Animal Farm , written by George Orwell , is a political fable that tells the story of a group of farm animals who rebel against their cruel human master, hoping to create a society where all animals are equal, free, and happy. Inspired by the dream of the wise old pig Old Major, the animals overthrow the farmer Mr. Jones and take control of the farm, renaming it Animal Farm. At first, the animals work together to build an egalitarian community based on the principles of Animalism, summarized in the Seven Commandments painted on the barn wall. However, over time, the pigs—led by the cunning and power-hungry Napoleon—begin to seize control. They gradually assume privileges, manipulate language and truth, and use fear and propaganda to maintain power. Eventually, they become indistinguishable from the humans they once overthrew. This allegory clearly reflects the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the rise of Stalinism. The animals represent different social and political groups...

  THE PLOT Nineteen Eighty-Four , written by George Orwell , is an anti-utopian, or dystopian, novel that describes a bleak and oppressive society in which human instincts, intelligence, and individual freedom are crushed by a ruthless and all-powerful political regime. The story depicts a totalitarian power that exerts complete control over individuals through advanced technology and psychological manipulation. At the head of this regime is Big Brother, a symbolic and omnipresent figure who embodies the government's authority. The novel explores the modern individual’s enslavement to mass media, surveillance, and propaganda. The novel is set in the year 1984, in a world divided into three superstates: Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia, which are in a state of perpetual war. Britain, referred to as Airstrip One, is a province of Oceania and is governed by a totalitarian dictatorship led by Big Brother. He is not just the ruler but also a constant presence: his image is everywhere, and...

  George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, was born in Bengal, India, in 1903 into a family of modest means. Although his family had aristocratic roots, their financial situation was precarious. Thanks to a scholarship, Orwell was able to study in England. At the age of eight, he was sent to a preparatory boarding school, and later he attended Eton College, one of the most prestigious schools in the country. At Eton, Orwell felt like an outsider, often treated poorly because he was not wealthy. This experience helped shape his lifelong sympathy for the underprivileged and his critical view of social hierarchies. After finishing his education, Orwell joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma in 1922. However, disillusioned with British colonialism and troubled by his role in enforcing it, he resigned from his post in 1927, later expressing his rejection of “every form of man’s dominion over man,” a theme explored in his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Upon returning to ...

Virginia Woolf was born in London in 1882 and received her education at home, primarily through extensive reading in the library of her father, Sir Leslie Stephen , a prominent Victorian literary critic and philosopher. Her early intellectual development was influenced by frequent contact with scholars, critics, and exposure to classical studies, including Greek. The death of her mother in 1895 marked the beginning of a long struggle with depression and emotional instability, which would continue throughout her life. After the death of her father in 1904, Virginia and her siblings moved to the Bloomsbury area of London, where their home became a meeting place for a group of writers, artists, and intellectuals later known as the Bloomsbury Group . This group was characterized by its rejection of Victorian conventions, its liberal views on art, society, and politics, and its skepticism toward religion. In her later years, Woolf experienced recurring mental health crises, often marked ...

  Ulysses , written by James Joyce , first came out in Paris in 1992 through the efforts of Sylvia Beach, the owner of the famous Shakespeare & Co. Bookshop . However, in England the novel was banned for obscenity until 1936. Ulysses is one of the greatest examples of reworking of myth Odyssey in modernist literature. Joyce uses the epic model to stress the lack of heroism, ideals, love and trust in the modern world: the epic structure becomes a a mirror in which the modern wasteland is reflected. So, Joyce makes a parallelism between Homer's epic hero in the Odyssey and the events in the life of two ordinary people, Leopold Bloom and Sthephen Dedalus, in modern Dublin. The plot Ulysses tells the story of a day - June 16, 1904 - in the life of three characters: Leopold Bloom, a Dubliner of Jewish origin who works as an advertising agent; Stephen Dedalus, a sensitive young man with literature ambitions who feels frustrated by Irish provincial life; Molly Bloom, Leopold's wif...

