Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
VICTORIAN AGE - Coggle Diagram
VICTORIAN AGE
-
Foreign policy
- Potato famine caused by bad weather. This generated death of a lot of people and emigration to America
- Great exibition to show the develop of England to other countries
- Wars to expand the Victorian's world (Crimea war between Russia and Turkey)
The Victorian compromise
Victorian age was a period of revolution and progress, but it is also a period of poverty, handships and injustice for the lower social classes
Darwin
In this period Darwin's Theory spred.
He said that the stronger being survived and the weaker died through natural selection
-
Victorian poetry
- the literary form used was the novel
- novelists' aim was to describe the double nature of victorian sociey
- the narrator is omiscent and he comments the story during the narration
- the setting is the city, symbol of the industrial civilization
- characters are realistics so the reades could find thmselves in them
- Didacticism: there is a moral to underline the vices of society
Charles Dickens
His aim is to denunciate:
- the poor conditions and mistreatment of children in the workhouses (Oliver Twist was an orphan who lived in a workhouse)
- women were considered inferior than men
- the differences between poor and rich conditions
- the problem of the society after the industrial revolution, which turned people into machines (Coketown, an extract of "Hard times". It is an industrial city full of factories)
The Bronte sisters
(Emily, Anne, Charlotte)
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte in 1847
- criticism to the social division and the differences between women and men
- Marrige is a relationship between equals and not a social compromise
- Demonstartion that women could be indipendent but becaused of the social class sistem they couldn't improve their position
Wuthering Heights written by Emily 1847. The main theme is Death seen as the liberation of the spirit
Decadentism and aestheticism: Art for art sake, art has not a didactic aim
(Art for art sake: art is the cult of beauty and could prevent the murder of the soul)
Wilde
"The picture of Dorian Grey"
- The moral is that every excess must be punished and there isn't escape from reality
- The picture is the siymbol of immoraliti and bad coscence of victorian middle class
- Dorian's pure appearance represents burgeois hypocrisy
- The return of the picture to his original beauty demonstrates that art is eternal
"The Preface"
- The manifesto of English Aestheticism
- Art hasn't an educational aim
- Art exists just for itself and not for a moral aim
- Only a restrichted public could understood art
- The artist is the creator of beautiful things
- The artist wrote only for himself and not to comunicate his ideas to the readers
"The painter studio"
- Basil, the painter, says that he will not show his paint anywhere because he thinks that if a paint is made with true feeling it will reveal more about the artist than about the subject painted
- Basil is an example of how a good artist can be destroyed in a sacrifice for art
"Dorian's death"
- Dorian Grey remains beautiful and young. The portrait get older and it is marked by the wrong actions made by Dorian
- Dorian wants to destory the portrait to eliminate the evidence of his faults
- the destruction of the portrait caused Dorian's death
Stevenson
"The strage case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde"
- The novel is the portrayal of good and evil
- the good is represeted by Jekyll and the evil by Hyde, which are the two side of the same man
- It takes place in London, which has double nature
- The hypocrisy of society is represented by the two facades of Jekyll house
- The discovery of the evil side, that is present in all people, represents the artist research on the unexplored side of human psyche (unconscious)
- There are 4 narrators
The story of the door
- through a story told by Enfield is presented Hyde
Jekyll experiment
- doubts and fears about the experiment
- the experiment
- the comparison beetween the good side and the evil side of the same person
- The return to Jekyl
- Evil prevails good because Hyde grows progressively during the story
Whitman
- different view of nature because he saw it as the body of the earth instead as a shelter
- "Oh Captain, my Captain": The approach of the ship to the shore refers to the end of the War. The ship hasn't got a captain because America has lost Lincoln