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FROM
THE LATE RENAISSANCE
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THE RISE OF ROMANTICISM
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Ioana Mohor-Ivan
English Literature: From the Later Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism 3
1.1. Introduction
1.2. Cavalier Poetry
1.3. Metaphysical Poetry
1.4. John Milton
1.1. Introduction
Though literary history does not lend itself to tidy divisions and the late
Renaissance in England should be seen as a whole movement – from Sidney and
Spenser to Marvell and Milton (Vickers 1990, 160), the literary modes, genres or
individual texts included in this survey tend to belong to the historical period
spanning the accession to the throne of James I (1606) and the restoration of
Charles II (1660), at the centre of which there lies the Puritan Revolution which
wrought immense social changes and impinged upon the quality of English
literature.
Throughout the Jacobite and Caroline ages the court remains an undisputed
centre of national authority, influence, power, reward and intellectual
inspiration. As such, the literature produced in this context will tend to reflect
courtly values, favouring an intricate, allusive and decorative writing, where the
emphasis is placed on love (not necessarily marriage), warfare (largely free of
political context) or devotional piety (quite apart from practical morality.) In the
period of the Civil.Wars and Commonwealth, the urgency of crisis dominates
English society, while the court looses its privileged position. Social divisions
(e.g. Puritan / Anglican, or Parliamentarian / Royalist) reflect themselves
within the literary field. If decorative writing survives among cultured
parliamentarians and royalists, new developments are registered with the
growth of a more civic and utilitarian writing favouring plain-style verse or
plain-style prose, particularly within politico-religious controversy.
If the lyric mode is representative for the courtly values that poetry enshrines
and finds expression in the two ‘alternate’ poetic modes - Cavalier and
Metaphysical - which dominate the first half of the century, John Milton’s verse
is not only too varied in tone and scope to be adequately contained by either of
them, but also exemplifies the Puritan ethos and its hostility towards the courtly
culture, remaining thus apart.
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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 Castiglione’s 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 Jonson’s 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,
flippant, 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 very essence of 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.
1.2.1. Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
Though primarily remembered as a dramatist, the author of the famous
“comedies of humours” and Volpone, Jonson was also a scholar, critic and poet,
and it is with the songs and poems in the masques together with the collected
verse of Epigrams and The Forest (both published in 1616) and Underwoods
(1640) that his influence among the Cavalier poets is to be explained.
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 Jonson’s command of metrics, verse and stanza forms.
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Song: To Celia
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
And I’ll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine:
But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.
I sent thee lat-e a rosy werath,
Not so much honoring thee,
As giving it a hope that there
It could not withered be.
But thou thereon did’st only breath,
And sent’st it back to me;
Since when it grows and smells, I swear,
Not of itself, but thee.
Vivamus
Come, my Celia, let us prove,
While we can, the sports of Love;
Time will not be ours, for ever,
He at length, our good will sever.
To be taken, to be seen,
These have crimes accounted been.
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Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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Beads, prayers.
Left to dream, ceased dreaming.
Green-gown, tumble on the grass
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Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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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.
These characteristics may be exemplified by Love’s Growth, in which
commonplaces of Elizabethan thought are ingeniously transmuted by
Donne’s argumentation, which teases them out in a mock-serious way and
sustains the argument through a series of images that surprise and yet
compel acquiescence in their validity.
Love’s Growth
I SCARCE believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore,
My love was infinite, if spring make it more.
But if this medicine, love, which cures all sorrow
With more, not only be no quintessence,
But mixt of all stuffs, paining soul, or sense,
And of the Sun his working vigour borrow,
Love’s not so pure, and abstract, as they use
To say, which have no Mistress but their Muse,
But as all else, being elemented too,
Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do.
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The second part of the Ode is designed as the Hymn itself and consists
in 27 eight-line stanzas in a more lyric metre. Having been failed by the
Muse, the poet takes it upon himself to glorify Christ as a transcendent
paragon of heroic action, decribing his virtuous deed and victory, while
still in cradle over the pagan gods of the ancient world:
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The ending, after offering a vision of Lycidas rising to heaven, like the
stars, has Milton himself (as “the uncouth swain”) utter the final lines
which bring the remarkable optimism of a renewal:
c) During the period of the Civil wars and the Commonwealth all of
Milton’s 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 Milton’s
reaction at his loss of sight, as he reconciles his own desire to surrender
hope with his faith in God’s will:
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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.
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After Eve has yielded to Satan’s temptation and bitten of the forbidden
fruit, Adam’s choice to share in the transgression of divine law is
similarly an act of free will: the effect of his choice is one of loss, but a
loss that will later turn to gain – the gain of a future for humanity on
earth and, like the ending of Lycidas the final image of Paradise Lost is
profoundly forward-looking:
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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Task
Consider the following topics to defend in oral or written form:
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Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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biblical story of Absalom’s 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 Monmouth’s claim, to
Achitophel, Absalom’s chief adviser in the Bible. One of the most
impressive features of the poem resides with Dryden’s skill in
rendering the fragility of the Restoration settlement, while reasserting
his faith in the king’s 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 king’s faults, but finally transforms
them into qualities, related to principles of warmth and creativity:
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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:
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To the Pious Memory. . .Mrs. Anne Killigrew (1686) is an elegy over the
death of the title figure, whose talent for poetry and painting offers
Dryden an opportunity to consider the arts themselves, their present
style, their central role in civilisation.
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Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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II.
Antony: Oh, Dollabella, which way shall I turn?
I find a secret yielding in my Soul;
But Cleopatra, who would die with me,
Must she be left? Pity pleads for Octavia
But does it not plead more for Cleopatra?
[Here the Children go to him, etc.]
Ventidius: Was ever sight so moving! Emperor!
Dollabella: Friend!
Octavia: Husband!
Both Children: Father!
Antony: I am vanquished: take me,
Octavia; take me, Children; share me all.
[Embracing them.
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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.
As such, the two main genres favoured by the Restoration theatre are:
the heroic tragedy and the comedy-of-manners.
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Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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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.
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Medley: I find, Sir Fopling, in your solitude you remember the saying
of the wise man, and study yourself.
Sir Fopling: ‘Tis the best diversion in our retirements.
Horner: You would not take my advice to be gone home before your
husband came back; he’ll now discover all. Yet pray, my dearest, be
persuaded to go home and leave the rest to my management. I’ll let
you down the back way.
Mrs Pinchwife: I don’t know the way home, so I don’t.
Horner: My man shall wait upon you.
Mrs. Pinchwife: No, don’t you believe that I’ll go at all. What, are you
weary of me already?
Horner: No, my life, ‘tis that I may love you long. ‘Tis to secure my
love, and your reputation with your husband. He’ll never receive
you again else.
Mrs. Pinchwife: What care I? D’ye think to frighten me with that? I
don’t intend to go to him again. You shall be my husband now.
Horner: I cannot be your husband, dearest, since you are married to
him.
Mrs Pinchwife: Oh, would you make me believe that? Don’t I see,
every day at London here, women leave their first husbands and go
and live with other men as their wives? Pish, pshaw! You’d make
me angry, but that I love you so mainly.
Horner: So, they are coming up. - In again, in, I hear ‘em.
