week7The Eighteenth Century English Literature--18世纪英国文学

The Eighteenth Century English Literature

I. Historical and social Background

The 18th century is a period of comparatively peaceful development in England. After the Glorious Revolution, England entered the Golden Age. The state power passed from the king gradually to the Parliament and the cabinet ministers; therefore, system was established in England. A vast abroad of British colonies in Asia, Africa and North America and Acts of at home caused the Industrial Revolution.

So, towards the middle of the 19th century, England had become the first powerful capitalist country, the work-shop of the world, flooding the markets both at home and abroad with its manufactured goods.

Popular again and again hit Ireland; in Scotland people were threatening of independence from the British government; and the American people started their War of Independence in 1776 and finally broke away from the British government. As the Industrial Revolution went on in its full swing, more and more people joined the rank of the middle class or the propertied class through much hard work. Morally, they stressed the virtues of self-discipline, thrift and hard work. People divided into the liberal Whigs, who were determined to safeguard popular liberty, and the conservative Tories, with tender memories of kingcraft. On the extreme of Toryism were Jacobites. And almost all writers of the

age were servants of Whigs or Tories during their competition.

Ⅱ. Cultural Background

1. Enlightenment

The was a progressive intellectual movement throughout Western Europe in the 18th century. It was an expression of struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism. The enlighteners fought against class inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. They thought the chief means for bettering the society was "enlightenment" or "education" for the people. The English enlighteners were bourgeois democratic thinkers. They set no revolutionary aim before them and what they strove for was to bring it to an end by clearing away the feudal ideas with the bourgeois ideology.

Enlighteners fell into two groups-the group and the radical group. Moderate enlighteners supported the principles of the existing social order and considered that partial reforms would be sufficient. In this group may be included chiefly Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. They tried to work out a standard of moral conduct, which could be more suitable to the existing social conditions. Radical enlighteners struggled for more resolute democratization in the management of the government, and defended the interests of the exploited masses, the peasants and the working people in the cities. The representative writers of this group are

Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Tobias George Smollett, Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. They stressed the discrepancy between what they called “the proper, moral standards”and the bourgeois-aristocratic society of their age.

2. The influence of Enlightenment

Inspired by the spirit of the Enlightenment, people were encouraged to cultivate a sound sense of rationality and a witty intellectuality. More schools were set up. The Copyright Act of 1709 made, for the first time in English history, literary creation an honorable and independent profession.

Besides the popular forms of poetry, novel and drama, the period also saw the appearance of such popular press as pamphlets and newspapers and periodicals. And there was also the flourish of coffee houses and all kinds of social clubs, (about 2000 in London.) which greatly helped the cultivation and promotion of the new English culture.

However, in the later part of the century, people began to feel discontented with the rigidity of rationality. A demand for a release of one's spontaneous feeling, a relaxation from the cold and rigid logic of rationality and an escape from, the inhuman Industrial Revolution gradually took shape in the form of sentimental and pre-romantic novel and poetry.

Ⅲ. Characteristics of the Literature

The main literary stream of the 18th century was . What the writers described in their works were social realities. The main characters were usually common men. Most of the writers concentrated their attention on daily life. Literature included book, newspaper, magazine, and pamphlets. Prose had a rapid development in this age, so the 18th century was an age of prose.

Novel writing made a big advance in this century. Along with the economic independence, the eighteenth-century writers enjoyed greater freedom in their creative activities and were now able to devote themselves to whatever interested them and to give utterance to whatever they thought right or proper. For the first time too, the literary tendency of the age was moving-away from the conventional romance stories about the life of the rich and noble people of the aristocratic class and turning to works that would give accounts of the common life of the ordinary folk.

In this age was much used in writing. It refers to any writing, in poetry or prose, with the purpose to ridicule, censure(责难) and correct the vices, follies, stupidities and corruptions of the society, and to satirize their enemies.

The development of the literature in this period can be summarized as: the predominance of neoclassical poetry and prose in the early decades of the 18th century; the rise and flourish of modern realistic novel in the middle years of the 18th century; and the appearance of

gothic novel and the sentimental and pre-romantic poetry and fiction in the last few decades of the 18th century.

