Summary English Literature. A Short History Summary English Literature. A Short History

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Summary English literature. A short history
Letteratura inglese b (Università degli Studi di Torino)
StuDocu non è sponsorizzato o supportato da nessuna università o ateneo.

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)
lOMoARcPSD|4181294
English literature, a short history.

CHAPTER 1: from the origins to the renaissance.
1. The beginning
43 AD England invaded by romans (Britannia ~ stayed there for 4 centuries)
Then Germanic tribes arrived  Saxons, Jutes, Angles.
Germanic language spoken: English  Old English
Poems written in Old English. The most ancient were of religious matters, while other were warrior
type. Beowulf is epic. Composed during the 8th century. 3182 lines. Heroic world of the north from
which the English had come to Britain. Protagonist a young warrior who defeats the monster
Grendel, son of a witch. The poem ends with Beowulf’s funeral.
The tone of the poem is legendary. Hero in superhuman opposition to a fantastic monster who
incarnate evil. Positive values of the Germanic warrior world: family honour, obligations to lord and
to guests, bond between lord and his people. They do not know the Bible (the poet does). The
story of Beowulf, maybe developed in oral form, retains ethos of the pagan Germanic world.
Religious poetry: The Dream Of the Rood, 750. Short poem. The Holy Cross tells the story of the
crucifixion. Riddle tradition of speaking objects.
King Alfred to the throne in 871, (Danes had control of all English kingdoms except his one). Alfred
translated St Augustine, St Gregory and Bede. English became literary language. He was probably
responsible for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which records Alfred’s descendants successes and a
cultural growth, until new Danish invasions brought to a political decline.
2. After the conquest.
1066 last invasion of England. William the Conqueror, duke of Normandy, landed on 28 September
crowned king on Christmas day. Norman conquest formally and solemnly proclaimed in the
presence of God and men. Norman French became the language of the court. William imposed
his bishops, clergy wrote in Latin and delivered sermons in English. English poetry in old English died.
French invaded the language, and English became a semi-inflected language. Cuisine and law
with tons of French words. Dialectical variations.
English between 1100-1400= Middle English. No standard literary language. Every poet wrote in his
own language.
Sir Gawain* anonymous author, the most refined English verse romance, used the language
spoken in the West Midlands. It is an example of the changes brought by William.
Jongleurs sang about nobles deeds in the court of Charlemagne  chansons des gestes ~ songs
of deeds. Chanson de Roland poem about Roland’s heroic fight against the Saracens and his
death and Charlemagne’s revenge against the enemy and the traitor Ganelon. Success due to
the simplicity of the values promoted  disinterested heroism, love for one’s country, loyalty to
kind and faith  greatest example of the Matter of France.
Historia Regum Britanniae story of Brutus and of his successor, King Arthur, and his knights at the
Round Table. The story of Brutus sounds epic, while Arthur’s defines what will be later called
romance.
King Arthur’s stories, whit their romance, constitute the Matter of Britain. These stories were written
in vernacular rather than in Latin. Chivalry was the system of values existing in the feudal world, so
it was soon going to disappear. The Matter of Britain is still actual and revisited.
La Morte Darthur written by Sir Thomas Malory. Prose version of the Arthurian legend. 1469/1470.
Definitive and canonical version of the legend written in both English and French.
3. Sir Gawain, Pearl, and Piers Plowman.
* Sir Gawain and The Green Knight. Verse romance 2500 lines. Also contains 3 religious poems.
Alliterative verses of OE but more sophisticated in form. Chivalric vision proper to romance.
Mystery, magic and appetite for adventure. Trawthe is the highest of Gawain’s virtue, that’s to say
loyalty and fidelity. Religious values. The existence of courtly love and religion have given rise to
many critical interpretations.
When the poem was written, Richard II had to face up to earls and dukes. He will be forced to
abdicate for the Duke of Lancaster, King Henry IV.
When Malory was writing La Morte Darthur England was being torn apart by the War of The Roses
(1455-85) between Lancaster and York for the throne. Richard III died in battle  King Henry VII,

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Earl of Richmond, who married the daughter of the former king, Edward IV, uniting the houses of
York and Lancaster.
Pearl dream poem ( the most important genre with romance) of 1212 lines. Complex metrical
structure and sophisticated rhetorical constructions. The dreamer falls asleep in a garden and
dreams about his lost daughter, who transforms into Christ’s bride and reveals him the New
Jerusalem. When the dreamer tries to join a procession, he wakes up.
Piers Plowman – William Langland (1330-1386). Dream poem in the alliterative style, written in a
dialect comprehensible in London. Revised 3 times. Journey of Will, the dreamer, searching for
salvation in a corrupted world. Fails. Series of interviews with personified abstractions and with the
3 stages of a good Christian life (Dowell, Dobet and Dobest). End with the realisation of the
kingdom of Christ on earth. Denunciation of the corruption of the church  remembered and
quoted for centuries by the puritans. Denunciation of the sufferings caused by the social system 
Peasants revolt (1831)
4. Chaucer
Second half 14th century (Edward III French wars for the crown, Richard and the suppression of the
Peasants revolt and Henry IV who overthrew him).
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) poet. Served with the English army in France and entrusted with
diplomatic missions for Edward III. Always had important public function, also with king Richard
and Henry.
Imitation e re-elaboration of French models. Encounter with Italian culture  Dante (inspired him
that the vernacular could be used in poetry) and Petrarch (technical and ideological model).
House of fame
Troilus and Criseyde anomalous romance. Rhyme-royal (7-lined stanzas, ababbcc). Story of the
lovers of the title. Label of the tragic with a non-tragic ending. The model was Boccaccio, but
Troilus is original.
The Canterbury Tales stories told by different characters. Different social classes gather at a Inn
before setting out a pilgrimage to Canterbury. Each pilgrim tell 2 stories on the way and 2 on the
way back. 30 pilgrims= 120 tales. Only 22 were completed before Chaucer’s death.
Fabliaux (comic tales, popular setting with a triangle – wife, jealous husband and lover), romance
genre tales and religious tales ( The Clerk’s Tale)
The Nun’s Priest’s Tale was the best tale. Genre of the beast fable. Moral entrusted to animals.
Great formal elegance. Comic effect  human psychology to animal behaviour.
The prologue is interesting for modern readers. Very accurate description of the characters, with
little irony.
The Wife of Bath  formidable character, survived to 5 husbands, expert in the “old dance”.
Incarnates life’s pleasures and the pleasure of living. Her idea of sexuality (woman should have
the dominant role in the relationship except for bed situations) is against that of the church.
The Pardoner  sells indulgences and fake relics just to make money. A full vicious man.
The Pardoner’s Tale 3 young men want to kill Death, finding him by killing each other for money 
money is the root of evil. Tale delivered with great rhetorical skill.
The Parson’s Tale concludes the poem. Long sermon on penitence. Chaucer repudiates all the
works which have no moral intention, enumerating them and including The Canterbury Tales.
The characters remain in our mind telling the pleasures, the weaknesses, the faults and the virtues
of human existence.
5. Interregnum
Chaucer died. Literary mediocrity (he was the model to imitate). Imitation failed in the innovative
aspects of history belonging.
Robert Henryson (1424-1506) remarkable originality. Testament of Cresseid sequel to Chaucer’s
Troilus and Criseyde. Cresseid deserts Troilus for Diomede, who in turn deserts her. She curses Cupid
and the Gods punish her.
Moral attitude. Originality lies in the fact that he took liberties on someone else’s work.
This literary period ends with the conferment by the University of Cambridge of the title of
“laureate” on the poet John Skelton (1460-1529) who defined Chaucer’s language inadequate to
poetry and proposes a new type of verse, really not refined; he was insensitive to Italy’s cultural
innovations.
Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) – works published after his death. Courtier and diplomat, served Henry
VIII on several missions. He was arrested and accused of adultery with Anne Boleyn. Freed.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
His inspiration derived from Petrarch. Many of his poems are actually translation of Petrarch’s
“Rime Sparse”.
Discipline of the Italian verse but with modified scheme for he sonnet  3 quatrains and 1 final
couplet (abba abba cddc ee). Different themes  the loved one is always present (physically
too) and always invited to declare herself.
They Flee From Me poem. Attack on the hypocrisy of the court. Composed in the rhyme-royal.
Compare the attitude of courtiers with a capricious woman.
Henry Howard also translated Petrarch and created the sonnet schema that will be used by
Shakespeare, 3 quatrains and 1 final couplet (abab cdcd efef gg).
He translated the Aeneid’s book II and IV with his own new verse: the blank verse (10 syllables lines
not rhymed with a rhythm not far from the oral.
6. Medieval Drama
Subject matter was an episode of the Bible or the Gospels. 14th century. The Church wanted to
ensure the religious teaching to the majority of the population, even the less educated. In
England this was realised by putting together episodes covering different moments of the annual
cycle of services (gospel accounts of the Passion of Christ). The episodes were performed on
moving platforms on the streets, stopping while playing and then moving and reproducing it
again.
Second Shepherds’ Play – Mak the sheep-stealer tries to hide a stolen ship in his cottage putting it
in a cradler and creating a comic pseudo-Nativity. The episode concludes with a real Nativity.
In the cycle we have moments of realism and comedy, combining doctrine and laughter.
Suppressed in the 16th century.
Morality plays  allegorical conflict between Good and Evil to conquer the character who
represents Humanity. Everyman journey of everyman towards death. Nobody wants to
accompany him (neither Fellowship nor Goods), except Good Deeds and Knowledge. Moral but
not entertaining.
Henry Medwall
Fulgens and Lucrece interlude (played between courses in banquets)
Interludes could be moral plays or comical in genre.
CHAPTER 2: Elizabethan Literature.

1. From Henry to Elizabeth
Henry Tudor (Henry VIII), king in 1509. In 1521 defender of the faith by the Pope, but soon dispute
with the Church, which refused to annul his wedding with Catherine of Aragon. In 1553 he
declared his marriage annulled and married Anne Boleyn.
1534 Act of Supremacy head of the Church of England, monasteries dissolved and their riches
transferred to the crown. 1536 Anne Boleyn executed (supposed adultery) and Henry married
Jane Seymour, who will die in childbirth in 1537.
His son Edward will succeed him in 1547, but he will die in 1553  Mary Tudor (daughter of
Catherine), fervent catholic who persecuted protestants (Bloody Mary). She married Philip II of
Spain  war against France, 1557.
1558 Mary died  Elizabeth (daughter of Anne) became queen. Unstable situation dominated
with prudence and determination.
Religious schism, Anglican Church consolidated, she became the Supreme Governor. Danger to
the throne opposed by Mary  executed.
Nation united under one crown. Economic expansion. Victory over the “invincible” Spanish
Armada in 1588  English domination over the sea.
Attention to her figure, jewels, virgin queen. Compared to the chaste divinities of the classical
world.
The “Cortegiano” by Castiglione and the “Civile Conversazione” by Guazzo expressed the cultural
dimension of the Elizabethan aristocracy.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
2. Philip Sidney
1554-1586 poet. Protestant. Perfect representative of the Elizabethan age, for his strong ideals and
for how he pursued them. Works published posthumously. Lover of the art of poetry.
Defence of Poetry Vindication of the superiority of Literature against history and philosophy. Its
greatness in all countries and times, potential for language (English in particular) development.
Purity of style.
Astrophil And Stella sonnet (108)and songs (11) sequence which describes the love of Astrophil for
Stella. Model of Petrarch with the presence of the author in the foreground.
Concern on how to correctly express feelings in poetry.
Arcadia prose romance containing some verses. Prototype is Sannazaro’s “Arcadia”.
Complex work of revision, added new characters and new twists on the plot.
2 princes love 2 princesses  comic, tragic and dramatic episodes. Setting of the pastoral fantasy
with the adventures proper to romance.
3. Edmund Spencer
1552-1599. poet. Degree of Bachelor and Master of Arts. Already poetically talented at university.
He died in London apparently in poverty.
Appreciated Chaucer, the classics (Latin poetry), but also modern writers. Intention to introduce
into English poetry the elegance and precision of classical poetry.
The Shepherd’s Calendar dedicated to Sidney. 12 pastoral eclogues (1 for each month of the
year). Strong allegorical value  real personages hidden beyond the shepherd’s dialogues.
Themes such as love, morality, religion and poetry are developed.
The Faerie Queene epic/Anglican poem. 6 books (12 planned). Catholicism is the enemy. Queen
Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen, is celebrated. Educate English ruling class  moral lesson for correct
behaviour is given. 1 hero par book every knight is a virtue. Heroic poetry blended with moral
(like Tasso and Ariosto). Ottava rima + one more line rhymed ababbcbcc. Allegory might be
simple to understand or more complex. Allegory used to tell the truth  easier to deny if
unpleasant.
Prothalamion poem. Double marriage of the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester.
Amoretti sonnet sequence dedicated to his second wife
Epithalamion marriage hymn
4. Elizabethan Drama
4.1 Actors and Theatres
Most socially widespread of the arts. The queen loved the theatre. The Protestants hated it
(diabolical imitation of reality). The potential public was enormous, but altogether with the
Protestants, the authorities were against the theatre too (infections, drunk people, spectacles in
daytime would distract people from work).
So the theatres were built in the Bankside, where the brothels were. 1576/1577 two theatres were
build, the Theatre and the Curtain.
Actors were usually vagrants, men without a master. 1572 Vagrancy Act severe penalties for
those found guilty. Only the servants of a nobleman had the right to continue to exercise their job.
Companies: Lord Admiral’s Men, Queen’s Men, Chamberlain’s Men (Shakespeare joined when
the company became King’s Men).
The practice of doubling allowed small companies to stage plays with many characters. Girl’s
roles played by young men  limited female parts. Tale in which a girl disguises herself as a man
without the other characters being aware of the fact.
The companies needed a stable base in which perform. The theatres had circular shape, made of
wood. The “pit”  standing spectator, 1penny the entrance.
Performances in the daylight, fixed and not changeable background, space and time were to
understand by the words of the actors. Direct relationship with the public.
End of the 16th century  private theatres arose. Since the performances were very expensive,
only a restricted social class could afford them.
Companies invented plays which could be performed both in private and in public theatres.
During the reign of James I the public began to split up, the most cultivated decided to go to
private theatres, and in the reign of Charles I the theatre addressed itself to an elite public.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
4.2 Plays and Playwrights

High demand for novelty and diversity in plays  in public theatres a different show every day 
30 new plays a year.
The inspirational source for the new plays were romances and the Italian novellas, Roman history,
mythical and legendary heritage of the classical world, from 1582 English history, and
contemporary goings- on (crime news etc)  inspiration from fiction or from real life.
Sometimes writers worked together on the same text, without arranging it for publication. Texts
were not always published because of companies were afraid that rival companies could use
them. Pirate editions flourished (they were based on reconstructions of the actors taking part).
Genres:
 Comedy  generally a romantic comedy. Misunderstandings and mistaken identities.
Later love and gentle smiles will be substituted with money and harsh satire. First English
comedy was Ralph Roister Doister
 Tragedy  less practised than comedy. Seneca was the model but was interpreted in a
bloodthirsty way. From Seneca also derived the “revenge tragedy” (Hamlet). Metric of the
blank verse. The first English tragedy was Gorboduc
 History play  traditional conception of the time when presenting past events, “mirror for
magistrates”, containing a lesson given often by the fall of the powerful (legitimize the
power of present day rulers, strengthen Elizabeth’s role)
 Tragicomedy.
Seneca, Plautus and Terence were translated and used as models.
4.3 Marlowe
1564-1593 playwright
University Wit and spy for the Queen. Mortally wounded in a fake tavern brawl because the secret
services decided he was no longer useful.
His characters were monolithic and grandiose in their wickedness  shocking and extreme
actions. The public of the time was fascinated and amazed thanks to their taste for excess.
Tamburlaine the Great heroic and cruel story of a Scythian shepherd who rises to become
emperor by killing everyone on his way to the throne.
Power and beauty of the verse.
The Jew of Malta tragedy.
Barabas, the protagonist, is to achieve vengeance. Denunciation of the hypocrisy of the
Christians and their prejudice against Jews.
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus morality play
Faustus challenges God, but he makes a bargain with the Devil to obtain power, honour,
boundless knowledge in exchange of his soul. Sympathy of the audience both because he is torn
between sin and penitence and because we know he will be damned for having excessively
desired what we all desire.
Edward II historical tragedy.
Tragedy revolves around for characters of dramatic force. Their quest for power almost brings the
country to catastrophe.
The hero is a king with limited political and military capacities  tries to assert power over constant
insubordination. Desire for power and sexual desire will ruin him.
Marlowe posed with this work the problem of the legitimacy of the power.
Great poet and theatre writer, who entrusted the blank verse for writing his plays
CHAPTER 3: William Shakespeare

1. Life and Works
1564-1616 Stratford-upon-Avon. Poet and playwright
Except from the wedding with Anne Hathaway, his life is a mystery.
He is the author of his works. Heminges and Condell collected his works into the First Folio in 1623.
When theatres were closed because of the plague (1592/94), he wrote his poems, Venus and
Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and some comedies/tragedies (probably Romeo and Juliet).
As mentioned before, plays didn’t often become books, so, in order to date Shakespeare’s works
we can rely on external data and internal textual elements  “original” scripts + pirate editions
(called bad quartos) + First Folio.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
In the First Folio instead of the original works, we can find the scripts that Heminges and Condell
were able to find, and so maybe containing variants.
1594 theatres reopened  Lord Chamberlain’s Men were formed and Shakespeare joined.
In those years he wrote comedies and history plays. 1599 The Globe was completed. In the
theatre company performed the “Roman tragedies” and the tragedies.
In the years of the great tragedies they were the King’s Men.
1608 new plague  King’s Men moved to a private theatre, and Shakespeare developed the
tragicomedy, and wrote The Tempest.
He also collaborated with Fletcher on 2 plays, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Henry VIII.
Shakespeare attended grammar school, had a great memory (he was and actor himself) and
was an extensive reader. He might not have experience of the world gained through adventures ,
but London was a metropolis in which information poured in easily, and he was able to make the
stories he heard his own and exalt them with the language of poetry.
Shakespeare’s works are fascinate in the way they are told, whatever is the subject, we seem to
hear the most extraordinary tale ever told  amazing storyteller, who used the drama as a form of
telling.
Theatrical conventions allowed his genius to explode. Aristotelian idea of place and time with
Elizabethan’s mobility and independence  switch of time and place were fluid and credible.
Language is at the centre of his art  everyday speech with sudden unexpected locutions give
unusual tone to the content (whatever is said on stage is true by convention).
His plays speak to our sensibility too. He was a man of his time, so the things he said and believed
belong to his time, and must be understood by such.
Shakespeare instead of recreating the archetype of the ancient heroes or values created an
archetype of an attitude and a form of experience which could be common to each of us, giving
his characters the status of myth. Name of the characters are now synonyms with a mode of
being.
2. Histories
3 interlinked historical dramas about Henry VI and a sequel about Richard III  Shakespeare
wanted to deal with crucial political problems. Different themes common to all his history plays:
responsibilities of the king, disasters caused by opposing forces within the nation, national unity,
legitimacy of a kingship. Important educational value for the less cultured  reflect on the nature
of power. The interest derives from the dramatic vigour and the theatrical fascination exercised by
the play’s protagonist.
Richard III the protagonist has extraordinary rhetorical artistry and is a figure of evil. Richard’s aim is
to conquer power and his cruelty enables him to acquire it. Makes imposture an art of politics.
Richard the tyrant can be compared to our tyrants.
Richard II is written to deal with the legitimacy of kingships. Powerful dramatic power figure of
the unfortunate and weak king gains the sympathy of the audience.
Henry IV (part 1 and 2) travails of the new king, the usurper Bolinbroke, with the rebellion of earls
and archibishops and of his son, Prince Henry.
Figure of Falstaff, comic, liar and pretender, spokesman of the pleasures of life. He is free and
instruct us on how to be free from society. Henry IV dies  Henry V.
The play was on screens after WW2  national pride against Nazism and statement of war’s
cruelty.
3. Comedies
The Taming of the Shrew strict moral but with the vitality of Petruchio, the protagonist, and the
comic exchanges with Kate. The play can be turned into a musical, or played as if it was a
fantasy dreamt by the drunken Sly (play within a play dreamt up by Sly).
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is presented as play within the play. Enjoyable for children because
of fairies, songs and magic spells. Acts I and V take place in Athens, while Acts II, III and IV take
place in the wood. The magic is performed in the wood. A play is performed at the Duke’s
wedding.
Even if we don’t believe in magic and the characters deny what happened, we know that
everything is real  magic of the theatre.
Often the real protagonists of Shakespeare’s plays are women, beautiful, intelligent and witty.
Since female roles were performed by male actors, Shakespeare devised plots in which girls were
dressed as a man for most of the play.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
As You Like It Forest of Arden, Orlando and Rosalind have separately taken refuge to escape
dangers at court. Shakespeare unmasks the conventions of the pastoral genre  Rosalind
unmasks the convention of love by dressing like a countryman. Orlando does not recognise her.
Power of love. Highly symbolic finale (marriage), with the false ideas about life and love
unmasked.
Twelfth Night love triangle, woman disguised as a man. The comic situation is enriched by the
complication generated by the resemblance between Viola and Cesario. Happy ending.
Psychological verisimilitude is not obligatory.
Shakespeare’s comedies take place in fantasy locations (Verona is not Verona etc…)
Moral in randomly given as a pearl of wisdom by characters, or by a Fool, to whom is usually given
the hidden sense of the play, who is less important than most characters but often wiser.
The Merchant Of Venice the protagonist will choose a husband by subjecting her suitors to a test
specified in her father’s will. She disguises herself as a man too. Anti-Semitism is presented in the
play and in the London of the time. The words the Jew speaks are extraordinary and simple and
make him a man like the rest of us. We don’t care if Shakespeare also shared prejudices towards
Jews, we only care about what he wrote.
4. The great tragedies and the Tempest
Romeo and Juliet one of the major and one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s tragedies. Story
of the 2 star-cross’d lovers, victims of the hatred between their two households.
Unfortunate concatenation of events or tragic depth of characters? Scholars disagree.
Same unhappy fate arouses the painful engagement of the audience. A love in which there is no
fault will be rewarded only with death. The core of the tragedy is the feud between the 2
households, and leads to the death of the lovers. Private story not separable from public context
 events reconstruction only in the finale, with the reconciliation of the families.
Hamlet revenge tragedy. Hamlet do not manage to carry out his vengeance until the end of act
V, when he returns home.
The power of the tragedy derives from Hamlet (not from the plot), who is on stage almost all the
time. He directly speaks to the audience with soliloquies of great poetic intensity.
To us Hamlet is the hero who can reflect on the meaning of life, and make us reflect on it as well.
“it is we who are Hamlet”. It is still modern. Hamlet belongs to our world. Denmark deprived of
order and balance  this can be applied to the whole world.
Othello strategic opacity  hide explanatory elements of the motivation of the characters.
This theory can be applied to the character of Iago, who convinces Othello that Desdemona has
cheated on him. When Othello asks him why he das deceived him he answers “ask me nothing”.
Othello shows us how reason can be overpowered by emotion, and how we can be nullified by
the irrationality of feelings. Jealousy robs Othello of the ability to understand and leads him to his
wife’s murder. When he will discover the truth, he will kill himself.
Different interpretations of the suicide and of Othello’s last speech  seal pity and compassion for
his fate.
King Lear strategic opacity. The king abdicates and leaves his kingdom to his 3 daughters, equally
divided. All of a sudden the king says he will extend his bounty to whoever of the daughters will
demonstrate with words that she loves him most. Cordelia, who does love him most, fails, and we
don’t know why.
Tragedy about power, but also tragedy about fathers unable to understand their children.
Cruelty reins unopposed, and humans act like beasts in the pre-Christian world, where there is no
hope for a merciful God.
Macbeth is the “Scottish play”, a modification of Holinshed’s “Chronicles”.
Macbeth is a grandiose embodiment of evil, tormented by doubt, in the end his thirst for power
leads him to the murder of the king putting the blame on his officers. His friend Banquo is also put
to death. Lady Macbeth is driven by evil determination. She is the mind behind Macbeth actions,
she convinces him to kil15l both the king and Banquo. She then loses her mind (without and
explanation).
In the cruelty of his actions, in Macbeth remains a glint of humanity.
Antony and Cleopatra last of the great tragedies. The source is Plutarch, brilliantly reworked.
Theme: passion vs reason. Cleopatra and her irrational, capricious and warm country against
Octavian’s roman world, which is cold and calculating.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Antony loves Cleopatra, and is caught between two worlds. He falls  his passion will lead him to
deny his Roman-ness.
Shakespeare was a businessman, his last works reflect the taste for tragicomedy which had
developed in the last years of his career  make more use of music.
The Tempest music and sound effects are a decisive element of the plot, it is a Masque.
Prospero’s island recalls a Caribbean island encountered by English ships on their way to the
Americas. Caliban is portrayed as the inhabitants of the new world were. He is a symbol of
exploitation, since The Tempest can be seen under the light of the theme of colonialism.
Prospero guides the plot towards a happy ending.
The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s finest creations, and a farewell to the magic of theatre.
5. Poems
1592-1595 he wrote 2 long poems (theatres closed for the plague) + a volume of Sonnets.
Venus And Adonis erotico-mythological poetry. Recounts in a sensual style how Venus tries to
seduce Adonis.
The Rape of Lucrece language full of verbal artifice to tell one of the grimmest episodes of the
Roman history.
Sonnets the order was probably decides by the publisher.154 sonnets divided into 2 sections: 1 to
126 are concerned with a young man, 127 to 154 are concerned with a Dark Lady. Many
hypothesis on the identities of these people. The sonnets are not to be considered
autobiographical  personal relations in friendship and love, and offer the reader many
reflections.
Theme of the immortality of poetry and the immortality that poetry confers.
Challenge to time and immortality thanks to childbirth and poetry.
The sonnets of the second part deal with the Dark Lady, and the sufferings caused by his love for
her. Linguistic grace and originality.
CHAPTER 4: The early 17th century