[Exit Mrs Pinchwife.]
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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:
Millamant: I’ll never marry, unless I am first made sure of my will and
pleasure.
Mirabell: Would you have’em both before marriage? Or will you be
contented with the first now, and stay for the other till after
grace?
Millamant: Ah, don’t be impertinent – My dear liberty, shall I leave
thee? My faithful solitude, my darling contemplation, must I
bid you then adieu? Ah-y adieu – my morning thoughts,
agreeable wakings, indolent slumbers, all ye douceurs, ye
sommeits du matin, adieu – I can’t do it, ‘tis more than
impossible. – Positively, Mirabell, I’ll lie a-bed in a morning as
long as I please.
Mirabell: then I’ll get up in a morning as early as I please.
Millamant: Ah! Idle creature, get up when you will – And d’ye hear, I
won’t be called names after I’m married; positively, I won’t be
call’d names.
Mirabell: Names!
Millamant: Ay, as wife, spouse, my dear, joy, jewel, love, sweetheart,
and the rest of that nauseous cant, in which men and their
wives are so fulsomely familiar, - I shall never bear that. – Good
Mirabell don’t let us be familiar or fond, nor kiss before folks,
like my Lady Fadler and Sir Francis: not go to Hyde Park
together the first Sunday in a new chariot, to provoke eyes and
whispers; and then never be seen there together again; as if we
were proud of one another the first week, and ashamed of one
another ever after. Let us never visit together, nor go to a play
together, but let us be very strange and well-bred: let us be as
strange as if we had been married a great while; and as well-
bred as if we were not married at all.
Mirabell: Have you any more conditions to offer? Hitherto your
demands are pretty reasonable.
Millamant: Trifles, - as liberty to pay and receive visits to and from
whom I please; to write and receive letters, without
interrogatories or wry faces on your part; to wear what I please;
and choose conversation with regard only to my own taste; to
have no obligation upon me to converse with wits that I don’t
like, because they are your acquaintance; or to be intimate with
fools, because they may be your relations. Come to dinner
when I please, dine in my dressing-room when I’m out of
humour, without giving a reason. To have my closet inviolate;
to be sole empress of my tea-table, which you must never
presume to approach without first asking leave. And lastly
wherever I am, you shall always knock at the door before you
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Mrs Sullen: Ah! [Shrieks, and runs to the other side of the stage.] Have my
thoughts raise a spirit? - What are you, Sir, a man or a devil?
Archer: A man, a man, Madam. [rising.]
Mrs Sullen: How can I be sure of it?
Archer: Madam, I’ll give you demonstration this minute. [Takes her
hand.]
Mrs Sullen: Do you intend to be rude?
Archer: Yes, Madam, if you please?
Mrs Sullen: In the name of wonder, whence came ye?
Archer: From the skies, Madam - I’m a Jupiter in love, and you shall be
my Alemena.
Mrs Sullen: How came you in?
Archer: I flew in at the window, Madam; your cousin Cupid lent me his
wings, and your sister Venus opened the casment.
Mrs Sullen; I’m struck dumb with admiration.
Archer: And I with wonder. [Looks passionately at her.]
Mrs Sullen: What will become of me?
Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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Apart from blaming Ben for finding inspiration for her plays in Molière
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, women’s 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 gender-biased, 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 Centlivre’s life, which
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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 Perjur’d Husband (1700),
Centlivre’s first play, Placentia dresses as a men because she wants to
gain access to her husband’s 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 Centlivre’s 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 age’s 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 men’s apparel.
The same role reversal in Centlivre’s 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
Beau’s 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 play’s 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
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Task
Consider the following topics to defend in oral or written form:
2. Restoration Drama
• Historical and cultural contextualisation
• Characteristics of the Restoration theatre
• Genres of Restoration Drama:
– The heroic tragedy (characteristics)
– The comedy-of manners (characteristics)
• Representative playwrights
• Choose a text for illustration
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His first notable poetic attempts are four Pastorals (1709), dedicated
each to one season and beginning with spring, which abound in visual
imagery and descriptive passages of an ideally-ordered nature:
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The masterpiece of the earlier part of Pope’s career is, nevertheless, The
Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714). It is a mock-heroic 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 Fermour’s 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.
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[…]
Pope returned once more to the question of literary ambition with The
Temple of Fame (1715), a poem modelled distantly on Chaucer’s The
House of Fame. Written in the form of a dream vision, it presents the
fantastic visions induced by sleep in the mind of the poet, at the centre
of which there stands the presiding deity of the poem, the Goddess of
fame:
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In the temple, the poet faces the statues of the various heroes that
populate its interior. The first to be described is that of Homer:
There follow those of Virgil, Pindar, Horace and Aristotle, each of them
representing a classical ideal (of poetry, wisdom, or patriotism), which
they embody it and shadow forth.
Nevertheless, these are the ideals of fame, and, as such, they are further
opposed to its reality - presented in the dramatic procession of
suppliants who crowd around the Shrine of Fame, and in the Mansion
of Rumour, placed next to the Temple, where lies and truth contend
until "At last agreed, together out they fly, / Inseparable now, the Truth
and Lye" (494). But the allegory somehow reconciles these extremes,
and the poet decides neither to seek nor to reject the reward of Fame,
but to follow virtue rather than the fickle Goddess.
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But Bayes decision is made up for him, because, like the aged Flecknoe, in
Dryden’s Mackflecknoe, the Goddess Dullness, contemplating her realm of
confusion and bad poetry, anoints the Hero king of the Dunces, his domain
being the empire of Emptiness and dullness. The celebrations which follow
his enthronement are described as a burlesque of the funeral games for
Anchises in the Aeneid in the second book, while the third book presents
Bayes, asleep in the goddess’s lap, dreaming of the past and future triumphs
of the empire of Dullness, extended to all arts and sciences, the theatre and
the court. The last book sees the dream realized, describing how the
Goddess comes to substitute the kingdom of Dull upon the Earth and
closing on a bleak vision of cultural chaos:
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Ioana Mohor-Ivan
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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 Anne’s
reign, under the Tories) by whom they were generously treated. The
aim of these two conscious moralists was frankly educational; they
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[Our aim] is to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with
morality. [. . .] And to the end that their [the readers’] virtue and
discretion may not be short, transient, intermittent starts of thought,
I have resolved to refresh their memories from day to day, till I have
recovered them out of that desperate state of vice and folly into
which the age has fallen. I shall be ambitious to have it said of me,
that I have brought philosophy out of closets and libraries, schools
and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and
coffee-houses.
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:
Though the other papers which are published for the use of the
good people of England have certainly very wholesome effects, and
are laudable in their particular kinds, they do not seem to come up
to the great design of such narrations, which, I humbly presume,
should be principally intended for the use of political persons, who
are so public spirited as to neglect their own affairs to look into
transactions of State. Now these gentlemen, for the most part, being
men of strong zeal and weak intellects, it is both a charitable and
necessary work to offer something, whereby such worthy and well-
affected members of the commonwealth may be instructed, after
their reading, what to think; which shall be the end and purpose of
this paper: . . . I have also resolved to have something which may be
of entertainment to the fair sex, in honour of whom I have taken the
title of this paper.
