Victorian Age

Materie:	Appunti
Categoria:	Lingue
Voto:	1 (2)
Download:	227
Data:	24.04.2001
Numero di pagine:	8
Formato di file:	.doc (Microsoft Word)

VICTORIAN AGE
_Chartist movement (asked for universal suffrage, vote by ballot, payment of the members of parliament)
_Social reforms: ten hours act, public health act, education act, mines act
_There was a disorganisation of England sanitation
_In 1901 the queen died, she had represented all the solid civil virtues: duty, morality, love for family and a great love for her people
SOCIAL BACKGOUND
_ It was a complex age, marked by political, social and religious unrest
_There was optimism due to the belief that happiness could be reached through technical progress
_ The middle class increases its power
_Many problems still affected England: the working class had great problems with misery and bad health conditions; Poverty was still considered a crime and education had its problem too
_Because of the pacific coexistence of different trends and impulses, a balance of opposite tendencies without any violent revolution we use to define this situation with the term “Victorian compromise”
_Another contradiction is Creation of Fabian Society inspired by Marks theory
_RESPECTABILITY: the age turned excessively Puritanical, there was a strict code of behaviour for men and women and the family was big
LITERARY PRODUCTION
_Late romanticism: still looked a the middle age as source of inspiration
_Realism: art has to reproduce the reality faithfully
_Naturalism: total objectivity and scientific approach to literature
_Decadents: art is superior to nature, the finest beauty was that of dying things
EARLY VICTORIAN | | LATE VICTORIAN
Writers who identified themselves in their own age | |Sense of satisfaction and rebellion prevailed
PROSE--&--FICTION
_Prose was the best mirror of spirit of the time. Prose writers were deeply involved in social and political problems, they became the spokesmen for their time.
_Victorian age was the best age of English fiction for many reasons:
• Urbanisation and better ways of communication
• The invention of a new printing machinery, so that material was cheaper
• Prose fiction became the vehicle to communicate, to support and to question the ideas of the age
EARLY VICTORIAN FICTION
_The main factor that helped the spread of early Victorian fiction was the publication in serial instalments, at very low price. Because before novels were published in three volumes which were sold at a high price that only wealthy people could pay
This method proved to be very successful:
• It increased the number of readers
• It gave an episodic structure to the plot
• It created the “popular” appeal of some works (later defined as mass literature)
• The writer has to catch reader’ s attention with some devices (for ex. the “sensational”)
Sensational novel: mixture of melodrama, mystery, complicate plots. Dickens, who thought that “sensational” would also help to focus on the social issues of his novels
Imaginative Romantic novels: the urban middle class reader wanted a “realisti” book that provides an escape from routine life and that could be read by the whole family and containing Christian morality.
Historical novels and Romances
_Avoiding exoticism they turned to contemporary scene as source of inspiration, and mostly set their works in contemporary England (dickens)
Humanitarianism novel: focused on social problems denouncing the evils of industrialisation.
Domestic novel-: was richer in psychological analysis, more upper class setting and accurate structure. There was strong criticism of hypocrisy and the anti heroic features of the materialistic Victorian Age.
_They both shared the same “reality” and the writer becomes the moral spokesman of his time.
CHARLES DICKENS (1812-1870)
In 1823 moved to London, his father was imprisoned for debt he started working in a dirty and cold factory, he felt deeply humiliated and this comes out his works (ex. in David Copperfield)
_Humorous novels: The Pickwick papers: (first real success) series of adventure of a club of sportsmen
_Sentimental novels: A Christmas Carol ghost story set in Christmas David Copperfield best known work
_Social & humanitarianism: Oliver Twist through the story of a boy he denounces degradation of poverty
Charles Dickens is the foremost representative of the Vict. Novel. He was very popular during his age & after
Humour
_One side of his genius was his natural sense of humour, that can be found in character, in dialogue and in whole episodes; the sequence of events due to the serial form.
_In the Pickwick Papers each episodes is pure humour
_His comic characters are endowed with common sense, and with his own philosophy of life.
_He looks at them with sympathy.
Pathos _Often humour is mixed with pathos, Dickens is here at his best.
The Painter of English Life
_He is a subtle observer of London life, a city that he observed during is life, especially where the poor lived.
_He gives us a minute description of British home life, school system, and domestic life with every day detail of manners, appearance and dress.
Christmas
_Is the festivity he likes most and his description resumes the ghost stories told in front of the fire.
_He was a reporter of habits and tradition of an age.
His characters
_Drawn from observervation of real people each one of his character is an individual.
_Dickens does not show the spiritual side but the external qualities of people.
_He is at his best with simple characters
Social and Humanitarian novel
_He uses fiction to denounced the evils of his age but he did not suggest any specific reform.
_But he inspired the reform movement by denouncing:
• Brutality of schools
• Dirt & squalor of Londo slums & the conditions of their inhabitants in the period of industrial expansion
LATE VICTORIAN FICTION :
A spirit of rebellion began to gain ground, the Anti-Victorian Reaction also due to the scientific theories. Writers rejected any romantic attitude & focused on clash between realty & illusion, man & his environment.
The Naturalist came to see man only as a creature conditioned by heredity, man was no longer responsible of his actions since they were determinated by forces beyond his control. Naturalist writer had to only record events with the objectivity of a scientist, they applied scientific methods to literature.
HARDY
_His regionalism is strictly connected to the limited area in which he set his works and which he called _Wessex. He justified the adoption of the term with his need to give “territorial definition” and “unity of scenes” to his novels.
_Wessex therefore became both unifying element and link between past and present, the main theme is the consequence of the changes and transformation of a Wessex agricultural society under the impact of modern industrial life
Nature: He is one of the greatest writers about rural life in English, he describes the smallest details of visible nature. Nature not only acts as a background and a setting but it becomes an essential part of the story
Romanticism and Realism: _His belief that only in rustic life can men express their passions; make Hardy, in same respects, a romantic. But for a romantic nature is joy and consolation, for Hardy it is a hostile power, indifferent to man’s destiny. Love quite often ends in disillusion and failure.
Naturalism and Pessimism: _He was deeply struck by the new geological discoveries, which proved that the world had existed longer than man. So he elaborated a pessimistic theory according to which man is an insignificant insect in the universe.
_Man is victim of an obscure fate and he is only a puppet in the hands of an “Immanent Will “.
Fatalistic Determinism: _His fatalistic determinism is also due to the scientific studies of the time on the hereditary factor in human beings, which seemed to deprive man of all responsibility for his actions. This led the foundation of the idea of predestination, quite often a predestination to failure.
Characters: _His individual characters maintain a stoicism and a moral dignity of their own
Technique: _Hardy’ s technique can be defined as architectural and cinematic.
As architect by profession he gives unity to his novels. His cinematic method can be see in accurate description; he starts giving a panoramic effect of the whole and then focuses on the various details.