1. James I and Charles I
1603 Elizabeth died  James Stuart (son of Mary Queen of Scots)first Stuart king of England  King
of Great Britain. Royal absolutism and incomprehension of the right of the Parliament. Policy of
international peace-making (with Spain)unpopular.
James was cultivated. Promoted a new translation of the Bible, which formed one of the main
linguistic and cultural reference point of the English-speaking world.
1625 James died  his second son Charles became King and married Henrietta Maria, sister of
Louis XIII of France. He was a patron of the arts, like his father was. He also believed in the absolute
power of the crown, not capable of coming to terms with the House of Commons. Civil War broke
out in 1642, ending with the defeat of the King.
2. Jacobean and Caroline Drama
Theatre lost its unitary character. James favoured the genre of the Masque, which had already
established itself during Elizabeth’s rein. Main features: extravagant costumes, music, dancing,
special effects provided by purpose-built machines  huge cost  performed only at court or in
the palaces of the aristocracy.
Legitimate drama continued to exist, even if during Charles’s rein the theatre aspired to the
approval of a refined and exclusive public rather than being “universal” as it used to be.
2.1 Ben Jonson
1572-1637. Poet and dramatist. Comedy of Humours
Classical culture was his guide both for poetry and for drama. He edited and published his works
in a volume  The works of Ben Jonson (also containing his plays)
He wrote comedies and tragedies respecting the unities of place and time. His comedies are set
in the real world of his time (London)
Bartholomew Fair
Every Man in His Humour  Comedy of Humours is the expression used to define his comedies. The
for humours are blood, phlegm (flemma), choler (collera) and melancholy. A man should be
governed with a proportioned mixture of all of them, while Jonson’s characters are dominated by
only one of the humours, breaking the equilibrium and creating the comic situation through the
interaction of the conflicting humours of different characters.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
The Alchemist set in a house of London, which has been abandoned by its owner (Mr Lovewit). In
his absence a fake alchemist and Lovewit’s servant engage a series of deceptions by promising
various characters the fulfilment of their desires. The deceived characters are shown as petty and
their deceivers are so ingenious that moral judgement gives way to laughter. No punishment is
inflicted, because the victims are no better than the tricksters.
Volpone Takes place in Venice, but it’s actually representing London. The rich man Volpone
pretends to be seriously ill in order to get gifts from his would-be heirs.
Jonson’s 2 masterpieces have different endings: Volpone is punished and morality and law win.
The ending is more tragic than comic.
The author is expressing in both plays his conservative point of view of his society, displaying a
profound contempt for the rising merchant classes + disapproval of human follies.
Different attitude towards the upper classes  embodying Renaissance values .
Jonson’s social, aesthetic and cultural credo is expressed in his poem To Penshurst, dedicated to
the Sidney family. The Sidney’s were an example of civilisation, relationship between art and
power.
Jonson was a master in writing Masques (he wrote 28 of them), and is famous for creating the
Antimasque  strange representation in which appeared grotesque figures representing chaos
and disorder, performed by professional actors. At a certain point the real Masque begins,
performed by members of the nobility present at the spectacle.
Jonson’s texts present complex allegories on the contrast of good against evil. The king was the
incarnation of moral virtues.
Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue most representative Masque. Full of symbolic meanings and
references to classical and Renaissance culture. Celebration of James I.
Jonson was appointed Poet Laureate in 1616, London City Chronologer in 1628.
2.2 Fletcher, Heywood, Middleton, Webster
John Fletcher (1579-1625)
Remembered for the two plays he wrote with Shakespeare: Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen.
The genre of which he was a master was the tragicomedy.
The Faithful Shepherdess was not a success.
He then collaborated with Francis Beaumont in some tragicomedies  language close to
ordinary speech. Their plays enjoyed great success at the court of James I and Charles I.
Plot complexity, presences of a double or an opposite for many of the characters, moral
difficulties of the hero, music and dance sequences.
Comedies  The Knight of the Burning Pestle (partial flop), The Wild Goose Chase described as a
social satire on the relationship between marriage and interest.
City comedy  last years of the 16th century  Jacobean period. The setting is London and the
story is about daily life of the time. Characters belong to the middle classes whose attitude are
those of the puritans. Their ambitions were often the object of satire for playwrights.
The leading author of city comedies was Tomas Middleton (1580-1627). He wrote ferocious
comedies which offered a photographic representation of the less attractive side of the life of
that time. A Trick to Catch the Old One farcical comedy in which dissipation and avarice are
shown as normal; the vice of youth comes out victorious. A Mad World My Master this time youth
loses.
Middleton’s masterpiece is A Chaste Maid In Cheapside. Four plots involving four London families.
Merchant class is full of double dealers and liars obsessed with money. Negative idea of humanity.
Tragedy Women Beware Women set in Italy. Everything is driven by lust, money and the quest for
power. The Changeling set in Spain. Here is presented a villain, a very common figure in
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
The Revenger’s Tragedy. The genre was very popular at the time. They were all set in Italy which
was imagined as the country of the corrupt and cynical catholic courts. The plot is extremely
complex and full of deceits, coincidences, disguises. The moral is that vengeance is something
that only god can do. Another successful genre is the domestic tragedy which deals with
everyday situations.
Thomas Heywood (1573-1641)A Woman Killed with Kindness example of domestic tragedy. It
contains a moral that puritans would appreciate + modern times. Many of the plays were written
in the first part of James I’s reign but they still are called Elizabethan.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
John Webster (1578-1632)The White Devil stereotypical Italian atmosphere even if names and
events really took place  dark, violent, blasphemous and corrupt. In the final part of the tragedy
we have a focus shift from intrigues to death. No moral concern.
The Duchess of Malfi succession of deceits and crimes  psychological richness of the characters
+ pity aroused by the suffering of the innocent. Echoes of Shakespeare.
The main character is accused of violation of the established order but is portrayed as a
completely positive character.
Webster’s tragedies have dramatic constructions, coups de scène, topoi and figures of the
Elizabethan theatre. The only certain value is obedience to power. Court of James I = Italian
corrupt courts.
2.3 Ford
During the Caroline period, tragedies, comedies, tragicomedies and masques were written and
were very appreciated in the courts. Unfortunately none of them survived, except Ford’s.
John Ford (1586-1640)’Tis Pity She’s a Whore tragedy on incest taboo. Love presented as a spiritual
union  a sanctuary. Absolute love which could survive only if undiscovered.
The Broken Heart set in Spain, with no parallels to his time or to the court of Charles I. Feelings
which are absolute and shape and dominate characters’ fate. Dramatic power of its blank verse.
3. Poetry
3.1 Donne
John Donne (1572-1631)sermons, religious writings and hymns. Ascetic life. Brought up as a
catholic. Travelled on the continent. Wrote poetry. Abandoned Catholicism, he became a royal
chaplain and got a degree. 12 children. After his wife’s death, religious dimension became a
central topic.
Central theme is love. Love of God can also be physical, erotic.
Holy sonnets address to God for His mercy.
Songs and Sonnets no sonnets  lyrics of varying length and with different metrical properties
(depends on what he wants to communicate).
Sometimes platonic and spiritual love, more often physical and erotic.
The woman is asked to accept love. She is not an icon, the poet addresses himself directly (to her)
in the first line with an abrupt opening.
Dramatic dimension of love is also represented. Psychologically concrete datum hidden under
rhetorical artifices  different from Elizabethan poetry.
“Metaphysical”  wit (acutezza, perspicacia) typical of baroque poetry, where artifice and
wonderment are an end in themselves.
Donne = rhetorical cunning  strike out unexpected truths.
3.2 Metaphysical poets.
Rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century. Some are more metaphysical than others.
George Herbert 1593-1633 priest. Friend of Donne. He is considered to be less metaphysical.
The Temple volume of poems. Religious unity recalled by the image of the Greek temple
conflicts between God and Herbert’s soul.
Less quality than Donne.
Richard Crashaw 1612-1649 son of a puritan preacher. Converted to Catholicism. He is considered
to be more metaphysical.
Steps to the Temple homage to Herbert only in the title. Inspiration from Marino and the Spanish
myths. Metaphors and extravagant conceits  baroque. Intensity of religious feelings + originality
of imagery in his poetry.
3.3 The Cavalier Poets
Lyrics poets who wrote about love and loyalty to king Charles I  lightness of tone + wit +
controlled form. More appealing to the Victorian taste than the Metaphysical poets.
Robert Herrick 1591-1674 from the city moved to the country.
Hesperides lyric collection. 1400 poems refined stylistically  echoes of classical poetry.
Idealised rural world (pastoral tradition) but also a more realistic rural world (English tradition) is
represented.
Pastoral world into which to escape. Free sensual satisfaction and happy love.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
4. Bacon
Elizabethan + Jacobean period’s prose was about thieves  warning honest people from the
provinces of the dangerous life in the metropolis  entertainment  arouse reader’s curiosity on
the exciting world of low life.
The finest prose writer was Francis Bacon 1561-1626 who was not a man of letters but a politician
and a writer of philosophical and scientific texts.
Essays direct and essential style.
The New Atlantis published after his death.
Discover of the island of Bensalem  home of and ideal state.
Attention shift from politics to science  research which could improve the life in Bensalem 
hope that James I would establish a similar institution in England = commonwealth + establishment
of the royal society.
“Instauratio Magna” programme of intellectual and scientific reform started with Advancement of
Learning. Writing in LAT or ENG  study should be based on experiments not on theory.
Clarity of expression + flowing arguments  rhetorical devices with simple style.
Shakespeare written by Bacon?
CHAPTER 5: Revolution and Restoration

1. A Century of revolutions
1640 Charles I summoned Parliament to finance his war against Scotland. He fled to the north and
the first phase of the civil war started (1642-46)  defeat of the royalists.
Second phase of the civil war  the king and his allies were crushed by Cromwell (leader of the
parliamentary forces). Charles I sentenced to death and executed in 1649.
Cromwell first chairman of the council of state of the new republic. 1653 dissolved parliament and
became Lord Protector.
Cromwell death 1658  his son Richard proclaimed Lord Protector. Dismissed by parliament in
1659. 1660 Charles (son of Charles I) became king Charles II. Alliance with France. Death  his
brother James became king, he was catholic and hostile to parliament. He was deposed by
parliament in 1668. Mary (his daughter) became queen with her husband, William of Orange.
It was not a bloodless revolution, but a Great Revolution, which gave rise to the very first
constitutional monarchy. Parliament became the centre of political life. The people represented
by it were from the bourgeoisie.
2. Marvell
Andrew Marvell 1621-1678 student of the classics. After the restoration he wrote satires both in
prose and in verse. Remembered as a satirist, but he also wrote lyrics.
Miscellaneous Poems out of fashion, because related to that of the metaphysical poets.
Rhetorical virtuosity + wit. Beauty of nature, of flowers and gardens (he is also called the “green”
poet). Nature observation generate reflections on human condition  multiplicity of interpretation.
To His Coy (schivo) Mistress theme of carpe diem. Wait imposed for desire causes death when
“beauty shall no more be found”.
Irony and wit. Erotic invitation to the loved one.
3. Milton
John Milton 1608-1674 second only to Shakespeare. Great poet: the voice that spoke to the british
nation the divine message. Protestant. Active during the civil war. Study of the classics, as an
intellectual he was active in community of citizens. He wrote in ENG, but also in ITA and LAT.
Deeply studied the classics and Shakespeare.
Study of high literature  subvert and rearrange; separate from aristocratic culture.
Lycidas pastoral elegy on the premature death of a young student. Reflection on the apparent
serenity of nature. From classical tradition, the poem takes on Christian overtones  message on
consolation. Poet is now active in the real world.
Comus masque. Here there is no pre-existing perfect world, perfection is to be pursued.
During the civil war Milton wrote on religious and political subjects  defender of the principle of
liberty. He was against bishops.
On Education Treatise. Reformation of the traditional educational system, with literary and
philosophical disciplines as its heart.
Aeropagitica Speech. freedom of the press.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Milton also wrote 4 pamphlets on divorce inspired by his personal experience  adultery +
incompatibility as legitimate ground for divorce.
The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates essay which justifies the execution of Charles I  the power of
the king resides with the people.
Poems in ENG, LAT, ITA.
The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth defence of the republican cause.
After the restoration some copies were publicly burnt.
Paradise Lost poem. Probably started before restoration. Milton was blind, and had to dictate the
hole poem (10 books, 12 in the second edition, as in Virgil’s Aeneid).
Protagonists are Adam and Eve, ancestors of the human race.
Constant comparison with the epic. The poem has the fundamental principle of the epic poem:
the story constitutes for the whole of humanity an occasion to imagine its own collective identity,
based on shared values.
The epic is the story of a victory  paradise lost is the story of a defeat. The fall of Adam is the
archetype of the fall experienced by men and women.
The poem starts with a literal fall  that of Satan.
The beginning is in medias res with jumps backward and forward in time towards the end, which is
not victory but necessary acceptance.
There is no positive hero. The values on which human civilisation should be based are different
from those of the great epic  humility and meekness, temperance, friendship, conjugal love,
labour (protestant values). Love and labour are dear to Milton  LOVE: the ideal relationship
between husband and wife is that which existed in Eden. Woman is admired for her submission to
the man. “we are one/one flesh: to lose thee were to lose myself”. LABOUR: opposed to the ideals
of the aristocratic class. Work is a pleasant task.
Anglican church is corrupt  second coming of Christ, final overcoming of Satan. Paradise is lost
forever, but they will be able to find a “paradise within” by hard working, with love and virtue.
Paradise Lost had an enormous influence in English poetry and literature  linguistic and formal
point of view. Forms proper of LAT, ITA or GRE. Milton used the blank verse (Elizabethan tragedy)
4. Bunyan
John Bunyan (1622-1688) Serve in the Civil War for the Parliamentary army. Arrested because he
was protestant  12 years in jail.
The Pilgrim’s Progress religious allegory. Enormous success, important for the formation of
American culture.
Second Part of the Pilgrim published because there were many fake sequels of the previous book.
Same pilgrimage but done by the wife and children of the original protagonist. The whole story is
presented as a dream. Allegorical characters and dream with attention to details and realistic
features. Episode of the Vanity Fair, where everything is for sale. In this episode the protagonist is
taken to court and tried, and here we see how Bunyard reveals the absurdity of legal logic. Same
idea of Milton’s hell (represented vices and sins associated with the aristocracy).
Simple prose, realism of dialogues, the pilgrim is an ordinary human being  wider readership 
story in which ordinary people face extraordinary adventures.
5. Restoration Drama
Puritans closed the theatres in 1642, but in 1660 they reopened thanks to Charles II  only two
theatre companies, but with new theatres, built on the French/Italian model (u shaped). New
scenery  no more representation of space and time entrusted to the actors + female roles
performed by female actresses.
The public was different from the Elizabethan drama  aristocracy and rich people.
Repertory was provided by earlier dramatists (Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, Shirley). Restoration
tragedy was modelled on that of Corneille  no excesses of language with the action typical of
previous English tragedies. Shakespeare was “improved”.
Moderation, clarity and order  metre used was the heroic couplet = pair of rhyming verses of 10
syllables (used by Chaucer).