As can be seen, they both clearly point out the new social ideal of
balance between the morality and respectability of the old, rather
Puritan middle-class and the wit, grace and enlightenment of the
aristocracy, stressing moderation, reasonableness, self-control, urbanity
and good taste.
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A Country Sunday
I am always very pleased with a Country Sunday, and think, if
keeping holy the Seventh Day were only a human Institution, it
would be the best Method that could have been thought of for the
polishing and civilising of Mankind. It is certain the Country-People
would soon degenerate into a kind of Savages and Barbarians, were
there not such frequent Returns of a stated Time, in which the whole
Village meet together with their best Faces, and in their cleanliest
Habits, to converse with one another upon indifferent Subjects, hear
their Duties explained to them, and join together in Adoration of the
Supreme Being . . .
My friend Sir Roger, being a good Churchman, has beautified the
inside of his Church with several texts of his own choosing. He has
likewise given a handsome Pulpit-Cloth, and railed in the
Communion-Table at his own Expense. He has often told me that at
his coming to his Estate he found his Parishioners very irregular;
and that in order to make them kneel and join the Responses, he
gave every one of them a Hassock and a Common-prayer Book: and
at the Country for that Purpose, to instruct them rightly in the Tunes
of the Psalms; upon which they now very much value themselves,
and indeed outdo most of the Country Churches that I have ever
heard.
As Sir Roger is Landlord to the whole Congregation, he keeps
them in very good Order, and will suffer no Body to sleep in it
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His prose is the model of the middle style; on grave subjects not
formal, on light occasions not groveling; pure without scrupulosity,
and exact without apparent elaboration; always equable, and always
easy, without glowing words or pointed sentences . . . Whoever
wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant
but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes
of Addison . . .
The Tatler and the Spectator were not, however, the only periodicals
of the time. Reference should also be made to other periodicals such as:
The Gentleman’s Journal (1692-94) that eventually turned into the
long-lasting The Gentleman’s Magazine (1731-1914), The Grub Street
Journal (1730-37), a satirical literary magazine (the jockey name is
synonymous with literary hack work) and The Monthly Review (1760-
), the most significant of the literary magazines. They all reflected the
image of London during the Augustan period and its tastes, that
dominated and influenced the tastes of the entire nation. That is why
many of the writers of the age (Pope, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Johnson)
used journalism as a vehicle for their ideas.
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
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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
Swift’s mastery of light, ironic satire, makes use of allegory which was
to become the author’s favorite device in Gulliver. The Spider standing
for the Moderns is opposed to the Bee, representing the Ancients.
For the rest of his life, Swift devoted his talents to politics and religion
(not clearly separated at the time) and most of his works in prose were
written to further a specific cause. Introduced to Pope, he enjoyed the
literary company of the Scriblerus club. Having befriended Addison
and Steele, he wrote several satirical pieces for the Tatler, including
The Bickerstaff Papers that was meant as an attack on projectors and
schemers, using Swift’s favourite device (an astrologer appears as an
obvious fraudulent spokesman). He continued his journalistic activity
with his taking over the editorship of the Examiner, a weekly
propaganda paper for the Tories, and writing major essays defending
government policy. As a reward for his services, he was offered the
deanship of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in 1713, one year before the death of
Queen Anne and the fall of the Tories, that marked the end of the hopes
of preferment in England.
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As for the poem Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift (1739), it is Swift’s
own joking epitaph in which he presents his perception of himself:
For a long time he was considered merely a mad misanthrope, but that
critical opinion – convenient for the tastes of his own day – could now
be seen to do less then justice to a writer who used satire with great
originality and wit to highlight what he saw as the faults and
hypocrisies of his age. His literary personality was aggressive in
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During the next journey he visits the flying island of Laputa and the
neighbouring Lagado and Luggnagg. Laputa’s inhabitants are obsessed
with astronomical speculations involving mathematic and music; at
Lagado’s 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.). Swift’s 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 Gulliver’s account of European politics in general, the
Houyhnhnms decide he is a yahoo, i.e. the vilest form of life in their
country.
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In a period when horses were one of the main servants of man, Swift’s
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
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teasing and controlled the more fierce the indignation that is called
upon to express.
Swift’s literary career is remarkable for the way in which his artistic
energy both sewed and transcended ideological conservatorism,
mindful, in all he wrote, of the public and political responsibilities of a
writer. Through satire, parody and other kinds of literary
impersonation, Swift diverts attention away from his own limited yet
consistent principles towards the distortion of reason and sanity which
he detects in his enemies. His ambiguous art is reflected in the
anonymous and pseudonymous forms he habitually employed (he
very rarely spoke in his own voice or signed his name), largely a
stylistic preference (something of a legal safeguard). Consequently, his
most memorable works are based solidly on the intrinsic exploitation
of a seemingly innocent persona whose character eventually becomes
part of the satirical strategy of rebuking the reader’s complacency.
Swift’s elusive literary identity illustrates an ambivalent sense of
national loyalty. Although he repeatedly referred to himself as
“Englishman born in Ireland”, he came to feel increasingly alienated
and vengeful towards England.
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Task
Consider the following topics to defend in oral or written form:
1. Neoclassical Satire
Definition of satire
Cultural contextualisation: neoclassicism
Types of neoclassical satire
Representative authors:
o Verse satires: John Dryden and Alexander Pope
o Prose satires: Jonathan Swift
Choose a text for illustration
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Working against this was the need to shape experience into narrative
order, which would lead to the inevitable conflict between the demands
of narrative order and realistic portrayal. Part of the answer, in Defoe's
case, was to produce a loose novel, without a clear sense of narrative
order and progression, which employed the episodic technique. By the
time of Fielding, he is already self-consciously using Chapters and
Books to order his narratives. This conflict between realistic intention
and aesthetic narrative order is most clearly evident in Sterne's anti-
novel Tristram Shandy, in which the conventions of the Novel are
exploded before the novel has had a chance to become a settled form.
Another issue related to this was that of moral purpose. The eighteenth
century novel often appears torn between the demand not to offend, to
teach, and yet to be realistic. Novel writing is thus tied to the moral
demands of a middle class readership, with is need for pleasurable
instruction, evident in the way in which these early novelists deal with
sex, adultery, passion and desire.
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The author is here supposed to be writing her own history, and in the very
beginning of her account she gives the reasons why she thinks fit to conceal
her own name, after which there is no occasion to say any more about that.
It is true that the original of this story is put into new words and the
style of the famous lady we here speak of is a little altered; particularly she is
made to tell her own take in modester words than she told it at first, the copy
which came first to hand having been written in language like one still in
Newgate than one grown penitent and humble, as she afterwards pretends
to be.
The pen employed in finishing her story , and making it what you
now see it to be , has had no little difficulty to put it into a dress fit to be seen,
and to make it speak a language fit to be read.
Thus, the first person narration unravels Moll’s 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
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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:
As soon as it was day, I got out of the hole we lay in, and rambled abroad
into the fields, towards Stepney, and there I mused and considered what I
should do with this money, and many a time I wished that I had not had it,
for after all my ruminating upon it, and what course I should take with it, or
where I should put it, I could not hit upon any one thing, or any possible
method to secure it, and it perplexed me so, that at last, as I said just now, I
sat down and cried heartily.
