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HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND LITERARY BACKGROUND 

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HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND LITERARY BACKGROUND 

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The birth of English romanticism is marked by the publication of the preface to the lyrical ballads by William Wordsworth, in which the author defines the main features of romanticism:

nature, which is the ideal place to live in

distrust in progress, new inventions and factories

interests in rustic life

Imagination used to understand the beauty of the universe and to create the truth

spontaneity, emotions and feelings

the importance of the inner self

During the romantic age there were 3 main genres, which had in common the deep psychological analysis of the characters, the use of dialogues to express the personality of the characters and the use of prose to tackle social issues and relationships between social classes.

the gothic novel with gloomy elements and mysterious events

the novel of manners such as Jane Austen’s works

the historical novel such as Walter Scott’s works

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Pre-Romantic poet born 1757 in Soho, London. Briefly attended school, then educated by his mum. The Bible deeply influenced his first years of production but in general his whole life. He created his own mythology and symbolism in an highly unorthodox visionary religious feeling. At his young age he experienced vision that would have effects on his poems. He became also an apprentice to an engraver.  He developed his love to gothic arts when sent to Westminster Abbey to make drawings of monuments and tombs. He then became an engraver  , and a painter (he entered in the Royal Academy)

-the marriage of heaven and hell:series of prose texts where he expresses his revolutionary beliefs. In the description the poet descents into hell (Dante and Milton). He proposes a unified version of cosmos in which material world and physical desire were part of the divine order.

-songs of innocence and experience: he creates the opposition of  the innocent world of childhood and the corrupted and repressed world of adulthood. The same situation is seen differently according to the different perspectives :innocence and experience.

- the Lamb represents the meek virtue pag 320

-the tyger the opposer darker forces.  Pag 322

Some songs of innocence are written from children or children seen from an adult perspective. They focus on positive aspects of the human nature

The songs of experience describe how the harsh experiences of adult life can destroy what is good in innocence and underline how weak innocence is.

From this work we can understand Blake’s opinion: he criticized both position of the state and the church. He proposed a new revolutionary ,ethical and intellectual society. He was against the industrial revolution as it led to poverty child labor and prostitution. He was tough a supporter of the French revolution and the campaign to abolish slavery. Although he was very religious he criticized the church as he believed that it favored the fragmentation of the dualism of existence.  He believed that in the human nature exist two sides: love and hate two complementary opposites .
For him world could be known exclusively trough imagination ,and that for this reason the poet has an important role. Only god, children and the poet see the world trough imagination and can truly understand the reality. Therefore he didn’t believe in reason and physical feelings.

Abry

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He was born on 7 April 1770 in Cumbria, in the north-west of England. He studied first at Howkshead Grammar School and then at Cambridge University, where he graduated in 1791.
He visited France in 1790 and supported the government’s republican ideals.
In 1795 he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the two became friends. They worked together on the “Lyrical Ballads”, published in 1798 and on the “Preface” which is considered the Manifesto of English Romantic Poetry. In this period Wordsworth wrote his most famous poem “I wandered lonely as a cloud”.
Another important work is “Prelude”, a collection of 13 books which is an autobiographical work, describing the development of his ideas ,poetry and political attitudes.
Wordsworth belongs to the first generation of romantic poets. For this reason he emphasises  the importance of feelings, instinct and pleasure. He believes that poetry should be written in the natural language of common speech. His style is plain and easy.
OPERE:
- Preface to Lyrical Ballads (pag.329)
- I wandered lonely as a cloud (pag.332)

Also the nature plays an important role; Wordsworth takes inspiration from it searching joy and emotions. For this reason nature is an uncontrollable force that dominates human beings.
Imagination has a key role for Wordsworth. This is explained in the “Preface” to “Lyrical Ballads” (pag.329), an introduction where Wordsworth explains a new concept of poetry as spontaneous feelings expressed in common language. This process is called: “ emotions recollected in tranquillity “. The poet in this case, has to experience deep emotions inspired by nature. These feeling are then refinished trough memory and this allows the poet to re-create a new purified version of emotions and feeling that he originally felt.

- I wandered lonely as a cloud -
This poem is the reconstruction of the experience after the poet went for a walk with his sister Dorothy in the Countryside where they were struck by the view of an immense group of daffodils. The poet in this case adopt his “recollection in tranquillity” technique and after coming home, he transforms his experience into poetry.

- Simone

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1792, Sussex (England) - 1822

VITA: he had 6 siblings and left home at the age of 10. He went to a private school were was bullied. He started using his imagination to escape. He went to Oxford, from where he was later expelled. He had some troubles with his family and knew several languages. He fell in love with Mary Godwin (daughter of W. Godwin, his idol), which is nowadays known as Mary Shelley. They got married and had 2 children, one of them died. They lived in Italy (Venice, Ravenna, Rome and Florence). He wrote Prometheus, Unbound, The Cenci. He died when his boat sank while he was sailing.

OPERE: ODE TO THE WEST WIND pag. 368
The ode describes the effect on nature of the autumnal west wind, which is a symbol of inspiration for the poet. The west wind also represents the radical change that poetry and the prophetic figure of the poet can bring to the world. Shelley describes the seasons and goes from destruction and death of the wind, to the promise of a rebirth in spring. By this, he wants to say that the poets' words can bring a positive change in the world.

