Da William Blake a Jane Austen

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Data:	10.04.2008
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INGLESE
BLAKE
LIFE AND MAIN WORKS
Blake was born in London in 1757. His best works are Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. The first deals of the childhood as a state connected with the happiness, freedom and imagination. It contains poems written in a simple language , rich of symbols drawn from Bible and Christian pastorals. Songs of Experience deal of the adulthood and it is more pessimistic and poor of symbolism. These songs must be read together with the songs of Innocence, so that the paired of poems comment on each other.

INFLUENCES ON BLAKE’S WORKS.
Blake wasn’t agree with the values and cultural patterns of the previous Age of Reason and his poetry wasn’t truly Romantic in its triumph of imagination. He followed the ideas of free thinkers as Voltaire and Diderot that the individual had a right to happiness and pleasure outside the restrictions of conventional morality and religion. His most important influence was the Bible, because it contains a complete scheme of the world and its history.
COMPLEMENTARY OPPOSITES
He believed that the church was the responsible of the dualism that characterised man’s life. He substituted to this dualistic view, a vision made of complementary opposites not of contraries. Progress is possible with the tension between opposite state of mind.
IMAGINATION AND THE POET
Imagination for Blake is the mean through which man can know the world. It means to see more, beyond material reality, into the life of things. God, the child and the poet have this power of vision and they have also the power to create things.
SYMBLOISM
Blake’s poems have a very simple structure and an individual use of symbolism.

WORDSWORTH
He was born in Cumbria where he spent his childhood and most of his adult life and which was the main source of his inspiration. He attended the ST John’s college in Cambridge. The revolution and the war between France and England brought him close to a nervous breakdown. The despairs of these years were healed by the contact with nature, which he rediscovered in Dorset. William became a close friend of Coleridge and they composed together a collection of poems called “Lyrical Ballads”. The second edition contained a preface of Wordsworth which was the Manifesto of English Romanticism.
THE MANIFESTO OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
Wordsworth in his preface in the second edition of Lyrical Ballads said that the poetry should deal of situations of everyday. Even the language should be simple in contrast with the poetry of the 18th century that was artificial. According to him, poet is a man among men.
MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD
He said that nature and man are inseparable, man can’t exists without the natural world because he is an active participant in it.
RECOLLECTION IN TRANQUILLITY
Genuine poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity”. The poet looks at a natural object and feels a sensorial perception that he transforms in an intimate emotion. It is retained in the memory. Then it is reproduced in a second emotion that gives the start to the composition of the poem. It will be read by people that fell again the same emotions of the poet, thanks to the strength of his lines.
COLERIDGE
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire in 1772. he was heavily influenced by French Revolution ideals.
MAIN WORKS
1. “The Rime of the ancient mariner” his masterpiece; it is the first poem of the Lyrical Ballad
IMPORTANCE OF IMMAGINATION
Coleridge stressed the role of imagination, and his critical essay. He distinguished between “primary” and “secondary” imagination. He described “primary imagination” as a fusion of perception and the human individual power to produce images. “Secondary imagination” was something more.
THE POWER OF FANCY
Imagination was more important than fancy, Coleridge uses several details that had impressed him during his reading. This fancy enable the poet to blend various ingredients into beautiful images.
MARY SHELLEY
Mary Shelley was born in 1797, her father was a philosopher. In 1813 she met Percy Shelley and they fell in love. Together they ran off to continental Europe several times. Byron was important for the development of Mary Shelley’s best work: Frankestein.
Mary’s life was influenced by a lot of disasters as for example the death of three of the four children he had with Shelley.
FRANKESTEIN
F. deals about a student of chemistry who creates a terrible monster. The monster at first time was gentle, but eventually he showed himself as an horrible being who wanted to destroy everyone and everything. He started to have this behaviour because all the people who met him were afraid of his ugliness. The monster killed Frankestein family, for this reason Frankestein follows the monster to kill him. While he was searching the monster he died on Waltom’s ship.
THEMES
Forbidden knowledge, social injustice, Frankestein and the monster are two aspects of the same being, education and experience.

VICTORIAN AGE (1832-1902)
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Queen Victoria
Reform bills: 1832 suffrage for land-owners in the city
1867 suffrage for the town labourers too
1884 suffrage for all male workers
Period of industrialization
Period of colonialism, urbanization
UTILITARIANISM
Pursuit of happiness for the greatest number of people
EXPLOITATION of workers who lived in poverty and had to work up to 15 hours, women and children too.
RESPECTABILITY
Key word of Victorianism: manners and language became very sober

CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)
He was born in Southcoast, his father was imprisoned in the debtors prison and Charles at the age of 12 was obliged to leave school and go working in a factory. He became a clerk in a lawyer office, then a parliamentary reporter, then a journalist. He committed himself to a variety of social causes.
DAVID COPPERFIELD
Is an autobiographical novel about the hard work in factories.
DICKENS has sense of humour, pathos, realism; his novels are social denounces for the injustices of Victorian society.

JANE AUSTEN (1775-1817)
She was born in a small village of Hampshire. She had a no exiting life, infact she didn’t get married. She loved the English countryside and lived like a typical middle class woman. She spent her time in countryside writing novels.
WORKS: love stories taking place in the little world of a village about middle class families.
PRIDE AND PREJUDICE
Description of life and manners of the upper middle class in the English countryside
THEMES: she wasn’t interested in social problems and historical events.
STYLE: ironic, humorous, satirical, witty
She is not so romantic but still linked to the Augustan period.