When my crying was over, the case was the same; I had the money still,
and what to do with it I could not tell, at last it came into my head, that I
would look out for some hole in a tree, and see to hide it there, till I should
have occasion for it: big with this discovery, as I then thought it, I began to
look about me for a tree; but there were no trees in the fields about Stepney. . .
and if there were any that I began to look narrowly at, the fields were so full
of people, that they would see if I went to hide anything there, and I thought
the people eyed me as it was, and that two men in particular followed me, to
see what I intended to do.
This drove me further off, and I crossed the road at Mile-End, and in the
middle of the town I went down a lane that goes away to the Blind Beggar’s
at Bethnal-Green; when I came a little way in the lane, I found a foot-path
over the fields, and in those fields several trees for my turn, as I thought; at
last one tree had a little hole in it, pretty high out of my reach, and I climbed
up to the tree to get to it, and when I came there, I put my hand in, and found
(as I thought) a place very fit, so I placed my treasure there, and I was mighty
well satisfied with it; but behold, putting my hand in again to lay it more
commodiously, as I thought, of a sudden it slipped away from me, and I
found the tree was hollow, and my little parcel was fallen in quite out of my
reach, and how far it might go in, I knew not; so that, in a word, my money
was quite gone, irrecoverably lost, there could be no room, so much as to
hope ever to see it again for it was a vast great tree.
As young as I was, I was now sensible what a fool I was before, that I could
not think of ways to keep my money, but I must come thus far to throw it
into a hole where I could not reach it; well I thrust my hand quite up to my
elbow, but no bottom was to be found, or any end of the hole or cavity; I got a
stick off of the tree and thrust it in a great way, but all was one; then I cried,
nay, I roared out, I was in such a passion, then I got down the tree again, then
up again, and thrust my hand again till I scratched my arm and made it
bleed, and cried all the while most violently: then I began to think I had not
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so much as half-penny of it left for a half-penny roll, and I was a hungry, and
then I cried again: then I came away in despair, crying and roaring like a little
boy that had been whipped, then I went back again to the tree, and up the
tree again, and thus I did several times.
Novels in the form of letters had been popular for several decades
(Aphra Behn had published Love Letters between a Nobleman and his
Sister as early as 1683). Richardson’s 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 Pamela’s
acclimatisation to the new social position and the dignified way with
which she conducts her marriage, in accordance to Richardson’s
didactic purpose – to prove that worth depends on individual effort
rather than social status.
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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 Richardson’s
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.
The excerpt, taken from one of Clarissa’s letters in which she describes
how her sister Bella broke the news that the family decided that the
heroine must marry Mr. Solmes, proves that the novel is essentially
dramatic in form:
Obedience without reserve is required of you, Clary. My papa is
justly incensed that you should presume to dispute his will, and to
make conditions with him. He knows what is best for you; and as your
own matters are gone a great way between his hated Lovelace and
you, they will believe nothing you say; except you will give the one
only instance, that will put them out of doubt of the sincerity of your
promises.
What, child, are you surprised? Cannot you speak? Then, it seems,
you had expected a different issue, had you? Strange that you could!
With all your acknowledgements and confessions, so creditable to
your noted prudence!
I was indeed speechless for some time: my eyes were even fixed, and
ceased to flow. But, upon the hard-hearted Bella’s proceeding with her
airs of insult, indeed I was mistaken, said I; indeed I was! For in you,
Bella, I expected, I hoped for, a sister -
What! Interrupted she, with all your mannerly flings, and your
despising airs, did you expect that I was capable of telling stories for
you? Did you think that when I was asked my own opinion of the
sincerity of your declarations, I could not tell them how far matters had
gone between you and your fellow [Lovelace]? When the intention is to
bend that stubborn will of yours to your duty, do you think I would
deceive them? Do you think I would encourage them to call you down,
to contradict all that I should have invented in your favour?
Well, well, Bella; I am the less obliged to you; that’s all. I was willing
to think that I had still a brother and a sister. But I find I am mistaken.
Pretty Mopsa-eyed soul, was her expression! And was it willing to
think it had still a brother and sister? And why don’t you go on, Clary?
(mocking my half-weeping accent) I thought too I had a father and
mother, two uncles and an aunt: but I am mis-taken that’s all - come, Clary,
say this, and it will be in part true, because you have thrown off their
authority, and because you respect one vile wretch more than them all.
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How have I deserved this at your hands, sister? But I will only say, I
pity you.
And with that disdainful air, too, Clary! None of that bridled neck!
None of your scornful pity, girl! I beseech you!
This sort of behaviour is natural to you, surely, Bella! What new
talents does it discover in you! But proceed - if it be a pleasure to you,
proceed, Bella. And since I must not pity you, I will pity myself: for
nobody else will.
Because you don’t, said she -
Hush, Bella, interrupting her, because I don’t deserve it - I know you
were going to say so. I will say as you say in everything; and that’s the
way to please you.
Then say, Lovelace is a villain.
So I will, when I think him so.
Then you don’t think him so?
Indeed, I don’t. You did not always, Bella.
And what, Clary, mean you by that? (bristling up to me) Tell me
what you mean by that reflection?
Tell me why you call it a reflection? What did I say?
Thou art a provoking creature - but what say you to two or three
duels of that wetch’s?
I can’t tell what to say, unless I knew the occasions.
Do you justify duelling at all?
I do not: neither can I help this duelling.
Will you go down and humble that stubborn spirit of yours to your
mamma?
I said nothing.
Shall I conduct your ladyship sown? (offering to take my declined
hand)
What! Not vouchsafe to answer me?
I turned from her in silence.
While the novelist is much less obviously in control of the presentation
of the scene – with no narrator to stage-manage its development – it is
the dialogue alone which carries on the story, as well as indicating
emotion and attitude, and differentiating between the two sisters. The
novel itself may be read as a play of voices, at times communing, at
other times, conflicting, in which Clarissa’s tones are often contradicted
or qualified, but in the end, for most readers, thoroughly vindicated.
At the end of the 18th century the epistolary novel had a brief but
intense European vogue. Jean-Jacques Rousseau employed in his Julie
ou la nouvelle Héloise (1761), J. W. Goethe used it in The Sorrows of
Young Werther (1774), and Choderlos de Laclos brilliantly exploited the
dramatic possibilities of the form in his only novel, Les Liaisons
Dangereuses (1782). Though the artificiality it imposed on the writer
brought about its disappearance during the next century, 20th century
authors, like Iris Murdoch in An Accidental Man (1971), Saul Bellow in
Herzog (1964) and John Barth in the suggestively entitled Letters (1979)
have witnessed to its continuing appeal.
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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 reader’s 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, like in the following fragment where the reader is
challenged to visualise Lady Booby’s surprise at Joseph’s recoil from
her advances by following the narrator’s instructions:
You have heard, reader, poets talk of the statue of Surprise; you
have heard likewise, or else you have heard very little, how
Surprise made one of the sons of Croesus speak, though he was
dumb. You have seen the faces, in the eighteen-penny gallery,
when, through the trap-door, to soft or no music, Mr
Bridgewater, Mr William Mills, or some other of ghostly
appearance, hath ascended, with a face all pale with powder,
and a shirt all bloody with ribbons - but from none of these, nor
from Phidias or Praxiteles, if they should return to life - no, not
from the inimitable pencil of my friend Hogarth, could you
receive such an idea of surprise as would have entered in at
your eyes had they beheld the Lady Booby when those last
words issued out from the lips of Joseph. ‘Your virtue!’ said the
lady, recovering after a silence of two minutes; ‘I shall never
survive it!’
