UNIT 4. THE LITERARY ENLIGHTENMENT (1700-1789)

UNIT 4.
THE LITERARY
ENLIGHTENMENT
(1700-1789)
4.1. Satire and politics.
L1. Introduction to the 18th
century: culture and ideas.
a) Politics: the age of
revolutions
Greater representation in Parliament: landowners and rich merchants.
THE DEATH OF QUEEN ANNE AND THE NEW GERMAN HOUSE OF
HANOVER
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1714: George I’s reign begins.
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1715: First Jacobite Rebellion: the son of King James II claimed the
throne of England and led Scottish and Catholic forces against English
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1745: Second Jacobite Rebellion led by Bonnie Prince Charlie, grandson
of James II
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1754-63: Wars with France: important British gains in India and
Canada – the beginning of Empire.
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1776: The American Declaration of Independence: THE LOSS OF THE
AMERICAN COLONIES WAS DEVASTATING FOR GB. THE SEARCH FOR
NEW TERRITORIES (AUSTRALIA, NEW ZEALAND, ETC.)
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1789: The French Revolution
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1793-1815: The Reign of Terror in France, followed by the Napoleonic
Wars.
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Frictions with Ireland at the end of the century.
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b) Economy: industrial and
agricultural revolutions
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Growing industrialisation:
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Urban growth
Changing patterns of the population: food production
increased
Technical and mechanical innovations
Development of transport: river and sea transport;
turnpikes; canals.
Textile manufacture: inventions
Revolution in agriculture: enclosure system;
rotation of crops; fertilisation of soils.
GEORGE III (1760-1820), KNOWN AS “FARMER
GEORGE”.
Beginning and exploitation of the Empire.
c) Society / culture
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Growth of industrial towns
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“slum”: the poor housing conditions of
the new working class
Hard working conditions for women and
children.
L2. Augustan satire and the
mock-heroic style
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Satire and its political target
The Augustan period
Alexander Pope and the mock-heroic or mock-epic style. The
Rape of the Lock is the great masterpiece of the genre.
Jonathan Swift:
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The Battle of Books (pub. 1704): the Ancients and the Moderns
A Modest Proposal (1729)
Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Alexander Pope:
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The Dunciad (1728;1743): an attack on literary rivals
The use of the heroic couplet
Satirical transformations in The Rape of the Lock
P2. Histories of the individal:
The conventions of travel
narrative in Daniel Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe
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Verisimilitude as the “likeness to truth”.
The late 17th century and the development of the
novella: Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, or the History of the
Royal Slave (1688)
Definition of “novel” in the 18th century: amatory
novellas, criminal and rogue biographies, etc.
Daniel Defoe and the history of the individual:
survival against odds
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Robinson Crusoe (1719)
A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
Moll Flanders (1722)
L3. Sentimental vs.
Anti-sentimental literature
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The genre question in the 18th century:
“amatory fiction”; sentimental novel;
anti-romance fiction, etc.
The Licensing Act of 1737 (theatre
censure): it favoured the proliferation of
prose.
Sentimental authors:
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Eliza Haywood:
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Love in Excess (1719)
Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751): the
difficulty of the heroine in making good
decisions.
A hybrid between amatory novella and
domestic fiction.
“Sexual agency” and the linguistic
expression of desire.
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Samuel Richardson:
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The use of the epistolary novel
His heroines try to maintain their identity in times
of trial: Pamela (1740-41); Clarissa (1747-49)
Cautionary tales: teaching women how to behave
The question of virtue: morals and sex
The creation of female subjectiviy
Common female prototypes: good woman, eternal
sufferer, devoted wife
A fantasy of female power.
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Charlotte Lennox:
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The Female Quixote (1752)
Inheritor of Samuel Richardson and the
sentimental tradition
New directions: combining the legacy of
romance and anti-romance
Female experiences told from a female
perspective: Arabella and her infatuation
with romances.
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Henry Fielding:
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Joseph Andrews (1742): a reaction against
Richardson’s Pamela. Against “naive
empiricism” by means of “extreme
escepticism”
Against the literature of sensibility: focus
on male points of view (bildungsroman)
Learning about human nature through
experience.
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Laurence Sterne:
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The Life and Adventures of Tristam Shandy
(1760-67)
The prototype of the “sentimental man”
Subverting conventions of time, plot,
character and design.
L4. Journalism and criticism
Journalism
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The representation of “truth”: the new journalistic discourse
(akin to the new scientific methods)
Richard Steele and Joseph Addison and the creation of different
newspapers and journals: The Tatler, The Spectator.
The creation of a standard of “taste” and judgment presented
through the figure of an external (fictional) observer: e.g. Isaac
Bikerstaff
Their responsibility in the configuration of manners and social
behaviour in the 18th century
Audience: the well-to-do middle class
The involvement of newpapers (and their writers) in party
politics
Most 18th century writers contributed off and on with articles to
different newspapers: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Eliza
Haywood, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, etc.
Criticism
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The establishment of a standard
language: the writing and publication of
the first Dictionaries of the English
language. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary
of the English Language (1755)
The foundation of the Royal Society
(following French procedents.+
Works of criticism:
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Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism (1711):
decorum and norms; the rules of art; the
respect for the classics.
Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets (about
the great canonical writers: Shakespeare,
Milton and others)... He contributes to the
creation of the “canon”: a standard of
critical and literary judgment.