-Jacq

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1775 Hampshire - 1817 Winchester

VITA: She was the seventh child of an anglican parish. She attended school for a short period, then she quitted for financial problems. She started writing at very early age. She never married but lived in an intellectually family, spending much of her time reading, writing, helping the family and socializing with local families. She died in Winchester at the age of 41. Her major novels are: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma.

Pride and Prejudice tells the story of the Bennet Family. Mr and Mrs Bennet are obsessed with finding suitable husbands to their five daughters, to make them become rich. Jane, the older one is sweet and attractive. Lydia and Kitty (the younger ones) are silly and vulgar, while Elizabeth, the protagonist and the father’s favourite, is intelligent and quick-witted. At one point a young gentleman, Charles Bingley arrives nearby Netherfield Park (where the story is set) and a series of meetings lead to love between Jane and him. A friend of Charles, Darcy Fitzwilliam is attracted by Elizabeth, but she is irritated by his arrogance and his continuously awareness of Bennet’s social inferiority. When Darcy propose to Elizabeth, she rejects him. She disliked the moment, she felt sorry for the misunderstanding, while he  was angry and  left the room as soon as she rejected him, because he was way too proud to be rejected.

Erika

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1797 Somers Town - 1851 London

VITA She was born as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, her mother was the first feminine writer and her father was a philosopher. Her mother died 10 days after giving birth and her father got married again, with a woman, who didn’t took care of her. Mary idealised her mother and used to visits her mother’s tomb everyday. Her father used to invite many intellectuals to his house, for example Coleridge and Shelley. Mary met Percy Shelley at his house, he was married, but the couple fell in love and eloped to Switzerland with Lord Byron in Lake Geneva. Harriet, Percy’s wife died and the couple got married. Mary gave birth to 5 children but just one of them lived, his name is Percy Florence. In 1822 Percy died, because his boat sunk during a trip. Mary published her most famous novel ‘Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus’ as a widow. She got sick and died due to a tumour.

Frankenstein starts with Walton a man that finds Viktor Frankenstein trapped in ice, he was dying. Viktor starts telling his story and how he managed to make a not living creature to live. This horrific creature starts having bad behaviours, due to some rejections and starts killing people. Then the monster escapes to Switzerland and asks for a feminine companion, but the doctor refuses. So the monster kills his friend and his fiancé. Viktor, as a revenge, takes the monster to the Artic and some days after the encounter with Walton, the doctor dies. The monster cries over Viktor’s dead body.

This is a gothic novel, with dark settings, and episodes of violence and horror. This is written as an epistolary novel between Walton and his sister. There are three different narrators, which are Viktor, Walton and the monster.

Alessia Cantarutti

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HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND LITERARY BACKGROUND

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HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND LITERARY BACKGROUND

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VITA: was born in 1812 in Portsmouth. His formal education was short, indeed due to economical problems in his family he was forced to work ten-hour days in a blacking factory.

He began his writing career as a journalist. In 1836 he married Catherine Hogarth and they had 10 children. He left his wife in 1858 for his mistress and he died in 1870.

He produced an immense number of novels and each episode ended with a dramatic turn of events that provoked suspense in order to maintain interest in the reader from one episode to the other. His novels focused on social criticism, on the consequence of Industrial revolution ( Hard Times) and on child labour (Oliver Twist).

With his novels helped he the spread of unknown words in English and some of his characters names have become part of the English language (Fagin from Oliver Twist is now synonym of thief).
He wrote: Pickwick Papers (1837), Oliver Twist (1839), A Christmas Carol (1843), Hard Times(1854), David Copperfield (1850), Great Expectations (1860).

Oliver Twist (1837-1839)

The novel described the cruelty and hypocrisy of Victorian England and the living conditions of poor families which were forced to live in workhouses where they were divided. In this novel Dickens expressed his anger at the iniquity of the Poor Law of 1834.

PLOT

Oliver Twist was an orphan who lived in a workhouse then he worked for an undertaken, but then he run aways and became involved in a gang of thieves led by Fagin. During one mission he got arrested, but eventually Mr. Brownlow rescued him. Afterwards he has been captured by the gang and during another mission he has been shot and taken in by Ms Maylie and her niece Rose. At the end we discover that Monks, one of Fagin’s accomplices is the half-brother of Oliver and Fagin wanted to kill Oliver in order to get his inheritance. Rose was also Oliver’s aunt. At the end Fagin is dented to be hanged and Monks died. Oliver is adopted by Mr.Brownlow.

Lucrezia Chiappo

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Vita

- 21/04/1816, Bradford.

- Attended Clergy Daughters' School – her two sisters died and she returned to home.

- Her experience inspired her for Jane Eyre.

- Returned to the same school as a teacher and then became a governess.

- Went to Brussels with Emily to study languages and fell in love with Mr. Heger, but he was alredy married; returned home.

- Discovered Emily's works and wanted to publish them.

- 1848 the sisters revealed their identity.

