EK2 – All Lessons

The Age of Reason - I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the
madness of people. - Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727)

Terms and chronological demarcations

• 1690–1780: from late 17th-century events with impact on 18th-century climate,
and first novelists like Aphra Behn, to the peak of Pre-Romanticism
• 1700–1798: until the formal beginning of Romanticism
• (Age of) Neoclassicism (Classicism vs. Neoclassicism)
• Augustan Age
• Age of Reason
• (Age of) Enlightenment

Divisions within the epoch

• Political:
Age of Queen Anne (1702–1714)
Georgian period (1714–1811)
• Literary:
Neoclassicism (1700–1740/44)
Sentimentalism and Realism (1740–1760)
Sentimentalism and Pre- Romanticism (1760–1798)

Foundations of 18th-century climate

• 1689: the Glorious Revolution → James II William and Mary as joint sovereigns of
a constitutional monarchy
• Tensions between England and Scotland → union in 1707 (illusion of toleration)
• Jacobite Rebellions (1715, 1745)
• Porteous Riots (1736)
• Gordon Riots (1780)
• Struggles between Whigs and Tories
• Social and political events vs. the ideals of the age
18th-century wars
• War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714)
• War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748)
• Seven Years’ War (1756–1763)
• American War of Independence (1775–1783)
• The French Revolution/Revolution of 1789 (1787–1799)
• Democracy as an idea rather than reality

Economic changes
• Britain as a dominant trading empire and the first nation to industrialize
• Internal economy still largely based on agriculture
• Flourishing of industry → rise of the middle class
• Slave trade: joint forces of colonialism and capitalism
• Accumulation of wealth based on capitalist exploitation (industry, trade,
destruction of small landowners, slavery)

Ideological background
• Rationalism – faith in the power of reason and knowledge gained
independently of experience
• Empiricism – sense experience as the primary source of knowledge
• Deism – religious belief holding that God created but does not control the
world of rationally comprehensible moral and natural laws
• Henry Saint-John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751)
• Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727) (intelligible laws, symmetry, certainty, order,
design)
• John Locke (1632–1704) (knowledge based on experience, equality, natural
moral law, religious toleration)
• Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713)
• Bernard de Mandeville (1670–1733)
The Rise of the Novel
Literary climate
• Socio-political events, economic changes, and class structure as driving
forces of literature
• Rationalism – reason as the chief source of knowledge, reality as inherently
logical, negation of emotion
• Sentimentalism – in philosophy (capacity to feel and how it leads to the
truth) and literature (mode and movement focused on emotional worlds →
the sentimental novel, sentimental comedy)
• Neoclassicism – classical role models and emphasis on order, elegance,
harmony, and exclusion of emotion (aristocratic art reflective of ruling-class
interests)
• Realism – portrayal of life with fidelity, bourgeois subject matter

The novel
• Emerged in late 17th century
• Became dominant form and genre in terms of readership
• Early influences: Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c. 1375), Thomas Nashe’s
The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516)
• Reflective of middle-class interests and values
• Expanding readership
• New themes: interest in topics that were long unappreciated and considered
inferior/improper

Coffeehouse culture and literary clubbing

• London as the centre of literature and culture
• Literary clubs in coffee houses/“penny universities”
• First coffee house in Oxford in 1650
• London’s first coffee house in 1652
• Each with a distinct clientele (traders, physicians, publishers and
booksellers, literary figures, etc.) → central places of 17th and 18th-century
culture and commerce reserved for men
• Egalitarian and democratic spirit
• Dwindling popularity by mid 18th century as tastes turned to tea
• Many later transformed into exclusive private member clubs
Major representatives
• Aphra Behn – critique of the slave trade and moral constraints
• Delarivier Manley – political allegory and satire with elements of eroticism
• Daniel Defoe – middle-class realism with attention to detail
• Jonathan Swift – major satirist
• Samuel Richardson – the sentimental novel
• Henry Fielding – “comic epic poem in prose”, parody
• Oliver Goldsmith – the sentimental novel
• Tobias Smollett – the picaresque novel
• Laurence Sterne – forerunner of 20th-century (post)modernism
• Representatives of the Gothic novel (Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Gregory Lewis,
Horace Walpole and others)

Genres
• Adventure fiction
• Fictional travel narrative
• Satire
• Allegory
• Epistolary novel
• Picaresque novel
• Sentimental novel
• Family novel
• Gothic novel
Mothers of the Novel
Expanding female authorship
• Expanding female readership
• Expanding female authorship since the 17th century
• At times did secret publishing deals or published anonymously or under
pseudonyms
• Frequently non-conformist fiction (open social/political critique, satire,
eroticism)

Aphra Behn (1640?–1689)

• Dramatist, novelist, and poet
• First Englishwoman to earn her living by writing
• Sometimes called the mother of the English novel
• Critique of the slave trade → Oroonoko (1688), containing autobiographical
detail
• Other fiction: epistolary novel Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His
Sister (1684–87) and The Fair Jilt (1688)
• Politically active: anticolonial and antigovernment sentiments, advocate of
women’s rights and sexual freedom

Delarivier Manley (1663–1724)

• Mary de la Riviere Manley
• Another threatening presence known for her political satire and explicit
sexual content
• The New Atlantis (1709)
• The Secret History of Queen Zarah (1705)
• 1711: succeeded Jonathan Swift as editor of The Examiner
• The Adventures of Rivella (1714)
Frances Burney (1752–1840)
• Fanny Burney
• Novelist and letter writer
• Novel of manners – customs, values, manners of a social world
• Evelina (anon. 1778) – epistolary chick lit: young woman’s “entrance into the
world”; keen social observation, ear for dialect, representation of
fashionable town life and contemporary manners → paving the way for Jane
Austen
• Cecilia (1782) – morally didactic themes combined with social satire
• Camilla (1796) – poor quality
• Journals and letters in eight volumes published 1972–80
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
Life and career
• Tradesman, journalist, novelist, pamphleteer, spy → Tour Through the Whole
Island of Great Britain (1724–26)
• Politically and religiously provocative
• A/The father of the English novel and its first true master – the rise of the
novel
• Keen observation
• Genres: political pamphlet, biography, history, travel book, novel
• “a new kind of literature which emphasized the significance of private
experience”
• Of Flemish descent; Dissenters; studied at Newington Green
• From economic prosperity to bankruptcy
• Interest in politics tied to trading career: leading pamphleteer of William
III/William of Orange; continued writing and carrying out intelligence work
under George I

Selected writings - Part 1

• The True-Born Englishman (1701) – first successful work, anti-xenophobic
satirical poem
• The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) – ironic pamphlet “with the
hyperbolical argument that Dissenters should simply be exterminated” →
partly inspired Swift’s A Modest Proposal
• “Hymn to the Pillory” (1703), anon. poem inspired by his punishment for the
previous work

Selected writings - Part 2

• Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Inspiration: colonial contact with other cultures, castaways’ and travellers’ tales
Realism
Genre: mixture of confessional narrative, memoir, fictional autobiography, fictional
travel narrative, adventure novel, journal, with elements of the picaresque novel,
utopia, Bildungsroman
Interpretations: tale of survival and triumph of civilization, myth of the self-made
man, or allegory of colonialism
Crusoe as an epitome of the age (rationality and pragmatism; middle-class
mercantile values; English values)
Propaganda fiction?
Rewritings: Michel Tournier’s Friday, or the Limbo of the Pacific, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe
Influence of career as a journalist: eye for detail and gift for reporting

Selected writings - Part 3

• The Adventures of Captain Singleton (1720) – adventures of a seafarer turned
mutineer and pirate, who discovers virtue
• Moll Flanders (1722)
Representation of low life (cf. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and Henry Fielding’s
The Life of Jonathan Wild, the Great)
Genre: memoir, fictional autobiography, confessional narrative, picaresque novel,
Bildungsroman, cautionary tale
Impression of realism due to journalistic manner of representation
Success story of a modern heroine
Social commentary: conditions in prisons, poverty, immigration, prostitution,
position of women

Selected writings - Part 4

• Colonel Jack (1722) – confession of a child pickpocket in London slums
• A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) – hint at the 19th-century historical novel;
diary; inspired by the Great Plague of 1665; intended as a warning
• Memoirs of a Cavalier (1724) – another hint at historical fiction; gentleman
narrator (untypical)
• Roxana (1724) – another “much-abused, belatedly penitent, entrepreneurial”
heroine who, unlike Moll Flanders, declines from respectability and dies
penniless in prison

Gift and legacy

• Struggles of solitary figures

• Extraordinarily resourceful characters
• Explores the bounds of human potential, but also human weakness
• David Daiches: no real understanding of the complexities of human
behaviour
• Keen social observation
• Middle-class values and sensibility
• Robinson Crusoe – enduring appeal as story of suffering, loneliness, and
triumph in extreme circumstances
Satire – A very brief overview
Term
• L satira, later form of satura, “medley” (possibly a cooking term in origin: “a
mixed dish”)
• Quintilian: poem in hexameters on various themes with the tone of Lucilius
and Horace
• Later: works satirical in tone but not in form
• Confusion between the Greek satyros (L satyrus, lusty woodland demon)
and satura → satyra and then, in English, satyre (Elizabethan writers were
misled by the etymology). Cleared up in 1605 by a French scholar.

Definitions
• Dr Johnson’s Dictionary: poem “in which wickedness or folly is censured”
• Dryden: “amendment of vices”, Defoe: “reformation”
• Swift: “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover
everybody’s face but their own…” → “so very few are offended with it”

O sacred Weapon! left for Truth’s defence,

Sole dread of Folly, Vice, and Insolence!
To all but Heav’n-directed hands deny’d,
The Muse may give thee, but the Gods must guide.
Rev’rent I touch thee!
Alexander Pope, Epilogue to the Satires (1738)

Purpose
• Satirist – self-appointed guardian of standards, ideals, and truth; of moral
and aesthetic values; more commonly male? (“women satirists are very
rare” contradicted, for instance, by a number of 18th-century women
satirists, such as Delarivier Manley, Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, Mary Barber, Mary Leapor, and Laetitia Pilkington)
• To correct, censure, and ridicule the follies and vices of society/to deride
aberrant behavior and values
• A kind of protest, a sublimation of anger and indignation
• Satirists expose all sorts of social and moral ills in society at large or in a
particular social group
Origins
• Early Greek poets and dramatists: Archilochus, Hipponax, Aristophanes
• Rome: Lucilius, Varro, Horace, Petronius, Seneca, Juvenal
• Horace and Juvenal as fathers of 2 basic classes of satire: tolerant, urbane,
and amused outlook on the human scene (Horace) vs. bitter, misanthropic,
and indignant one (Juvenal)
• Menippean satire: after Menippus, 3rd-century philosopher and Cynic;
imitated by Varro → aka Varronian satire; often mixes verse and prose, and
employs caricature or parody
• Horatian satire, Lucilian satire, Juvenalian satire, etc.
• From the 1st c. AD to the 12th there was little satire of any note in Europe;
occasional satirical elements in, for instance, medieval fabliaux, Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, Langland’s Piers Plowman, etc.
• Increasing propensity for satire in the 16th and 17th centuries in prose and
verse (Thomas Lodge, John Donne, Ben Jonson, John Dryden, and many
others)

