THE GOTHIC NOVEL

The first Gothic fiction appeared with works like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765), Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796), which opposed 18th-century “rationalism” with scenes of mystery, horror, and wonder. Gothic was a designation derived from architecture, and it carried connotations of rough and primitive grandeur. 

The atmosphere of a Gothic novel was expected to be dark, tempestuous, ghostly, full of madness, outrage, superstition, and the spirit of revenge.  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which maintains its original popularity and even notoriety, has in overplus the traditional Gothic ingredients, with its weird God-defying experiments and its monster. 

Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic atmospheric devices continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as the Brontë sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great Expectations. In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to the originals.

Gothic fiction asks to be considered as ingenious entertainment; the pity and terror are not aspects of a cathartic process, but transient emotions to be enjoyed for their own sake.

Read here.

https://research.dom.edu/gothicliterature/historyandkeyelements

https://www.invaluable.com/blog/elements-of-gothic-literature/

THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2013/10/the-elizabethan-theatre.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2012/07/a-general-view-of-shakespeares-works.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-elizabethan-theatre-4c.html

https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/shakespeares-world/

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - 5^C LINGUISTICO

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2018/12/william-wordsworth-5c-linguistico.html

THE ROMANTIC AGE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

https://www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism

https://www.thoughtco.com/romanticism-definition-4777449

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2022/09/the-romantic-age.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2017/10/romanticism-5c-linguistico.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2016/10/english-romanticism.html

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2016/12/romanticism-in-literature-and-art.html

https://spunkynotes.com/characteristics-of-the-romantic-age/

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-romantic-age.html

SONNET 130

 

Here and here you can read a short commentary on this sonnet.

SONNET 18

It is the best known and most well-loved of all 154 sonnets. It is also one of the most direct in language and intent.

The poet starts the praise of his dear friend without ostentation, but he slowly builds the image of his friend into that of a perfect being. He is first compared to summer in the octave, but, at the beginning of the third quatrain (line 9), the speaker states with a renewed assurance that “thy eternal summer shall not fade” and that his friend will preserve his beauty and even cheat Death and Time by becoming eternal. He achieves this through his sonnet. The final couplet reaffirms the poet's hope that as long as there is breath in mankind, his lines too will live on, and ensure the immortality of the “fair youth”.

Here  and here you can read a short commentary on this sonnet.

SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS

In the late 16^th century  it was fashionable for English gentleman authors to write sonnets, lyric poems composed of 14 lines. The sonnet is composed with a formal rhyme scheme, denoting different thoughts, moods, or emotions, sometimes summed up in the last lines of the poem.

The two main forms of the sonnet are the Petrarchan (Italian) and the Shakespearean (English).

Sonnets had been glorified by Petrarch in Italy more than 200 years before English poets even knew about them. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, were among the first to introduce the sonnet into England. William Shakespeare's first and second years in London were spent writing in the Petrarchan style. The Petrarchan sonnet has an eight-line stanza, or octave, and six-line stanza, or sestet. The octave has two quatrains, rhyming abba, abba, but avoiding a couplet; the first quatrain gives the theme, and the second develops it. The sestet is built on two or three different rhymes; the first three lines reflect on the theme, and the last three lines bring the whole poem to an end.

The English sonnet  is divided into three quatrains, each rhymed differently, with an independently rhymed couplet at the end. Its rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Each quatrain takes a different appearance of the idea or develops a different image to express the theme. In his lifetime William Shakespeare composed 154 sonnets  which  were in this form and can be divided into three groups:

1. twenty-six sonnets written mostly to a young man, seventeen  of them urging marriage;

2. one hundred and one sonnets, also written to a young man (probably the same young nobleman as in the first twenty-six). These have a variety of themes, such as the beauty of the loved one; destruction of beauty; competition with a Rival Poet; despair about the absence of a loved one;  and reaction toward the young man's coldness;

3. the remaining twenty-seven sonnets are written mainly to a woman, popularly known as  "the Dark Lady." Seemingly Shakespeare had a love affair with this woman.