1. Neo-Classicism in English Literature

In early 18th century, writers of the neo-classical school were Addison, Steele and Pope. In the middle decades of the century, Samuel Johnson became the leader of the classical school in English poetry and prose.

The classicists found their artistic models in the classical literature of the ancient Greek and Roman writers, and tried to control literary creation by some fixed laws and rules drawn from their works. In writing plays they used rimed instead of blank verse. They observed the three unities-the unities of time, place and action. They thought poetry should follow the ancient divisions, falling into lyric, epic, didactic, satiric or dramatic and each group should be guided by some peculiar principles. Prose should be precise, direct and flexible. They put the stress on the classical ideals of order, logic, restrained emotion, accuracy, good taste and decorum. Their works, mostly refined and perfect, are conscientious craftsmanship and often highly didactic. Neoclassical poetry reached its stylistic perfection during the period.

A. Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

a. A brief introduction of Pope

Pope was the representative writer of the neo-classical school. He was a master in satire and heroic couplet and epigram. He popularized the neo-classical literary tradition. He was one of the early representatives of the Enlightenment, who introduced into English culture the spirit of rationalism and greater interest in the human world. He represented the highest glory and authority in matters of literary art and made great contributions to the theory and practice of prosody(诗学).

b. Pope's Major Works:

An Essay on Criticism《批评论》(1711), written in heroic couplet, was a manifesto of English neo-classicism. It sums up the art of poetry of old Greek and Roman.

The Rape of the Lock《卷发遇劫记》(1714). A fop at the court forcibly cut off a lock of curls of a pretty maid of honor. In this poem the poet describes how a quarrel between two aristocratic families arose.It is a satire of the court life of that time.

Essay on Man《人论》, written in her oic couplet, indicates the poet’s political and philosophical viewpoint. It deals with man’s relation to the universe, to society, to himself, and to happiness.

The Dunciad《愚人志》is Pope’s famous satirical poem. It is full of bitter personal attacks on the poet’s personal enemies, and it also gives a broad satirical picture of the whole literary life in the early 18th century England.

c. Pope’s epigram

“Hills peep over hills, and Alps on Alps arise!”

山外有山，天外有天。（学而后知不足）

Whatever is，is right.凡是存在的都是合理的。

For fools rush in where angels fear to tread.天使不敢践踏之地，蠢才蜂拥而至。

To err is human, to forgive, divine. 凡人多舛误，唯神能见侑。

A little learning is a dangerous thing.学识浅薄是件危险的事。

B. Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729)

In 1709, Steele started a literary periodical named “The Tatler”《闲谈者》. In 1711, Addison collaborated with Steele to create a literary periodical called “The Spectator”《观察者》.

Steele and Addison’s Contributions to English Literature:

a. Their writings in “The” and “The Spectator” provide a new

code of social morality for the rising bourgeoisie.

b. They give a true picture of the social life of England in the 18th century．

c. In their hands, the English essay completely established itself as a literary genre．Using it as a form of character sketching and story-telling; they ushered in the dawn of the modern novel．

C. Samuel Johnson: a lexicographer, critic and poet. His dictionary was published in 1755. His famous article include Sir Roger at Church and

Sir Roger at the Assizes.

2．English Realistic Novels

The novelists of this period told the reader in their novels, not about knights or kings but about the ordinary people, about their thoughts; feelings and struggles. The major realist novelists of this century are Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Henry Fielding. By combining the allegorical tradition of the moral fables with the picaresque tradition of the lower-caste stories, they achieved in their works both realism and moral teaching.