- Branwell (brother) died because he was addicted to opium and alcohol and Emily died soon after followed by Anne.

- She spent some time in London .

- She married and in 1855 she died while she was pregnant.

Jane Eyre

She is a poor orphan girl brought up by her aunt. She had a ribellious behavior so her aunt sent her to an institution for orphans. She became teacher at the same school and became governess of Adele, the daughter of Mr. Rochester. She is not a beautiful girl but Mr. Rochester falls in love with her bc of her intelligence; before the wedding she found out he was already married so she went away; St John Rivers takes care of her and when she is about to marry him she hears the voice of Rochester in the night. She went to Mr. Rochester house and saw that the house has been burnt to the ground by Bertha (his mad wife that was locked in a room on the top of the house) but he is alive. Jane has been married with Rochester for ten years and her husband has regained his sight.

Gothic and Romantic elements

themes of horror, madness, passion and dreams – typical of the ghotic genre. The setting is gothic: Thornfield Hall is a old mansion which hides the R's dark past. Supernatural situations.

Rochester and Jane are romantic heroes. Rochester is a byronic hero; Jane is a passionate individual with a romantic nature (nature appears as a reflection of her inner self)

A new heroine

A realistic story – autobiographical – allows the reder to follow the events through the point of view of a woman and can identify with Jane's feelings and fears.

Social novel – critique of the role of women in Victorian society – being poor, Jane must struggle to have an education – it is only through education that a woman who is poor can live in a dignified way. She is an independent and intelligent woman.

She is a round character an also complex – she defends her independence and she also refuses to brcome Rochester's mistress after she discovers she cannot marry him.

- Viktoria Coppola

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She was born in 1818, Yorkshire. After the death of her mother, she and her siblings were brought up by their aunt. She studied with four of her sister but when two of them died there one year later, she returned to the family home in Haworth, Yorkshire. After an unsuccessful attempt at setting up a school with her sisters, the three of them spent their time at home, writing poems. In 1846 Charlotte included some of them in a collection called Poems by Currer,Ellis, and Acton Bell. These were pseudonyms used by the sisters to disguise their feminine identity. Emily’s only novel ​Wuthering Heights w​ as published. She died of tuberculosis in 1848, at the age of 30. Emily was a very reclusive, retiring person. She had a deep bond with this landscape and nature constantly stimulated her imagination.
Wuthering Heights
Is the retrospective narration of a visitor in Yorkshire telling the story of ​two households ​on t h e Y o r k s h i r e m o o r s : ​ W u t h e r i n g H e i g h t s , ​ t h e h o m e o f t h e ​ E a r n s h a w s a​ n d ​ T h r u s h c r o s s Grange,​ the home of the ​Lintons.​ The story begins 30 years earlier, when Mr Earnshaw finds

a homeless gipsy-boy on a journey to Liverpool and adopts him as his son. The boy’s name is Heathcliff. Mr Earnshaw’s son Hindley resents Heathcliff, but his sister Catherine grows attached to him. Heathcliff grows up and is bitterly angered when Catherine,whom he loves, marries the well-born and rich Edgar Linton from Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff runs away and returns a rich man to exact revenge on both families. After his death their two ghosts are said to walk together on the moor. This story combines ​Romantic ​and ​Gothic elements o​ f unbridled passion, stormy natural settings,dreams and ghosts.
The story is told by ​two narrators.​ One is ​Nelly​, Catherine’s housekeeper, the other is an outsider, a visiting gentleman called Mr Lockwood. The novel is not based on a conventional sequence of events. It goes backwards and forwards through ​flashbacks​ and ​personal recollections​.

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1882, London  – 1941, Rodmell
VITA:
She was born and she died in the same year of James Joyce.
She was the daughter of an philosopher and of a very smart woman. Her house was full of artists and of writers. She suffered sexual assaults by one of her stepbrothers. The death of her parents and her brother disturbed her psychological balance: she had a nervous breakdown and attempted suicide. During the Second World War she and her husband moved to a small village near London because of the bombings. The life in the countryside was not good for Virginia’s psychological balance. She committed suicide by drowning herself in a river. She wrote articles, essays and novels.
OPERE:
MRS DALLOWAY (1925)
The story takes place on one single day in London. The protagonist is Clarissa Dalloway. She is the wife of a member of Parliament and she is organising a party for the evening. The whole novel is centered on the interior life of Clarissa. Clarissa’s counterpart is Septimus Smith, a veteran of the First World War, who came back from the war with a shell shock. At the end of the day he commits suicide. Clarissa understands that death is part of life and that Septimus died in order for her to live. In this novel Virginia Woolf uses a 3rd-person omniscient unobtrusive narrator. She describes the flux of thoughts, which is not rationally organised, because thoughts work by association. There is a distinction between subjective and objective time.
TO THE LIGHTHOUSE (1927)
The 1st part of the novel is set during the First World War. Mr and Mrs Ramsay are spending their summer holidays with their eight children in a house on an island in Scotland. They organise a trip to a lighthouse, but they are not able to go there because of the bad weather.
In the 2nd part we get to know that seven years later Mrs Ramsay died and that the house on the island is abandoned.
In the 3rd part Mr Ramsay and his sons and daughters go back to the house on the island and finally manage to organise their trip to the lighthouse.
The most important character in the novel is Mrs Ramsay.
To The Lighthouse is a Modernist novel. Virginia Woolf uses the indirect interior monologue in order to describe the thoughts of the characters. The story is narrated by an external narrator.

