Schemi

George III

In the fisrt part of his reign, the 7 years war ends. England obtained Canada and Florida.

Then there was America's Revolution -> loss of those colonies.

Then also the industrial revolution. The invention of the steam engine by Watt. This destroyed the whole domestic industrial system. It made population move from the country side to the cities where factories were built, under inhuman condition. Overpopulation, lack of sanitation and starvation were some of the most serious among many others.

Economic theory of Adam Smith (the lassez-faire theory) made the government not impose any rules.

Romanticism

Reaction to enlightement.

Russeau is the Philosopher of the Romanticism.

The child is the archetipal innocent with true wisdom and happiness, the one who is still not corrupted by society. He's closer to his divine origin. According to him, more attention had to be shown to lower classes. Immagination as a device to escape from human society was also valued

The Ballad

Composed in the middle ages. Musical, probably accompanied by music.

Straightforrward lexicon, incremental repetition, short compositions.

Often dialogs, simple. Themes were religion, love, supernatural elements.

They were considered an inferior genre up to bishop percy, which collected ancient ballades.

From that point onwards well known poets became to co

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Social Background

Important events:

• 1799 - Combination acts
• Trade unions (and others too) were no longer permitted
• 1811-1812 - Luddites
• Attacks of the worker against the machines
• 1819 - Peterloo massacre
• 12 killed by the army - named after st peters (where the tragedy happened) and waterloo
• 1825 - Combination acts repealed
• 1829 - Introduction of the Bobbies
• Also called metropolitan police, named after Sir Robert Peel (Bob)
• 1832 - First reform bill - extend the right to vote to a large part of the middle class
• 1833-1834 - Abolition of slavery, system of national eucation, children less then nine couldn't work in factories

2009-09-21 09:03

SCHEMI!

• Cultural Background
• French and American revolutions
• French writers (Rousseau, Voltaire)
• After the Terror, and Napoleonic Wars, many became conservatives, nationalist
• Sturm und Drang, Goethe, Schiller
• England was the country where romanticism expressed the literature
• Poetry Features
• Language became closer to the kind really spoken by people
• Rediscovery of verse forms
• Blank verse
• Sonnet
• Folk-ballad stanza
• Task of the poet, poet = prophete
• He had to convey truth to mankind
• His creative genius allowed him to see things unknown to mankind
• Introspection, meditation, egotism, individualism
• Some revealed titanism, some irrationalism, mystics, supernatural
• Beauty = idealized Hellenism, or the exotic and distant
• Middle ages were reevaluated
• Imaginatin = noblest gift
• Nature intimate connection with man
• Sharing emotions, passions
• Inseparable parts universe
• Shelling -> art is the supreme moment
• Wordsworth
• Wrote a long time
• Lyrical Ballads
• Collection of poems written with Coleridge
• Preface = Manifesto of the English Romantic movement
• Ideas
• Draw inspiration from everyday life
• Write in a language close to spoken english
• Imagination should "color", show stuff "in an unusual aspect"
• Every description should be seen through the eyes of memory
• Poet should teach the essence of things and moral values
• Nature = consolation, source of happiness
• Other stuff:
• Solitary reaper
• The rainbow
• Daffodils
• Coleridge
• Ideas
• More romantic than W.
• Medioeval flavour (setting, formal structure, rythm)
• Nature, but not as consolation
• Exoticism
• Very musical writing
• Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Modeled after Bishop Percy's Reliques
• Keats

• Ideas
• Turned to poetry in the moments of sorest need
• Poetry should spring naturally from the soul
• Not to convey a message, but only to reproduce what imagination suggested
• Beauty is immortal, joy for ever
• Imagination alone creates beauty
• Ode on a Grecian Urn
• La belle dame sans merci

• Dickens
• Early novels poorly structured, partly auhobiographic
• Sustained emphasis on social ills of victorian england
• Single symbol as unifying eleement within the narrative
• Bleak House most comprehensive attack on the Law
• → Fog often associated with the obscurities of the legal system
• Sense of Humor (pickwick papers)
• Painter of English life
• Social or humanitarian novels
• Extended a considerable influence on the reform movement of his age
• Emily Bronte
• Wrote only one novel
• Features of Wuthering Height
• Modern use of time (not chronological)
• Two generatins linked by Heathcliff
• Romanticism and Realism
• Romantic
• Heatcliff
• Passion
• Nature
• Realist
• Setting
• Way of life
• Complexity of personalities
• Goticism
• Not confined to lockwood experience
• Analysis of Passion
• Thomas Hardy
• Regionalism, everything is in Wessex, unifying link
• Natural environment, essential
• Nature = indifferent mechanism
• Pessimistic
• Rejected Christian doctrine
• Compassion for all living creatures, genuine love
• Tess of the D'urbervilles
• Oscar Wilde

