The Lyric Mode during the 17th century: Cavalier poetry

The Cavalier Poets (followers of Ben Jonson): tried to compress and limit their poems, giving them a high finish, at the expense (sometimes) of an explicit intellectual content. The Cavalier are a group of poets associated with the Court as cavaliers, not only in the sense of being Royalists in opposition to the Puritan Roundheads, but also as Renaissance Courtiers, having accepted the ideals of the Renaissance gentleman popularised by Castigliones The Courtier: at once a lover, soldier, wit, man of affairs, musician and poet. Moreover, poets like Thomas Carew, Sir John Suckling, Richard Lovelace and Robert Herrick were fervent admirers of Ben Jonsons lyric verse (hence the other label - The Tribe/Sons of Ben attached to the group), whose eloquence and elegance they tried to imitate in their own artful poems. The characteristic theme of their verse is love. Yet its treatment differs from the Elizabethan praise of an abstracted and idealised beauty, being more carefree and often sexual. The dichotomy between Art / Nature is also present in much Cavalier poetry, which often contains pastoral scenery and images, drawn from a combination of a nostalgic English past and classical mythology. Most poems are also hedonist, embodying the Latin carpe diem (seize the day) philosophy, while the dark side of the poems is provided by the sense of impending decay or death implied in the theme of transience. A classicist by formation, Jonson took the lead from Latin poets like Catullus and Horace, showing a similar concern for humane, largely secular topics and the craftsmanship of the verse. The light playfulness of Song: To Celia, a poem about the act of flirtation, realised, placed and valued, or the brisk and alert movement of Vivamus, with its outspoken carpe diem philosophy are also proof of Jonsons command of metrics, verse and stanza forms. Robert Herrick turned to the classical lyric for inspiration and worked to achieve eloquence and precision of form. Though his major collection of poems, Hesperides (1648) takes on an impressive variety of forms including elegies, epigrams, songs, hymns and imitations of the same Horace and Catullus, it is the lyrics like To the Virgins, to make much of time a classic exposition of the carpe diem motif -, or Corinna's Going A-Maying a synthesis of classical paganism with English folk themes which gives a special twist to his celebration of the seasonal custom which have earned him the reputation of a distinguished verbal craftsman.

The Lyric Mode during the 17th century: Metaphysical poetry

Metaphysical is a term used to group together certain 17th- century poets like John Donne, Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan or Richard Crashaw, who tried to deepen the traditional lyric forms of love and devotion by stretching them to comprehend the new scientific discourses and theories, the topical debates on humanism, faith and eternity. As such, their poetry investigates the world by a rational investigation of its phenomena, rather than by intuition or mysticism. It is traditional to oppose the Cavalier to the Metaphysical poets: whereas the Cavaliers preferred more straightforward expression, valuing elegance, the metaphysical poets were fond of abstruse imagery and complicated metaphors, sharing common characteristics of wit, inventiveness, and a love of elaborate stylistic manoeuvres. John Donnes literary output lends itself to two major divisions: the first phase, coinciding with his youth and studies, combines gaiety and sophistication of the urban wit with the specific immersion in metaphysical concerns. The most interesting are the love poems collected in Songs and Sonnets, addressed to different persons, some cynical in nature, others marked with a violence of passion. The second phase belongs to the later part of his life, when the young and sophisticated scholar had grown into a grave and philosophical divine, the Dean of St. Pauls Cathedral. The poems included in Donnes Divine Poems and Holy Sonnets reflect religious tensions and his poetic exploration of mans relationship with God. Although thus changed in focus and theme, they still retain the same intensity, the same combination of passion and argument that is characteristic of his earliest endeavours. It is sharply opposed to the intricate, allusive, highly decorative writing and the idealised view of sexual love which constituted the central tradition of Elizabethan poetry; It adopts a diction and meter modelled on the rhythms of actual speech; It is usually organised in the dramatic or rhetorical form of an urgent or heated argument: the opening of the poems shock the reader into attention, sometimes by asking a question; then the thought or argument is ingeniously developed in terms of ideas developed from philosophy or scientific notions; It is marked by realism, irony, and often cynicism in its treatment of the complexity of human motives; It puts to use a subtle and often outrageous logic It reveals a persistent wittiness, making use of paradox, puns, and startling parallels. Andrew Marvells poetry ranges from political (the Horatian Ode: Upon Cromwells return from Ireland) to pastoral poems (The Garden), from satirical (The Loyal Scot) to passionate love verse (To His Coy Mistress). Nevertheless, Marvells chief influence was Donne, whose metaphysical conceits he adopted.

John Milton and the Lyric

Widely considered among the five greatest poets in English language, John Milton is the last great liberal intelligence of the English Renaissance, as the values he advocated in his work are: tolerance, freedom and self-determination, the same that Shakespeare had expressed in his time. In all his writings, Milton drew on an extensive classical education - which included seven years at Cambridge, seven years further study, a years travel in Italy devoted to the study of the Bible and theology, literature and philosophy, in Latin Greek, Italian and English. (Vickers 1990, 196). a) Miltons early poems (from the 1620s) include the famous On the Morning of Christs Nativity (1629), his first considerable poem in English. It is a poem in two parts, consisting of an introductory invocation of 4 seven-line stanzas, in which the poet summarizes the generally accepted Christian understanding of what happened at Christmas, and then turns to the pagan Muse for inspiration: b) The works of the 1630s may be included in Miltons so-called pastoral period, for they reflect the poets mood as he lived in retirement at his fathers country-house in Buckinghamshire. LAllegro and Il Penseroso (c. 1632) are a pair of contrasted poems related to the synkriseis tradition of classical literature, which extend the lyrical mode established by the Ode in order to juxtapose the cheerful and the thoughtful man. Though notionally opposed, the qualities of both are alluring, because the two are in fact complementary, dividing all legitimate pleasures into the private and the public realms. Lycidas (1637) is a pastoral elegy published to the memory of Edward King, a former Cambridge student and possibly a friend of Miltons who had drowned on a journey to Ireland. Nevertheless, the poem moves from its commemoration of the actual person to reflections on the writers own mortality and ambitions, while also engaging in polemic and touching upon the political, philosophical and religious concerns of the time. c) During the period of the Civil wars and the Commonwealth all of Miltons energies went into the support of radical republicanism, his work becoming civic and utilitarian. While prose propaganda on topical issues like the defence of the new state (Defence of the British People; Second Defence, Eikonoklastes), divorce, education or the freedom of the press (Aeropagitica) dominates his literary output, the only poems that he wrote are 24 sonnets, public and political rather than personal, with the exception of On His Blindness (1652), the poem which records Miltons reaction at his loss of sight, as he reconciles his own desire to surrender hope with his faith in Gods will

4. The Epic vs the Mock-epic

Cultural background Neoclassicism, The Age of Reason a. a regard for tradition and reverence for the classics b. a sense of literature as art (i.e artificed, artificial, made by craft) c. a concern for social reality, and the communal commonplaces of thought which hold it together d. a concern for nature, i.e. the way things are and should be e. a concern with pride (threat against the status quo) Political and Social Issues: restoration of monarchy; development of a two-party parliamentary system; the growth of a protestant, middle-class and stable society; increased urbanization triggering a shift in the balance of power from the country-side to the city. Epic: a long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes, in a grand ceremonious style. The hero, usually protected by or descended from gods, performs superhuman exploits in battle or in marvellous voyages, often saving or founding a nation or the human race itself.

John Milton
Paradise Lost (1667) remains the most impressive of the three. Though at first Milton seems to have been tempted by the Arthurian legends as the fit subject for a national British epic, he then decided on the theme of the Fall, because the latter went beyond national confines, allowing the poet to analyse the whole question of freedom, free will and individual choice. Milton set out to demonstrate that even sin was a part of Gods plan for humanity, for mankind would not exist outside Paradise if Satan had not engineered the fall of Adam and Eve. Undergoing constant revision, in its final form Paradise Lost is clearly divided in two halves: the first one deals with the Fall of Satan and his rebellious Angels, while the second parallels it in the Fall of Man. Yet for both the Fall involves individual choice and becomes an assertion of their free will: reasoning between heaven and hell, Satan chooses the latter, to be free and supreme: Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671), both published four years after Paradise Lost, show a different conception of humanity from that portrayed in the first epic. Unlike Adam and Eve, Christ and Samson are both superhuman, i.e. beyond the bounds of normal human beings, and their triumphs (Christs over the tempting Satan, or Samsons over the Philistines) are less clearly explorations of human qualities than ideal exempla of what humanity should be rather than what it is. In Samson Agonistes Milton also returns to the theme of blindness, as Samson is eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves: The poem becomes a journey from darkness to light, from defeat to victory. Samsons final act of strength as he pulls down the temple of his foes turns his own death into an achievement, while the last lines compare his fame to the Phoenix, and turn Samson into a Christ-like figure, resurrected after death: John Dryden (1631-1700) is the dominant figure in the literature of the Restoration, a highly prolific writer expressing himself in all the important contemporary forms (odes, satires, epistles, fables, literary criticism, drama), as well as always placing himself at the centre of the greatest debates of the time (be them political, religious, or the specifically literary questions of neoclassicism.) Mock-epic: a rhetorical strategy in which the high style and the typical poetic strategies of the epic are used to satirize far lower subjects than the hero's defense or destruction of a mighty city, or his reclamation of his birthright. In this manner, the satirical point is made by the disparity between the subject and the style of the poem. Mock-biblical: a rhetorical strategy in which scriptural quotations, typologies, or tropes are used for satirical ends. In the 1680s, Dryden moved on to writing formal verse satires, as part of the ages preference for the genre. Restoration satire, mainly written in verse, could be of two kinds: the first one took the form of a very general sweeping criticism of mankind, such as A Satire Against Reason and Mankind, written by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester exemplifies. The other type tended to be very specific, with allusions to real figures in politics and society. Samuel Butlers Hudibras is a commentary on the Civil Wars and the events