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As can be seen from the above examples, 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
Allworthy’s 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 Allworthy’s 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:
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Smollett’s 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
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point of the journey - where the family finally reach a kind of utopia - is
a “Scottish paradise” at Loch Lomond, not far from Smollett’s own
birthplace, at Dumbarton.
The tradition of the English novel, after less than a century of existence,
started to lend itself to subversive experimentation once Laurence
Sterne’s 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.
As such, the novel, which is narrated in the first person, begins on the
night of Tristram’s 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 Tristram’s life never getting told. The author deliberately
hinders all movement, for his narrator’s 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.
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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
reader’s sympathy for their fellow men, which eventually, under the
influence of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s philosophy, came to be associated
with emotions.
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In spite of the deliberate naivities of the story and the moralising and
sentimental exhibitions of feeling, the real achievements of Goldsith’s
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:
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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”.
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which the two face at Udolpho and which eventually lead to the aunt’s
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 Emily’s return to her native Gascony where
she is happily reunited with the Chevalier de Valancour, her first and
faithful lover.
To support this view, one may often cite the creature’s 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,
such as is the case in the following fragment in which the monster
utters his first words to another human being:
My heart beat quick; this was the hour and moment of trial which
would decide my hopes or realise my fears. The servants were gone to
a neighbouring fair. All was silent in and around the cottage; it was an
excellent opportunity; yet, when I proceeded to execute my plan, my
limbs failed me, and I sunk to the ground. Again I rose; and, exerting
all the firmness of which I was master, removed the planks which I
had placed before my hovel to conceal my retreat. The fresh air revived
me, and, with renewed determination I approached the door of their
cottage.
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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. Thady’s 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 Patrick’s 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 Thaddy’s own son, Jason, and the Rackrents’ line is
ended when Condy himself dies trying to emulate one of his
grandfather’s 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 Thaddy’s 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 retainer’s self-
professed loyalty to the Reckrents becomes ambiguous, especially in
view of his son’s eventual possession of the estate.
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Then we were all bustle in the house, which made me keep out of the way,
for I walk slow and hate a bustle, but the house was all hurry-skurry,
preparing for my new master. - Sir Murtagh, I forgot to notice, had no
children, so the Rackrent estate went to his younger brother - a young
dashing officer - who came amongst us before I knew for the life of me
whereabouts I was, in a gig or some of them things, with another spark
along with him, and led horses, and servants, and dogs, and scarce a place
to put any Christian of them into; for my late lady had sent all the feather-
beds off before her, and blankets, and household linen, down to the very
knife cloths, on the cars to Dublin, which were all her own, lawfully plaid
for out of her own money. -So the house was quite bare, and my young
master, the moment ever he set foot in it out of his gig, thought all those
things must come of themselves, I believe, for he never looked after any
thing at all, but harum-scarum called for every thing as if we were
conjurers, or he in a public-house. For my part, I could not bestir myself
any how; I had been so used to my late master and mistress, all was upside
down with me, and the new servants in the servants’ hall were quite out of
my way; I had nobody to talk to, and if it had not been for my pipe and
tobacco should, I verily believe, have broke my heart for poor Sir Murtagh.
The first of them and the one which established her reputation is
Evelina; or, The History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World,
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After subtly setting the heroine for a fall in the first sentence by means
of the series of three epithets which encapsulate the deceptiveness of
Emma’s seeming “contentment”, the narrator rapidly summarises the
circumstances likely to breed her arrogance: deprived of her mother’s
guidance at an early age, she had assumed the role of mistress of the
house due to an indulgent father and a governess who had supplied her
with a mother’s affection and not discipline. In the third paragraph, the
exact nature of Emma’s relationship with Miss Taylor, the governess, is
rendered more emphatic by means of a shift of point of view between
the author/narrator and the heroine herself, though the latter is not
allowed to appear entirely in the light of her own point of view because
the reports of her thinking are still in the third person.
Task
Consider the following topics to defend in oral or written form:
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6.2.1. 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.
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6.2.3. George Crabbe (1754 - 1832) in The Village (1783) reacted against
the view of rurality as that of a lost golden age, attempting to show that
country life was not idyllic, not a romantic dream, but a continual trial.
By vividly painting the squalor and poverty of the lives of humble
farmers, fishermen, agricultural laborious, Crabbe was attacking both
the Arcadian ideal as well as the complacency with which town-
dwellers viewed their lot:
6.3.1. 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. Thomson’s vision of nature as harsh, especially in winter, but
bountiful, stresses the ‘pure pleasures of rural life’, with no denial of the
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6. 3.2. 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:
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6.4. Proto-Romantics
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To a Louse
Ha! Whare ye gaun, ye crowlan ferlie!
Your impudence protects you sairly:
I canna say but ye strunt rarely,
Owre gauze and lace;
Tho’ faith, I fear ye dine but sparely,
On sic a place.
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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,
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The Lamb
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life & bid thee feed,
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice!
Little Lamb who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
The Tiger
Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
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Task
Consider the following topic to defend in oral or written form:
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APPENDIX 1
THE NOVEL
INTRODUCTION TO NARRATOLOGY
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1. PLOT
The pattern of events and situations in a narrative, as selected and
arranged both to emphasise relationships (usually cause and effect)
between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader
(through surprise or suspense.) A simpler definition would be: the
author’s design for a novel, in which the ‘story’ plays a part, as well as
the author’s choice of language and imagery.
The concept of plot was first developed by the Greek
philosopher, Aristotle, to describe the properties of drama. His
formulation introduced concepts such as the protagonist, or hero, whose
fate is the focus of the audience’s attention. The hero may be in conflict
with an antagonist in the form of a human opponent or of some abstract
concept such as fate; or the conflict may be in his own mind.
As the plot progresses, it arouses expectations in the reader
about the future course of events and how characters will respond to
them. A concerned uncertainty about what is going to happen is known
as suspense. If what in fact happens violates the readers’ expectations, it
is known as surprise.
A plot has unity of action if it is perceived by the reader as a
complete and ordered structure of actions, directed towards the
intended effect, in which none of the component part (incidents) is
unnecessary. Aristotle claimed that it does not constitute a unified plot
to present a series of episodes which are strung together because they
happen to a single character. Many picaresque narratives, nevertheless,
such as Defoe’s Moll Flanders, have held the interest of the readers for
centuries with such an episodic plot structure.
A successful development which Aristotle did not foresee is the
type of structural unity that can be achieved with double plots, where a
subplot - a second story that is complete and interesting in its own right
- is introduced to broaden our perspective on the main plot and to
enhance rather than diffuse the overall effect. The subplot may have
either the relationship of analogy to the main plot, or of counterpoint
against it.
