The Edwardian Age (1901 - 1910)

PG 266
1901 - Queen Victoria dies. The Victorian Age ends. Edward VII becomes king

MODERNIZATION of the monarchy and of the court’s life.

Edward was a gambler and before he became king he spent a lot of money
drinking, gambling, traveling, women and so on (he was kind of a dandy

When he became king life at court became very fun. While his mother had been
a very serious woman, representing the ideal victorian female, Edward didn’t
follow the same values. The upside of his attitude, was that court became really
modern. This is the beginning of the Modern Age of literature.

1906 - GENERAL ELECTIONS (change of everyone in power) - 85% of people

voted - victory of the liberal party
This party tried to introduce a lot of social reforms to help poor people,
especially children - Children’s Charter (set of laws in defense of children)

1903 - WSPU - Women’s Social and Political Union

They wanted the right of vote for women - they were called “su agettes”
They also wanted to take part in political and social life (ex: they wanted to be
the boss). They held large marches in London, chained themselves to railings,
broke windows, hit and spit at policemen
WSPU was founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and Christabel (Emmeline’s
daughter
1918 - Women aged at least 30 were granted the right to vote

Georgian age
George V (1911 - 1936
His reign saw WWI (1914-1918) in which Europe was divided between the Triple
Alliance (Germany, Austria and Italy) and the Triple Entente (Britain, France and
Russia).
Everywhere there was a patriotic enthusiasm for the war because many people
thought it was right and had romantic ideas that it would be an heroic
adventure..
The war was fought in trenches. Huge numbers of men were killed by machine
guns and gas bombs.

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Shell Shock was the name with which PTSD was referred to as by the doctors
that treated the surviving soldiers
The war ended in 1918. The peace treaty was signed in Versailles in 1919. There,
Wilson proposed “Fourteen points” to prevent future wars.

Poetry of the Georgian Age

There are di erent groups of poets.
1) the Georgian Poets - they employ the conventions of diction and were
inspired by the Romantics and Victorians. They were traditionalists and
considered the English countryside as an idyllic place
Avant-gard
2) The War Poets - who deal with the horrors of the war in an unconventional
and anti-rhetorical way, through the violent, everyday language
3) The Symbolists - they are inspired by French Symbolism (Baudelaire - Les
Fleur du Mal) and focus on the importance of the unconscious and the use of
images to evoke rather than to state. They use free verse to exploit the sound
and musicality of words.
T.S. Eliot said that poetry should not be the expressive of a subjective
emotion but an escape from it - OPPOSITE OF WORDSWORTH
Symbolists invented their own vocabulary and mythology to voice the
fragmentation of culture. The style of Symbolist poets was characterized by
• indirect rather than direct statements
• Allusive language and multiple associations of words
• Importance given to the “sound” of words as conveying “the music of ideas”
• Use of quotations from other literature revealing cosmopolitan interests
• Use of free verse
• Open to interpretatio
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 Stream of consciousness and the

interior monologue
PG. 28
Stream of consciousness = continuous ow of thoughts and sensations that
characterize the human mind. (De nition coined by William James
FRAGMENTATION OF THE CHARACTERS
This feature was used in the 20th century ction which focused on this inner
process. Writers gave more and more importance to subjective consciousness and
understood that the human mind was too complex to t in the traditional
techniques of description. They invented new means of expression.
In a novel the interior monologue was adopted to represent the unspoken activity
of the mind before its ordered speech.
Interior monologue and the stream of consciousness di er because the former is
the verbal expression of a psychological phenomenon, while the latter is the
psychological phenomenon itself

Features of the interior monologue

• verbal expression of a psychological phenomeno
• Immediacy (that it distinguishes it from soliloquy and dramatic monologue
where the conventional syntax is respected
• Free from introductory expressions such as “he thought
• Presence of two levels of narration (one external, one internal
• Lack of chronological order and presence of subjective tim
• Absence of rules and punctuatio
• Lack of formal logical orde

There are three kinds of interior monologue:

1) INDIRECT interior monologue (the narrator never lets the character’s
thoughts ow without control and maintains logical and grammatical
organization) - the character stays still in space while his consciousness moves
freely in time
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 2) Interior monologue characterized by TWO LEVELS OF NARRATION

(int/ext
3) Inner monologue where the character’s thought ow freely, not interrupted
by external events

War poets
PG. 29
WWI - these poets actually fought in the war and wrote their poems while they
were in the trenches. Most of them died there and never came home. We know
their works from their letters, or because they gave them to soldiers who
survived
When the war started thousand of young men volunteered for military service
thinking that the war would’ve been an adventure. Only with the slaughter on the
Somme in 1916, that sense of pride and exhilaration was replaced by doubt and
disillusionment
Life in the trenches was awful because of the rain and mud, the decaying bodies
the rats fed on, the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas in warfare.

