5 – THE AUGUSTAN AGE
First half of the 18째century First Industrial Revolution
New inventions People started going to live in towns Newspapers Rise of the Novel
The Novel: a fictional form written by and for people of the middle class about every day life and events
Diary and epistolary forms: 1st person narrator to describe feelings and thoughts. Didactic aim: how to keep accounts, to write letters, to behave in society
Daniel Defoe 1660 –1731 Giornalista Opere:
Robinson Crusoè (1719, Man and wild nature; colonialism); Captain Singleton (1720, piracy) Moll Flanders (1722, woman’s situation) Roxana (1724, a courtesan’s life) The Journal of the Plague Year (1722, about plague in London)
SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689 – 1761) Epistolary Novels; Didactic aim: moral lesson, how to behave in society and how to write letters. . Works: Pamela or The Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (1748)
Henry Fielding (1707 –1754)
Works: Tom Jones (1749) Joseph Andrews (1742)
Humor and social satire. Picaresque novel. Epic-comic plot J. Joyce (20th century)
Laurence Sterne (1713 – 1768) Irish-born novelist Satirist Precursor of Modernism ( J. Joyce) Work: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759)
Tobias Smollet Scottish poet and author. Picaresque novels: The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751) Charles Dickens (19th century)
(1721–1771)
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)
Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer, poet. Dean of St. Patrick's, Dublin. Works: Gulliver's Travels (1726, anti-utopia) A Modest Proposal (1729, suggestion given to rich people about how to cook poor children )
American War of Independence (1775–1783)
American people rebel against English heavy taxation
French Revolution (1789–1799)
ity, Equality rn te ra F , m o d e re F Ideals: rature influence on lite
The Gothic Novel Mystery and gloomy atmosphere Imagination and unconscious
Horace Walpole : The Castle of Otranto Anne Radcliff: The Mysteries of Udolpho Further developments 1800 - 2000 The Nightmare, H. Fuseli (1781)
PRE ROMANTICISM New sources of inspiration: Nordic and Celtic cultures; the Middle Ages, ancient national folk poetry (T. Percy); The Works of Ossian (J. Macpherson)
New features: originality and creativity; spontaneity; emphasis on individual genius; interest in the unknown and in the supernatural; free imagination; sensations; interest in Middle Ages; subjective feeling for nature; exotic times and places. .
The Graveyard Poetry Macpherson’s: Ossian (1760) Thomas Gray: Elegy written in an English Courtyard (1751, death makes everybody equal)