Most Elizabethan sonnets were written about joys and sorrows of love. Some of Shakespeare's sonnet arrangements are thought to be autobiographical. This is why scholars have tried to learn about William Shakespeare's life from his sonnets. But some of the critics view the sonnets as "purely literary exercises."  

"On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" is a sonnet written by John Keats when he was just 20 years old. Essentially, it is a poem about poetry itself, describing a reading experience so profound that an entire world seems to come to life. 

The poem talks specifically about a translation of Homer, the Classical Greek poet, by George Chapman, an Elizabethan poet whose translations were more concerned with the reader's experience of the text than loyalty to the original form.  Read here. 

VIRGINIA WOOLF - 5^C LINGUISTICO

 

Virginia Woolf was a well-known English writer in the 20th century. She was best-known for her novels, but she was also a writer of essays, biographies, letters, and diaries. Her writing fell into the Modernist Movement, which was a literary movement that took place between World War I and World War II.

https://www.iispandinipiazza.edu.it/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/virginia-woolf.pdf

WILFRED OWEN - DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Wilfred Owen immortalized mustard gas in his indictment against warfare, "Dulce et Decorum Est." Written in 1917 while at Craiglockart, and published posthumously in 1920, the poem details what is, perhaps, the most memorable written account of a mustard gas attack.

The Latin title is from Horace (1^st century BC)  and it means “it is sweet and proper”. This is followed by the phrase pro patria mori, or “to die for one’s country” in English.

The poem is known for its horrific imagery and condemnation of war. It combines two sonnets and is formed by 28 lines. Read here.

https://myblog-inplainenglish.blogspot.com/2017/05/revising-wilfred-owen.html

THE MODERN AGE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Click here and  here to revise Modernism in literature.

JULIUS CAESAR - 4^C LINGUISTICO

https://www.rsc.org.uk/julius-caesar/

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/j/julius-caesar/play-summary

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/julius-caesar

THE BEAT GENERATION - 5^C LINGUISTICO

The Beat movement was an American social and literary movement, originating in the 1950s, and centred in the bohemian artist communities of San Francisco’s North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West, and New York City’s Greenwich Village. Its adherents, self-styled as “beat” (originally meaning “weary” (= tired), but later also connoting a musical sense, a “beatific” spirituality, and other meanings) and derisively called “beatniks,” expressed their alienation from conventional, or “square,” society by adopting a style of dress, manners, and “hip” vocabulary borrowed from jazz musicians. They advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen Buddhism. The Beats and their advocates found the joylessness and purposelessness of modern society sufficient justification for both withdrawal and protest.  Read here. 

THE BALLAD THROUGH TIME - 3^C LINGUISTICO

Once medieval ballads (=oral compositions passed on from generation to generation) became popular, they began to borrow freely from  the carols (=religious folk songs or popular hymns, especially associated with Christmas), riddle songs, popular stories and romances of the time. Ballads were popular throughout (=in every part of) Europe and the English-language ballad also borrowed from other countries and cultures.  Read here.

There are examples of the ballad form from the Middle Ages right up to the present day.  The 16^th century saw the gradual disappearance of the old-style romances, along with the minstrels who used to recite and sing them. 

The ballad form remained popular through the 17^th  and the 18^th  centuries, which saw a revival especially of magic and supernatural themes. 

In the 19^th century the poetry of the Romantics drew widely for inspiration on the materials of folk narrative ballads and lyrical folk songs: Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner  owes  its intense supernaturalism and its archaisms to traditional ballads; Keats's  La Belle Dame Sans Merci is a ballad about an encounter that involves both pleasure and pain. 

In the 20^th  century an oral ballad tradition still survived in England and the United States  and the term "ballad" was applied to a short song with a slow rhythm and romantic or sentimental content.

In the 1960s popular music in general became a space for cultural and political conflict and dialogue. Bob Dylan started to use the form of the ballad to protest against the Vietnam War  when, in 1962, he used the mixture of dialogue and narration of Lord Randal in his song A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall. Among his most famous anti-war songs are Blowin’ in the Wind and Masters of War.

The ballad is still used in modern pop and folk music. Read here. 

from Performer Heritage 1,  Zanichelli, p. 63