leading to the Restoration, attacking the Puritan religion and debasing its enemies by using the burlesque, caricature, and the grotesque. Drydens satirical works belong to the second type, being specifically targeted. Absalom and Achitophel (1681) uses an allegorical form in order to comment on the fundamental religious and political issues of the time: the succession to the throne, disputed between the Kings Catholic brother, James, and his Protestant, but illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. The poem blends the heroic and the satiric, distancing contemporary events through the analogues found in the biblical story of Absaloms revolt against his father, David, the king of Israel. Other contemporary figures are similarly matched to their biblical counterparts, most notable being the association of the Whig earl of Shaftesbury, the principal supporter of Monmouths claim, to Achitophel, Absaloms chief adviser in the Bible. One of the most impressive features of the poem resides with Drydens skill in rendering the fragility of the Restoration settlement, while reasserting his faith in the kings ability to control the situation. Among other things, this involves a tactical success in the presentation of the main characters. David is not offered as a simple heroic character at the start. Dryden is careful to mention the kings faults, but finally transforms them into qualities, related to principles of warmth and creativity. Absalom and Achitophel also proves Drydens mastery of the heroic couplet a pentameter couplet, containing a complete statement - which becomes the norm with Neoclassicist authors. MacFlecknoe (1684) is another specifically-targeted satire, this time against a literary rival, Thomas Shadwell, with whom Dryden had had an argument. In order to expose his victim to ridicule, Dryden uses the devices of the mock-epic - which treats the low, mean or absurd in the grand language, lofty style, solemn tone of epic poetry in order to link Shadwell to a minor poet, Richard Fleckoe, who had been ridiculed by Andrew Marvell in a previous poem. The ageing Flecknoe is made by Dryden an anti-monarch, ruling over realms of Nonsense absolute, who hands on his power (in an absurdly pompous ceremony of procession and coronation) to his son (Mac) Shadwell: Alexander Pope The masterpiece of the earlier part of Popes career is The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714). It is a mockheroic poem on an actual episode which involved two prominent families of the day, and its aim to laugh the two out of the quarrel that resulted after Lord Petre had cut off a lock from Miss Arabella Fermours hair. Pope elaborated the trivial event into the semblance of an epic in miniature, which abounds in parodies and echoes of The Iliad, The Aeneid, or Paradise Lost, forcing thus the reader to constantly compare great things with small. Even if the familiar devices of the epic are observed, the incidents or characters are beautifully proportioned to the scale of the mock epic: the war becomes in the poem the drawing room one between the sexes, the heroes and heroines are the beaux and the belle of the day, supernatural characters are present in the Sylphs (the souls of the dead coquettes), the epic journey to the underworld becomes a journey undertaken to the Cave of Spleen. As such, the poem traces the course of the fateful day when Belinda, the society beauty, wakes up, glorifies her appearance at a ritualistic dressing-table, engages into a game of cards, sips coffee and gossips and finally has her hair ravaged. As in the pastoral tradition, the action is set in the wider circle of time itself: at the close of the poem, the violated lock is transported to heaven to become a new star, an attractive trap for all mankind. His editing of Shakespeares Works (1725) prompted a pamphlet by a contemporary scholar and playwright, Lewis Theobald, in which the latter was pointing out Popes scholarly deficiencies. In response, Pope turned Theobald into the hero of his Dunciad, a satire and mock-epic reply to the poets critics. In the final version of the work, another contemporary, Colley Cibber, a playwright who, in the meantime, had earned Popes disapproval, was moved into that position. The Dunciad was designed originally as a contribution to the war against literary dullness carried on by the members of the Martinus Scriblerus club which Pope had joined in 1713. The first version, published in 1728, consisted of three books; a fourth, The New Dunciad, was published in 1742, while the complete work appeared in 1743 as a brilliantly wrought attack on all sorts of literary vices. In the first book, the character Bayes (Colley Cibber), unpopular and despairing, tries to decide where his talents will be best deployed.

5. Neoclassical Satire
Cultural background Neoclassicism, The Age of Reason a. a regard for tradition and reverence for the classics b. a sense of literature as art (i.e artificed, artificial, made by craft) c. a concern for social reality, and the communal commonplaces of thought which hold it together d. a concern for nature, i.e. the way things are and should be e. a concern with pride (threat against the status quo) Political and Social Issues: restoration of monarchy; development of a two-party parliamentary system; the growth of a protestant, middle-class and stable society; increased urbanization triggering a shift in the balance of power from the country-side to the city. Satire (from Latin satura) is a literary genre in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to bring about improvement. Restoration satire took two main forms: a general, sweeping criticism of mankind and a specifically-targeted criticism, alluding to real figures in politics and society Drydens satirical works belong to the second type, being specifically targeted. Absalom and Achitophel (1681) uses an allegorical form in order to comment on the fundamental religious and political issues of the time: the succession to the throne, disputed between the Kings Catholic brother, James, and his Protestant, but illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth. The poem blends the heroic and the satiric, distancing contemporary events through the analogues found in the biblical story of Absaloms revolt against his father, David, the king of Israel. Other contemporary figures are similarly matched to their biblical counterparts, most notable being the association of the Whig earl of Shaftesbury, the principal supporter of Monmouths claim, to Achitophel, Absaloms chief adviser in the Bible. One of the most impressive features of the poem resides with Drydens skill in rendering the fragility of the Restoration settlement, while reasserting his faith in the kings ability to control the situation. Among other things, this involves a tactical success in the presentation of the main characters. David is not offered as a simple heroic character at the start. Dryden is careful to mention the kings faults, but finally transforms them into qualities, related to principles of warmth and creativity. Absalom and Achitophel also proves Drydens mastery of the heroic couplet a pentameter couplet, containing a complete statement - which becomes the norm with Neoclassicist authors. MacFlecknoe (1684) is another specifically-targeted satire, this time against a literary rival, Thomas Shadwell, with whom Dryden had had an argument. In order to expose his victim to ridicule, Dryden uses the devices of the mock-epic - which treats the low, mean or absurd in the grand language, lofty style, solemn tone of epic poetry in order to link Shadwell to a minor poet, Richard Fleckoe, who had been ridiculed by Andrew Marvell in a previous poem. The ageing Flecknoe is made by Dryden an anti-monarch, ruling over realms of Nonsense absolute, who hands on his power (in an absurdly pompous ceremony of procession and coronation) to his son (Mac) Shadwell: Alexander Pope The masterpiece of the earlier part of Popes career is The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714). It is a mockheroic poem on an actual episode which involved two prominent families of the day, and its aim to laugh the two out of the quarrel that resulted after Lord Petre had cut off a lock from Miss Arabella Fermours hair. Pope elaborated the trivial event into the semblance of an epic in miniature, which abounds in parodies and echoes of The Iliad, The Aeneid, or Paradise Lost, forcing thus the reader to constantly compare great things with small. Even if the familiar devices of the epic are observed, the incidents or characters are beautifully proportioned to the scale of the mock epic: the war becomes in the poem the drawing room one between the sexes, the heroes and heroines are the beaux and the belle of the day, supernatural characters are present in the Sylphs (the souls of the dead coquettes), the epic journey to the underworld becomes a journey undertaken to the Cave of Spleen. As such, the poem traces the course of the fateful day when Belinda, the society beauty, wakes up, glorifies her appearance at a ritualistic dressing-table, engages into a game of cards, sips coffee and gossips and finally has her hair ravaged. As in the pastoral

tradition, the action is set in the wider circle of time itself: at the close of the poem, the violated lock is transported to heaven to become a new star, an attractive trap for all mankind. His editing of Shakespeares Works (1725) prompted a pamphlet by a contemporary scholar and playwright, Lewis Theobald, in which the latter was pointing out Popes scholarly deficiencies. In response, Pope turned Theobald into the hero of his Dunciad, a satire and mock-epic reply to the poets critics. In the final version of the work, another contemporary, Colley Cibber, a playwright who, in the meantime, had earned Popes disapproval, was moved into that position. The Dunciad was designed originally as a contribution to the war against literary dullness carried on by the members of the Martinus Scriblerus club which Pope had joined in 1713. The first version, published in 1728, consisted of three books; a fourth, The New Dunciad, was published in 1742, while the complete work appeared in 1743 as a brilliantly wrought attack on all sorts of literary vices. In the first book, the character Bayes (Colley Cibber), unpopular and despairing, tries to decide where his talents will be best deployed: Jonathan Swift is the greatest writer of the first half of the 18th century (if not of the whole century). He was a great humanist and a savage satirist, taking the satire of such poets like Dryden and Pope to a polemical extreme, criticizing and mocking authority figures with an ever-increasing venom. A Tale of a Tub (1704) is a prose satire on religious fanaticism. It tells the story of three brothers representing the main branches of the Christian Church: Peter represents Catholicism, Martin stands for Anglicanism and Jack for Dissent. Their father leaves his coat to the three boys, saying that they must not alter it, but all three of them fail and fall out in the process. Accounting for the various ways in which the brothers behave towards the coat, Swift ironically presents the history of the development of Christianity: Rome is attacked for its arrogance and doctrine of transubstantiation, Dissent (Presbyterianism) for its religious fundamentalism, whereas the Anglican Church, while celebrated as the most perfect in discipline and doctrine, still has its flaws. The Tale is meant to divert attacks upon the ship of state and religion by using the old seamans trick of throwing an empty tub into the sea to distract whales. The preface is then followed by five digressional episodes satirizing various modern absurdities, such as pedantic scholarship and Puritanism. The narrator is the most memorable character, interrupting the story with digressions (e.g. a Digression in Praise of Digression), and whose pride in learning and lack of common sense represent the zealous modern insanity that Swift takes as his target for satire. It is a prose parody which is divided into: A tale which presents a consistent satire on religious excess: an allegory that concerns 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). Sections of "digressions: a series of parodies of contemporary writing in literature, politics, theology, Biblical exegesis, and medicine. Both in the narrative sections and the digressions Swift is attacking misreadings of all sorts through the persona of the narrator who is seeking hidden knowledge, mechanical operations of things spiritual, spiritual qualities to things physical, and alternate readings of everything. The Battle of the Books (1704) is part of the Ancients vs. the Moderns controversy. This mock-heroic prose satire, revealing for the first time Swifts mastery of light, ironic satire, makes use of allegory which was to become the authors favorite device in Gulliver. The Spider standing for the Moderns is opposed to the Bee, representing the Ancients. It is a short satire that depicts a literal battle between books in the King's Library, as ideas and authors struggle for supremacy. The battle is not just between Classical authors and modern authors, but also between authors and critics. The combat in the "Battle" is interrupted by the 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. Swift indicts pride (believing one's own age to be supreme) and the inferiority of derivative works

However, Swifts masterpiece is Gullivers Travels (1726), looked upon as the most universal satire, in spite of its being also full of allusions to recent and contemporary events, whose main objects are mans moral nature and the defective political, economic and social institutions which human imperfections call into being, in other words, antagonism to the current optimistic view that human nature is essentially good. Swift used the device of the imaginary voyage in producing a purportedly autobiographical narrative of Lemuel Gulliver, a ships surgeon, who tells of his voyage to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa and the country of the Houyhnhnms. In his first voyage to Lilliput, he encounters diminutive inhabitants who call him Man Mountain; his satirical plan is aimed at pointing out the long-standing feud between England and France (Blefuscu) and the petty functionalism of the kingdom with its political parties and religious controversies. In the second voyage to Brobdingnag, the perspective is reversed: Gulliver is diminutive and the Brobdingnagians gigantic. The main features of this second voyage are Gullivers revulsion at the magnified details of human anatomy and his defensive account of English and Continental politics. The account he gives of England grows increasingly ironic as he unintentionally exposes the irrationality and barbarism of his own culture, all the time convinced that he is making a good impression. After two years, he leaves Brondingnag through a misadventure and makes his way to England which he now sees as Lilliputian. During the next journey he visits the flying island of Laputa and the neighbouring Lagado and Luggnagg. Laputas inhabitants are obsessed with astronomical speculations involving mathematic and music; at Lagados Academy of Projectors a satire on the Royal Society he finds manic researches going on at the hands of scientists (one trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, another one trying to build a house starting from the roof, etc.). Swifts satire is this time directed against some new scientific institutions of the time such as the above mentioned Royal Society and other schools of learning. Finally, he visits the land of the horses who live by the dictates of reason and whose language is the perfection of nature. Having listened to Gullivers account of European politics in general, the Houyhnhnms decide he is a yahoo, i.e. the vilest form of life in their country. This is the culmination of Swifts angry polemic: he contrasts the rational, clean, civilized horses with the foul, brutal, uncivilized Yahoos, a race of ape-like beasts in human form. Gulliver himself has to recognize that the Yahoos are the closest to his own species. In a period when horses were one of the main servants of man, Swifts examination of roles seems intended to provoke and offend, but in fact it was dismissed as fantastic comedy and its satiric power was blunted. As the above given quotation shows, his prose style is clear, simple, characterized by concrete diction, uncomplicated syntax, economy and conciseness of language, that shuns amazement and grows more teasing and controlled the more fierce the indignation that is called upon to express. Gulliver is banished and returns to England, where the impression made on him remains so strong that he prefers the company of horses to that of his own family. That determined many critics to see his work, for a long time, as a deeply pessimistic judgment on human nature.