The order of a unified plot, as Aristotle pointed out, is a
continuous sequence of beginning, middle, and end, and develops
through the stages of exposition, amplification, climax, denouement. In
many plots the denouement involves a reversal in the hero’s fortunes,
which frequently depends on a discovery, i.e. the recognition by the
protagonist of something of great importance hitherto unknown to him
or to her.
Novelists in particular have at times tried to subvert or ignore
the reader's expectation of a causally linked story with a clear
beginning, middle, and end, with no loose ends. James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf wrote novels that explore the minutiae of a character's
experience, rather than telling a tale. However, the tradition that the
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novel must tell a story, whatever else it may do, survives for the most
part intact.
English novelist E M Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, defined it
thus: The king died and then the queen died. The king died and then the queen
died of grief at the king's death. The first is the beginning of a series of
events; the second is the beginning of a plot.
2. SETTING/SPACE
“Setting” refers to the part which may be played by location or milieu
or historical time in the design of the novel. This is most commonly a
reflective or supporting role; it underlines or enhances the nature of the
action or the qualities of the characters which form the substance of the
novels. Setting may be a means of placing a character in society which
allows scope for the action his nature is capable of, or it may generate
an atmosphere which has a significant function in the plot.
In simple terms, the relations between setting on the one hand
and character and events on the other, may be causal, or analogical:
features of the setting may be either cause and effect of how characters
are and behave; or, more by way of reinforcement and symbolic
congruence, a setting may be like a character or characters in some
respects. While the examples above tend towards the broadly
personifactory, the more conventional, ‘undramatised’ settings play an
important part in promoting verisimilitude and indirect
characterization.
3. TIME
The amount of time which is allotted in the narrative to the various
elements of the story is determined with respect to the amount of time
which these elements take up in the story.
One must distinguish here between the moment in history when
the story is supposed to take place, and the time-span covered by the
story, i.e. the fictional time taken up by the action (e.g. a whole
generation, a single day.)
The most influential theorist of fictional time is Gerard Genette,
who isolates three aspects of temporal manipulation or articulation in
the movement from story to narrative/text:
a) order (refers to the relations between the assumed sequence of events
in the story and their actual order of presentation in the text.) Any
departures in the order of presentation in the text from the order in
which events evidently occurred in the story are termed anachronies, i.e.
any chunk of text that is told at a point which is earlier or later than its
natural or logical position in the event sequence. They naturally divide
into flashbacks and flashforwards. The first (called analepses by Genette) is
an achronological movement back in time, so that a chronologically
earlier incident is related later in the text; the second (prolepses)is an
achronological movement forward in time so that a future event is
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related textually before its time. The two types of anachrony entailed by
them are called correspondingly: retroversions and anticipations.
b) Duration (concerns the relations between the extent of time that
events are supposed to have actually taken up, and the amount of text
devoted to presenting those same events.) Maximum speed is said to
constitute ellipsis (no text space is spent on a piece of story duration);
the opposite situation is a descriptive pause (text without story duration.)
Related terms are summary and scene. In summary the pace is
accelerated through a textual compression of a given story period into a
relatively short statement of its main features. In scene, story and text
duration are conventionally considered identical (e.g. purely dialogue
passages.)
c) Frequency (how often something happens in story compared with
how often it is narrated in text.)it may be: singulative (telling n times
what happened n times); repetitive (telling n times what happened
once); iterative (telling once what happened n times.)
4. CHARACTER
A personage in a narrative (or dramatic work): it is normally expected
of a novel that it should have at least one character, and preferable
several characters shown in processes of change and social relationship.
CHARACTERIZATION: the representation of persons in narrative and
dramatic works. It may include direct methods (narrative), like the
attribution of qualities in description or commentary, and indirect (or
‘dramatic’) methods inviting the reader to infer qualities from
characters’ actions, speech or appearance. A distinction was made by
Forster made between FLAT and TWO-DIMENSIONAL characters
(which are simple and unchanging) and ROUND characters which are
complex, ‘dynamic’ (i.e. subject to development) and less predictable.
Another classification was advanced by W.J. Harvey (Character and the
Novel), including protagonists, background figures, intermediate figures.
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about the agents and the events; is free to move at will in time and
place, to shift from character to character, and to report (or
conceal) their speech and actions; and also that the narrator has
privileged access to the characters’ thoughts and feelings and
motives, as well as to their overt speech and actions. Within this
mode, the narrator may be INTRUSIVE (not only reports, but
freely comments on and evaluates the actions and motives of the
characters, and sometimes expresses personal views about human
life in general: e.g. Dickens and Hardy), or UNINTRUSIVE
(IMPERSONAL or OBJECTIVE) (i.e. describes, reports, or ‘shows’
the action in dramatic scenes without introducing his own
comments or judgements, e.g. Hemingway.)
2) the LIMITED point of view: the narrator tells the story in the
third-person, but within the confines of what is experienced,
thought, felt by a single character (or at the most by very few
characters) within the story. Henry James, who refined this mode,
described such a selected character as his ‘focus’ or ‘mirror’, or
‘centre of consciousness’. In a number of James’s later works all
the events and actions are represented as they unfold before and
filter to the reader through the particular awareness of one of his
characters. Later writers developed this technique into STREAM-
OF-CONSCIOUSNESS narration, in which we are presented with
outer observations only as they impinge on the current of thought,
memory, feelings, and associations which constitute the observer’s
awareness (e.g. Joyce, Virgina Woolf.)
b) First-person points of view: This mode naturally limits the point of
view to what the first-person narrator knows, experience, infers, or
can find out by talking to other characters. We distinguish between
the narrative “I” who is a fortuitous witness of the matters he relates,
or who is a minor or peripheral participant in the story, or who is
himself or herself the central character in the story (e.g. Mark Twain,
Salinger.)
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APPENDIX 2
POETRY: GENERAL CONCEPTS
(ADAPTED from www.ucea.courses/outlines/introd.poetry)
Poems often try to capture a feeling (love, death, fear, joy etc.).
Poems often try to express the inexpressible: what the mind can't
rationalize.
Poems often try to make abstract concepts concrete.
Poems often deal with contradictions and uncertainties.
Poems often try to answer the deepest questions about the
human experience.
Poems often try to express their anger, pessimism, criticism, or
hope about a moment in time (especially historical events) and
how that impacts the human condition.
Poems often try to make the seemingly unimportant experience,
important. (John Donne even wrote a poem entitled, "The Flea"!)
10. Assume there is a reason for everything. Poets do make mistakes, but in
poems that show some degree of verbal control it is usually safest to
assume that the poet chose each word carefully; if the choice seems
peculiar to us, it is usually we who are missing something.
Craftsmanship obliges us to try to account for the specific choices and
only settle for conclusions of ineptitude if no hypothetical explanation
will make sense. (390)
The Speaker as a Poetic HOW
The poem's speaker is NOT necessarily the poet! So, please do not
confuse the two.
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When:
Why does the event take place? What prompts the speaker to make the
poetic statement? love; memory; death etc.
Since poems often have so few words, every word contains meaning.
