1. The Neoclassical Age and the Rise of the Novel (1660-1789)
by Anna Lazzari

2. Restoration Period + Augustan Period = the Age of Reason
Outline
: the Restoration Period (the Age of Dryden)
: the Augustan Period (the Age of Pope and Swift)
: the Age of Sensibility (the Age of Dr Johnson)
Restoration Period + Augustan Period = the Age of Reason

3. Restauration Accession to the throne of Charles II (1660)
All principles of Puritanism were rejected
Theatres were reopened (1660)
Women were allowed to be actresses
Trade continued to grow (importance of ships)
The plague (1665) and the fire of London (1666)

4. Restauration Death of Charles II (1688)
His brother James II (Catholic) on the throne
James II’s Protestant daughter, Mary and her husband William invited to rule England, but they must obey parliament’s wishes
James II flees and the divine right to rule is over.
William and Mary sign the Bill of Rights
Detail of William and Mary as portrayed on the ceiling of the Painted Hall of the Greenwich Hospital

5. Restauration – Bill of Right (1689)
Ratified the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688
Ensured that Parliament would now and forever be superior to the monarchy (constitutional monarchy)
King had to call parliament regularly and Parliament controlled spending
No Catholic could sit on the throne
King couldn’t interfere with Parliament or dissolve it
Habeas corpus – nobody could be thrown in jail without being charged with a specific crime (trial by jury and no excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishment)

7. Restauration – New Literary Genres
Drama
Heroic plays (Dryden, All for Love, 1677)
Comedies of manners (Congreve, The Way of the World, 1700)
New indoor theatres designed by Sir Christopher Wren
Poetry
Heroic couplet (Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 1681)

8. Portrait by Michael Dahl, 1705
The Augustan Period
Mary died in 1694
William ruled alone until his death in 1702.
Mary’s younger sister, Anne, became Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland (8th March 1702)
1st May 1707, Acts of Union (the kingdoms of England and Scotland united as a single sovereign state known as Great Britain).
Anne continued to reign as Queen of Great Britain and Ireland until her death (1714).
Portrait by Michael Dahl, 1705

9. The Augustan Period From Augustus, Roman Emperor
Strong interest in tradition (thus the “neo”), distrust of radical innovation
Great respect for classical writers (those of Ancient Greece and Rome)
Literature was one of the arts – as an “art” it required the practice and study of a set of skills and the involvement of the artist in the forms and styles of the “classical” era, the original Augustan Age

10. The Augustan Period Emergency of the Empire
First prime ministers (Walpole and Pitt) expanded British power and commerce overseas
Britain became colonial power, ruling Canada and India, though in they lost American colonies.
Slave trade enriched nation; opposition to slavery widespread by both Anglicans and Methodists

11. The Augustan Period Poetics Imitation of Classical literature:
Perfect imitations of nature
Craftmanship
Codification of rules in literature
Imitation of nature:
‘Human nature’ (Pope)
Stressed balance, logic, sophisticated wit, and emotional restraint

12. The Augustan Period Poetry
Had to express universal truths and not personal emotions
Formal perfection (classical inspiration)
Triumph of the «poetic diction»
Use of elevated and poetical words
Use of Latinate words
Use of the heroic couplet (rhymed iambic pentameters)

13. The Augustan Period Literature
The Age of Swift, Pope, Addison, Walpole
Expansion of reading public
New journalism
Professional writers and booksellers
Writers, artists, politicians, etc., gathered in coffeehouses to exchange ideas, conduct business, and gossip

14. The Augustan Period – New Literary Genres
Sentimental comedy: Gay, The Beggar’s Opera (1728)
Mock heroic: Swift, Battle of the Books (1704); Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1712, 1714)
Landscape poems: Thomson, Winter (1726)
Satires: Swift, A Modest Proposal (1729)
Novel: Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)

15. The Augustan Period Antecedents of the Novel
Newspapers: news, gossips, reports
Journals: best writers, didacticism, model for taste, education of middle classes; Steele and Addison, Tatler and Spectator ( , )
Pamphlets and satires: political, occasional, ridicule
Other: essays, travelogues, biographies, letters

16. The Augustan Period Characteristics of the Novel
From Italian «novella» (idea of novelty, telling something new)
Aimed at middle class readers (a lot of women too)
Easy to read
Set in a world easily recognizable by middle classes
Interaction between individuals and society
Novelists mainly wanted to reveal, educate and stimulate moral reflection
Novel often published in installments

17. The Augustan Period Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719
Defoe, «father» of the English novel
First full-length prose fiction and first English popular novel
Application of journalism (Defoe was also a journalist)
World view of middle classes

18. The Augustan Period Defoe’s innovations:
Narrative realism (loosely based on Alexander Silkirk’s real story)
Fictitious events against a realistic background
Reportage: keen eye for the detail (descriptions)

19. Main novelists Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1740, epistolary form)
Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)
Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy ( )
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764)

20. The Age of Sensibility - Towards Romanticism…
Prose (fiction)
Novels more popular than poems for the first time
Epistolary novels and satires
Gothic novels
Experimental fiction influenced by Cervantes in Spain
Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (first metanovel and antinovel)

21. The Age of Sensibility - Towards Romanticism…
Prose (non fiction)
Essays - literary criticism, biography, philosophy, politics, history, aesthetics, economics (Adam Smith)
E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757
Concept of Sublime: natural beauty that was not neat and well- ordered like a garden but complex, uncontrollable and impressive, leading to feelings of awe.
Memoirs of women created celebrities who let readers into private lives
First dictionaries

22. The Age of Sensibility - Towards Romanticism…
Poetry
Poems were melancholy and lamented loss of poetic age
“Primitives” like Ossian were popular
By, the Scottish poet James Macpherson (from 1760: Fragments of ancient poetry, collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Gaelic or Erse language)
 Cycle of epic poems translated into poetic prose, with short and simple sentences
Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of Fallen French Heroes, Anne-Louis Girodet, 1805