THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT

The Aesthetic movement was born in the 19th century in France.

The movement showed the frustration and uncertainty of the artist and it was against materialism
and the moral code of the bourgeoisie.
The movement redefines the role of art. The motto of the Aesthetic movement was “Art for Art’s
sake” which means that the intrinsic value of art is divorced from any didactic, moral, political, or
utilitarian function. Aesthetes led an unconventional existence, pursuing sensation and excess and
cultivating art and beauty.
The main theorist of the Aesthetic movement in England was Walter Pater.
He rejected religious faith and said that art was the only means to halt the passage of time. He
thought life should be lived as a work of art. The artist was considered a transcriber of the sense of
the word. In his visual art had nothing to do with morality and did not need to be didactic.
Peter’s works influenced the poets and writers after the 1890s especially Oscar Wilde.
This literary current was also called Decadence. The term decadent is referred to the decline of
recognised values.
The main features of the Aesthetic works are:

 Excessive attention to the self

 Sensuous attitude
 Perversity in the subject matter
 Cynicism With society
 Evocative use of language.

Decadence is a European movement.

In Italy the main representative of Decadence were Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pascoli e Guido
Gozzano.

The figure of the dandy was firstly introduced by George Bryan Brummell, and it was linked to
vanity extravagance, and refinement.
He created Dandyism as a lifestyle.
From England, this trend spread to France and reappeared in England towards the end of the 19th
century with the figure of Oscar Wilde.

OSCAR WILDE

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He attended Trinity College and later was sent to Oxford,
where he gained a degree in classics.
He became a disciple of Walter Pater, sharing the theory of art for art's sake.
He moved to London where he became a celebrity for his wit And his dandy style.
Wilde stated that Aestheticism was the search for the beautiful. He became famous for his irony, his
attitudes, and his posing.
He married Constance Lyod and they had 2 children. In the 1880s Wide publish a series of short
stories written for his children and the novel the picture of Dorian grey. In the later 1890s, he
released a series of plays that were successful on the London stage, one of these was The
importance of being Earnest.
Some of his works damaged his reputation because the former was considered immoral. His close
friendship with the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas aroused doubts about his sexuality. He was put
on trial for homosexuality and sentenced to two years of hard labour.
When he was released, he wasn't the same man. His wife refused to see him and he was exiled to
France, where he lived his last years.
Wilde adopted the aesthetic ideal and lived his life as a work of art. He was a rebel, because he
demanded absolute freedom, and he was a dandy, whose elegance his a symbol of the superiority of
his spirit. Oscar Wilde rejected the didacticism of the Victoria novel.

The importance of being Eearnest

The importance of being Earnest is Wilde’s most famous play.

Plot: The action in the first act takes place in London. Algernon Moncrieff, an aristocratic, waits for
the arrival of his aunt, Lady Bracknell. He was surprised by the visit of his wealthy friend, Earnest.
He came from the country to propose to Mrs. Bracknell’s daughter, Gwendolen. Algernon discovers
that the person he called Ernest was Jack Worthing, an orphan who was adopted by Mrs. Thomas
Cardew, who made him guardian to his granddaughter, Cecily Cardew.
Jack explains that he uses the name “Jack” in the country and “Earnest” in the city. He introduces
Earnest as a wicked younger brother who lives in the city to avoid his duties.
Even Algernon confesses that he has invented an alter ego, Bunbury, who lives in the country.
Jack wants to marry Gwendolen but has to overcome the obstacle of his mother, Lady Bracknell,
and Algernon wants to marry Cecily.
Algernon begins to flirt with Cecily in the guise of Earnest. Straight after, Jack appears announcing
the death of his brother.
Then Gwendolen is introduced, she wants to know more about Jack, whom she knows as Earnest.
At one point, Gwendolen and Cecily seem to be engaged to the same man, Earnest Worthing.
Lady Bracknell doesn’t allow marriage with Algernon until she knows that Cecily is the heiress of
an immense fortune.
Miss Prism confesses that, when she was younger, he lost a baby while she was working as a
nursemaid.
Lady Bracknell solves the mystery about Jack’s birth: he is the eldest son of his sister, Mrs.
Moncrieff, and Algernon’s brother.
Finally, both men are able to marry Cecily and Gwendolen.

