The Augustan Age & t he Rise of the Novel

The Augustan Age & the Rise of the Novel The Age of Reason (1713-1789)

Politics and society • The monarchywas not popular anymore; there were two failed rebellions. • The power of the Parliament and the Prime Minister continued to grow. • This was the time of the Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions. • New inventions made manufacturing easier and quicker. • The growing British Empire was ready market for British products. • People moved from the country to the new cities.

Elsewhere! • England remained relatively calm: “strong and stable” • A new mood of freedom started to begin towards the end of the century: The American Declaration of Independence 1776 and The French Revolution 1789. • The French Revolution brought the spirit of “Liberty, Equality, & Fraternity”. • This was a great threat to the stability of the British society. • The economic power of the middle classes gave England its strength and its political power.

Literature: The Rise of the Novel • The literature focused on the rational mind and an ordered society. (Rules of Decorum!) • Drama became less important. • The novel became more and more important. • More and more people could read and write. • Writing became a an important profession. • Journalism and magazines were very common.

AphraBehn : 1640-1689 • Women have always written fiction. (Why?) • In the late 17th and early 18th centuries women were the greatest part of the readership. • AphraBehn’sLove Letter between a Nobleman and his Sisteris an epistolary novel. • It’s a novel that depends mainly on exchanging letters. • This type of novels became popular 60 years later. • Remember: the literary critics of the time where MALE!

Behn’sOroonoko • Oroonoko(1688) is sometimes called the first philosophical novel in English! • Oroonoko is originally an Africa prince who was enslaved and sent to the English colony Surinam in South America. • The novel is a strong protest against trade of slaves and colonialism.

Behn’sOroonoko • Behn was not afraid to voice her disagreement and protest. • She was a speaker for women’s rights and freedoms. • But, like Donne, she was an outsider in the society. (Why?)

Mary de la Riviere Manley • Manley’s satire was like Dryden, sharp and personal. • But she was considered “scandalous”. • Manley was ignored by the critics. (why?) • TheSecret History of Queen Zarab(1705) • The New Atlantis was political and handled many ’objectionable” themes such as rape. • When these themes were treated by men, they were not considered so objectionable! • Behn and Manley are the mothers of the English Novel.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe • Defoe started his life as a journalist. • He published Robinson Crusoe in 1719. • Robinson Crusoe has remained one of the most successful works in the world. • Robinson Crusoe makes a ‘kingdom’ on the island after a ship is wrecked.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe • He remains on the island for over 28 years, where he builds a society. • The society consisted of his man, Friday, and Polly, a parrot.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe • The story can be read as a fable/allegory of survival in praise of human/white European spirit. • It reveals, too, how the new society brings its values, religion, and self-fish behaviour to any place it colonises. • As Crusoe grows rich, he returns back and becomes a model of the new capitalist.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe • Property and white man’s power are more important than such things as love or marriage. (Robinson’s marriage occupies only one page!) • The happy ending of Robinson Crusoe suggests the continuation of the way of life Crusoe has brought to the Island, on the model of white European society. • Post-colonial critics, such as Edward Said, consider this novel an allegory of Imperialism.

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe • Friday is presented as the uncivilised, inferior other who needs to be saved. • Even his language ”mans” and ”me saw” is inferior to that of the Parrot, Polly, who even uses the past perfect tense!

Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe • Defoe’s technique in most of his novels is a first-person narrator. • It is an ”I” that tells the story as if it had happened. • As a matter of fact, the novel was inspired by the story of Alexander Selkirk who spent many years on a desert island.

Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders • Moll Flanders tells the story of a woman who has been a prostitute and a thief. • When she tells the story, Mollhas reformed and changed her life. • The novel therefore makes a moral point about ways of living: • The reader shares Moll’s terrible experience in order to learn what life should be.

Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders • This reflects the age’s concern with experience and how to live. • Moll Flanders is also a first person narrator. • The fact that the main character was a woman shows how writers were trying to please the readership. • Most novelists in the 18th century described the bad side of life, but with a happy ending to show it was all worthwhile.

Jonathan Swift • Swift uses satire and humourin The Battle of the Books • His main question is will the Ancients make place for the newer modern writers in the library? • He highlights the differences between the classical writers and the modern ones in the literary taste of the Augustan period.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels • Gulliver’s Travels is Swift’s strongest political and social satire. • Gulliver’s Travels is in 4 parts • Book One: Gulliver travels to Lilliput, where he meets with very small inhabitants. • Book Two: he travels to Brobgidnag where the people are enormous/giants.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels • Here, he satirizes religion and politics as the king after hearing Gulliver describes the society in England saying: “Your natives are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” • In Book Three, science is ridiculed and mocked.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver's Travels • In Book Four, Gulliver meets the cultured horses, the Houyhnhnms, and compares their ways with the nasty monkey-like Yahoos, who represent humanity. • Swifts satire is strong because in another world, ordinary human actions are criticised when performed by extraordinary characters. • As soon as Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726, it was considered a kind of children’s story, a fable rather than a strong social and political criticism. Why?

Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal • Swift’s view of life was seen as pessimistic (Why?) and against the mood of the time. • Gulliver’s Travels was not taken seriously. • A Modest Proposal (1729) is a satirical article by Swift • A Modest Proposal suggested a way to solve the Irish problem. How?

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela • Richardson was met with enormous approval from his readers. • He was a publisher. • Pamela(1740) is a bout a typical heroine of the age: Pamela is a poor but a good woman. • In her letters, the readers can follow her problems and crises.

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela • Mr. B. wants to marry her, and tries to rape her. • She later agrees to marry him. • Pamela then becomes a model for the good wife.

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa • Many readers find the moral tone of Richardson’s novels hard to accept. • Clarissais narrated through the letters of Clarissa and Lovelace (epistolary). • Lovelace is a womanizer but not wealthy. • Clarissa’s parents insist that she marry a rich man and not Lovelace. • When she is locked up, Lovelace convinces her to elope to London.

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa • She lives among prostitutes thinking they’re respectable people. • He finally drugs her and rapes her. • Clarissa goes mad and dies. Lovelace dies in a fights. • Again, the woman is a victim of men. • The rules of moral behavior in male/female relations were fixed.

Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa • Only later women novelists started to challenge them. • Richardson took the advice from his readers regarding the plot. • The novel was published in parts (serialisation).

Henry Fielding • Henry Fielding examined male point of view to Richardson’s ideas and circumstances. • Tom Jones & Joseph Andrews are his best-known novels. • Fielding calls his novels “comic epics in prose”. • Fielding follows the heroes through long, complicated epic journeys (picaresque). • He stresses the experiences they go through and how they form their characters.

Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews • Joseph Andrews follows the life of Joseph in a novel which begins as a parody of Richardson's Pamela. • Fielding defends the good but displaying ‘the ridiculous’. • His plots show the strength and weakness of human beings. • Men always have rather more freedom than women. • Fielding uses a third-person narrator and often puts his opinion for the benefit of the ‘dear reader’.

The Novel after 1750 • After Richardson and Fielding, the novel had become rich and varied genre. • There were several women writers who led the way • Charlotte Lennox (The Female Quixote) • Eliza Haywood (Miss Betty Thoughtless) • Sarah Fielding (David Simple)

Laurence Sterne’s TristramShandy • The Life and Opinions of TristramShandy, Gentleman (1767) is the most ‘unusual’ novel of the time. • This is a long comic novel which plays with time, plot, and character. • Traditionally, the plot has a beginning, a middle, and an ending, in that order. • Sterne was the first to change this order.

Laurence Sterne’s TristramShandy • He wanted to show how foolish it is to force everything into a traditional plot. • His shows his plot line in his famous illustration.

Laurence Sterne’s TristramShandy • Sterne was the first writer to use what is known as “stream of consciousness”. • “Stream of consciousness” follows the thoughts of characters as the come into their heads. • It is a person's thoughts and conscious reactions to events, perceived as a continuous flow.

Elements of the Novel • CHARACTER: (protagonist vs antagonist/ flat vs round) • THEME: what is it about? Moral lessons. • PLOT: (Exposition; Complication; Climax; Resolution) • POINT OF VIEW. (Third person (he, she, they); first person (I) • SETTING: (place, time, and social conditions) • CONFLICT

Elements of the Novel • Journalist first-person narrator • The letters and diaries (epistles) • Third-person, all-knowing • Stream of Consciousness • Types of novels • 1- political 2- romantic (romance) 3- comic 4- social 5- satirical

Augustan Poetry

Augustan Poetry: Rules of Decorum Stressed • The rules of Decorum adopted during the Augustan age followed the Roman poet Horace. Those rules of old discovered, not devised, Are nature still, but nature methodized:

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) • Popewas a neo-classicistwho believed in the Rules of Decorum in poetry. • He was an essayist, a translator, a critic and a poet. • Pope is also famous for his satire poetry. • In Dunciad, he attacks the dullness of his literary rivals. Like whom? • His The Rape of the Lockis a mock-epic satire. • Pope is mocking the stupid self-importance of the age. • Pope made a great use of heroic couplet

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) A little learning is a dang'rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: True wit is nature to advantage dressed What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd ‘Pope’s Essay on Criticism’ • How the spirit of the Augustan age is reflected in these lines?

Lady Mary Worthly Montagu • Montagu is a famous woman poet in the Augustan age. • She was a friend and later an enemy of Pope. • It was she who told Pope that: Satire should, like a polished razor keen,Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.

Mary Leapor • MaryLeaporis another famous woman poet. She died at 24. • She left remarkable poems, said to be influenced by Pope. • The poems were published posthumously, i.e. after her death. Now, madam, as the chat goes round, I hear you have ten thousand pound: But that as I a trifle hold, Give me your person, dem your gold; Yet for your own sake 'tis secured, I hope -- your houses too insured;

The Augustan Age & t he Rise of the Novel