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implied metaphor
extended metaphor= ranges over part or whole of poem
controlling metaphor
structure : 14 lines
Italian / Petrarchan:
1 octave : abbaabba
1 sestet: cdecde OR cdcdcd OR
cdccdc
English / Shakespearean
3 quatrains: abab cdcd efef
1 couplet: gg
quatrain: 4 line stanza
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Blank verse
assonance
consonance
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onomatopoeia
enjambment
end stopped
punctuation
punctuation can also shape how one reads a poem and therefore,
shape its meaning.
Many commas may suggest parallelism or equality
Dashed suggest rupture, long pauses
spacing
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APPENDIX 3
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money he printed the first edition of his poems in 1786. Thus, the so-
called “Kilmarnock” edition made him famous and took him to
Edinburgh where his modesty and conviviality made him very popular.
The appreciation of literary Edinburgh helped Burns forget the
death of his dear Mary while the second edition of his poems brought
him £ 500, enabled him to settle down on a small farm at Ellisland and
to marry Jean Armour. Farming proving unsuccessful again, he secured
the office of excise man at the Dumfries customs in 1791. His
enthusiasm with the French Revolution brought him in conflict with the
authorities and nearly cost him his place when he brought two cannons
and sent them as a present to the French Republic.
Meanwhile he contributed some 200 songs to James Johnson’s
SCOTS MUSICAL MUSEUM, among which the famous AULD LANG
SYNE, SCOTS WHO HAE, A RED, RED ROSE. No other single poet in
literature produced so many lyrics that compulsively sing themselves.
Burns died at the age of thirty-seven broken in health and fortune,
leaving behind him a literary work of unique value.
All the elements of Romanticism: sensibility, personal effusion,
love of nature, wealth of imagination, sympathetic interest in the
humblest things in nature are to be found in the work of Burns.
However, he has none of the romantic pangs of the mind and soul. His
strong, robust self renders him immune from any excesses either of
melancholy or ecstasy.
Most of Burns’s verse appeared in POEMS, CHIEFLY IN THE
SCOTTISH DIALECT, of which three gradually expanding editions
appeared successively in 1786, 1787 and 1793.
Any attempt at analysing Burns’s poetry has to face the
abundance and variety of his poetic achievements. A classification
according to the major themes adopted here for didactic purposes
causes the poetry of Burns to fall into the following divisions:
a) Social poetry. A sense of liberty is the animating force of his
poetic genius which ranks Burns in the same line with such proletarian
writers as William Langland and John Bunyan5. Burns is deeply aware
of the dignity and equality of men and voices the conviction that social
rank does not determine man’s real worth. The poet’s attitude varies
from the glorification of the simple and humble life in THE COTTER’S
SATURDAY NIGHT, through the vivacious mock-heroic animal tale in
THE TWA DOGS, to the wild bravado song in THE JOLLY BEGGARS,
to culminate in the pathetic cry for equality in FOR A’THAT AND
A’THAT.
THE COTTER’S SATURDAY NIGHT follows the current taste
for sentimentalism in its pictures of rural simplicity, homely virtues and
praise of unaffected rural life. Burns reveals himself as a rustic poet
who wrote when Scotland was on the verge of the Industrial
Revolution, hence the irresistible temptation to sentimentalise over an
idealised country-life. The principle that inherent worth determines the
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rank of man is voiced in the often quoted line: “An honest man’s the
noblest work of God”.
THE TWA DOGS relates, in the manner of a beast mediaeval
fable, a conversation between Caesar, a gentleman’s Newfoundland
dog, and Luath, a poor man’s mongrel, on the social inequality in the
country. This dog’s eye view of man’s world is carefully handled so as
to make the latter appear the more contemptuous and abusive. The two
dogs part in the end “rejoic’d they were na men, but dogs.”
THE JOLLY BEGGARS, published after the poet’s death in 1799,
depicts the sturdy independence and courageous defiance of all social
conventions of a group of beggars carousing in an ale-house. Brief
descriptive moments are linked together in challenging songs
resounding with revolutionary motifs. All institutions, all conventions,
anything that limits the freely chosen human intercourse, are
abandoned in roaring professions of anarchist independence.
FOR A’THAT AND A’THAT voices the equalitarian cry of the
French Revolution, looking forward to the days when class
discriminations will end and all men will be brothers.
b) Satirical poems. Burns’s poetry breathes a spirit of irreverence
which spares neither church nor clergy. With peculiar verve he pokes
fun at the devil, makes free with the theme of eternal damnation and
laughs at the secret troubles which haunt the Puritan conscience.
ADDRESS TO THE DEIL reduces Milton’s Satan to the folklore
devil in an attack against the rigid Calvinism of the Scottish church. The
poem is a fine example of Burns’s technique of criticising theological
dogmas by translating them into the realities of daily, ordinary
experience.
HOLY WILLIE’S PRAYER, one of Burns’s greatest satirical
poems, is a monologue in which Willie, a parish elder, is overheard at
his prayers. Willie is convinced that he is one of God’s elect and that his
salvation is assured regardless of his moral conduct. Willie’s filthy soul
and his hypocritical religion are laid bare in solemn, biblical rhythms6.
The target of Burns’s satire here is again the Calvinist doctrine of
predestination and of salvation of predestined grace regardless of
man’s behaviour but, as the poem proceeds, it acquires generalising
force, Willie standing for universal religious hypocrisy and selfishness.
TO A LOUSE, ON SEEING ONE ON A LADY’S BONNET AT
CHURCH is another satirical approach to the old theme of social
inequity. The lady’s aristocratic airs are confronted with the vulgar
louse which reveals pretence and hypocrisy in their true light. Her airs
and graces are stripped away in a tone of kind amusement and the
poem concludes with a simple, epigrammatic note: “O wad some low’r
the giftie gie us/ To see oursels as others see us!/ It wad frae monie a blunder
free us/ An’ foolish notion;/ Wat airs in dress an’ gait wad lae’e us,/ An’ e’en
Devotion!”
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c) Patriotic lyrics. Burns’s love for his native land calls forth
various responses on the part of the poet.
MY HEART’S IN THE HIGHLANDS voices a Scot’s intense love
for his native hills though Burns was a native of the Lowlands.
SCOTS WHA HAE also known as BRUCE’S ADDRESS BEFORE
BANNOCKBURN celebrates the Scottish victory over the English at
Bannockburn in the 14th century. Burns’s hostility at contemporary
reactionary forces is obvious in the prose conclusion to the poem: “So
may God defend the cause of Truth and Liberty as he did that day!”
THE TREE OF LIBERTY echoes the ideals of the French
Revolution which are contrasted with the life of the oppressed people:
“A scene o’ sorrow mixed wi’ strife”.
Burns’s devotion to the Stuart pretenders expressed in such
poems as CHARLIE, HE’S MY DARLING should be interpreted as a
longing for the national independence of the by-gone patriarchal days
rather, than an attachment to monarchy, which was so alien to his
spirit.
d) Nature poems. The poetry of Burns is in close touch with all
the human element in life. The keen love of nature intermingles with a
sympathetic interest in the humblest things in it.
TO A FIELD MOUSE bridges the gap between the world of men
and that of the animal in the similar unexpected misfortune befalling
both. The poet expresses his regret to the mouse, the “wee, sleekit,
cowrin’, timi’rous beastie”, on turning her up with the plough, and muses
over the hostile forces that thwart the ideals of both animal and man.
