history society literature in modern age
Post on 14-Dec-2015
231 Views
Preview:
DESCRIPTION
TRANSCRIPT
1. The Edwardian and Georgian AgesWhen Queen Victoria died, the royal house took the Germanic surname of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Victoria’s son Edward reigned until 1910 as Edward VII.
Edward II.
He was succeeded by George V, his son (1910-1936).
George V
1. Children from poor families
1906: Free school meals.
The Liberals won the general elections in 1906.They introduced reforms to help three groups of people:
1907: Free school medical inspections.
1. The Edwardian and Georgian Ages
2. Old people
1908: The Old-‐Age Pensions Act, which introduced pensions for people over 70.
3. Workers
1. The Edwardian and Georgian Ages
Soldiers parade to intimidate workers, Liverpool 1911.
• 1910–14: A series of strikes was called because of high prices and low wages. They were remarkable for the number of men involved and for the violence which often accompanied them.
1. The Edwardian and Georgian Ages
2. The Suffragettes
WSPU leaders Annie Kenney (left) and Christabel Pankhurst.
• At the beginning of the 20th century only men were allowed to vote.
• A few educated ladies had been arguing in favour of voting rights for women since the 1860s.
• In 1903 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel founded the WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union).
• The Suffragettes, as they were called, protested that women should be able to vote.
2. The Suffragettes
• The Government dealt with the protests harshly and sent many Suffragettes to prison.• In prison some women
went on hunger strike to draw attention to their campaign. Prison
authorities began force-feeding them.• In 1918 women were finally
allowed to vote -> universal suffrage.
3. World War I
• Britain declared war on Germany on 4th August 1914.
• The war ended on 11th November 1918.
• Almost 8,000,000 people died. • Almost 22,000 were wounded.• The war was known as ‘the war
to end all wars’, but it could be better named as “the war to change all wars” due to the technological advancements and the new attitude to warfare.
3. World War I: in English painting
THE MENIN ROAD, 1919, oil on canvas, Imperial War Museum, London..
The most individual and expressive of the artists who recorded the battlefields of World War I
Paul Nash
His first-hand experience gave his work immediacy and brutal honesty. It took a message from the trenches tothe firesides back at home.
3. World War I: in English poetryMany British soldiers
wrote about WWI, often from the trenches,
among them Wilfred Owen and Siegfried
Sassoon.
S.Sassoon was one of the first to unveil the hypocrisy
of the war and of the propaganda. As it can be
seen in this sonnet (also on Millennium p.422)
GLORY OF WOMEN (1916)
You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,Or wounded in a mentionable place. You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace. You make us shells. You listen with delight, By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed. You can't believe that British troops “retire” When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,Trampling the terrible corpses—blind with blood. O German mother dreaming by the fire,While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
3. The War Poets
The War Poets: • experienced the fighting• in most cases lost their lives in the conflict
Content of their poetry ➔ the horrors of modern warfare represented in an unconventional, anti-rhetorical way
Aim of their poetry ➔ to awaken the conscience of the readers to the horrors of the war
Language employed ➔ violent, everyday
Their poetry ➔ a definite move away from the 19th-century poetic conventions.
• 1916 Easter Rising
• 1918 Sinn Féin won the elections everywhere except Ulster
• 1919-1921 Irish war of independence
• 1922-1923 Civil War between IRA and the Irish Free State Army
• 1937 official creation of Eire •••••Eamon de Valera and Michael Collins ————————>
4. Ireland
1. A cultural crisis• The First World War left the country in a
disillusioned and cynical mood. • Stability and prosperity belonged only to
the privileged class.• Consciences were haunted by the
atrocities of the war.• The gap between the younger and older
generation grew wider and wider.• Beginning of the slow dissolution of the
British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations
• New views of man and the universe emerged
2. Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis
ID EGO SUPER-EGO
The set of instinctual
impulses lacking organisation
The coordinated realistic part
Has a critical and moralising role since it
includes the constraints imposed on the
individual by society, education and moral laws
2. Effects of Freud’s theory
Freud painted by Andy Warhol (1980).
