5 5 5 5 –––– THE THE THE THE AUGUSTANAUGUSTANAUGUSTANAUGUSTAN AGEAGEAGEAGE

�New inventions

�People started going to live in towns

�Newspapers

�Rise of the Novel

First half of the 18°century

First Industrial Revolution

The Novel: a fictional form written by and for people of the middle

class about every day life and events

Diary and epistolary forms: 1st person narrator to describe feelings and thoughts.

Didactic aim: how to keep accounts, to write letters, to behave in society

Daniel Defoe1660 –1731

Giornalista

Opere: � Robinson Crusoè (1719, Man

and wild nature; colonialism);� Captain Singleton (1720,

piracy)� Moll Flanders (1722, woman’s

situation)� Roxana (1724, a courtesan’s

life)� The Journal of the Plague

Year (1722, about plague in London)

SAMUEL

RICHARDSON(1689 – 1761)

Epistolary Novels;

Didactic aim: moral lesson, how to behave in society and how to write letters. .

Works:

�Pamela or The Virtue Rewarded (1740),

�Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748)

HenryFielding(1707 –1754)

Works:���� Tom Jones (1749)���� Joseph Andrews (1742)

Humor and social satire.

Picaresque novel.

Epic-comic plot

����J. Joyce (20th century)

Laurence Sterne

(1713 – 1768)

Irish-born novelist

Satirist

Precursor of Modernism (����J. Joyce)

Work: ����The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759)

Tobias Smollet(1721–1771)

Scottish poet and author.

Picaresque novels:

The Adventures of Roderick

Random (1748)

The Adventures of Peregrine

Pickle (1751)

����Charles Dickens (19th century)

Jonathan Swift(1667 – 1745)

Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet.

Dean of St. Patrick's,

Dublin.

Works:

����Gulliver's Travels

(1726, anti-utopia)

���� A Modest Proposal(1729, suggestion given to

rich people about how to cook

poor children )

American War of

Independence

(1775–1783)

�American people rebel against English heavy taxation

French Revolution(1789–1799)

Ideals: Freedom, Fraternity, Equality

����influence on literature

The Gothic Novel

� Mystery and gloomy atmosphere

� Imagination and unconscious

� Horace Walpole : The Castle of Otranto

� Anne Radcliff: The Mysteries of Udolpho

� Further developments 1800 - 2000

The Nightmare, H. Fuseli (1781)

PRE ROMANTICISM

New features: originality and creativity; spontaneity; emphasis onindividual genius; interest in the unknown and in the supernatural; free imagination; sensations; interest in Middle Ages; subjectivefeeling for nature; exotic times and places..

New sources of inspiration: Nordic and Celtic cultures; the Middle Ages, ancient national folk poetry (T. Percy); The Works of Ossian (J. Macpherson)

The Graveyard Poetry

���� Macpherson’s: Ossian (1760)

���� Thomas Gray: Elegy written in an English Courtyard (1751, death makes everybody equal)