Augustan LiteratureSatires and Essays

Augustan early 18th-century Britain ~ the Roman Empire under Emperor Augustus (27 B.C. – 14 A. D.)Queen Anne (1702-1714)George I of Hanover (1714 - 1727)George II (1727 – 1760) • An age of political stability and party politics—Whigs versus Tories, under a Constitutional Monarchy• An age of Empiricism and Experimental Science An age of religious accommodation rather than dogmatism —with the occasional Evangelical Revival. An age of economic growth and stock booms and busts The South Sea Bubble, 1720 An age of world wars and political expansion War of the Spanish Succession, 1701-1713 Seven Year’s War, 1756-1763 An age of increasing Literacy (60+ % of adult males by 1800?)Augustan Literature 1700 – 1745 (death of Pope and Swift, 1744-45) it refers back to the heyday of classical writing, represented by the works of the Latin poets of the Golden Age: Virgil Horace Ovid Tibullus. Authors in this period gained inspiration from the great writers of the past classical age and followed their examples. Literary Background Neoclassicism reaches its peak. Art is pragmatic, and man is its most appropriate subject. Literature reaches out to a wider circle of readers, with special satirical attention to what is unfitting and wrong.  The influence is felt within the works of: Alexander Pope Jonathan Swift Joseph Addison and Richard Steele The rise of the novel witnesses to the same neoclassic tendencies (Defoe, Richardson, Fielding).

PoetrySatires and Essays

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) 1709 Pastorals

1711 An Essay on Criticism 1713 Windsor Forest 1714 Rape of the Lock 1715-1720 Translated the Iliad 1717 The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady; Eloisa to Abelard 1725-1726 Translated the Odyssey 1725 Edited The Works of Shakespeare Collated and Corrected 1728 The Dunciad 1734 Essay on Man 1735 Imitations of HoraceEarly poems Pastorals (1709) Windsor Forest (1713) The Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady (1717) Eloisa to Abelard (1717)Satires The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714) Prompted by an actual incident in polite society (Robert, Lord Petre → Miss Arabella Fermour) A mock-epic (mock-heroic) poem It echoes the Iliad, the Aeneid, Paradise Lost. It invokes classic epic devices: invocation of a deity, a formal statement of theme, the division into books and cantos, grandiose speeches, battles, supernatural machinery It bears upon a trivial subject: the cutting off of a lock of hair It functions as: A satire on the trivialities of fashionable life A commentary on the distorted moral values of polite society An implicit indictment of human prideCharacters and Plot Belinda Beautiful young lady with wondrous hair, two locks of which hang gracefully in curls.  The Baron Young admirer of Belinda who plots to cut off one of her locks. Ariel Belinda's guardian sylph (supernatural creature). Umbriel Mischievous spirit who enters the cave of the Queen of Spleen to seek help for Belinda.  Queen of Spleen Underworld goddess who gives Umbriel gifts for Belinda. Clarissa Young lady who gives the Baron scissors. Thalestris Friend of Belinda. Thalestris urges Sir Plume to defend Belinda's honor. Sir Plume Beau of Thalestris. He scolds the Baron. Sylphs, Fairies, Genies, Demons, Phantoms and Other Supernatural Creatures

Canto 1: Belinda wakes up, glorifies her appearance at a ritualistic dressing table and is warned by Ariel of impending doom. Canto 2: She takes a boat ride up the Thames to attend a party (both the Sun and the Baron become victims of her beauty.) Canto 3: At the party she engages in the epic game (plays cards, sips coffee, flirts and gossips) and the Baron cuts off the lock. Canto 4: Umbriel journeys to the Cave of Spleen to procure a sack of sighs and a flask of tears.