6. Restoration Drama: the heroic tragedy vs. the comedy-of manners.

Cultural background Neoclassicism, The Age of Reason

a. a regard for tradition and reverence for the classics b. a sense of literature as art (i.e artificed, artificial, made by craft) c. a concern for social reality, and the communal commonplaces of thought which hold it together d. a concern for nature, i.e. the way things are and should be e. a concern with pride (threat against the status quo) Political and Social Issues: restoration of monarchy; development of a two-party parliamentary system; the growth of a protestant, middle-class and stable society; increased urbanization triggering a shift in the balance of power from the country-side to the city. Between 1642 and 1660 the theatres in England were officially closed and the actors were put outside the law, being considered rogues or vagabonds. When theatre was officially reopened three months after the restoration of Charles II, a new type of theatre, quite different from its Elizabethan and Jacobian predecessors, emerged. Unlike the Globe or the Fortune, the Restoration theatres were roofed, bigger and less intimate. While the Elizabethan thrust stage was incorporated, it gradually grew shallower, with the action being jutted back, behind the picture frame. Artificial lightning, stage boxes, or moveable perspective scenery were also introduced. Another innovation consisted in the introduction of women players, which encouraged a more realistic sexual atmosphere on stage, and also witnessed to the beginning of extratheatrical relationships being established between performers and members of the audience. The audience itself also changed in its social composition, shrinking from the wide spectrum of national life of the Elizabethan playgoers to encompass mainly members of the aristocracy and the newly-rich middleclasses . The heroic tragedy Its basic conception is simple: at its centre there is a hero, conceived as a superman, and placed in a situation where he is to choose between fulfilling his own emotional needs, or dedicating himself to the public good. His actions are meant to arouse not pity or terror, but wonder and admiration. In keeping with the neo-classical standards, the plays are written in rhyme, and very often make use of the splendour and fascination of the spectacle. Among the playwrights making their contribution to the Restoration tragedy the most notable are: John Dryden, with The Conquest of Granada and All For Love, Nathaniel Lee, with his Nero, Sophonisba, Gloriana or The Rival Queens, and Thomas Otway, with The Orphan (1680) or Venice Preservd (1682). By far the most original, Otway wrote tragedies of failure, remorse and suicide, rather than of ambition, corruption and destiny. In Venice Preservd, the hero Jaffeir becomes a foe to Venice by joining a conspiracy against the its senators not for the sake of freedom, but mainly to avenge his love, Belvidera. A case apart is represented by George Lillo, in whose plays like The London Merchant (1731) or The Fatal Curiosity (1736) the domestic tragedy of the Elizabethan theatre finds a new middle-class setting. The Fatal Curiosity is set in Cornwall where an old couple murder a visiting stranger in the hope of monetary gain, only to discover that the young stranger was their own son, thought long lost at sea: The comedy of manners At the other end of the spectrum there lies the comedy-of-manners, an import of the French comedy of morals, which mirrored the manners, modes and morals of the upper-class society. Its main subject is sex: sexual attraction, sexual intrigue, sexual conquest, with an acute interest in the relationships between love and money, or love and marriage. The typical play features a witty and amoral couple at the centre, a fatuous fop, a discarded mistress and a cuckolded citizen in the middle distance, as well as a group of assorted elderly lechers of both sexes in the background. The plot, which is highly complex and involves the proliferation of intrigue in subplots, deals alternatively with the pursuit of love and money.

Another subject of interest is related to the uses and abuses of affectation (or socially determined behaviour): its characters are obsessed with fashion, gossip and their own circle in society. Strong contrasts are made between innocence and knowingness, often represented as contrasts between rustic countrymanners and the refinements of the city. Its aims are twofold: to correct (by making vice seem ridiculous) and to amuse. As such the plays offer a realistic picture of life, less stylized and more naturalistic, creating the illusion of a more familiar world than that presented in the tragedies. George Ethereges plays - The Comical Revenge, or Love in a Tub (1664), She Woud If She Coud (1668) or The Man of Mode or, Sir Fopling Flutter (1676) were among the first notable successes. The Man of Mode uses interwoven plots to counterpoint youth and old age, town and country, male and female. At one end of the scale we find Dorimant, the young gallant always in search of pleasure until forced to agree to marriage; at the other there Sir Fopling Flutter, the old country squire, the innocent in town, whose mindless foppery is satirized William Wycherleys plays - The Gentleman Dancing Master 1672); The Country Wife (1675); The Plain Dealer (1676) belong to the 1670s when the presence of the actresses had become firmly established. As such as subjects are related to physical sex and cuckoldry, and Wycherley has often been considered the most obscene and amoral of the Restoration playwrights. The Country Wife is a comedy of seduction and hypocrisy, dealing with Horners sexual conquests of both the fashionable town wives and the artless country wife of the title: Nevertheless, the masterpiece of the genre is considered to be William Congreves The Way of the World (1700), whose way was paved by the other three comedies that Congreve wrote in the 1690s: The Old Bachelor (1693), The Double Dealer (1693) and Love for Love (1695). The Way of the World makes use of the standard situation which involves the witty pair of lovers, the amorous widow, the squire from the country, intrigues and adultery, and the usual tensions between desire and reputation. Though the plays main theme is marriage, its reality and appearance, its relationship to love and money, Mirabell and Millamant demonstrate that the terms need not be antagonistic, for their marriage should primarily be linked to emotional fulfilment. At the same time, the the play remains memorable for the classic jousts of wit into which the two lovers - in the tradition of the Shakespearean comic lovers like Beatrice and Benedick engage, with Millamant demonstrating great poise and a sense of appropriate modern behaviour:

7. The Essay during the 17th- and 18th- centuries: John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Addison and Steele.
Drydens literary criticism is represented by the various essays, prefaces, dramatic prologues and epilogues in which he expressed his opinions on literature and art. Some of the best known ones are: Essay of Dramatic Poesie (1668) Essay of Heroic Plays (1672) Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) Preface to Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) Having proclaimed himself a classicist, Dryden follows the model of the Graeco-Roman tradition and considers that literature must imitate nature and give a picture of truth in order to both delight and instruct. Moreover, he stresses the importance of decorum (a literature principle in accordance to which style and subject-matter must be matched) and of the rules (e.g. the rule of the dramatic unities) which literature must obey. Alexander Popes Essay on Criticism (1711), as well as surveying abuses in reading and writing, makes a plea for correctness in literary composition and, in neoclassical fashion, highlights the relationship between Art and Nature. It is a compilation of Pope's various literary opinions. It is a verse essay written in heroic couplets and is primarily concerned with how writers and critics behave in the new literary commerce of Pope's contemporary age. Throughout the poem, Pope refers to ancient writers such as Virgil, Homer, Aristotle, Horace and Longinus. This is a testament to his belief that the "Imitation of the ancients" is the ultimate standard for taste. It preaches correctness in literary composition and highlights the relationship between Art and Nature (the ideal which serves as a model for imitation In the last part of his literary career, Pope moved on to philosophical, ethical and political subjects, through which he championed the same values of traditional civilisation: right reason, humanistic learning, sound art, good taste, and public virtue. In his Essay on Man (1733-34), the poet, influenced by Deism, approached the study of humanity scientifically, in relation to the cosmos, confident that meaning can be found. Comprising four philosophical epistles, An Essay on Man devolved from discussions instigated by Pope's friend Lord Bolingbroke concerning the place of rational humans in an ordered universe and various relationships between the individual, society, and the possibility for happiness. The Moral Essays (1731-5) continued the investigation at the social level, focusing on various aspects of mans social morality: However, before dealing with them, the development of the newspapers and of the periodical essays, standing as an interesting literary sideline of the 17th and 18th centuries, should be considered. Journalism had started developing during the Civil Wars, stimulating the public appetite for up-to-minute news that was vital at the time. The Restoration period with its interest in men and affairs, its information services in the coffee houses developed an even wider interest in home and foreign news and as the market for the printed word expanded, the production rose to meet the demands of the public, largely represented by middle-class readership. The result was the foundation of newspapers and weekly journals. The Tatler (1709-11) and The Spectator (1711-12, 1714) were journals of coffee house gossip and ideas in London and progenitors of a long line of well-informed magazines. Their founders, Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729), are looked upon, in many ways, as being the fathers of the modern periodical. Their friendship began when they were schoolboys together in London, their careers ran parallel courses (they both attended Oxford) and brought them into fruitful collaboration; they both enjoyed the patronage of the great Whig magnates (except during the last four years of Queen Annes reign, under the Tories) by whom they were generously treated. The aim of these two conscious moralists was frankly educational; they never disguised their intention of improving the minds, morals and manners of their readers.

Addison outlines a moral and educational programme for the post Restoration English society, particularly for the nouveaux riches and the rising middle-class in general, mainly through the discussion of great authors and their books. Steele, in his turn, has the same educational purpose that he believes can be achieved by insinuating moral or other teachings under the guise of entertainment: The Tatler (1709-11) was first launched by Steele (hiding behind a pseudonym, Isaac Bickerstaff) with the contribution of Addison and its title was meant as a bid for female readers. It provided the readers with a mixture of news with personal reflections that made it highly popular. Steeles essays applied his ideal to any topic that suggested itself as pleasing or useful: the theatre, true breeding as against vulgar manners, education, simplicity in dress, the proper use of Sunday etc.; he ridiculed common social types such as the prude, the coquette, the rake, etc. The Spectator (1711-12, 1714) was a joint undertaking, though dominated by Addison. He turned it into the journal of an imaginary gentlemans club (Mr. Spectators Club), whose members represented contemporary social types (a man about town, a student of law and literature, a churchman, a soldier, etc.). The most memorable of all were Sir Roger de Coverley, a Tory country squire, rather simple-minded, thoroughly good-hearted, never for long away from his country estate, full of prejudices and superstitions, and, respectively, Sir Andrew Freeport, a Whig London merchant, a man of less charm, but of far more intelligence. The intention was to outline the middle way as being the best: though there is much good in the old, the progress lies with the Whigs. The attitudes the essays display in relation to the opposition between the city and the countryside and between the social classes provide, in fact, the readers with significant indications of the time. This sense of class and social identity is significant in the papers consideration of market appeal, for it sets down and perpetuates class values which would remain strong for two centuries.

