Many of the writers we study, beginning with Dryden and ending with Keats, showed keen interest in the visual arts of painting and sculpture and in their relation to literature. And many of the issues important to the thought and literature of the period under study are reflected in works of art. Thus an important supplementary dimension of our studies will deal with art as well as literature,and students will have the opportunity to write about literary-artistic relations, as well as relations between literature and music.
In admiring reference to the age of the Roman emperor Augustus, a period of great cultural and political power, schoars often refer to the late 17th and early 18th century periods as "Augustan." Chief Augustan authors include John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope. The reference to Augustus ties in with the Neoclassic orientation of English culture from the late 1700s until well into the 18th century. For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see Martin Price's Introduction to the Oxford Anthlogy of Enlglish Literature.
The outstanding contributions to drama in the period covered are those of the Restoration and 18th century, most notably the sharply comic works of Congreve, Wycherly, Sheridan, and Goldsmith. The Romantic period was rich in poetry and prose, but not drama, despite the earnest attempts of such Romantics as Byron and Keats to create works in this genre.
This term applies both to a period loosely identical with the Augustan period (i.e., from the late 1600s to about 1745, by which time the two greatest early 18th-century Neoclassicists, Swift and Pope, were both dead), and to the ideals and attitudes of writers during this period who strove to apply principles of classical literature and art to the contemporary English situation. Thus, Neoclassicism involves a veneration for the classical virtues of logic, balance, harmony, and order, both in artistic forms and in social, moral, and political life. The comprehension of the intricacies of Neoclassicism will be an important feature of the first half of the course. Reflective of those intricacies is that fact that, as Martin Price notes in discussing Neoclassicism in the glossary at the back of the Oxford Anthology, "in England such Neoclassic artists as Henry Fuseli, John Flaxman, George Romney, and even, in some measure, William Blake, are close to the origins of pictorial and literary Romanticism itself" (p.779).
One of the exciting things about the literature of this period is its extraordinary range of poetic accomplishment and variety. While Neoclassic poets are best known for their razor-sharp satirical verse, such masters as Dryden, Pope, and Johnson also produced work in a "kinder, gentler" vein. It is fascinating to watch the Neoclassic emphasis on perfect form, wit, tradition and balance modulate into the Romantic experimentations with poetic form, subject matter, and with the very notion of the character and role of the poet. The period's concern with the meaning and value of poetry, and with the role of the poet, continues to have resonance in our own time as we deal with problems of censorship (in literature, the movies, rock n' roll), the writer's relation to society, and the connections between literature and morality.
Literature from the Restoration (1660) on to the end of the 18th century was rich in poetry, drama, and what John Dryden called the other harmony of prose." The structure of this course is such that, while we will not study the development of the novel, we will read some outstanding examples of prose writing, e.g., Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, William Wordsworth's Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.
A terms that has a confusing plethora of references and overtones, "Romantic" in the literary sense refers, in Enlgland, to the period from approximately the late 1780s to the early 1830s, when a literature emphasizing individuality, artistic, political, and personal freedom, nature, and emotion rose into dominance. This is not to say that Romanticism signaled an overnight transformation from Neoclassicism's meticulous attention to traditional forms, reason, and order. Rather, romanticism, as we shall see, was the result of a gradual but powerful flow of changes in attitude and style, and left as its literary legacy a rich body of writing, especially in poetry, by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, and Keats. The second half of the course will focus on the development of Romantic literature and thought, with particular emphasis on four important, representative writers: William Blake (also a major English painter, whose most famous body of poetry, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, combine poetic texts with detailed pictures), William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, and John Keats.For an excellent beginning discussion of Romantcism both in historical terms and as a set of beliefs and approaches to art and life, see the introduction to "The Romantic Period," by M. H. Abrams and Jack Stillinger, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2. The nature and history of Romanticism are the topics of a number of books on the reserve list for this course.
The word "satire" comes from the Latin term satura, denoting a dish of mixed fruits--a kind of salad or medley that, in its literary application, suggests the mixture of diction (elevated speech, colloquialisms, slang) that characterized works of satire. The genre has a long history, going back in western literature to classical Greek and Roman literature. For Neoclassic writers like Samuel Johnson, satire served as a tool with which to "reform through ridicule"--to use biting wit to attack those individuals and practices that seemed corrupt, foolish, or hypocritical, and thereby to change society for the better. Many of the satires that we will read, beginning with Dryden's magnificent MacFlecknoe, reveal the mixture of styles of speech and subject matter that is traditional for the satire. In the Romantic period, satire became a less favored genre, although it survives in brilliant examples by Byron (Don Juan, Beppo, A Vision of Judgment). A full discussion of this rich genre appears in Gilbert Highet's study, The Anatomy of Satire, which also makes some useful observations about some visual satires, such as William Hogarth's print, Gin Lane (see picture gallery).
Derived from the Old English word witan, meaning "to know," wit is one of the most salient characteristics of Neoclassic literature. Wit involves a combination of quick, agile mental process and light, at times sharp humor, as in the numerous aphorisms of Alexander Pope, one of the age's most admired --and feared--wits. As the previous sentence suggests, wit also refers to an individual person who possesses and shows this trait. Many authors took pains to distinguish between true wits and those who misued wit or merely pretended to have it--i.e., the various cruel wits, false wits, would-be wits and half-wits that populate the satires of the time.