- Maia

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George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) was born in 1903 in India. He spent his childhood in England and went to the prestigious boys' boarding school, Eton College. His family's circumstances did not allow him to go to university, and in 1922 Blair joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, gaining first-hand experience of the poor and of the oppressive role of the Imperial administration. Five years later he returned to England and lived among the poor people in London before leaving for Paris. He returned to London and, under the name of George Orwell, published his first book "Down and Out in Paris and London" (1933), describing the conditions of the poor in the two capital cities. Orwell wrote a series of books before going to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After the war, he suffered of tuberculosis, Orwell worked briefly for the BBC and then became literary editor of "The Tribune". In 1945 his allegorical novel "Animal Farm", was published.In 1949 Orwell published his last great novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four", a bleak, a dystopian vision of a future world ruled over by an oppressive totalitarian regime in which the state controls every detail of a person's life, down to their own private thoughts, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was a big success. All his work was based on his interest in the social and political conditions that he had observed in his own lifetime.
ANIMAL FARM: It is an anti-Soviet satire in a pastoral setting featuring two pigs as its main protagonists. Orwell clearly shows his commitment and political positions. The novel is a representation of the dangers of all kinds of revolutions and denounces the threat of selfishness and greed that characterises human actions.
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR: The story is set in 1984, in a chilling dystopian reality placed in London.
The main character is Winston Smith, a humble man who works in London. He is an ordinary guy whose job is to rewrite history in order to bring it in line with political thinking. The atmosphere is really sinister: every single person is brainwashed into obedience, worshipping "The Big Brother". The Brotherhood is a secret organization whose purpose is to defeat the current government. Smith is not sure whether this group exists or not, but he eventually decides to rebel against Big Brother. He has a forbidden affair with a girl who works with him in the Ministry of Truth (which is, of course, something strictly forbidden by the rules because it can cause deviant thought) and they join The Brotherhood together. They are soon found out and punished in Room 101, the torture chamber inside the Ministry of Love. They both are tortured, brainwashed and then forced into cheating on their partners. The torture is meant to completely destroy their humanity and dignity. The novel sadly ends with an indifferent Smith, who feels "happy" and satisfied worshipping The Big Brother.
The title of novel shows that what Orwell had in mind was to represent the frightening possible future of England. "1984" refers to the future and is the reverse of "1948", the year in which Orwell wrote the book. The novel analyses the role of power and domination in an imaginary future society.
The most amazing aspect of this novel is how relevant it is, even after a long time since it was first published. Winston is the hero of this story because, even if he lost, he rebelled and tried his best against the government. He represents the values of civilization, and his defeat is still relevant because it is the symbol of how the oppressing power of all-powerful States can make you more vulnerable.
The title of the novel shows that what Orwell had in mind was to represent the frightening possible future of England. "1984" refers to the future and is reserve of "1948" which is the year where Orwell wrote the book. The novel wants to to examinate the role of power and domination in the imaginary future society that reflects the totalitarian regimes that Orwell came to know in the  1930s and '40s.
The character's name are symbolical:
Winston Smith is refered to Winston Churchill --> the name seems to suggest the idea that he is common English man, a sort of contemporary "everyman" representing the universal qualities of English people.
-Anastasia

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HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND LITERARY BACKGROUND (UK AND USA)

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HISTORICAL, SOCIAL AND LITERARY BACKGROUND (UK AND USA)

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1850, Edinburgh-1894, Vailima
VITA:  he was born in a scottish family of lighthouse engineers. Since he was a child, he was considered a frail sickly boy and forced to stay at home where he developed a passion for reading. Although he did not want to, he graduated in law when he was 25.
During his life, he traveled a lot, writing about his experiences. In France he met Fanny Vandergrift Osbourne, whom he married in 1880 in the USA. Then he went back to England with his wife and child, where he wrote "Treasure Island", "A Garden of Verses" and "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde", appreciated by other writers but not critics.
After his father's death, Robert returned to the USA and sailed through the Pacific.
During his life, he produced a lot of works of different genres.
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE
The novel is based on the story of Dr Jekyll, the prototype of victorian handsome man, who is reserved, well-educated and sticks to the rules. One day, wanting to divide the bad part of his personality from the good one, drinks a potion. The  result is Mr Hyde, a man who represents the bad part of the victorian society, by being aggressive, violent, ugly, powerful and free.
The main theme is the double and  it contains elements both from Gothic tradition and detective fiction, adding psychological features.
Carlotta F.