8. The 18th - century Novel: Defoe and Richardson DEFINITION: An extended fictional prose narrative, often including the psychological development of the central characters and of their relationship with a broader world. The modern novel took its name and inspiration from the Italian novella, the short tale of varied character which became popular in the late 13th

century. As the main form of narrative fiction in the 20th century, the novel is frequently classified according to genres and subgenres such as the historical novel, detective fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. Context the growth of economic/possessive individualism, and with it the new mercantile capitalist values of investment and capital accumulation. related to this, the rise of materialistic philosophical individualism, with its new emphasis on the individual (rather than social groups) as the essential social unit. the new demand for education/moral training associated with middle class values. The middle classes existed as a readership, and required reading material. the influence of protestant individualism (especially Calvinism) in directing new attitudes towards the individual.

A key concern in terms of the development of the eighteenth century novel is the recurring preoccupation with realism, and realistic depiction of society. This is seen in Defoe's and Fielding's preoccupations with the word "History" (and the need to defend themselves against accusations of lying, and in their attempts to make their works as realistic as possible, whether by using first person narration as in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, or by relying on Aristolean notions of "mimesis". An alternative tactic was to use epistolary form, most notably in the works of Richardson, (and burlesqued by Fielding in Shamela), or to use consciously anti-romance forms, in the picaresque tradition of Cervantes (as in Roderick Random), as a means of asserting the realism of their writing. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) and the Fictitious Autobiography The story of Robinson Crusoe is based squarely on the account of a fugitive sailor, Alexander Selkirk, who survived on an uninhabited island in the Pacific for five years. Defoes imaginative reworking of Selkirks memoirs enjoys therefore a pronounced degree of realism. His Crusoe is a mariner who takes to sea despite parental warnings and, after suffering a number of misfortunes at the hands of Barbary pirates and the elements, is shipwrecked off South America, where, according to his journal, is able to resist for some 28 years, two months and nineteen days. If, as a psychological study in isolation, the novel seems now unconvincing, its strength comes from a combination of disparate echoes and shapes: Jonah, Job, Everyman, the Prodigal Son, the colonial explorer and the proto-industrialist. The economic aspects of Defoes fiction have in particular prompted the interest of recent criticism: Crusoes survival and his enterprising behaviour are seen as expressions of Defoes own belief in the mercantilist mentality of the expanding British Empire. Crusoe starts his journey as a trader, to make money and thus increase his material comforts. Once shipwrecked on the island, his only thought is to remould in his distant isolation the whole pattern of the material civilisation he has left behind. This is supplemented by a sober, businesslike religion, with due gratitude for the Gods mercies and a belief that God helps those who help themselves. The novel confirms for the reader the ultimate rightness of Crusoes way of thinking and acting. It ends positively, going beyond Crusoes rescue to show how the mariners investments make him rich, while the island becomes colonised, ensuring thus the continuation of the model of society that Crusoe established there. Moll Flanders (1722) is another of Defoes attempts to pass as genuine a work of imagination. This time it is the memoirs of a prostitute, and, as Defoe wrote in the preface to the novel, he was keen to insist on their truthfulness. Thus, the first person narration unravels Molls dissolute life as thief, prostitute and incestuous wife, while also containing much social comment on the gaols, the conditions of the poor, and the suffering of emigrants, all of them subjects of concern for the well-intentioned middle-classes. Though Moll uses her beauty and sex as a commodity, continually trying to sell them in the highest market in order to reach financial security, she is penitent in the end, and the narrative allows her not only to find happiness and peace but also to be accepted back into society. The title hero of Colonel Jack (also 1722) is another narrator telling his story from the vantage point of someone who has achieved wealth and respectability, after no less dissolute beginnings as pickpocket and

member of the London underworld. Looking back on his youth, the mature colonel recounts his first major exploit as a thief: Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) and the Epistolary Novel In the next generation of novelists, Samuel Richardson devised a different formula for achieving authenticity in his fictional works, namely to allow it to be understood that the author was simply the editor of a bundle of letters from various hands which threw light on an interesting human situation. Richardsons Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) raises the tone of the novel from the level of this kind of subject-matter. In the letters that Pamela Andrews sends to her honest and poverty-stricken parents, the novel presents a breathless account of how the poor but virtuous teenage maidservant resists the sexual harassment of her master until the man learns to appreciate and respect her nature and proposes marriage in earnest. However, the story does not end here, and the second part of the novel focuses on Pamelas acclimatisation to the new social position and the dignified way with which she conducts her marriage, in accordance to Richardsons didactic purpose to prove that worth depends on individual effort rather than social status. Clarissa (1748) marks a major step forward. A longer and more elaborate novel, it tells the story of the title heroine, the virtuous, beautiful and talented young daughter of the wealthy Harlowes, who falls in love with a profligate aristocrat, Robert Lovelace, rejecting an older suitor, Mr. Solmes, whom the family have chosen for her. Lovelace abducts Clarissa, then plays with her emotions in devious ways and finally rapes the young woman while she is under the influence of drugs. Filled with remorse, he then wants to marry her, but Clarissa refuses and, very slowly, dies a martyr to the combined cruelty of her lover and her family. The novel handles the interplay of its characters psychology with more subtlety and complexity than the previous Pamela, mainly due to a development of Richardsons epistolary technique which employs two main sets of correspondents: Clarissa and her friend, Anna Howe, and Lovelace and his friend, Belford. This arrangement allows Richardson to take the readers into the inner thoughts of the main characters. It also allows him to present the action of the novel through the eyes of each of them, and while one of them is explaining what is happening, to keep the reader in suspense about what the other is thinking and feeling.

9. The 18th - century Novel: Fielding and Sterne

DEFINITION: An extended fictional prose narrative, often including the psychological development of the central characters and of their relationship with a broader world. The modern novel took its name and inspiration from the Italian novella, the short tale of varied character which became popular in the late 13th

century. As the main form of narrative fiction in the 20th century, the novel is frequently classified according to genres and subgenres such as the historical novel, detective fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. Context the growth of economic/possessive individualism, and with it the new mercantile capitalist values of investment and capital accumulation. related to this, the rise of materialistic philosophical individualism, with its new emphasis on the individual (rather than social groups) as the essential social unit. the new demand for education/moral training associated with middle class values. The middle classes existed as a readership, and required reading material. the influence of protestant individualism (especially Calvinism) in directing new attitudes towards the individual.

A key concern in terms of the development of the eighteenth century novel is the recurring preoccupation with realism, and realistic depiction of society. This is seen in Defoe's and Fielding's preoccupations with the word "History" (and the need to defend themselves against accusations of lying, and in their attempts to make their works as realistic as possible, whether by using first person narration as in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, or by relying on Aristolean notions of "mimesis". An alternative tactic was to use epistolary form, most notably in the works of Richardson, (and burlesqued by Fielding in Shamela), or to use consciously anti-romance forms, in the picaresque tradition of Cervantes (as in Roderick Random), as a means of asserting the realism of their writing. Henry Fielding (1707-54) and the omniscient narrator Henry Fielding was the other dominant figure of the mid-eighteenth century English novel. An adept at literary parody and a good stylistic mimic, Fielding was prompted into novel-writing by the furore caused by the publication of Richardsons Pamela in 1740. A year later he replied with a skilful pastiche entitled Shamela (1741), which makes the innocent virtue displayed by Richardsons original heroine appear calculating and conniving. Fielding followed up the same idea with his first novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), which was also intended as a kind of parody of Richardson. Supposedly the story of Pamelas brother, the novel intends to make fun of chastity (male) as a heavy moral issue. Thus it begins by ridiculing the view that innocence is possible would a young man-servant reject the advances of his mistress? However, under Fieldings hand, the novel develops quite differently: its simple tale - in which the chaste young hero is unjustly dismissed for resisting the lures of his employer, Lady Booby, and travels homewards, accompanied by Abraham Adams, a poor clergyman, and Fanny, Josephs sweetheart - ends by asserting the opposing view. The episodic narrative, which traces the mishaps of the trio on their way home, constantly opposes their unaffected goodness and innocence with the greed, arrogance, aggression and deceit that characterise the predatory world of Georgian England. But Joseph Andrews is not only an enquiry into the character of a virtuous man, but also an enquiry into the form of a novel, on which Fielding theorizes in its Preface. Appealing to Homer and Aristotle as authorities for the new genre, Fielding considers the novel to be a comic romance or a comic epic poem in prose, with a more extended and comprehensive action, which includes a much larger circle of incidents and introduces a greater variety of characters. This comic epic would take its subjects from life and would follow Nature, and though the subjects would be treated in a comic way, they would not be distorted. Moreover, events and characters should be presented not as examples of life, but as comments on it, in order to provide the readers with models of ethical behaviour. As such, the novelist becomes not simply a chronicler, still less an entertainer, but a moralist who believes that through fiction (a fabricated tale which resembles the historians narrative, but goes beyond it to trace permanent features of human nature) can make recommendations about how people should behave: In order to achieve this end, the novelist becomes an active shaper and manipulator of the narrative, an omniscient and intrusive narrator who not only controls the lives and destinies of his characters, but can intervene, explain, move away from the detail of the story to the general truths which it was intended to illustrate. As such, Fielding places his novel before the reader, as if inviting him to engage in a deeply

serious game, where the distance between its three participants (the narrator, the narrative, and the reader) is often altered: now the actions of the characters completely occupy the readers attention, now the narrator acts as commentator, quietly describing what is going on, now narrator and reader confront one another talking about the game and its implications. Fielding focuses more on male characters and manners than Richardson, intending his heroes to be types representative of their sex. The same holds true for The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling (1749), where the title character is the model of the male rake reduced to good looks, ready instincts and an inability to say no. Tom Jones is thus both a vital and fallible hero, both generous and imprudent, enjoying his freedom in various ways: hunting, travelling, having relationships with women. But in the course of the journey that he is forced to undertake from the security of Mr Allworthys country home to the rickety of London is also a journey from innocence to experience, from freedom to responsibility, during which the hero matures and learns prudence. As such Tom is eventually rewarded with a happy marriage to Sophia Western, the woman he has always loved and with financial security, for his true origins as Mr Allworthys proper heir are promptly discovered. The novel, structured in eighteen books, is also distinguished by the way in which the fortunes of the hero are described by a separate narrator, who is virtually a character in his own right, playing a great part in directing the spicing the course of the story. These omniscient and frequently intrusive authorial utterances invite the reader to sympathise with the hero, despite his faults or yieldings to temptation. Laurence Sterne (1713-68) and the anti-novel The tradition of the English novel, after less than a century of existence, started to lend itself to subversive experimentation once Laurence Sternes Tristram Shandy made its entrance onto the literary scene, upsetting previous notions of time, place and action and extending thus the boundaries of what fiction meant, beyond a mere observation of human actions with moral overtones. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, a highly original 8-volume novel published between 1760 and 1767, is the first to parody the existing conventions of the form. If plot was supposed to follow the natural order of things, having thus a beginning, a middle and an end, Sterne was addressing his readers even at the outset of his work pointing up the absurdities, contradictions and impossibilities of relating time-spacereality relationship in a linear form. As such, the novel, which is narrated in the first person, begins on the night of Tristrams conception, but does not allow its character to be born until the fourth volume, to finally end some four years before his birth, becoming thus a parody of the autobiographical novel, with the story of Tristrams life never getting told. The author deliberately hinders all movement, for his narrators thoughts ramble forward, backward, sideways, describing a wide range of characters and their peculiarities, covering every subject under the sun, but never able to carry a story to its end. Influenced by John Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) - which viewed mental life as a stream of ideas, linked together by chance and flowing on beyond the control of the human being which were its hosts - the novel attempts to imitate what passes in a mans own mind, with the narrator being led from one topic to another in an apparently random way, interrupting the narrative with frequent digressions, i.e. episodes going off at a tangent from the main line of the plot. For example, the accident on Tristrams nose (flattened with the forceps by Dr. Slop when delivering the baby) prompts the narrator intervene with a long digression on noses. Other digressions are provided by a sermon delivered by Yorrick, the local clergyman named after the jester in Hamlet, a solemn and extensive oath of excommunication in Latin, with the translation given on the opposite page, or an unfinished tale of the King of Bohemia. The same effect is achieved by Sternes use of graphological means, such as a blank sheet, a page with a marbled design on it, a collection of asteriks, lines and curves to display the difficulty of keeping to one single line of his story.

