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Historical

Background

� 1906: Edward

� 1912: Irish Home Rule

� 1914-18: First World War

� 1916: Ireland �Sinn Fenn rebelled in Dublin, creation of IRA

� 1917: Russian Revolution

� 1918: Creation of Labour Party

� 1935: Gandhi

Mass slaughters and atrocities (World Wars,Russian revolution and Spanish Civil War)

The Age of Anxiety(Wystan Hugh Auden’spoem) ����new consciousness of modern man

Preoccupation shifts from society to

man himself:

socio-economical crisis (anxiety)

collapse of values

new means of communication

(radio and movies)

Joseph Conrad(1857 – 1924)

•Precursor of modernism � decay of English

empire and analysis of human soul

•Anti-heroic characters

Works:

� The Nigger of Narcissus (1897)

� Nostromo (1904),

� The Secret Agent (1907),

� The Duel (1908),

� Victory (1915),

Heart of Darkness (1899): a journey on the

Congo river to rescue Kurtz, an ivory trader

who has faced the unknown

F. F. Coppola’s 1987

movie took inspiration

from Heart of Darkness

Poetry

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) Victorian poet

• celebration of nature, sadness and anxiety for society after

Darwin’s theories. .

• inner conflict between his Roman Catholicism and sense of the beauty

of this world,

• complicated experiments in metrics and vocabulary.

Features: tradition and experiment ; psychoanalysis

and nostalgia for past values and mythology.

The Georgian poets no concern with contemporary problems.

John Masefield (1878-1967), Walter De La Mare (1873-1956), William Henry Davies (1871-

1940), David Herbert Lawrence, and Robert Graves (1895-1975).

The War poets from glory and honour of sacrifice to concern with the horror of war

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918),

Edward Thomas (1878-1917).

Thomas Stearns ELIOT (1888 –1965)

� The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1910 -1915) interior monologue (�R. Browning); Protagonist: intellectual, mask or dramatis persona dell'autore; rreferences to everyday banality and modern discoveries (cinema)

� The Waste Land (1922), despair over the sterility of modern life.

� Four Quartets (1943), quest for religious

� Plays: Murder in the Cathedral (1935) about T. A’ Beckett’s murder; Greek tradition.

� Metaphysical poets� Dante

� Shakespeare

� The Bible ���� American Imagism (Ezra Pound)

American-born poet, British citizen at 39, playwright, and

literary critic, Nobel Prize (1948)

The Waste Land(1922)

• Published in The Criterion in 1922. • Dedication: il miglior fabbro � Ezra Pound

shortened the long poem • Personal difficulty: failure of his marriage,

nervous disorders (Lausanne) • Disillusionment of the post-war generation;

incommunicability and impossibility to love �quotations from different writers and languages

• Shifts of time and places, abrupt changes of speaker

����American Imagism (Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell)

William Butler Yeats

(1865 – 1939) Irish poet and dramatist

Features

• First: ancient Irish traditions

• After 1900: powerful, physical and realistic

• reflective and philosophical contents

• rich poetic idiom

Works�Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921): The

second coming: theory of history diagram two conic

gyres, one inside the other (1921:apocalyptic moment)

�The Tower (1928): metaphorical journey of a man

(vision of eternal life and conception of paradise.)

Sailing to Byzantium; Leda and the Swam

� The Winding Stair and other Poems (1933).

Irish Literary Revival (with Lady Gregory founded the Abbey

theatre)

Nobel Prize 1923

PROSEJames Augustine Aloysius

Joyce(1882 –1941)

Works

• short-story collection Dubliners (1914),

• novels : A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) ; Ulysses (1922) and

Finnegans Wake (1939).

• His adult life was spent in continental Europe, but his novels are set in Dublin, and his

characters resemble family members, enemies and friends

• “…I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to

the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

Irish writer and poet

key figure in the development of the modernist

novel.

The Dubliners (1914)

•Collections of 15 stories•Naturalistic and symbolic portrait of the Irish middle class in Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.•Tripartite division of the collection into childhood, adolescence and adult age.

.

The last story is called

The Dead � Joyce’s declaration of his desire

to leave Dublin

Themes:

paralysis of Irish world

(Irish nationalism)

Epiphany: sudden

revelation of a hidden

thought

Ulysses(1922)

•Passage of Leopold Bloom through Dublin during an ordinary day, 16 June

1904 (day of his first meeting with his future wife, Nora Barnacle).

•Set with precision in the real streets and alleyways of Dublin.

•Allusion to Odysseus ( Ulysses), the hero of Homer's Odyssey

•Parallels between characters and events (Leopold Bloom �Odysseus, Molly

Bloom � Penelope, Stephen Dedalus � Telemachus).

stream-of-consciousness technique� interior

monologue in literature:

associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can

make the prose difficult to follow.

Adeline Virginia Woolf

(1882-1941)

• English novelist, essayist and writer of short stories

• Feminist; schizophrenic; suicide

• member of the Bloomsbury Group.

