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...

The Twenties and the Thirties of the XX century were characterised by the vote for women, the rise of the Labour Party, new living conditions, technological development and Great Depression. Following the support of women in factories during World War I , women represented by the Women's Suffrage Movement, headed by Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, claimed the right of vote. So in 1918 all men aged twenty-one and women over thirty were allowed to vote. Most of them were workers that increased the ranks of the Trade Unions and in 1924 the first Labour government was created. In this period the younger generation of the British upper class gradually abandoned the gentlemanly style of their ancestors and took on a loud and obsessive search for fun (Roaring Twenties). This change of lifestyle influenced the family: it became smaller, both parents worked and divorce became more common. During the first postwar, the telephone and electricity expanded on a large scale; the motion picture and radi...

   When George V died in 1936, his son Edward VIII became king of England. The new king abdicated after only ten months in order to marry an American woman, who had divorced, and his brother George VI ovent to the throne ruling country during World war. Because of Versailles' treaty signed in June 1919, Germany underwent a terrible economic crisis in the 1920s, which helped the Nazi Party's rise to the power. In order to avoid another world war, Britain ignored the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), the occupation of Austria by Hitler (1938) and Czechoslovakia, thankin Munich Agreement signed by Britain and France with Germany. When Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939 France and Britain declared war on Germany. In this way World War II broke out. In the first phase of the conflict Germany occupied France and most European countries, Italy entered the war on Germany's side (1940) and the United States were still neutral. In 1940 Britain had to bear the brunt of the...

  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...

Da dove veniamo? Chi siamo? Dove andiamo?  è un olio su tela realizzato da Paul Gauguin nel 1897-98 e conservato al Museo di Fine Arts a Boston. Il dipinto è considerato un testamento spirituale dell’artista, il quale realizza il ciclo della vita ambientandolo all’interno di un paradiso polinesiano. Paul Gauguin realizza questo dipinto in un momento tragico della sua vita, poco prima di compiere il suicidio. L’artista stava per compiere 50 anni e fu spinto a fare un bilancio della propria esistenza, aggravato dalla precaria condizione di vita e dalla morte della figlia Aline. La sua sofferenza, pertanto, lo spinse a creare un'opera di grandi dimensioni (la più grande del suo opus) che fosse una riflessione sull'esistenza, una summa di tutte le sue ricerche cromatiche e formali degli ultimi otto anni. Descrizione Il dipinto ha formato orizzontale con uno sviluppo panoramico simile ad un fregio: a ll’interno di un ambiente idealizzato e naturale vi sono dodici figure umane (11 do...