The characters themselves are further illustrations of Lockes theory, proving that each man lives in a world of his own, with his private obsessions, or hobby-horses, as the consciousness of every individual is conditioned by his private train of associations. Thus, if the obsession of Tristrams father, Walter Shandy, is the theory of names, which leads to the accidental mis-naming of the child, corrupting the Greek name of the Egyptian god of wisdom, Trismegistus, his uncle Tobys hobby horse is the theory and practice of

fortification and siege warfare, and the retired military man who has fought on the Continental wars spends much of his time attempting to reconstruct the battle of Namur on the bowling green. With no declared ideological or moral position other than to be a unique, civil, non-sensical and goodhumoured Shandean book, much of the appeal of Tristram Shandy is to be sought for in its self-conscious narrator, who proves fully aware of the artificiality of his form and the fact that he is engaging in an intricate game with the reader, in a conversational manner that rustles on headlong, with no regard for consistency or coherence, such as illustrated by the following excerpt in which the narrator enters into a direct dialogue with his imaginary audience, explaining the problems he confronts as an author:

10. The 18th - century Novel: Smollett and Goldsmith

DEFINITION: An extended fictional prose narrative, often including the psychological development of the central characters and of their relationship with a broader world. The modern novel took its name and inspiration from the Italian novella, the short tale of varied character which became popular in the late 13th century. As the main form of narrative fiction in the 20th century, the novel is frequently classified according to genres and subgenres such as the historical novel, detective fiction, fantasy, and science fiction.

Context the growth of economic/possessive individualism, and with it the new mercantile capitalist values of investment and capital accumulation. related to this, the rise of materialistic philosophical individualism, with its new emphasis on the individual (rather than social groups) as the essential social unit. the new demand for education/moral training associated with middle class values. The middle classes existed as a readership, and required reading material. the influence of protestant individualism (especially Calvinism) in directing new attitudes towards the individual.

A key concern in terms of the development of the eighteenth century novel is the recurring preoccupation with realism, and realistic depiction of society. This is seen in Defoe's and Fielding's preoccupations with the word "History" (and the need to defend themselves against accusations of lying, and in their attempts to make their works as realistic as possible, whether by using first person narration as in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, or by relying on Aristolean notions of "mimesis". An alternative tactic was to use epistolary form, most notably in the works of Richardson, (and burlesqued by Fielding in Shamela), or to use consciously anti-romance forms, in the picaresque tradition of Cervantes (as in Roderick Random), as a means of asserting the realism of their writing. Tobias Smollett (1721 - 71) and the picaresque tradition Tobias Smollett followed Fielding in writing life-stories of high-spirited young men, like Roderick Random (1748), Peregrine Pickle (1751), The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), or The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1762). These novels partly belong to the tradition of picaresque fiction, which deals with the lives of thieves and vagabonds, and which originated in 16 th century Spain, the earliest example being the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1553). Alain Ren Le Sage adapted the tradition of the picaresque novel in his Gil Blas (1715), a much more ambitious narrative in which the story of the title hero, a respectable young man who falls among thieves, serves as a frame for the life histories of many of the men and women he meets on his travels. This is the formula which Smollett himself drew upon, as the novelist was careful to acknowledge in his preface to Roderick Random. Nevertheless, Smollett also aimed to charge it with a human warmth that he found lacking in his admired Gil Blas, appealing to a much wider range of interests than Le Sage did. As such, Smolletts expects his reader to be sympathetic rather than merely curious, but open-minded enough to look dispassionately on the raw scenes of low life in which his chosen form of the picaresque novel compels him to place his hero. Though his heros surname (Random) hints at the chances to which he will be subject, Smollett has taken a decisive step away from the picaresque tradition by making him a man of good birth, while the circumstances in which Roderick finds himself are due to the ill-will of his grandfather as much as to chance. And like Tom Jones, Roderick will be saved from his surroundings and an incredible series of adventures - during which he is press-ganged in London, sails to the West Indies, is kidnapped and taken to France by smugglers -, by his innate good breeding, and will finally be rewarded by a happy marriage to the beautiful Narcissa. Though the plot lacks in plausibility, the Smolletts realism finds expression in the slices of documentary or non-fictional matter which are roughly inserted, like the following description of a storm at sea which the novelist could have experienced first-hand while a surgeons mate in the navy: Smolletts last novel, Humphry Clinker (1771) differs from the rambling narratives of his other fictions by adopting the old-fashioned form of the epistolary novel. Through the interplay of several letter-writers outlook, the readers find out the story of the Brambles, a family who tries to achieve health and social harmony as they travel round Britain. It also bears witness to the cult of sensibility, which had already entered fiction several decades earlier, and had brought about an interest in the analysis, indulgence and display of the emotional life, prompting a real flowering and display of humanitarian ideals and philanthropic action. As such, the health in question is not just the health of the principal character, Matthew Bramble, a benevolent elderly hypochondriac, but of the nation and of all society, from the semi-literate servant Win to the frustrated spinster aunt Tabitha, from the young Oxford student Jery to the young and impressionable Lydia. And, significantly, the farthest point of the journey - where the family finally reach a kind of utopia - is a Scottish paradise at Loch Lomond, not far from Smolletts own birthplace, at Dumbarton.

Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74) and the sentimental novel During the second half of the 18th century, in reaction to the ideas of the Enlightment placing their emphasis on reason and order, there became more and more prevalent the belief that sentiment could influence social development more powerfully. As such, the literary atmosphere started to witness the replacement of the neoclassical calm detachment and mocking attitude by the compassionate note meant to rouse the readers sympathy for their fellow men, which eventually, under the influence of Jean Jacques Rousseaus philosophy, came to be associated with emotions. Oliver Goldsmith, successful as a poet and comic dramatist, published his Rousseauisque fable on the antithesis between the goodness and innocence of mans natural emotions and the corrupting power of society, law and civilisation, The Vicar of Wakefield, in 1766. The novel is an improbable fairy-tale about Dr. Primrose (the vicar of the title and a person who combines learning with innocence, finding his greatest happiness by the domestic hearth with his wife and children) who is led by the activities of the wordly and the vicious, as well as a number of accidents, from one misfortune to another: his fortune is lost, his elder daughter is apparently seduced and ruined by the local squire; himself is cheated and deceived in numerous ways until he finds himself in the local jail; his eldest son becomes a fellow prisoner, accused of severely injuring a man in a duel. Nevertheless, to all these the vicar responds with gentle resignation and fortitude, and, by implausible contrivance, the novel is finally huddled to a happy ending, where the lost fortune is restored, the ruined daughter is discovered alive and married to her seducer, the son is freed and able thus to marry his first love. In spite of the deliberate naivities of the story and the moralising and sentimental exhibitions of feeling, the real achievements of Goldsiths novel are to be found in the way in which the tale is told in the first-person point of view, in the slight but effective differentiations in character between the various members of the family, and the comprehensive picture of provincial, family life that it provides:

11. The 18th - century Novel: Edgeworth, Burney and Austen

DEFINITION: An extended fictional prose narrative, often including the psychological development of the central characters and of their relationship with a broader world. The modern novel took its name and inspiration from the Italian novella, the short tale of varied character which became popular in the late 13th century. As the main form of narrative fiction in the 20th century, the novel is frequently classified according to genres and subgenres such as the historical novel, detective fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. Context the growth of economic/possessive individualism, and with it the new mercantile capitalist values of investment and capital accumulation.

related to this, the rise of materialistic philosophical individualism, with its new emphasis on the individual (rather than social groups) as the essential social unit. the new demand for education/moral training associated with middle class values. The middle classes existed as a readership, and required reading material. the influence of protestant individualism (especially Calvinism) in directing new attitudes towards the individual.

A key concern in terms of the development of the eighteenth century novel is the recurring preoccupation with realism, and realistic depiction of society. This is seen in Defoe's and Fielding's preoccupations with the word "History" (and the need to defend themselves against accusations of lying, and in their attempts to make their works as realistic as possible, whether by using first person narration as in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe, or by relying on Aristolean notions of "mimesis". An alternative tactic was to use epistolary form, most notably in the works of Richardson, (and burlesqued by Fielding in Shamela), or to use consciously anti-romance forms, in the picaresque tradition of Cervantes (as in Roderick Random), as a means of asserting the realism of their writing. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849) and the regional novel Maria Edgeworth, or the great Maria as she came to be known -, was one of the best-known literary figures of the time, writing of the Irish social scene at the time when the Act of Union passed in 1801 had brought Ireland fully into he United Kingdom, in both a political and legal sense. Her fictional work established Edgeworth as a writer of small-scale, provincial novels, where the particular detail and the humour and sense of character enlists the sympathetic participation of the reader. At the same time, these novels proved to become an acknowledged influence on Walter Scott, who praised Edgeworths innovations in his praface to Waverley (1814) and followed their model in his own depictions of the Scottish provincial scene. Castle Reckrent, published in 1800, is the first of these. The novel is set in 1782, aiming to provide a vivid picture of the Irish social conditions preceding the Union. It focuses on the history of a family of Irish landlords, whose path to ruin is narrated by Thady Quirk, their steward, who has witnessed their excesses and improvidence for the past three generations. Thadys narrative starts with the story of the lavish entertainer Sir Patrick Rackrent, who drinks himself to death. Then it goes on to that of Sir Patricks eldest son, Sir Murtagh, who dies in a rage against the enemies whom he continually sues. Sir Kit, the next Rackrent, is a gambler who fares no better, being killed in a duel. The present landlord, Sir Condy, eventually loses the estate by loans and litigations to Thaddys own son, Jason, and the Rackrents line is ended when Condy himself dies trying to emulate one of his grandfathers drinking feats. The novel displays a lively awareness of the Irish scene as well as that of the moral and psychological problems arising out of an impinging new social order, for Thaddys son, Jason, who educated himself and managed to become a lawyer, is intended as a representative of a rising, predatory middle-class. In the same order of ideas, the retainers self-professed loyalty to the Reckrents becomes ambiguous, especially in view of his sons eventual possession of the estate. The addition to the text of a preface, footnotes and a glossary introduces s;s,emts of antiquarian and sociological commentary, while the use of Hiberno-English (a term applied to those varieties of English spoken and sometimes written in Ireland) in Thaddys narrative, reveals an interest in regional varieties of language. Castle Reckrent was followed by Belinda (1810), a satiric novel in which the wicked Lady Delacour, whose tortured life has elements of gothic mystery, is reformed by the title-character. The Absentee (1812) deals with the ill-effects of landlord absenteeism in Ireland, while Ormond (1817) is innovative in its exploration of the effect of reading on the title-hero. Of her later novels, Helen (1834) presents a depressing view of the prospects for Irish society. Edgeworths keen, but disillusioned love of Ireland which her work records is also acknowledged in a letter dated the same year, 1834, in which the novelist declared it impossible to write fiction about the post-Union Ireland: The people would only break the glass and curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature distorted nature, in a fever.