Canto 5: A battle ensues between heroines and heroes to recover the lock. The violated lock reappears in heaven, transformed Epic Mock-epic

Iliad, Aeneid, Paradise Lost The Rape of the Lock

Invocation of a muse Invocation of his friend (John Caryll)

The Arming of the Hero Toilet [dressing] scene

Aeneas voyage up the Tiber Belinda’s voyage up the Thames

Battle Card Game

Meddling Gods and Goddesses Spirits (Sylphs and Gnomes)

The Journey to the Underworld The Cave of Spleen

Rape of Helen & Fall of Troy Cut of lock

The Heroic Couplet

The Dunciad (1728, 1743) Written and recast and then enlarged 1728: the "three book" Dunciad (Pope was member of the Martinus Scriblerus Club) 1735: the Dunciad Variorum (Pope confirmed authorship). 1743: the New Dunciad, in four books, with a different hero. Struggle against ignorance, dullness and emptiness / Personal attacks on personal enemies Gives (in the neoclassical spirit) a broad satirical picture of the whole literary life in the 18th-century England

The First Dunciad Subject of satire: literary dullness Personified as the goddess of Dulness, daughter of Chaos and Night, at war with reason and with light. Object of satire: Lewis Theobald (1688 – 1744), scholar and playwright, author of Shakespeare Restored, a reaction to Alexander Pope's edition of Shakespeare → Tibbald: king of the Dunces Dunce: a slow-witted or stupid person → John Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308) Mock-epic structure: influenced by Dryden’s MacFlecknoe Plot: The Goddess looks for a successor to the throne of her kingdom She chooses Tibbald In honour of his coronation, she holds heroic games. He is then transported to the Temple of Dullness, where he has visions of the future.

The New Dunciad Object of satire: Colley Cibber (1671 – 1757), actor-manager, playwright, and Poet Laureate, who had ridiculed one of Pope’s plays → Bays: king of Dunces Adaptations and expansions of key passages to fit Cibber’s career A darker tone→ overarching metaphor of Cibber as “Anti-Christ of Wit”, rather than Classical hero of Dullness. Apocalyptic ending:

She comes! she comes! the sable Throne beholdOf Night Primaeval, and of Chaos old! […]Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd;Light dies before thy uncreating word:Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;And Universal Darkness buries All. (629-56)

Essays Essay On Criticism (1711) Essay On Man (1733-4) Moral Essays (1731-5) Imitations of Horace (1733 – 5)

Essay On Criticism a compilation of Pope's various literary opinions; a didactic poem in heroic couplets discusses the rules of taste which ought to govern poetry, and which enable a critic to make sound critical judgments; best authority → the classical authors who dealt with the subject; conclusion: the rules of the ancients are in fact identical with the rules of Nature ~ poetry and painting, like religion and morality, actually reflect natural law.

An Essay on Man philosophical, in heroic couplets influenced by deism → attempt to justify the way of God to Man addresses the question of human nature and the potential for happiness structure → medieval doctrine of the Great Chain of Being 4 epistles: I : the nature of man and his place in the universe II : man as an individual III : man in relation to human society, political and social hierarchies IV: man’s pursuit of happiness in this world Conclusion: there exists an ordered universe which possesses a coherent structure and functions in a rational fashion, according to natural laws designed by God humanity should acknowledge its insignificant position in the greater context of creation in order to live happily and virtuously on earth.

ProsePeriodical Essay 17th-century background: 1645: the Oxford Gazette (first English newspaper) was introduced; 1647: the Licensing Act established government control of the press; 1681: The Observer;

1691: The Athenian Gazette; 1694: the Licensing Act expired.Other changes: Improvement of printing press technology; Rise of the burgeoning commercial class → an audience with the means, education, and leisure time to engage in reading.

↓Periodical culture—newspapers & magazines, both topical and philosophical, and a freer and partisan press