The golden age of satire

• The end of the 17th and much of the 18th century in European literature
• Why then? Satirists wanted to protect civilization and culture from abuse,
aberration, and corruption by exposing and ridiculing, for example,
materialism, hypocrisy, political and economic evils, cruelty, vanity, etc.
• A preferred mode of expression in verse and prose → Alexander Pope (verse)
and Jonathan Swift (prose)
• Other notable satirists: Henry Fielding and later George Gordon Byron
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) – Life and Work
Intro
• Priest, journalist, and writer
• Anglo-Irish: born in Dublin to English parents → ambiguous position/in-
betweenness
• Politically ambiguous due to conflicted loyalties
• Ambiguity, oppositions, and reversals in his work
• Focus on political and religious issues
• Among the greatest satirists in world literature (mockery of authority vs.
Defoe’s affirmation of authority)
• Published anonymously or under pseudonyms (Lemuel Gulliver, M. B.
Drapier, Isaac Bickerstaff)

Family, education, and early work

• A mysterious life
• Swift’s father settled in Ireland after the Stuart Restoration and died before
Swift’s birth → dependent on his uncles’ generosity
• Kilkenny School → Trinity College, Dublin (BA) → University of Oxford (MA)
• Dependence on Sir William Temple, diplomat and statesman, distant
relative
• Early work: Temple’s personal secretary, vicar, chaplain, and secretary to
the Earl of Berkeley

Muses
• Esther Johnson (possibly Stella) – life-long attachment between tutor and
pupil; marriage?
• Esther Vanhomrigh (possibly Vanessa) – girl who ran away from home
because she was madly in love with him; lovers?
• Ambiguous attitude to women: tenderness vs. representation of women’s
moral corruption and waning beauty, or of the grotesquely enlarged and
flawed female body

Political engagement
• First on the Whig side, especially when they were the leading party (1707–
1710)
• Became a Tory supporter when they gained power in 1710 → political writing
with Tory sympathies + editor of The Examiner, a Tory periodical
• Stymied career
 • 1713 appointment as Dean of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin meant
political exile
• Supporter of Irish rights

Scriblerus club
• 18th-century British literary club
• Founding members: Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas
Parnell, and John Arbuthnot
• Purpose: to ridicule pretentious erudition and scholarly jargon through a
fictitious hack, Martinus Scriblerus
• Martinus after John Dryden’s Sir Martin Mar-all (synonymous with absurd
error) and Scriblerus after scribler (scribbler, talentless writer)
Jonathan Swift – Major Works
A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books
• A Tale of a Tub (1704) – anon. prose satire on the diverging tastes of 3 brothers
who represent Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and Calvinistic Dissent
• The Battle of the Books (1704) – allegorical satire/satirical allegory on the
pretensions of modern literature through a conflict between classical literature
and its modern rival

Other works before Gulliver’s Travels

• Bickerstaff Papers (1708–1709) – satirical attacks on an astrologer
• Ironic pamphlets on church questions
• A Meditation upon a Broomstick (1710) – ridicules the solemn style of moral
essayists by employing it to talk about trivial matters
• Journal to Stella (1710–1713) – letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley;
comments on the current political and social events, eminent people, etc.,
combined with warm personal messages
• The Drapier’s Letters (1724) – 5 pamphlets in letter form + 2 that were added
later, inspired by his indignation at unfavourable economic practices in Ireland

Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

• Allegorical satire/satirical allegory with elements of adventure fiction and
travel narrative
• Intended “to vex the world, not to divert it”
• Pseudo-realism: Gulliver’s letter and publisher’s note meant to maintain the
illusion of realism
• Lemuel Gulliver – English surgeon turned ship captain; well-educated, patriotic,
informed, but average and easily gulled; masters languages, observes, reports,
but also judges
• Structure: 4 books in which he encounters the extraordinary

Gulliver’s Travels: Books and satirical method

• Book 1: political satire and criticism of conflicts between Christian
denominations; physical disproportion
• Book 2: satirical outlook on violence/war and the human body; physical
disproportion
• Book 3: criticism of new scientific institutions; mental imbalance
• Book 4: critique of human nature through the oppositions
civilization/barbarism, rational/irrational, human/animal, mind/body
 • Imaginary places compared and contrasted with England and/or human life
and society in general → symbolism
• Humour relies on grotesque physical disproportion, mental imbalance, or
contrast

A Modest Proposal and poetry

• A Modest Proposal (1729) – brutally satirical prose pamphlet on the
economic situation in Ireland and English policies towards Ireland
• Poetry (1691–1694) – a number of poems; notably, six odes; not nearly as
successful as his prose

Legacy and influence

• Wit, humour, allegory, satire, adventure fiction, travel narrative, parody
• Exposed political, social, and economic problems, flaws in human nature and
hierarchy of human society
• An originator of transgressive fiction
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)
A new kind of fiction
• Another father of the English novel, different from Defoe and Swift
• Contribution: the epistolary novel and the sentimental novel
• A new kind of fiction, designed to “exhibit life in its true state diversified only by
accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and
qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind” (Dr Johnson)

Family background and work

• Of yeoman stock
• Family of tradesmen
• Country → city
• “Common School-Learning”
• Apprenticed to a London printer → successful printing business
• Printer, letter writer, and novelist
• Master of the Stationers’ Company

Letter writing
• Determined Richardson’s contribution to English literature
• Wrote letters for other people, especially love letters for young women
• Style reflects his inclination towards literary expression
• Commissioned to write a collection of letters to serve as guidelines for letter
writing and behaviour in different situations → seed of Pamela (1740), NOT the
first epistolary novel in English → Aphra Behn, Love-Letters between a Noble-Man
and his Sister (1684–87)

The epistolary novel

• Novel in letter form
• Appeared in the 17th century and popular in the 18th century
• Peak: Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747, 1748), Smollett’s
Humphrey Clinker (1771), Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)…
• Early examples: Diego de San Pedro, The Prison of Love (1492) – combination of
epistolary form and sentimentalism
• Contemporary examples: John Barth’s Letters (1979), Jeanette Winterson’s
ThePowerBook (2000)...
• Richardson’s narrative technique: writing to the moment – writing things down
as they are happening
The sentimental novel
• Another popular 18th-century genre
• Example of sentimentalism in literature
• Focus on emotions and characters’ inner worlds, on “the distresses of the
virtuous […] to show that a sense of honour and moral behaviour were justly
rewarded”
• Emotion as evidence of kindness and goodness
• Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield
(1766), Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)…
• “Sentimentality” as a pejorative term in literature – pathetic effect overload

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740): inspiration, form, and genre

• Inspiration: collection of letters as model for letter writing → Familiar Letters on
Important Occasions
• 2 volumes in letter form
• First English novel?
• First “proper” epistolary novel?
• Popularity → Vatican’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum and two-volume sequel,
Pamela’s Conduct in High Life (1741) and Pamela in her Exalted Condition (1742)
• Epistolary and sentimental
• Early chick lit – story of a virtuous young maid pursued by her master → search for
balance between virtue and feelings

Pamela: narrative technique & social and moral implications

• Pamela’s correspondence with her parents + journal when correspondence is
intercepted
• Features of companions for letter writing: perspective, style, moral and
practical advice
• Writing to the moment
• Shortcomings: plausibility of technique, language, and style
• Social and moral aspects: virtue rewarded in a social context marked by class
differences → democratic novel that allows heroine/love to break class barriers?
• Alternative interpretation of Pamela: clever social climber
• Parodies: Henry Fielding’s Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742)
Clarissa (1747-48) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54)
• Clarissa: or, The History of a Young Lady – 7 volumes; perfected epistolary form
where the text occasionally reflects emotional states → masterpiece?;
multiple perspective: several correspondents; cautionary: “the Distresses that
may attend the Misconduct both of Parents and Children, in Relation to
Marriage”; Clarissa as the first great bourgeois heroine
• The History of Sir Charles Grandison – last novel; life of an ideal hero, “the
good man”, with focus on a love triangle; strength: fast movement and
successful social comedy vs. weakness: Grandison’s “priggish virtue” which
“breathes its petrifying breath over the narrative”

Art or entertainment?
• Among the first who explored inner worlds and emotions in novel form
• Ushered and perfected the epistolary novel and the sentimental novel
• Art/entertainment?
• Contribution: epistolary form, sentimental exploration of human psyche and
emotions, focus on middle- and lower-class female characters, moral
instructiveness → significance from today’s point of view?
Henry Fielding (1707-1754)
“A new species of writing”
• Playwright, journalist, barrister, judge, novelist
• A founder of the English novel
• Fielding and Richardson as the classic English novel, “a new species of
writing” (Richardson) or “a new kind of prose fiction” (Johnson)
• Fielding and Richardson as rivals: Fielding’s gentlemanly career vs.
Richardson’s bourgeois career, Fielding’s propensity for comedy, satire, and
parody vs. Richardson’s liking for sentimentality and instruction

Education and work

• Family related to a branch of the Habsburgs
• Educated at Eton and University of Leiden, Holland (classical studies)
• Worked as a playwright until 1737; editor and journalist for Champion; or,
British Mercury, The True Patriot and the History of Our Own Times, The
Jacobite’s Journal, The Covent Garden Journal; barrister and judge; novelist →
impact on his writing

Drama: genres
• Comic and satirical plays
• Combined
comedy of humours – end of 16th, early 17th century; actions of characters ruled by a
particular passion, trait, disposition, or humour (see the medieval and Renaissance
theory of humours)
comedy of manners – the behaviour of men and women living under specific social
codes, usually those of the middle and upper classes (see English Restoration comedy)
farce – “low” comedy provoking basic mirth by employing exaggerated physical action,
character, and situation; absurd situations and improbable events; surprises
(unexpected appearances/disclosures); associated with burlesque
burlesque – derisive imitation of a literary/musical work, associated with stage
entertainment but not confined to drama (see burlesque poetry)
ballad opera – early form of musical invented by John Gay which combines dialogue
and music
satirical political comedy – exposing and ridiculing the follies, vices, and shortcomings
of society/politics; often akin to burlesque, farce, and comedy of manners
Drama: works
• Love in Several Masques (1728) – love, virtue, morality; eclipsed by Colley
Cibber’s The Provok’d Husband and John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera
• The Temple Beau (1730) – hypocrisy
• The Author’s Farce and the Pleasures of the Town (1730) – world of
booksellers, writers, publishers, playwrights, theatre; first successful play
• Rape upon Rape; or, the Justice Caught in his own Trap (1730) – injustices of
the legal system
• Tom Thumb: A Tragedy (1730) – tragedy turns to farce; based on a story from
English folklore
• Don Quixote in England (1734) – class inequality and parasitical life of
aristocracy

End of theatrical career and impact on prose

• 1737: Pasquin and The Historical Register, For the Year 1736 provoked Sir
Robert Walpole’s government → the Licensing Act of 1737 → censorship +
London performances restricted to two approved theatres → end of Fielding’s
theatrical career
• Influence on his prose: sense of dialogue, patterning of incident, well-
established denouement, comic and satirical edge, Fielding as puppet master
and characters as puppets

Novels: parodies
• Shamela (1741) – anon. epistolary parody of Pamela, written to expose “the
many notorious Falsehoods and Misrepresentations” in Richardson’s novel;
attack on hypocritical morality, sentimentality, narrative technique, and Pamela’s
language; sham virtue/“Vartue”
• Joseph Andrews (1742) – another anon. parody of Pamela, focusing on Pamela’s
brother; third-person narrative; Preface defines the novel as “a comic epic poem
in prose” → parodic imitation of an epic (cf. Byron’s Don Juan); virtue that does
not seek reward

Novels: The Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great (1743)