“Dubliners” is a collection of fifteen short stories written by James Joyce in which the author analyses the failure of self-realisation of inhabitants of Dublin in biographical and in psychological ways. The novel was originally turned down by publishers because they considered it immoral for its portrait of the Irish city. Joyce treats in “Dubliners” the paralysis of will in four stages: childhood, youth, maturity and public life. The paralysis of will is the courage and self-knowledge that leads ordinary men and women to accept the limitations imposed by the social context they live in. In “Dubliners” the style is both realistic - to the degree of perfectly recreating characters and idioms of contemporary Dublin - and symbolic – giving the common object unforeseen depth and a new meaning in order to show a new view of reality. Joyce defines this effect “epiphany” which indicates that moment when a simple fact suddenly explodes with meaning and makes a person realise his / her condi...

Given Joyce ’s musical patrimony – his own fine voice and talents as a musician, his father’s considerable and near-professional skills as a singer, his encyclopaedic knowledge of musical matters, and the rich musical milieu in which he grew up – the profound influence of music on the shaping of his works should come as no surprise. The number of books that Joyce wrote in his lifetime is small compared to the output of virtually any other author one can name. But what books! In prose, with each new work he pushed dramatically past the boundaries he had set for himself in his previous endeavours, stylistically as well as thematically. Between “Dubliners” and “Finnegans Wake” there is both continuum and continuity: continuum from the local (people of Dublin) to the universal (Here Comes Everybody) accompanied by an evolution – and revolution- in technique; continuity in that his characters, locales, and subject matter always remained distinctly Irish and of his time, while Joyce, as arti...

The relationship between James Joyce and Trieste is an extreme element not only of his autobiography but also of its evolution as a writer. If Dublin was the city where Joyce’s personality was created and shaped, Trieste is the one where Joyce’s personality developed and matured. Joyce moved to Trieste for more than ten years with her wife Nora. The Italian city was the place where Joyce had a long series of personal and literary experiences: he became father of two children, losting, but, a third one, he fell ill, encountered poverty and experienced an increasing number of literary successes. Joyce worked here as English teacher at the Berlitz language school, journalist and reporter of local journal “Il Piccolo della Sera” and gave some literary presentations in conferences. Despite the troubled period, Joyce completed some short stories which would later compose “Dubliners” and, then, he finished the second draft of “Chamber music”. Joyce often gave private English lessons which we...

James Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin into a middle class Catholic family. His father was a supporter of Charles Parnell, the leader of the movement for Home Rule for Ireland (to learn more about “the free State of Ireland” go to the end of this post). Joyce attended two Jesuit schools, then went on to study modern languages at University College in Dublin, where he graduated. Finding life in Ireland an obstacle to his own artistic development, in 1902 Joyce left Ireland in voluntary exile, living first in Paris, then to Pola in 1904 and, finally, in Trieste, where he wrote “Dubliners” and “A Portrait of the artist as a young man”. When World War I broke out, Joyce went to Zurich where he started working on “Ulysses”. In 1920 he moved to Paris where “Ulysses” was published and Joyce wrote his last novel “Finnegans Wake”. When France was occupied by the Germans in 1940, Joyce returned to Zurich, where he died in 1941. All of Joyce’s works are centred on Ireland and on the early 20th-c...

At the beginning of the 20th century intellectuals attitudes were changing and people found it difficult to believe in anything. First of all, an explosion of new ideas changed man’s view of himself and of the universe. In 1905 Albert Einstein published “Theory of Relativity” in which he dealt a further blow to the belief that objective reality and science as a substitute for religion could give an explanation of the universe. British writers were inspired by the philosophical ideas of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche who proclaimed existing abstract values such as the “good” and the “beautiful” were decadent. These ideas were incorrectly late linked with Nazism and Fascism. Another important influence on British artists came from Sigmund Freud and his theories on the structure and workings of the human mind, which are known as psychoanalysis, in order to treat hysteria and neurosis. Freud, then, explored new areas of sensibility which cae to be known as the unconscious. 20th century liter...

  Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 and attended Edinburgh University, where he studied before engineering and then law. However, he decided to become a professional writer, going against family expectations. Moreover , he rebelled against his father’s Calvinist religion. Several trips and travels abroad due to his consumption asserted literary tendencies of Stevenson: in 1873 Stevenson went to the French Riviera and undertook a canoe tour in Belgium (1876) and described it in An inland voyage (1878). Then he moved to California where he met a woman, Frances Osbourne, and they got married. The travel memoir The Silverado squatters written in 1883   is the result of his stay in California. He collected essays, short stories and fragments, which were published in periodicals: Virginibus puerisque (1881); The new Arabian nights (1882); Familiar studies of men and books (1882) are some examples. In 1884 they returned to England for three years. His f...