Jane Austen was born in 1775 at Steventon in Hampshire, a little town in the south of England. She was one of the eight children of the rector of the village George Austen and Cassandra Leigh. In the early years, she was brought up by a wet nurse and her father taught her French and Italian language. In 1783, according to family customs, Jane and her sister Cassandra went to Oxford and later to Southampton, in order to improve their education with Mrs. Ann Cawley. Between 1795 and 1798 she wrote first drafts and versions of novels such as Juvenilia , three collections of novels and parodies, which, with humorous or gothic tones, emulated the literature of the time and entertained the narrow circle of relatives. All the novels, in fact, are dedicated to friends and relatives. In December 1795, Jane Austen met Thomas Langlois Lefroy, the grandson of some of Steventon's neighbors, and they fell in love. The Lefroy family considered Reverend Austen's daughter socially inadequate fo...

Mary Shelley was born in 1797 in London from two important intellectuals of the time: William Godwin, a radical philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a pioneer feminist who wrote one of the first books on the rights of women, A Vindication of the Rights of Women . Ten days after Mary’s birth, her mother died. So, Mary grew up in an intellectual household with her father’s famous friends and among Godwin’s ideals. Here, in 1814 she met Percy Bysshe Shelley , a poet and an ardent admirer of her father. Percy B. Shelley was an important poet of the Romantic movement and was already married at the time. For this reason, her father was against their relationship and tried to keep the two lovers apart. Therefore, when she found out she was pregnant, they ran off to Europe, but they had to return home due to lack of money. In this period, Mary wrote History of a six weeks: Tour through part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland . Once home, though, Shelley had to go into hiding to avoid...

Introduction Ode to the West Wind  is one of the most famous lyrics written by Percy Bysshe Shelley , who is considered, together with Lord Byron and John Keats, one of the most important poets belonging to the Second Romantic generation. This poetry was written in 1819 during his stay in Florence and was published together with Prometheus Unbound  in 1820. It contains five stanzas and a final couplet that describe the West Wind effects on nature. In this poetry, the West Wind, a natural element, becomes a symbol of the poetic inspiration and of radical change for man and society brought into the world by poetry and the prophetic figure of the poet. Inspired by Pindaro, Orazio and John Dryden, in this lyric Shelley reconciles the Romantic sensitivity and his rebel spirit with some features of the ode, a particular literary genre, in order to express and celebrate human feelings with a high language. The five stanzas and the final couplet transmit sensations and impressions gen...

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, before winning a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford. After graduating, Wilde moved to London and during the years 1878-81, he was considered a refined and provocative writer and, through his Oxford connections, was introduced to the upper class. Because of his flamboyant personality he became the leader of the Aesthetic Movemen t, and was invited to the United States for a series of lectures in 1881. Oscar Wilde lived fully during the Victorian Age , so-called for British Queen Victoria, a sovereign who gave Great Britain a long period of stability and prosperity, obviously not without negative aspects. In this period, in fact, the Irish writer acquired the role of external observer of reality, which was characterized by Puritanism, opium trade by India, purity appearances and frequent adulterers. In his comedies, he comments in a sarcastic way the superficial lifestyle of the upper class and the n...

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1972 into a rich family in Horsham, Sussex. According to family tradition, he went to school at Eton and, then, to Oxford. At Eton he came to regard the tyranny and repression in the outside world and he rebelled against it. At Oxford, Shelley collaborated in writing a pamphlet called The necessity of Atheism  (1811), for which he was expelled from the university. In London he married Harriet Westbrook, with whom he will have two children, and they lived together for three years, moving from place to place. During this period, he wrote his first poem Queen Mab  (1813), in which he revealed his aversion to institutions and hatred against tyrants, Christian orthodoxy and the conventions of current morality. He collaborated with the radical philosopher William Godwin, whose libertarian ideas were decisive on his cultural formation and imagination as a writer. The first two novels Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811) show a tendency to the "Got...

Inizialmente, l’Italia appariva decisamente arretrata dal punto di vista industriale rispetto agli altri Paesi Europei a causa, da una parte, della frammentazione politica ed economica che bloccava lo sviluppo di un efficiente mercato interno, dall’altra per la carenza di materie prime (ferro e carbone) che erano alla base dei nuovi processi industriali. In particolare, durante il periodo del Risorgimento, il processo di industrializzazione venne condotto principalmente dall'alto e guidato da imprenditori delle regioni settentrionali, con il risultato di aumentare il divario con le regioni meno sviluppate, le quali si trovarono nella condizione di subire la concorrenza delle regioni più avanzate del Nord ed a pagare la pesante pressione fiscale. Dopo l’Unità d’Italia, il quadro economico ed industriale del Paese mutò profondamente; a fini semplificativi è possibile distinguere tre fasi: il ventennio successivo all'Unità (1861-1880), durante il quale, il Paese gettò le basi dell...

Waiting for Godot  is the best example of the play belonged to the theatre of the Absurd and the major work written by Samuel Beckett . It talks about two French tramps, Vladimir and Estragon (or Gogo), who spend their days waiting for a mysterious Mr Godot who is expected to come and save them from their miserable condition. The play is structured into two acts: Act I : Vladimir and Estragon meet another couple of characters. Pozzo is a rich middle-aged man and the master of Lucky, his poor old servant. At Pozzo’s commands Lucky dances, then “thinks” for the entertainment of the two trumps. Act II : Pozzo and Lucky reappear, but they have changed. Pozzo has become blind and Lucky is dumb now. At the end of each day the hopes of Vladimir and Gogo are revived by the visit of a messenger, Boy, sent by Mr Godot, who invariably announces that “Mr Godot won’t come today, but surely tomorrow”. They occasionaly talk about suicide as a solution, and try to commit suicide, but they fail fo...

Samuel Beckett was born near Dublin in 1906 into a middle-class Protestant family. After graduating from Trinity College, he was appointed English lecturer at the École Normal Supérieure in Paris and, consequently, moved to Paris. There he came into contact with the French and foreign avant-garde intellectuals and artists of the 1930s such as James Joyce . He joined the French Resistance during World War II and, in order to escape the Gestapo Police, he worked undercover as a farm labourer in the Avignon area. He worked as translator and wrote some novels like the trilogy Molloy , Malone Dies  and The Unnamable . These works were written in French and translated in English by Beckett due to achieve greater discipline and economy of expression, as dictated by his main goal: an attempt to explore and describe the human condition. He became famous thanks to his major play Waiting for Godot  and spent the rest of his life writing pays, some for the cinema, radio and television unt...