• Oscar

• Soldier poets, writing from within the war
• First everybody was enthusiast - sense of patriotism, of adventure
• Then everybody saw the actual face of war
• Brooke
• Born at Rugby, published firt volume in 1911
• Extremely enthusiastic about the war
• Died in 1915 of blood poisoning, at the Dardanelles
• Fervent idealism, legendary death: the romantic symbol of the soldier poet
• The soldier
• Part of «1914», expresses what English men generally felt
• Abstract view of the war, doesn't describe anything precise
• Petrarchian sonet, idealization of war
• Sorley
• Son of a Scottish professor, spent his childhood in Cambrige
• Spent six months in Germany until the war broke out
• Killed in 1915
• Sassoon
• Started his carreer as poet, also wrote some prose
• Decorated and promoted, but full of disgust and hatred of war
• Satirical works against war
• Glory of Women
• Self contained stanzas
• Seems to promote war, then immediately the climate changes and becomes tremendously sarcastic
• Unifies germans and english in the war pain
• Owen
• Most important of the war poets
• Deeply influenced by Sassoon
• He was killed in action in November one week before the armistice
• Rosemberg
• Russian-Jewish descent
• Also a painter, he enlisted for financial reasons
• Unfit for miitary service, published Night and Day
• Killed in 1918 in France
• Read

• Served four years, won some medals
• Wrote some violent and striking poems
• The Happy Warrior

• Contrasts sharply with Brookes' pleasant sonnet
• «The happy warrior» is only an ironic title
• The warrior is crazy with terror and can no longer control himself
• The poet is witnessing human folly

• 15th century → british people ruled and exploited Ireland and its population
• 19th century → most of the country was settled by British people, they were Protestant.
• They were landowners, they didn't live in Ireland but irish people had to pay taxes for lands to them. (Swift already denounced it - A modest proposal)
• Parnel suggested to the prime minister (belonging to the Liberal Party) to grant the Home Rule bill was rejected twice in the parliament.
• 1905
• Sinn Fein, a movement for Home Rule gained strenght
• And when the first world war broke out...
• 1916
• Easter Riot, in Dublin
• But most of its leaders were executed
• Hatred against english people grew
• 1919
• Founded IRA (Irish Republican Army) which made terroristic attacks
• 1921
• Home Rule granted for Ireland, but just for the south of Ireland (the current Ireland Republic)
• Because the northern part was protestant, for about 60% of the population, and considered themselves loyal
• 1949
• Southern part became completely independent, also from Commonwealth
• 1972
• Sunday bloody sunday
• A pacific demostration from Irish in London Derry (one of the biggest town), where english army shot 27 people and killed 13
• 1998
• Under Tony Blair: the good friday/belfast agreement. Tensions ceased
• 2005

• IRA ceased existing

French philosopher (Henri Bergson) says: Duration is subjective and inner time, clock time is objective and another thing.

Modernism

- Virginia Woolf -

• She belong to a family where he could breathe a very intellectual atmosphere
• Mother dies, she goes in depression, and her nervous stability becomes fragile
• What her characters think is more important than what they do
• Continous change of thought offers the material for her work
• Orlando: the novel who gave her success
• She was an awesome critic
• Works:
• To the Lighthouse
• A very complex novel, of a journey to a lighthouse
• A room of one's own
• On the position of women and their right to live their lives
• Features
• Abandons traditional tecnique to use a more modern one
• Translates everything in an interior monologue
• Gives importance to the «life of the mind»
• Time follows mind's process
• Time montage: subject remains fixed, conciousness moves in time
• Space montage: time remains fixed, spatial element that changes
• Aware of the risk of being obscure and incoherent, but uses the stream of conciousness extemely well
• Manages to balance extremely well the inner thoghts and realism
• To the Lighthouse

• Divided in three parts
• Rich in symbolism
• lighthouse
• alternation of light and darkness
• journey
• innocense → experience
• sea
• so much loved
• Time treatment has been emphasized

• Full of micro-structures which show her ability

- James Joyce -

• Works
• The Dubliners
• 15 tales who have as themes life, death, and city that makes life stagnant
• A portrait of the artist as a young man
• An irish man that deals with his growth and his dedication to art
• Autobiographic
• Less realistic
• Ulysses
• Finnegan's wake
• His last work and the most complex of them all. Speaks all the time of one night
• He is inspired from Vico's idea that says that there's only one man, because he's the everybody
• Features

• Reject Irish nationalism
• He infacts speaks of death and despair only when he lives in ireland
• Interested in froidian psychology
• He invents the "Dream language"
• Epiphany

• Moments buried for years in someone's memory suddenly surfaces in one's mind, and starts a long mental labour