WALTER SCOTT
Historical Novel
_Walter Scott was the creator of a new type of novel the historical romance, which tried to recapture the glamour of recent or distant past through extraordinary adventures.
_Set in a romantic atmosphere made up of heroism, honour and loyalty, peopled by heroes & heroines living fantastic experience. Scott’ s historical novel had great success and spread its influence all over the country.
He was excellent in portraying humble folk, peasants and his influence was enormous.
_Even in Italy our great novelist Manzoni recognised his debt to Scott, even if Manzoni went deeply in the mind of his characters.
• Scott reproposes old chivalrous values as honour, courage, loyalty and moral code to a society afflicted by commercial pressure and spiritual poverty.
• He gave a new dimension to European novel, his novel is the bridge that connected gothic to serial novel
JANE AUSTEN Novel of manners
Jane Austen contributed to what has been defined as the novel of manners or domestic novel a kind of fiction faithful to realty, quite conventional as plots and characters, without any romantic “hero” quite unsentimental, but focused on everyday life and events, Jane Austen style was very difficult to imitate.
THEME & FEATURES _She is grouped with romantic novelist only for her date of birth, she was not romantic, her mentality, her education, her moral values where AUGUSTAN.
Great Qualities:
• Focused on everyday life, Characterisation, Objectivity, Non sentimentality, Realism, Humour, Satire
• Intensity of observation: with her observation & her detachment she describes her characters with the eye of a scientist
• Profound psychological study: her subjects are courtship and marriage, she shows the restriction’ s of a woman’ s position in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Precise and lucid style
• Dialogues and Conversation, Precise use of words (supporting the realism of situation)
• Well structured and polished sentences Use of letter (writing typical of Augustan age)
• Ironic wit(presented above all in the dialogues)
Jane Austen’ s literary importance
_She id one of the greatest novelist of manners she writes first of all to please herself
_She had all the opinions, the attitudes of the late 18th cent. & she was untouched by the romantic revolution.
_Her novel did not have a great influence on later writers, now readers appreciate most of all her lucid style
BYRON
He was a mixture of idealism and rationalism.
Byron The Romantic
_His life (he was aristocrat & handsome & successful poet, he travelled all over the world fighting for revolution) _His nationalism
His rebellion against any form of sham and oppression _His Melancholy (due to his Calvinistic education)
_His interest in history _His taste for exoticism and Gothicism
_His Titanism he emphasised wild passions & emotions _His realisation of the so called Byronic Hero
_His Satanism (his hero-worship and the struggle for self assertion)
Byron The non Romantic
_His criticism of society (cynicism and scepticism)
_His concern with the True Reality of Things
_His mock-heroic attitude
_His lucid way of writing (modelled on 18th century poetic style)
_His concern for man in society (rather than man in nature)
_His deflation of romantic ideas _His sense of fun
Byron The Satirist
These features where already present in Byron’ first work, then in 1816 he visited Italy and was inspired by Pulci’ s and Casti’ s works. He begins to write in “half-serious rhyme”
The Byronic Hero
_He is a mysterious man: there is a secret in his past. He is solitary, silent, and inaccessible, he cannot give forgiveness and never ask for mercy abandoned as he is by god
_He is Wild and rough in his manners but he is also of noble birth.
_His face is hard, impenetrable but beautiful
_No woman can resist him. Destiny runs after him and he becomes destiny for anyone he meets.