• Stories of low-life characters were in vogue
• Satirical exposure of hypocrisy through ridicule
• Great man vs. good man → satirical portrait of the English society and its “great
men”
• Jonathan Wild – leader of thieves and thief-taker (≈ fictional Moll Flanders)
• One of the first antiheroes of English literature
Novels: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749)
• Masterpiece
• Genre combines the epic, comic, picaresque, and satirical, with elements of
Bildungsroman. Also a kind of social novel (distinct genre in mid-19th century)
that dramatizes social problems through a character.
• Comic redefinition of the epic
• Epic and picaresque journey towards self-realization with picaro as the main
character
• Imposing omniscient narrator as puppet master
• Humankind described, praised, and criticized as a species
• Country manners vs. city manners
• Wide gallery of characters → vivid picture of 18th-century England

Novels: Amelia (1751)

• Sombre
• Anticipation of the Victorian domestic novel (represents middle-class life and
produces it as a cultural ideal that binds middle-class respectability to notions
about proper masculinity (productivity and professionalism) and femininity
(exemplary and well-regulated domesticity)
• Idea: “to promote the cause of virtue, and to expose some of the most glaring
evils, as well public as private, which at present infest the country”
• Focus on the sufferings of a moral heroine
• Urban temptations vs. rural pleasures and safety
• Diminished role of the narrator
• Middle-class family life in a wider social setting → an early social novel

Legacy
• Model for later social and comic writers
• Inspiration for Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
• The first to develop a theory of the novel as a distinct genre
• Established realism
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)
A late bloomer
• Born in a poor family in Clonmel, Ireland
• Educated at Jesus College, Cambridge
• Anglican priest
• Writing: sermons, political articles, and a Swiftian satire, A Political Romance →
lost chances for advancement in the clerical profession, but discovered a talent
for writing
• Wrote the first of his 2 novels at 47: masterpiece Tristram Shandy

Contribution
• Experimentation: typographic devices, doodles, marbled pages, blank pages,
black pages, narrative technique, etc.
• Originator of stream of consciousness: term coined by William James in
Principles of Psychology (1890) to denote the flow of inner experiences; narrative
technique which seeks to depict the many thoughts and feelings that pass
through the mind; popularized by modernists
• Tristram Shandy – the first example of stream of consciousness and the first
metafictional novel (novel about the process of writing/fictive composition)

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67)

• 9 volumes
• Inspired by John Locke, Robert Burton, François Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, the
Scriblerians, Miguel de Cervantes
• Immensely popular across Europe
• Comic novel “written under the greatest heaviness of heart”
• Genre: history, epic, comedy, satire, parody, the sentimental novel
• A new kind of sentimental comedy in novel form
• Play with linear chronology, plot, character, and form → foreshadows
modernism and postmodernism

Experimentation in Tristram Shandy: Part 1

• “Its organization lies in the consciousness of a narrator who fails in the first two
volumes even to get himself born.”
• Highlights the “absurdities, contradictions, and impossibilities of relating time,
space, reality, and relationships in a linear form” – influence of Locke’s ideas on
the relativity of time, the nature of sensation, and random association (Essay
Concerning Human Understanding)
Experimentation in Tristram Shandy: Part 2
• A mixture of genres
• Play with linear chronology and plot: narrative goes back, forth, and sideways
• Narrative follows the narrator’s rambling thoughts
• Defies the conventions of history and the epic: “in writing what I have set
about, I shall confine myself neither to his (Horace’s), nor to any man’s rules” (cf.
Byron’s Don Juan)
• Challenges expectations, remains provisional and open-ended
• Digressions as “the life, the soul of reading” (cf. Byron’s Don Juan)
• No respect for coherence or consistency

Experimentation in Tristram Shandy: Part 3

• Word and image
• Hiatuses, gaps, and digressions
• Blank, black, or marbled pages
• Typographic devices and doodles
• Single-sentence chapters and misplaced chapters
• Reader as participant
• Questioning linearity, order, and meaning
• Storytelling as a means of transcending death

Tristram Shandy: social implications

• Provincial England represented by Shandy Hall and their neighbours
• Microcosm of human society as a whole
• Daiches: “comic-sentimental-moral picture of individuals in their oddities,
obsessions, and fundamental loneliness teasing, misunderstanding, ignoring,
amusing, or loving each other”

A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768)

• Inspired by Sterne’s trips to France and possibly his impending death
• Represents a new “design” intended “to teach us to love the world and our
fellow creatures better than we do”
• Genre: sentimental novel and rewriting/parody of travelogue
• Narration marked by “artful randomness” – episodic collection of sketches
• Humour and sentimentality with focus on emotions
• Unfinished: ends literally in mid-sentence → comical and suggestive ending

“I wrote not to be fed, but to be famous”

• Sterne’s sentimentalism: “To be sentimental was to be self-consciously
responsive to the slightest emotional stimulus, to relish every sensation and
 feeling”, to be “sympathetic with the feelings of others […] charitable and
affectionate”
• Sterne’s view of time: avoidance of linearity to juxtapose subjective and
objective time and highlight the existence of the past in the present
• Fame: a literary celebrity in his time, but not genuinely understood → value
recognized by modernists
• 18th-century novelist whose experimentation belongs in the 20th and 21st century
Tobias Smollett (1721-1771)
A note on 18th – century Scottish writing
• Prominence of Scottish writing in late 18th century
• Poets Robert Burns (“Scotia’s bard” – poems in the Scottish dialect; interest in
Scottish history and traditions) and Robert Fergusson (influence on Burns;
combination of satire, mock-elegy, pastoral; keen observations of Edinburgh with
its busy streets and taverns, city constabulary, lovers and prostitutes, beggars
and shopkeepers, schoolboys and porters)
• Novelists Henry Mackenzie (anon. 1771 sentimental novel The Man of Feeling →
“the arch-sentimentalist of Scottish literature”; also playwright) and Tobias
Smollett (best known for his picaresque novels)

Background and work

• Wealthy aristocratic family
• Medicine at the University of Glasgow, but his true ambition was literature
• Surgeon, novelist, journalist, editor (The Critical Review, The British Magazine,
The Briton), translator (Lesage’s Gil Blas and Cervantes’s Don Quixote)
• Fiction: picaresque, epistolary, Gothic

Theory of the novel

o A novel is a large diffused picture, comprehending the characters of life,
disposed in different groups, and exhibited in various attitudes for the purpose of
a uniform plan, and general occurrence, to which every individual figure is
subservient.
o … a principal personage to attract the attention, unite the incidents, unwind the
clue of the labyrinth, and at last close the scene, by virtue of his own importance.

The picaresque novel: term and origins

• Sp pícaro, “rogue”
• Tells the life of a knave/picaro/picaroon, a roguish character and servant of
several masters to satirize the society
• Originated in 16th c. Spain
• Earliest example: anon. Lazzarillo de Tormes (1553)
• Popularity of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache and Francisco Quevedo’s La
vida del Buscón across Europe
• Other popular titles: Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Alan-
René Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715), Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Henry
Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743), Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random (1748)
The picaresque novel: features
• Term first used in 1829
• Roguish hero/heroine on a journey (physical journey, journey of self-discovery,
journey towards maturity)
• Adventures and misadventures
• Triumphant ending
• Portrayal of society – often a wide gallery of characters and range of
experiences + coarse humour, vulgarity, sexuality, etc. for the purpose of social
observation/criticism

Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle

• The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) – naval life, semi-autobiographical;
educated young hero exposed to “selfishness, envy, malice, and base
indifference of mankind”, aggressive, affectionate, sexually inquisitive, but also a
victim who fights his way back to money and respectability; episodic plot
suggestive of randomness of character; setting follows the slave trade routes →
wider implications
• The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) – wandering hero who shows “a
certain oddity of disposition”, violent, imprudent, arrogant, philandering; final
repentance coincides with his release from prison and an inheritance; savage
satire of 18th-century English society

Humphry Clinker and other works

• Translated Don Quixote, finished Complete History of England, wrote the novels
The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753) and The Life and Adventures
of Sir Lancelot Greaves (1760–61), and non-fictional Travels Through France and
Italy (1766) and The Present State of All Nations (1768–69)
• The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) – a family journey in epistolary form
with 6 correspondents → different perspectives on the same events, places, and
characters → humour; epistolary novel and satire with elements of sentimental
romance, family novel, and travel narrative; the first “state of the nation” novel
(the family microcosm represents the nation)
• Some drama and poetry

Legacy
• Comic characters reminiscent of Ben Jonson
• Further developed and popularized the picaresque novel
• Influenced Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray
Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774)
General info
• Essayist, novelist, poet, playwright
• Born in Ireland; son of a poor clergyman with a large family
• Graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and studied medicine in Edinburgh but
never received a medical degree there
• Friends with artistic and literary figures, including Samuel Johnson, James
Boswell, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Edmund Burke
• Known for the essay collection The Citizen of the World (1762), the novel The
Vicar of Wakefield (1766), the plays The Good-Natur’d Man (1768) and She
Stoops to Conquer (1773), and the poems The Traveller, or, a Prospect of Society
(1764), “An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog” (1766), and The Deserted Village: A
Poem (1770)

Biographical details
• Family moved to Kilkenny West
• Doubts about his intellectual abilities: cheerful and affectionate, but considered
“impenetrably stupid” and “little better than a fool” + small-pox scars → bullied,
sensitive and reserved in childhood
• Love of learning → sent to college
• Financial difficulties: depended on occasional allowances from uncles after his
father’s death; continued throughout his life
• Wrote poetry for money at the time
• Intended to go to America, but did not have the money for it
• Failed to receive ordination → employment as a tutor
• Toured the Highlands and the Continent, supporting himself by playing the flute
• Apparently received a medical degree in Leiden and one in Padua → shortly
worked as an apothecary’s assistant in London

Small steps into the world of writing

• A reader in Samuel Richardson’s print shop
• Shortly assisted in editing the periodical Monthly Review and continued to
contribute to various magazines (The Critical Review, The Weekly Magazine, The
British Magazine) → these essays, “Chinese letters”, were later collected in The
Citizen of the World, led to an acquaintance with Dr. Johnson, future friend, and
an introduction into the higher social circles
• Among those who inaugurated a famous literary club, known as The Club
(Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Boswell et al.)
The Vicar of Wakefield
• Established Goldsmith’s reputation as a prose writer
• His most famous work
• Sentimental novel, interspersed with essays, literary discussions, sketches of
country life, and three poems
• Portrait of village life focused on the large family of a funny, kind, simple, and
honest priest Primrose (narrator and main character), who lives a life of moral
righteousness and believes in mankind’s goodness → establishes the family
novel (family in a wider social setting)
• Innocence and simplicity vs. shallowness of the “sophisticated” classes, natural
openness vs. hypocrisy of social niceties
• Moral purity of common people, old country traditions, beauty of old ballads… →
idealization of country life and puritan values (self-discipline, honour, truth to
one’s word, moral correctness, etc.)
• Social critique

Plays
• The Good-Natur’d Man – sentimental comedy and what he called laughing
comedy about the trials of an open-hearted young man who is too generous and
altruistic, and is cured by being arrested for debt
• She Stoops to Conquer – an immensely popular light-hearted farce/laughing
comedy that mocks the simple morality and clichés of sentimental comedies
and focuses on the daughter of a wealthy countryman who disguises herself as a
maid to help her suitor in his attempts to woo her; city life and country life at
odds, parental responsibility, women’s agency, gender, marriage, class and
social mobility
• Idea: to mock human folly in characters of all classes and expose vices