18th century developmentsTerm: applied to any grouping of essays that appear seriallyFirst use: George Colman the Elder and Bonnell Thornton in their magazine the Connoisseur (1754-56) But: serial essays had been published for half a century: Established with the Daily Courant (the first true daily) in 1702; Reached maturity with Addison and Steele's Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1711–12The Tatler Edited by Richard Steele, and including contributions by Joseph Addison, the periodical appeared thrice weekly from 12 April 1709 to 2 January 1711(271 issues.) At first it took the form of a miscellany: accounts of manners and morals literature scholarship news. In time → single essays, written in the voice of Isaac Bickerstaff. Its avowed intention was to investigate manners and society, establishing its principles of ideal behaviour, its concepts of a perfect gentleman and gentlewoman, and its standards of good taste. Dueling, gambling, rakish behaviour, and coquettishness were criticized, and virtuous action was admired. Numerous anecdotes and stories gave point to the moral codes advanced. The periodical had an explicit Whig allegiance and was several times drawn into political controversy. The Spectator Founded jointly by Addison and Steele, it appeared daily - except Sundays - for 555 issues, from 1 March 1711 to 6 December 1712. Stated goal: to edify and instruct morally and aesthetically Form: one long essay, narrated by the fictitious Mr. Spectator → a man of travel and learning, who frequents London as an observer Through him the readers were introduced to his small circle of friends (Mr. Spectator’s club): Sir Roger de Coverley → the country squire and Tory foxhunter; Will Honeycomb → the gallant man-about-town; Sir Andrew Freeport → a Whig merchant and man of affairs; Captain Sentry → the retired soldier.

↓social-types meant to exemplify different modes of social conduct

↓

The stories and the characters’ witty, sometimes satirical observations of the contemporary scene attempted to teach lessons on the proper behaviour of men and women in society.

Prose SatireJonathan Swift (1667 – 1745) Born in Ireland, of Anglo-Irish parents 1689 went to England (secretary to Sir William Temple, a diplomat and man of letters) 1695 ordained as a priest in the Church of Ireland Supported the Whigs, then the Tories Published many works, and edited the Examiner (chief Tory newspaper) Loved two Esthers: Esther Johnson – “Stella” / Esther Vanhomrigh – “Vanessa” 1714 returned to Ireland, installed as the Dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin (“to die like a poisoned rat in a hole”.) Satires: A Tale of a Tub The Battle of the Books A Modest Proposal A Meditation Upon a Broom-Stick Gulliver’s travels Pamphlets: The Drapier’s Letters The Abolishing of the Christianity in England On the conduct of the allies The Barrier Treaty The Public Spirit of the Whigs The Story of an Injured Lady A Short View of the State of Ireland Poems: A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed Cadenus and Vanessa A Description of a City Shower Other: The Journal to Stella Also wrote periodical essays, sermons, prayers, etc.

A Tale of a Tub It is a a satire on religious excess. An allegorical “tale” → the adventures of three brothers, Peter, Martin and Jack (Catholicism, Puritanism, Anglicanism) and their treatment of the coats (religious practices) inherited from their father (God) through a Will (Bible). The Battle of the Books A satire indicting pride (believing one's own age to be supreme) and the inferiority of derivative works a literal battle between books in the King's Library, as ideas and authors struggle for supremacy: Classical vs. modern authors, authors vs. critics. An interpolated allegory of the spider and the bee: The bee (who gathers its materials from nature and sings its drone song in the fields) is like the ancients;

The spider (who kills the weak and then spins its web (books of criticism) from the taint of its own body) is like the moderns and like critics. A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Becoming a Burden to their Parents or to their Country

satirical essay ironically and paradoxically suggesting the poor in Ireland could sell their children as food to rich people Narrator → parodies the style of contemporary ‘projectors’ (authors of pamphlets writing in accordance to the rules of rhetoric: stating the case, establishing that they have no interest in the outcome, and then offering a solution before enumerating the profits of the plan.) → goes to great lengths to support a logical argument whose proposed solution (cannibalism) is immoral: "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout." satire → in the extra-literary realm of morality and ethics: Gulliver’s Travels Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships, a satire on human nature a parody of the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre. structured in 4 parts / booksPart I: A Voyage to LilliputLilliput – Court of Lilliput // court of George I Lilliputians vs their neighbours the Blefuscudans // feuding between England and France, or between Catholics and Protestants Allegory of man’s pettiness and greedPart II: A Voyage to BrobdingnagBrobdingnag – the giant people Turned into the King’s pet Occasion to discuss English and European systems of government Allegory of his pride and belief in man’s superiority on all other creatures (another form of monstrosity)Part III: A Voyage to Laputa, Balnibarbi, Glubbdubdrib, Luggnagg and Japan Absent-minded astronomers, philosphers and scientists Lagado Academy: satire on the Royal Society and its experiments Absurdity and evils of reason when wrongly used → attack on intellectuals’ and scientists’ tendency to theorize everything (abstract thought) instead of applying their knowledge to practical needs→ satire on 17th- and 18th-century philosophical movements of rational thoughtPart IV: A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnmsthe Houyhnhnms vs Yahoos // vile species of conscious animals, grotesque images of men, hybrid monsters personifying the worst barbarity yet harmless Disturbing experience: man is more similar to them than to the horses Allegory of pure reason united with common sense (perfectionEpilogue Utterly pessimistic: he cannot stand his wife and children’s smell, seeing them as Yahoos; he goes to live in the stable – hyperbole

