1. The Augustan Age & the Rise of the Novel
The Age of Reason ( )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

35. Augustan Poetry

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

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

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

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

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