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
5.1 Dryden
John Dryden 1631-1700 poet, playwright and essayst.
Of Dramatic Power essay
Heroique Stanzas on the death of Cromwell
Astraea Redux poem on the return of the king.
Topics = great political events + questions of politics and religion. He was presented as an
opportunist, since he praised whoever was in power. He converted to Catholicism.
Annus Mirabilis poem
The Hind and the Panther poem. Complex allegories to criticise the Anglican church.
The glorious revolution deprived him of his laureateship and excluded him from politics  he
remained catholic.
Translated Latin poets.
Dryden’s first plays were verse and prose comedies.
The Rival Ladies comedy. the metre was the heroic couplet.
The Indian Emperor tragedy. Heroic couplet. Great success.
Subject matter  love, honour, duty, loyalty (Orlando Furioso)  heroic tragedy, with the heroic
couplet.
All for Love tragedy. Use of the blank verse. Political and amorous vicissitudes of Antony and
Cleopatra. 7 distinct settings and 10 characters, in a single place and on a single day. Contrast
between two cultural poles, Egypt and Rome. The protagonists are well portrayed (dramatically
and psychologically). Beautiful verses.
Marriage à la Mode comedy. Question the institution of marriage in alignment with the attitudes
of aristocratic circles. Happy ending.
Amphitryon comedy.
5.2 Restoration comedy
Many types  political themes, Spanish inspiration, imitations of Molière + London comedy.
London comedy  subject matter was the world of the metropolitan high society  “heroes”
young gentlemen and ladies of that social class, who have wit. The comedy of manners is the
type of London comedy which had most success  satire on the customs and manners of the
day.
The fop is the object of ridicule, he is often defined by one type of defect. The fop also believes to
be a wit.
[Wit = a quickness and variety in linking together concepts and ideas for entertainment and
pleasantry]
The point of reference of all these plays was London. People from the countryside, even
gentlemen, were depicted as clumsy and ridiculous.
5.2.1 Etherege
George Etherege 1635-1693
The Comical Revenge comedy. 4 interlinked plots in 4 different social strata with 4 different
languages spoken.
She Would if She Could London comedy. Great success.
The Man of Mode comedy of manners. Its sub-title is “or, Sir Fopling Flutter”. To fop here unmasks
the vain and superficial essence of the high society he was trying to impersonate. But the
protagonist is Dorimant, a libertine (rake). In the comedy of manners the rake is motivated by
eroticism  always absolved in the end and this makes him to be seen as a positive figure. In the
man of mode the rake falls in love and at the end he asks her to marry him.
The courtship is in reality a duel, both psychological and linguistic  the young lady’s weapon is
her wit.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
5.2.2 Wycherley
William Wycherley 1640-1716 lived for five years in France and returned to England for the
Restoration. Appreciated Molière, and used some of his episodes in his plays.
The Country Wife comedy of manners. Here the rake-hero remains a libertine until the end. The
rake pretends to be a eunuch in order to easily seduce the ladies of respectable society. In this
play Wycherley attacks the forms which regulate social relations and elevates appearance to the
level of truth  social conventions which replace honour with reputation.
Clever construction of the play, lively dialogues, comic charm of country life + the character of
Horner, who is not condemned. This is not a sex comedy, as some would define it.
The Plain Dealer openly derives from “le Misanthrope” by Molière.
Love in a Wood comedy of intrigue based on a play by Calderón.
The Gentleman Dancing-Master
5.2.3 Congreve
William Congreve 1670-1729 leading author of Restoration theatre. Elegant dialogues, brilliant
linguistic invention.
The Old Bachelor comedy of manners. Light-hearted tone.
The Double Dealer comedy of manners. satirical. The protagonist is a negative character. He
comes close to winning over the audience to his point of view. In the end he is unmasked.
Love for Love comedy of manners. Huge success. The satire is centred around the protagonist,
who pretends to be mad and shows the hypocrisy of the social convention to which they all
subscribe. Sense of ridiculousness generated from their behaviour.
The Glorious Revolution brought hostilities to aspects typical of Restoration comedy (pamphlet “A
Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage”)
The Way of the World comedy of manners in which none of the features of the pamphlet is
present one of the finest text of the Restoration theatre. Economic aspect of marriage plays a
key role.
Portrait of society dominated by conventions shows that no member of that society is exempt
from it.
Comic secondary characters. Lightness and effervescence of dialogues, rhythm and musicality.
This was Congreve’s last comedy because he believed there was no longer place for the genre
he wrote.
5.2.4 Farquhar
George Farquhar 1677-1707 Irish actor, left Dublin for London because he accidentally killed a
fellow actor  in London wrote comedies in which he combined situations familiar to Restoration
comedies with Irish originality.
The Recruiting Officer comedy based on his experience in the army. The tone is of laughter at the
foolishness of the victims. The action is placed outside London without the style typical of the
comedy of manners, but with open-minded attitudes of the genre and its casual realism.
The Beaux’ Stratagem comedy, his masterpiece. The action also takes place in a provincial town.
Farquhar uses concepts of Milton’s pamphlet on divorce turned into dialogues for his characters.
Moral and modern resolution of the story  theatrical escamotage  make possible on stage
what is impossible in real life.
5.2.5 Conclusion
There are many types of Restoration comedy. The ones that survived time are the comedies of
manners  typical features and topoi of universal comedy but root in their own time, with
characteristics of the historical reality of the Restoration period. Marriage contract is nothing but a
contract. The comedies of manners put at their centre the relations between sexes (amorous and
institutional). These comedies offer the spectators a dream of how they themselves would like to
be. Marriage as institution is object of satire  marriage of interest presented as a cause of falsity
and unhappiness.
The writers of comedy of manners often forced reality  love could overcome every obstacle 
wanted to dive voice to the hope for a better world in which hypocrisy and power of money were
annihilated.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
CHAPTER 6: The Eighteenth Century

1. A Century of Contradictions.
When William died in 1702, Anne, second daughter of James II, became queen  last English
queen to wear the crown. No children  1714 Georg Ludwig became king George I  his
successors George II, III, IV, William IV and queen Victoria are the so called Hanoverian dynasty.
During the first two Georges the kingdom was in the hands of the parliament, in particular in the
hand of the two parties, the Whigs and Tories. Foreign and military policy led in1763 to the Treaty
of Paris  Britain acquired Canada, Florida and part of the west Indies (already had India)  most
powerful colonial power in the world.
1783 American Revolution  loss of colonies but not of money.
1793 French Revolution.
In literature the first half of the century is called Augustan Age (inspired by Latin culture = Neo-
classical age)  art should imitate nature.
Century of Enlightenment world which had faith in the authority of Reason  Reasons if the
heart.
The second half of the century is in fact that of Sensibility  cult of the feelings, co-present with
Reason.
2. Parody and Satire
2.1 Pope
Alexander Pope 1688-1744 poet (physically deformed), the first who made a living from his works.
Faith in poetry (educative) + love for elegance and clarity of classical poetry.
Essay on Criticism concept of imitation of nature. Use of the heroic couplet guarantee classical
purity.
Pastorals inspired by Virgil. Pastoral genre to represent an ideal state of life.
The Rape of the Lock mock-heroic poem. The tragi-comic events are presented with the noble
tones of the epic  comic effect because of the gap between reality and how it is told
(rhetorical features). Allusions to other masterpieces, including the Aeneid and Paradise Lost. The
satirical tone is accompanied by a recognition of the elegance and grace which that society
attempted to cultivate.
Pope also translated the Iliad
Eloisa to Abelard elegy. Treats the themes of love and passion.
Pope could not enter university because he was a Catholic + insults because he was physically
deformed  wrote a satire on the literary world  Empire of Dullness, contained in the 3 volumes
of The Dunciad, mock-epic poem. Pope added a 4th volume in which the satire is against a poet
laureate of his time  kingdom of the inversion of civilised values.
Pope’s satire is moved by sincere indignation expressed by the grace and rigour of the heroic
couplet.
2.2 Swift
Jonathan Swift 1667-1745 his satire was marked by bitterness and disgust. Irish. When young
supported the Whig party and he never had a shower, then switched to the Tories. When the
Whig took the power he left London and returned to Ireland.
A Modest Proposal pamphlet on the poverty in Ireland  selling young children as meat for rich
people.
The Battle of the Books battle between ancient and modern writers (modern lose)
A Tale of a Tub satire on contemporary political and religious controversies.
Gulliver’s Travels satire censored and reduced to its first 2 parts in order to become an adventure
story for children. Gulliver’s travels can be also read as a parody of existing works of the genre
(traveller’s tales). The story is divided into 4 books. The characters of Gulliver is honest  this
enabling Swift to create ironic or satirical effects deriving from the fact that there is no irony or
satire in Gulliver’s statements. Book I  shipwreck on the isle of Lilliput. Book II  Brobdingnag.
Book III  flying isle of Laputa. Book IV  country of the Houyhnhnms.
Ferocious satire on English society and politics, on George I, on Walpole (prime minister), on
religious quarrels between Catholics and Protestants, on the administration of justice  most of all,
on humankind.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Swift is described as a misanthrope  he is a moral philosopher who hates false ideals, lies and
injustices against individuals or communities.
He is also said to be a misogynist, but in his Journal to Stella, a birthday poem to Stella, he shows
sweetness and tenderness.
2.3 Gay and Fielding
Satire and parody are at the root of the most interesting theatrical productions of the first half of
the 18th century.
The most appreciated genre was the “exemplary” comedy  Richard Steele 1672-1729 and
Joseph Addison 1672-1719, both Irish, and both famous for the magazines they founded,
addressed to men and women of the bourgeoisie to whom they gave information on varying
topics (from literature to science etc.).
Belonging to the bourgeoisie wasn’t so bad  their ideals were superior to those of the past  do
not feel inferior to the aristocracy.
John Gay 1685-1732
The Beggar’s Opera “ballad opera”, contained 69 songs, or ballads, divided into 3 acts. The
technique of inversion realised satire and parody. The most important inversion is related to social
values (and not to the songs as we may think) the heroes are bandits/prostitutes. Order inverted
also in politics, since the malefactors seems to represent the prime minister Walpole and the Whig
party. Mistrust for a social order dominated by the bourgeoisie. The public enjoyed the opera,
especially the parody of the Italian opera (viewed with suspicion because it was foreign and
favoured by aristocracy) + parody of the dialogue between Brutus and Cassius in Shakespeare’s
Julio Caesar.
Lively dialogue, twists of plot, satire against the domination of money + sympathy for the idea of
criminals in roles of power.
*Henry Fielding 1707-1754 best known as a novelist, also wrote plays (ballad operas, farces and
parodies of heroic tragedies). Parody and irreverence of satire against the king, the queen,
Walpole etc.
The Historical Register play. Huge success.
Licensing act promoted by Walpole, effectively introduced theatrical censorship  end of
Fielding’s theatrical career and end of satire as a way of intervening in the political scene by men
of letters. But Fielding managed to transfer his vein for parody into the novel.
3. The Novel
Genre of the bourgeoisie, expressing middle-class values  realism was congenial to middle-class
reading public  interested in the material world, in the individual self, in what was concrete and
specific (=no abstract or mythological worlds of romance). Novels are close to the reader,
because we know the facts told belong to our world.
The reference for the English novelists were the ideas of French theorists and Cervantes’ Don
Quixote  model of construction of the story being told + showed the conflict between the world
of romance and the real world. Novel deals with common life, using riches of ordinary speech.
Upper/middle-class women did afford to buy and read novels. Men seemed not to have time for
reading.
3.1 Defoe
Daniel Defoe 1660-1731 born in London, son of a butcher. Travelled in Europe. Also worked as a
secret agent for Robert Harley. In the meantime he wrote pamphlets, political and ideological
essays, historical treatises, articles, and novels.
He was a dissenter.
The Shortest Way with the Dissenters pamphlet. Ironically proposed the suppression of dissent. For
this pamphlet he was arrested  the argument was about the problem of rights  thesis and
principles of great modernity. He wanted the sovereignty of people and its right to rebel against
un unjust ruler. He defended the importance of education.
Robinson Crusoe fiction. Robinson is what he owns. After his ship wrecks, he lists what he manages
to find  detailed inventory of his possessions. The story is told by Robinson himself the facts are
true (something similar really happened a few years earlier)  act as a lesson and a warning.
Novelty of the language  language of preachers, journalists, addressed to a public of
merchants and craftsmen  idiom of the people, spoken English that every Englishmen would
understand.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Robinson is alone on his desert island, he survives by creating “civilisation”. His solitudes has
religious overtones. The trials Robinson faces are undergone with courage, discipline and
determination. At the end he is saved and returns home as a rich and honoured man.
Moll Flanders here the protagonist is not from the bourgeoisie, is a poor girl, whose poverty is seen
as a sin. Moll wanted didn’t want to become a servant, she wanted to become a gentlewoman.
For Defoe it was more profitable to tell the story of a woman who, for necessity, becomes a thief
and a prostitute, who has 5 husbands and 8 children. The plot is sometimes implausible and the
psychological descriptions of some characters are rudimentary, yet Moll Flanders fascinates the
reader just like she fascinates the characters she gets in contact with (often using and cheating
them). A life of crime and sinfulness bring freedom and prosperity.
Doctrine of predestination  in Moll’s case she is pardoned also because she uses all that she has
(her body and her beauty) in order to survive, not to become the permanent property of a man.
Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress Roxana marries a rich man who wastes all of his money and
deserts her (she does not start from the same condition as Moll). She becomes a whore for
necessity (necessity plays a key role here too) but then she continues to practice it because she
enjoys it. She has no faith in gentlemanly behaviour  she must provide for herself  she refuses to
marry a rich man because she doesn’t want to lose her financial independence.
Here we have divine punishment for her sins, for having let her daughter die  repentance of her
sin as a mother.
Captain Singleton  could be subtitled “crime does pay”
The Journal of the Plague Year fictional “true” report of a London artisan during the great plague.
Defoe’s stories are meant to fascinate the reader  refresh their interest towards the character’s
faith. We don’t know what the characters deeply feel  no characters psychology.
3.2 Richardson
Samuel Richardson 1689-1761 Puritan printer.
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded is made up of letters and journals, most of them written by Pamela.
Moralise throughout the novel  the end is less convincing. Didactic values of the principles of the
middle-class he belongs to. Richardson intervenes on the social plane  he promotes the
principle of the “social mobility”. Huge success in England, it is the first novel to be published in the
American colonies. It was also taken up by Goldoni who used it to write a comedy, but changing
the end. For Richardson, Pamela’s story is a clear example of virtue rewarded. Language of
ordinary people with some corrections (irregularities of common speech replaced with a more
formal/literary language)
Clarissa epistolary novel. Exchange of letters between Clarissa and her admirer Lovelace. The
protagonist is, here too, a young woman who resists the advances of a man who wants to possess
her. Clarissa goes mad and regain her reason, but not her will to live  she is raped and commits
suicide. The bond between Clarissa and Lovelace is modern  psychologically subtle and
disturbing. The letters are a mean to convince the reader that the facts told are true  the
characters write the moment, without reflecting on them, corresponding their feelings. Real
people. It is up to the reader to reflect and draw lessons from the story.
*3.3 Fielding
Henry Fielding 1707-1754 studied the classics, liked parodies. With the licensing act, he had to find
another way to make a living.
Shamela mocking response to Richardson’s Pamela. The parodic intent is extended to the entire
epistolary form.
Joseph Andrews comic-epic poem in prose. Chastity in a man  matter for comedy  makes him
return home, in a much more complicated way than it was supposed to be (like Ulysses’
homecoming)  parody is then left on one side and the we have a bizarre English version of Don
Quixote.
The novel is stylish and entertaining  highly comic episodes and lively tones, and is told in 3 rd
person. Structure and form are completely original and there are reminders to the reader that
he/she is reading a novel. Fielding offers the reader a realistic representation of his subject, and so
a happy ending is not realistic.
Tom Jones Fielding’s masterpiece. Tom is a foundling who at the end of novels finds out to be the
nephew of a rich man, who adopted him, and this allows him to marry the woman he loves.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
The reader is glued to the plot thanks to the invention of spectacular incidents, and the use of
irony. Tom’s good nature triumphs in the end.
Amelia sentimental novel. Fielding left scepticism apart. Figure of the ideal wife and mother who is
victim of her husband and who is helped by generous people. Happy ending.
3.4 Smollett
Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews have echoes of the picaresque novel.
Tobias Smollett 1721-1771 anti-conformer (anticonformista). He translated Gil Blas de Santillana , a
picaresque novel by Alain-René Lesage.
The Adventures of Roderick Random a 1st person tale. Author’s own experience + adventures
similar to earlier picaresque novels.
The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle novel told by an omniscient narrator. Mocking critiques of
continental habits and manners. Several caricatures of personalities of the day (Fielding) led to
bad critics  prudent second edition.
Humphry Clinker epistolary novel. 5 characters describe the same things  always different
descriptions  things are not what they are but what we believe that they are  comic effect.
Journey within Britain. Scotland which represents the rural world.
3.5 Sterne
Laurence Sterne 1713-1768 came from the country.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy break with conventions  the story is not about
adventures, but about opinions. The author is the creator of the world of the novel and the
characters and events existed because they were brought into being in a novelistic world. Direct
and civilised conversation with the reader. Enormous success of the ordinary reading public, but
not of the critics.
Tristram writes following the thread of his thoughts  experience of time, interrupting the
chronological sequences with digressions. As he writes the time passes  problem of keeping the
time of his writings. The writer reveals the reader that the narration is fictional.
Rhetoric, every type of language presented, grammar and syntax artifices + non-verbal devices
(asterisks, blank pages, a black page etc.). We do not learn Tristram’s opinions.
The novel demonstrates the vitality of the genre and explores new forms of it + new form of
humour.
A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy published posthumously, is about journeys he did
for reasons of health  teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures. Attachment to
sentiment. The text is ambiguous, sensibility is truly defended of satirised?
4. The Age of Sensibility
Second half of 18th century, or age of Johnson.
4.1 Poetry
Sensibility  capacity to feel  benevolence was a virtue. View of the place of man in the world
 man is no longer the measure of all things  considerations on his mortal destiny and
meditation on death.
Thomas Gray 1716-1771
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard model for the next generation of poets. Rhymes abab.
Meditation on the death of poor rural people  the elegy gave rise to the “grave poetry”.
The Bard Pindaric ode. Aesthetic value to the grandeur and violence of nature  able to arise the
deepest emotions.
Edmund Burke 1729-1797
Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful terror as a
source of aesthetic pleasure.
All around Europe Gaelic poetry was seen as a sublime manifestation of natural poetic genius.
Completely new model of poetry  spontaneous, free of sophisticated rhetorical devices, bearer
of emotions, irrational and primitive.
4.2 The Gothic Novel
Horace Walpole son of the prime minister. He created a new genre, the gothic novel  taste of
sublime with predilection for mystery. The protagonist of these stories is often a young woman who
flees from pursuers and who faces every sort of danger (real e non). Happy ending offered as a
reward to the reader who suffered with the protagonist the most sublime of emotions, terror.
Boundary between life and death is no longer clear.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Gothic means medieval for Walpole, but it is not the case of all the authors of the genre. Apogee
at the end of 18th century.
The most famous author of the genre was Ann Radcliffe.
The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis changed the rules of gothic novel  no happy ending.
4.3 Dr Johnson
Samuel Johnson 1709-1784 literary critic. the age of sensibility is also called the age of Johnson on
him.
Wrote poems, essays and biographies
Dictionary of the English Language the work for which he is most famous. Definition of 40000 words
with quotes of famous authors, from Sidney onwards  entertaining value.
The Rambler periodical which defined him as the moralist of the period. The articles on literary
topics have the purpose of establishing general principles on which improve knowledge of culture
+ construct a canon of English literature.
The Vanity of Human Wishes and Rasselas express a moral vision of severity and rigour.
Lives of English Poets from Milton to his contemporaries. Judgements based on his classical values,
expressed with clarity coherence and literary sensibility.
Works of Shakespeare
4.4 Goldsmith and Sheridan
Oliver Goldsmith 1730-1774 wrote for periodicals, friend of Dr Johnson.
The Vicar of Wakefield novel on benevolence. Portraits of rustic environment.
The Good-Natured Man play. Benevolence professed by sentimental comedy. Language 
lightness of touch, wit and sense of humour (which was lacking in the theatre of the day).
Comedy needed to rediscover its nature. Was it to be sentimental, or to excites laughter by
exhibiting the follies of mankind?
She Stoops to Conquer play. Combine sensibility and laughter. The play rotates on a series of
misunderstandings, then transformed into revelations and giving salvation the protagonist.
Goldsmith managed to mix the theatrical ideals of the time with funny plots which have
psychological consistency.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan 1751-1816 member of parliament with very modern ideas. Impresario
and playwright and owner of a theatre.
The Rivals play of youthful gaiety and ebullience (esuberanza) + light-hearted comic tone +
characters rich of nuances, like the classic comedy ones.
Parental authority vs children’s freedom of choice. The play provokes reflection on the human soul
and comic delight.
The School for Scandals in this comedy the wit is given to negative characters (opposite to the
comedy of manners). Comic quality of the comedy depends on the plot, which is complex.
The incidents befalling the characters are a way of showing the ordinary face of human nature
and the hidden corners of human weakness. The hole comedy is devoted to reveals what lies
behind the surface.
CHAPTER 7: The Romantic Period

1. The Three Revolutions
Second half 18th century transformation of the economy, from agrarian to industrial  machine
manufacturing. People moved from the country to the city  industrial revolution, which made
Britain the greatest industrial power in the world. The American revolution did not affect this
transformation. Implications of the French revolution  in the early years of the revolution there
was a sympathetic eye on the developments in France  after Marie Antoinette’s death  war.
Thomas Paine 1737-1809 author of pamphlets in America, supported the struggle for
independence.
The Rights of Man political treaty, milestone of the democratic thought.
Paine defended the French revolution  he also proposed social changes  indicted for treason,
escaped to France before being arrested.
2. Blake
William Blake 1757-1827 he was an engraver and a painter. Poet.
Poetical Sketches collection of poems. Strongly evoking Gray, Collins and Macpherson.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Songs of Innocence volume of poems. Radical break with the 18 th century tradition. Figure of the
infant, who thanks to his innocence is in contact with the divine. Positivity and goodness is a
characteristic of children, while negativity is a product of the institutions of the adult’s world.
The Lamb poem. The poet, as a child, addressed the animal which symbolises gentleness and
goodness, the Lamb of God.
Songs of Experience collection that followed the songs of innocence. Experience reveals the
world for what it is, London is a place of pain. God as Lamb is replaced with a pitiless and sever
God. Poetical denunciation of Blake’s enemies  repressive government, heartless ruling class,
hypocritical Church.
The Tyger the most famous poem in the Songs of Experience. The lamb encounters its opposite,
the violent tiger. The French and American revolution brought violence and death, but they were
seen as necessary to freedom.
The bible and Milton were Blake’s main references. He created a system of myths which leave it to
the reader’s interpretation to discover their deep meaning. Complex allegories. Esoteric ambiguity.
3. The First Romantic Generation
<1810 first generation  Wordsworth and Coleridge
>1810 second generation Byron, Shelley, Keats.
Elizabethan period Restoration period Romantic period

Shakespeare Milton The Romantics
Reconstruction of English Constitutional settlement after Affirmation of an imperial G.B.
power republican moment of after the industrial revolution
Cromwell’s Commonwealth and victory against France
Creative crucible (crogiolo) “regular” workshop “sublime” foundry
3.1 Wordsworth and Coleridge

