From Satire to Sensibility: Literature

1660-1700
1. Principles
  1. Effort to bring refinement to English lit.
    1. Most important contemporary forms
      1. Verse
      2. Comedy
        'Comedies of manners'
        Pick social behaviour apart
        Expose power struggles in the upper classes
      3. Tragedy
      4. Heroic play
      5. Translation
      6. Critical essay
      7. Ode
      8. Satire
  2. Desire for an elegant simplicity
    1. A rising European trend
      1. Desire to reach a new audience
    2. Reaction against extravagance of late Renaissance lit.
      1. Lit. still tied to aristocratic heroic ideals, however
  3. 'Augustan' lit.
    1. Named for the writers of August Caesar's reign (first Roman emperor)
      1. Virgil
      2. Horace
      3. Ovid
      4. Addressed their work to the sophisticated aristocracy
  4. Charles II brought back from exile an admiration of French lit. & fashions
    1. Lit.: theoretical 'correctness'
2. Poets tried to see and represent Nature
  1. 'Universal and permanent elements in human experience'
  2. Study of the ancient poets
    1. Importance of craft
      1. Planning works to genres
        Epic
        Tragedy
        Comedy
        Pastoral
        Satire
        Ode
      2. Language & rhetoric
  3. Wit also crucial
1700-1745
1. A new group of writers emerged
  1. Inc. Swift & Pope
  2. Turned their wit against fanaticism & innovation
    1. A great age of satire
    2. Conservative but playful
  3. They responded more spontaneously to expanding commercialism of printing industry
    1. Popular prose genres
      1. News
      2. Political allegories
      3. Biographies of criminals
      4. Travelogues
      5. Gossip
      6. Romantic tales
    2. Birth of the modern novel
      1. See Swift's anonymous work
        Authors claim 'editorial' position
2. 'Comedy of manners' replaced by moral, sentimental plays
  1. Piety & middle-class values
  2. Aimed to move audience to tears
    1. An 'invented luxury' of 18th C
3. The stage prospered
  1. Celebrity culture of actors/actresses
  2. However, dramatists faded into the background
4. Theme of Nature became increasingly popular
  1. Tourists roamed the countryside as well as poets
    1. Looking for first-hand experiences
    2. Spiritual aspect
  2. Would inspire the poetry of the Romantic Age to come
1740-1785
1. Dominated by prose
  1. Novelists better known than poets
    1. Celebrity culture
2. Johnson's Dictionary
  1. 1755
    1. First of its kind
  2. Codified the new style of language in this period
    1. Language to formulate principles of philosophy, history, psychology & art
    2. 114,000 quotations for definitions from English writers = relevance to lit. culture
3. Poetry
  1. Morbid fascination with suicide & the grave developed
    1. Odes became more popular
    2. Melancholia
      1. Cultivation of archaic language/antique forms
4. The novel
  1. Medieval revival similar to poetry
    1. Produced the Gothic novel genre
      1. Horace Walpole
        The Castle of Otranto
        1765
      2. The laws of nightmare replace laws of possibility
      3. Forbidden themes, e.g. incest, necrophilia, atheism etc.
  2. Epistolary form still highly popular
    1. Instruction/moral books
    2. Journals & letters chronicling the history of the times
    3. Samuel Richardson
      1. Pamela
        1740

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