Restoration & 18th Century Literature PDF

THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY (PART II) 02 / 12 / 2024  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY The Enlightenment (the Age of Reason) was a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reaso...

THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY (PART II) 02 / 12 / 2024  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY The Enlightenment (the Age of Reason) was a European intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries in which ideas concerning God, reason, nature, and humanity were synthesized into a unique worldview. Central to Enlightenment thought were the use and celebration of REASON, the power by which humans understand and can improve their own condition.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY The Scottish Enlightenment - an intellectual movement which originated in Glasgow in the early 18th century, and flourished in Edinburgh in the 2nd half of the century. Its thinking was based on philosophical questioning and its practical applications for the benefit of society.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY The Enlightenment encompassed literature, philosophy, science, education, and even geology. David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739); arguments on God, the cause and effect of man’s relationship with God Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) was probably the most important work on economics of the century, revolutionising concepts of trade and prophesying the growing importance of America as ‘one of the foremost nations of the world.’  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY The growth of the writing profession coincided with a rise in writing which was private and not intended for publication. Diaries and letters were, for the new literate middle class, forms of expression which enjoved great popularity. Letters gave fiction the basis of the EPISTOLARY NOVEL, echoing the newly established fashion of letter-writing among the middle and upper classes. EPISTOLARY NOVEL = a novel told through the medium of letters written by one or more characters.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY At the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th centuries, THE NOVEL became the dominant form and genre in terms of readership. The expanding readership was largely female and upper or upper- middle class. In many novels, a new morality is articulated, covering male/female relationships, figures of authority, and the social awareness of needs, desires and fantasies.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Aphra Behn (1640?-1689), the first female figure in English literature Behn’s novel Oronooko (1688) uses a tale of an African prince, who is carried off to slavery in the English colony of Surinam, to illustrate the violence of the slave trade and the corruption of the primitive peoples by treacherous and hypocritical Christian colonizers. It is a novel of violence and cruelty and is ahead of its time in its defence of the ‘noble savage’ and its affirmation of an anti-colonial stance.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Behn was a controversial figure, despite considerable success as a writer for the theatre. She was accused of lewdness (vulgarity) and of plagiarism. She was also politically active, and, in general, was an uncomfortable presence in the prevailing moral climate of the late 17th century. Perhaps it was this which led to her being ignored in literary history for many years. She herself contended that the fact that she was a woman, and spoke out for women’s rights and sexual freedom, had a negative effect on how she was received.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY The novels of DANIEL DEFOE (1660-1731) are fundamental to 18th century ways of thinking. They range from quasi-factual A Journal of the Plague Year, an almost journalistic (but fictional) account of London (1664-1665) to Robinson Crusoe (1719), one of the most enduring fables (stories which try to teach something) of Western cultures. If the philosophy of the time asserted that life was, in Hobbes’s words (Leviathan), ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’, novels showed ways of coping with ‘brutish’ reality (the plague, solitude on a desert island) and making the best of it.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Robinson Crusoe makes a kingdom of his island after a ship is wrecked, and remains there for more than 28 years, building a society of two men, with only his ‘man, Friday’ as his companion. The story can be read as a fable of survival in praise of the human spirit, or as an example of how the new society brought its values, religion and selfish behaviour to any place it colonised. Friday is considered inferior, his religion laughed at, and his ignorance ‘cured’. In the meantime, Robinson grows rich, and when he returns to society he has become a model of the new capitalist man in Europe. The happy ending suggests the continuation of the way of life Crusoe has brought to the island, on the model of white European society.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Defoe’s technique in most of his novels is to use a first-person narrator, an ‘I’ who tells the story as if it really happened. Defoe’s best known heroine, Moll Flanders (Moll Flanders, 1722) defies her readers with her first-person narration of an immoral life as thief, prostitute, and incestuous wife. The novel contains much social comment: the conditions of the poor, the prisons, the suffering of emigrants, all became subjects of concern to novelists, journalists, artists and the middle-classes.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) has long been considered a comic fable for children. In fact, it’s a severe attack on the political parties of the time, and on the pointlessness of religious controversies between different denominations within Christianity. These differences are symbolised in the tiny Lilliputians and the enormous Brobdingnangians. The novel also satirizes some of the new scientific institutions of the time, such as The Royal Society (the UK scientific academy).  