The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 3, Sintesi del corso di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. 3 e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! The 20th century and after. Historical background. The roots of modern literature are in the late 19th century. The aesthetic movement, rejecting Victorian notions of the artist’s moral and educational duties, helped to bring to an alienation of the modern artist from society. The Education Act of 1870 resulted in the growth of public education, leading to rapid emergence of a mass literate population, which split up into ‘highbrows’, ‘middlebrows’ and ‘lowbrows’, helping to widen the gap between popular art and art esteemed only by the sophisticated and the expert. The end of Queen Victoria era began after her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Samuel Butler, in his novel The way of all flesh, attacked Victorian conceptions of family, education, religion. Thomas Hardy, in his poem The Darkling Thrush, marked the end of Victorian period and the dawn of the new age. Pessimism and Stoicism characterized the literature written in the transitional period between Victorian era and modernism. While the pace to change seemed to be accelerating, traditional stabilities of society, religion, and culture started to weaken. Early 20th century writers were keenly aware of the powerful concepts and vocabularies emerging in anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and the visual arts that reimagined human identity in radically new ways. Also everyday life was undergoing rapid transformation during these years with changes in electricity, cinema, radio, pharmaceuticals, labor, communications and transportation therefore modern writers sought to create new forms that could register these profound alterations in human experience. Poetry. The years leading up to WW I saw the start of a poetic revolution. Opposite to the romantics, the imagist movement developed in London. Its components wrote short, sharply etched, descriptive lyrics, mainly because they were incapable of writing longer and more complex poems. Modernists writers wanted to bring poetic language and rhythms closer to those of conversation. Irony, helped to achieve that union of thought and passion that Eliot wished to bring back into poetry. Along with the imagist movement there were others who were trying to reinvent poetry. D.H. Lawrence began writing poems freer in form and emotion. This was not the only revolution happening in that moment: writers were influenced by French impressionism, postimpressionist, cubists’ painters, Italian futurism. With the start of WW II the New Apocalypse movement developed. Its poetry saw the influence of imagists and surrealists. After the war a new group called ‘The Movement’ was formed. Its components aimed for a neutral tone, a purity of diction, in which to render an unpretentious fidelity to mundane experience. Some rejected the Movement’s notion of a limited, rationalist, polished poetics. Ted Hughes began to write poems in which predators and victims in the natural world suggest the violence and irrationality of modern history. Since the 1980s, British literary tradition was enriched with new voices as poets of different class, ethnicity, gender, and region joined the scene. From the former colonies of the British Empire came some of the most important innovations in the language and thematic reach of poetry in English. Postcolonial poets expanded the range of possibilities in English-language poetry by hybridizing traditions of the British Isles with their indigenous images and speech rhythms, creoles and genres.