7/27/2019 Literature II (P-03) 2do Cuatrimestre IMPRIMIr

1/2

2. The EnlightementThe Enlightenment is a name given by historians of ideas to a phase succeeding the Renaissance and followed (though not ended) byRomanticism. The Enlightenment believed in the universal authority of Reason, and in its ability to understand and explain.Edward Gibbon (1737-94) is one of the few English writers who are wholly of the EnlightenmentEnlightenment (German: Aufklrung): a period of intellectual progress in the 18th century, when it was hoped that Reason would clear awayhe superstition of darker ages.

3. Sense and SensibilitySense is a better watchword for the English 18th century than Reason. Sense embraces practical reason, the ability to tell tr ue from false,common sense (from Lat. communis sententia, the common opinion). It was at first related rather than opposed to Sensibility, a capacity formoral feeling. When Sensibility became more aesthetic and sentimental, it came to be contrasted with sense, as in the title of Jane Austensnovel. Sense, finally, recalls Lockes influential account of the mind, in which reliable knowledge of the real comes from sense-impressions.

4. Alexander PopeThe day of Augustanism coincides with the days of Alexander Pope (1688-1744), when Addison and Swift also flourished - as did theunAugustan Defoe. The Augustan temper did not thereafter rule the roost, but characterizes the most accomplished work of the century:Gullivers Travels, Dunciad IV, Grays Elegy and the judgements of Johnson. Joseph Addison was a poet and tragedian, but his legacy isThe Spectator, a daily paper which he edited and co-wrote with Sir Richard Steele, in succession to Steeles The Tatler (1709). Steelespaper amused, The Spectator educated entertainingly.

5. Joseph AddisonAfter the excesses of faction and enthusiasm, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren and others had shown what human intelligencecould do. Joseph Addison (1672-1719) relayed these achievements to the new middle class in a prose which Johnson thought the model ofhe middle style. The Spectator sold an unprecedented ten thousand copies of each issue; its wit was edifying, unlike that of theRestoration; Addisons essays were taken as a model for more than a century.

6. Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), born of English parents in Dublin after his father's death, had a career as frustrating as Addisons wassuccessful. In 1713 he became Dean of Dublins St Patricks Cathedral - not, as he would have preferred, a bishop in England. He gaveone-third of his income to the - usually Catholic - poor.Gullivers Travels (1726) takes new perspectives to logical conclusions. Captain Gulliver records his voyages to the lands of the tiny people,of the giants, of experimental scientists and of horses. Gulliver expects the little people of Lilliput to be delicate and the giants of Brobdignago be gross; they are not.Gulliver is, like Defoes Robinson Crusoe, one of the practical self-reliant seamen through whom Britannia had begun to rule the waves. Aswith Crusoe, the reader can identify with the hero, whose common sense gets him through his adventures.

. The Novel: Daniel DefoeA London butcher called Foe had a son who called himself Defoe. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) was expert in acceptable truths. He hadravelled much, failed as a retail hosier, welcomed William III to London, been to prison and worked as a spy before becoming a voyagewriter, a writer who makes you see. Unwary readers have read A Journal of the Plague Year as an eyewitness report, and Moll Flanders asa molls.

The credibility of this castaways adventures (based on the account of Alexander Selkirk) seems to be guaranteed by his everyday pocketsull of factual biscuit. Defoe had not time to lose as he told his story full of things: a saw, planks, a knife, ropes, a raft, a cabin, how to growcrops. We experience these things; we see a footprint in the sand; and with the arrival of Man Friday, we realize with Crusoe that Man doesnot live by ships biscuit alone, and that it is Providence which has saved him.

3. Samuel RichardsonSamuel Richardson (1689-1761) was a printer-publisher-bookseller-author. Courtesy books on how to behave in society included letter-writing: the thank-you letter, the condolence. Richardson wrote sample familiar letters for more complex social situations. From this grewhe idea of Pamela.To read the letters addressed to her parents is to overhear confidences and to feel sympathy: the formula of soap opera.Pamelas situation is morally interesting, as is the unfolding drama. Richardson, relying on his readers to know that virtue is its own reward,shows a good daughter becoming a very good wife, in conditions that are comic and trying. The prudential subtitle was too much for HenryFielding, who wrote a brilliant take-off, Shamela, in which a young prostitutes vartue is a sham designed to put up her price.Richardsons advance in Clarissa (1747-8) is astonishing. It is a mature and complex society novel, epistolary, with several correspondents.The heroine and her oppressor are more interesting than in Pamela, and the action and the texture richer.