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(1854 - 1900)

VITA: was born in Dublin, was a brilliant student. He went to the Trinity College and Oxford. He criticized the Victorian Age. He's for the aesthetic movement, but for him art is useless. He traveled a lot, for example he went in Ireland where he created a name for himself as a leading figure in the aesthetic movement. He went also in Italy, Greece, America and England. He was imprisoned two years because he was accused of homosexuality. His preface outlines his philosophy of art based of Aestheticism: art is neither moral nor immoral with beauty in itself as a supreme value. He wrote: "The Picture of Dorian Gray", "The importance of being Earnest", "The happy Prince and other tales", "The ballad of reading gaol".

OPERE:
the picture of Dorian Gray: is the story of a beauty young man and he wants to be beautiful and young forever. He has his portrait painted by B. Hallward. Dorian meets Lord Wotton, who talks about the transience of youth and beauty. Dorian will sacrifice his soul If he can maintain his youth and beauty. He leads a life of pleasure, sins, crimes and corruption but he remains young and beautiful, while is portrait becomes old and ugly bearing the sins. Dorian kills B. Hallward and an actress. At the end Dorian is found dead, transformed into an old man beside the portrait (returned to its original beauty). The novel teachea a moral lesson, as Dorian's sins lead to his own destruction. Dorian uses his innocent appearance to be accepted in the society. The portrait represents Dorian's conscience and his real self.

the importance of being Earnest: Jack Worthing is a young man, he lives in a boring country and invented a wicked brother (Earnest) as a pretext to go in London. In London he proposes to Gwendolen (cousin of hif friend Algernon Moncrieff). Gwendolen accepts because she has always wished to marry a man called "Earnest" because is a respectable name. Algernon arrives and pretends to be Jack's wicked brother Earnest and fell in love with Cecily. Jack joins them and proclaims that his wicked brother is dead. The truth comes out. The governess had carelessly lost a baby (Lady Bracknell's nephew) in a handbag at Victoria Station some 28 years before. Jack so is Algernon's elder brother.
[there are ridicule dialogue and hypocrisy of contemporary society]

-Syria

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VITA: George Bernard Shaw was born July 26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland. In 1876 he moved to London, where he wrote regularly but struggled financially. Lots of his works were rejected by publishers. In 1884 became actively interested in politics and joined the Fabian Society. Soon after, he found employment as a theater critic for the Saturday Review and began writing plays of his own.
His first plays were published in two collections: Plays Pleasant and Plays Unpleasant, all characterised by his biting wit and fierce social criticism.
He was deeply influenced by the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, from whom he derived his theory of individual life force. Shaw's theatre was also influenced by the plays from the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, using the plays as a vehicle for ideas, introducing real debates and discussions.
His play Pygmalion (1912) was later made into a film twice, and the screenplay he wrote for the first version of it won an Oscar. During his lifetime, he wrote more than 60 plays and won many other awards, among them the Nobel Prize.

PLAYS PLEASANT AND UNPLEASANT:
Shaw called his first set of plays Unpleasant since they were works which dealt openly and even shockingly with social questions including poverty, inequality, sex and prostitution. The main characteristic of his work is the brilliant and irreverent wit.
The Play Pleasant were a necessary counterbalance for his previous work. They were less shocking but still pointed out crucial issues of the time Shaw was living in.

MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION:
The story centres on the relationship between Mrs Kitty Warren and her daughter, Vivie. Mrs. Warren, a former prostitute and current brothel owner, is described as "on the whole, a genial and fairly presentable old blackguard of a woman." Vivie, an intelligent and pragmatic young woman who has just graduated from university, has come home to get acquainted with her mother for the first time in her life. The play focuses on how their relationship changes when Vivie learns what her mother does for a living. It explains why Mrs. Warren became a prostitute, condemns the hypocrisies relating to prostitution, and criticises the limited employment opportunities available for women in Victorian Britain.

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He was born in 1896 and he was an American novelist and short-story writer. He was a very talented writer since he was a child. Fitzgerald went to Priceton University  in New Jersey , where he dedicated himself to writing, though not to studying, and contributed articles to literary magazines. He did not complete his degree, and in 1917  joined the US army. His first novel in "The Side of Paradise" (1920). He married Zelda Sayre, who was a brilliant writer. Fitzgerald and Zeld maintained a life of partying and drinking. His second novel is "The Beautiful and the Damnned" (1922). In 1924 Fitzgerald moved to France, where he wrote his greatest novel "The Great Gatsby" (1925). The Great Gatsby was his finest achivement, but true recognition did not come until after his death. Zelda sadly suffered a breakdown at the age of 30 annd spent the rest of her short life in mental institutions, dying at the age of 48. Fitzgerald had always been a heavy drinker and after completing The Great Gatsby. He managed to complete a fourth novel, Tender is the Night (1934). Still tormented by depression and alcoholism, in 1937 Fitzgerald began to work as a screenwriter for Hollywood. He died of a heart attack on 21 December 1940 in Hollywood, at the age of 44.
THE GREAT GATSBY: It tells the story of a number of characters living in a fictional town called West  Egg on Long Island in the summer of 1922. The narrator, Nick Carraway, is fascinated by the lifestyle of the young millionaire, Jay Gatsby. Through Nick, Gatsby meets the beautiful Daisy Buchanan. Gatsby is obsessed with Daisy and the two become romantically involved. Tom confronts Gatsby in New York and tells his wife that Gatsby's fortune is based on illegal "bootlegging". Daisy is ready to break off her relationship with Gatsby. Daisy and Gatsby return to Long Island by car but on the way back they accidentally kill Tom's mistress Myrtle in a road accident. Daisy was driving, but Gatsby takes responsability for the homicide. Myrtle's husband, convinced that it was Gatsby who had killed his wife, goes to Gatsby's mansion where he shoots Gatsby and then takes his own life.
The novel, set in a limited frame of space and time, tells the story of an unfortunate love affair between Gatsby ad Daisy. It analyses the hollowness and moral poverty fo this setting and of the "American Dream" in the "Roaring Twenties". Rapid economic growth had produced a society in which this "new" money was consumed conspicuously in a dizzying round of parties, music and materialism. Fitzgerald exposed the cynicism and emptiness of the "new wealth" of the American provinces, represented by West Egg, where the "great" Gatsby lacked the grace and style of the "old wealth". Gatsby's attempt to win respect through money. The novel is written using a "cinematic"style  because action is fragmented into brief scenes that are connected by the voice of a narrator. The novel is characterised by an elegant style and by the use of highly evocative, poetic language and a series of vivdly described recurring symbols aimed at showing the opulence as well as the sterility of the "Roaring Twenties".
-Anastasia