William Wordsworth 1770-1850 and Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834 were friends. Common
literary ideals + shared political radicalism.
Lyrical Ballads volume of 23 compositions, only one is actually a ballad. It is not specified who
wrote which “ballad”.
*The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the only real ballad of the collection, written by Coleridge.
The poems are “experiments”  could the spoken language of middle and low classes be used
for poetry?
Biographia Literaria by Coleridge. Their poetry was meant to excite the sympathy of the reader by
adhering to the truths of nature.
Nature is the subject and the object of poetry  the poet must reveal the men the beauties of the
world.
 Coleridge describe incidents and supernatural or romantic characters  arise in the
reader the emotions he/she would have felt if he/she had been in presence of the events
recounted.
This is the case of *The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in which the mariner kills an albatross  this
provokes a curse which strikes the ship  everybody dies, only the mariner is save, but he is
condemned to repeat the hallucinatory tale of his guilt.
 Wordsworth  incidents and agents belonging to the life of everyday. Give voice to the
class of people who didn’t know “false refinements”
The Idiot Boy
We Are Seven
The Convict
Tintern Abbey last poem of the lyrical ballads. It seems a throwback to the taste for the
picturesque, but in reality it is the first romantic nature poetry. Nature is guide of the man and
allows him to better understand himself and humanity  beauty and spiritual elevation.
Wordsworth then retires and forgets his revolutionary ideals, destroyed with the terror of the French
revolution  goes back to the memories of his infancy.
Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood ode. Huge influence on
the authors who followed him. Poet’s sense of loss faced with the passing of time, with the
reconciliation and acceptance of growth in the second part.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Resolution and Independence

The Solitary Reaper
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
Then ended his consecration as a great romantic poet and end of his poetic inspiration. He tried
to write again, but the emotions he was trying to evoke were too far from his new reality.
The Prelude (written during his friendship with Coleridge) offers a complete and sincere portrait of
himself. But he changed and did not accept the ideals he had in youth  he became
conservative and believed in the Church of England  modified, rewrote his youthful works
eliminating all the libertarian positions  forget what he thought and hoped, and most of all what
he had lost.
BACK TO COLERIDGE.
*The Rime of the Ancient Mariner full of archaic words and spellings, after Wordsworth criticised it
he eliminated many of them. The moral lesson, weakens the poetic effect of the ballad, which
had nothing in common with the refined poetry of the 18 th century. The power of the ballad
derives from the tone of the mariner’s speech and from the nightmarish images he evokes when
speaking of his punishment  capture the reader’s imagination by not describing directly the
mariner’s damnation.
Christabel poem. Is also a sort of ballad, but metrically irregular. Verses of uneven length and with
different rhyme scheme, but always with 4 stresses. It is a medieval romance with tropes dear to
the Gothic novel. Theme is corruption of humanity and corruptibility of innocence. The poem is not
finished.
Christabel + The Ancient Mariner + Kubla Khan = “demonic group”
Kubla Khan  fragment of 54 lines. Vision in a dream. Influence on the poetry of the 19 th century +
on surrealism. Fascinating thanks to its mixture of the exotic, the irrational and the fantastic 
made Coleridge leave it unfinished  allow the reader to play with imagination.
“Conversational group”  Frost ad Midnight in which the authors reminds of his past. Tenderness
and hope for his child’s future. Dejection. An Ode also in this group. Attitude towards nature
changes, it still is beautiful, but the stars and the moon do not inspire the writer anymore. The
origin of joy is to be find inside of us.
Coleridge remained faithful to his revolutionary ideas. He also proposed that the government
should make its business to provide work for everyone and should provide education to lower-
class masses. His philosophical references were Kant, and the aesthetic of Schelling and Schlegel
 theory of poetic creation, based on the distinction between Imagination and Fancy.
From 1816 onwards he dedicated himself to philosophical concerns and literary criticism.
4. Byron
George Gordon Byron 1788-1824 radical and loose living.
Hours of Idleness collection of verse, very negative critique.
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers satirical poem written after the hard critiques he received.
Imitation of Pope, revealed his talent for poetry. Dismissal of the romantic poetry of the first
generation (Wordsworth and Coleridge).
Travelled around Europe.
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage sort of diary in verse. Harold is Byron’s first hero, the man without a
friend, melancholic and cynical.
Byron becomes a Romantic hero himself, he is a synthesis of the German Romanticism and the
English taste for the Gothic.
Many scandals made him leave England (incest, homosexual passions, illicit love-affairs). He never
came back.
Manfred dramatic poem, the first part was written in Geneva and the second in Venice.
In Venice Byron discovered Ariosto, Boiardo and Pulci.
Beppo: a Venetian Story poem full of irony and set during carnival. It is written in the English version
of the ottava rima.
Don Juan comic epic. Unfinished. Witty comic indictment (accusa) of hypocrisy in all its form and
a celebration of vitality, sexuality and courage. The narrator address himself directly to the reader.
Canto VIII is against war. Byron is constantly surprising the reader  changes on tone and
references or allusions to contemporary figures and events. He also evokes complicity from the
reader  colloquial quality of the language made it easier (even if it is caged in the ottava rima).
The narrator gives comic sense, not the protagonist  satire against aristocracy and government.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Byron entered the Carbonari, the group fighting for Italian independence.
In the last years of his life he wrote tragedies, a satirical poem on the congress of Vienna and a
poem on the Mutiny on the Bounty.
The Vision of Judgement
5. Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822 radical ideas and rebellious attitudes when young.
The Necessity of Atheism because of which he was expelled from Oxford.
Queen Mab poem in which he proclaims the same positions as the first generation of Romantic
poets, positions that were then abandoned by them.
He met Byron, becoming his friend for his whole life.
He and his wife Mary lived in Switzerland and in Italy. On Naples he wrote Stanzas Written in
Defection Near Naples which contrasts the contemplation of a gentle, delicate and powerful
nature and the solitude of the poet.
To the Moon poem
The Cloud poem
To a Skylark poem
To Jane: the Recollection evokes the image of a woman that merges with the beauties of nature
With a Guitar, to Jane art speaks the same language as nature
Ode to The West Wind written in terza rima (Dante’s metre). Here nature is a ruthless and impassive
force which pursues its own superior designs. The poet asks to be himself a dead leaf carried by
the wind  the west wind is seen as a symbol of the American revolution  freedom and liberty,
possible interpretation. Out of death there is new life.
Ozymandias sonnet. The ruins of a monument to a pharaoh show the sculptor’s denunciation of
the cruelty of power, on the royal figure itself.
The Mask of Anarchy poem. Murder, Fraud, Hypocrisy and Anarchy represent ministers or other
men of power. Anarchy here means despotic and ferocious power.
Prometheus Unbound lyrical drama
The Cenci Jacobean play on the corruption of society. Prometheus is impelled by the purest and
the truest motives to the best and nobles ends  he is benefactor of mankind. The defeat of the
tyrant (seen as victory of good on evil) marks the dawn of a new order  all are equal, unclassed
and nationless. Ideas of the French revolution given by a myth, whose images are a celebration of
love.
Adonais poem. Elegy for John Keats. Fierce attack on the British critics. Myth with his own vision of
nature.
Defence of Poetry proclaiming the supremacy of imagination over reason. Poets are prophets.
6. Keats
John Keats 11795-1821 modest origins.
On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer sonnet.
Poems
Endymion poem. Very negative reviews because Keats had not noble origins.
Keats then decided he wanted to be remembered for the highest and noblest genre of poetry,
the epic.
Hyperion epic poem. Struggle between Jupiter and the Titans. Didn’t finish it.
Odes  La Belle Dame Sans Merci esoteric meaning and a Gothic tone
 The Eve of St Agnes narrative poem. Contrast between dream and reality. The poem
ends with the two lovers who “fly away into the storm”  victory of love.
 Ode to a Nightingale pursuing mental experience through identification with something
belonging to the world of nature. The poet reflect on the brevity of life  man is mortal,
so is the nightingale, but its song is immortal. Immortality is given only by nature.
 Ode to a Grecian Urn here immortality is offered by art. The pastoral scene that appear
on the urn will never lose their beauty.
To Autumn poem with strong autobiographical overtones. Autumn is linked to early death 
acceptance of death/ annihilation of the individual caught up in the cyclical course of nature. It
is also acceptance of the beauty of the present.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
7. Scott
Walter Scott 1771-1832 novelist. His novels told romantic stories  entertained entire generations,
even the cinema have adapted some of them in recent times. Romantic stories in their high sense
 virtue of background settings, homage to noble past, taste for natural and wild landscapes,
attention paid to humble and simple folks.
Scott entered the world of letters as an editor and a poet (poems set in the middle ages).
In the novel he found interest in the romantic charm of past history.
Waverley novel. Set in Scotland during the failed Jacobite uprising.
Ivanhoe novel set in the reign of Richard I. Historically inaccurate but splendid in recreating a
fantastic vision of the medieval world. Scott’s descriptions of wild landscapes gave him success.
The author in his novels combined realism (his source was history) and romantic topoi. His heroes
are not exceptional figures  but they belong to a social group which plays an important role in
the society of time.
Scott’s novels are very long  shortened for younger people, and creating the impression to be
reading mythical heroes and adventures, when they are not.
The Talisman here we have mythical heroes and events.
Guy Mannering
Rob Roy
Heart of Midlothian
The Antiquary
Red Gauntlet
8. Austen
Extraneous to romantic sensibility and ridiculed the Gothic novel in Northanger Abbey
Jane Austen 1775-1817 she caught in advance the moment of transition regarding the switch of
“dominant class” (from rural to urban)  promotes the traditional values of a class whose rural
way of life was felt as the embodiment of the highest expression of English society.
Her novels are delightful comedies of manners (manners established respect and consent of
society). Manners are the values in which people believe. Her moral is in the behaviour and self-
reflection of her characters  how they deal with difficulties and more.
Marriage is a central theme in her novels  Love must make peace with reality + esteem for the
future husband + economic security.
Sense and Sensibility demonstrates how romantic sensibility is unreliable as a guide of conduct
and how important it is to examine one’s own feelings in the light of reason.
Pride and Prejudice also demonstrates that people cannot be judged on appearances, how
pride and prejudice can lead to error. Here love leads to a marriage based on love and mutual
respect (after they see each other without the veil of prejudice).
Irony moderated if compared to that of the first half of the 18 th century. It Is the irony of someone
who criticise excesses or lack of measures or superficiality. Not to mislead the reader  she is not
criticising.
Mansfield Park wealth of the gentry do not only derive from the rents of the lands but also from the
profits on slave plantations in the West Indies.
Emma guilty of excess of fantasy  spend her time trying to organise the sentimental lives of
others while not knowing their actual feelings.
In these two last novels both the heroines go through a successful process of development of their
personalities. Feelings that have usually to deal with love.
Persuasion Austen’s last novel.
Her stories still speak to our sensibility.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
9. Beyond the Bounds of Reality

Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey 1785-1859 use of drugs for creative
inspiration  waking dreams to be used in the creative experience.
Reality known by reason is now opposed to a reality unknown to reason but reachable by dreams
and visions.
James Hogg 1770-1835 connoisseur of ancient ballads.
The Mountain Bard collection of original ballads.
Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
In 1816 Byron devices a competition between himself, Shelley and his wife Mary and their friend
John Polidori on who could write the best Gothic novel.
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus written by Mary Shelley 1797-1851
Is it just a horror story, or a horror story which puts man on guard against the blasphemous
ambition to violate the laws of nature or a metaphorical accusation against fathers guilty of not
looking after their own children?

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
English Literature. A short history.

CHAPTER 8: The Victorian Age.
1. The Long Century.
Queen Victoria’s reign lasted from 1837 to 1901 (she died that year)  BR established herself as an
economic, industrial, colonial and military power. Industry based not only on textiles but also on
coal, iron and steel. 1851 Great Exhibition. The industrial growth hid terrible living and labouring
conditions. Chartism was born in the first years of Victoria’s reign, asking a complete reform of
parliament and protesting against the industrial system. They also asked for universal manhood
suffrage and equal electoral constituents. Their three petitions were rejected by parliament, and
the movement was dissolved. 1871 Trade Union Act  recognised the Trade Unions, which also
asked for social and parliamentary reforms. In 1893 the Labour Party was born.
The political life of the time saw social struggle with peaceful protest but also harsh repression, on
the other side a regular alternation of Whigs and Tories  improved working conditions  1871
Education Act, and gradually enlarged the electorate. In 1867 second Reform Bill extended the
number of eligible people, more increased in 1884. Women will not vote until the end of WW1,
even if the suffragettes and the feminists in general will achieve many results.
Women were relegated to the role of the “the angels of the hearth”  idea of decorum 
attitude of pruderie  this led to a massive increase in the number of prostitutes, to satisfy the
demands of the husbands of the angels of the hearth.
Maximum colonial expansion  almost all the Indian sub-continent, Afghanistan, south China Sea,
Sudan and much of East Africa, South Africa.
In Ireland the situation was different. In 1829 the emancipation movement gained political rights
for the Catholic population, but the situation got worse in 1845-46 due to the famine  starvation
and massive emigration to the USA of to Britain. 1881 Land Act changed the law of property in
favour of the Irish peasantry. Ireland remained a colony until 1921.
The attitude of the time oscillated from nostalgia of the past and impulses towards the future, to a
celebration of the present with denunciation of its injustices. In order to find a solution to the
façade of the Victorian society, some intellectuals (like Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, William Morris)
looked at the past. Matthew Arnold and Charles Darwin had more innovative ideas.
2. The Victorian Novel.
The novel is the critical voice of 19 th-century British society. The novelist dialogues with the readers,
and the novel has moral values  omniscient narrator who moves and guides the characters,
judging, rewarding or punishing them.
The number of readers increased thanks to the innovations in the printing and publishing industries,
bringing down the cost of books. They were more affordable for middle-class readers, but they
were still very expensive. The books were however long and in three volumes  Circulating
libraries developed, allowing readers to loan books at a modest price.
Serial publication became widespread. The novel was published in 20 monthly episodes, which
allowed the author to make changes to the plot and the characters based on the public’s
response  leave the reader in suspense.
2.1. Dickens.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) when young wrote sketches about urban life for many journals.
The Pickwick Papers written in 20 monthly episodes. It was not meant to be a novel. After the fifth
episode it gained great success and Dickens transformed the characters into figures of an
irregular novel, which developed in episodes.
Denunciation of the iniquities of the legal system of the time + critique to the entire electoral
system. There is little indignation towards social injustices compared to his later works.
The tone of the book is given by sheer humour and ironic attitude.
Oliver Twist published in monthly episodes in 2 years. Tone of the melodrama, with unexpected
revelations and coincidences. Most radical critique of the English society. Melodrama is used as a
political weapon, to move the reader into tears.
Barnaby Rudge historical novel.
A Christmas Carol Christmas fairy tale.
Pictures from Italy portrait of Italian life.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Martin Chuzzlewit critical attitude towards American way of life. American readers started to
dislike him.
Dickens then mastered the art of constructing a story around a central theme with digressions,
secondary episodes and details more linked to the nucleus of the story.
Examples are David Copperfield and Great Expectations in which there is no more the omniscient
narrator. The narration is in first person, and the “lesson” is given by the reflections of the narrating
“I”, the reader is free to draw conclusions from the stories.
Dickens is also a manipulator of the dimension of mystery, as demonstrated by his short story The
Signal-Man.
He was addressing a middle-class readership, and even if his ideas were in contrast with their
ideals (forced by social status) he managed to grasp their attention and take them wherever he
wanted with his stories.
In David Copperfield there are autobiographical tones, reinforced by the first person narrator.
This autobiographical elements are also present in Little Dorrit, even if there are also Dickens’
happiest comic creations. The ideal environment for the misfortunes the protagonist has to go
through is London.
In Bleak House the is a harsh critique of the English legal system, even stronger in Our Mutual Friend,
where London is the city where “God is absent”.
London becomes a zone of shadows, fiction and lies, and is described with tones of mystery.
Hard Times industrial novel  denounces the injustices of the organisation of labour, with
compassionate words for the workers. Here the real villain in the factory owner. To the cruel reality
and the harshness of the industrial world, Dickens opposed the freedom of Fancy, who is the only
one with imagination. Dickens had to find a fairytale solution to sustain his thesis  we must feed
our imagination in order to live well.
When we read Dickens we see every facet of life, with its many dramas and not so many joys.
2.2. Thackeray.
William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) His works are more like dialogues, speaks directly to
the reader.
The History of Henry Esmond historical novel set in reign of Queen Anne.
Thackeray is famous for his sense of humour  he became important for the sketches he wrote for
Punch. They will be collected in The Book of Snobs  satirical portrait of the class consciousness of
contemporary society.
Vanity Fair (a Novel Without a Hero). The novel is about the interwoven destinies of 2 women. One
of the protagonists, Becky, can be called heroine because her adventures recall the ones of the
picaresque novels (which Thackeray loved). Omniscient narrator. The society is viewed with irony
and cynicism. The author converses with the reader, comments the story. The narrator is ironic
about the limits of his protagonists, but at the same time recognise their merits. They represent the
antithetical images of woman in the Victorian society: the angel of the hearth and the whore, as
complementary faces of the Victorian male imaginary  mother and wife vs overpowering
sexuality.
At the end of the story Becky will be rewarded (like in the comedy of manners, the plot rewards
the characters, not the narrator)  the novel operates on 2 levels, criticising the materialistic 19th
century world denying one of the values on which its morality was based.
Punch’s Prize Novelists satire of the works of his contemporaries.
2.3. The Brontës.
From the Victorian age onwards, there are many women writers. The most famous are the Brontës
sisters.
The first who wrote about the horrors of the industrialization was Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865), in
Mary Barton and North and South. The former presents with strong sense of outrage the inhuman
labouring conditions and the squalor of the slums where the factory workers lived, justifying the
character’s struggle and their occasional violence while protesting. The end of the story is realistic
 the protagonist emigrates.
In the latter the author presents the death of a young woman caused by the toxic fumes of the
factory where she worked. The north is the industrial north while the south is the agricultural south.
Here is presented a vague notion of reconciliation between 2 characters, one defending the

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
ideals of the mill workers, and a mill owner. Emotional response to a social problem to promote
moderation.
These novels only have historical values, from a literary point of view they are worthless.
In both novels we can observe a diffidence attitude towards the trade unions.
Cranford vignettes on rural life in a community of spinsters (nubili) and widows.
We can find in the works of the Brontës the same focus on women experience, pursed with
determination. Their works are all anti-conformist (political events and anti-conformist ideas
reached the Brontës thanks to their father, who openly spoke to them about the problems of that
time), and their major novel were all published in 1847.
They all became governesses (a servant, but a higher level one)  gaining dignity and a social
status of more or less middle-class.
Anne Brontë/Acton Bell (1820-1849)
Agnes Grey is based on her own experience as a governess. The heroine is a governess who
observes with innocent eye the conventions of the Victorian society, in particular of the upper-
class, portrayed as superficial, egoistical and self-satisfied. The novel caused a scandal, as her
other novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, in which a wife rejects her role and leaves her husband with
her small son.
Charlotte Brontë/Currer Bell (1816-1855)
Jane Eyre is also a governess. Against all conventions she declares her love for her master, but
when she is about to marry him she finds out that he is married, and refuses to enter a sinful
relationship with him. She then flees from the town. In the end she will return and marry him.
In the story there are frequently elements of the gothic novel, but the supernatural here is vehicle
of reconciliations instead of terror.
Jane is a very modern and innovative character, which fascinated the readership  independent
and free to express her feelings. She can be also seen as a selfish and masochist character. She
also marries a man who is maimed, allowing her to have him all for herself, with no risk to lose him.
Shirley novel set during the Luddite rebellion.
Villette partly autobiographical.
Charlotte Brontë wanted a class reconciliation, still proclaiming the right of women to self-
expression.
Emily Brontë/Ellis Bell (1818-1848)
Wuthering Heights is a gothic novel with the atmosphere of the Sturm und Drang romanticism, yet
very modern in many aspects. The story is not linear  it has many time shifts and flashbacks, and
is told by many narrative viewpoints.
2.4. Eliot and Trollope.
George Eliot/Mary Ann Evans (1819-1890) collaborator on a radical newspaper, literary critic,
translator, novelist.
Richness of characters, episodes and events, with great attention to individual aspects of
everyday life  even greater attention paid to the psychology of characters, giving them
psychological depth and a place in the world.
The Mill on the Floss offers a critical portrait of the attitude of Victorian society towards childhood
and women. It was inspired by Eliot’s personal experience. Her protagonist’s imagination, vivacity
and intelligence are seen as an offence to the society, which will condemn her when she will
accept the advances of her cousin’s betrothed.
Eliot’s caused a scandal by going to live with a married man.
The author sets her novels in the provinces, describing very well the countryside and the rural
communities.
Felix Holt, the Radical explicit political novel
Middlemarch provincial setting. Written after the second Reform Bill  political urgency 
interpret the social and political changes that have taken place in the democratic advances on
the electoral front.
Importance of dialogue between spouses, the need to understand each other and the need for
women not to be confined to the role of the angel of the hearth.
Omniscient narrator who doesn’t put forward radical solutions.
Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) optimistic vision of Victorian reality  it has many defects which
have to be attended to, but he is faithful that the society will have the energy to correct them.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Omniscient narrator who expresses moral judgement.