The effects of Freud’s theories were deep:
•the relationship between parents and children was altered•the Freudian concept of infantile sexuality focused attention on the importance of early developments and childhood •the conventional models of relationship between the sexes were readjusted•his method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of dreams and the concept of ‘free association’ influenced the modern writers
3. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
Between 1907 and 1915 Einstein developed a new theory called
‘general relativity’ (GR) to distinguish it from the original
theory of special relativity.
A theory of gravitation according to which the observed gravitational
attraction between masses results from the warping of
space and time by those masses.
•1905 was Einstein’s annus mirabilis because he wrote four papers on:
1. the photoelectric effect;2. Brownian motion;3. special relativity;4. the equivalence of mass and energy E = mc2
where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light.
4. A new concept of time
our mind records every single
experience as a continuous flow of ‘the already’ into
‘the not yet’
distinction between historical time and psychological time
William James (1842-1910)
Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
4. Historical vs psychological time
Historical time Psychological time
• External• Linear• Measured in terms of the
spatial distance travelled by a pendulum or the hands of a clock
• Internal• Subjective• Measured by the
relative emotional intensity of a moment
5. ModernismA powerful international
movement reaching through Western cultures
gave shape to the modern consciousness
expressed the desire to break with established forms
and subjects George Braque, Houses at L’Estaque, 1908. Museum of Fine Arts Berne.
5. ModernismCOMMON FEATURES
• The intentional distortion of shapes and genres (in literature).• The breaking down of limitations in space and time. • Emphasis on subjectivity, on how perception takes place, rather
than on what is perceived. • New literary techniques such as the stream-of-consciousness.• The use of allusive language and the development of the multiple
association of words.• The importance given to the ‘sound’ of words as conveying ‘the
music of ideas’.• The intensity of the isolated ‘moment’ or ‘image’ to provide a true
insight into the nature of things.
5. ModernismCOMMON FEATURES
• The substitution of the mythical for a realistic method and the parallelism between the contemporary and antiquity.
• The importance of unconscious as well as conscious life.
• The need to reflect the complexity of modern urban life in an artistic form.
• A rejection of the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ or popular culture, both in the choice of materials used to produce art and in the methods of displaying, distributing and consuming art.
At the beginning of the 20th century under the influences of the French Symbolists (Stephane Mallarmé), and the American poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, many poets: rejected the 19th-century regular metre and employed free verse.
6. Poetry
Modern poetry officially began with Imagism, a movement which flourished between 1912 and 1917. The name ‘Imagiste’ was invented by the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972).
T.S. Eliot is closer to Symbolism. He stated that:
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers.
T.S.Eliot The Waste Land
• Absence of the traditional metre • Lack of regular rhyme scheme • Use of alliteration and assonance• Metre and sound determined by a correspondence
between feeling, impression and poetic form and not
by the conventional rules of poetic diction• The unifying element is the use of the poetic line• Flexibility of verse line length
6. Free verseFeatures of free verse:
7. The English novel: the beginning
The English novel bourgeois in its origin.
Its favourite theme
The novelist
Events and incidents
the gain or loss of a social status.
a mediator between his characters and the reader.
related in a more or less objective way in chronological order.
8. From the Victorian to the modern novel
the pressing need for different forms of expression
They forced novelists into a position of moral and
psychological uncertainty. The novelist ➔ became a mediator between the solid and unquestioned values of the past and the confused present.
This new ‘realism’ shifted from society to man ➔ a limited creature whose moral progress was inferior to the advances in technology.
a gradual but substantial transformation of British society
It was caused by
10. A new concept of timeTime was perceived as subjective and inner ➔
the distinction between past and present was meaningless in psychological terms.
Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, 1931.
Absence of a well-structured plot with a chronological sequence of events.
It was not the passing of time that revealed the truth about
characters.
It was the American psychologist William James who coined the term ‘stream of consciousness’ (1890): “the continuous flow of thoughts and sensations that characterise the human mind.”
11. The stream of consciousness and the interior monologue
Writers, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, adopted the interior
monologue ➔ to represent the unspoken activity of the mind.
• It’s immediate• It has no introductory expressions like ‘he thought, he remembered• There are two levels of narration: outside and inside the character’s
mind.• It has no chronological order • It uses subjective time• The rules of punctuation are not followed• There is no formal logical order
top related