English Literature 2 - Written by Bresciani Umberto httpdigilander.iol.it/umbecr umbe.cr@libero.it 1. Thomas Hardy 2. Charles Dickens 3. Oscar Wilde 4. George Bernard Shaw 5. David Herbert Lawrence a. Sons And Lovers 6. James Joyce a. Eveline 7. Virginia Woolf 8. Wilfred Owen a. Futility 9. Wystan Hugh Auden a. Musée Des Beaux Arts b. Refugee Blues 10. Samuel Beckett a. Waiting For Godot 1. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) Hardy's long life makes him a Victorian writer and a modern one. He started to practise architecture in London, because his father was a mason and a small builder. After his first literary succes he gave up his career in architecture to devote himself to writing. He had been married twice: when his first wife Emma Gifford died in 1912 he married Florence Emily Dugdale. Both marriages were childless. His novel are called "Wessex novels" from the name of the rural area where they are set; Wessex is Hardy's fictional name for the south-western English counties, in particular his native Dorset. His first popular success was Far from the Madding Crowd. His best-known novels are The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Victorian readers refused and criticized his novels because of their frankness in dealing with the aspects of Victorian life. In fact Hardy represented life in some of its most sombre and cruel aspects. All his works are permeated by a deep pessimism. Most of his novels are set in the countryside and show his affection for the vanishing agricultural world in the face of increasing urbanisation. In his earlier novels he laments the universe's indifference to man. In his later novels he recognises that man-made laws are partly responsible for the unhappiness and sufferings inflicted on the individual. Tess (the protagonist of Tess of The d'Ubervilles) is an indictment of the abject treatment of women and socially underpriviledged people in Victorian society. Hardy does not believe in the existence of a loving God and has a pessimistic and fatalistic outlook on life. According to him, the world is governed by forces that seem to enjoy inflicting endless suffering on a helpless creature like Tess. The premonitory incidents in the story of Tess of the d'Urbervilles show how Tess's destiny is predetermined by fate. 2. Charles Dickens (1812-1870) He was born at Landport, in the south of England, in 1812. When he was a child he had to work in a shoe-blacking factory in London for a few months while his father was in prison for debt. At the age of sixteen he gave up studying law and learned shorthand to become a reporter in the courts of law. These two experiences provided material for his novels (the conditions of exploited children and the description of lawyers and their world and the abuses of law). He had ten children and he died in 1870, broken down by strain and exhaustion. His first fictional work, Sketches by Boz (1836), and the publication of Pickwick Papers (1836-37 Continua »