Major poems
• Moralizing and descriptive
• The Traveller – a philosophical poem in heroic couplets; classicistic but simpler
in language and figures of speech; surveys European countries in a meditative
and rhetorical tone (compares and contrasts their vices and virtues, in the end
focusing on England and its vice of luxury)
• The Deserted Village – his most popular poem; heroic couplet; elegy on the
destruction of the countryside (the Industrial Revolution); nostalgic and
romanticized image of patriarchal rural life and portrayal of modernization and
depopulation; tedious melodrama that provoked Daiches to call it “Augustan
verse weakened by sententious rhetoric”
Bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature. - Sir Walter Scott
The Gothic Novel
The birth of the Gothic novel
• The most significant manifestation of Pre-Romanticism (see also graveyard
poetry)
• The Gothic novel, Gothic fiction, horror fiction, tales and novels of terror
• A type of romance (tale of extraordinary and mysterious events, usually set in a
distant time and place)
• Popular since the 1760s
• Minerva Press published mostly Gothic fiction between 1790 and 1820s
• Impact on the development of the ghost story, horror story, the Romantic Gothic,
the Victorian Gothic, Southern Gothic, the postmodern Gothic
• Gothic and/or gothic

The origins of the term

• Term originally meant “having to do with the Goths or their language” but then
came to encompass all the qualities associated with the medieval Germanic
culture
• Architecture, art, literature, fashion
• Horace Walpole first applied “Gothic” to a literary work in The Castle of
Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764) to mean “barbarous” and “deriving from the
Middle Ages”

The origins of the genre

• Gothic elements → Gothic genre
• Sensibility and mode → genre
• The Gothic in folk ballads, folk tales, fairy tales, Renaissance literature
(Shakespeare, Spenser)
• 18th-century ballad revival: Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
(1764), William Wordsworth’s and S. T. Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• Emergence of the genre with the arrival of the Gothic novel
• Response to Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason/the rational
• Expresses a “relish for literature outside, and alternative to, narrowly defined
canons”
Interest in the Gothic
• Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful (1757): the sublime → apprehension of vastness, infinity,
greatness produces “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of
feeling”, “a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquility tinged with terror”; “The
passion caused by the great and sublime in nature […] is Astonishment; and
astonishment is that state of soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with
some degree of horror.”

Horror vs. Terror

• Ann Radcliffe, “On the Supernatural in Poetry”
• Terror is characterized by indeterminacy, obscurity, and ambiguity that provide
outlines and entice the reader’s imagination to complete the rest; it “expands the
soul, and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”
• Horror features unambiguous displays of atrocity and “contracts, freezes, and
nearly annihilates” the faculties; it may involve a physical sensation/reaction
• Her fiction was inspired by terror, by Salvator Rosa’s (1615–1673) romantic
landscape paintings

Features
• Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto established many conventions of the
genre → the formal beginning (NB: NOT the first Gothic novel → see Tobias
Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom)
• Horror/terror and romance
• Historic ruins, historical settings, Gothic mansions
• Sublime, wild, romantic landscapes
• Motifs of torture, death, necromancy, necrophilia, haunting, decay, doubles,
dream, prophecy, madness, secret…
• Spatial and temporal dislocation in isolated mansions, bleak and mysterious
landscapes, distant places; in the past, often the Middle Ages or early
Renaissance; frequently unspecified to increase the sense of mystery
• Crime and mystery
• Evil fatalistically attached to man, inexplicable and ineradicable
• Focus on individual passions and destinies
• Emphasis on feeling and imagination
• Escapism
• The supernatural
• Characters of villains, victims, helpful servants; images of male threat and
female victimization
The Gothic Novel – Major Representatives
Horace Walpole (1717-1794)
• Art historian and antiquarian
• Writing as a hobby
• Made himself “a little Gothic castle”, Strawberry Hill House
• Private press called Strawberry Hill Gothic
• The Castle of Otranto – “translation” of an old Italian tale set in medieval Apulia
(Italy); set the standard for Gothic fiction (setting, character, plot, themes,
motifs, atmosphere)

Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823)

• “founder of a class or school” that led the way in “a peculiar style of composition
affecting powerfully the mind of the reader” (Sir Walter Scott)
• Relatively tame and close to Burke’s “tranquility tinged with terror”
• The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
• The Italian (1797)
• Male threat and female victimization
• Rational explanations of supernatural/mysterious phenomena
• Happy endings

Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818)

• Horror and sensationalism
• The Monk (1796) – the “most Gothic” novel at the time, scandalous, and
hugely successful; record of the title character’s fall from grace and his personal
netherworld → structural play with hidden chambers, subterranean passages,
sealed vaults
• Vs. Radcliffe’s novels
• Horror for horror’s sake?

William Beckford (1760-1844)

• Like Walpole, created his own Gothic mansion
• Vathek, An Arabian Tale (1786) – oriental fantasy/escapism and
orientalism/exoticization and eroticization of the Orient: Vathek as a tyrannical
and sensuous ruler → violence, decadence, and eroticism
• Not narrowly Gothic

Charles Robert Maturin (1782-1824)

 • “If I possess any talent, it is that of darkening the gloomy, and developing the
sad; of painting life in extremes, and representing those struggles of passion
when the soul trembles on the verge of the unlawful and the unhallowed.”
• Fatal Revenge; or, The Family of Montorio: A Romance (1807)
• The Milesian Chief: A Romance (1812)
• Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) – title character: archetypal figure ≈ Byron’s
Childe Harold and Cain, Goethe’s Faust, the Wandering Jew → archetypal outcast
& product of the marginalized Irish culture

♥ Mary Shelley (1797-1851) ♥

• Period of Romanticism
• An evening’s talk → John Polidori’s The Vampire (1818) and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
• Gothic fiction & science fiction
• Myth of Prometheus and modern science: scientific experimentation and
exploration into the unknown, possibility, responsibility, ethic, liberty
• Framework narrative of Robert Walton + confessions of Frankenstein and his
creation
• Epistolary novel
• Monster as the Other

More on the 18th- and 19th- century Gothic

• Clara Reeves – The Old English Baron (1777)
• James Hogg – The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner (1824)
• The Romantic Gothic – Shelley’s Gothic novels, Coleridge’s mystery
poems, Gothic ballads
• The Victorian Gothic – Robert Luis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897),
Gothic elements in the Bröntes, Dickens, Wilde et al.
• 19th-century horror story in America – E. A. Poe, H. P. Lovecraft et al.

Gothic fiction today

• Variety of subgenres: female, feminine, and feminist Gothic, postmodern
Gothic, urban Gothic, Southern Gothic, lesbian Gothic, postcolonial Gothic, neo-
Gothic…
• Popular horror fiction
• The Gothic in popular culture → increased popularity
• “the most resistant continuous strain in the history of the novel”
Romanticism–Historical context and inspiration – Intro
Definition and term
• Movement in art, literature, and fashion in the 18th and 19th centuries
• No strict chronology: c. 1750–1870 in Europe (France, Germany, England, the
rest), the US, and Latin America; British Romanticism c. 1770–1848,
1789/1798–1830; features present before and after these years (e.g. Joseph
Warton’s “The Enthusiast: or the Lover of Nature” from 1744)
• Romanticism/Romanticisms?
• Term: 18th-century; “romance-like”; different connotations in different variants
of Romanticism
British Romanticism in literature
• William Blake (1757–1827) – Pre-Romantic or Romantic?
• William Wordsworth (1770–1850) – father
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)
• George Gordon Byron (1788–1824)
• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
• John Keats (1795–1821)
• Not a homogeneous group or a school
• Shared concerns, themes, motifs, and features of style
• Idiosyncratic visions as reactions to the times

Response to the times

• To Enlightenment ideas and ideals
• To Neoclassicism
• To the political, social, and economic changes: the French Revolution, the
American Revolution, the Industrial Revolution
• To new developments in psychology and metaphysics, to the ideas of thinkers
like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, Jakob Böhme,
Immanuel Kant, to folk literature…

Enlightenment and Neoclassical ideals

• Imagination and emotion vs. reason
• Spontaneity and organic composition vs. order, proportion, symmetry,
perfection
• A more natural expression vs. language as “the dress of thought”
NB: not an absolute repudiation of Neoclassicism (e.g. Lord Byron
The Industrial Revolution
• 18th century in Britain → the US, 19th century in the US → Europe, 20th century in
Asia
• Traditional agricultural economies → modern industrial economies
• Machines, division of labour, mass production, application of scientific
knowledge, exploitation
• Growth of the cities
• New opportunities vs. loss of job security
• Pollution → destruction of nature, loss of habitats, extinction of species
• Feelings of isolation and alienation

Positive aspects of industrialization

• Easier and more comfortable life
• Improved health care
• Improved infrastructure
• Easier, faster, and more affordable travel
• More knowledge
• Progress or “progress”?

The French Revolution 1789-1799

• Absolute monarchy → republic
• Background: growing importance of the middle class, political crisis,
persecution of religious minorities, rising and unequal taxes, inefficient
government, antiquated legal system, debt…
• The Fall of the Bastille & imprisonment and execution of Louis XVI and Marie-
Antoinette → end of the feudal system
• National Assembly and Paris as the centre of power
• The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen
• Motto: liberté, égalité, fraternité

The American Revolution 1771-1783

• American War of Independence 1775–1783: 13 American colonies in North
America vs. Britain
• Formation of the American government in 1787
• Political independence and a republican start
• “a small fledgling nation won its freedom from the greatest military force of its
time” → birth of a giant
Effects on poetry
• Nature of the poetic process
• Function of poetry
• Subject matter
• Language
• Poetic composition and forms
• Role of the poet
Revolutionary political, social, and economic changes → tectonic shifts in sensibility →
impact on art and literature
William Blake: The Poet and the prophet – 1757-1827
Poet, painter, visionary
• Poet, painter, engraver, illustrator
• Radical visionary ahead of his time (ideas, text and image)
• Recognized in the 19th century (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the 20th (Aldous
Huxley, Dylan Thomas, William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, David
Herbert Lawrence)
• Impact on popular culture (The Doors, Pattie Smith, The Red Dragon, Beasts of
the Southern Wild)

Pre-Romantic/Romantic?
• Little traffic between him and the Romantics
• Different in his lack of interest in nature (pastoral nature subsumed by a
decidedly antipastoral vision)
• Similar in his view of the poet as a prophet, his social and political concerns
(advocate of revolution and liberty opposed to all tyranny and exploitation), his
defiance of Neoclassical conventions, and his emphasis on the power of the
imagination

Life, education, and work

• London → Felpham → London
• Middle class
• Largely self-taught
• Drawing school → apprenticed to an engraver
• Did not finish studies at the Royal Academy
• Print shop → engraver and illustrator (illustrated his own works and those of
authors like Thomas Gray or Edward Young)

Visions
• Sightings of angels
• Communication with his late brother and the Old Testament prophets
• Divine inspiration – instructed by archangels
• Visionary or madman?
• According to Blake, the faculty of vision is one we all share, but it is lost when
uncultivated
Poetry and radicalism
• Impact of social, political, and economic changes
• Poetry expressive of non-conformist radicalism common among freethinkers
like Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft et al.
• Abhorred slavery, tyranny, exploitation, materialism…
• Called for racial and gender equality
• Supported the French and American Revolutions
• Local and global concerns
• Strong influence: John Milton, Emanuel Swedenborg, Jakob Böhme, occultism

An early start
• Started writing at 12
• Poetical Sketches (1783) was his first collection; it anticipates his later poetry
(myth, symbol, social and political concerns); nature serves a celebration of a
world of happiness and easy (cf. nature in his later poetry); now seen as a major
poetical achievement of the late 18th century → Blake as a chief initiator of the
Romantic revival

Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1789, 1794): transgressive critique

• His most famous and popular work
• First published separately and then as a single collection
• Breakthrough in the 18th-century art and poetry: text and image, poems of
childlike simplicity as a vehicle for penetrating social critique
• The poems resemble nursery rhymes and criticize problems like social
inequalities, poverty, racism, or child labour, explicitly blaming the church, the
state, and society at large
Songs of Innocence and of Experience: protagonists
• Mostly children
• Symbolically associated with lambs
• Abandoned, neglected, exploited, poor
• Innocence cuts through social evils
• Mostly unaware of exploitation in Innocence → happy, cheerful, hopeful
• Far more mature in Experience → no optimism; more explicit critique

Songs of Innocence and of Experience: settings and atmosphere

• Innocence – rural, pastoral settings and cheerful, hopeful tone and atmosphere;
references to laughter, song, happiness; support an antipastoral vision
• Experience – bleaker, colder settings, often wintry and/or urban; serious, dark
tone and atmosphere → more explicit critique
How the contrast works
From “Introduction” in Songs of Innocence
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child
And he laughing said to me.