The Way We Live Now bitter satire on the falsity and corruption of the world of finance.
Barchester Novels and Palliser Novels are series of novels. The latter offers a portrait of the
parliamentary political society in the Victorian period. Sometimes it’s pessimist, but in general is
ironic.
The former is a study on domestic relationships in a small town community which is the seat of a
bishopric. Religious questions interwoven with private matters.
The first of the Barchester novels is The Warden.
3. Victorian Poetry.
Post-Romantic, imitating its forms but without its vigour; and pre-modern. Directed to the past, with
nostalgia for the medieval world and with endless revisitations of the Arthurian legends.
The Victorian poetry also dealt with the major problems that affected the society of the time, on
the political, philosophical or the scientific point of view. To the modern reader it seems partial,
indirect and poetically conventional.
3.1. Tennyson.
Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892). Extraordinary poetic talent + great technique. Post-Romantic. In his
works he shows musicality. He occasionally spoke about present times, like in Ode on the Death of
the Duke of Wellington and in Charge of the Light Brigade.
His work is mostly directed towards the past, to the Arthurian legends.
The Lady of Shalott poem. Manifesto of the Arthurian production. The poem can be seen as a
reflection of the relationship between life and death. It has richness in imagery, simple language
and echoes of the Arthurian myth.
In Memoriam A.H.H. elegy for the death of a dear friend. The poem involves many of the problems
of the time, but mainly explores the feelings experienced after the death of a friend, the doubts
about the meaning of life. 132 lyrics. The poet will accept the loss but the doubt will remain until
the end, when he will reach reconciliation  only poetry will bring relief  poetry allowed him to
transform suffering into enchantment. Great example of a personal experience which expresses
the subtlest elements of the Victorian sensibility (without wanting it).
3.2. Robert and Elizabeth Browning.
Robert Browning (1812-1889) poetry used in forms which are not proper to poetry. He is famous for
his dramatic monologues  poems in which the characters from history tell in first person events of
their lives, without the poet entering the text. The characters become “objective”, we have total
access to what they think, what’s on their minds etc. the poet stays apart, without judging what
they are and what they are saying.
Browning doesn’t fell like giving absolute answers or having an indisputable truth from which
giving judgement like the other Victorian authors did.
Many of his monologues are set in Italy (he lived there with his wife/poet).
Man and Women volume in which the arts are personified in characters from medieval and
renaissance Italy  the reader will evaluate the meaning of their experience as artists.
Dramatis Personae volume. Religious themes. Here too the poet stands to one side and leaves the
characters express themselves.  Bishop Blougram’s Apology religious monologue.
The Ring and the Book verse romance published in 4 monthly instalments. The story is told by many
speakers, each telling his/her truth of the events at issue in a trial.
Very long poem (21000 lines).
Elizabeth Barrett (1806-1861) poet
Sonnets from the Portuguese pretends to be a translation from a Portuguese original, tells the love
she feels for her husband, with delicate irony and words of love and passion.
Aurora Leigh poem. Blank verse. Reflection on poetry, on the society of the time and the
relationship between the two.
3.3. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Born in 1848. Group of artists, including painters, sculptors and poets. The name was inspired by
the Italian painting before Raphael, because they said he was too perfect and didn’t have
spiritual feeling.
The brotherhood rebelled against the canons of the 19 th century painting and promoted a return
to the purity of the Medieval art  revolt against the ugliness of the modern world  often took

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
refuge in an idealised past. Fidelity to nature. Subjects taken from literary sources of a distant past
(Dante, Shakespeare), inspired by Keats and Tennyson. The medieval theme required a medieval
form, the ballad.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) leading exponent of the Brotherhood. His poetry was directed
to a past outside history  use of the ballad with a language that sounds remote, archaic.
Attention to detail, taste of symbolic image, erotic feeling coexisting with a sense of melancholy.
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) theme of unhappy or frustrated love.
Goblin Market presented in the form of fairy tale  two sisters tempted by goblins who sell
forbidden fruits  the poem is seen as a religious allegory, a fable on sin and redemption, and
sexual desire.
The Pre-Raphaelite poetry paved the way for a reflection on art which culminated in the principle
of “Art for Art’s Sake”. Many artists saw in the Renaissance movement the inspiration for a new
modernity, in which art and life are reflected in one another.
3.4. Swinburne and Hopkins.
Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) was a man of scandals. He came into contact with members of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Knew Greek, Latin, French and Italian. He wrote some theatrical
works, and then became “famous” for his scandalous Poems and Ballads in which the subject was
blasphemous and sexually transgressive + spirit of rebellion underlying his writing.
His rebellion was also formal  he re-elaborated older forms of poetic compositions, and he
created highly innovative new ones very appreciated in the rest of Europe.
He was also a literary critic, often underrated because of his alternation of enthusiasm and
dismissals, but he appreciated Blake and Baudelaire, sign of anti-Victorianism.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) student at Oxford. In contact with circles which were
important for his religious conversion. He then became priest and decided not to write anymore.
He then wrote, following the suggestion of the Jesuit Rector, The Wreck of the Deutschland an
ode in 35 stanzas. Visionary and apocalyptic vein. The destructive force of nature is transformed
into flowers of paradise.
The poem was rejected by a Jesuit journal because it was too difficult.
Hopkins remained almost unknown and his works were published posthumous.
His poetic metre was the “sprung rhythm”, which was a re-elaboration of the rhythm of speech
and of old forms of verse.
Innovative poetry which tried to reconcile his aesthetic conception with his religious faith. Beauty
of the world as a manifestation of God.
He died in psychological sufferings.
4. Nonsense and Late Victorian Writers.
In the Victorian world the distance between form and substance, between appearance and
reality, was enormous. Some writers avoided the problem by creating a literary universe of their
own in which there was no form nor substance, and in which fantasy and dream ruled.
Edward Lear (1812-1888) inventor of the limerick form  nonsense verse with the rhyme scheme
aabba.
Lear was depressed, but he created a world of his own which may have given him relief.
His poetry was collected in A Book of Nonsense.
Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)started writing comic verses, but he became famous for a book for
children  Alice’s Adventures under Ground. World of fantasy in which Alice meets fantastic
characters and have bizarre conversations  puns and irrational logic.
“Amusement for amusement’s sake”  it is far from the didactic and moralizing attitude of the
Victorian children’s books. Free play of fantasy in order to entertain.
The world in which Alice enters is at the same time the Victorian world  Alice behaves with the
etiquette she learned from her family, with some irony and an underground critique from the
author.
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There the sequel. Same success, it is a little too
complicated for children.
Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927)
Three Man in a Boat misadventures of the 3 protagonists of the book. Great use of humour.
4.1. Wilde.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Leading exponent of the Aesthetic Movement. Anti-conformist

behaviour and wit. He wrote stories, poetry and plays, ranging from children’s stories of The Happy
Prince to The Ballad of Reading Gaol (in which a murderer kills himself in jail) + mystery stories like
Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.
The Picture of Dorian Gray shows the distance between appearance and reality. Dorian is a
“Faustian” character, he sells his soul to stay young and handsome.
The novel can be seen as the portrayal of Decadentism  Wilde shows his vision of the
relationship between art and life + the separation of literature and morality + reveals the hidden
face of the Victorian respectability.
4.2. Stevenson.
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde novel. The story is a variant of the Doppelgänger
theme. It is also an allegory of the hypocritical duplicity of the Victorian decorum.
It can also be seen as a reflection of the climate of the time  clash between religious values and
theories of evolution.
Treasure Island adventure novel for children. The story is told by a boy. Fascination of the world of
adults + thrill of mystery + obscure past of the pirates + secret content of the pirate’s chest + map
of the treasure island + danger, drama and clues.
The voyage is a formative experience for the boy, it will take him to maturity.
The novel is not just a story for children, it illustrates the relationship between youth and evil, which
will determine the formation of the adult. It contains the values of childhood  enthusiasm, love
for danger and challenge of rules and norms.
Stevenson was ill and moved to Samoa.
The Beach of Falesá and The Ebb-Tide condemn the colonial exploitation of the Polynesian Islands.
The Master of Ballantrae is Stevenson’s masterpiece. It tells the story of the feud between two
brothers. In the final part there is the supernatural dimension dear to the author.
4.3. Hardy.
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) is the last great Victorian novelist. His career ended because he felt he
could no longer be the author who could understand the world and judge it.
His novels are all set in the rural world. Unlike many other writers, he was guided by pessimism, a
fatalistic and tragic vision which allowed no space for conciliation or compromise.
Far from the Madding Crowd tells the story of a young woman loved by 3 men. The turning points
of the novel are melodramatic, but melodrama is redeemed by the tragic vision informing the
way events are told. Happy ending because the editor wanted so.
The Return of the Native also had problems with editors.
Hardy wrote stories which were too daring for the Victorian reader.
The Mayor of Casterbridge in which the protagonist sold his wife and child when drunk  will have
a solitary death. Less pressure from the editors because the main character deserved that end.
Tess of the d’Urbervilles is narratively more Victorian  changes of rhythm and explosions of
melodramatic actions. The protagonist is abandoned by her husband on her wedding day
because she told him of her past. He will than return. Meanwhile she killed the man who made her
pregnant and wanted to stay with her.
Great description of the landscapes.
Jude the Obscure is Hardy’s last novel. The two protagonist are cousins and have children. Their
challenge to society will be defeated  they will be left alone in poverty.
The novel addresses crucial problems like the education of the working classes, divorce, birth
control and the role of religion.
Hardy offers no solution.
4.4. Kipling.
Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was born in India, spent his youth in England and then returned to
India. Started his career as a journalist and wrote short stories and poems. When he returned to
England he published a two volumes of stories and the volume of poetry Barrack-Room Ballads.
India was the subject matter of his writings, but the protagonist were the English people who lived
in the colonies, not the Indians. Kipling was labelled “Poet of the Empire”, and maybe for this
reason he won the Nobel Prize in 1907.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
His short stories have a stern realism which enables him to give portrayals of the contradictions of
the colonialism  his stories tell both the English fear of being seduced by the Indian world which
at the same time fascinated and created discomfort in them; and the comradeship and sense of
loyalty for a just cause.
In fact Kipling describes a reality in which the Indian world comes out stronger than the English 
the white men never got to know that world, even dominating it, they never understood it. Kipling
was a patriot.
Mary Postgate short stories, offers a bitter reflection on war.
The Jungle Book romantic motif of the child who grows up in the wild. The protagonist grows up in
the jungle and learns to live with the animals and become their leader. In the end he will return to
civilization and become a forest ranger.
In the tale the “law of the jungle” is seen as nobler and morally dignified than the laws of men.
The Second Jungle Book
Kim vast portrait of the Indian world seen through the eyes of a boy. It is a sort of picaresque novel,
in which the protagonist travels the Indian continent with a Tibetan lama.
The protagonist is always in an ambiguous position  English among Indians, Christian alongside a
Tibetan lama, a child among adults. The book at the beginning was seen as an illustration of the
image the imperialism wanted to give of itself.
4.5. Scientific Progress and Literary Genres.
The development of scientific though give rise to a vast sector of literature which made fiction
from its hypothesis. The master of the genre is what now we call the “science fiction”.
H.G. Wells (1866-1946) wrote a series of scientific romances which started with The Time Machine
(the time traveller visits the future)and followed with The Island of Dr Moreau (prophecy about the
blind forces underlying civilisation), and The War of the Worlds (archetypal tale of alien invasion
used to criticise the worst aspects of British society).
Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) also used his stories set in the future to question the present time. In
After London the whole civilisation is destroyed by a meteor, and redemption is to achieved by
returning to pre-industrialization.
William Morris (1834-1896)
News From Nowhere imagines to wake up in the 21st century and that the society is based on a
“religion of humanity”.
Samuel Butler (1835-1902) devised a novel set in a land of Utopia.
Erewhon is a sarcastic attack on the Victorian attitudes towards religion and the rearing of
children.
The Way of All Flesh attack on the hypocrisies of family life and religious pities. Published
posthumous.
G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)
The Napoleon of Notting Hill step out of the present to talk about the present. Political fantasy
which sings the praises of the pre-industrial world.
The development of science and scientific rationalism are also the basis of detective fiction.
The first detective story was written by Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)  The Moonstone, while The
Woman In White belongs to the genre of the “sensation novel”.
The turning point for the detective stories is Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) with Sherlock Holmes.
The way the case is presented + the false impressions + the misleading clues = create the suspense
which will lead to the sudden final illumination. Holmes also challenges the reader to be as
“scientific” as he is.
CHAPTER 9: The First Half of the Twentieth Century.