This fellow-feeling is conveyed in well-controlled, proverbial lines: “The
best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ Gang aft a-glay,/ An’ lea’e us nought but
grief an’ pain/ For promis’d joy.”
TO A MOUNTAIN DAISY displays a similar disposition
towards a flower. The poet’s crushing of the blossom with his plough
becomes symbolic of man’s fate in a hostile environment. The poem
bears the stamp of Burns’s complying to the new sensibility since he
was here posturing as a man of feeling, one that “Melancholy has marked
for her own” as Gray whom he thought highly of, had described in his
ELEGY.
THE AULD FARMER’S NEW-YEAR MORNING SALUTATION
TO HIS AULD MARE MAGGIE recounts a farmer’s thoughts as he
brings the traditional extra food to his animal at the start of the new
year. The poem displays a realistic unsentimental sense of the shared
labour of animal and man which remained unequalled in Romantic
poetry.
e) Lyrical songs. The poet of good-natured frankness, Burns has
made of his poetry a full and open confession of himself. His private
life, his friendships, his love affairs, his marriage and his paternal
feelings are all reflected in his lyrical poetry.
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driv’n away;/ And mournful lean Despair;/ Brings me yew to deck my grave:/
Such end true lovers have”.
SONGS OF INNOCENCE (1789) represents a poet who is wholly
himself seeking his own visions of life. The poems in SONGS OF
INNOCENCE deal with childhood as the symbol of untarnished
innocence that ought to be, but which in modern civilisation cannot be,
part of the adult response the world. There is a sense of everything in
its proper place, of content and order and spontaneity ruling together
enhanced by the elemental simplicity of the language, by the regular
rhythmic patterns. The poems display an imaginative picture of the
state of innocence derived from the Bible, pastoral tradition and the
growing Romantic fascination with childhood and a supposed
primitive condition of human perfection in innocence.
The universe in SONGS OF INNOCENCE is seen through the
eyes of a child, felt through his senses, judged through his mind; and
this child is the symbol of the most delicate and courageous intuition of
the human mind, just like the soul of a peasant in those moments of
sober exaltation which will be with Wordsworth the very source of
poetry.
THE LAMB sees the innocence in the child as kindred to that of
the lamb of Christ.
NURSE’S SONG praises the happiness of the uninhibited
childhood freely playing. The final lines in THE CHIMNEY SWEEPER:
“So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm”, far from being versified
moral platitudes, are a half-ironic, half-yearning vision of a world in
which all men behave as Blake would have them behave.
The SONGS OF EXPERIENCE (1794) are in a marked contrast
with the precious collection. The theme in these poems is the notion
that the conventions of civilisation represented intolerable restrictions
on the individual personality and produced every kind of corruption
and evil. There is no road back to innocence, since innocence, by its
very nature, is easily led astray, only a road forward, through
experience, to a comprehensive vision. SONGS OF EXPERIENCE are
clearly the product of disillusion and present a sad picture of what man
has made of man10. The brightness of the earlier work gives place to a
sense of gloom and mystery and of the power of evil. They depict the
actual world of suffering mankind by means of concrete, evocative
symbols. Many of these poems are deliberate responses to the similar
pieces in SONGS OF INNOCENCE.
NURSE’S SONG counters the identical poems in SONGS OF
INNOCENCE. The nurse contemplates her own ruined life and
concludes with the idea that the innocence of childhood is followed by
the hypocrisy of mature age.
THE TIGER counters THE LAMB. The tiger is a symbol to the
fierce forces in the human soul and in the universe. Blake sees in the
apparent evil and malevolence of the tiger another manifestation of the
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unity of God displayed here in its power and energy. Power and energy
are necessary to achieve final fulfilment.
There is both beauty and terror in the elemental forces of nature
as later works of Blake proclaim. That section of THE MARRIAGE OF
HEAVEN AND HELL entitled PROVERBS OF HELL in which Hell is
the symbol of liberty and spontaneous energy provides a clue to the
meaning of the symbol of the tiger:
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a full story line and contains Blake’s proclamation that an old age is
dying and a new one is coming to birth.
THE BOOK OF THEL (1789) presents for the first time the theme
that will prevail in all Blake’s subsequent works: the soul is eternal but
must pass through the wheel of Destiny, through Generation (Blake’s
symbol for the physical world we live in) to surge up to Eden, i.e. the
state of imaginative power and balanced harmony.
THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL (probably printed c.
1790-95) considers “good” and “evil” as synonymous for “passivity”
and “energy”, both of which must be fully developed to achieve life.
Analysing PARADISE LOST in terms of his concepts,
Blake sees Milton’s God as Urizen, the great forbidder, and Milton’s
Satan as Los, energy, inspiration and revolt. Self-restraint is considered
not strength of will, but weakness of desire.
VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION (1793)
insists that everyone is entitled to the most ideal union that he or she
can secure despite such frequent obstacles as jealousy, hypocrisy,
abusive authority. Blake’s Albion is the sleeping self composed of the
harmonious balance of all elements. The indebtedness to Macpherson’s
OSSIAN can be easily traced in the similarity of names.
Though Blake was a visionary influenced by the main
undergrounds of European mystical thought, he was also a man of his
time who responded characteristically and sometimes violently to the
main political and social events of his age, notably the French
Revolution and the American War of Independence.
A SONG OF LIBERTY (c. 1793) considers the current unrest
throughout Western Europe, the prelude to the momentous toppling
over of all repression by the powers of innate energy.
AMERICA (1793) represents Blake’s vision of the American
Revolution as the wild upsurge of Orc (another name for Luvah, Blake’s
personification of Emotion) against Albion’s Angel (the repressive
George III.)
EUROPE (1794) figures Orc as the spirit of the French Revolution
freeing himself from Asia, the symbol of oppression.
THE BOOK OF URIZEN (1794) is Blake’s first attempt at an
overall explanation of man’s total psychic problems. Blake personified
the four functions which he identified in each human being as: Los
(Intuition), Urizen (Reason), Luvah (Emotion) and Tharmas (Sensation).
Blake sees the struggle between Urizen and Los as taking place
simultaneously within the individual soul and within the entire spirit of
mankind. Reason usurps the world of inspiration (Los) and his lack of
imaginative power results in terrible errors imposing superstitions and
restraint in order to maintain his dominance. Los establishes an
evolutionary cycle through Revolt personified as Fuzon that will
eventually bring the new age of perfection.
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APPENDIX 4
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Primary:
Ioana Mohor-Ivan, English Literature: from the Late
Renaissance to the Rise of Romanticism, D.I.D.F.R.,
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Ioana Mohor-Ivan, From Theory to Text: Criticism, Critics
and Readings of Late Renaissance to Romantic English
Literature, Editura Evrika, Braila, 2002.
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M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th edition,
Holt, Rhineheart, Winston, New York, 2002.
Brackett, Virginia, British Poetry: 17th and 18th Centuries,
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Ronald Carter and John McRae, The Routledge History of
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Ian Ousby (ed.), The Wordsworth Companion to
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Stephen N. Zwicker (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
English Literature: 1650-1740, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2004.
Wall, Cynthia (ed.), A Concise Companion to the
Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, Blackwell,
Oxford, 2005.
Ioana Mohor-Ivan