a concise account of Marxist socialist theory, provides the basic beliefs which later become the Seven Commandments. Old Major, in fact, tells them that Man is the only enemy the animals have. Man, in fact, consumes without producing and exploits the animals to maintain his high standard of living without giving them anything in return. All animals are killed in the end so the only solution lies in rebellion against Man. All animals are equal and must be comrades: they must never come to resemble Man and they must never adopt any of his corrupt habits, such as for example drinking alcohol. He ends his speech foretelling a golden future time, when Man will be expelled for ever from England’s fields and all animals will be finally freed. Old Major will die a short time before the revolution takes place. Among the pigs, the leading role is played by Napoleon (who stands for Stalin), Snowball (who stands for Trotsky) and Squealer (the propagandist of the regime). These three develop from Old Major’s speech a complete system of thought, which they call Animalism. After the expulsion of Mr. Jones and his wife from Manor Farm, they change the name of the farm into Animal Farm (that is possible because in the meantime they have been teaching themselves how to read and write) and they paint on the walls of the big barn the Seven Commandments of Animalism, which state:
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend No animal shall wear clothes No animal shall sleep in a bed No animal shall drink alcohol No animal shall kill any other animal All animals are equal seven commandments are to be an “unalterable law”. first days of the rebellion, Snowball and Napoleon work fairly well together although they These In the have very different ideas about policy. They are in disagreement, for example, about the principles of the revolution: Snowball thinks that they should stir up discontent and rebellion on other farms, while Napoleon on the contrary feels that defence and consolidation of power on their own farm are the most important priorities. The animals divide into two groups, one backing Snowball, the other Napoleon. Eventually Napoleon, being jealous of Snowball’s popularity and his success as a leader, manages to get rid of him. Attacked by the nine dogs which Napoleon has personally brought up to his purpose (the dogs stand for Stalin’s Terror State and secret police), Snowball is compelled to flee from the farm and so Napoleon has free hand: he wants power for the sake of power and he manages to get the animals think exactly what he wants them to think. As the tale goes on Napoleon becomes more and more corrupt, more and more merciless and one by one the original Commandments are altered to fit in with what he wishes to do. By the end of the story he starts wearing human clothes and walking on his hind legs, as all the other pigs do, so that the pigs are now indistinguishable from human beings. Squealer is Napoleon’s information officer and he is the propagandist of the regime. So he plays an important role in making the dictatorship stronger and stronger. He is a brilliant speaker and persuader and he is very good at altering the past in the other animal’s minds, in order to make it