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1830, Massachusetts- 1886

VITA: She was born in 1830 in Massachusetts in a well-to-do family. After attending college, when she was 25, she decided to remain at home and dedicating her life to writing poetry. She dressed only in white and she refused to see most people, however she was interested in what was happening around her, for example the Civil War, Abolitionism, Trascendentalism. She had a correspondence with a few friends, showing that she was interested in the key historical events and cultural issues.

She wrote lots of poems (1775) but only 7 were published when she was alive. When she died her sister published them, at the beginning they weren’t successful, but then she was recognised as a major poet until the 20th century. She died in 1886 of nephritis and she was also afraid of living.

She was not influenced by the contemporary writers, this is why she was so original. Her poems are short and compressed, she uses a concrete language and she refers to the natural world to convey abstract meanings. She uses paradoxes and unusual metaphors, simple words but with profound meanings. The punctuation is also highly personal, with extensive use of dashes, that substitute commas and full stops. The rhymes are imperfect and there are many assonances.

The themes are universal, the Bible and puritanism were very important, as the death, the afterlife and eternity. Trascendentalism looked for meaning in nature, so she searched for the personal and universal significance in the natural world.

- Lucia

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VITA: Martin Luther King was born in 1929 in Atlanta (Georgia). Like his father and grandfather before him, he became a Baptist minister and was known as a powerful, impassioned preacher. Against the backdrop of racism and segregation, especially in the southern states of the US, King dedicated his entire life to the fight for civil rights and from 1955 until his death (1968), he campaigned for equality for all people, black or white. In 1963 was named "Man of the year" by Time Magazine and one year later he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. On 4 April 1968, Martin Luther King was shot as he stood on the balcony of a hotel in Memphis. He left a widow, two sons and two daughters.

King's Philosophy
Inspired by Mamathma Gandhi's philosophy of non-violent protest, he worked tirelessly and was arrested over 20 times. As a follower of Gandhi's philosophy,King was a pacifist. He and other activists founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), a group whose motto was "Not one hair of one head of one person should be harmed". Their strategy of "civil disobedience" , based on the refusal to obey certain laws or regulations in order to bring change, included boycott, mass demonstration and sit-ins. King's leadership had helped effect political change without the use of violence.

I have a Dream Speech (1963)

Martin Luther King pronounced his most famous speech on 28 August 1963,speaking to a crowd of over 250.000 civil rights supporters in Washington. Significantly, the speech was delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, one hundred years after Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. King observed that one hundred years later "The negro is still not free" and towards the end of his speech he abandoned the text he had prepared with an improvised discourse - "I have a dream" - in which he expressed his dream that one day all men would be free and equal.

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VITA his parents died when he was 3, he was then adopted by John Allan. He always dreamt about being a writer. By the age of 13 he had already written a large quantity of poetry. After university (he dropped out) he went to the military academy of West Point where he was expelled for neglecting his duties in favour of writing. Abandoned by his foster family he was taken by his aunt Maria Clemm. At the age of 27 he married his cousin Virginia Clemm (14yo). In 1847 his wife died, he was unable to write and struggled with ill health, a combination of epilepsy, heart disease and alcohol addiction. On the 7th October 1849 he was four dead in the street.

He wrote about supernatural, he was attracted by the dark, he is considered the father of the detective story, he established the structure of the short story as a genre.

He wrote: Tamerlane and Other Poems (18yo), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837), Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).

