Literary Features of the English Literature Period (1660-1785)
1. Literary Features of the Period
• Literature from 1660 to 1785 divides into three shorter periods of 40 years each, which can be characterized as shown below.
• 1660-1700 (death of John Dryden): emphasis on decorum, or critical principles based on what is elegant, fit, and right.
Literatura Inglesa Hasta 1800
Grupo C. Curso 2017-2018
Prof.: Dra. María Porras Sánchez
5
• 1700-1745 (deaths of Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope in 1744): emphasis on satire and on a wider public readership.
• 1745-1784 (death of Samuel Johnson): emphasis on revolutionary ideas.
• England’s Augustan age was modeled on that of Rome, when Augustus Caesar re-established stability after civil war following Julius Caesar’s assassination. English writers, following the restoration of King Charles II, felt themselves to be in a similar situation, in which the arts (repressed under Cromwell) could now flourish.
• English writers endeavored to formulate rules of good writing, modeled on classical works, but with a new appeal to the passions, in simple, often highly visual, language. This embrace of new (neo) aims and old models is called neoclassicism.
• Horace’s phrase, ut pictura poesis (meaning “as in painting, so in poetry”) was interpreted to mean that poetry ought to be a visual as well as a verbal art.
• Augustan poets began the century’s focus on nature, by examining the enduring truths of human nature.
• The classical genres from which Augustan writers sought to learn included epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral, satire, and ode. Ensuring a good fit between the genre and its style, language, and tone was crucial.
• Augustan writing celebrates wit, or inventiveness, quickness of thought, and aptness of descriptive images or metaphors.
• The heroic couplet (two lines of rhymed iambic pentameter) was the most important verse form of Pope’s age, for it combined elegance and wit. Poets also continued to use blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter, not closed in couplets).
• Not just aristocrats and classically educated scholars wrote verse: ordinary people also began to write poetry, often featuring broad humor and burlesque, thereby creating a distinction between high and low verse.
Eighteenth-Century Literature, 1700-1745
• The Augustan era of writers like Swift, Defoe, Pope, Addison, and Steele was rich in satire and new prose forms that blended fact and fiction, such as news, criminal biographies, travelogues, political allegories, and romantic tales.
• Early eighteenth-century drama saw the development of sentimental comedy in which goodness and high moral sentiments are emphasized, and the audience is moved not only to laughter, but also to sympathetic tears.
• The theatre business boomed; celebrity performers flourished; less important were the authors of the plays.
• James Thomson’s poems on the seasons, beginning with Winter (1726), carried on the earlier poetic tradition of pastoral retreat and began a new trend of poetry focused on natural description.
The Emergence of New Literary Themes and Modes, 1740-1785
• Novelists became better known than poets, and intellectual prose forms such as the essay proliferated.
• The mid-eighteenth century is often referred to as the Age of Johnson after the renowned essayist Samuel Johnson, who in 1755 wrote one of the first English dictionaries to define word meanings by employing quotations taken from the best English writers, past and present.
• By the 1740s the novel rose to dominate the literary marketplace, with writers like Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and Laurence Sterne defining the form and its modes of representing the private lives of individuals.
Literatura Inglesa Hasta 1800
Grupo C. Curso 2017-2018
Prof.: Dra. María Porras Sánchez
6
• The late eighteenth century saw a medieval revival, in which writers venerated and imitated archaic language and forms. One important development of this movement was the Gothic novel, which typically features such forbidden themes as incest, murder, necrophilia, atheism, and sexual desire.
• Late eighteenth-century poetry tends to emphasize melancholy, isolation, and reflection, in distinction to the intensely social, often satirical verse of earlier in the period.
Continuity and Revolution
• Some critics place the end of the eighteenth century at 1776 (linking it to the American Revolution); others at 1789 (the beginning of the French Revolution); still others at 1798 (the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads).
• Later Romantic writers, who valued the idea of originality, also prized the meaning of revolution which signified a violent break with the past and often represented their work as offering just such a break with tradition. However, changes to literary forms and content occurred much more gradually than this use of the word revolution might suggest.