1.Modernism.
The first years of the 20th century are called Edwardian Age  king Edward VII came into throne in
1901. Consolidation of Britain’s economic, industrial and military forces + peak of the imperial
power. Still, the working and living conditions of the labourers were still very low. The bourgeoisie
thought to dominate the world forever, but then WW1 destroyed their belief.
The manifesto was “Make it new!”, that’s to say it was necessary to leave space for modernity 
essays, manifestos and magazines swept the literary conventions of the past. This movement took
the name of Modernism  create a new world by destroying what was in the way for its creation.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
At the beginning they promoted a recovery of tradition, not the recent one but the one of the
past, the golden treasure or the European culture. Some writers took Homer or Dante as an
inspiration. The modernist poet had to open up to international culture and get in contact with
the “European mind”. The war showed the writers they could no longer describe reality as before,
and so they limited the narration to a few days or hours, and decided that it was better to
investigate one single fact.
At the same time some of them dissolved reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of
consciousness, and so the stream of consciousness was born.
Bloomsbury Group  group of revolutionary people, each in his/her field (economists, biographers
and essayists, art critics). High social class was symptom of a relatively moderate position,
compared to Joyce of Pound. The group was noted for its rejection of the Victorian sexual
conventions, promoting women’s writing.
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) wrote splendid short stories. She was “helped” by the parity of
expression for women writers achieved in the early 20th century.
2. Poetry.
For the first part of the 20th century, published and readers preferred a traditionalist form of poetry
 celebrated English tradition and rural life with easy and repetitive verse forms.
The renewal of poetic language came with French Symbolism and with Imagism, a movement
which had the idea of a hard, dry image to go against the romantic poetry.
The most influential promoter of this idea was Ezra Pound (1885-1972) who declared that the old
sugary poetry had to be replaced by a poetic mode that was “hard and clear” short, intense
and compact lyric forms = LESS IS MORE  no more abundance of adjectives or metaphors 
direct language and use in poetry of everyday language.
2.1. Yeats.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) Irish.
At the beginning of his career he was immersed in a Romantic atmosphere and his poetry had an
elegiac character which found inspiration in figures of the ancient Ireland, still uncontaminated by
the industrial development. The tone was nostalgic with a feeling of abandonment. This mood
was to be broken by an evocation of the heroes of legends.
An important influence on his poetry was given by the French Symbolism and the encounter with
Pound  he turned to a more direct language with words and accents of colloquial speech +
empowered by the objectivity of the image, he started to confront the present.
His Modernist poetry covers many linguistic registers. He won the Nobel Prize in 1923.
2.2. Eliot.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) American. At university he studied the metaphysical poets and
Dante, and was also inspired by the French symbolism + the meeting with Pound  he started to
write for “BLAST”, the modernist magazine.
Rhapsody on a Windy Night poem. Image recurrent in his poetry  urban squalor.
Collection of poems entitled Prufrock and Other Observations, completely on modernist values 
use of everyday language to portray the unpoetic reality of the contemporary world +
presentation of the fragmentation of consciousness, reflection of the crisis of the self. There was no
linearity, replaced with decomposition and dislocations, of place and time. Recourse to satire and
ironic reversal.
The Hollow Men barrier against the temptation of falling into a Pre-Romantic mode and at the
same time a form of mockery of the present world.
The Waste Land his masterpiece. Poem. Loss of fertility represents the crisis of Western civilization.
Mythic elements  the legend of the Fisher King, who lost his virility causing his land to lose fertility
+ figure of Tiresias, the androgynous with female breasts + the image of the city, which has a key
role in artist’s creativity. London is the “unreal city”, in which dominates alienation and anonymity.
Moments of history (presented as fragments) and cryptic quotations from past eras co-exist in a
desolate present. Allusive references.
Structure in blocks and fragments  disturbing portrait of contemporary desolation.
Eliot overcame the negativity of his vision through the adoption of a religious perspective.
Ash Wednesday new musicality, new verse pattern  use of rhyme. The attention is directed
towards the inner world.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Four Quartets poem in four parts. Each quartet starts with a reference to a personal experience
and then develops with a reflection which is personal and absolute at the same time  reveal the
presence of the divine in our life and in history. In the background the is the presence of war.
Intense language.
2.3. Auden.
In the 1930s many writers joined the left-wing cause.
Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-1973) is one of them. Poet. Gay.
He became famous for the originality of his verses which mixed a great variety of metrical forms
and poetic sources.
Poems volume of poems. Influence of Eliot and echoes of ancient English poetry. Wish to
reconnect to Pre-Modernism poetry, as far as form is concerned. His language is vibrant, full of
elements of different expressive forms.
The Orators mixture of poetry and prose which investigates British society. Auden expresses the
need for “commitment”.
His join of the Communist party was due to his aversion to a system he perceived as unjust and
illiberal. Homosexuality was also a reason for rebellion towards the hypocritical establishment,
which persecuted them.
He then went to Spain when the civil broke out.
Spain 1937 great poetic vigour.
Auden was more and more disappointed, and bitter truths took the place of generous utopias 
poetry could no longer be vehicle of change. He went to live in the USA.
Another Time in which the theme is existential solitude of man, with religious reflections.
To his mother he dedicated For the Time Being
The Age of Anxiety dramatic poem
The Shield of Achilles modelled on the Horatian ode but less anguish in tone, denounces the ills of
modern society. In his later works he didn’t lose his taste for games of intellect, his linguistic forms
and his ability to marry popular modes of expression with the forms of poetry.
2.4. Thomas.
Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) Welsh. Emphasis on direct access to the emotions, not in a poetry of
impulse, but attentive to the sound of his verses, as he was a very skilled poetic technician.
His main theme is that of the oneness of every form of life and that of the continuity of life, death
and new life + link between sexuality and religious myth + sexual impulse and the forces that
preside over the development of natural phenomena.
His style is influenced by the Surrealism, by Blake and the Metaphysical poets and by the Welsh
religious folklore traditions.
Under Milk Wood radio drama. Rhetorical splendour and sonority.
3. Narrative.
3.1. New and Not So New.
Second half 19th century  French writers transformed the novel (Flaubert and Maupassant first,
Zola later + Henry James). In England this revolution arrived in the 1890s with Moore, Gissing,
Somerset Maugham and Bennett.
Get beyond the limits of the 19 th century novel, but the new one was not immediately
appreciated by the Modernist, because they promoted an innovation in continuity, while
modernism proclaimed a radical rupture with the past.
Herbert George Wells (1866-1946) (vedi anche cap 8.4.5) was the “historian of the ages to come”.
Art based on science, but the science was a science yet to come  science fiction.
From The Time Machine to The First Men on the Moon  extraordinary inventions, technological
developments, Martian invasions, world wars revealed his social and ideological concerns.
Mr Lewisham, Kipps, Ann Veronica, Tono-Bungay are tales express the interest in social change
and the overcoming of the social barriers inherited from Victorian times.
Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)
Anna of The Five Towns concern with how society was developing.
The Old Wives’ Tale novel also on social concerns. Contrasting destinies of two sisters  sense of
the passing of time.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
John Galsworthy (1867-1933) novelist and dramatist. Strong sense of social justice. He was so
influent that his drama Justice led to significant changes in the penal system.
The Man of Property highly critical fresco of the English bourgeoisie and its tendency to transform
everything into commodities. Events of a single family to represent the crisis of a social class.
The novel turned into a family saga and this led to the publication of 2 further novels, forming The
Forsyte Saga. Three more book were added, collected into A Modern Comedy. The social critique
slowly fade as the volumes went on.
Galsworthy gained the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.
3.2. Conrad.
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born in what now is part of Ukraine. Polish parents. He moved to
France and joined the French mercantile marine, then the British.
After his novel Almayer’s Folly he definitively settled in England and dedicated only to his writings.
His idols were Flaubert and Maupassant + Henry James. But his mater was the sea and his
experiences as a sailor.
His experiences allowed him to fascinate the reader and at the same time offer a vision of the
world in which life is a confrontation with adversity as sense of community.
Everyone had his tasks and a duty of obedience  what was valid for the crew was valid for the
society as a whole.
Many of Conrad’s stories are set in the colonial territories and the seas connecting them, but his
attitude towards the colonies wasn’t supportive but clear-minded as to give reflection on them.
Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, An Outpost of Progress, Heart of Darkness. The last one
in set in Congo and its protagonist is a symbol of Europe as a whole  he is sent to the African
Colony as a “bearer of civilization”, but he fails. The heart of darkness is that of the European man,
who left alone in the primordial world becomes himself primitive, abandoning himself.
Typhoon short novel. Story of a terrible storm through which the modest and insignificant captain
leads his ship to safety. He has done his duty, there is no reward.
This is a recurrent theme in Conrad’s works  put his characters in extreme situations, faced with a
radical choice. If you succeed there is no particular reward, if you fail you die.
The Shadow Line autobiographical. Here too the captain saves himself and is saved.
Lord Jim tells the story of a just man who in crisis abandons his ship and is condemn to wander in
search of a test which might redeem him, only finding death in the end.
Conrad with his attitude is like God in the Old Testament  unlike modernists, he is able to discern
in the disorder of the world an ordering principle. His novels are illuminated by a totalising moral
certainty.
Nostromo again there is an extreme situation, and Nostromo will die for his betrayal. The whole
novel is a series of betrayals of one’s self.
The Secret Agent attention turned to Europe. The story takes place in London and is about a
group of anarchists who planned a murder. Tragedy not political but human. Small figures
overwhelmed by a game that seizes command of them  end with death.
Under Western Eyes tale of failure, moral more than practical of a group of revolutionaries.
In his works Conrad confronted the nature of the human condition and that of historical reality in
a time marked by man’s illusion of omnipotence. He wrote plots, invented characters far from the
spirit of modernism.
The narration is given to a “second narrator”, someone not able to grasp the significance of what
is being recounted.
3.3. Ford.
Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) grew up in a cosmopolitan artistic environment.
English Review monthly magazine. It launched D.H. Lawrence.
Transatlantic Review magazine. Published texts by Joyce, Pound and Hemingway among others.
The Good Soldier tells the story of the upper-middle-class couples in the years of the war. The
narrator is the betrayed husband.
It is the first adult novel on the theme of marriage, and is also a good fresco of the Edwardian
world, with its luxury, the hypocritical conventions, its denial of sexuality trapped between
gratification and repression.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
The narration is unreliable, as if it was a recollection of ideas for a silent listener. The listener is the
reader, who tries to find a way among the episodes told, which are written.  it is a poetic choice
by the author who rejects linear subsequence of events.
Parade’s End 4 novels. They are more traditional. The saga deals with a country gentleman who
embodies the conservative virtues of the old England and his amorous tribulations and his
experience in the war.
Epic novel about the English world and a warning against war.
Ford became a “historian of his time”
3.4. Forster.
Edward Morgan Forster (1879-1970)
Howards End his masterpiece. Its motto is “Only Connect”. The central character hopes to
reconcile the two worlds of the bourgeoisie (the business one and the liberal one). It is a novel
about the “state of a nation”, and investigates into the character of the men and women of the
English bourgeoisie + psychologically and sociologically foray into the pathetic world of the petty
bourgeoisie.
The novel does not end with a closure but with an opening to the possibilities of experience.
All Forster’s novels have a dichotomy which dialectically informs the events narrated.
Where Angels Fear to Tread opposition between England and Italy, between Victorian rigidity and
Mediterranean spontaneity.
A Room with a View English self-censoring and Italian passion, suffocating conformism and free
expression of feelings.
A Passage to India novel set before the war. There is the contrast between two worlds and
cultures, and between dominators and dominated. The Englishman Fielding is put on trial because
he defended an Indian friend.
3.5. Joyce.
James Joyce (1882-1941) Irish. Lived in Paris and in Trieste. Moved to Zurich and finally settled in
Paris.
Dubliners collection of short stories, each of which is complete on its own, but they were
conceived to represent the life in Dublin in the aspects of childhood, adolescence, maturity and
public life.
Symmetries, internal references, symbolic valences through the whole collection. The symbol is
that of the paralysis.
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man exile is synonymous with the condition of the artist. It has
autobiographical aspects but it is an illustration of the maturation process of the artist as a young
man. In manhood there will be the liberation from all bounds and limits through exile, which is
freedom.
Ulysses Joyce’s masterpiece. References to the Odyssey and realism of the narration. Leopold
Bloom, Molly and Stephen Dedalus are respectively Ulysses, Penelope and Telemachus. It is a
modern Odyssey.
The several years of Ulysses’ travels are replaced by a single-day event.
There is a parodic aspect, heroic-comical pose + the conviction that the small modern world can
be elaborated into epic. It is the epic of two-races and the epic of the human body (as a matter
of fact the book was censored until 1933).
Exuberant linguistic inventions, plays on words, verbal cocktails, literary echoes, borrowings. The
most important linguistic invention brought in the novel is the “stream of consciousness”.
Finnegans Wake Joyce’s last work entirely on linguistic inventions. It recounts the dreams and
thoughts of a pub keeper and his relationship with his wife and children.
Their little experiences can represent the entire adventure of humankind  transfiguration of the
singular to represent the whole  polyglot idiom, linguistic babel.
It is so extreme in its narrative experimentation that the narration itself almost disappears.
3.6. Lawrence.
David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) modest origins. Original writings.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Sons and Lovers expresses the lives of labouring classes, their poverty and sufferings. Realist novel
with a standpoint objectivity opposed to that of the ruling class + shows the relationship between
parents and between parents and children  Oedipal relationship between mother and son
(partly autobiographical). Once the man’s mother dies, he feels lost, but he understands he has to
life his life for himself.
Central theme in Lawrence’s works  conflict between conventions and passion, between nature
and industrial civilisation.
The Rainbow saga of three generations of the Brangwen family  denounce the destruction of
the rural civilisation caused by the industrial civilisation.
Real life is lost and has to be found somewhere else  Lawrence went to Sardinia, Ceylon,
Australia and Mexico. He also had great sociological interest and narrative vigour of the social
transformations taking place in England.
Women in Love the loss of vital integrity can be recovered through Eros, a sexual experience
which for Lawrence is something sacred. The novel shows a break with the traditional narrative
schemas. Language accentuate subterranean sensuality + symbolic value in what is being told +
the single episodes, the single moments of liberation, the discovery of a profound truth seen
through emotion is the what determines the development of the narrative.
It also is a powerful attack on British intellectuality, which Lawrence saw sick with complacency
and unable to see the tragedy of the present.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover ultimate attack to the sterility of the bourgeoisie. Banned by the censor in
the USA and in England.
Sexuality is a chance of redemption and self- realisation. The ending is open.
Deep psychological analysis of his characters.
Lawrence must be included in the Modernist poets, even if he didn’t like them.
3.7. Woolf.
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) member of the Bloomsbury group. Her first novel were quite traditional.
Then she wrote Jacob’s Room and Mrs Dalloway, the fruit of a long reflection on the genre of the
novel  need to go beyond realism and give space to the movements of the mind and the soul
 increased psychologically awareness. The action of Mrs Dalloway takes place in a single day
and the passing of time is marked by a clock bell. The story alternates that of the protagonist and
that of a young man mentally destroyed by the experience of the war.
Psychological portrait is sensitive and profound.
Reality is not objective, is determined by the subjectivity of the characters.
To the Lighthouse entirely designed to five space to the inner experience. The novel divides into
two women’s experiences. The two parts cover the space of a few hours. Major events do not
have a key role, but “little miracles” have (moments often left to interior monologue). The
monologues are not like Joyce’s stream of consciousness, the maintain a delicate order of
exposition.
The Waves flow of the voices, feelings and thoughts of the characters is accentuated.
Orlando fantasy biography.
Woolf gave life to a profound reflection of the role of women and women’s writing, but
committed suicide because she was depressed.
3.8. Outside the Modernist Frame. Maugham, Waugh, Isherwood, Orwell.
Some writers didn’t follow the modernist path, but were however very talented and famous.
William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) started as a playwright and fiction writer, became
famous for his short stories, and his novels.
Liza of Lambeth “naturalist” novel
Of Human Bondage novel
Cakes and Ale mockery of the English belles lettres.
Ashenden; or, The British Agent made him famous for the invention of the genre of the modern spy
novels. Anti-rhetorical and aware of the cynicism of the political world.
Rain short story. Analysis of the puritan fear of sexuality.
Many of Maugham’s stories are set in the bonds of the British Empire, and are notable for the
portrayal of the men and women who were the last exponents of the colonial enterprise.
The stories also have universal qualities  in particular in those describing conjugal and amorous
relationships, he offers a penetrating portrayal on human nature.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Evelyn Waugh (1903-1968) he was the voice of the discontent felt in England for the weakening of
the Empire and of the ruling class, which he treated in a cruel way.
Stylistic finesse and formidable sense of humour.
A Handful of Dust satire on the decay of English civility. Crude comical tone + ferocious satire
which spares nobody, even the main character, creating around him a halo of sympathy.
Brideshead Revisited has an elegiac tone. The novel embraces the social history of England
between the 2 WW, focusing on the personal life of his protagonist and his relationship with the
members of an aristocratic family. Everything is swept away by time and by the war. The novel
seems to say that there is a possibility of salvation through the survival of ancient values.
The Loved One again have satire. The target is an America in which everything is commercialised.
Sword of Honour a trilogy in which returns the elegiac tone. Look on the way WW2 destroyed
much of the fabric of traditional British class society.
Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) storyteller. Spend some time in Berlin when Germany was
rushing in the Nazi abyss.
All the Conspirators
My Norris Changes Train and Goodbye to Berlin are the so called “Berlin novels”, in which the
historical moment is captured by the protagonist of the stories. The narrator is like a camera, which
registers what is happening in front of it without comments or reflections.
Isherwood emigrated to the USA.
Prater Violet novel. Deals with the making of a film, and have the characteristics of the Berlin
novels, in which the personal experience is the material of history.
George Orwell (1903-1950) ranged on the side of the Republican forces in Spain and joined the
Civil war.
From that experience he wrote Homage to Catalonia, the best English book on the Spanish Civil
war.
Animal Farm it is a real fable, with the tone and narrative rhythm of a story for children. Satire on
Stalinism very comic in form. Motto: all animals are equal, some are “more equal than others”.
Brave New World described as a fable. It is an anti-utopia, a sophisticated text with a strong
intellectual basis.
Nineteen Eighty-Four deals with the fears generated by technological progress that is more hostile
than friendly to mankind. Underlying political vision of a world dominated by Stalinist dictatorship.
(didn’t happen, but the fears connected to the force of the mass media remains even nowadays.
Concern with the political language).
3.9. Lowry and Compton-Burnett.
These two authors were admired by a small readership, unknown to the majority.
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969)
Dolores relatively traditional novel
Pastors and Masters different novelistic technique  the narrator disappears and the entire story is
entrusted to the dialogues between the characters. The dialogues have cunning irony, and they
carry more weight than the drama of the events described. The setting is always a palatial
residence of a patriarchal family and the period is that of the apogee of the English Empire.
Behind the “respectability” are hidden bigamy, incest and matricide, but nothing have to disturb
the appearance of decorum and civilisation.
Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) embarked on a merchant sheep and spent time in Spain, Paris, New
York, Hollywood and Mexico. Settled in Canada. He published a small part of his works, and some
of them were published posthumously by his widow.
Under the Volcano is a story of a British consul in Mexico who is killed by Fascist thugs. The entire
story takes place in one day.
Lowry’s writings picks up many aspects of modernism: multiple points of view, interior dialogue,
stream of consciousness, but with a difference  developed a mode of writing that was
subjective, personal and autobiographical.
The story of the Consul takes place when Hitler occupied Austria  powerful allegory to his time.
But it is not a political novel. It is a modernist novel full of erudite references, meta-novelist
moments and echoes of the classics.
4. The Theatre.
4.1. From the 19th to the 20th century.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
English drama in the 18th century didn’t count so much. The writers attempted to write for theatre,
but failed. So did the Victorian ones. But the theatre itself flourished. The melodrama genre
flourished, first with musical sections, than without. Passions and emotions still were represented 
opportunity to empathise with the sufferings of the good and to be indignant at the wickedness of
the evil, to be thrilled by plots.
The authors were mostly hacks who began by adapting to the English theatre French pièces. This
genre was enjoyable for the bourgeoisie, thus saving the theatre.
The only pièce of the time which survived is J.M. Barrie’s (1860-1937) Peter Pan, plus the comedies
of Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), with his The Importance of Being Earnest.
4.2. Shaw.
Opponent of the well-made play and supporter of the Ibsen revolution.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) started his career as a political propagandist and theatre critic.
Widowers’ Houses the first of his three “plays unpleasant”.  quite explicitly ideological, the motor
of the plot lies in the discussion on the moral legitimacy of the private incomes of the respectable
bourgeoisie, presented as immoral by the play.
Mrs Warren’s Profession also presents the theme of the “dirty money”. The money gained through
prostitution is as dirty as that of the industrialists who pay starvation waves to the women who work
for them.
Unpleasantness gives way to unmasking  the plays are pleasant and the object of satire shifts to
the false ideals affecting the society.
Shaw started with the formulas of the 19th century theatre adapting it to the demands of his own
theatre of discussion. He also rewrote existing genres by writing comedies whose comic quality
derived by two mechanisms  paradox and inversion or reversal (things are said or done in the
opposite way one would expect).
Shaw believed he could change the society. He reserved his irresistible aphorisms, paradoxes,
mockery and dialogues to the upper class. He also managed to entertain the audience by
creating different accents for all social classes.
Pygmalion comedy.
Heartbreak House less work
Saint Joan drama.
4.3. Irish Theatre.
W.B. Yeats (cap.9.2.1) believed that theatre could arise the consciousness of the Irish people and
so founded the Irish Literary Theatre. His dream was to create a theatre which rediscovered the
intellectual vigour of the classical Greece. He was disappointed, his works didn’t reach the
audience.
His later works were influenced by the Japanese No theatre, but his lines didn’t have the dramatic
form which could manage the passage from page to stage.
John Millington Synge (1871-1909) managed to transform the English spoken in the Irish countryside
into a literary language, leaving it as a manifestation of the vitality of people.
The Playboy of the Western World is set in a village in which there burst the playboy of the title.
Continual shifts between real and fantasy, truth and lies and the contrast between these
opposites is given by the relationship set up between fact and speech.
Only after WW1 there will be other important Irish playwrights.
Sean O’Casey (1880-1964) who tells the dramas by which Ireland had been riven in the preceding
years. Anti-capitalist and anti-clerical.
The Silver Tassie was rejected by the Abbey Theatre.
4.4. Coward and Priestley.
The first to bring to stage the changes of WW1 was Noël Coward (1899-1973) but only novelties in
manners and language, because he ignored the problem of English society.
He invented a style of conversation and a type of character which reflected the ideal of
elegance of a certain section of the bourgeoisie in the interwar years.
His plays are charmingly scandalous in matters of marital relations.
Coward’s quality was his use of language and the ear for novelties of speech.
His plays all take place in a drawing room, with its cigarette smoke, the rustling of dresses and the
eccentric phraseology of characters.
Hay Fever