reductio ad absurdum of contemporary reality Desperate parable of man’s progress and ambitions Accuse of misanthropyConstruction Each part is the reverse of the preceding part: Gulliver is big/small/sensible/ignorant; the countries are complex/simple/scientific/natural; forms of Government are worse/better/worse/better than England's. Gulliver's view between parts contrasts with its other coinciding part: Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same light. Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and Gulliver's Houyhnhnm master sees humanity as equally so.

↓Double perspective

The Age of SensibilityThe Movement from Neoclassicism to RomanticismAge of Sensibility (1750-1798)

The period in English literature which forms the transition between the Age of Reason, or Neoclassical period and the Romantic one.

Works written during this time are noted for their increased emphasis on instinct and feeling, rather than judgement and restraint.

A growing sympathy for the Middle Ages was manifest during the Age of SensibilityReaction against:

neoclassical stress on reason, calm detachment and mocking attitude; social and cultural changes triggerred by:

– the agrarian revolution: sweeping changes, possibly in response to the increased demand for food from a rapidly expanding population. It undermined the communal, mutually-supportive way of village life, and replaced it with business farming;

– the industrial revolution: a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, production, and transportation had a profound effect on the socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain. The Industrial Revolution witnessed the triumph of a middle class of industrialists and businessmen over a landed class of nobility and gentry.

↓ a more impersonal, mechanised society in which individuals lost their identity Neoclassical vs. Romantic Attitudes

Neoclassicisim Romanticism

reason imagination

intellect intuition

head heart

civilisation nature

society individual

order freedom

centre margin

rationalism mysticism

Novelistic Developments The sentimental novel “sentimentalism”:

An overindulgence in emotion, especially the conscious effort to induce emotion in order to enjoy it; expressing a “sensibility,” or susceptibility to emotions and sentiments (as opposed to logic or reason).

An optimistic overemphasis of the goodness of humanity (Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s doctrine of the natural goodness of man and his belief that moral development was fostered by experiencing powerful sympathies.)

The sentimental novel: In a broad sense: any novel that exploits the reader’s capacity for tenderness,

compassion, or sympathy to a disproportionate degree; In a restricted sense: the novelistic development of the 18th century, which arose

partly in reaction to the austerity and rationalism of the Neoclassical period and exalted feeling above reason, raising the analysis of emotion to a fine art.

Laurence Sterne (1713-68) The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1760-67)

It is often referred to as an anti – novel because it ignores or subverts the realist conventions that the novel was developing in the 18th century.

Sterne’s manipulation of time anticipates by almost two centuries the steam of consciousness experiments of modernist writers like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

The book references to the process of its construction as well as its ludic use of encyclopaedic knowledge anticipates the sophisticated literary games of postmodern writers such as Italo Calvino, Vladimir Nabokov or John Fowles.

According to its title – an "autobiographical" novel. But: The birth of the hero, which the author sets about to discuss on the first page, does

not finally occur until volume iv Tristram is not breeched until volume vi. The novel ends four years before the birth of its hero.

Instead the novel largely concerns itself with events and personages from before the author's birth:

his father Walter's obsession with the influence of the proper name on a man's character,

his Uncle Toby's hobby of re-enacting famous sieges, the death of Yorick the Parson from the ill-effects of rumour.