4. Henry FieldingRichardsons psychology had an effect on the European novel. He deserves credit also forstimulating Henry Fielding into fiction. Fieldingound Pamela so sanctimonious that he began a second burlesque of it, Joseph Andrews. Joseph is Pamelas virtuous brother who (likeJoseph in Exodus), rejects the amorous advances of his mistress Lady B[ooby], and is sacked. Parody is forgotten in the perpetual motion ofaughable adventures on the road and in the inns, and in the richly comic character of Parson Adams, a guilelessly good-hearted truth-tellern a wicked world.Fielding had written twenty-five plays before he took up the law, driven from the stage by Walpoles censorship. He confronted Londonscorrupt system of justice, and tried to reform the justice meted out to the poor. In his experiments with the new form of novel, he wasuninterested in realistic detail and individual psychology. Since he offers neither pictorial realism nor inner life, to read him demands ageneric readjustment. He is an Augustan prose satirist, classically educated, brisk, high-spirited and discursive, a narrator who is perpetuallypresent, outside his story, not absorbed into it. The narrative itself takes its sense of pace, scene and plot from the theatre.

2. Gothic Fiction

Manuscripts were all the rage. In a preface Horace Walpole pretends to have found The Castle of Otranto: a Gothic Story (1764) in amanuscript by Onuphrio Muralto, Canon of Otranto in the 12th century.Grays Odes. His story begins with Conrad being killed at his wedding by a vast falling helmet. His father Manfred, tyrant of Otranto,mprisons the suspected murderer inside this helmet, which is able to wave its plume. Enlightened readers did not suppose that such eventsook place even in Latin latitudes, but their universe was short of miracles. The fantasy of The Castle of Otranto created a vogue for camphrillers in which nobles drug and rape beautiful wards in the bowels of their mountain fastnesses, and statues bleed from the nose.

7/27/2019 Literature II (P-03) 2do Cuatrimestre IMPRIMIr

2/2

3. The Age of Johnson: Samuel JohnsonSamuel Johnson (1709-84) dominated the world of letters for thirty years. The Johnson of James Boswells sound-bites, theconversationalist who felled opponents with a sentence, were real enough. But Boswells talker was primarily a great writer: poet,biographer, critic, editor, essayist, author of a tragedy and a philosophical tale, of political and travel books, and prayers.Unmatched as a judge of language and literature, he made permanent contributions himself in the Dictionary, the Preface to Shakespeareand the Lives of the Poets. These were part of a general expansion of knowledge, the most public symbol of which was Captain CooksSouth Sea voyages with the naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. A summary retrospect on English from 1760 to 1798 shows non-fictional proseaking the centre ground. Poetry withdrew, the novel wilted, but the decline of drama was halted by Goldsmith and Sheridan. Yet between770 and 1791 appeared the works of Johnson, Gibbon, Smith, Burney and Boswell listed below.

4. The DictionaryMemory and composition were central to education, yet Johnsons mental strength and acute verbal sense were exceptional. He composed

n Latin or English in his head, writing down poems when complete. The quotations in the Dictionary were recalled from his wide reading,often in unliterary subjects such as travel, manufacturing, agriculture and chemistry. His writing is weighty and trenchant. He examined ideascritically, considering their true meaning, relation to principles and practical consequences. His principles were Anglican and Tory, opposingAmerican independence in Taxation No Tyranny, unlike his friend Burke. He attacked British injustice, as towards Ireland, and would drinkto the next insurrection of the Negroes in the West Indies. He disliked Americans because they owned slaves.

