TITLE  OF WORK

AUTHOR

Name:

Relevant events of his/her life:

Main works:

LITERARY GENRE

STORY  OR SITUATION

SETTING

TIME:

PLACE:

ATMOSPHERE:

CHARACTERS

Description:

Type:

THEMES

Main ones:

Social/historical  references:

Autobiographical elements:

NARRATOR

POINT OF VIEW

STYLE

Attitude:

Language:

Technical devices:

PERSONAL  REACTION

(give your opinion if you have enjoyed it!)

POINTS YOU HAVE SELECTED FROM THE TEXT

TITLE  OF WORK

Mrs Warren’s Profession;

AUTHOR

Name:G.B.Shaw (1856-1950)

Relevant events of his/her life: Dublin – aristocratic family in decline – London – contributed to newspapers & magazines – Socialist  JOINED THE Fabian society– married a rich wife – admired totalitarian leaders like Hitler & Mussolini – 1925 NOBEL PRIZE.

Main works:The Quintessence of Ibsenism ; Widower’s houses;Mrs Warren’s Profession; Pygmalion.

LITERARY GENRE

“PLAYS OF IDEAS”

DRAMA ßAfter crisis = novels more remunerative than plays; dominance of actor-managers. à Victorian playhouse =semicircular, modest size, curtain, stage setting aimed to give the optical illusion of reality. Naturalistic treatment of stories and great attention to stage directions.

STORY  OR SITUATION

Taken from real life. He suggested replacing Shakespeare with  Ibsen.

Eliza Doolittle, a flower girl with a strong cockney accent , is transformed into a duchess by professor Henry Higgins – who bet he could train her to speak proper English in three months. At the end she leaves him since she does not want to be the object of his experiments any more.

SETTING

TIME: Victorian age

PLACE: London

ATMOSPHERE: Humorous,witty, realistic, with tragic and comic overtones.

CHARACTERS

Description: Mrs. Warren, a prostitute. and her daughter Vivie.

Mrs Higgins and  Liza.

Type: Liza = Round, while the others are flat. The say exactly what they think.

They are brilliant orators but lack the warmth of human beings.Their conflicts are rational.

THEMES

Main ones: Militarism, equality of women, religion; class division in British society also based on the ability to speak good English, Victorian hypocrisy in condemning what it itself has created; the necessity of social reform. = drama of discussion of ideas. Drama as instrument of moral propaganda.

Society is responsible for so much distortion of vision, so much suffering & evil.

Social/historical  references: British socialism, Victorian context.

POINT OF VIEW

G.B.Shaw’s

STYLE

Attitude: very critical towards Victorian society. Witty and with serious concern for the problems.

Language: Although sentences are long, with many statements, the effect is of great speed and simplicity.

Technical devices: paradox, exaggeration, outspoken truth.

 Apostrophes omitted.

Abundance of descriptive stage directions with playwright’s comments.

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“No normal woman would be a professional prostitute if she could better hersel by being respectable, noe marry for money if she could afford to marry for love”

TITLE  OF WORK

Robinson Crusoe

AUTHOR

Name:Daniel Defoe 1660-1731

Relevant events of his/her life:businessman, secret agent, journalist, at 59 novelist. Dissenter – could not enter Univ. – broad education and set up as merchant in Europe.

Main works:The Life and strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, mariner; The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders; Roxana.

LITERARY GENRE

NOVEL in the form of a diary.

SETTING

TIME: 1650’s. Augustan age.

PLACE: desert island .

ATMOSPHERE:Realistic.

CHARACTERS

Description: Friday = more positive than negative details – tall, well shaped,26, sweet, manly face , long black hair, sparkling eyes, tawny, agreeable skin, small not flat nose, thin lips, well set as white as ivory eyes. “had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance”.

Character = hunmble, submissive. To be civilized.

Type: not fully developed. Does not undergo much psychological change.

Belonging to the middle class = average man, presented from the inside and through their actions.

THEMES

Main ones:a)Middle class man individualistic, egocentric, ambitious, enterprising selfish, resourceful.àRelation between individual & society with its ideals of material productiveness and individualism.

b)Puritan element: relationship with God (R. deserved to be saved by Providence has to do his best to increase the gifts God has given him)and pragmatic outlook ( he always starts observing the situationà makes a list of possible solutionsà considers pros and consà chooses the best alternative.

c) English colonization as a chance to exploit and dominate nature.

d) Good savage who has to be civilized by the English people.