A.Daniel Defoe

B.Jonathan Swift

C.Henry Fielding

D.T.G. Smollet（1721-1771）: his satirical novels touched upon various

aspects of English life.Roderick Random《蓝登传》was the first important work by Smollett. Humphry Clinker《汉弗莱·克林克历险记》is generally regarded as the best and pleasantest of his novels. E.Samuel Richardson (1689-1761): He is noted as a storyteller, letter

writer and moralizer. His main achievement as a novelist lies in his technique to show characters as personalities, thinking and feeling for themselves with the author himself absent from the stage, refusing to intervene in the action. His first novel Pamela《帕米拉》and his masterpiece Clarissa《克拉丽莎》are epistolary novels, famous for

psychological analysis.

3．Gothic Novel----“a novel of ”

The term "Gothic" derived from the frequent setting of the tales in the ruined, moss-covered castles of the Middle Ages. Gothic novel exploits the possibilities of mystery and terror in gloomy, craggy landscapes, decaying mansions with dark dungeons, secret passages; instruments of torture, ghostly visitations, ghostly music or voices, ancient drapes and tapestries behind which lurks no one knows what, and often, as the central story, the persecution of a beautiful maiden by an obsessed and haggard villain. These novels, in rebellion against the increasing commercialism and rationalism, opened up to later fiction the dark, irrational side of human nature - the savage egoism, the perverse impulses, and the nightmarish terror that lie beneath the controlled and ordered surface of the conscious mind.

The gothic novel exhibits the gothic qualities of doom and gloom as well as an emphasis on chivalry and magic.

Gothic heroes and heroines tend to the equally mysterious, with dark histories and secrets of their own.

Exaggeration and emotional language are frequently employed by gothic writers, who typically emphasize story line and setting over character and characterization. They seek to evoke an atmosphere of terror, often from an unidentifiable source.

The more notable of the Gothic novels are The Castle of Otranto《奥特兰托堡》by Horace Walpole and The Mysteries of Udolpho《奥多芙的神秘》by Ann Radcliff.

4．Sentimentalism

By the middle of the 18th century, sentimentalism came into being as the result of a bitter discontent among the enlightened people with social reality. It was a direct reaction against the cold, hard commercialism and rationalism. Dissatisfied with reason, sentimentalists appealed to sentiment, to “the human heart”. Sentimentalism turned to countryside for its material, and their writings were marked by a sincere sympathy for the peasants. It indulged in emotion and sentiment, which were used as a sort of relief for the grief and heart aches felt toward the world's wrongs, and as a kind of mild protest against the social injustice. They yearned for the return of the patriarchal times.

In Laurence Sterne’s “A sentimental journey《感伤的旅程》through France and Italy” and Tristram Shandy《项迪传》, Thomas Gray’ s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard《墓园挽歌》and Oliver G oldsmith’s “The Vicar of Wakefield”, we can see the sentimentalism.

5. Pre-romanticism

The Romantic Movement was marked by a strong protest against the bondage of Classicism, by recognition of the claims of passion and

emotion, and by a renewed interest in medieval literature. In England, this movement showed itself in the trend of Pre-romanticism in poetry, which is ushered in by Percy, Macpherson and Chatterton and represented by William and Robert Burns. They struggled against the neoclassical tradition of poetry.

IV．Literary Terms

1.Three Unities: the unity of time, which limits a play to a single day,

the unity of place, which limits a play’s setting to a single location, and the unity of action, which limits a play to a single story line.

2.Novel: A novel is a fictional prose narrative of considerable length,

typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters and so on. It arose in the 18th century to become a major literary expression of the modern world. The term comes from the Italian novella.

?1)Every time we race, you win (Yamaha)

?每次我们竞赛，你总赢（雅马哈电子琴）

?2)The choice is yours. The honor is ours. (Ford)任君选择，深感荣幸（福特汽车公司）

?3)Good to the last drop. (Maxwell)

?滴滴香浓，意犹未尽麦斯威尔咖啡

?4)You’ve got China with American Express. (American Express)拥有运通卡，走遍全中国（美国运通卡公司）

?5)You don’t just rent a car. You rent a company.(Hezi Car Renting Company)你不仅租了一辆车，你租了一家公司（美国赫兹出租汽车公司）

?6)Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.(State Farm Insurance)像个好邻居，州农场保险公司就在这里。州农村保险公司