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Swift’s view of life was seen as pessimistic and against the mood of times, and so his book was not taken seriously, but in fact a lot of his writing was the most original satire of its day. He wrote a great many political pamphlets on a wide range of topics, and with Defoe, is one of the most prolific of all British authors.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was enormously popular. He created the typical heroine of the times in his epistolary novel Pamela (1740). Pamela is poor, but a good and virtuous woman, and in her letters the readers can follow all her problems with Mr B who wants to marry her. She goes through uncertainties and crises, including an attempted rape, before agreeing to marry him, and becoming a model of the good wife.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY The novel has many themes: strong men and weak women; the power of sex; the social need for good behaviour. Pamela not only created a fashion for the epistolary novel, but emphasized role distinctions which were to become predominant in society for some two centuries: the dominant male as provider and master; the female as victim, preserving her virtue until submitting to ‘affection’ and the inevitability of the man’s dominance.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Richardson’s next epistolary novel, Clarissa (1747-48) marks a major step forward. There are 4 major letter writers (in Pamela almost all the letters come from the heroine). The novel ends in tragedy. Clarissa’s suitor, Lovelace plays with her emotions, he eventually drugs and rapes her and she not only begins to lose her reason but also her very identity. She dies eventually. The woman is a victim of men once again. In many ways the rules of moral behaviour in male/female relationships were fixed in the novels of Richardson, and it was not until the next century that female writers began to challenge them.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Henry Fielding wrote Joseph Andrews (1742), intended as a kind of parody of Richardson. He developed his highly personal narrative style – humorous and ironic, with an omniscient narrator controlling the lives and destinies of his characters. Fielding focuses on male characters and manners. Tom Jones in Tom Jones (1749) is the model of the young man enjoying his freedom. When he matures, he assumes his social responsibilities and marries the woman he has always loved, who has been waiting faithfully for him.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY In Fielding’s novels, there is a picaresque journey from innocence to experience, from freedom to responsibility. Don Quixote, the epic novel of Spanish literature by Cervantes, was a major influence on English writing after the Restoration. Many 17th century plays and novels borrowed something from Cervantes – the idea of ‘picaro’, or the clever rogue is often associated with Don Quixote.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY ‘Picaresque’ = the term has been applied to the novels of trickery and rogues, including Tom Jones and Moll Flanders; the term covers the 18th- century novel which takes its hero or heroine on a journey, or through a series of events and misadventures, out of which he/she emerges triumphant. Picaresque novel = an early form of novel, usually a first-person narrative, relating the adventures of a rogue (tramp, vagabond) or lowborn adventurer as he/she drifts from place to place and from one social milieu to another in his/her effort to survive.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY The tradition of the novel from Behn to Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, even after less than a century of existence, already lent itself to experimentation. The rationalism which seemed to dominate the first half of 18th century began to give way to new forms of humour, to the expression of emotion, to extension of the limits of imagination, and to an awareness of language. These first experiments disrupt previous notions of time, place and action, and extend the boundaries of what was possible in the novel.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Laurence Sterne published the first volume of Tristram Shandy in 1759, completing the 8th volume in 1767. The work was attacked by many critics, but has been more influential than any other novel of its time. He has been seen as the originator of what came in the 20th century to be known as ‘stream of consciousness’ (following the thoughts of characters as they come into their heads). Traditionally, a plot has a beginning, a middle and an end, in that order. Sterne was the first to change that order.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY He wanted to show how foolish is to force everything into the traditional plot. The novel seems to parody the developing conventions of the novel, pointing up to the absurdities, contradictions, and impossibilities of relating time, space, reality, and relationships in a linear form. ‘What passes in a man’s own mind’ is Sterne’s main concern. He wanted to break the newly set rules of novel writing and to escape from the moral and the social restrictions of the genre.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Sterne’s narrator frequently addresses the reader directly. His thoughts ramble forward, backwards, sideways, where they will. He describes a wide range of characters, covers every subject under the sun, from sex to science, from war to noses, in a conversational manner that rushes on headlong with no regard for consistency or coherence.  THE RESTORATION & THE 18TH CENTURY Another Scottish writer, James MacPherson caused a great controversy with his books Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763). He claimed these were the translations of Gaelic epics by Ossian, but in fact he had written them himself. These poems became famous, and created a fashion for wild Scottish scenery and old stories. They created an image of Scotland that was to have an influence on writers, composers and artists throughout Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  Narrative: another word for a story (or a novel) Narrator is someone who tells a story Point of view (who is telling a story) Omniscient narrator (all-knowing narrator); a narrator who, in the fiction of the narrative, has complete access to both the deeds and the thoughts of the characters in the narrative. First person narrative/narration (recognized by the use of ‘I’)