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Private Lives
Design for Living
Blithe Spirit
J.B. Priestley (1894-1984) managed to represent the uncertainties and bewilderment of English
society between wars.
Idea of time in which past, present and future co-exist in different dimension.
An Inspector Calls the inspector seems to be a being from another dimension in which time is
circular and not linear.
Detective format to give voice to his appeal for solidarity and for respect of the rights of others.
4.5. T.S. Eliot and the Poetic Drama.
In the 1920s and 1930s verse drama muted to religious theatre  medieval miracle plays.
T.S. Eliot (cap 9.2.2) wrote something for the Canterbury Festival  he wrote the chorus of the
drama The Rock.
Eliot was convinced that the best way to communicate poetry was theatre  started to work on
a theatrical text in verse  found a new form of drama.
Murder in the Cathedral, the story of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Perfect correspondence of
form and content  the verse seems natural to the spectator. It is a work of great dramatic and
moral force.
Eliot’s next plays were all set in the present.
5. Beckett.
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) Irish. He spent a great part of his life in France. He started writing
novels and plays before WW2. Friend of Joyce.
More Kick Than Pricks is a parody of Joyce’s Dubliners. Inadequacy of realism and taste for
linguistic invention is to be found also in Murphy, a novel which adopts realistic themes and
devices but at the same time subverts them.
Beckett was involved in the Resistance during the war and after the war he decided to settle in
Paris and chose English as his literary language  a logic and rigorous language which best suited
the narrative forms he wanted to experiment  developed a crystalline and abstract style, with
no rhetoric and no linguistic connotations  his characters have no linguistic culture.
Mercier et Carnier novel
Molloy, Malone Meurt, L’Innommable a trilogy of novels. The protagonist is a decrepit narrator
whose ability to move will diminish towards immobility. The monologue of the protagonist
becomes more and more unreliable as the narrator of a story. Succession of arbitrary stories 
failure of narration and of the world  Beckett’s vision the artist in a world emerging from the war.
In his later prose works Beckett was inspired by the maxim of Calderòn  thus renewing his literary
experiment, rarefying the narrative material  expose the contradiction between aspiration
towards silence and the obligation to express.
En Attendant Godot written after Malone Dies. Beckett used for Godot the genre of the
conversational drama, emptying from the inside, reducing it to a dialogue which is an end to itself,
which does not lead to action  succession of phrases exchanged to pass the time and conjure
away the waiting. The act of waiting is the essence of the entire play  waiting for someone who
will never come becomes the form through which human existence is revealed.
The dialogue is made up of leaps of logic, of questions which presuppose no answer and lines
which expose the fiction of the theatre.
The old naturalistic form in grotesque and impracticable.
Fine de Partie metatheatrical moments and emphasis on the illogicality of the discursive discourse.
Theme of the abolition of movement. Everything happens in a sort of bunker.
Happy Days the words of the protagonist are happy, even if she is restricted to total immobility.
The scene is abstract
Not I
That Time
Rockaby
Beckett stripped the theatrical fact of most of its constituents.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
CHAPTER 10: From the End of the Second World War to the Present
Day.
1. The Theatre.
1.1 The 1950s Renaissance.
Great actors and actresses, intensity of theatrical life, originality of the plays.
Cultural renewal aimed at rescuing the theatre from its provincial torpor  need to promote a
close relationship between theatre and post-war reality, with a fresh look at the classics from a
contemporary point of view, an opening to other theatrical cultures and the promotion of new
authors.
John Osborne (1929-1994)
Look Back in Anger epoch-making triumph. Its main character with his anger towards every
English institution was to become the spokesman for the profound dissatisfaction of an entire
generation. The play itself is quite traditional, but its content is original.
The Entertainer different theatrical mode. Setting in the world of the music hall  symbol of the
decadence of England.
Luther has Brechtian echoes, but slight and superficial. Osborne created dramatic theatrical
events from the figure of the rebel and a prevailing sense of anger against social conventions.
Inadmissible Evidence the protagonist’s collapse in portrayed in a series of scenes of unreal
imagined solutions, signs of his mental vacillation.
Osborne show the world that the theatre could stage the tensions, the discontent and the
language of the contemporary reality.
Arnold Wesker (1932-)
Chicken Soup with Barley is the story of a Communist Jewish family of London in three crucial
moments in the English political
history.
Roots the main character is used for an exploration of the possible modes of commitment to
reform society.
Chips with Everything
The Very Own and Golden City written in no naturalistic style.
Later Wesker used different linguistic idioms with varying degrees of stylization, dealing with a
great variety of themes and gained notability with the One-Woman Plays.
John Arden (1930-) presented the themes and action of his plays through the filter of comedy and
history  with techniques of interrupting and exposing the theatrical fiction.
Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance “realistic but not naturalistic”  the action is interrupted by poems
and songs, with the main character acting like a commentator on the action and addressing
directly to the public. The action take place in an indeterminate 19 th-century period, but the story
was inspired by more recent events. It is a pacifist drama.
Arden wrote a play on the colonial theme with his wife, less pacific in approach  The Island of
the Mighty, which uses the figures and themes of the Arthurian legends to establish a parallel
between the 6th-century Britain and the former British colonies.
Arden then decided to work only with non-professional companies.
Pearl radio drama
Edward Bond (1934-)
Saved deals with the killing of a baby in a pram by a group of young people grown up in a
culture in which violence is at the base. Monstrous and exemplary culmination of an alienated
everyday existence. Alienation and violence is at the center of Bond’s early work  then his
attention will shift from the effects to the cause. Question about the nature of power, how it
develops, how it operates and how it preserves its effectiveness.
Understanding the nature of power means postulating the need for change  art should be a
guide to action.
Narrow Road to the Deep North portrait of the hypocrisy inherent in the colonial enterprise.
Lear rewriting of King Lear.
The Bundle text on the role of the intellectual and revolutionary ethics.
Restoration portrait of the nature of power developed around the settings and characters typical
of the Restoration.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
The War Plays dystopian trilogy on a nuclear holocaust and the degeneration of democracy.
1.2. Pinter.
Harold Pinter (1930-2008) Greatest English playwright of the second half of the century. Inspiration
from Beckett, for the way his plays underline the illogicality of everyday conversation.
In Pinter’s theatre we have a great use of language and the richness of the implications of a
dialogue that at first seems banal. He has ear for the irregularity of English mode of speech and
ability to recreate them for the stage  revealing the nature of everyday conversation, as
incoherent, with its voids and repetitiousness.
Difficulty to communicate through speech, which highlights the emotional force with which one
can transmit one’s fears and the aggressiveness and violence within us.
Often the pauses and the silences serve to communicate. But equally often the words which serve
NOT to communicate.
Pinter showed us how words can be used as a weapon
The Caretaker cast of only three characters and a very simple plot. From this simple starting point,
there can be attributed many meanings  struggle between youth and age, defence of territory,
the search for identity. The text is full of implications given by its linguistic ingenuity and the
ambiguity of its words.
It can be seen as Pinter’s protest against marginalisation, intolerance and the repression of
difference.
The play takes place in a single room. It is at the same time a metaphysical space and a concrete
one.
Of the characters we know very little, the drama is constructed around a crucial moment in their
lives  a turning point which catches the characters in an extreme state and at a moment when
the sense of an entire existence is called into question. The past counts for nothing.
The dimension of the past, in the form of tricks of memory, comes to have a central role in Pinter’s
later plays  Betrayal  simple mechanism (the drama goes back in time) revealing how the
characters elaborate what has happened previously.
Pinter’s movement between memory and present reality, between words and silence offer the
spectator a desolating reflection on the inability to love.
One for the Road the present here is one of a dictatorial regime and the room is that of a suave
torturer talking with two opponents of the regime who have been imprisoned.
Gap between what words say and what they mean  proof of the aggressive power of words.
Political and civil concern in the centre of the stage.
Mountain Language
Party Time
Moonlight
Ashes to Ashes
Celebration
1.3. Comedy.
Comedy was important for the theatre in the mid-20th century but also in the latter half.
Joe Orton (1933-1967)
Entertaining Mr Sloane drama which exposes the hypocrisies surrounding sex and sexuality.
Loot and What the Butler Said have a more comical and farcical vein.
Alan AyckBourn (1939-), whose main subject is the domestic side of the suburban way of life, seen
with sociological perceptiveness. His central characters are husband and wives. Sometimes just
one couple and sometimes two or three, trapped in marriages which are experienced both as a
prison and a source of security. The stories are always hilarious  offer an insight into the social
malaise which affects a large strata of English middle and lower-middle classes.
Ayckbourn liked to show actions going on in two different spaces, or two actions going on in
parallel in the same place, or in twin “text”  The Norman Conquests the same story is told from
three different points of view as it takes place in each play in three different parts of the same
house.
Michael Frayn (1933-) ingenious stagecraft.
Noises Off is about a theatrical company which is first rehearsing and then catastrophically
performing a farcical comedy of misunderstandings.
Tom Stoppard (1937-) stagecraft + play with language.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead meta-theatrical comedy constructed around references
to lines of Hamlet.
Travesties also has a theatre text behind it (Importance of Being Earnest)
The Real Thing is a play-within-the-play and have excerpts from two classics.
Also important is the reflection on language and Stoppard’s preoccupation with the correct use
of words and the need for a language that does not mask the meaning of communication.
Jumpers
Arcadia characters from fiction and famous personages from the past are together. Triumph of
intelligence. It speaks for the recognition of the right of feelings  reason vs passion,
enlightenment vs romantic sensibility. No moral conclusion.
The Invention of Love characters of the past are together. Fact are not trustworthy.
Stoppard’s theatre  ingenious variety of dramatic solutions, linguistic refinement.
Peter Shaffer (1926-)
Equus drama
Amadeus
Black Comedy comedy
Lettice and Lovage
Peter Nichols (1927-)
The National Health
Privates on Parade
Alan Bennett (1934-) plays and television plays  most typical exponent of English humour.
Terry Johnson (1955-) put on the stage the 20th century icons  imagination as a bearer of truth.
1.4. From the Laboratory of the Alternative Theatre.
English theatre of the second half of 20th century  sociological theatre, staging the most
significant social and political issues of the time. Emergence of authors from the school of
alternative theatre  which produced many companies and actors and authors.
Post-Pinter generation.
David Hare (1947-) committed theatre  unmasking dishonesty of the reactionaries and expose
the limits and the fragility of the progressives. His themes are best shown in the private lives and
feelings of his characters  progressive-minded English spectators recognised themselves, their
dilemmas and weaknesses.
Writing is traditional in form.
Howard Brenton (1942-) wrote political texts showing radical freedom of dramatic form, which will
be also part of the more mainstream and official theatre.
The Churchill Play play within the play. Theme of the fear of the authoritarian involution.
Epsom Downs theme of the illusion of the end of class dichotomies.
The Romans in Britain theme of violence and distortion of truth involved in the Irish question.
Pravda co-written with Hare. Grotesque comedy on the world of the media. Twists of plot, frenetic
rhythm, original stage effects. Faith in the power of theatre.
Howard Barker (1946-) richness of language, which is powerful and rhythmic and evocative of the
dramatic density of the Elizabethans. Shows how speech can be used as an instrument of
domination. His plays are set in the past but put themselves in a visionary critique of the present.
Caryl Churchill (1938-)
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire play on the radical changes brought about by the Puritan
revolution. Epic style of theatrical presentation.
Cloud Nine temporal structure in which past and present exist, future and past are superimposed
on each other  a present that has within it past and an anticipated future.
Top Girls shows a woman of present day talking with characters who lived centuries ago.
Churchill’s theatrical writing is marked by a continuing search for new forms and an original
rethinking of the models  force and economy of language  her images remain in the mind of
the spectator.
The Striker
Blue Heart
1.5. End of a Century.
Two phenomena mark the end of the 20th century: the explosion of Irish dramatists and Sarah
Kane.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Many young authors invaded London with the freshness and pathos of works whose theme is
rooted in Irish reality, its past and its present.
Brian Friel (1929-) Catholic born in Protestant Ulster. Express the reality of Irish experience in its
totality. He is a writer of great finesse, with a bitter-sweet tone and sense of irony.
Philadelphia Here I Come! Main theme is emigration
Faith Healer play which reveals Friel’s fascination with the evocative power of place names.
Translations play. Allegory on the relationship between language and power. Notion of translation
as a metaphor for Ireland. In the play translation marks the end of the Gaelic language and the
consequent loss of national identity.
Dancing at Lughnasa story of the five Mundy sisters, victims of modernisation.
Formula of the “laughter through tears”  portrait of his country which has general and absolute
value embedded in the life and problems of everyday life.
Many of the new emerging authors belong to the “in-yer-face” school of theatrical provocation.
Sarah Kane (1971-1999) committed suicide.
Blasted play. Provoked indignation at first but was then recognised as the manifestation of a great
theatrical talent. Kane portrayed a world dominated by violence and cruelty, emphasising things
current. Occasional bursts of obscenity and scenes of violence.
Cleansed here too there are scenes of violence and obscenities, motivated by a sincere sense of
urgency.
4.48 Psychosis searing declaration of defeat in the face of an anguish that only death can
appease.
2. Poetry.
2.1. Larkin, Betjeman, Hughes, Hill, Harrison.
Rejection of Modernism, of its traditional dimension, its roots in high culture. The new poetry is
provincial, concentrated to everyday life and regulated by irony.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985) wrote four collection of poems. Managed to represent the banality and
existential poverty of the English bourgeoisie.
Larkin wore the mask of the anti-Romantic, and filtered through irony his observation of the squalid
reality which he described in his poetry.
John Betjeman (1906-1984) popular broadcasting personality + author of various tourist guides
and books on architecture. He also wrote poetry, technically traditional and appearing simple,
but hiding a subterranean melancholy and a vein of humour. Comedy of middle-class life.
He was a singer of the English landscape, both for the countryside and for the townscape.
Collected Poems
Geoffrey Hill (1931-) set his poetry in a mythic world he personally created. Great stylistic elegance
and refined erudition. Quite close to Modernism, he created works of great intellectual complexity
and moral rigour  meaning of Christianity in a world where Christ is absent.
Ted Hughes (1930-1999) also set his poetry in a mythic world of his own creation. Violence plays a
crucial role in his poetry  it has the role of motor of life, outside of history
Crow
His poetry is peopled by animals and beasts who are endowed by the poet with mythic values
and powers. They all obey an instinct that is of violence and domination.
Wodwo here appears a fantasy creature, which also has the same brutal charge of the natural
creatures.
Hughes than dedicated himself to his “topographical” poems.
He was nominated Poet Laureate
Birthday Letters 88 short poems.
Tony Harrison (1937-) poet rooted in reality, alert to major political issues and the realities of the
working-class life in the North of England. Attitudes and expression of that part of England +
expression drawn from the Greek and Latin classics. Dramatic writer.
2.2. Heaney.
Seamus Heaney (1939-) Catholic born in Ulster. Nobel Prize Winner 1995. His earliest poems are full
of the feel of the countryside, whose sounds and atmosphere he recreates.
Death of a Naturalist digs in the Irish earth to bring to light its strata, from prehistoric to Gaelic times.
More complex and impassionate style in his later poems.
North violence of the present is transported to a distant past.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Later we find in his poetry a sense of guilt for having renounced to action in favour of writing.
Field Work
Station Island ode dedicated to a cousin killed by the Protestants.
Heaney’s work was influenced by many authors, most importantly by Dante.
Seeing Things great emotional power. Deals with the death of parents, conjugal love and the birth
of children, hymn to the gift of being able to see things.
3. The Novel.
3.1. On Either Side of the 1950s.
Modernism in the novel did not last for long. The realist tradition took soon its place  many
reasons  sheer talent of some writers; literature of “commitment” (writing with strong social and
political motivations behind it); continuing conservative strand represented by writers who cared
about the faith of the upper classes.
P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) transformed the brutal realities of class power and imperial
exploitation into an idyllic world, populated by delightful characters representing how the English
liked to think of themselves. Ruling class of charming ineptitude. Use of improbable similes. Reality
implausibly transfigured.
The young novelists of the 1950s draw their materials from the provincial working lower and
middle-classes. None of these authors wrote masterpieces  healthy fresh provincial air into the
stuffy world of British culture. They were realistic but also had a typically English writing ironic vein.
John Wain (1925-1994)
Hurry On Down picturesque adventure of its main character in revolt against the education
system and middle class conventions. Final compromise with the bourgeois society.
John Braine (1922-1986) less comic tone.
Room at the Top has a cynic, materialistic and social-climbing hero.
Alan Sillitoe (1928-)
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning whose hero is a factory worker who combines joie de vivre
with an instinctive anarchic rejection of power.
David Storey (1933-)
This Sporting Life a young worker become a famous Rugby player, become rich but loses the
people who really loved him.
Kingsley Amis (1922-1993)
Lucky Jim whose hero is the anti-hero of the post-war English novel. The novel’s social comedy,
and the satirical spirit behind it, is directly targeted to the academic world and its pomposity, but
is extended to the whole mode of being of English society.
3.2. Greene.
Graham Greene (1904-1990) chronicled ab England which was still a great power but against the
dire economic conditions and the political context which was leading towards a disaster.
After the war he turned his attentions to the new realities and became a chronicle of a wider
world, that of the Cold War.
He worked as a journalist  his narrative style make use of a journalistic eye in describing reality +
mechanism of the thriller to devise ingenuous plots, cinematic language.
Greene also worked for the Secret Service, and loved risk and adventures.
The protagonists of his novels are ordinary individuals, modest, marked by human weaknesses.
These individuals find themselves confronted with decisive choices to make. At the outset the
negative aspects seem to prevail, at the end they pay with their sacrifice and save the little
dignity they have left  anti-heroes.
The Power and the Glory
The Heart of the Matter
The Quiet American
The Comedians
Our Man in Havana
The Human Factor
Greene was “on the side” of the victims. Fighting injustices was his only non-negotiable principle
and it’s what moved his work. Passionate moral tension, aligning him with the oppressed against
the powerful.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Quality of his prose, in the atmosphere. Most important of all, the type of novels Greene wrote all
used the expressive forms of modernity while their content addresses the issues of the modern age.
3.3. Golding.
William Golding (1911-1993) won Nobel Prize in 1983, is most famous for Lord of the Flies, in which a
group of boys shipwrecked on a Pacific island, who gradually turn themselves into a primitive tribe.
Moral fable. The sacrifice of the innocent can be seen as an allusion to the massacre of the Jews.
It is the fiercest manifestation of the triumph of evil in a world beyond history.
Darkness Visible explore the presence of evil in historically defined context, in London, from WW2
to present day.
3.4. Outside the Realist Frame.
Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990)
Black Book scandalous.
His reputation is based on the four novels that form the “Alexandria Quartet”, which have
separate narrators telling the same story.
Anthony Burgess (1917-1993) began as a realist with his “Malayan Trilogy” , three novels which
offered an acute commentary on the end of the colonial period.
Then Burgess turned his attention to structural and linguistic experiment.
A Clockwork Orange
MF homage to structuralism
Earthly Powers bizarre reflection on the 20th century and on the artificial nature of narration.
A Dead Man in Deptford
Burgess was also a great critic and an admirer of Joyce.
John Fowles (1926-2005)
The French Lieutenant’s Woman deconstruction of the 19 th century novel. The story is brought to a
conclusion half way through the book, then the narrator reveals himself as author and investigates
the destiny of the characters, offering two possible endings.
Fowles was attentive to social dimension, to the massification of man in contemporary world, a
man capable of experimenting.
A Maggot in which fiction is accompanied by historical documents.
Antonia S. Byatt (1936-)
Possession interplay between present and the Victorian past.
Peter Ackroyd (1949-)
Hawksmoor
Julian Barnes (1946-) mixed fiction, the essay form and literary curiosities in his Flaubert’s Parrot.
He had taste for everything French.
John Banville (1945-) Irish. Mixed fictional biography and science in his “historical” novels
dedicated to great scientific figures like Newton and Copernicus.
The Untouchable sort of fictional biography.
Banville had a prose of great elegance.
The Sea
J.G. Ballard (1930-2009) first wrote science fiction and then dystopian novels  conviction that the
human race is potentially dangerous, even more in our western world, dominated by absence of
values and boredom.
People need high-tension excitement and violence is an answer to their condition.
The Drowned World global disaster novel
Crash automobile used as a sexual symbol but also as a metaphor for man in contemporary
society.
Series of explorations of human psychopathology  Kingdom Come disturbed and disturbing
account of a possible tomorrow.
Empire of the Sun realistic stamp. Ballard evokes his childhood experience in a Japanese prison
camp in China in WW2.
3.5. Women Writers.
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999) prolific author of novels inspired by 19 th-century realism, but more explicit
in sexual matters and almost always centred on discussions about philosophical-moral themes.
Muriel Spark (1918-2006) moral reflection, but often it takes surreal, grotesque or fantastic tones
always from a neutral point of view.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Doris Lessing (1919-) Nobel Prize winner in 2007. She was born in Persia, but grew up in what now is
Zimbabwe, then went to London. Strong political convictions and fascinated by the great models
of 19th century realism.
Firmly placed in realist tradition and powerful narrative are The Grass is Singing and the first three
novels of the cycle “The Children of Violence”.
The Golden Notebook great complexity, rethinks the novel form and its expressive possibilities and
digs into the profound and devastating psychological crisis of its heroine (corresponding to that of
women of the time). It is a meta-novel  attempts to discover what in narrative can represent the
confused, contradictory and lacerated reality of the modern world.
The answer is the novel itself  demonstrate the capacity of the writers to speak for the world of
today in the correct form.
The Diaries of Jane Somers return to realism  attention directed towards the dimension of old
age and a faith in solidarity between women.
Angela Carter (1940-1992) drew on the repertory of the fairy tale and popular narrative, the world
of technology and models of Poe and Kafka to offer new variants of the novel form.
The Magic Toyshop
The Passion of New Eve dystopian “magical realist”
Nights at the Circus fantastic and magical adventures of its heroine to portray a vision of the world
affected by major changes centred on a woman’s experiences and hopes.
Wise Children comic tale. Ironically describes the world of 20th century show business.
Jeanette Winterson (1959-) female sexuality and homosexuality are at the centre of her narrative.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit autobiographical.
Beryl Brainbridge (1934-) author of many realist novels, and humorous in a very English way. Her
characters struggle to come to terms with a world dominated by violence and injustice. No
concession to sentiment.
3.6. McEwan and the Post-war Generation.
Ian McEwan (1948-)
First Love, Last Rites and In Between the Sheets are volumes of short stories.
The Cement Garden is a novel  success for the scandal caused by the cruelty of the mode in
which he brought to life the instincts and obsessions of the subjects of his writing. Themes of
violence, incest, perversion, loss of innocence  entrusted to a cold and detached writing
marked by stylistic finesse  contrast between macabre subject of the tales and the way they
were told.
The Child in Time calls into question our vision of time and redirects attention from the children to
the parents, providing a study on their relationship. In the background, a sharp criticism of the
Britain of Mrs Thatcher.
Political aspect prominent in The Innocent and Black Dogs  great themes of modern Europe.
Enduring Love journey into the secret corners of the mind, land of erotic obsessions. Interesting
novel, a study on the limits of rationalism and science.
Atonement fascinating reflection on the nature of narrative invention and the responsibilities of
the writer + reflection on class prejudice and reflection on the banality of the horrors of war.
Graham Swift (1949-) main theme is coming to terms with a sense of the past and the need to
recover it.
Waterland myths and fantastic tales have equal status with documented facts, fiction and History
can co-exist.
Last Orders won the Booker Prize. Language which recreates the immediacy of south London
vernacular.
Martin Amis (1949-) had fame for scandal, like McEwan.
London Fields presents a damaged and distasteful reality, observed with detachment with a
sense of attraction. Then Amis preferred to move into new narrative territory, to fiction.
Jonathan Coe (1961-) master of traditional construction but also a skilled user of meta-novelistic
devices. He adopted a variety of narrative modes to capture the outrageous reality of Mrs
Thatcher’s Britain.
The Rotters’ Club
James Kelman (1946-) Scottish. Unique style which brought to page the working-class Glasgow
English to represent the harshness of existence.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Not Not While the Giro short story.

Kelman is a regional writer. Some other are the Scottish Alasdair Gray (1934-); the Irish Roddy Doyle
(1958-) and Patrick McCabe (1955-).
3.7. Ishiguru, Kureishi.
Kazuo Kureishi (1954-) born in Japan but grew up in England.
The Remains of the Day English tale reviewed through the eyes of the butler. Tragic comedy of
manners, very conservative and cold in its repression of the feelings. There is no Japanese
influence in his work.
It is not the case with many recent writers whose novels reflect the co-presence of different
cultures and traditions  “ethnic novel” emerged in multi-racial Britain.
Hanif Kureishi (1954-) themes and characters take shape out of the ethnic mix and the encounters
and clashes between the reality of metropolitan London and the traditions of the Asian
immigrants and their London-born children.
The Buddha of Suburbia
Other interpreters of the ethnic novel are Monica Ali (1967-); Zadie Smith (1975-); Caryl Philips
(1958-) and Andrea Levy (1956-).
CHAPTER 11: Literatures In English.

1. Unity and Diversity.
In the last thirty years the Nobel Prize was awarded to English-language writers who are not English
at all.
Many writers from different places share the same literary language and communicate their own
distinct world through literary invention.
“Commonwealth Literature”  is historically imprecise and politically dubious  “post-colonial
literatures”  label not liked by the writers  literatures in English.
Settler colonies: (CAN, AUS, ZEL) the land was occupied by European colonisers who took it from
the indigenous population that lived there. The authors write in their own language, which is also
the language of the community and the national language of the country.
Invaded colonies: (IND, NIG) the British presence was limited to the necessities of rule. Authors
write in a language which is not their mother tongue or the language or their nation  it is a
language historically imposed on them, used as a lingua franca. Authors choose to use it, adopt it,
re-elaborate it.
There are also differences in the literary production at the level of content and theme  the
relationship with Britain and the desire of independence during the colonial period (invaded
colonies) / the relationship with one’s own past in the period that followed (settler colonies) 
depend on the distance with which the imperial rule was experienced in the two types of colonies.
Common to all was the fact of being subject of the Empire, but the nature of this subjection
varied a lot. The definition of one’s identity is also varying.
In common there is also the theme of exile and the problem of how to deal and come to term
with the colonial inheritance after the independence, how to learn a new identity  how to
construct the very idea of nation and of national identity  “Imagining the nation”.
Relationship with the past and with history was central  in the invaded colonies the material
came from the everyday reality of exploitation, moments of revolt and from the lives of
anonymous people overwhelmed by the contrast between their values and the culture of their
rulers.
In the settler colonies there was also a process of digging into the colonial history and there has
been a similar work of recovery of elements to be chosen as foundational of the new identity.
2. Africa.
2.1. African Literatures.
The African writers in English come from places widely separated and belong to ethnic groups
whose languages, traditions and cultures are very different. English is the only common aspect,
used as a lingua franca + diglossia (English with words or expression from the author’s native

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
language, sometimes translated, sometimes not). The English used can be standard or one
modified by African usage (pidgin).
Common noteworthy aspects:
1) a legacy of the oral tradition which manifests itself in many ways  in the choice of the narrator
who is a narrating voice, use of proverbs, recourse to a non-linear concept of time (past and
present co-exist), incorporation of magic into reality.
These characteristics can be found in The Palm-Wine Drinkyard by the Nigerian Amos Tutuola
(1920-1997).
2) concerns the role of the writer  as the man who knows, he establish himself as a guide, as
critical and visionary consciousness, able to warn, to denounce and to propose the road to follow.
For many African writers, this is linked to a strong political commitment often deriving in exile.
The differences between the African writers are many  cultural and anthropological + different
colonial histories.
First generation of authors.
Chinua Achebe (1930-) Nigerian.
Things Fall Apart set in eastern Nigeria. The tale of the protagonist coincide with the arrival of the
British rule. Achebe wants to demonstrate the importance of a culture which is African, so as to
rewrite the history of Africa from an internal perspective  show how the Ibo world worked before
the arrival of the British. Use of oral forms, proverbs and popular tales, imaginary proper to his
ethnic origin + ironic portrait of the encounter between Africans and whites.
The Arrow of God set at the height of colonial rule, internal division brought by Christianisation.
No Longer at Ease
A Man of the People in which the inquiry shift to the present and there is more attention to the
individual.
Anthills of the Savannah use of pidgin. Political focus of Africa’s post-colonial reality to portray the
struggle between rival elites who were turning contemporary Africa into a monstrous tragedy.
Ayi Kwei Armah (1939-) novelist. corruption and brutality of the post-independence regimes is his
main theme.
The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born rotten and toxic reality, contaminated and contaminating.
Fragments
Wole Soyinka (1934-) Nigerian. Nobel Prize winner in 1986. Find in African roots the material with
which to reshape the present. Poet, novelist and dramatist. He mixed his European experience
with the pagan theatre of ancient Nigeria.
A Dance of the Forests play. Invoked the need to root in the past the celebration of the new.
References to European classical and contemporary theatre with African spectacle and rituals.
The Lion and the Jewel comic tone, happy ending.
He then confined himself to the grotesque  Death and the King’s Horseman and A Play of Giants.
Aké autobiographical work on his childhood.
Season of Anomy novel written during the civil war. The private story of the protagonist enables
Soyinka to examine the weaknesses of both reformist caution and revolutionary voluntarism.
Soyinka’s career is linked to that ideal of the writer-guide.
The same guiding role was taken by James Ngugi (1938-), Kenyan. Went to prison and exile.
Idealistic temperament and uncertainty about the future of his country.
A Grain of Wheat centred on the Mau Mau revolt. Jumps from the present into the past, truly epic
dimension of the exaltation of the heroism of the revolt + attachment to the land.
Petals of Blood shows a strong Marxist conviction that the labouring classes can rescue the
Kenyan people from the oppression of the new African masters. The novel has narrative force.
Ben Okri (1959-) Nigerian. Lived in London.
The Famished Road novel. Its protagonist is a child who returned from the land of the dead and
which portrays contemporary Nigerian reality.
His writing is suggestive of the style of magic realism, but Okri is just drawing from the Yoruba oral
tradition the idea of the coexistence of the real and the supernatural.
Gabriel Okara (1921-) Nigerian. Poet.
The Voice novel on the theme of alienation.
Explored the possibility of mixing English verse with his African idiom, on both a linguistic and
conceptual level.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Christopher Okigbo (1932-1976) poet. Creator of a sophisticated hybridisation between classical

rhetoric and western poetry and the legendary and hinterland of his native Ibo tribe.
His poetry ranger from religious reflection to political protest, passing through alienation, childhood
innocence, cultural burden of colonialism.
Labyrinths, with Path of Thunder posthumous volume. Sophisticated rhetorical and stylistic
armature, suggestive imagery and moral force.
Other poets of the next generation  Tanure Ojaide (1948-); Odia Ofeimum (1950-); Niyi Osundare
(1947-)  they created what has been called “alter-native” African tradition. “Native” is not only
folklore, legends and oral inheritance of the author’s origins, but also the traditional social role of
the poet.
2.2. The Literature of South Africa.
The birth of South African literature in English is dated from Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), with her
The Story of an African Farm. Attention to the theme of the liberation of women, with specific
reference to the colonial world, but expressed in a way that makes it transcend time and space
and to illuminate the state of colonisation in general. Theme of landscape as founding element of
the relationship between literary creation and the south African. In the reality she describes there
is little space for black people, who are part of the landscape.
Sol T. Plaatje (1876-1932), who believed in a possible unity of Africa transcending ethnic division.
Mhudi
In the second half of the 20th century literature was bound to the existence of the regime of
apartheid.
Alan Paton (1903-1988) was able to imagine reconciliation in his Cry, the Beloved Country.
He was reduced to silence, with censorship, prison and exile.
Bessie Head (1937-1986), her land of exile was Botswana, even if apartheid is not at the centre of
her work  discrimination and rivalry also between African ethnic groups, and the oppression of
women.
A Question of Power
André Brink (1935-) white. Boer. Apartheid for him meant choosing English instead of Afrikaans
(language of the boers).
Athol Fugard (1932-) dramatist. For him apartheid meant challenging its prohibitions in the field of
artistic creation  working in the theatre with black actors, and experimenting with a language
which drew on their experience as actors  “poor” theatre with overwhelming dramatic power 
ordinary characters representing the mental and spiritual disaster of apartheid.
His plays have a dramatic invention which start from a specific reality to represent events which
assume meanings that transcend it, becoming a portrayal of tension and darkness characteristic
of human life in general.
Nadine Gordimer (1923-) novelist. Nobel Prize winner in 1991. Her novels and stories first
represented the moral and political uncertainty affecting the South Africa of apartheid  need
for a radical political commitment in face of liberalism.
July’s People the accent shift to the possible destiny of the whites in the face of the revolution that
will sweep apartheid away.
Ability to investigate the mind of white South Africans and to show how apartheid was a source of
humiliation for them too.
The Conservationist novel.
She was basically a realist writer.
J.M. Coetzee (1940-) novelist. Nobel Prize winner in 2003. Confrontation with the great names of
European literature.
Foe, in which the protagonist finds herself in the Island of Robinson and Friday and once home
asks the writer Foe to tell her story, leaving Friday untold.
Age of Iron The terminal illness of the classicist Elizabeth Curren make her recount her life
devoured by cancer, like South Africa is devoured by apartheid.
Waiting for the Barbarians memorial. The story of a magistrate in a remote settlement who save a
“barbarian” girl and is condemned by his people and imprisoned.
Disgrace bitterness and discomfort and at the same time possibility of hope.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
3. Australia and New Zealand.

