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In 1901 Victoria died, Edward the seventh came to the throne and at the beginning of the century general election was held; the liberals won and they carried out reforms on pensions, medical service an school, coal mines regulation act, new acts of education, and so on.
We can understand that Victorian conventions gradually faded out; in the pre-war years we have strikes, violence, industrial arrests that come from men and women too. Women were educated and they had been arguing in favour of voting rights since 1860s; they were called "suffragettes".
Among them Emmeline Pankhurst together with her daughter founded the women's social and political union. The suffragettes chained themselves to fences and they broke windows and they made hangar strikes because they wanted to obtain the right to vote.
In 1909 the Prime Minister Lloyd George made a new system of taxation that penalises the unearned incomes in favour of the earned income, coming from work.
Before the first world war
we have the end of the balance of power:
EFFECTS OF THE 1ST WORLD WAR AND THE IRISH SITUATION
The effects of the 1st WW were:
the death of 9 million people,
the ruin of 4 empires,
the communist revolution in
the rise of dictators like Hitler and Mussolini,
the negative economic
effects in 313c21d
The causes are huge design of powerful man without taking consideration of modern warfare. (Shall-shock: psychological disorder among the solders of the 1st WW caused by bomb explosion).
In 1912 we have the Home-rule introduced by the
liberals that was a self government or even independent parliament in
They wanted to keep the union with the British,
because of this conflict this rule was suspended till peace time. In 1916 we
have a real threat of civil war at East. The Irish republican
party Sinn Fein attempted to seize power in
The treaty was not accepted by the assembly in
After the 1st WW we have to remember
the birth of the
THE 20s AND THE 30s.
In 1918 we have the women's right to vote but they had to be over 30 and they had to be property owners. Only in 1928 they have the same right as men.
The Labour Party was born after the 1st
WW, while in 1924 the Liberal Party was almost disappeared. The capitalist
principles were developed by the Conservative Party, while the reformers
belonged to the Labour Party. In the 20s we have the unrest both in
In 1924 the leader of the Conservative Party was
Stanley Baldwin, after the war we have an economic boom, but then we have a
decline in International trade, large scale unemployment, the reduction of miners wage (salario): these are the
years of Depression in Europe,
In the 30s we have the Spanish Civil War that was won by Francisco Franco and a lot of English intellectuals (like Orwell, Auden, Hemingway) joined the anti-fascist International Brigade.
George change his German title into
men could vote if they were over 21
women could vote if they were over 30
voters rose from 8 to 16 million and this is why in 1924 we have the first labour government.
Other important events were:
in 1926 there was a general strike that lasted 10 days; the miners were on strike for 6 months.
In the 20s the main problem was the economic depression.
o In 1929 there was the great depression with the Wall Street's crack, that was the collapse of the stock market
o
From 1929-1933 this depression affected
During the 1st WW women had taken men's places and they had given a huge contribution to war. (This was the end of the battle to vote of the suffragettes.)
It was an association of self governing
countries; in 1926 the independence was recognise by the imperial conference
held in London, to Australia, New Zealand, Canada, New Foundland and South
Africa. In 1931 the founding of the British commonwealth
was declared by the statute of
Gandhi was born in 1869 and was killed in 1948.
Mahatma means great soul in fact Gandhi was against violence and in favour of
passive resistance and non co-operation. Thanks to this civil disobedience
We have a lot of important men to be remember:
the main one as regards literature and culture in general was Freud. He emphasise the power of unconscious to effect behaviour; he plays enormous importance of demands of the libido, so he gave great importance to sex; he provided a new method of investigation of the human mind through demands and associations.
Jung introduced the concept of collective unconscious, a sort of cultural memory containing the universal myths. It means that he discovered that a lot of most universal myths are common in different cultures.
Einstein and his theory of relativity that discarded the concept of time and space which he conceived as a subjective dimensions.
William James, Henry James's brother (a famous novelist), was a philosopher; he claimed that our mind records every single experience as a continuous flux.
Henry Bergson that distinguish historical time which is external and linear from psychological time which is internal and subjective.
Nietzsche that replaced Christian morality with a belief in human perfectibility. He declared that God was dead.
The first decade of the 20th century
was centred in
The key ideas in the modern literature are 4:
broke with the tradition, so the first writers was traditional writers in language and plot
isolation and alienation
creation of subjective mythology
cosmopolitan literature.
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TRADITIONAL NOVEL |
MODERN NOVEL |
Interest |
in society's actions |
in men psyche |
Time |
Objective time |
Subjective time |
Narrator |
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INTRODUCTION TO JAMES JOYCE
The change between traditional novel and modern novel happens gradually. In the modern novel in particular change style. Only few writers anticipated modernism for example Henry James and now we can find psychological analysis to show the complexity of human mind.
Great influence of Freud: Oedipus complex, mental processes, family and love relations; the mind has many layers, come of them are hidden. The greatest blow to traditional ways of ordering reality was the break down of the time division, we have no more division in past, present and future (link to Bergson). We have a continuous flux in which only individual consciousness identified significant moments: Virginia Woolf and James Joyce.
In their novels we find these new ideas that is: human perceptions depends on the way the mind is affected by time. This ideas couldn't be expressed in traditional ways; this is why we have new narrative techniques. This technique tried to reproduce the continuous flow of the human through, putting together distant and incongruous ideas or using flash back, using time shift, using different points of view, using new ways of portraying human psychology.
JJ attended Jesuits school,
he admired D'Annunzio, Ibsen and so on. He was born in
After that he left
So he proposes to Nora to leave
15 short stories. This stories disclose human situations, moments of intensity; they move to a moral, social and spiritual revelation; these stories portrait some characteristics situations which could reveal historical, social and psychological forces and conditioned the life of Dubliners leading them to a moral and psychological paralysis. Joyce in Dubliners proceeded from individual to general. From childhood to maturity; in fact is divided into 4 groups of people:
some belonged to childhood
some belonged to youth
some belonged to mature life
some belonged to public life.
"The Dead" is the last and longest and it's considered his first master piece. This short story is hold together by certain themes, symbols and narrative technique. Each story has a naturalistic description, concise but detailed, and many external details. Realism is combined with symbolism and we often find deeper meaning; epiphany is often the key of the story; epiphany means sudden revelation caused by something you remember or something banal.
Joyce wanted to take the readers beyond the usual aspect of life showing deep and hidden meanings. Paralysis is both physical and moral, is linked to revelation to its victims and paralysis together with the epiphany is the climax of the story.
"Eveline" is a girl who lives with her father and she has some problems with him; she meets a boy and she wanted to escape with him.
Epiphany → the revelation is when she hears a sound, an organ playing in the street and suddenly she remembers when her mother was alive and their promise. So she decided to live, but at the end she can't.
The story is divided into 3 parts
Eveline's family situation
Making d9iscussion, begins with the sound of the street organ, she doesn't want to repeat her mother's life. She had decided, she wanted to live
She reaches the part, but she doesn't have the strength to board.
The setting:
We find a lot of details with a deeper meaning, for example the house is a little brown house, that is the colour of paralysis in Joyce.
In the description we have also the description of the curtains, "dusty cretonne". This suggests death, then we have another symbol that represent the fact that the harmony in the house is broken. We have the "yellowing photograph that have an important religious meaning. One important topic is the role of religion because Eveline puts duty before desire and freedom. she has a serious of constrains, she has internalised and this has become a way of living or better a choice not to live.
Character
Eveline is the first significant female character.
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