What the story is about, however, is of secondary importance to how it is told: – Non-linearity of plot:

Digressive technique: each time the narrator verges on a new event, or the readers think that they are about to pick up the thread of a previous storyline, the text suddenly veers off on yet another tangent.

Supposedly mis-placed chapters suddenly appear out of sequence. – Graphological means call attention to the materiality of the text and undermine

the apparent "naturalness" of its faux conversational tone: A cross appears when Dr. Slop crosses himself, a black page "mourns" the death of Yorick, squiggly graphs indicate the progress of the narrative line, blank pages appear to represent pages torn out, a very different kind of blank page is offered to the reader for the purpose

of composing his or her own description of Widow Wadman's beauty. – Self-conscious narrator:

Regular appeals to the reader, Self-reflexive commentary on the nature of the book.

• It is influenced by John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):– It rejects a belief in innate ideas and argues that the mind at birth is a tabula rasa.

Experience of the world can only be accumulated through the senses, which are themselves prone to unreliability.

– Mental life is a stream of ideas, linked together by chance and flowing on beyond the control of the human being which is its host.

– As the consciousness of every individual is conditioned by his private train of associations, it results that each man lives in a world of his own, with his private obsessions, or “hobby-horse”.

Oliver Goldsmith(?1730-1774) The Vicar of Wakefield (1766) an improbable fairy-tale about the fall and rise of the Primrose family the Vicar is led from one misfortune to another:

– his fortune is lost on the eve of his son George’s wedding;– his daughter Olivia is apparently seduced and ‘ruined’ by Thornhill, the local

squire; – unable to pay his rent, the vicar is put in the local jail;– George becomes a fellow prisoner, accused of having severely injured a man in

a duel. he responds with gentle resignation and fortitude, and is duly rewarded by a contrived

happy ending:– the lost fortune is restored, – Olivia turns out to be alive– Sophia, the other daughter, marries Sir William, the squire’s uncle– the son is freed and able thus to marry the wealthy Arabella Wilmot, his first

love. The Gothic novel designed to thrill readers by providing mystery and terrifying accounts of villainy, murder, and the supernatural, to evoke horror, the mysterious, or terror. Its conventions include:

wild and desolate landscapes; ancient buildings such as ruined monasteries, cathedrals, and castles with

dungeons, torture chambers, secret doors, and winding stairways; apparitions such as phantoms, demons, and necromancers; an atmosphere of brooding gloom; powerful or impetuous male figures threatening virtuous female characters.

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) central character: Manfred (the tyrant prince and negative father figure), whose ancestors

had usurped the castle of Otranto in Sicily from its rightful possessor, Alfonso the Good; a mysterious prophecy announcing the reversion of the kingdom to its real owner

→Manfred intending to forestall this prophecy; a number of dreadful mysterious accidents at the wedding of Manfred’s son to Isabella→

Conrad is killed; Manfred decides that he will divorce his barren wife and marry Isabella: →a generational opposition: a vicious, rotten older generation trying to repress and maltreat the younger one; Manfred pursues the terrified Isabella through the subterraneous passages and ruined

vaults of his castle:→ an archetypical situation in the Gothic novel, male tyranny, and female persecution (prefigured in Richardson’s Clarissa);

→gloomy vaults and subterraneous passages as the proper milieu for nightmarish psychic experiences; ending: Manfred mistakenly stabs his own daughter, the ghost of Alfonso rises from the

ruins to heaven, proclaiming Theodore the true heir of Otranto. → marriage of Isabella and Theodore, the new and rightful owner of OtrantoAnn Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) Features

– written from the perspective of the victim (Emily St Aubert), not from that of the villain (Montoni);

– focussed on the soul of an oversensitive woman who has to go through a number of painful experiences;

– the familiar pattern of the Gothic novel: a woman who is the victim of male tyranny and persecution (Madame Cheron, Emily/Montony Count Morano;

– heroine confused by a number of mysteries and oversensitive, overimpressionable → imagines her situation to be more distressful, more terrible than it really is;

– only when she recovers her reason and her fortitude which were latent all along → Montoni loses his power over her