The Masque of the Red Death (1845)
Is a short story. Themes: mystery, death, nightmare visions and horror. It is set during a plague.
The main character is Prospero, the prince of the country who believes that his wealth can save him from death so he decides to organise a masked ball in his palace. The rooms of the palace present a sequence of different colours and the story ends in a black room with red windows where a personification of death finally reaches Prospero, destined to die like his guests.
-Alessia Cecot

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Siegfied Sassoon (1886-1967)

The Sasson family is a Jewish family and one of the richest families in the world. Siegfried Sassoon was born on the 8 September 1886 in Kent. He lived a comfortable life and began to publish small volumes of poetry. He is best remembered for his war poetry, which was written during and after the First World War and includes the collections Counter-Attack (1918) and War Poems (1919). He is the only war poet who lived until old age, in fact he had a fever at the beginning of the war and was wounded, so was sent back to England. He met several pacifists an became increasingly disillusioned with the war, his open opposition to the war nearly led him to a court-martial. In his works he uses a violent, simple language, describing the reality of the war with all its horrific details. He did not have a patriotic vision of the war, also because he thought that soldiers were sent to death with no reason. His war poems were criticised in England because of his lack of patriotism and for the shocking violence of his works. After the conflict he continued to write throughout his life. He wrote both prose and poetry, including a successful trilogy of autobiographical novels “The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston”. His post-war works where characterised by his spiritual concerns (Catholicism). He died on 1 September 1967.
"Suicide in the trances"
-Anna

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He was born in Dublin in 1882. When Joyce was a child, his parents lost their wealth and his father lost his job as a tax collector. In 1898 he started studying Italian, French and English at University College in Dublin, where he also started writing literary reviews and articles. He met Nora Barnacle who later became his wife. When the director of the Berlitz Institute of Trieste offered him a teaching position, Joyce moved to the Adriatic seaport city, then still belonging to the Austria-Hungary, where he worked on two of his best-known literary works: Dubliners (1914) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In 1914 when the first World War broke out, Joyce moved to Zurich, where he started working on what would become his masterpiece, Ulysses. In the 1920 Joyce moved to Paris, where he started working on his last novel, Finnegans Wake (1939). After the Germans occupied France in 1949, Joyce and his family went back to Zurich, where he died in 1941.
ULYSSES: is a long, complex novel set in and near Dublin on one single day, 16 June 1904. Its 18 “episodes” narrate the actions and interactions of three characters. Ulysses is an epic novel which offers different vision of daily life, personal attitudes, political and cultural discussion and reflection on the human condition.

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RUPERT BROOKE (1887-1915)

Rupert Broke is born in 1877. He studied in Cambridge. His writings are characterized by the  tendency to represent an idyllic view of the English countryside. After a serious nervous breakdown, he travelled a lot. He published his first collection of poems: Georgian Poets, which suggest he belonged to this group of writers. They dealt with a melancholic and elegiac tone. Brooke died on a hospital ship in Greece. His death was announced by Winston Churchill in the Times.

He was a war poet, but he never reached the battle-field, actually, he died of blood poisoning  before going to fight. He has not experienced the terrible aspects of the war (trenches), this explains such of his exaltation and exaltation. Besides, death in war is not a tragic, according to him, but a noble end. Critics considered so him too superficial and sentimental.

THE SOLDIER

One of the famous five sonnets he wrote dying, is “the Soldier”, that became, in 1915, one of the most popular war’s poem, because the poet saw the war, not as a cruel experience, but as a way, for a soldier, to become an hero and to demonstrate the patriotism. The sonnet was successful because it celebrated the patriotic and idealistic mood of the war, before the British people’s discovering the outbreak of the First World War and of the horrors of the war.

I’s like a Petrarcan sonnet, because it’s composed by two quatrains and two tercets. If he will die

and if he will be buried in a foreign country, there will be a piece of that country that will be forever England, because it will contain his body which his English. In that piece of hearth there will be a richer dust (himself). England is seen as an other, actually, she bore him, she gave him a shape, she made him know, she gave him her flowers to love and her paths to explore. England takes care of her (she is personified in a human being) children. His body is an English body (happy dreams, gentleness).When he will die and his body will be buried, his mind will always think about all what he has received by England.

SOUND DEVICES: Regular rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD ABC ABC

FIGURES OF SPEECH: personification= England is seen like a mother, his mother-country. This emphasis the love of the poet for England

LANGUAGE: The language used by the poet is high-flown, it’s emphatic (many words to express a single concept)

THEMES: Patriotism = the war is a way to demonstrate your patriotism and to become immortal. Death= a way to become immortal and a hero. Idealistic poem= how noble is to die for your mother-country

CORRESPONDANCE BETWEEN high-flown language, Conventional and traditional them, conventional and traditional genre

Questions:
1) What kind of writer was he?
2) How did he consider war?
3) Which themes do emerge in "The soldier"?

(-Lisa)

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VITA: He was born in 1899 in Illinois. He was an American novelist, journalist and short-story writer. He took part in World War I as a volunteer ambulance driver in the Italian Army; later on he received a Silver Medal for bravery. He then went to Canada and in the 1920s he went to Paris, where he became a member of a group of intellectuals and artists together with Fitzgerald, E. Pound, Picasso and Joyce (The Lost generation). He then wrote The Sun Also Rises, based on the San Firmino Festival in Pamplona, Spain. Then, he went back to the US and lived in Florida, where he completed his work Farewell to Arms, based on his experience in the war. He went to Spain as a war correspondent during the Civil War, an experience which gave him inspiration for For Whom the Bells Tolls. When America joined the Second World War he was a war correspondent. In 1953 his novel The Old Man and the Sea, won a Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and the year after he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. He then struggles with physical problems, drinking and depression, until he shot himself at home in Idaho in July 1961.