Di erent attitudes to war

Stages of reaction to war
1) Patriotism and enthusiasm that led many to enlist - Rupert Brooke (1887 -
1915) When the war rst broke out there was an enthusiast patriotic reaction.
Many people actually volunteered
2) Anger towards war rhetoric which had been revealed a lie - Siegfried Sassoon
3) Compassion for the young soldiers - Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918

Rupert Brooke
Wealthy family, important friends, he was very popular because of his handsome
looks. He volunteered to ght in the war, but during the rst phase of the war he
fell ill with blood-poisoning. In 1915 he died because of it.
He didn’t know the utter reality of war, he didn’t experience much of the
trenches war
(He saw only the idealistic view, he had a positive opinion of the war) - he didn’t
have the time to change his opinion
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 His poetry is considered too sentimental but it re ects the spirit of his time. But
he was one of the favorite poets among his generation. At his death he was
turned into a symbol of the “young romantic hero”

THE SOLDIER
Pg 300
2 stanza
Regular rhyming scheme ABABCDC
His British ashes will enricher the foreign soil on which he’ll die.
Repetition of England (lines 5 -7) - POLYPTOTON repetition of the same word
with di erent endings (ex: englAND, englISH
Line 6 - 7- 8 what England has done for Rupert. His country looks after and takes
care of him in every possible wa

This impression of a nation that brings up (- cresce) her sons is given by the
natural elements such as owers, air, sun, rivers.

Wilfred Owen
He was a teacher of English in France. He enlisted after seeing a war hospital in
1915. He volunteered because he wanted to help save people. He lived throughout
the whole war and died one week before the armistice. He experienced life in the
trenches and he talks about it in his poems.

ELEGIES - lyrical poems that have very dark themes (grief, pain, su ering
All a poet can do is to WARN the next generation about the horrors of war, and
show that it is a bad thing and that it should not be glori ed

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Pg. 30

In this poem the soldiers are returning to their camp after a ght, when a gas
bomb explodes. One of them doesn’t put on his antigas mask in time. He dies
choking (“drowning under a green sea”) on the poisonous gas. The poet tells that
in his recurrent nightmares he can still see the soldier choking with painfully
clear details. The death from gas poisoning is depicted in order to show readers
who believe that dying for the nation is a good thing, that this is just an OLD
LIE (that Horace said in one of his works: “dulce et decorum est / pro patria
mori”)
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 The honor of sacri ce is a lie. Owen wants his readers to stop believing it so.
There is nothing honorable in the way soldiers were dying in the trenches
He achieves his goal by describing the horror, the cruelty, the brutality, the pity of
the war, through the use of LANGUAGE

OWEN VS BROOKE
Owen Brooke

He wants to show war and the pity of the war (pg. Enthusiastic and idealistic view of war and
299) and of the brutality of war patriotism (feelings of the soldiers before the war)

He dies one week before the end of the ghts. He He dies at the beginning of the war so he doesn’t
talks about the MEMORIES of the traumatic events really experience its cruelty
he has witnessed

He enlists because he wants to help save people He enlists because he wants to serve the “greater-
(after seeing a war hospital) good” and his mother country

He wants to help future generations understand the He wants to express his enthusiasm towards the
horror of the war and the fact that there’s nothing war
honorable in dying for one’s country

Age of anxiety
PG. 27
A deep cultural crisis had been growing since the last decades of the 19th
century and led to the end of the system of Victorian values. The First
World War, in which almost one million British soldiers had died, left the
country in a civic and disillusioned mood.
An increasing feeling of frustration led to a remarkable transformation and
to the slow dissolution of the Empire into a free association of States: the
Commonwealth
Scientists and philosophers destroyed the traditional conception of the
universe and new views of man and the Universe emerged

Sigmund Freud - PSYCHOLOGY

The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) - Freud explains that human psyche
is deeply a ected by the subconscious and irrational forces. And that
the surrounding environment (Ex: society) can in uence and distort a
man’s behavior.
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 Albert Einstein - SCIENC
He introduces the concept of relativity. His theory conceives of time
and space as subjective dimensions. This and others shocking
discoveries represented a scienti c revolution. As a consequence of
these ideas traditional certainties lost their solidity

Henri Bergson - PHILOSOPH

He also questioned the idea of time, distinguishing between the
historical and external time line and the psychological perception of
time, measured by the emotional intensity of a moment.
His thought helped many writers developing their characters
psychological depths.
Writers used literature to help explain new concepts and ideas to a world
which was changing. - literature is the guide to understand this historical
period

Friedrich Nietzsche - PHILOSOPHY

He shatters the idea of God and religion. His philosophy contributed
to the age of anxiety

END OF THE SYSTEM OF VICTORIAN VALUES

BREAK OF POSITIVIS

BU
The people of the 19th century had some certainties life which allowe
them to have a positivistic faith in science and progress; they thought the
knew who they were, they had a certain unity in their religious beliefs
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 they had a set of moral values..

1st half of the 20th centur

-WWI and WWII ( + atomic bombs
-scienti c progres
- great importance of psycholog

BIG TRANSFORMATION

CULTURAL CRISIS AND FRUSTRATIO

Scientists and philosophers destroye
the Victorian views and introduce
new perspectives of man and th
univers

SIGMUND shatters the THE “I”

idea of
FREUD
ALBERT shatters the idea of THE WORLD
EINSTEIN
HENRI shatters the idea of TIME
BERGSON
FRIEDRICH shatters the GOD / RELIGION
idea of
NIETZSCHE

In this crisis of values, the writers established literature as a guide to try

and understand this age of isolation, alienation and anxiety.
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