Radcliffe’s insistence on reason and restraint indebted to the Age of Reason / her study of the mental life of a highly sensitive woman points forward to the romantic period

Radcliffe’s characteristic: the explained supernatural, the rational explanation of what seems supernatural or mysterious

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818) one of the ancestors of science fiction (especially the novel’s first part); Frankenstein →a Genevan student of natural philosophy who discovers the secret of

creating life at the university of Ingolstadt – a modern Faustus who no longer requires a pact with the Devil → a kind of

secularisation of the Gothic novel;– related to the myth of Prometheus (the over-reaching of modern man into

dangerous areas of knowledge) → the novel’s subtitle: “The Modern Prometheus”;

The creature (‘daemon’) → inspires terror and loathing in whoever sees it; – doppelgänger motif (a ghostly double which haunts its fleshy counterpart) → the

monster is an externalised part of its creator’s self: “I considered the being whom I had cast among mankind […] nearly in

the light of my own vampire, my own spirit let loose from the grave, and forced to destroy all that was dear to me.”

Narrative: – framed by the letters of the north-pole explorer Walton to his sister Mrs. Saville in

England– the letters relate Walton’s encounter with Frankenstein, contain the story of his

life, which Frankenstein has told Walton – into Frankenstein’s story is inserted the story of the monster, the account of what

happened to him after Frankenstein had left him. The regional novel Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849)

Born in England, she followed her father to Ireland where they settled on the family estate of Edgeworthtown.

There she mixed with the Anglo-Irish gentry and also acted as manager of her father's estate, later drawing on this experience for her novels about the Irish.

Castle Rackrent (1800):

history of a family of Irish landlords, whose path to ruin is narrated by Thady Quirk, their steward:

Sir Patrick Rackrent (a lavish entertainer) drinks himself to death; Sir Murtagh dies in a rage against the enemies whom he continually sues; Sir Kit (a gambler) is killed in a duel; Sir Condy (the present landlord) eventually loses the estate by loans and

litigations to the cunning lawyer Jason Quirk (Thaddy’s own son). The domestic novel Sometimes referred to as "sentimental fiction" or "woman's fiction," "domestic fiction"

refers to a type of  novel popular with women readers during the last decades of the 18th and throughout the 19th century.

It is a spawn of the "sentimental novel” The plot focuses on a heroine who struggles for self-mastery, learning to balance

society's demands for self-denial with her own desire for autonomy. Frances (Fanny) Burney (1752-1840): novels typically portray how a young woman grows up and develops as she enters and experiences the society of her day (e.g. Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778)

Jane Austen (1775-1817) Austen lived her entire life as part of a small and close-knit family located on the lower

fringes of English gentry. She was educated primarily by her father and older brothers as well as through her own

reading. Austen's artistic apprenticeship lasted from her teenage years until she was about thirty-

five years old. During this period, she experimented with various literary forms, including the epistolary novel.

From 1811 until 1815, with the release of Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816), she achieved success as a published writer.

She wrote two additional novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both published posthumously in 1818.

The NOVEL OF MANNERS: a kind of fiction focused on everyday routine life and events:

– It explores character, personal relationships, class distinctions and their effect on character and behaviour;

The DEBT to the 18th century NOVEL:– Richardson and the epistolary novel: the insight into the psychology of the

characters and the subtleties of the ordinary events of life, like balls, walks, tea-parties and visits to friends and neighbours;

– Fielding: the OMNISCIENT NARRATOR (but without its explicit manipulation of the reader) and the technique of bringing the character into existence through dialogue.

CHARACTERISTICS:– The traditional values of the families of the landed gentry and upper middle class

(PROPERTY, DECORUM, MONEY and MARRIAGE ) → the basis of the plots and settings of her novels.

– She treats love and sexual attraction according to her general view that strong impulses and intensely emotional states should be REGULATED,

CONTROLLED and BROUGHT TO ORDER by private reflection, not in favour of some abstract standard of reason but to fulfil a social obligation.

– CONVERSATION plays a central role and PASSIONS and EMOTIONS are not expressed directly but more subtly and obliquely.

