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WILLIAM BLAKE
BLAKE’S STYLE: difficult of his use of complex symbols; symbols of a transcendent reality; his language and syntax are fairly simple; often adopts an apparently naive style; typical of ballads, children’s songs and hymns -
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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
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SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
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ROMANTICISMO
sarebbe tra la fine del XVIII secolo e gli inizi del XIX secolo in diversi paesi europei -
The lamb
Balancing between the 1st (interrogative) and the 2nd (answers) stanza; major question: “Who made thee?” = “Who made/created you”; obvious answer (the poet asks, but he knows, he is one of the characters): God. 2 references to cristianity: Lamb = Jesus’s symbol; Child (like the author because he has imagination) = Jesus’s symbol; Correlation: Christ = Lamb (pure) = Child (pure); The Lamb and the Author shares something of their creator; Image of peace and serenity -
Songs of Innocence and of Experience di William Blake
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The tyger
6 stanzas of 4 quatrines
A lot of questions
Major question: “Who is the creator?”
Answer: there are no answers
- Potential Evil. But probably the same creator of the Lamb = God
- God and Evil exist at the same time
- Complementary opposites
- Contrary states of human soul (both necessary) -
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MARY SHELLEY
Novel of PURPOSE, written with the purpose of propagating ideas (social-political ones following the French Revolution) -
Lyrical Ballads di William Wordsworth
da fare -
It Is an Ancient Mariner di Samuel Taylor Coleridge
da fare -
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
The speaker is the poet, who wandered lonely as a cloud in a natural landscape when he saw a host of daffodils, which were fluttering and dancing in the breeze. They stretched around the lake, like the stars in the sky. The waves danced too near the flowers, but the daffodils out-did the sparkling waves in glee. A poet must be happy, in such cheerful company, but what well-being the vision had brought to the poet
- the poet like a cloud
- and the daffodils like the stars -
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EDGAR ALLAN POE
He regarded brevity as indispensable to produce a strong emotional effect on the reader. His stories are characterized by strict rationalist logic, but only to show the limits of reason, the failure of rationality and the triumph of instinct and irrationality. -
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CHARLES DICKENS
He is a master of the English language
He also mixes social criticism with lively portraits of universal characters
Combed pathetic with comics
The main strength is humor
Compromise
Melodramatic or openly didactic passages → his weak point -
Frankestein di Mary Shelley
Doctor Frankenstein is ambitious, he wants to be like god and try to go against the rule of nature and do something more. He wants to overcome the man's limits and acquire the god-like power in his hands. The monster created by the doctor is a symbol of the romantic concern for the isolation of individuals by society.
TRY TO GO OVER THE LIMIT, is a TOPIC.
Frankenstein is considered the forerunner of science fiction. With electricity the doctor created life -
The novel becomes the major literary form
The NOVEL became a major literary form by 1830, it was characterized by the full analysis of a social situation involving relations between different people and classes and by the constructions of the spoken language ( dialogue extended). -
The Victorian Compromise
The Victorian compromise is the attempt of the establishment to cover up the evil contradictions of the society under a strict moral code of behaviour, which promoted values that reflected the word as they would have liked it to be and not as they really saw it. -
The Victorian Values
Prudishness and Chastity: strict and hypocritical behaviour and speech in regards to sexual matters;
Duty, hard work and discipline: school and exploitation of children;
Respectability: morality, conformity to social standards;
Charity and Philanthropy: help the poor to be an example of morality -
Oliver Twist di Charles Dickens
Novel that tells the adventures of an orphan, Oliver Twist, who manages to preserve his angelic qualities despite a very hard life;
Dickens combined the sentimental story of an exploited orphan with social satire and realism:
- He criticizes the exploitation of children in workhouses and, consequently, the Poor Law
- He highlights the issues with the comic element ( dark humor, irony, satire)
- He denounces social issues but he never actually suggests problem solving strategies -
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THE VICTORIAN AGE
The Victorian age was one of the most fascinating periods in British history, a period which witnessed scientific, industrial and technological advances, a rapid expansion of the British Empire and growing wealth for the nation, but also problems of overcrowding, poverty and vice.
Charles Dickens wrote: “ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair……” -
The Black Cat di Edgar Allan Poe
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Hard Times di Charles Dickens
Set in Coketown → industrial city in the North of England (the fictitious name means ‘town of coke’, coke being a kind of coal used in industry).
The novel is built around two issues:
- The inhumanity of the factory system;
- The application of the principles of the utilitarian philosophy– which judged the value of everything according to its practical value – to school syllabi -
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OSCAR WILDE
Oscar Wilde is the major exponent of the Aesthetic Movement in England,
This movement is a reaction against materialism. Wilde was inspired by Walter Peter, who worshipped beauty and insisted that art is an expression of the spirit
- He was convinced that art hadn’t a didactic aim. The artistic values are only real values -
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VIRGINIA WOOLF
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JAMES JOYCE
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RUPERT BROOKE
He advocated a return to nature and simple emotions in contrast with the cultivated artificiality of the Aesthetic and Decadent movements. On leave in December 1914, Brooke wrote the ‘war sonnets’ that made his fame; they show the heroic side of war, very much in the old classical tradition. In 1915 he died of an infection. Brooke’s The Soldier (1914) is surely the best-known poem in the English language about modern war -
The Picture of Dorian Grey di Oscar Wilde
The only novel and the work that best sums up Wilde’s aesthetic theories about a life of sensation and pleasure as the supreme form of art.
The man of taste, like the artist, is above common morality and must pursue his own aesthetic goals – though this has a tragic outcome in the novel.
The plot of The Picture of Dorian Gray has analogies with folk and fairy tales, common to the Romantics, of a person whose life is strictly dependent on a magic object -
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WILFRED OWEN
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THE MODERN AGE
If during the last decades of the 19th century religious faith, faith in progress and science and traditional values had been questioned, at the beginning of the 20th century people found increasingly more difficult to believe in anything (religion, philosophy, art, science and progress). Furthermore, World war I left the country in a disillusioned and cynical mood, nothing seemed to be right or certain. New views of man and universe emerged as a consequence of new ideas and theories -
The Soldier di Rupert Brooke
- We find the same identification of the soldier with England in the first quatrain: the foreign field where the soldier is buried becomes “forever England”, and as a consequence that foreign earth becomes “richer”
- The identification of soldier and mother country is restated in the tercets: the dead soldier’s heart beats with English sights and sounds, recreating a late Victorian world of quiet dreams and laughter, peace and gentleness
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Dulce et Decorum Est
The poem ends with a latin tag “Dulce et Decorum est pro patria mori” which is the epitome of a centuries-old tradition of patriotism.
Owen defines this sentence as a false and an “old lie” because he wants us to understand that love for one’s country cannot justify war.
Moreover, the latin sentence sounds noble and idealizing, while the contest is realistic and deeply disturbing.
Owen underlines his opinion about the war which is considered as something horrible and to be avoided. -
Ulysses di Joyce