From “Introduction” in Songs of Experience

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees
Whose ears have heard,
The Holy Word,
That walk’d among the ancient trees.

Songs of Innocence and Experience: the world

• World ruled by hypocrisy, materialism, misuse of the intellect, distrust of the
imagination, frustration of desire, corrupt institutions…
Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we:
And mutual fear brings peace:
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.
From “The Human Abstract”, Songs of Experience

Songs of Innocence and Experience: innocence and experience

• “two contrary states of the human soul” – contrary but complementary → no
progression without opposites (Böhme)
• Central symbols: lamb and tiger
• Innocence – condition of the prelapsarian man/state of spiritual and moral
purity; harmless, hopeful, happy, spontaneous, uncorrupted, sympathetic, but
naïve, ignorant and therefore fragile and weak
• Experience – condition of the postlapsarian man/state of maturity,
disillusionment, moral corruption; affords a deeper understanding of the world
and is therefore strong and powerful
Songs of Innocence and Experience: structure and form
• Most poems in simple quatrains with paired/interlocking rhyme
• All metric feet, but the commonest are those used in nursery rhymes (trochaic
IX and anapestic XXI); iambic XI and dactylic IXX reserved for poems with a more
serious tone
• Form, rhythm, language, and imagery evoke a world of children
• Companion poems resembling Milton’s “L’ Allegro” and “Il Penseroso” designed
to highlight the contrary yet complementary nature of innocence and experience

Illuminated printing
• Symbiosis of text and image
• Technique: illuminated printing
• Process: wrote and drew on copper plates using acid-resistant liquids, applied
acid to leave the text and image in relief, and finally applied ink or a colour wash
• Images: religious and secular motifs, unusual effects of light and perspective,
bright colours, evocative of Mannerism, hinting at magic realism
• Also used in Prophetic Books

Prophetic Books (1789…)

• A series of longer poems and a prose work
• Complex symbolism and mythology of his own making, based on the Bible and
other existing mythologies
• Express his social and political concerns
• A world of conflicts, falls and rises, destruction and creation, but the conflict is
not simple (good vs. evil) as his creations are endlessly transforming
• Central myth: man’s fall from innocence to experience and the struggle towards
their synthesis, i.e. division of man and struggle for reintegration through a
balance between reason, imagination, instinct, and emotion
• Cry against capitalism, materialism, industrialization, exploitation, tyranny,
oppression
• Hope in the possibility of democracy and brotherhood

A man of and ahead of his time

• Outspoken and revolutionary
• Radical and complex moral and political vision
• At odds with official doctrines
• Visions of the future
• Inspired the world, but was dismissed in his time and died in great poverty
Pre-Romanticism – The briefest introduction
Pre-Romanticism and Romanticism
• European cultural movement from c. 1740 to 1790s
• Presaged Romanticism
• Break away from Neoclassicism → simpler, more sincere and natural
expression
• Reflected the tastes of the growing middle class
• Inspiration from Rousseau’s repudiation of polite aristocratic restraint and strict
adherence to formal artistic rules

Features and representatives

• Free expression of genuine, spontaneous emotion
• Graveyard English Poetry (Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts”, Thomas Gray’s
“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”)
• The sentimental novel
• Sturm und Drang movement (“storm and stress”; 1770–1780)
• English Gothic novel
• Efforts to collect folk tales and ballads

Pre-Romanticism or Poetry of Sensibility

Sensibility (OED)
emotional consciousness; glad or sorrowful, grateful or resentful recognition of a
person’s conduct, or of a fact or a condition of things
quickness and acuteness of apprehension or feeling; the quality of being easily and
strongly affected by emotional influences
capacity for refined emotion; delicate sensitiveness of taste; also, readiness to feel
compassion for suffering, and to be moved by the pathetic in literature or art
• Poetry from Pope's death (1744) to the first Romantic works in the 1790s: “post-
Augustan” or “pre-Romantic”
• Northrop Frye suggested the term “Age of Sensibility” rather than define it
transitionally “as a period of reaction against Pope and anticipation of
Wordsworth”
• “Poetry of Sensibility” has gained some currency among specialists (see The
Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry)
• “pre-Romanticism” continues to be used; “misleading to characterize the
ends”?
Features of Romanticism
Romanticism as a response
• Influenced by social, political, and economic changes, as well as advances
in science and philosophy
• As a reaction to Neoclassicism, Romantic poetry represented a major shift in
terms of the nature and function of poetry → new ideals, rules of composition,
forms, subject matter, language, and style
• Poetry for all people: often about middle or lower classes, in a language and
style suited to the content and representative of spontaneous expression of
emotion and thought
• Preference for organic composition and form
• Significance of the natural, spontaneous, genuine, sublime, mysterious,
imaginative

Imagination
• Preference for imagination over reason, emotion over logic
• Imagination as creative freedom → divine creativity of imagination (see William
Blake’s “The Tyger”, S. T. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”, and P. B. Shelley’s “Mont
Blanc”)
• Theory of imagination: S. T. Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria
• Imagination as the point of contact and interaction between the mind and the
world → the mind shapes/transforms the world (Blake), the mind and the world
influence each other (Wordsworth), the world is refracted through the mind
(Shelley), and imagination is connected with the heart (Keats)

Approach and expression

• Subjectivity of approach – emphasis on individual use of imagination;
importance of individual experience and perception; poetry as a vehicle for
free expression of genuine emotion and thought
• Expressive rather than mimetic – to convey the poet’s ideas and feelings, not to
imitate
• Hence the return to folk literature as a more spontaneous expression of
genuine feeling
• The link between the poem and the poet is seen as more relevant than that
between the poem and the world or the poem and the reader

Subject matter and language

SUBJECT MATTER
• Nature (inspired by industrialization)
 • Human condition (inspired by contemporary pressures)
• Freedom (inspired by political, social, and economic changes)
• Life and art (links between art, world, artist, and reader/observer; imagination)
• The mundane (ordinary life, experience, or man)
• The exotic, mysterious and supernatural (reflective of latent wonder and truth)
LANGUAGE
• Naturally figurative, with figures of speech as spontaneous stylistic
expressions of experiences/emotions/ideas
• Sometimes that of ordinary people (Wordsworth) → ordinary as superior; does
it inadvertently reinforce the elitist dichotomy ordinary/extraordinary?
• Linked with imagination – poem as an organic creation that allows for no
separation between subject matter and expression (Coleridge)

Imagery, symbolism, and form

• Imagery illustrates the link between language and imagination; associated
with nature, imagination, the sublime, the ordinary, the mysterious,
revolution
• Symbol as the meeting point between imagination and truth – imagination
made visible/defined, truth uncovered
• Organic form – individual experience/perception → individual form; union of
form and content; spontaneity of expression
• When preconceived forms are used, they are subjected to individual
experience

The poet’s role and inspiration

• World-conscious, visionary, prophetic
• More sensitive and perceptive than most
• His task is to awaken “the slumberous mass” (Blake)
• Poet as prophet in William Blake’s “Introduction” (Experience), Coleridge’s
“Kubla Khan”, William Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, P. B. Shelley’s
“Ode to the West Wind”
• Poet as healer (Keats)
• Engaged with and inspired by the world around him (social, political, and
economic pressures; nature; the common and the extraordinary; the
spontaneous and the instinctive)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
A/the father of English Romanticism
• Poet laureate
• Dominant among the Romantics – patriotic sentiment & typically English
settings and imagery
• Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 2nd edition – the manifesto of English
Romanticism → theoretical views of poetry (focus, intention, language, style,
purpose…)

Family and education

• Born in Cockermouth, Cumberland
• Relatively wealthy and large family
• Parents’ deaths → children taken care of by different families
• Wordsworth and Dorothy (sister, poet, diarist, possible inspiration for Lucy)
• Studies classics at St. John’s College, Cambridge

Nature as inspiration
• Greatest inspiration, comfort, friend, foster mother
• Meditative, philosophical poems about the laws of the universe, man’s place in
the world, harmony with nature, interaction between nature and the mind,
relationship between man, nature, and the pervading spirit
• Actual landscapes as starting points for spiritual meditations
• Focus on man – man and nature, man and society, specific hardships; often
interested in the stories of individual characters
• 1790 walking tour
• Lived in the Lake District – Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey as the
Lake Poets

More sources of inspiration

• The Industrial Revolution – urbanization, pollution, unemployment, poverty,
alienation → soothing nature vs. city as a place of waste, crowd, noise, stress,
and sadness
• The French Revolution – shared his contemporaries’ enthusiasm about it and
was later disappointed with the outcome; experienced it at first hand; met
Annette Vallon → inspiration for Lucy?
• Thinkers like William Godwin, John Locke, and John Milton
Wordsworth and Coleridge
• Neighbours, friends, travelling companions, and collaborators
• Discussions on poetry, art, nature, each other’s works → mutual influence
• Joint projects → Lyrical Ballads (1798)
• Different interests and sensibilities: Wordsworth sought truth in the ordinary,
while Coleridge looked for it in the extraordinary, the mysterious, and the
supernatural
• Eventually estranged

Early poetry
• Started as a schoolboy
• First published works in 1793
• “An Evening Walk”
• “Descriptive Sketches”
• Little originality → little notice
• Anticipate his later poetry: interest in nature, the beauty of nature, human
predicaments → amidst natural beauty he hears “the sad music of humanity”
(“Tintern Abbey Revisited”)

Lyrical Ballads (1798)

• Wordsworth and Coleridge
• Return to folk literature and the ballad tradition
• Experimental and revolutionary
• Poetry that stems from “naked experience” and rebels against Neoclassical
conventions
• Focus on strong emotion “recollected in tranquility”, in “the blessed mood”
when the poet becomes “a living soul” (“Tintern Abbey Revisited”), ordinary
people, incidents of everyday life, nature, the rustic, the primitive
(Wordsworth), but also the mysterious and supernatural (Coleridge)
• Wordsworth’s task: humble, rustic life; honestly expressed essential emotions;
simple language; a charm of novelty in everyday things
• Coleridge’s task: a semblance of truth in the exotic, mysterious, and
supernatural
• Language of middle and lower classes
• Folk ballads and philosophical poems inspired by nature → no blind following
of the ballad tradition
Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800)
• Wordsworth’s theoretical views
• Poetry is not for the educated alone; it should stem from naked experience,
express the poet’s mind, describe incidents of everyday life, and convey
emotion; it is born of harmony between the poet’s mind and the world; the idea is
to keep people sensitive, give pleasure and excitement, and pay homage to “the
native and naked dignity of man”
• The poet is endowed with a more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and
tenderness, a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive
soul → his ability to “see into the life of things” (“Tintern Abbey Revisited”)
differs not in kind but in degree
• Organic form as a result of the peculiarity of the poet’s experience
• Subject matter and language chosen on account of their simplicity,
naturalness, and force of feeling; ordinary things sometimes presented in an
unusual aspect (“The Thorn”) and extraordinary incidents/situations expose the
primary laws of our nature (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”); genuine,
essential emotion → language free from artificial refinement but also purified
from triviality and vulgarity