If women took an active part in producing the gothic novel, they proved even more active in producing a different type of novel, at the other end of the scale, namely the one of contemporary social and domestic life. Here the chief interest lies in the delineation of manners and the detail and intimacy with which the behaviour of characters in a specific and limited social environment is described. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is the author of a series of novels which portray how a young woman grows up and develops as she enters and experiences the society of her day. The first of them and the one which established her reputation is Evelina; or, The History of a Young Ladys Entrance into the World, published in 1778. Employing an epistolary form, the novel traces the story of the title-heroine, a girl of humble education, brought up in rural seclusion until the age of 17 when she is sent to see the world and also enters the world of fashion. There she suffers a series of frustrations and humiliations until she meets the right people, in the persons of the aristocratic Lady Howard and Lord Orville, who, in seven months (and three volumes) tutor her education in self-knowledge, prudence and discretion and eventually turn her into a right match for Lord Orville himself. Her second novel, Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress, published in 1782, concerns the fortunes of Cecilia Beverley, who is victimised by her three unscrupulous guardians, Harrel, Briggs and the Hon. Compton Delville until she is eventually allowed to find a modicum of happiness with her lover Mortimer Delville. In both of them the tone is gently satirical, blended with vivid observation, while society and the aspirations to be part of it are their main concerns. Their strength lies in comedy and the comedy of domestic life, developed around innocent heroines like Evelina and Cecilia. As a novelist, Burney inherited the form from Richardson and Fielding, but handled it in such a way that would prove useful to Jane Austen, herself. Jane Austen (1775-1817) ranks as the greatest of these women novelists, the one who raised the genre to a new level of art by applying the techniques of the novel to the acute observation of the provincial society of her time. Austens novels portray small groups of people in a limited, perhaps confining environment. Her characters, who are middle-class and provincial, have as their most urgent preoccupations courtship, while their greatest ambition proves to be marriage. The apparently trivial incidents of their life are moulded by the author into a poised comedy-of-manners, where a gentle irony is deployed in order to point to the underlying moral commentary. Though one finds no exhibitionist critical apparatus, like in Fielding, nor any pretentiously announced didactic purpose, like in Richardson, Austens novels remain arresting because she managed to apply the microscope to human motivation and character, turning her fictions into representations of universal patterns of behaviour, which display the vision of man as a social animal, as well as the ironic awareness of the tensions between spontaneity and convention, or between the claims of personal morality and those of social and economic propriety. Northanger Abbey, published in 1818, but completed in 1798, is probably the first. The novel gently satirises the 1790s enthusiasm for the gothic sub-genre, by contrasting day-to-day life with the imagined horrors of Ann Radcliffes novels. These have had a considerable effect on the impressionable heroine, Catherine Morland, who humiliates herself in the eyes of her fiancs father when she misconstrues the atmosphere and events occurring at the Tilneys home (the rebuilt old abbey of the title) as part of a gothic novel situation: In the novels which followed, Austen continues to focus on young heroines. Sisters are often contrasted, like in Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, in which Elinor represents sense and self-control, while Marianne stands for sensibility and impulsive emotions. Their closely worked out plots usually involve the twists and turns of emotion in search for love, marriage, happiness and social status, like in Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813, where Elizabeth Bennett and Darcy have first to discover themselves and then each other in their loss of pride and prejudice. It is this development which allows them a happy marriage, while the other characters, who remain quite the same throughout the novel, settle back at the end into their accustomed modes of behaviour.

Austens use of point of view also becomes more sophisticated. Though she employs the omniscient point of view, the explicit manipulation of the reader which characterised Fieldings narrators dissapears, and irony determines something of the point of view shared between an invisible third person narrator and the reader. EMMA - begun in 1814 and published in 1816, it was the last work published during the novelists lifetime/ Emma, a clever and very self-satisfied young lady, is the daughter and mistress of the house of Mr. Woodhouse, an amiable old gentleman. Emma takes under her wing Harriet Smith, the natural daughter of some person unknown, a pretty but foolish girl of 17. Emmas active mind sets to work on schemes for Harriets advancements and the story is mainly occupied with the mortifications to which Emma is subjected as a result of her injudicious attempts in this respect. She induces Harriet to reject the proposal of Robert Martin, a young farmer, and to concentrate on the vicar, Mr. Elton. When the latter marries an ill-mannered bride, Emma steers Harriet towards Frank Churchill but Frank is secretly engaged to Jane Fairfax. Harriet falls in love with Mr. Knightley but Emma wakes in the midst of her terrible blundering to find out that her own heart has actually been set upon this old and trusted friend. The wise Knightley proposes to Emma and Harriet accepts young Martin. Exchanging letters, a diary or journal, narration by one of the characters or by someone outside the events authors can choose from many different ways of telling a story. When a story is told by someone outside the action, he is called a third person narrator (because he refers to everybody in the story in the third person). In this form of narration the person who is telling the story is like an observer who is witnessing or has witnessed what has happened, but plays no part in the events. In a certain sense the third-person narrator is a kind of god (omniscient narrator). We have the sensation that he knows exactly what is going to happen and how each character will behave. This kind of narrator was particularly popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. The narrative technique Jane Austen uses in Emma is a development of the third-person narrative. Sometimes the narrator is omniscient, at other times he sees things from the main characters point of view. In setting the scene, for example, the narrator is independent, looking down on the characters from a point outside the action. At other times, it is clearly Emmas point of view expressed. Although the narrating voice remains outside the story, the phrase This would not do is obviously an expression of Emmas point of view, conveying her frustration at Harriets behaviour. The technique of shifting narrative viewpoint between an objective account and subjective interpretation is called free indirect speech. This technique makes the reader feel less detached from the story. Also, because much of the story is told from the partial viewpoint of one of the characters, the reader gets the idea that anything can happen in the course of the novel, just as it can in real life. In the case of Emma it adds an element of humor as the reader contrasts the way Emma sees the world around her and how it really is. Free indirect speech is widely used in modern novel writing. 12. Women Writers of the 17th-, 18th and Early 19th centuries Aphra Ben can be considered the first Englishwoman to see herself as a professional writer, or, as Ben herself often said, as an author who is forced to write for bread and not ashamed to own it. It is precisely this condition which should distinguish Ben from her contemporary peers, most of them coming from the ranks of nobility, or at least enjoying the benefits of good families and a proper education received at Oxford, who took to writing plays in a gentlemanly manner. Ben was a poor woman, widowed at an early age and forced into an adventurous life, including a governmental spying mission in Holland in 1666 during the Dutch wars, as the only means of financially supporting herself. Imprisoned for debt in the late 1660s, she turned to writing plays after her release, maybe because she had noted the success male authors were enjoying at the time, or because she considered that writing could provide an easier access to independence than mercantile ventures. Whatever the inspiration, the sequence of plays that followed witnessed an outstanding success in production also proving that writing for bread could succeed handsomely. Nevertheless, Bens contemporary critics sneered at her self-professed pecuniary goal,

suggesting that she was only a hack writer, producing derivative plays guided more by money than by aesthetics. Despite such criticism, Bens self-assumed role of a professional writer provided an inspiration to many women authors to follow, including Virginia Woolf who, in A Room of Ones Own acknowledged that: here begins the freedom of the mind . . . for now that Aphra Ben had done it, girls could say I can make money by my pen. Apart from blaming Ben for finding inspiration for her plays in Molire or Middleton, for example, the playwright was often criticised for presenting just stock characters in stock situations, and for the bawdiness of her plays. But seen within the context of Restoration comedy which revelled in salacious situations including extensive foreplay with adultery, her plays were of the same kind with the male-authored ones which were successful at the time. It is true that she set scenes in brothels - like in The Town Fop (1676) and created happy scenes between illicit lovers, even as they were just getting out of bed (like in The Forced Marriage (1679). But apart from seeing this as part of the immoral and decadent note of Restoration comedy, one should also be aware of the fact that such scenes are situated in the domain of women. As sexualised objects of their society, womens realms of power and development were the bedrooms and the brothels of the day, for they lived in the spheres of sexual and marital arrangements, deriving their personal power from liaisons with men. Such criticism then should be seen as being genderbiased, because if these situations are bawdy, they are so for men, who have the liberty of the public sphere. For women, they were simply the only realm of potential narrative and dialogue. Moreover, Ben herself responded to it saying that it is the least and most excusable fault in the men writers . . .but for a woman it was unnatural. Susanna Centlivre, who was even more prolific than Ben, also has the merit of introducing new images of women on the stage - a project which her precursor did not undertake. One explanation for this endeavour can be found in the circumstances of Centlivres life, which provided her with experiences that allowed for a more unique and daring sense of possibilities for women characters. Leaving home at 16, the future playwright lived part of her youth as a boy. In drag as Cousin Jack she frequented the university, attending classes in fencing, grammar, logic, rhetoric and the like. Living in a cross-gender role must have provided her not only with an education, but also with a set of adventures that were to prove useful in her writing career. Indeed, Centlivre devised scenes for women in drag, and though this was no novelty on the English stage, Shakespeare having excelled at it, they are not derivative of the great master (as some critics hurried to label them.) These are not happy, witty scenes set in forest such as Arden, but rather they are dark, desperate ones in which women cross dress in order to gain the power of freedom to express their wills. For example, in The Perjurd Husband (1700), Centlivres first play, Placentia dresses as a men because she wants to gain access to her husbands new mistress. Only when she determines that the woman is guilty of consciously stealing her husband, the heroine reveals herself as a woman, but also stabs her rival to death. As different from Shakespeare, the use of drag in Centlivres play does not resolve the social issues (such as it happens for Portia in The Merchant of Venice.), but demonstrates the anger and desperation of the female characters. Though life in drag was not uncommon for women in the 17th century London (as documented some of the ages texts), the necessity of male disguise must have caused in many privation and anxiety, as they experienced the fear of discovery and the social distaste for their roles. Yet, in order to gain access to education or daring physical actions, women were certainly required to do mens apparel. The same role reversal in Centlivres real life must have also provided her with the viewpoint of an independent woman, living outside the social order. This may be the explanation for the series of independent female characters that appear in her plays, characters who invent unusual social roles for themselves. Sometimes, as it happens in The Beaus Duel, the heroine adopts the role of the sexual pursuer, a social role identified with men. But perhaps her most memorable character is Viola, the heroine of The Basset Table (1705). Valeria, a philosophical girl, is both the brunt of the plays humour, but also the victorious exception to the social code. She makes her first entrance in pursuit of a fly, worrying that she will lose the finest insect for dissection, a huge fresh fly, which dr. Lovely sent me just now, and opening the box to try the experiment, away it flew. Though the other characters on stage berate her for the unwomanly pursuit of such studies, Valeria manages to defend herself well. Finally, one lady advises her to found a college for the study of philosophy, where none but women should be admitted; and to immortalize