Wilde's plays can be considered as a sort of restoration comedy of manners. His social drama was a
mirror in which fashionable audiences could see reflected their world full of hypocrisy.
The characters of the play are aristocrats, Victorian snobs. They are arrogant and concerned with
money.
All the events go around marriage. Wilde makes fun of the institution of marriage, which was
surrounded by hypocrisy and absurdity. Victorian aristocracy sees marriage as a tool for achieving
social status.

THE AGE OF ANXIETY

After the First World War, Britain was in an atmosphere of disillusionment and cynicism.
The gap between the old and the new generation was growing. The main feelings were rootlessness
and frustration that led to the transformation of the concept of institutions.
Writers became averse to political subjection and warned their readers against totalitarianism.
There were new views of man and the universe, developed thanks to the theories of philosophers
such as Sigmund Freud. His theories affirmed that man's action could be motivated by irrational
forces.
The relationship between parents and children completely changed.  The models of the relationship
between women and men were reformed, also thanks to the movement for women's suffrage.
Freud also developed a new method of investigation of the human mind through the analysis of
dreams.
Another philosopher, Carl Gustav Jung, added to Freud's theories a new concept of “collective and
unconscious", a cultural memory of universal images and believes which operates through
symbolism.
This meant that some figures or objects had great symbolic power.
The new theory of relativity, by Albert Einstein, caused a growing crisis of confidence. The word
view lost its integrity.
There was also a new idea of time.
The American philosopher William James affirmed that our mind records every experience as a
flow of the already into the not yet.
Bergson distinguished the historical time that is linear and external from the psychological time that
is internal and subjective.
Bergson Billy believed that feeling could be measured in terms of numbers of perceptions,
memories, and associations related to that feeling.
There were different concepts of the man.
To Froid man was a part of nature, to Marx man was the outcome of the social and economic
forces.
Due to the theories of Nietzche, Christian notions were weakened.
More and more people started to search for alternatives to Christianity.

THE MODERNISM

Modernism is an International movement which involved all form of art with different approaches.
Modernism in the literature is related to World War I, a period full of disillusionment and
fragmentation.

New ideas in psychology and philosophy were developed.

All artistic forms of modernism have common features:
1. The distortion of shapes
2. The Destruction of limits Of time and space
3. The emphasis on subjectivity
4. Allusive language
5. The power of the isolated moment For providing a true insight of the World
6. The importance of the unconscious
7.The reflection of modern urban life in artistic form

Novelists and poets took inspiration from classical. The past was a source that artists wanted to
reshape in a personal way.
Influences of the past and from abroad made English literature cosmopolitan.

The modern novel

The English novel has its origins in the bourgeoisie and it has a deep connection with society.
The novelist was a mediator between the characters and the reader and between the solid values of
the past and the uncertain present. The writers presented a world of accepted values and standards
of behavior that was familiar to the reader.
The novel maintains a linear structure until the 2nd decade of the 20th century.
After the 1st World War, British society was completely transformed and this led to the
transformation of the novel.
Novelists were brought into a position of psychological and moral uncertainty.
This new realism was influenced by Marcel Proust, Dostoviesky, Tolstoy, etc
Freud's theories create a new concept of time, also in the novel.
The narrator wasn't omniscient, because it couldn't've represented the reality of the world. The point
of view switched from the external world to the internal world of the character's mind.
The personality of each human being was determined by the simultaneous existence of different
levels of consciousness and subconsciousness.
Time with subjective and internal.
As a consequence of this concept plots weren't a chronological sequence of events.
The story was revealed by new techniques such as epiphany, the sudden revelation of an interior
reality caused by trivial events of everyday life.
Another narrative technique was the stream-of-consciousness, which is the continuous flow of
thought and sensation that characterize the human's mind.
His verbal expression is the interior monologue.
There were at least 3 distinct things groups of novelists:
1.The psychological novelists
2.The novelists who experienced new subjective narrative techniques
3.The novelists who were concerned about the social and political problems