– The happy ending: a common element to her novels → all end in the marriage of hero and heroine (What makes them interesting is the concentration on the steps through which the protagonists successfully reach this stage in their lives.)

Emma (1816) Emma is the perfect heroine (“handsome, clever and rich”) who has everything from the

beginning ►in opposition to the traditional novel which uses a typical Cinderella-plot (woman

climbing society showing moral integrity) Mr. Knightley is the perfect gentleman who doesn't need any kind of improvement

► in opposition to the traditional sentimental novel where it's the man who has to demonstrate his love to the heroine, in “Emma” the heroine undergoes moral growth to deserve the love of the male character.

Plot: Emma's mistakes leading to misconstrued romances (Harriet – Mr. Elton; Harriet – Frank Churchill; Harriet – Mr. Knightley

►metafictional character (Emma is the plotter who devises her own fictions within the novel)

►mythological allusions (like Pygmalion, she transforms Harriet into a work of art.) End: self-knowledge → order → marriage: symbol of social reunion & reconciliation

(Emma – Mr. Knightley, Frank Churchill – Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith – Mr. Martin)The Movement from Neoclassicism to Romanticism in PoetrySamuel Johnson(1704-1784)

Samuel Johnson was the outstanding writer of the period. His works included: Biography, criticism, lexicography, prose

– A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) – The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765]) – Lives of the English Poets (1781)

Essays, pamphlets, periodicals– "Plan for a Dictionary of the English Language" (1747) – The Rambler (1750-1752) – "The Patriot" (1774)

Poetry– London (1738) – The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749)

His intellectual breadth and contributions as a public man of letters were so imposing that the late eighteenth century is often termed the Age of Johnson.

As a poet, Johnson is still anchored in the neoclassical tradition, using the heroic couplet mainly for moralising purposes.

London (1739) is written "In imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal" - a poem about the decay of ancient Rome and the decadence which the poet found there.

It blends:– social satire (expressing disgust with the inequalities, the follies and the rottenness

of city life, and exalting by contrast the conditions which are surmised to prevail in the country)

– political satire directed against king and government, and emphasising the corruption and violence the policies of Walpole’s government have fostered (the

abuse of pensions, the tyranny of the licensing laws, the servitude of a thoughtless age.)

Nature Poetry Towards the end of the 18th century, poetry began to present a novel approach to the

handling of nature, with a move away from poems about formal gardens and landscapes by urban poets (characteristic of neoclassicism) and towards poems about nature as lived in (foreshadowing Romanticism.)

Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village (1770): a pastoral elegy which contrasts an idyllic rural past with the harsh reality of the present, represented by the Enclosure Acts and the depopulation of agrarian communities triggered by the Industrial Revolution.

James Thomson,The Seasons (1726-1730): long blank-verse poem including four parts (Winter, Summer, Spring, Autumn); is considered to be the first sustained nature poem in English and it concludes with a “Hymn to Nature.”

Graveyard Poetry The term is applied to a minor but influential 18th-century tradition of meditative poems,

often set in graveyards. – Themes: death, mortality, melancholy, religion. – Tone: elegiac (by the 18th Century, an elegy is simply a poem in lament of a

death) – Imagery: funereal or gloomy (night, death, gloom)– Setting: graveyards.

In their frequent emphasis on the lives of ordinary, even unidentified individuals and the death of those individuals, the Graveyard School writers are sometimes taken as precursors of the Romantic interest in the commonplace, and the melancholic introspection of many Graveyard School works prefigures and contributes to the Romantic fondness for self-scrutiny of various emotional states, including "negative" states (e.g. Keats' "Ode on Melancholy." )

later practitioners added to this a feeling for the 'sublime' and uncanny, and an interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry.

Edward Young’s The Complaint; or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-46) is a long and disconnected poem written in blank verse, in which in which a lonely traveller in a graveyard reflects lugubriously on:

The vale funereal, the sad cypress gloom; The land of apparitions, empty shades! (117-18)

Thomas Gray’s "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751) is noteworthy in that it mourns the death not of great or famous people, but of common men. The speaker of this poem sees a country churchyard at sunset, which impels him to meditate on the nature of human mortality. The poem invokes the classical idea of memento mori, considering the fact that in death, there is no difference between great and common people.

