GOTHIC NOVEL
…in Europe… Mary Shelley Science fiction: Power of science: manipulation of nature 1818: Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus Creation of man; the “different”; the double.
New sources: Nordic and Celtic cultures; Middle Ages, ancient national folk poetry (T. Percy); The Works of Ossian (J. Macpherson) New features: originality and creativity; spontaneity; emphasis on individual genius; unknown and supernatural; free imagination; sensations; nature; exotic times and places.
1760: Enlightment in Europe: Voltaire, Diderot, Hume 1770s: Thomas Gainsborough: landscape paintings 1781: Kant writes the Critique of Pure Reason 1790: orchestral music: Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven
DRAMA
…in America… 1600-1700 First: prayers; hymns; diaries Soon after the Independence: adventures; puritan tales Benjamin Franklin: Poor Richard Almanac Irving Washington: The Mystery of Sleepy Hollow Fennymore Cooper: The Last of Mohicans
Oliviero Goldsmith (1728 – 1774 ) and Brinsley Sheridan (1715-1816) POETRY William Blake :Contemporary world and spiritual world, art as a creative vision, freedom and love for justice Poet and prophet ; sources: Divina Commedia by Dante; Works: Song of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
Reactions against the Enlightenment Re-evaluation of the individual Influence of revolutionary ideals
Poetry: First generation
Novel
Poetry: Second generation
William Wordswoth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Lyrical Ballads (1798), Romantic manifesto
imagination and emotion subjective and particular individuality freedom medieval and modern subjects From nature to supernatural; emotion recollected in tranquility
ordinary language
from supernatural to nature
different poetic forms. Imagination: exoticism; orientalism
Sir Walter Scott
Jane Austen
•Domesticc novels
•Past
•Witty and ironic dialogues
•England vs Scotland
•Well defined characters ; Country gentry
•Journey : growing
•Works: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey (parody of Gothic novels) , Persuasion, Emma, Mansfield Park (about slavery in America)
•History : masses are protagonists. •Works (about 90 novels) : Ivanhoe (crusades); Rob Roy (Scottish clans), Waverly (Scotland) Richard I or The Talisman (Crusades in the Holy Land)
Politically committed Struggle on the continent Classical, medieval, oriental inspiration Variety of forms •POETS: Lord Gordon Byron; Percy Bisshe Shelley; John Keats
America E.A. POE: Father of detective story; double; fear in man himself Autobiographical elements (tragic life) Works: Tale of Mystery and Ratiocination
-Historical background -Urbanization and communication -New printing machinary
Literary background Three stages
Early Victorians Writers identify themselves with their own age↓ • Increased the numeber of the readers • Episodic structer of the plot; serial instalments after 1820 • Very long works • Mass literat. Realistic books & domestic books (psychological introspection; experiences)
Mid Victorians 1919-1901: J. Ruskin : Gothic architecture →moral qualities, beauty of hand made products against machines. Charles Darwin: The Origin of the Species and The Evolution of man
Late Victorians Dissatisfaction and rebellion Anti victorian reaction due to new scientiphic and philosophical theories
Emily Brönte
Work
Charlotte Brönte
Work
Wuthering heights -plot without chronology, modern shifts of time Romantic (love) and gothic aspects (ghosts, life in death) + natural approach to love and feelings and modern structure (various narrators) Indirect narrative tecnique Nelly (world that disappears) and Lockwood (age of changes): 2 narratives, 2 cultures
Jane Eyre -gothic, mistery - psychological introspection, education. - women condition
Charles Dickens Social novel
-sense of humour -episodies (pathos) -world seen though children’s eyes - caricatures/figures - Painter of English life - characters (human qualities) -denounce of social evils - fluent style and use of symbolism. powerful imagin. - evil of utilitarianisms (towns) Work
“Hard Times”
“Oliver Twist”
Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood: New taste for Beauty in a world dominated by materialism and compromise. Return to semplicity and spirituality Paintings before Raphael
Robert Browning POETRY: revival of Romanticism but with a sense of uneasiness
Poet as a missionary in a world without art
Tennyson Work
“act of divine love”
Poetry: religion, middle ages, nature, details, idealisation of beauty; symbols, against machines that kill
(search for God) themes: greatness of his period , soul study dramatic monologue→ Shakespeare; revelation of unconscious crisis of man seen ironically.
Aestheticism: European movement 1835: Theophile Gautier: frustartion and uncertainty; break of conventions, free imagination.
Art:
-
Impressionism France: - decadentism, 1890: symbolism, escape not in nature but in the self, Baudelaire
Realism: clash between man and environment, illusion and reality (E. Zola)→naturalism (Darwin). Man no longer responsible for his action determined by forces beyond his control Writer’s task: to record events, impersonal like a scientist, without
DRAMA Crisis: -audience demanded amusement -Star system -Show business -Great expensive three dimensional sceneries -Distorted spirit of classics Rebirth→new influences France(Scribe) Denmark (Ibsen): Sweden (Strindberg) Russia (Checkhov):psychological introspection; women independence; social problems;retrospective method ↓ naturalism and realism
Authors G. Eliot
T. Hardy
Stevenson
Works
Works
Return to a period before industrialization
double personality of man; Darwin; double personality Primitive nature; far off lands.
R. Kipling
Works
O. Wilde
G. B. Shaw
Works
Works
Works male pen name, to be taken seriously. The Mill on the Floss
The return of the Native Tess
Dr. Jeckyll and Mr Hyde Tresure Island The Black Arrow .