Works

� novels: Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse(1927), Orlando (1928), Waves (1931)

� essay: A Room of One's Own. (1929),

.

Chronologiacal and fictional or inner time

Stream of consciousness: psychological and

emotional motives of characters

Mrs Dalloway(1925)

• A day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England.

• Created from two short stories, Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street and The Prime Minister

• Clarissa Dalloway's preparations for her party

• Interior perspective �shifts in time and in and out of the characters' minds

• Clarissa’s end of mental depression �end of World War 1

Movie: The Hours

(2002),

By Stephen Daldryf,

from Mrs Dalloway

George Orwell(Eric Arthur Blair ; 1903 –1950)

���� Works• Down and Out in Paris and London

(1933)

• Burmese Days (1934)

• A Clergyman's Daughter (1935)

• Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)

• The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

• Homage to Catalonia (1938)

• Coming Up for Air (1939)

• Animal Farm (1945)

• Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

English journalist, against social

injustice, totalitarianism, belief in

democratic socialism.

Experiences in Burma, among

workers and during Spanish Civil War

•Shooting an Elephant(essay)

Animal Farm

(1945)

• Dystopian (anti-utopian)novel, allegory of totalitarianism

• Names of animals � names of political figures

• Events before and during Stalin era before World War II.

• Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (England allied to Russia during

the world; difficulty to find a publisher)

Last commandment:

all animals are

equal, but some are

more equal than

others

dystopia (or anti-utopia) �Ancient Greek: bad place:

futuristic society degraded into a repressive and controlled

state, with a technology going "too far" , pretending to be

utopian.

utopia���� from the Greek not place: ideal community with a

perfect socio-politico-legal system. Name given by�

Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) : fictional island in the

Atlantic Ocean; ideal place realistically impossible

1984 (1948)

Dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of a socialist Party:

• world of perpetual war, constant government surveillance, and public mind control.

• individual subordinated to the masses, the Party manipulates and control humanity.

Plot: Winston Smith works in the Ministry of

Truth (Minitrue, in Newspeak): he revises

historical records to render the Party

omniscient and always correct,

He tries to rebel against Big Brother, and is

arrested, tortured, and converted.

New terms and concepts: Big Brother,

doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak,

Memory hole,

Aldous Huxley

(1894 –1963)

�Drama: The Devils of Loudun �The Devils by John Whiting (Theatre of Cruelty ) �Scripts: Pride and Prejudice (1940); Jane Eyre (1944)

humanist and pacifist, interested in spiritual subjects

(parapsychology and philosophical mysticism). .

published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film

stories

Works:

�Crome Yellow (1921)

�Brave New world (1932) anticipates developments in

reproductive technology and sleep-learning

�Brave New World Revisited (essay, 1958)

�Island (1962)

�The Doors of Perception (1954)

1. The Theatre of Cruelty

• Surrealist form of theatre theorized by the French Antonin Artaud ( The Theatre and its Double).

• the cruelty consists in showing the audience a truth that they do not wish to see.

• unique language between thought and gesture.

Serjeant Musgrave's Dance,

An Un-historical Parable by

English playwright John

Arden (1959)

The DramaRepresentation of physical and psychological violence after the Wars and

disillusionment of new generations.

Three trends:

�The Devils: demonic

possession, religious fanaticism,

sexual repression, and mass

hysteria in 17th century France.

2. The Theatre of Anger

Angry Young Men

Turning point � kitchen-sink drama genre

John Osborne (1929 –1994)

Born in a poor family,

• personal life extravagant: famous for violent language, both on behalf of the political causes and against his own

family

Works:

� Look Back in Anger (1956) �concern with social issues; working class characters; slang and dialects; problems of

young people and unemployment

� The Entertainer (1957): metaphor death of music hall for rock and roll � end of British Empire and its eclipse for

the U.S.A.

� Luther (1961): life of Martin Luther, rebel of the past.

Further development: American Beat generation

3. The Theatre of the Absurd term coined by essayist Martin Esslin

Absurdists: Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Fernando Arrabal, andEdward Albee.

Samuel Barclay Beckett (1906 –1989)

Irish avenguard dramatist and poet,

Wrote in English and French.

Works:

� Waiting for Godot (1952);

� Endgame (1955–1957;),

� Krapp's Last Tape (1958),

� Happy Days (1960)

Features

Existential philosophy and dramatic elements �human existence

without meaning or purpose

communication breaks down

Circular plot; scenery unrecognisable /universality of situation);

dialogue without any sense; characters without a real name or

identity

Harold Pinter

(1930 – 2008)

Works:

�The Room (1957),

� The Birthday Party (1957),

�The Dumbwaiter (1957),

�The Caretaker (1959),

� Mountain Language

(1988).

Famous script: The Servant (1963), The Go-Between

(1970), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981)

Actor: Mansfield Park (1998)

Playwright, screenwriter, actor, theatre director, left wing

political activist and poet.

Features (plays): lack of explanation, interruption of

outside forces upon a stable environment

Unlike Beckett and Ionesco, world seems to be realistic.