The interior monologue

In the 20th-century writers give more importance to subjective consciousness

They were looking for new techniques capable of expressing the complexity of the human mind.
Novelists adopted the interior monologue.
The interior marmot is the verbal expression of the stream-of-consciousness. The events are not
narrated in chronological order; formal logical order is lacking. The narrator may be present; the
action takes place in the character's mind. Speech is immediate.
The interior monologue could be direct and indirect.
In the indirect monologue, the narrator controls the character's Thought Flow.
The character's thoughts are presented by adding descriptions, comments, or introductory phrases.
The character doesn't stay fixed in space while thoughts move freely in time. This concept is called
inner time: in the character's mind everything happens in the present, but in the reality can last
forever or be just a moment.
In Ulysses, Joyce uses the direct interior monologue, where the narrator seems not to exist.
Joyce uses the interior monologue with two levels of narration, one external to the character's mind
and one internal.
He also uses the interior monologue with one level of narration, characterised by a mix of 3rd
person narration linked to an external time and into an interior narration.
The character's thoughts move freely.
JAMES JOYCE

James Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882. He received a jesuit education, and then entered at Dublin
University College, and gained a bachelor's degree in modern language and literature. He was
disinterested in the political and literary movements aimed at the liberation of Ireland from British
government. His interest lies in the development of a wider European culture, which made him
think of himself as European rather than Irish. Joyce believes that the only way to increase Ireland’s
awareness is to provide realistic portraits its life from a European and international perspective. He
spent some time in Paris, but his mother's fatal illness in 1903 brought him back to Dublin.
It was during this period that he began to seriously imagine his future writing career and published
his first short story "Sisters" in the "Evening Telegraph". It will eventually become the opening
story of his Dubliner collection. In June 1904, he met and fell in love with Nora Barnacle, a 20-
year-old girl who was working as a waitress in a hotel. Their first date was June 16, and that day
would be the “bloom’s day” of Ulysses.
Joyce was hostile toward the Church. He believed that it was the artist's responsibility to render life
objectively. The consequence of the artist’s task was the isolation and detachment from society.
He used new narrative techniques and different points of view. He used free direct speech, interior
monologue, and a language without punctuation or grammatical connections.

Dubliners

Dubliners is a collection of fifteen short stories. They all lack action, but they reveal human
situations and moments of intensity and show revelations.
The first stories are about childhood and youth in Dublin; the others deal with the middle years of
characters. Joyce was hostile to city life. Dublin is described as a place where true feelings and
compassion for others do not exist.
The stories are divided into four groups: childhood, adolescence, maturity, and public life.
The last story, "The dead", summarises the themes and motifs of the other stories and can be
considered an epilogue.
Dubliner's afflictedness is caused by religious, cultural, and economic forces.
They are in an endless web of despair. Even if Dubliners want to escape, they are incapable because
they are morally weak.
The description is realistic and full of details.
Joyce uses realism and symbolism. External details have a deeper meaning.
Joyce believed that the function of symbolism was to take the reader beyond the usual aspects of
life through the analysis of the particular.
He employed a new technique called “epiphany” which is the sudden spiritual manifestation caused
by a trivial object or situation which reveals the character’s inner truths.
He makes extensive use of interior monologue and chiasmus. In the first three stories, the narrator is
in 1st person. The story is described from the point of view of a young boy.
For the other stories, Joyce employs a third-person narrator that often shares a particular character's
perspective. The narrator disappears in the interior monologue. The language is simple objective
and neutral, always adapted to the character’s age, social class, and role.
The paralysis is the condition of the Dubliners, is both physical and moral. The Dubliners accept
their condition because they are not aware of it or because they are incapable to move on.
The moral center of Dubliners is the relation of the paralysis to its victims.
As a consequence of this revelation, we have a failure, because the Dubliners are incapable of
escape.