your name, they should be called Valerians. Once more, the answer of the heroine dispels the mocking tone verging on the seriousness of the issue: What you make a jest of, Id execute, were it in my power. Thus, Centlivres portrayal of a college for women achieves both dramatic force as well as comic eccentricity in its treatment, probably not far removed from her own illicit attendance of classes at the university as a boy. Like the playwright herself, Valeria is an outsider, but a forceful one, a woman who wants to live by her own intelligence. Delarivier (sometimes spelt Delariviere, Delarivire or de la Rivire) Manley (1663 or c. 1670 - 1724) was an English novelist of amatory fiction, playwright, and political pamphleteer. Her career as an author effectively began with the publication of her New Atalantis in 1709, a work that spotted present British politics on the fabulous Mediterranean Island. Manley was immediately questioned by the authorities in preparation of a libel case against her. She had discredited half the arena of ruling Whig politiciansJohn Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, who, she said, had began his career at court in the bed of the then royal mistress, Barbara Villiers. Manley answered the authorities, so her Adventures of Rivella, insisting that her work was entirely fictional. Whigs who felt offended should prove that she had actually told their stories. The result was a silent agreement over the preferable fictional status of her works under which she continued to publish another volume of the Atalantis and two more of the Memoirs of Europe. The novels of Ann Radcliffee (1764-1822) combined Gothic sensationalism with the cult of feeling. Though they still employ standard Gothic properties, such as secret passages, vaults, sliding panels, old manuscripts unexpectedly discovered, their emphasis falls on romance, and the supernatural incidents, after allowing the novelist extract maximum of suspense and excitement, are always explained in the end as produced by natural causes. For example, in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Radciffes most successful novel, the young heroine, Emily, is forced to follow her tyrannical aunt, Madame Cheron, to the castle of her new husband, the cruel Montoni. But the series of sinister and frightening occurrences which the two face at Udolpho and which eventually lead to the aunts death are proven to have been engineered by Montoni himself, who has, in the meantime, turned his attentions to Emily. Nevertheless, in the nick of time the heroine manages to escape and the resolution seals the triumph of good, with Emilys return to her native Gascony where she is happily reunited with the Chevalier de Valancour, her first and faithful lover. Frankenstein, the novel published by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) in 1818, is not properly Gothic if compared to The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho, where the virginal female victim is subjected to increasingly exaggerated horrors. Here the horror element of the story is related to the unsuccessful experiment of the hero, the young doctor Victor Frankenstein, who, instead of creating a perfect human being, gives birth to a monster, an eight-foot hideous creature who will become responsible for the death of his family, fiancee, as well as his own eventual destruction. During the 20 th century, mostly due to the Hollywood film industry, the subject of Mary Shelleys novel was raised to the level of universal myth, while its title is liable of giving a new word to the language. Nevertheless, many modern readings have reacted against the cinematic image of the monster, preferring to read the tale as a psychological exploration of creation, childbirth and responsibility, with a corresponding emphasis on the creature as an outcast - an innocent who has had human life thrust upon him and who is destined to roam the icy waters (a vision of 20th-century wastelands) in solitude. To support this view, one may often cite the creatures own point of view, which is given full voice in the epistolary form of the novel, balancing with pathos the horror which other narrative voices describe. Maria Edgeworth, or the great Maria as she came to be known -, was one of the best-known literary figures of the time, writing of the Irish social scene at the time when the Act of Union passed in 1801 had brought Ireland fully into he United Kingdom, in both a political and legal sense. Her fictional work established Edgeworth as a writer of small-scale, provincial novels, where the particular detail and the humour and sense of character enlists the sympathetic participation of the reader. At the same time, these novels proved to become an acknowledged influence on Walter Scott, who praised Edgeworths innovations in his praface to Waverley (1814) and followed their model in his own depictions of the Scottish provincial scene.

Castle Reckrent, published in 1800, is the first of these. The novel is set in 1782, aiming to provide a vivid picture of the Irish social conditions preceding the Union. It focuses on the history of a family of Irish landlords, whose path to ruin is narrated by Thady Quirk, their steward, who has witnessed their excesses and improvidence for the past three generations. Thadys narrative starts with the story of the lavish entertainer Sir Patrick Rackrent, who drinks himself to death. Then it goes on to that of Sir Patricks eldest son, Sir Murtagh, who dies in a rage against the enemies whom he continually sues. Sir Kit, the next Rackrent, is a gambler who fares no better, being killed in a duel. The present landlord, Sir Condy, eventually loses the estate by loans and litigations to Thaddys own son, Jason, and the Rackrents line is ended when Condy himself dies trying to emulate one of his grandfathers drinking feats. The novel displays a lively awareness of the Irish scene as well as that of the moral and psychological problems arising out of an impinging new social order, for Thaddys son, Jason, who educated himself and managed to become a lawyer, is intended as a representative of a rising, predatory middle-class. In the same order of ideas, the retainers self-professed loyalty to the Reckrents becomes ambiguous, especially in view of his sons eventual possession of the estate. The addition to the text of a preface, footnotes and a glossary introduces s;s,emts of antiquarian and sociological commentary, while the use of Hiberno-English (a term applied to those varieties of English spoken and sometimes written in Ireland) in Thaddys narrative, reveals an interest in regional varieties of language. Castle Reckrent was followed by Belinda (1810), a satiric novel in which the wicked Lady Delacour, whose tortured life has elements of gothic mystery, is reformed by the title-character. The Absentee (1812) deals with the ill-effects of landlord absenteeism in Ireland, while Ormond (1817) is innovative in its exploration of the effect of reading on the title-hero. Of her later novels, Helen (1834) presents a depressing view of the prospects for Irish society. Edgeworths keen, but disillusioned love of Ireland which her work records is also acknowledged in a letter dated the same year, 1834, in which the novelist declared it impossible to write fiction about the post-Union Ireland: The people would only break the glass and curse the fool who held the mirror up to nature distorted nature, in a fever. If women took an active part in producing the gothic novel, they proved even more active in producing a different type of novel, at the other end of the scale, namely the one of contemporary social and domestic life. Here the chief interest lies in the delineation of manners and the detail and intimacy with which the behaviour of characters in a specific and limited social environment is described. Fanny Burney (1752-1840) is the author of a series of novels which portray how a young woman grows up and develops as she enters and experiences the society of her day. The first of them and the one which established her reputation is Evelina; or, The History of a Young Ladys Entrance into the World, published in 1778. Employing an epistolary form, the novel traces the story of the title-heroine, a girl of humble education, brought up in rural seclusion until the age of 17 when she is sent to see the world and also enters the world of fashion. There she suffers a series of frustrations and humiliations until she meets the right people, in the persons of the aristocratic Lady Howard and Lord Orville, who, in seven months (and three volumes) tutor her education in self-knowledge, prudence and discretion and eventually turn her into a right match for Lord Orville himself. Her second novel, Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress, published in 1782, concerns the fortunes of Cecilia Beverley, who is victimised by her three unscrupulous guardians, Harrel, Briggs and the Hon. Compton Delville until she is eventually allowed to find a modicum of happiness with her lover Mortimer Delville. In both of them the tone is gently satirical, blended with vivid observation, while society and the aspirations to be part of it are their main concerns. Their strength lies in comedy and the comedy of domestic life, developed around innocent heroines like Evelina and Cecilia. As a novelist, Burney inherited the form from Richardson and Fielding, but handled it in such a way that would prove useful to Jane Austen, herself.

Jane Austen (1775-1817) ranks as the greatest of these women novelists, the one who raised the genre to a new level of art by applying the techniques of the novel to the acute observation of the provincial society of her time. Austens novels portray small groups of people in a limited, perhaps confining environment. Her characters, who are middle-class and provincial, have as their most urgent preoccupations courtship, while their greatest ambition proves to be marriage. The apparently trivial incidents of their life are moulded by the author into a poised comedy-of-manners, where a gentle irony is deployed in order to point to the underlying moral commentary. Though one finds no exhibitionist critical apparatus, like in Fielding, nor any pretentiously announced didactic purpose, like in Richardson, Austens novels remain arresting because she managed to apply the microscope to human motivation and character, turning her fictions into representations of universal patterns of behaviour, which display the vision of man as a social animal, as well as the ironic awareness of the tensions between spontaneity and convention, or between the claims of personal morality and those of social and economic propriety.

13. Pre-romantic attitudes in prose

Age 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 during the Age of Sensibility sparked an interest in medieval ballads and folk literature.

During the second half of the 18th century, in reaction to the ideas of the Enlightment placing their emphasis on reason and order, there became more and more prevalent the belief that sentiment could influence social development more powerfully. As such, the literary atmosphere started to witness the replacement of the neoclassical calm detachment and mocking attitude by the compassionate note meant to rouse the readers sympathy for their fellow men, which eventually, under the influence of Jean Jacques Rousseaus philosophy, came to be associated with emotions. Oliver Goldsmith, successful as a poet and comic dramatist, published his Rousseauisque fable on the antithesis between the goodness and innocence of mans natural emotions and the corrupting power of society, law and civilisation, The Vicar of Wakefield, in 1766. The novel is an improbable fairy-tale about Dr. Primrose (the vicar of the title and a person who combines learning with innocence, finding his greatest happiness by the domestic hearth with his wife and children) who is led by the activities of the wordly and the vicious, as well as a number of accidents, from one misfortune to another: his fortune is lost, his elder daughter is apparently seduced and ruined by the local squire; himself is cheated and deceived in numerous ways until he finds himself in the local jail; his eldest son becomes a fellow prisoner, accused of severely injuring a man in a duel. Nevertheless, to all these the vicar responds with gentle resignation and fortitude, and, by implausible contrivance, the novel is finally huddled to a happy ending, where the lost fortune is restored, the ruined daughter is discovered alive and married to her seducer, the son is freed and able thus to marry his first love. In spite of the deliberate naivities of the story and the moralising and sentimental exhibitions of feeling, the real achievements of Goldsiths novel are to be found in the way in which the tale is told in the first-person point of view, in the slight but effective differentiations in character between the various members of the family, and the comprehensive picture of provincial, family life that it provides. The Gothic novel In the last decades of the century, a new shift in sensibility occurred toward what came to be called the sublime, a concept from classical Greek which entered English thought through the French of Boileau and found its definitive explanation in Edmund Burkes Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful. Published between 1757-9, Burkes essay was to become a key text of the times, displaying an emphasis on feelings and on imagination, in stark contrast to the neoclassicist insistence on form and reason. Nevertheless, Burkes idea of the sublime goes beyond natural beauty into the realms of awe, or terror, because, for him, the sublime is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. Linking it thus with terror, emotion and feeling. The link between the sublime and terror is most clearly seen in the Gothic novel, a form which concentrated on the fantastic, the macabre and the supernatural. The term Gothic has medieval and architectural connotations, being generally held to refer to the kind of European building characterised by its use of pointed arches which had flourished in the Middle Ages. But in a series of novels written from the 1760s to the 1790s, which featured haunted castles, spectres rising from the grave and wild landscapes, the term came to be associated with mystery, romance, ivy-covered and owl-haunted ruins, acquiring the generic meaning of horror fantasy. The Castle of Otranto, the novel published by Horace Walpole (1717-97) in 1764 is the first of this kind, initiating this sub-genre in English literature. It is a story of medieval times, set in south Italy, with castles, vaults, ghosts, statues which come to life, sudden violent death, forest caves, and the whole paraphernalia of horror. Passion, grief and terror are the mainstrays of the plot, which moves between the unlikely and the totally incredible. Manfred, the actual prince of Otranto, is in fact the offspring of a usurper who had poisoned the rightful heir, Alonso. Haunted by the prophecy foretelling the end of his male line and the return of the rightful heir, Manfred engineers the marriage of Conrad, his son, to the beautiful Isabella and then attempts to enforce himself on the maiden once his son gets mysteriously killed. But his plans are thwarted by a peasant boy, Theodore, who helps Isabella escape and who, at the end of the novel, is proclaimed the true price of Otranto by a suddenly enlivened statue of Alonso, which grows enormous and overthrows the castle burring a terrified Manfred with it.