Lucy Poems (1798-99) and The Prelude (published posthumously)

• Lucy Poems – 5 poems on laws of the universe, mortality/immortality, cycle of
life, oneness with nature; centring on the speaker’s onetime beloved in harmony
with nature; ballads in form, content, and tone; philosophical poems; love
poems; Lucy’s ambiguous identity
• The Prelude – masterpiece; poetic autobiography that traces his development
as a man and poet; inspired by Milton’s Samson Agonistes → sees himself as a
chosen figure; combines his great themes

Poetry after 1800

• The Prelude completed in 1805
• Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) – contains “Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality”
• Poems (1815)
• Change towards conservatism – more moralistic and rhetorical but also more
successful (government pension in 1842 and title of poet laureate in 1843)
• Notable poems: The Excursion, The Recluse, Yarrow Revisited, The White Doe of
Rylstone, and others
Key elements and forms
• Autobiographical experience – interest in real-life incidents, situations, and
people; starting point for philosophical musings
• Philosophy of nature – moves beyond simple descriptions; meditations on
nature, man, society, the pervading spirit; found in all his best works
• Ballad tradition – some of his poetry is modelled on folk ballads; dramatically
and emotionally related stories, often with an element of tragedy and a sense of
loss; oneness with nature; spontaneous expression of genuine feeling;
occasional explorations of philosophical and/or social themes
• Love sentiments – mostly in Lucy Poems; Lucy as a child of nature rather than a
woman whom the poet desires
• Organic and received forms – combination of organic and received forms;
preconceived forms subjected to content and the poet’s treatment of it; ode,
ballad, blank verse, the heroic couplet, the Spenserian stanza, rhyme royal, etc.

Wordsworth’s politics and legacy

• Vagabond, rebel, and radical who turned conservative
• Traces of the liberal in his later poetry: equality, child labour, reforms…
• Evasion of history?
• Calls for a radical change of heart and a return to a simpler existence in
harmony with nature
• Critique of particular social and economic problems, such as poverty or
unemployment
• Nature has the power to rescue the individual mind from degradation and
despair
• The poet as a mediator between common people and the truth, an upholder
and preserver of the truth whose task is to demonstrate the power and beauty
of the mind when influenced by nature
• Is his poetry reflective of “the egotistical sublime” or “the sympathetic
imagination” (Keats)?
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Poet, critic, philosopher
• Poet, theorist, critic, philosopher
• The most imaginative and mysterious English Romantic poet?
• Focus on the supernatural, the exotic, the deeply personal
• Ambiguous, symbolical, elusive, and intimate
• Dreamlike quality – changes the familiar into the strange and creates peculiar
Coleridgesque worlds
• Romantic features: emphasis on imagination, interest in the relationship
between the mind and the world, exploration of the exotic and the supernatural
as evidence of the world’s wonder, use of organic forms and some received
forms (ballad, ode)

Background
• Born in Ottery Saint Mary (Devonshire)
• Youngest of ten children of a vicar
• Early orphaned → link with Wordsworth
• Boarding school in London and later Jesus College, Cambridge
• University significant for the development of his political and religious views
• Lover of books: called himself “a library cormorant”

Pantisocracy
• 1794: Southey’s and Coleridge’s idea
• Utopian society in Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Susquehanna
• Influence of Rousseau (return to nature) and Godwin (shared property)
• All would work, rule, be equal, and share property (pan-socratia − all-governing)
→ a self-sustainable paradise on earth with no specific religious or political
beliefs
• An early intentional community
• Tradition of alternative living in the US: the English Puritans and Pilgrims in the
early 17th century escaping religious persecution; the Transcendentalists in the
1830s seeking a life driven by Romantic ideals, away from the effects of the
Industrial Revolution

1795: Sarah Fricker

• Overwhelmed by enthusiasm for Pantisocracy, Coleridge and Southey married
the sisters Edith and Sarah Fricker
 • Loveless and dysfunctional
• Coleridge fell in love with Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law
• Religious feelings and belief in the sanctity of marriage → guilt
• Love for Sara Hutchinson inspired some of his concerns and particular poems
(“Letter to Sara” → “Dejection: an Ode”)

1795: the Wordsworths

• “the marriage of true minds”
• Discussion, collaboration, borrowing, influence → poetry in dialogue
• 1798: Lyrical Ballads and joint trip to Germany
• Suggestions, borrowed lines/stanzas, stanzas and poems in dialogue
• A weakening friendship due to Wordsworth’s increasing conservatism and
Coleridge’s addiction

1795: Iaudanum
• Tincture of opium used for medical purposes
• Difficult to assess its effect on Coleridge’s writing
• Dreamlike quality of much his poetry, use of strong colours and vivid poetic
imagery
• “Kubla Khan” was based on an opium reverie

Major influences and early work

• Influences: Thomas Gray, William Collins, Alexander Pope, Edmund Spenser,
William Cowper, Jean Jacques Rousseau, William Godwin, Immanuel Kant,
Jakob Böhme
• Started writing as a schoolboy
• 1796 – published Poems on Various Subjects
• 1796 – began the publication of a short-lived political periodical The Watchman

Mystery poems
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), “Kubla Khan” (1816), “Christabel”
(1816)
• Levels of interpretation: literal, metaphorical/allegorical/symbolical,
metaphysical
• Dreamlike and ambiguous
• Romantic Gothic: mode, aesthetic, sensibility rather than genre at that time
• Other notable examples of the Romantic Gothic: Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans
Merci” (1820), Byron’s Oriental Tales (1813–14), Shelley’s Zastrozzi (1810)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
• Lyrical ballad
• Story of evil, sin and redemption, crime and punishment
• Set in a strange sea and a supernatural atmosphere
• Told by an ancient mariner
• Crime against the created world → inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Interpretations: ballad on crime and punishment, metaphysical exploration of
evil, allegory of artistic creation
• The physical journey is parallel to the mariner’s spiritual journey
• Duality: imagination and reality, the real and the supernatural, the literal and the
symbolical, the ordinary and the extraordinary
• Christian and non-Christian symbolism and archetypal imagery
• Contemporary relevance – ecological concerns

“Kubla Khan”
• Composed in 1797 and published in 1816, at Lord Byron’s request
• Inspired by Purchas, His Pilgrimes (1613), a travel account by the clergyman
Samuel Purchas (by a description of Xanadu, the summer palace built by the
Mongol ruler, Kubla Khan)
• Dream origin?
• Vision, imagination, creation, poet as prophet and his role
• Exoticism/Exoticization of the Orient
• First vision – exotic paradise on earth, Kubla Khan’s pleasure dome, garden,
surrounding area; sacred river as imagination
• Second vision – maiden singing of another paradise on earth; impact of her
singing on the poet
• Poetic rendering of Coleridge’s theory of imagination?
• Fragment of a larger work composed in his dream or a finished work?

“Christabel”
• Omissions, gaps, mysteries, and ambiguities
• Good and evil, innocence and experience, purity and corruption through the
contrasting characters of Christabel and Geraldine – Christabel as the innocent,
pure, kind, naïve, vulnerable heroine/victim vs. Geraldine as innocent-looking,
mysterious, possibly morally corrupt and/or evil (victim or villain?)
• Elements of the Gothic: evil, mystery, magic, vulnerable heroine, guardian
spirit, illness, death, deviancy, ambiguity
Conversation poems
• aka poems of friendship
• Blank verse poems on various topics addressed to friends and usually set in
particular places
• Informal, conversational, intimate tone
• Vs. mystery poems: more personal, autobiographical, and realistic
• ≈ mystery poems: vivid imagery and meticulous detail
• Frequent motif of journey
• Some titles: “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison”, “Frost at Midnight”, “The Eolian
Harp”, “Dejection: an Ode”, “Reflections on Having Left a Place of Retirement”,
“Fears in Solitude”, “The Nightingale”, “To Wordsworth”/“To a Gentleman”

Theory and criticism

• Biographia Literaria (1817) – literary theory and criticism, essays on
philosophical and literary subjects, and autobiographical notes
• Theory of imagination: primary and secondary imagination, and fancy
• Organic form
• “willing suspension of disbelief” – now used in defining magic(al) realism
• 1808–1819 – lectures on literature and philosophy
• Major contribution to the study of Shakespeare
• Arguably the most influential literary critic of the 19th century
• Also wrote about religion and political theory

After 1816
• Highgate Village
• Biographia Literaria (1817), Sibylline Leaves (1817), Aids to Reflection (1825),
and Church and State (1830)
• 1824 – a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• Struggling with finances, loneliness, depression, addiction – “damaged
archangel” (Charles Lamb)
• Wrote his own epitaph before he died
George Gordon Byron: Man, poet legend (1788-1824)
“Mad, bad and dangerous to know”
A magnetic poseur
• George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron aka Lord Byron
• The most controversial Romantic?
• Enigmatic, eccentric, unconventional, adventuresome, given to extremes of
temper → extravagant and adventurous life
• Poet and lover
• Major contribution to literature: Childe Harold, Don Juan, the Byronic Hero
• The first celebrity poet in British literature

Byromania vs. critical disdain

• Byromania in his lifetime and after his death: literary and sexual interest in
Byron as celebrity in his lifetime, as well as posthumous poems to him,
continuations of his unfinished works, and reconfigurations of him in 19th-
century novels
• Oscillating 20th-century reputation: T. S. Eliot’s repugnance to Byron’s physical
appearance (!) merged with his disdain of the “distressing bulk” of his poetic
output; the Yale School Critics’ view of him as “the joker in the pack” (vs. “High
Romanticism”); followed by a renewed interest in Byron’s work in subsequent
decades: a revaluation of Byron’s oeuvre as a field that merits scholarly attention
in the wake of the Clarendon edition of his poems (1980-93)
• Contextual readings drew the attention away from the mesmeric figure of the
poet
• Continuing fascination with Byron’s sexuality in biographical writing
• For more, see Jane Stabler’s “Introduction” to Byron Studies

Background
• Eccentric and dysfunctional family – suggestive nicknames like Foulweather
Jack and Mad Jack, separations, suicides, debts
• Between Scotland and England
• Impact of upbringing by a neurotic single mother, Catherine Gordon, and an
eccentric nanny
• Educated at Harrow and Cambridge
• Eccentricities of university life
Nonpoetic interests
• Sports – swimming, fencing, shooting, boxing
• Politics – contrary to his status: member of the House of Lords who publicly
defended the Luddites; impact on poetry (revolution, liberty, equality, etc.)
• Travel – travelled a lot across Europe and Asia → impact on his writing
(exotic/exoticized cultures vs. life in England)
• Armenian culture – special interest in their struggles for liberty and language → A
Grammar: Armenian and English

Love, marriage, and their influence on poetry

• Married Anne Isabella/Annabella Milbanke
• Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Oxford, Claire Clairmont, Augusta Leigh…
• Anonymous male lovers
• Marital violence, affairs, incest, homosexuality → transgressed the boundaries
of conventional morality → loved and then ostracized by the society
• Passionate poems to Augusta, homoerotic poems and passages, thematization
of sin and pleasure/hypocritical morality vs. nature

