Università Roma Tre

In the hundred years between 1815 and 1914 Great Britain extended its military, industrial and financial domination throughout the world, to the point that the nineteenth century is called the "English century". At home, the so-called "Victorian compromise" signed between the aristocracy and the middle class forged the body of ideas and values that still today is identified as "English culture" tout court. Through the questioning of some narratives and poetics of the Victorian age and of the early twentieth century we will try to understand together what was the contribution of literature to the elaboration of those values, and to what extent they were influenced by a widespread awareness of being a superpower. In this way, we will try to bring out the continuing relevance of that literature to the understanding, also, of contemporary English culture.
A fundamental prerequisite for this will be the acquisition by students of specific interpretative tools, as well as the broadest possible historical and cultural knowledge. In this we will be helped by the texts contained in a pantry that will be ready before the beginning of the lessons.

Emily Brönte, Wuthering Heights (1847);
Robert Louis Stevenson, Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1889)
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1926)
George Orwell, “A Hanging” (1931) “Shooting an Elephant” (1936)
Selezione di testi poetici, con poesie di Lord Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Derek Walcott.

Measures for foreign students
The module is held partly in Italian and partly in English, depending on the language skills of the students attending the module.