The immediate widespread popularity of the Gothic novel was also helped at the hands of several accomplished women writers, such as Ann Radcliffe and Clara Reeve, who combined Gothic sensationalism with the cult of feeling. The novels of Ann Radcliffee (1764-1822) are typical in this respect. Though they still employ standard Gothic properties, such as secret passages, vaults, sliding panels, old manuscripts unexpectedly discovered, their emphasis falls on romance, and the supernatural incidents, after allowing the novelist extract maximum of suspense and excitement, are always explained in the end as produced by natural causes. For example, in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Radciffes most successful novel, the young heroine, Emily, is forced to follow her tyrannical aunt, Madame Cheron, to the castle of her new husband, the cruel Montoni. But the series of sinister and frightening occurrences which the two face at Udolpho and which eventually lead to the aunts death are proven to have been engineered by Montoni himself, who has, in the meantime, turned his attentions to Emily. Nevertheless, in the nick of time the heroine manages to escape and the resolution seals the triumph of good, with Emilys return to her native Gascony where she is happily reunited with the Chevalier de Valancour, her first and faithful lover. Frankenstein, the novel published by Mary Shelley (1797-1851) in 1818, is not properly Gothic if compared to The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho, where the virginal female victim is subjected to increasingly exaggerated horrors. Here the horror element of the story is related to the unsuccessful experiment of the hero, the young doctor Victor Frankenstein, who, instead of creating a perfect human being, gives birth to a monster, an eight-foot hideous creature who will become responsible for the death of his family, fiancee, as well as his own eventual destruction. During the 20 th century, mostly due to the Hollywood film industry, the subject of Mary Shelleys novel was raised to the level of universal myth, while its title is liable of giving a new word to the language. Nevertheless, many modern readings have reacted against the cinematic image of the monster, preferring to read the tale as a psychological exploration of creation, childbirth and responsibility, with a corresponding emphasis on the creature as an outcast - an innocent who has had human life thrust upon him and who is destined to roam the icy waters (a vision of 20th-century wastelands) in solitude.

14. The Movement from Neo-classicism to Romanticism in Poetry

Cultural context: the Age 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 during the Age of Sensibility sparked an interest in medieval ballads and folk literature. During the second half of the eighteenth century, paralleling developments in the novel, poetry began to explore new themes, handled in more low-key language and forms which often lacked the bite of satire,

reacting thus against the formal, self-consciously heightened, and satirically self-referential poetry of the Augustans. While some voices, like that of Dr. Samuel Johnson, still pay tribute to the waning neo-classical ideals, others, like those of John Thomson, Thomas Gray, or Robert Burns become pointers to the English Romantic age, the beginnings of which are marked by the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridges Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Dr. Samuel Johnson (1704-84) is the major author of the period who is still strongly anchored in the neoclassical tradition. Best remembered as a lexicographer (author of the Dictionary of the English Language, 1755) and literary critic (The Lives of the Poets, 1779-81), Johnson was also a poet who used the heroic couplet mainly for moralising purposes. In the two verse satires that he wrote, London (1739) and The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) he tried to modernise the Roman poet Juvenal in order to attack various evils of the thoughtless age he lived in: from courtiers, flattery and fashion to the dangers of wishful thinking. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774), though not primarily a poet, exemplifies the transition between neoclassical and romantic writing with two long poems written in heroic couplets, The Traveller (1764) and The Deserted Village (1770). The latter is the most famous of the two, taking the form of 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 Revolotion. The Deserted Village is the imaginary and idealised Auburn, recreated in part from his childhood memories of the Irish Westmeath, where Goldsmith had grown up, and the poem laments the vanishing of traditions and that of the romantic pleasures of rural life brought by the fact that money and progress have become more important than human destinies, leading to the decay of such a previously happy place. James Thomson (1700 - 1748) is the first poet of the age who chose to reject the heroic couplet and use, instead, a quasi-Miltonian blank verse in his four long poems, published season by season between 1726 and 1730. The Seasons aim to describe the countryside at different times of the year, often interlarding the descriptive passages with meditations on man. Thomsons vision of nature as harsh, especially in winter, but bountiful, stresses the pure pleasures of rural life, with no denial of the pain these pleasures can involve. His celebration of nature is thus closely allied with a sense of desolation, of hard work and harsh landscapes, so that the tone of his Seasons is far removed from that of the classical idyll: The last of these was also the major concern of the so-called poets of the Graveyard School, exemplifying the strain of descriptive and meditative poetry, developing throughout the 18th century, where natural description prompted moral reflections on the human situation. The foremost of them was Edward Young (1683 - 1765), whose early verses were in the Augustan tradition. Nevertheless, in his The Complaint; or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality (1742-46), the melancholy meditations against a backdrop of tombs and death indicate a major departure from the conventions and convictions of the preceding generation. While the neoclassical authors regarded melancholia as a weakness, the pervasive mood of the Complaint is a sentimental and pensive contemplation of loss, as the speaker, in carefully wrought gloomy context of night, broods over his sorrow, meditating on mortality and immortality. Thomas Grays (1716 - 1771) Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751) is often considered the central text in this tradition, though the poem is considerably different in emphasis, becoming, in some senses, a life-affirming reconsideration of rural values. Grays Elegy opens with a contemplation of the landscape, which is gradually emptied of both sights and sounds as dusk descends and the meditative tone is thus set. Having thus introduced the poets considerations of the rude forefathers of the village and the short and simple annals of the poor, the poem alternates then between generalised abstractions and individual examples that turn it into an affirmation of simple lives and their values. The elegiac element, however, concerns the consideration of loss in the villages lack of ambition, and the passing of the poets own life, for The Elegy is given an unexpected turn at the end, revealing the poets own epitaph: 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. His poetry blends influences from classical, biblical, and English literature with the Scottish Makar tradition. Burns wrote both in Scots and in English and some of his works, such as Love and Liberty (also

known as the Jolly Beggars), are written in both languages for various effects. Included in his Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), To a Louse is a humorous dramatic poem written in Scots. Romantic Poetry: William Blake (1757 - 1832) Almost completely unknown in his age (he was discovered 50 years after his death), Blake was trained to be and made his living as an engraver. Though he had no systematic schooling, his impressive erudition is evident in the poetry he wrote, where he created an idiosyncratic visionary universe, consciously repudiating the major ideas of the Enlightenment. His main collections of poetry consist of: The Book of Thel (1789-91); Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1791-93); The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93) Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794) The Four Zoas; Milton; Jerusalmen (1804-20) In his Songs of Innocence and Experience, the two states are not opposites but contrasts which complement each other. Hence parallel, complementary and contrastive poems appear in the two series: e.g. "Introduction", "Holy Thursday", "The Divine Image", "Lamb" and "Tyger", "The Echoing Green" and "Nurse's Song". Despite its horrors, the maturity of experience is needed to come to consciousness, nave 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.

Poetical Sketches (1783)

15. The Aesthetic Matrix Change

Renaissance Period and intellectual movement in European cultural history that is traditionally seen as ending the Middle Ages and beginning modern times. It started in Italy in the 14th century and flourished in Western Europe until about the 17th century. The word "renaissance" means "rebirth," an allusion to the Italian belief that they were merely rediscovering or reviving lost ancient knowledge and technique. A cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the early 16th century, reaching its apex around the year 1600, and not concluding until roughly the restoration of Charles II in the 1660s. The dominant art form of the English Renaissance was literature, while the Italian Renaissance was driven much more by the visual The English

seem to have been less directly influenced by classical antiquity, which was a hallmark of the Italian Renaissance. Instead, the English were primarily influenced by the Italians themselves, and rediscovered the classical authors through them. Late Renaissance Early seventeenth-century writers inherited a system of knowledge founded on analogy, order, and hierarchy. In this system, a monarch was like God, the ruler of the universe, and also like a father, the head of the family. Yet this conceptual system was beginning to crumble in the face of the scientific and empirical approach to knowledge advocated by Francis Bacon. William Harveys discovery of the circulation of blood and Galileos demonstration that the earth revolved around the sun disrupted long-held certainties. The conditions of the dissemination of ideas also changed, as the printing of all kinds of literary works was becoming more common. Since overt criticism or satire of the great was dangerous, political writing before the Civil War was apt to be oblique and allegorical. Neoclassicism Cultural background Neoclassicism, The Age of Reason a. a regard for tradition and reverence for the classics b. a sense of literature as art (i.e artificed, artificial, made by craft) c. a concern for social reality, and the communal commonplaces of thought which hold it together d. a concern for nature, i.e. the way things are and should be e. a concern with pride (threat against the status quo) Political and Social Issues: restoration of monarchy; development of a two-party parliamentary system; the growth of a protestant, middle-class and stable society; increased urbanization triggering a shift in the balance of power from the country-side to the city. The Age 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 during the Age of Sensibility sparked an interest in medieval ballads and folk literature. During the second half of the eighteenth century, paralleling developments in the novel, poetry began to explore new themes, handled in more low-key language and forms which often lacked the bite of satire, reacting thus against the formal, self-consciously heightened, and satirically self-referential poetry of the Augustans. While some voices, like that of Dr. Samuel Johnson, still pay tribute to the waning neo-classical ideals, others, like those of John Thomson, Thomas Gray, or Robert Burns become pointers to the English Romantic age, the beginnings of which are marked by the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridges Lyrical Ballads in 1798. Neoclassicism reason, intellect, civilisation, progress, rationalism. Romanticism: imagination, intuition, heart, nature, individual, freedom, mysticism