3.1. Australian Literature. The Novel.
Three pivotal point around which rotates the Australian imaginary:
1) the origins of British settlement through the transportation of convicts to that remote country;
2) the virtual genocide of the aborigines and the treatment on the survivors;
3) the relationship with the spaces of the interior, the “bush”, mythicized as a place of challenge
by the first colonisers.
Everything written about Australia or in Australia is a historical document.
In the last years of the 19th century until WW1 the key category was realism, as found in the stories
of Henry Lawson (1867-1922). “national mystique” of the bush life, which became expression of the
Australian soul, mixing idealisation and exaltation of the feelings of comradeship that linked two
men.
In the post-war years realism became social realism  the bush and its labourers were seen as the
essence of Australia and rural values were identified with progressive and egalitarian ones.
Katherine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969)
Coonardoo first Australian novel to put the aboriginal world at the centre of the narration.
Xavier Herbert (1901-1984)
Capricornia denounces the physical and cultural massacre inflected on the aborigines. Close to
the social realist mode, but with massive authorial intervention and comic and grotesque vein.
Poor Fellow My Country theme of the sack of the Australian continent by the European invaders,
denouncing their inability to understand and appreciate its beauty and natural resources.
Christina Stead (1902-1983)
Seven Poor Men of Sidney starts idyllically, exalting the beauty of the landscape, but with the
horrors of the war everything changes  the protagonist, damaged from his war experience,
cannot find a place in this new world, and kills himself.
The Man Who Loved Children study on familiar relationships. Analysed with the coldness of
someone who has broken with the values it incarnates.
For Love Alone
Stead’s stories have solid plots presented as an accumulation of episodes, which is what shows
the existential condition of the characters.
Patrick White (1912-1990) radical refusal of the Australian establishment and where the only thing
that mattered where money and power, and not cultural and intellectual values.
The Aunt’s Story the story of an expatriate.
Voss rewrote the history of colonial Australia, showing its hidden hypocrisy. Metaphor of the search
and discovery of the self and one’s interior reality  parallel journey of the two main characters.
Impressive portrait of the components out of which Australia will be forged.
In White’s novels the humble reaches the meaning of existence thanks to an intuitive knowledge
that bypass rationality  Riders in the Chariot, truth is reached by the humble through sacrifice
and suffering (coming from the indifference of men),
A Fringe of Leaves novel based on real events and rich in episodes dear to Australian drama. Digs
into the relationship between the white and aborigines cultures. Happy ending is apparent.
Thomas Keneally (1935-) is known for Schindler’s List.
Peter Carey (1943-) emerged as a story writer who mixed realism with the surreal or science fiction.
Bliss black novel
Oscar and Lucinda love story + historical novel of colonial Australia. Sense of humour, supreme
command of how to re-elaborate in fantasy the data of history, freedom of invention. Ability to
transfer to the page the fears and monsters of the mind.
Jack Maggs literary game. The story is about the convict from Dickens’s Great Expectations.
My Life as a Fake
Theft investigated the notion of fake work of art, while dissecting the provincial Australian
mentality.
Now Australian literature have also space for aboriginal writers.
Colin Johnson (1938-)
Doctor Wooredy’s Prescriptions for Enduring the Ending of the World curious historical novel, in
which the main character is an aborigine (the only one left on the island) who tells the story of the
arrival of the Europeans, and the genocide of his people.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Point of view of the indigenous people  white shown as barbaric and ferocious. Use of aboriginal
mythology and of its linguistic inheritance.
Johnson constructed a literary Aboriginal English.
3.2. Australian Literature. Poetry and Theatre.
Australian poetry was highly derivative at the beginning of the 20 th century. From 1930s, it has
searched for its autonomy and identity.
Judith Wright (1915-2000)
The Moving Image volume of poetry.
Will to render both the past and the present of Australia.
The Two Fires volume on the fear of nuclear disaster. Concern with political and social arguments
+ love of the land transformed into ecological denunciation.
Birds poem. Change of linguistic register  more immediate language, more in line with her
denunciatory rhetoric and with her description of nature.
In the 1970s the political climate changed  progressive ideologies, condemnation of past
massacres and present discrimination against the aborigines were more frequent.
Les A. Murray (1938-) expressed the fascination with the rituals, the myths and the magic
dimension of the aboriginal world.
The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle structure and sequence of images of an aboriginal song
cycle  trying to create a verse form in English which reproduced the characteristics of the
original. Direct relationship with nature. Exaltation of the rural proletariat, negative attitude
towards urban reality.
All the components of his country’s history and culture coexist  poetry fully Australian,
autonomous of expressive means.
Fredy Neptune novel in verse.
The history of Australian theatre is one of imports. The first affirmation took place in the 1920s and
1930s, promoted by “committed” companies  repertory which aspired to be popular , “local”
and progressive. Only in the 1960s a truly Australian drama will start to exist.
New Wave  group of authors whose plays reflect the paradoxes and contradictions of
Australian society (relationship men/women in male-dominated society, racial prejudice,
homosexuality).
Much of the creative energy spent in theatre moved to cinema.
David Williamson (1942-) dramatist.
The Removalists study on the violence and repression of Australian society  portraits of bourgeois
environments of both linguistic and sociological efficacy. Satire on the world of mass media, world
of politics, business and the academy. Scintillating dialogues.
3.3. New Zealand Literature.
New Zealand colonists thought of themselves as inhabitants of a remote province of the British isles.
Only after WW1 they will develop a national identity. Cultural revolution after the Depression  the
first “committed” poets and novelists started to work.
Frank Sargeson (1903-1982) language dug into the richness and variety of colloquial speech. with
rhythms and vocabulary of everyday speaking. Dry, direct prose. The narrator confide the reader
his observations and experiences. This language is well studied  the readers asks himself what lies
beyond the words  what remains unsaid is as important as what is said.
Solitude has been the central feature of New Zealand life  theme of male friendship.
James K. Baxter (1926-1972) poet. Poetry is total experience, it intervenes in the society, the poet is
a prophet.
Theme of the Fall of the humanity of sin, liberatory qualities of the sexual act, recovery of the
myths and tribal values of Maori culture. Evocative power of romantic stamp, solid rhetoric, even
low everyday language is transformed into the high language of poetry.
Janet Frame (1924-2004) whose writing creates a novelistic world declared other in relation to the
surrounding reality. “Mad” characters clash with a world that rejects them, and they replace it
with a world of their own creation, with their own verbal invention, other in relation the world
“outside”. Their challenge is Frame’s challenge to petty-bourgeois values. Cold and objective
style, “spontaneous” meta-novelistic devices. Emotions and pain of existence, proclaimed the
right to be different.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
4. Canada.
In Canada the question of identity have to face the presence of the USA along its southern border.
At the end of WW2, the government decided to devote financial resources to local theatrical
activities and to publishing houses dedicated to promoting Canadian authors.
19th/early 20th century writers  “local” interest.
Stephen Leacock (1869-1944) novelist. Humorist. Comical scenes and characters contained in
sketches and stories.
Most authors had a vision of man as destined to struggle against a land which is firm and at the
same time a disaster.
End of WW1  Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948); Sinclair Ross (1908-1996); Morley Callaghan
(1903-1990).
4.1. The Novel.
WW2 ended the traditional way to see the world and one’s place in the world  new values
needed to be proclaimed, a new identity to be defined.
Robertson Davies (1913-1995) theme of an elusive Canadian identity.
Tempest-Test (draws on Shakespeare’s) British and Canadian autonomy are confronted, it seems
that the latter will emerge victorious.
Margaret Laurence (1926-1987) her first novels were inspired by her life in Africa.
“Manawaka Cycle” volume of four stories.
Her leading characters are women who have to face the pressures and traps of a provincial
male-dominated society.
The cycle opens with The Stone Angel, which have themes of the condition of women, sexuality
and the relationship with the natural environment + cultural inheritance and how the origins have
shaped the present.
A Jest of God the accent falls on the position of women.
The Diviners last novel of the cycle. Story told in the third person and in direct monologue.
Margaret Atwood (1939-) theme of the relationship with nature and the contrast between respect
of the land and its inhabitants and the destructive materialism of technological progress +
condition of women.
The Edible Woman
Surfacing novel on the relationship with nature and the remote past of Canada.
Lady Oracle meta-narrative structure.
Alias Grace investigation on women’s psychology and the battle of the sexes.
Michael Ondaatje (1943-) born in Sri Lanka. Focus on the world of popular music and American
mass culture  narrative technique based on the modernist belief of the fragmented nature of
experience.
In The Skein of a Lion novel.
The English Patient combines narrative invention with historical documents, fragment of a diary
and disquisitions on cartography, using a montage technique in part cinematic and in part like
jazz.
Mordecai Richler (1931-2001) Jewish family, Anglophone in francophone Quebec.
Humor and satirical vein.
A Choice of Enemies novel.
Barney’s Version novel. Total irreverence towards political correctness and irreverent admiration
for high culture. Disenchanted anti-rhetorical and anti-demagogic attitude.
4.2. Poetry and Theatre.
Irving Layton (1912-2006) central role of eroticism. Social and political commitment, radical critic
of petty-bourgeois mentality. Sexual taboos to strike at hypocrisy, but also exalted at its own right.
Canadian theatre was crushed between British influence and Broadway.
Many of Canada’s dramatists work in a naturalistic and localist vein.
Less traditional path  George Ryga (1932-1987) with The Ecstasy of Rita Joe play on the
condition of the indigenous population; Judith Thompson (1954-) have strong metaphorical
theatrical language; Morris Panych (1952-) black comedies.
George F. Walker (1947-) whose first plays tried to create an anti-realistic theatre but then will
redirect towards American pop culture with a technique similar to that of comic books. The

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
response of public led him to two new directions  a series of plays on the figure of the
detective/journalist and an attempt at a theatre beyond the text (Zastrozzi)
Theatre of the Film Noir.
He will return to more traditional solutions.
5. The Caribbean.
the original inhabitants of the Caribbean islands were annihilated by their conquerors and the
islands were repopulated with African slaves, who brought with them the myth and the traditions
of their continent.
Their culture was also incorporated by European culture. The language and culture of the whites
remained one of oppression.
The English spoken in the West Indies is neither that of the ancestors, nor it is a second language. It
is the first and only language of the inhabitants of the islands, taught in schools and used in law.
However, it is very different from standard English, diving rise to different dialects from one island to
another. The tension between these types of English is a great enriching factor.
5.1. Narrative.
Jean Rhys (1894-1979) had European origins. Wrote novels and stories based on her experience in
Europe, with at their centre figures of women, and with a style influenced by modernism.
Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of the youth of Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre and portrays her
descent into madness.
The short story form enjoyed popularity among aspirant Caribbean writers in the middle of the 20 th
century. Central theme was the definition of a Caribbean identity + emigration.
Samuel Selvon (1923-1994) native of Trinidad who emigrated to London.
The Lonely Londoners splendid sense of humour, it is set in the newly-formed West Indians
community in London. The narrator gave voice to the popular feeling on issue of the day and life
in general. Immediacy of narrating voice + vivid language which gives literary form to the spoken
English of the islands. Express behind the smiles the drama of solitude which accompanies the
convulsion of emigration and describe with irony the difficulties and pains and the vitality of its
characters.
Wilson Harris (1921-) Guyanese. Idea of regeneration and fertile mixing of different cultures and
worlds. Harris is sensitive to relations with nature and landscape.
Palace of the Peacock first novel of the “Guyana Quartet”. Recreates the myth of Eldorado
through the adventures of a planter.
V.S. Naipaul (1932-) Trinidadian. Nobel Prize winner in 2001. Cultural and emotional break with his
land and his choice of England was to be the centre of his writings.
His first novels are set in the colonial period, rooted in Trinidad’s Indian community, expressing its
weak and contradictory status trapped between the whites and the African majority.
The Mystic Masseur
A House for Mr Biswas rejection of colonial reality + traditional Indian community are at the centre
of the novel. Lucid and bitter irony are the features of the narration.
The Enigma of Arrival Naipaul goes back over his existential and cultural journey, observing his
relationship with England.
The Enigma of Arrival and A Way in the World are not proper novels. The latter is part
autobiographical, part historical essay and part fiction.
Half a Life
5.2. Poetry.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite (1930-) focus on the concept of creolisation, arising from his discovery
that the linguistic model for his writing could only come from a fusion of English and African
languages (“nation language”).
The Arrivants trilogy. Notion of the importance of an African “Great Tradition”.
His next poems are an exaltation of a native “creole” culture of the Caribbean.
Derek Walcott (1930-) born in Santa Lucia, where the majority of the population spoke French
patois. He was a mulatto and spoke English. He perceive a profound division, physical,
psychological, geographical and racial  his poems are about the relationship between blacks
and whites and his belonging to both worlds. What prevails is compassion, a desire for
reconciliation.
The most important sound is that of the sea.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Reflection on the work of the poet and on the instruments with which to transform what he feels
into words. Use of dialectal forms, underlining the contrast between the syntactical power of
English and the richness of dialectal spontaneity.
In the 1970s there is also the theme of the contrast Between North and South.
Omeros is an epic poem in terza rima.
6. India.
6.1. Indian Literature in English.
Indian writers have behind them the great tradition of Sanskrit literature  grandiose epics,
popular oral narrative tradition in inexhaustibly inventive storytellers.
In the 1930s they begin to combine the literary models of the West with the heritage of their own
tradition.
Raja Rao (1909-2006) novelist.
Kanthapura pictures the effects and consequences of Gandhi’s preaching on a village in
southern India.
Literary and linguistic operation Rao was about to develop  chose English as the language of
narrative communication, but with words, rhythms and registers deriving from both Sanskrit and
from the low speech of popular vernacular.
Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) chose English. What mattered for him was content.
Untouchable and Coolie echo the ideas of Gandhi, in particular his preaching on the injustice of
the caste system  angry social denunciation. Superbly told story.
R.K. Narayan (1906-2001) ”grand old man” of Indian literature.
Swami and Friends novel
His stories are set in the imaginary city of Malgudi, peopled with figures of traditional India which
at the same time open to modernity.
The protagonists of his novels are not rich but not poor, dedicated to some modest commercial
activity but conscious of having a respectable and respected role. They are religious, but their
lives are not dominated by religious beliefs like the very poor. These individuals best succeed in
finding an equilibrium between the old and the new. Narayan vision of the world in Indian, but the
language he chose was English in the European literary forms.
India gained independence in 1947.  partition of the subcontinent between India and Pakistan,
and this became the main theme for many writers.
Khushwant Singh (1915-2014)
Train to Pakistan views the events of the formation of the two states from a village on the border
between them. Exceptional narrative power.
Indo-English Literature  Anita Desai (1937-) with Fire on the Mountain parable on the condition of
women in India explored through the difficult relationship between a grandmother and her
granddaughter.
In Custody and Baumgartner’s Bombay mark a break from her earlier work  language assumes
a central role as the expression of social and existential condition. In the latter the language is
German, while in the former it is Urdu.
Problem of the relationship between present reality and the heritage of the past.
Fasting, Feasting have cultural and literary importance. Theme of the contradiction between
knowing the limits of Indian society and the alienation experienced by the ones who emigrated.
Amitav Gosh (1956-)
The Circle of Reason novel.
Gosh will then find his own voice  fiction is overlaid with levels of historical research.
The Shadow Lines shows the abyss of fanaticism, but also communicates that salvation can be
found only in tolerance.
In an Antique Land
The Calcutta Chromosome history provides the fiction with characters and uncontested facts.
Gosh mixes genres and settings to arrive to a completely personal stamp, using a universal
language and no boundaries of space and time.
His later novels are more traditional in form.
Vikram Seth (1952-)
A Suitable Boy novel. Use of India’s great oral tradition with a mode of storytelling closer to the
television serial  delightful soap-opera in book form. Lightness of touch and narrative vigour.

lOMoARcPSD|4181294
Vikram Chandra (1961-)

Red Heart and Pouring Rain fantasy vein + narration characterized by a proliferation of stories
springing from a central stem.
Indian woman writers are prominent  Arundhati Roy (1961-) is extraordinary original and uses a
lively language + continual jumps in time + denunciation of the Hindu caste system.
There are few Indian poets.
Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) are two important poets.
Aurobindo wrote Savitri, an epic poem composed in free verse.
Kamala Das (1934-) is a contemporary famous poet. She is also famous for her prose fiction,
written mainly in her native language.
Summer in Calcutta volume. Imaginary and language close to concrete experience.
Denunciation of the subaltern role of women in India + exaltation of sensuality. When the themes
are of sickness, hope is given by the figure of the lover of the woman. Evocative force of its
images.
6.2. The Indian Diaspora.
The authors of the diaspora are those who come from the Indian subcontinent, and whose
production find inspiration in the events, history and cultural world of their native land.
These authors mostly live in Britain or in the USA.
Jhumpa Lahiri (1967-) USA.
Interpreter of Maladies book of short stories.
Rohinton Mistry (1952-) CAN.
Such a Long Journey novel of strongly realistic stamp.
A Fine Balance focuses on the state of emergency proclaimed by Indira Gandhi following
accusation of electoral malpractice.
Salman Rushdie (1947-) his Indian background provided him materials for his fantasy but also the
narrative modes with which to communicate it. He put on the same plane reality and dream,
realist narrative and mythical invention. Constant contact with the reader who is made his
accomplice in the inventiveness of the narrative. He is a master of suspense, of humour. Important
relationship with history, reconstructed and distorted by man’s memories.
Midnight’s Children
Shame
The Moor’s Last Sight
Shalimar the Clown
The Ground Beneath Her Feet
The Enchantress of Florence
In Rushdie’s work “truth” is born through the elaboration in fantasy of things that have really
happened.
The Satanic Verses there is enough material in this book for other three novels. Fictional revisiting of
aspects of Islamic culture centred around the nucleus of the relationship between religious faith
and the secular world.
Emphasis on the value of tolerance.
Indian writers in general are great teachers and reminders that tolerance is a foundational value
of our shared civilisation.

Summary English Literature. A Short History Summary English Literature. A Short History

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Summary English Literature. A Short History Summary English Literature. A Short History

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

lOMoARcPSD|4181294

Summary English literature. A short history

Letteratura inglese b (Università degli Studi di Torino)

StuDocu non è sponsorizzato o supportato da nessuna università o ateneo.

English literature, a short history.

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

CHAPTER 2: Elizabethan Literature.

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

4.2 Plays and Playwrights

CHAPTER 3: William Shakespeare

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

CHAPTER 4: The early 17th century

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

CHAPTER 5: Revolution and Restoration

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

CHAPTER 6: The Eighteenth Century

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

CHAPTER 7: The Romantic Period

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Elizabethan period Restoration period Romantic period

3.1 Wordsworth and Coleridge

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Resolution and Independence

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

9. Beyond the Bounds of Reality

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

English Literature. A short history.

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Omniscient narrator who expresses moral judgement.

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). Leading exponent of the Aesthetic Movement. Anti-conformist

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

CHAPTER 9: The First Half of the Twentieth Century.

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)

Scaricato da Sofia Civenni (sofiacivenni@gmail.com)