Escape; colonialism Kim The jungle Book
-Cult of art and beauty Social life Novel: - “Picture of Dorian Gray�: Double, gothic Drama: - The Importance of Being Earnest absurd situations satire
Revitalization of the drama influence of economists and philosophers comedy of ideas, various viewpoints
Romantic poets
Ugo Foscolo
Poet and novelist Patriotism I Sepolcri Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis
A. Manzoni
I Promessi Sposi patriotic, historical and didactic novel
G. Leopardi
- Pessimistic view - Natura matrigna I Canti
Scapigliatura
Renewal in Italian culture (1860-1880) - realistic (verismo) - foreign influences (Germany).
Verismo
Verismo (Italian vero, "truth") :Italian literary movement (1875 - 1895). Verga and Capuana: main exponents, writers of a verismo manifesto - pessimistic - impersonality
Work Work
Emilio Praga :“Preludio” : Arrigo Boito :“Lezione d’anatomia” :
Verga : “I Malavoglia” -“Mastro Don Gesualdo”
Prose Vorticism Imagism Modernism
Exoticism Modernism
Poetry Transition 1885/20s Bridge, Houseman W. B. Yeats
The Georgians Rural life and romanticism Brooke ;De La Mare
War poets - Horror and disillusion Owen; Sasson; Brooke; Sisley
R. Kipling
Conrad
Sea -Faith in man -Supporter of colonialism, (White Man’s Burden),at first, then seen it as a Nightmare -Education -Different mentality.
journey into the self (epiphanies) Sinister background=inner world of man European civilization confronts itself with alien environment: it
Heart of Darkness different points of view;narrator with common values; manipulation of time sequence Double character Style: rethorical; long sentences(obscurity) use
Characteristics Experiences on new forms focus on mental ↓ stream of consciousness
Techniques -story in the story -metaphors -montage monologue :instrument to transform the phenomena into words
time Autors
J. Joyce
-direct interior monologue -total objectivity (artists disappears). -Irish paralysis; exile -realism + symbolism Dubliners: naturalistic linear tecnique (15 stories, Dublin life in various period of life; use of epiphanies = sudden revelation of inner thoughts →Portrait of an Artist Ulysses: sperimentation; alter ego, interior monologue; Odyssey
V. Wolf
G. Orwell
-indirect interior monologue -fictional and chronological time Works: Mr Dalloway (time; suicide; IW.W. as nervous breakdown) Orlando (time and sexes) The Waves (Flowing of life) To the Lighthouse (inner and chronological shifts of time; desire and aims)
Distopian novels, Politically connected, language to communicate ideas. Essays Novels: Animal Farm (allegory; political fairy tale) Danger of propaganda →manipulation Oversimplification→ Control of language
H. Bergson
Inner time eludes the clock time
W. James
Entire area of mental attraction Consciousness flows like a river; area beyond communication Portrait of a Lady
1920-1930
T.S. Eliot
-T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats -Politically motivated, - interested in mind and symbols
Prufrock The Waste Land Aridity, sterility Fragmentation, incommunicability, quotations; images, various levels; past; spiritual decay emptiness (Hollow Men)
• • • • • • • • •
alienation incommunicability tradition and past objective correlative Myth Metaphysical poets Dante (journey) Before the conversion: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land Conversion: The Journey of the Magi; Four Quartets: faith religious solution (faith, religious solution)
Decadentism, Intellectual emotion (vorticism)
E.Pound
-New experiences, Celtic and Oriental languages. -He “cut� the Waste Land Blast Vortex: beauty of the machine -with and then in contrast with Amy
• • • •
precise images concentration no descriptions 1914. Des Imagistes
Amy Lowell: inner introspection
• Hulme: hard, dry images • exact words from common speech • new rhythm • freedom in subject matters
-Commercial theatre -Non realism (Brecht ) - Expressionism
-Irish revival: Yeats, O’Casey -T. S. Eliot:Greek Drama
Between the two wars
Theatre of Cruelty
Theatre of Anger
Theatre of Absurd
American writers in Europe (roots) • F.Scott Fitzgeral: the Roaring Twenties disillusion of the American Dream • E. Hemingway personal experiences in Spanish Civil War ; Nobel Prize
A.Huxley
The Devils about Inquisition. NOVEL: Brave New World (anti-utopian )
Violence on the stage→ violence of war, of man
John Osborne
Involved in the period: • welfare • cold war • Suez Canal • generation gap • lower and upper middle classes Language: slang and colloquial language; verbal violence (cruelty)
Angry Young Men Work: Look Back in Anger (1956)
↓ dissatisfaction disillusion verbal
Samuel Becket
life is meaningless characters : stylized; complementary; Works: Waiting for Godot (1953) Language: essential; short sentences; nonsense; violent Psychological violence (cruelty, anger) Structure: circular Themes: sterility, deterioration, incommunicability; mental dependence; monotony; actions without; progression; entertainment; inability to act; fixed time
Harold Pinter
Sources: Kafka; Becket Menaces: →Physical violence (cruelty); →loss of security; →room/outside world (protection; womb; refuge; property; prison); →memories ; racial intolerance; cosmic disaster →intruder (false identity; blindness; impossibility to recollect the past; solitude; reality vs unreality. Language: contradictions →uneasiness; incommunicability; repetitions; pauses and silences; common speech Works: one act plays (for radio); The Dumb Waiter; The Caretaker; The Room