Important years
• Started writing at 14
• Fugitive Pieces → Hours of Idleness (1807)
• “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” (1809)
• 1809-11: Grand Tour
• Childe Harold: Cantos I and II (1812) → fame
• The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos (1813) Oriental Tales/Oriental Romances/Turkish
• The Corsair and Lara (1814) Tales/Eastern Tales
• Marriage in 1815
• Exile since 1816
• Childe Harold: Canto III, Parisina, The Prisoner of Chillon (1816)
• Manfred (1817)
• Don Juan: Cantos I and II (1818-19)
• Childe Harold: Canto IV (1818)
• Mazeppa (1819)
• Cain and Sardanapalus (1821)
• Journal The Liberal (1822)
• The Island, the rest of Don Juan (1823)
Death
• 1823 – joined Greek rebels against the Ottomans
• 1824 – died of fever in Greece
• National hero in Greece – statues in Athens and Messolonghi/Missolonghi,
Messolonghi Byron Society, Athenian suburb Vyronas
• Heart rumoured to have been buried in Messolonghi, body buried in Nottingam

A note of Ada Lovelace

• Augusta Ada Byron, later known as Ada Lovelace
• Byron’s famous daughter
• Mathematician and early computer programmer
• Helped develop an early computer
• Wrote the world’s first computer programme for Charles Babbage’s prototype
of a digital computer
Byron’s Narrative Poetry
Byron and Romanticism
• Adventures and struggles of Romantic heroes and heroines in
foreign/exoticized settings
• The Byronic Hero as a Romantic figure
• Interest in personal and collective liberties
• ≠ the other Romantics: admired 18th-century writers and poets (Alexander
Pope); traditionalist in style and language; used a number of received forms; no
interest in Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s innovations, no praise of imagination or
insistence on the poet’s prophetic role
• Poetry characterized by playfully sharp social and political satire, humour,
contrast between enjoyment of life and a sense of wretchedness and
alienation, and between the exoticized adventures of passionate heroes and
life in England

The Byronic Hero

• First appeared in Childe Harold
• Modelled on Byron
• Features: young, cynical, alienated, egotistical, proud, marked by stormy
emotions, tortured by a sense of guilt for unspecified past sins, characterized by
Weltschmerz
• Weltschmerz – realization of the tragic inadequacy of the world which can and
should be better; discontent or pessimism characterized by “a nihilistic loathing
for the world”
• Common in literature and popular culture → see Atara Stein, The Byronic Hero
in Film, Fiction, and Television
• His appeal: represents “power and empowerment, autonomy, mastery, and
defiance of oppressive authority”

Features of Byron’s narrative poetry

• ≈ novel (plot, events, numerous characters, lengthy)
• His best works
• Partly autobiographical
• Thematic concerns: complex relations between man and nature, and man and
society, pleasure and sin, the hypocrisy of morality, solitude in nature, beauty of
nature versus man’s brutality, tyranny and liberty
• Passionate interest in all forms of liberty
• Some of them are satirical: sharp satire aimed at hypocritical morality, upper
classes, contemporaries, social and political issues; combined with humour
Childe Harold (1812-18)
• Shot him to fame
• The Spenserian stanza
• Cantos 1 and 2 (1812) were inspired by his Grand Tour (1809-11) in Portugal,
Spain, Malta, Greece, Albania, and Turkey
• Novelty: new/“exotic” settings and cultures, lively description combined with
sharp critique, the Byronic Hero, language and style
• Childe Harold as the prototype of the Byronic Hero – combination of hero of
sensibility/man of feeling, child of nature, Gothic villain, gloomy egoist
• Contrasts: nature and the noble man vs. modern civilization and man as
destroyer, nature’s beauty vs. man’s brutality, past vs. present, different places
and cultures, strange vs. familiar
• Cantos 3 and 4 (1816-18) are set in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy –
more mature

Don Juan (1818-23)

• Ottava rima
• Long poem/novel in verse?
• Mock-heroic epic and satire, with elements of the picaresque (adventures,
sexual inquisitiveness, and defiance of conventional morality) → plays with the
conventions of the traditional epic as a “manly” genre
• Satire aimed at upper-class English society, contemporaries, especially fellow
poets, literary conventions, and himself
• Episodic structure & love of self-counscious digressions
• Don Juan as incompetent hero (≠ legendary figure or Byronic Hero) → comment
on the times and society

Beppo (1817)
• Precursor of Don Juan
• Ottava rima, borrowed from the Italian burlesque poetry
• Humorous satire set in Venice
• Relies on Venetian cicisbeism to expose the hypocrisy of English morality
• Cicisbeism – 17th- and 18th-century Italian custom of having a cicisbeo/cavalier
servente (escort/lover of a married woman)
• Digressions on various topics
Oriental Tales/Oriental Romances/Turkish Tales/Eastern Tales (1813-14)
• The Giaour (1813), The Bride of Abydos (1813), The Corsair (1814), Lara (1814)
• Adventures of passionate Romantic heroes and heroines whose lives are
outside the range of ordinary English experience
• Byronic Heroes as main protagonists
• Stories of passion, cruelty, defiance, bravery, death, and misery
• Digressions
• Non-linear narration
• Multiple perspective
• Cultural exoticization

Other narrative poems

• Parisina (1816) – tragic 15th-century story of the second wife of Niccolò III d’Este
• The Prisoner of Chillon (1816) – imprisonment of François Bonivard (1493-1570)
• Mazeppa (1819) – story of a Ukrainian page becomes the leader of the Cossacks
• The Island (1823) – escapist story of revolutionary politics set in a paradise on
earth, an island of free love; Romantic idealization of the Noble Savage

Shorter poems
• Wrote them throughout his life
• Eclipsed by the more significant narrative poems
• Explore different poetic genres (epigram, elegy, sonnet, etc.)
• Frequently addressed to particular people
• Some are imitations or translations of classical works
• Perceptiveness, wit, linguistic and stylistic prowess, hedonistic nature, and at
times humorous and/or satirical edge
• “She Walk in Beauty”, “And Thou Art Dead, as Young and Fair”, “Dear Doctor, I
have Read your Play”…

Legacy
“an actor who devoted immense trouble to becoming a role that he adopted”
• Major contribution to world literature (Childe Harold, Don Juan, Oriental Tales...)
• Sharply satirical social critique
• The enduring appeal and popularity of the Byronic Hero
• Obsessive interest in his life and work
• Continues to attract attention as a mesmeric and influential figure
Percy Bysshe Shelley: The Hippie of Romanticism
(1792-1822)
“A beautiful but ineffectual angel”
• Another uncompromising, non-conformist radical; unconventional, visionary,
and revolutionary idealist
• Dedicated his life and poetry to liberty and a new world of love
If men were taught and induced to treat their fellows with love, charity, and equal rights,
this world would realise paradise. He looked upon religion, as it is professed, and above
all practised, as hostile instead of friendly to the cultivation of those virtues which
would make men brothers.
Mary Shelley
“A devoted enemy to […] oppression”
• A dangerous immoralist?
• “I am a devoted enemy to religious, political, and domestic oppression.” (The
Examiner)
• Political causes: republic instead of monarchy; advocate of revolution;
participant of Irish nationalist rallies; supporter of land reclamation in Wales
and freedom of the press → unfavourable attention from the government
• Personal causes: free love, open marriage, vegetarianism
• His activism had no impact in his time → private action

Background and education

• Born in Sussex to a wealthy family
• Tyrannical father → impact on personal relationships and poetry
• Eton and then Oxford
• Expelled from university after the publication of the anonymous pamphlet The
Necessity of Atheism (1811), authored by Shelley and Thomas Jefferson Hogg
• Interest in philosophy, mythology, science, religion, and politics →
incorporated in his works

Free love
• First attempt at 19, when he married 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook (eloped);
Shelley invited Hogg to live with them, but she objected
• Left for Europe with Mary Godwin, his future second wife and partner in open
marriage, and Claire Clairmont
• Life also marked by tragedies
• Inspired by William Godwin’s idea
• Rumours about their time in Villa Diodati
Major influences
• Contemporary political, social, and economic events and changes
• William Godwin, Thomas Paine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• The New Testament
• Plato
• The natural world
• Science
Shelley and Romanticism
Second generation of English Romantics
• Took inspiration from the first generation, but were later disappointed by
them
• Influenced by the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)
• More cosmopolitan than the first generation – interest in other cultures,
especially Greek (democracy and republic)
• Lord Byron and P. B. Shelley as “the Satanic school” (atheism)
• John Keats, P. B. Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and William Hazlitt as “the Cockney
school”
• Overlapping interests (other cultures, nature, sex, death) and poetic styles
(rich poetic language and classical allusions)
• All three died young abroad – southern Europe vs. Britain and Germany for the
first generation

Features of Shelley’s writing

• Sometimes straightforward, but at other times allegorical or elusive
• Often described as Neoplatonic (a greater reality beyond the palpable world)
• Near-scientific interest in natural phenomena
• Nature, history, revolution, tyranny, love, poetic inspiration, mythology
• Poetry, verse drama, novel, theory

Queen Mab (1813)

• Philosophical, satirical, and allegorical poem in 9 cantos in blank verse,
appended with 17 notes/essays on various topics
• Influenced by William Godwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and David Hume
• Social and political critique of institutions through a story of Queen Mab
• Vision of a better future – “utopian political epic”
• Queen Mab – queen of fairies in English folklore
• Initially intended for private circulation; later illegally published; finally included
in a volume of Shelley’s works published by Mary Shelley

Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude (1816)

• Blank-verse allegory and quest romance
• Shelley as the narrating minstrel
• Cautionary tale
• Psychological quest for a completed self
• Story of an idealist poet who dies unsatisfied in his “vain pursuit of evanescent
dreams”
 • Also reflects “the narcissistic self-absorption of the poet”

Poems between 1817 and 1819

• 1817: “Mont Blanc”, a poem about the unintelligible and supreme power and its
intelligible manifestations in nature, and “Laon and Cythna” (revised and
published in 1818 as “The Revolt of Islam”), a poem about a bloodless
revolution against the Ottoman Sultan initiated by two lovers
• 1818-19: Julian and Maddalo (published in 1824), based on conversations with
Byron

1819-21: major poems

• “Ode to the West Wind” (1819), a poem about revolution and inspiration;
celebration of the wind’s creative and destructive power and its potential to stir
poetic imagination
• “To a Skylark” (1820), a Neoplatonic poem about art and inspiration which
compares the unpremeditated art of the bird with the premeditated art of man
• “The Cloud” (1820), another Neoplatonic poem; celebration of life and change
as its only constant through a detailed poetic rendering of natural phenomena
• Adonais (1821), pastoral elegy mourning John Keats’s death
1819-20: verse
• The Cenci (1819) – demise of a wealthy 16th-century Italian family; inspired by
the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, Count Cenci’s daughter; tragic story of domestic
violence that ends in the abusive father’s murder at the hands of his daughter
and her subsequent death sentence
• Prometheus Unbound (1820) – modelled on Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound
and Prometheus Unbound; combination of verse drama, the epic, the pastoral,
the antipastoral, lyrical drama, romance, heroic drama, marriage masque;
Prometheus as a Romantic hero (defiant, rebellious, revolutionary); optimistic
end: triumph of revolution