5. Literary CriticismJohnsons moral essays and Rasselas have long been admired, and his prayers and meditations can move atheists. His literary criticism isespecially valuable, and now that criticism has few general readers, especially enjoyable. Often we do not agree - neo-classical principlescan be technical or moralistic - but Johnson makes his judgements on clear grounds, obliging us to agree or disagree. He delivers theeaction not of the judging intelligence only but of the whole man. Milton thought woman made only for obedience, and man only forebellion. Pope never drank tea without a stratagem; though he translated the Iliad he did not overflow with Greek. Gray did not use hisearning. But these imperfect men wrote extraordinary works compelling rational admiration: Paradise Lost, or the Churchyard. What hehought false, he disdained: Miltons Lycidas or Grays Odes.

. Non-FictionNon-fiction is a library classification too drab for the prose of Burke, Gibbon and Sheridan. History was part of 18th-century literature - bothGray and Warton became professors of history - and so was oratory: all were branches of rhetoric. Literature today neglects most non-ictional prose, although history can be well written (as can literary criticism), but formal oratory has decayed. The 19th-century historianMacaulay once described Burke as the greatest man since Milton. Few politicians today have read any of the three.

2. Edward Gibsondeals of style changed in the 18th century also, from Drydens ease and Addisons polish to Johnsons range of manner. But the top endbecame more majestic and oratorical. Burke and Sheridan begin the age of British parliamentary oratory. But the prize for memory,composition and learning goes to another member of the Club, Edward Gibbon (1737-94). Gibbon read and condensed the materials inancient and modern languages for the twelve centuries connecting the ancient with the modern world, taking in the invasions of the Goths,Persians, Saracens and Turks, the rise of Christianity and Islam, and the crusades. He combined antiquarian detail with an enlightenedmoral and philosophical interest in human nature.

3. Edmund Burket is not for his ideas on the sublime that Edmund Burke (1729-97) is generally remembered, but for his Reflections on the Revolution inFrance (1790), with its image of Marie Antoinette undefended, in the land of gallantry, by a single French sword. He opposed the atheismand extremism of the revolutionaries, and offered a conservative idea of society as made up of little platoons of family, locality and othernatural associations, and as adapting and improving organically rather than by the application of universal ideas. He stood f or the liberationof the House of Commons, of Ireland, of Catholics and of the American colonies, and had opened for the prosecution against WarrenHastings, accused of corruption and ruthless government in British India. As a reformer, Burke opposed revolution. The great issues madehim define his assumption that society was a living thing rather than a model run by contract or by mechanism or by ideas. Matthew Arnoldhought Burke so great, because, almost alone inEngland, he brings thought to bear upon politics, he saturates politics with thought. Henfluenced both Wordsworth and Coleridge.

4. Oliver GoldsmithOliver Goldsmith (1730-74) was, like Dryden, Addison, Gay and Johnson, an Augustan all-rounder, writing an analytic Essay on the PresentState of Polite Letters (1759), fiction in The Vicar of Wakefield (1764), poetry, notably The Deserted Village (1770) and, in She Stoops toConquer (1773), a fine comedy, as well as much hackwork. Boswell said that Goldsmith wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll; hewas helped by Johnson, rather as Pope had helped Gay.

5. Fany BurneyFanny Burney (1752-1840) wrote from the age of ten, and had transcribed her fathers General History of Music, yet she published Evelina,or a Young Ladys Entrance into the World anonymously. It succeeded and she was asked to Mrs Thrales, where she was horrified to find iton display. I hid it under other Books, for I should Die, - or Faint at least - if anybody was to pick it up innocently while I am here. The well-brought-up Fanny knew that society frowned at fiction.

6. Richard SheridanThe son of an Irish actor, Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) went from Harrow School to Bath, where he eloped with a singer, fightingduels and reconciling fathers - a good start to a life in theatre management.He was 28. But in 1780 he entered the Commons, where he followed the example of Burke rather than that of Gibbon, who never spoke. Hespoke for six hours in the trial of Warren Hastings. Oratory led to office, and he then divided his public career, as a leader of the WhigOpposition, between speaking at elaborate length and running Drury Lane, which had to be rebuilt twice.

The three plays of his youth show that he understood the theatre better than anyone since the decline of Restoration drama. Restorationormulations underlie his plays, which were most unlike the sentimental dramas then on Londons large public stages.