Social/historical  references: Colonialism , myth of progress, empiricism (Newton, Locke)

Autobiographical elements: references to Alexander Selkirk.

NARRATOR

First person, omniscent.

POINT OF VIEW

The narrator’s.

STYLE

Attitude: Objective approach to the events through clear and precise details.

Informative and didactic.

Language: Simple, matter of fact (factual)and concrete.

Technical devices: Short sentences, ordinary words.

TITLE  OF WORK

Gulliver’s Travels

AUTHOR

Name:Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

Relevant events of his/her life:Irish, secretary to Sir William temple.Miss Waring refused to marry him, Menière’s disease, Whig àTory supporter.

Main works:The battle of the Books;A Tale of a Tub; the Drapier’s Letters; Gullivers Travels published anonimously.

LITERARY GENRE

SATIRICAL NOVEL of travel account.

First example of Utopia and Distopia.

STORY  OR SITUATION

4 books dealing with the adventures of ship’s surgeon Lemuel Gulliver.

1)      Lilliput, the land of dwarves.

2)      Brobdingnag (Alaska) , land of giants. He becomes the Queen’s pet.

3)      Laputa, whose inhabitants are absent-minded astronomers, philosophers and scientists. Capital =Lagado. The most unhappy people are those who were born immortal, since immortality does not imply being young forever.

4)      Houyhnhnms, horses endowed with reason that rule over Yahoos, a vile species of animal resembling men.

Once back in England he joins his wife and children but cannot stand the smell of humanity. He therefore goes to live in a stable among the animals that remind him of the nobility of the Houyhnhnms.

SETTING

TIME:from 6^th May 1966

PLACE: shipwreck  somewhere in the South pacific.

ATMOSPHERE: realistic, ironical, rational.

CHARACTERS

Description: animals described with minute realism.Caricaturesque.

Type: Flat.

THEMES

Main ones:Satire of: human irrationality; wickedness, moral smallness; aberrations of human reason;political allegory of Swift’s time; misanthropy.

Social/historical  references: England and Europe of the time.

NARRATOR

First person, omniscent.

POINT OF VIEW

Gulliver’s.(what he sees and feels)

STYLE

Attitude:Conservative, bitter, pessimistic, rational.

Language: Factual, simple.

Technical devices: maps of the voyage to make it more realistic.

TITLE OF WORK

Sons and Lovers

AUTHOR

Name:D.H.Lawrence 1885/1930 (in Vence)

Relevant events of his/her life: working class novelist. Father miner, mother ex-school teacher. Qualified as a teacher. 1911=first novel and death of his mother.Married Frieda Weekley à Italy, ceylon, Australia, America and Mexico.

Main works:The White Peakock; Sons and Lovers;Women in Love;Cangaroo; The Rainbow; Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

LITERARY GENRE

Novel

STORY OR SITUATION

Paul Morel and his relationship with his mother and with Miriam . They are 16  and 14 and the walk together in the wood ‘cause Miriam wants to show him a rose bush. When he comes home his mother is very cross and jealous thus making him feel angry and then guilty. He reacts but then makes peace.

SETTING

TIME: 1900 -   late in the evening

PLACE: an English mining village Bestwood (=Eastwood)

ATMOSPHERE:

CHARACTERS

Description:Paul= dependent on his mother with whom he has a very close relationship.

Mr Morel= a miner, ignorant, rough and proud of his ignorance but jealous of his wife’s superior education. He’s often drunk and violent.

Mrs. Morel has set all her frustrated hopes and expectations on Paul who has inherited her sensitivity and artistic ambitions. ßFreud’s theories “Oedipus complex”.

Miriam = the spiritual woman (a Botticelli angel). Paul thinks she wants his soul while denying the existence of his body, frustrating him emotionally and sexually.

Clara =the sensual and physical woman. She is older, married and more mature and gives Paul the kind of sensuality he needs.

Type:Round with complex psychology.

THEMES

Main ones:Paul’s feeling towards his parents; family life;psychological and emotional relationships.

Social/historical  references: industrial towns, women’s condition.

Autobiographical elements: Characters and setting.

NARRATOR

3^rd person non-omniscent.

POINT OF VIEW

First part . Miriam’s. Second part: Paul’s and Mrs. Morels.

STYLE

Attitude:First part: he TELLS the reader. Second part : he SHOWS Paul and his mother.à Non-intrusive/Unobtrusive.

Language:Poetic, symbolic, of the senses.

Technical devices:Similes, personifications  

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