Gothic novels
• Gothic romances
• “flirtations with atheism or the occult”
• Zastrozzi (1810), novel about a delirious villain, Zastrozzi, who wishes to avenge
his mother and therefore imprisons and tortures Verezzi, who may be his half-
brother
• St Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian (1810), novel in which the original Gothic plotline
revolving around wandering, alchemy, and immortality is replaced by a
sentimentalist narrative centering on the trials of Eloise de St. Irvyne
A Defence of Poetry (1821, published 1840)
• Essay on poetry and the balance between reason and imagination
• Reason: the mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another
• Imagination: the mind acting upon those thoughts; guided by the principles of
synthesis and analysis
• Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, the body to the spirit,
the shadow to the substance
• Poetry is the expression of imagination and has a social function → poets as
missionaries, prophets, potential leaders of a new society, and
“unacknowledged legislators of this world”

Death and legacy

• Death veiled in mystery – A tragic accident or a political murder? Did he
actually see his doppelgänger? Found ten days later with a copy of Keats’s
poems in his pocket.
• Numerous admirers: experimented with different genres, passionately
expressed antireligious skepticism, and rebelled against any kind of tyranny in
life or art
• Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles
Swinburne, William Butler Yeats
John Keats – Part 1: Life & Legacy; Poetry & Theory
John Keats (1795-1821)
• Reputation → today, the most respected and admired of the Romantic poets,
seen as one the giants of English poetry (with Shakespeare and Milton). Not so
much during his lifetime.
• This reputation rests on only a handful of poems written during an extremely
short period
• Fascination still deeply involved in his tragic early death and unknown potential,
but also in the universality of work not seen since Shakespeare
• Quintessential Romantic poet (in both life and poetry), and yet the one who
manages to most easily reach today’s readers

Early Life + Poetic Beginnings

• More humble origin than the other Romantics; a Londoner → later on, this will
provoke classist attacks (cf. ‘The Cockney School’)
• Family → eldest of 4 surviving children, early loss of parents
• Enfield school (meets Charles Cowden Clarke (top image), who later introduces
him his circle of political progressive thinkers, artists, poets, etc.)
• Apprenticed to a surgeon, licenced as apothecary – gave up medicine to seek a
career as a poet upon coming of age.
• Leigh Hunt (bottom image) – radical journalist and poet, editor of The Examiner
→ launched JK’s career (published him, wrote about him, introduced him to
people). First poem published in The Examiner – ‘O Solitude’ (1816)
Poetry
• First Collection – Poems, 1817 → critically panned
• Endymion → mostly attacked, some praise
• Poems, 1820
• As a respite from Endymion, wrote some minor odes (e.g. ‘Ode to Apollo’ – Apollo
as the god of both medicine and poetry appealed to JK)
• Second epic – Hyperion (a deliberate revision of Milton, the intended hero was
again Apollo) → unfinished because of both personal and poetic problems
• As a respite from Hyperion and some personal issues, produces his most
admired work (between the end of 1818 and autumn of 1819) → ‘The Eve of St.
Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘Lamia’, all the great odes, a clutch of great
sonnets incl. ‘Bright Star’
General poetic style and themes
• Uses lots of established forms (sonnet, Spenserian stanza, etc.) and sometimes
invents his own (the stanza he uses for several odes). Most famous for his use of
ODE and SONNET
• Usually (particularly in the odes) → slow-moving orchestration of sound,
versification and sensuous imagery
• Synaesthesia (the attribution of the traits of one sense to another, which results
in the imagery that appeals to all the senses)
• Imagination takes centre-stage
• Themes most often explored → imagination, art, poetry, death, nature,
ephemerality, immortality, love, beauty
• Contrasts and conflicts often present in his poetry – life/death, life/art,
dream/reality, mortality/immortality, joy/melancholy, the ideal/the real…

Letters and theories; Negative Capability

• Unlike most of his contemporaries, Keats didn’t write theoretical prefaces,
pamphlets, polemics, critical essays → he wrote letters, where he show brilliant
critical intelligence – T. S. Eliot calls these letters ‘the most notable and the most
important ever written by any English poet’
• In a letter to J. H. Reynolds, he mentions that ‘every department of knowledge…
[is] excellent and calculated towards a great whole.’ The task of life is to try and
construct that whole. His conception of human mind is of ‘a large Mansion of
Many Apartments’. During one’s life, the whole building, ‘dark passages’
included, must be experienced and known.
• His most important and most influential theory is the theory of Negative
Capability, which he expressed in a letter to his brothers (31 Dec 1817) → ‘…at
once it struck me; what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in
literature and what Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean NEGATIVE
CAPABILITY, that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’
• JK is talking about a state of intentional open-mindedness, a place between the
mundane and ready reality and the multiple potentials of a more fully
understood existence. He expresses this idea in several poems (‘La Belle Dame’,
‘Nightingale’, ‘The Fall of Hyperion’…)
Poetic Influences
• Influences: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Hunt, Chatterton, Wordsworth,
Burton…
• Attitude to Wordsworth → admired his nostalgia for the imaginative vitality of
the old myths, passages of pagan enthusiasm for a ‘nature’ informed with divine
presence, his view of nature as an ancient pastoral realm where people and
nature are one (aspects of WW’s mythology). He disliked WW’s self-importance,
which he called the Wordsworthian or ‘egotistical sublime’ in one of his letters.
• Attitude to Shakespeare → huge admiration, read Hamlet over 40 times, read
King Lear so many times that he even wrote a poem about yet another reread,
engaged with WS as a contemporary and an example of a ‘most genuine Being’ –
influence can be seen in both motifs and themes (most important – imagination
Vs. reality)

Keat’s Mythology
• Severely earthbound mythology of nature → cf. ‘To Autumn’ → he celebrates
the healing, loving and creative powers of poetry and nature
• Greek mythology → not intellectual or textual (unlike that of Shelley, who
translated a number of ancient Greek texts). Keats could not read Greek, had
trouble pronouncing Greek names – Greek was associated with the educated
elite, of which JK was not a member. His Hellenism is more aesthetic than
grammatical, inspired by artworks (cf. ‘Grecian Urn’), more sensual/emotional
than intellectual.

Later Life
• Walking tour of the North (the Lakes, Scotland, Northern Ireland) in 1818 with
friend Charles Brown
• Returns home to find brother Tom severely ill – ‘family illness’ (mother died of
TBC when JK was 14, Tom dies in December 1818, JK himself would succumb to
it less that 3 years later)
• Meets Fanny Brawne during summer 1818, after Tom’s death moves into
Wentworth Place as Brown’s tenant
• Between winter 1818 and autumn 1819 composes all of his great works
• Reaches ‘agreement’ with Fanny Brawne by the end of 1819 – hopes to marry her
when he is financially capable
Death and Legacy
• In early 1820 suffers a major haemorrhage, has enough medical knowledge to
understand that he might have very little time left
• Told that he would not survive another English winter, so sets sail for Italy in
Sept 1820
• Dies in Italy on 23 Feb 1821, 4 months after his 25th birthday, in such despair of
what he had accomplished that he asked for his tombstone to read ‘Here lies
one whose name was writ in water’
• A few months later, Shelley writes ‘Adonais’, in which he accuses critics of JK’s
death – ‘he is not dead, he doth not sleep, / He hath awaken'd from the dream of
life’. Half-heartfelt, half-fake sentiment.
• JK’s effect upon later 19th c poetry was extraordinary → Tennyson, Arnold,
Hopkins, Rossetti; the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Oscar Wilde & Aestheticism;
20th c English and American poetry (Eliot, Stevens, Ginsberg, Plath…) and prose
(Nabokov) into the 21st
• In the end, he proved to be a more timeless poet that any of his great
contemporaries, and is consistently linked with Shakespeare in modern
criticism
John Keats – Part 2 – Poetic Works
Poems (1817)
• Fist collection
• Themes → poetry and poetic greatness, politics, imagination
• Interest in classical mythology shown already (even before)
• Style → sonnets, Spenserian stanzas, meditative long poems, etc.
• ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ – political implications
• ‘Sleep and Poetry’ – attacks ‘the foppery and barbarism’, ‘musty laws’ and
‘wretched rule’ of 18th c. neoclassical poetry. Attacked for it by the Conservatives
(and Byron).
• Collection ridiculed by the Tory journalists and critics – marked as one of the
‘Cockney Poets’

Endymion (1818)
• Long narrative poem
• Inspiration – Greek mythology and later adaptations (Lyly, Dryden). Similar to
other Pre-Romantic and Romantic free adaptations of myths (cf. Goethe, Shelley,
Byron)
• Mortal shepherd who falls in love with the Goddess of the Moon
• ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’
• Too abstract, not all that skilful, he expressed regret over it in the preface (work of
‘inexperience’ and ‘immaturity’)
• Critics destroyed it, particularly Z of Blackwood magazine – JK is a self-absorbed,
self-glamorizing ‘Cockney rhymester, dreaming a fantastic dream at the full of
the moon’. Byron – ‘a sort of mental masturbation’, ‘the very onanism of poetry’
• Defenders – the poet is chosen by the gods, destined for immortality
• Despite its failure, this is the poem that ‘made’ Keats

Isabella; or, the Pot of Basil

• Taken from Bocaccio
• No ironic distance (which is present in The Decameron), so it seems somewhat
ridiculous (the evil murdering brothers and Lorenzo’s severed head planted in a
pot of basil that Isabella spends all her time with)
• Endymion and Isabella are two extremes (one too abstract, the other too
concrete)
The Eve of St. Agnes
• Idyllic, fairy-tale like atmosphere, happy ending
• About the love between Madeline and Porphyro
• Influence of Shakespeare
• Themes of love, imagination, dream, reality

Lamia
• Inspired by Greek mythology, about a serpent-woman called Lamia and the
human man (Lycius) who falls in love with her
• Subtle humour and irony
• Themes of love, illusion, reality, life and art

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

• One of his most influential poems (literature, culture, art, music, film…)
• Part of a letter to his brother George (21 Apr 1819), JK did not think much of it
• Two versions
• Ballad
• Inspired by chivalric romances and troubadour poetry
• Many levels of meaning and many interpretations

The Great Odes

• Shadowed by the great Hyperion project which was going nowhere by spring
1819 → when he abandoned it, he had a burst of lyrical composition that
included the great odes
• The best guess at the order of composition: ‘Ode to Psyche’ (late April 1819),
‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (early May 1819), ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’, ‘Ode on
Melancholy’, ‘Ode on Indolence’ (late May-early June 1819), ‘To Autumn’ (Sept
1819)
• Here he intensifies the techniques he had mastered in other genres (sound,
movement, tone, versification, imagery)
• Powerful imagery that arouses pain and pleasure
• Lots of linguistic activity – puns, echoes, allusions…
• All odes are concerned with poetry, passion, art and imagination

Ode to a Nightingale
• One of the most beautiful poems ever written in the English language
• Rich ambiguities that showcase his idea of negative capability – no answers, only
questions
• Lots of allusions
• Themes of art, life, death, poetry, immortality and ephemerality, nature…
Ode on a Grecian Urn
• Loosely inspired by Greek mythology, but not on an intellectual, textual or
narrative level; instead, he focuses on the visual
• Ekphrastic poem – about a visual work of art (imaginary, in this case)
• Ambiguities of interpretation
• Lots of contrasts (life/art, art/nature, life/death, death/art…)
• The poem is extremely self-reflexive

To Autumn
• Maturity of tone, masterful craft
• Inspired not by myth or art, but by the English countryside; draws upon the rich
Georgic tradition (literature about agriculture)
• Often seen as a coda to the May odes, or even to JK’s career
• Mingling of beauty and sadness, conciliatory tone
Bright Star
• Sonnet
• Expresses the desire to be part of the world, and yet unchangeable
• Themes of immortality, love, life, death