STYLE: His art was based on simplicity and essential prose, so he used short and simple sentences to convey action, dialogue and silences. Punctuation is kept to a minimum and he largely used a cinematic technique, which is based on cutting rapidly from one scene to another. He also used the iceberg technique, where visible elements support an unseen structure and symbolism. He wanted to represent life as realistically as possible, so he abandoned the descriptive style, to use a dry style based on dialogues, in which there is there is no intervention from the author. His style was revolutionary.

A Farewell to Arms

The protagonist is Frederic Henry, a young American ambulance driver, volunteer in World War I. During the conflict he meets an English nurse, Catherine Barkley, they fall in love and she gets pregnant. Henry leads the team of ambulance drivers trying to evacuate the area and shoots an engineer when he refuses to help free the ambulance while it’s blocked in the mud. Forced to abandon their vehicles the men continue on foot towards Udine, chaos has broken out and the Italian battle police are shooting men and officers whom they accuse of desertion. Henry is taken but manages to escape and goes back to Milan. Him and Catherine are reunited in Stresa and escape to Switzerland, even though the man is tormented by feeling of guilt when he thinks about the men he left behind. The lovers manage to get to Lausanne, but the baby is stillborn and Catherine dies as well. Henry stays by her side, incapable of saying farewell to his love.

The main theme is the brutal reality of war, which is pictured as a physical, moral and social damage which has no solution. There is also the theme of tragic love, and the illusion of escape and happiness does not protect the protagonists from the sad reality.

It’s a multi-layered novel, and the title expresses both the farewell of the protagonist to war and the farewell to his lover’s arms as she dies giving birth. This has become one of the most loved anti-war novels of all time.

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VITA: Wilfred Owen was born on 18 March 1893.  He was on the Continent teaching until he visited a hospital for the wounded and then decided, in September 1915, to return to England and enlist.  Owen was injured in March 1917 and sent home; he was fit for duty in August 1918 and returned to the Front. On 4 November, just seven days before the Armistice, he was caught in a German machine gun attack and killed. He was 25 when he died.
THE POETRY IS IN THE PITY:   Owen stated that his subject was war and the pity of war.  As in so many poems of the First World War, horror, pity and the firsthand experience of the terrible realities are all present. What is missing is  any reference to an enemy or any reflection on military glory.
THE TRAGIC IRONY OF THE SOLDIER POET:   Owen volunteered for service believing that he could help his fellow soldiers by providing an honest report of what they had to endure. At the time of composition of this ‘anthem’, Owen had full, first-hand experience of the horror of the conflict and, again like so many of his fellow-poets and soldiers, he too fell victim to the war, dying just a week before hostilities came to an end.
- Nicole

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George Gordon Byron: 1788, London - 1824

VITA: he studied in a private school where he had love experiences with both boys and girls (he was bisexual). His father, Captain John Byron, was brutal and vicious. He had lots of debts so he married a rich woman with whom he had 2 daughters: the one who survived was named Augusta. He married also Catherine Gordon (George's mother), she was moody and melancholic. When his father died, George became Lord Byron.
In 1805 he went to Trinity College in Cambridge where he did lots of sports and had sexual escapades. He also had a love affair with a boy who described him as "violent, through pure love and passion".
He published Hours of Idleness (a collection of poems) and it was attacked in the Edinburgh Review, so Byron replayed with English Bards and Scotch Reviews (satire).
In 1809 he went on a tour of the Mediterranean with a friend (Grand Tour: Portugal, Spain, Gibaltar, Albania, Greece, Malta, Turkey). In Greece he started  the poem Child Harold's Pilgrimage (a boy who wants to become a knight, it was based on his adventures).
When he returned to England he met his half-sister Augusta, with whom he had a daughter. In 1815 he married Anna Isabella Milbank, who gave him a daughter but she left him accusing him of incest and homosexuality, so Byron had to left for the scandal.
He spent the summer in Geneva in 1816 (the year without summer - eruption of a volcano) with John Polidori, Percy and Mary Shelley and Claire Claremont (Byron's ex). They did a competitions for the creepiest story: Mary won with Frankenstein.
Byron went to Italy, where he had lots of love affairs, but he had a love story with Teresa Guiccioli who was deeply in love with him and they travelled to Venice, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa, where he started writing Don Juan (epic satire novel in verse).
He gave his financial support to the cause of Greek liberation from Turkish oppression, he organised an expedition but he died of fever in 1824: his heart is buried in Greece where he is considered as a national hero.

She walks in beauty: in this poem Byron celebrates the perfection of a beautiful woman, whose beauty is compared to the starry night and in contrast with the light of the day. In the second stanza the poet talks about women's beauty in terms of perfection and describes it as the result of all the beautiful thoughts that se makes. The tird stanza is focused on the woman's face, which reflects the inner and outer beauty.

I have no loved the world: is a representation of which qualities a byronic hero must have: attractive, smart, with a bad past and outcast.

-Letizia