James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760): a translation of ancient Scottish verse supposedly composed by a 3rd century bard named Ossian. Though denounced as a forgery, the poems became hugely popular (the simple, melancholy virtues of the heroic characters in the poems provided an appealing contrast to the complexity and deceit of the modern world) and taken as evidence of and support for the "natural poet" concept (so popular with the Romantics.)

Regional Poetry Robert Burns (1759 – 1796) (also known as Rabbie Burns, Scotland's favourite son,

the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as simply The Bard) is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland.

Burns's poetry blends influences from Classical, Biblical, and English literature with the Scottish Makar tradition (15th century poets writing in Scots and combining skilful artifice with natural diction, concision and "quickness" of expression.)

Romantic poetry William Blake(1757-1827) "One Power alone makes a Poet - Imagination, the Divine Vision" middle-class family; no systematic schooling, yet impressive erudition; trained to be (and made his living as) an engraver almost completely unknown in his age (he was discovered 50 years after his death) Poetical Sketches (1783) poems composed between Blake's 12th and 20th years; contains

most of the important genres of the Age of Sensibility, but boldly experimental in metrics and imagery

Songs of Innocence and of Experience / Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul (1789-94) his best-loved work; the only one that attracted the attention of his contemporaries

mythological epics: The Book of Urizen, The Book of Los; political trilogy: America:A Prophecy; Europe: A Prophecy; The Song of Los; major prophetic books: Vala; Milton and Jerusalem

Characteristics

1.created an idiosycratic visionary universe - contemporaries regarded his ideas completely "mad“:

– World seen in terms of opposites: Reason-Emotion, Imagination-Sense, Good-Evil, Love-Hate. Contraries supply the life force of the universe.

– Four-fold division of humanity: Urizen = Reason Luvah = Emotion Tharmas = Senses Urthona = Energy = Imagination

– Exclusive use of symbolism: Innocence, unexperience: children, flowers, birds, sheep, fields, dew,

spring Repression: priests, forests, clouds, thunder, iron, mills, mountains Joyful or overpossessive sex: roses, gold, moonlight, nets, arrows,

branches Creative or heroic energy: tigers, lions, eagles, forges, swords, spears,

chariots, sun, fire. 2. unusual mode of publication of his poems (illustrated, engraved his works; limited

number of hand-made copies; "composite art" of verbal and visual)Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Innocence series printed in 1789 in 22 copies; combined Innocence and Experience appeared in 1794 in 27 copies;

state of Innocence and Experience: not opposites but contrasts, which complement each other→parallel, complementary and contrastive poems in the two series (e.g. “Lamb” and “Tyger”

often compared with Milton's L'Allegro (gaiety=Innocence) and Il Penseroso (thoughtfulness=Experience) but in Milton: cyclical pattern, in Blake: progress

Innocence: introduced by the piper inspired by an angel-like child;

quasi-idyllic world of pastorals and psalms; central figures: child, lamb, flower, piper, shepherd, nurse; main elements: humble life in uncorrupted nature, uninhibited sexuality, Poet-Christ-Divine

Providence ("The Shepherd"); Experience: introduced by the ancient Bard, "Who Present, Past & Future sees"; dark, self-enclosed, claustrophobic world; dominant images: prematurely blighted and embittered children, dark forests, sick flowers,

wild beasts, black city, poisonous Tree of Mystery that grows in the human brain, hostile (instead of protective) adults;

“Fearful symmetry”The Lamb = InnocenceImagery: pastoral, golden ageSpiritual WorldCreation as Pure LoveChild → Christ → Lamb of God

The Tyger = Experience Imagery: industrialised modernity Natural World Creation as Evil, Vengeance Prometheus → the artist → human creative energy

Despite its horrors, the maturity of experience is needed to come to consciousness, naïve Innocence must pass through and assimilate Experience, to achieve, by an act of Imagination, a "Higher Innocence", a transcendental state which is a marriage of the former two