Aestheticism and Decadence

Aestheticism

Charles Dickens

Aesthetic movement reflected the sense of frustration and uncertainty of the artist.

Charles Dickens was born in Portsmouth

in 1812, he had an unhappy childhood,

since his father went to prison for debt and

he had to work in a factory. He became a journalist at the Parliament and Law Courts. He wrote some novels like Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Hard Times and other; these novels are set against the background of social issues, highlighting the conditions of the poor and the working class and were influenced by the Bible, fairy tales, fables and nursery rhymes. Dickens created caricatures, he exaggerated and ridiculed the social characteristics of the middle, lower and lowest classes.

This novel fictionalized the economic insecurity and humiliation Dickens experienced when he was a boy. The name Twist represents the outrageous reversals of fortune that will experience. The setting was London and it was divided into three level: world of workhouse, criminal world and the world of Victorian middle-class.

In this novel Dickens attacked the social evils of his times such as poor houses.

Walter Pater rejected religious faith and said that art was the only means to stop time

Dandy

The novel can be divided into three main parts of the protagonist's life:

1. his childhood and early youth;

2. his later youth and early manhood;

3.his maturity.

David Copperfield is a novel that follows the development of the hero from childhood into adulthood. The characters of the novel are both realistic and romantic.

The main themes are: the struggle of the weak in society, the bad living conditions of the poor, cruelty to children, the importance of social status.

This novel is divided into three sections (or books) and each book is divided into three chapters.

1- 'Sowing': shows us the seeds planted by the Gradgrind/Bounderby education;

2- 'Reaping': reveals the harvesting of these seeds;

3- 'Garnering': gives the details.

Decadence

Hard Times focuses on the difference between the rich and poor, or factory owners and workers. It suggests that England was turning human beings into machines.

This term was first used in the song Yankee Doodle Dandy, sung by the British troops during the American revolution, so the term "dandy" was referred to the man who boasts about his appearance even though he is wearing odd and ordinary clothes. George Bryan Brummell created dandyism as a lifestyle: dandyism reappeared in England with Oscar Wilde.

Robert Louis Stevenson

The main characteristics are:

-Excessive attention to the self;

-Perversity in subject matter;

-Disenchantment with contemporary society;

-Evocative use of language

Stevenson was born Ediburgh in 1850, he spent most of his childhood in bed and in his adolescence he travelled a lot. After giving up engineering, he graduated in law and decided to devote himself to writing. He married American woman and they moved to Australia and Tahiti. He died of a brain haemorrhage in 1894.

Oscar Wilde

Stevenson became popular as a novelist when he published Treasure Island,

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and other.

The main representatives in Italy are Gabriele D'Annunzio, Giovanni Pascoli and Guido Gozzano

This novel had its origin in a dream: haunted by sleeplessness and melancholy, Stevenson wrote down in his diary his dream.

The protagonist is a man divided against himself in a respectable being Jekyll, and in an evil genius, Hyde.

The setting of the novel could be either London or Edinburgh, both capitals had 'double' nature. The most important events are wrapped up in darkness and fog.

Stevenson drew inspiration for the description of Hyde from Darwin's studies.

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin

in 1854. In Oxford he became a

disciples of Pater and after

graduating he settled to London

where he became a celebrity for his dresses as a 'dandy'.

In 1881 he edited Poems and was engaged for a tour in United States that was a great success for him, who became famous especially for his irony. Then he published short stories, like The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince and Other Tales written for children, and a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; after his first and only novel he developed an interest in drama and he produced a series of plays like The Importance of Being Earnest. Then he met a young man with whom he had a homosexual affair, so in prison he wrote De Profundis and when was released he went in exile in France where he died in 1900 for meningitis.

This story is told by an unobtrusive third-person narrator; the perspective adopted is internal, the settings are vividly described.

This story is profoundly allegorical. Wilde plays on the Renaissance idea of the correspondence between the physical and spiritual realms.

The moral of this novel is that every excess must be punished and reality cannot be escaped

Edgar Allan Poe

Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809, he was

a critic, an editor, a poet, an author who

wrote many poems, tales and short stories.

He was known for his dark, depressing and

gothic writings; these characters was

influenced by the father who was an alcoholic,

by the dead of the mother and for continuous humiliation in his life.

The Importance of Being Earnest

presents an aristocratic society

whose members are typical

Victorian snobs; they are often

arrogant, formal, and concerned

with money. Wilde makes fun of

the institution of marriage,

which he saw as a practice

surrounded by hypocrisy and

absurdity; although the play ends happily.

The whole play is built on witty dialogues, amusing puns, misunderstandings and paradoxes.

Imagination is important in this play, too.

The Black Cat revolves around narrator's wife and two cats. This short story also involves the themes death, insanity and gore. The intoxicated narrator is furious when the cat doesn't approach him when getting home; therefore cuts one of the cat's eyes.Then the narrator kills both the cats and his wife murdering.

He was considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. The styles was dramatic, dark romanticism genre and gothic appealing. The main themes was untimely death, insanity, depression and other.

The main themes of this work are untimely death and insanity, that plays a role because the fear and obsession with the eye grows so strong. These themes are seen when the narrator describes how he continues to kill the old man

Also "The Raven" revolves around death, insanity and gore. Insanity is highly evident because the narrator is very depressed for the lost of hi love leads to an unstable mental state.

A raven visits the narrator and

in turn he makes himself

believe that the raven

somehow has communications

with Lenore, his love. So the narrator gets angry when asking the raven questions and the narrator says that it replies by saying "NEVERMORE". At the end of the poem the narrator expresses how he cannot get the raven to go away so he leaves it alone.