GLOSSARY
Age of reason
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Restoration and Augustan periods
A special reverence to the workings of
reason.
Balance, decorum and order
The Augustan age (1660-1760). The Emperor
Augustus
Dryden, Pope, Addison, Swift, Goldsmith:
imitators of the style of the classics.
The Enlightenment
Thought: Locke, Newton, Hume
Anti-hero
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The antithesis of the hero
A man with an inclination to failure
Tristam Shandy in Laurence Sterne’s
Tristam Shandy, departing from the
model of the old-fashioned heroic kind
Bildungsroman
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Inherited from German criticism
The so-called “formation novel”
The development of the hero or heroine
from youth to maturity
Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Fielding’s Tom Jones
Epistolary novel
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Letters
Popular in the late 17th and 18th centuries
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and
Clarissa Harlowe
A sense of verisimilitude and realism
The letter represented a “historical” record
A lot about the writer’s personality and
subjectiviy
Memoir-novel
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A form of novel which intends to be a
“true” autobiographical account but
which may be partly fictitious.
Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and
Moll Flanders
Mock-epic
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In verse
The high and serious tone and the
supernatural ingredients of epic to treat
of a trivial subject in such a way as to
make both subject and theme ridiculous
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock
Noble savage
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A man in his primitive goodness and
untainted by the evils of civilization
Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688)
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A virtuous, young, beautiful and brave
warrior
Behn dwelt on primitive innocence and
deplored the effects of civilization
Satire
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First half of 18th century
Samuel Johnson: a poem “in which
wickedness and folly is censured”
Jonathan Swift
Alexander Pope
Sensibility
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18th century
“susceptibility to tender feelings”
A capacity to identify with and respond to the
sorrows of others –and to respond to the
beautiful
Accepted as part of social ethics and public
morality
Goldsmith’s The Desserted Village, Sterne’s A
Sentimental Journey, Mackenzie’s The Man of
Feeling.
Sentimental novel
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18th century
The distresses of the virtuous
A sense of honour and moral behaviour
were justly rewarded
Richardson’s Pamela
Very apparent in Sterne
Published and read avidly
Taste
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A faculty to discern between beauties
and imperfections
Joseph Addison in The Spectator
Verisimilitude
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Likeness to truth
The appearance of being true or real
even when fantastic
An essential concern in the prose fiction
texts of the late 17th century and early
18th century
To appear as historical as possible.
UNIT : GOTHIC AND
ROMANTIC LITERATURE
(1789-1832)
L5. Introduction to the
Romantic period: culture and
ideas
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An age of revolutions: French Revolution, Industrial
Revolution, etc.
Poetry is the Romantic genre par excellence. The rejection of
over-industrialization; the rejection of the Enlightenment and
its aesthetics; the migratory movements from country to city;
the value of simple lifestyle
Empowerment of the new middle class. The differences
between the poor and the rich becam extreme. A society
about to collapse and fragment
The key is education: William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft. A vindication of the Rights of Man (1790) and
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), following the
revolutionary trend.
The value of the individualistic spirit: exploration of
subjectivity, the irrational, the overflow of feelings.
L6. Revolution in poetics: from
Augustan to Romantic
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The Augustans: satire and philosophical
observation; the use of reason; the reverence
of classical rules
The Graveyard School of Poetry
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Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-5)
Robert Blair, The Grave (1743)
“death and delightful gloom”
Locations: cemeteries and charnel houses
The irrational side of nature
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The pre-romantics:
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The return to simple values in the form of
a return to nature and village life: Oliver
Goldsmith’s The Desserted Village (1770);
George Crabbe’s The Village (1783) and
the Borough (1810)
The celebration of nature in a much sadder
tone: James McPherson’s Fingal (1762),
William Collins’s Odes (1746)
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The Romantics: a revolution in poetic
style
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The references to fancy and imagination;
the place of nature (the “objective
correlative”); the study of human nature
Two generations of Romantic poets:
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William Blake
First Generation: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge
Second Generation: John Keats, P.B. Shelley and Lord Byron
Common features: the return to the simple rural world
(Wordsworth); the taste for the exotic and the primitive (Blake
and Coleridge); the choice of a simpler language (far from the
grandiosity of the diction of the Augustans); the new vision of
the poet (intellectual and inspired)
The concept of imagination (primary and secondary) and the
difference between fancy and imagination... Fancy is associated
to memory, while imagination is not voluntary and goes beyond
the senses. William Wordswoth and S.T. Coleridge’s Preface to
Lyrical Ballads (1798); S.T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria
(1817)
L7. Gothic aesthetics: The
sublime and the beautiful
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Definition of the Gothic: linked to the evolution of the
horror story
Lasting influence in the contemporary Gothic: late 19th
century (R.L. Stevenson’s Doctor Jeckyll and Mr Hyde) and
late 20th century (Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber).
The origins: Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into
the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
(1757). New aesthetics.
A critique of institutions and social conventions; a reaction
against political stability and the idea of progress
The prototypes of the Gothic: the Gothic villain and the
Gothic heroine.
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Representative authors and novels:
Horace Walpole, The Castle of
Otranto (1764)
 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of
Udolpho (1794); The Romance of the
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Forest,The Italian
 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the
Modern Prometheus (1818; 1831); a
late Gothic novel.