The Augustan age and the novel

1
The Augustan age and the novel
ANTONIO SAGGIOMO E VINCENZO CONTALDI (IVB)
2
(No Transcript)
3
What does it mean?

• The Augustan age was also known as the
  Enlightenment, a movement based on the faith in
  human reason and in the progress and evolution of
  mankind reason was considered the instrument to
  free man from fears, prejudices and mistakes of
  the past reason could light the way of man
  towards progress . As a consequence , Augustan
  writers celebrated man s reason man was seen
  as a rational being, whose reason had to be
  severely controlled and whose emotional
  spiritual part had to be banished from
  literature. The worst error for an Augustan
  writer was to allow is emotion to influence what
  he wrote reason was the only guide to good
  conduct and good taste.

4
Historical events

• The Restoration period ended with the exclusion
  crisis and the Glorious Revolution, where
  Parliament set up a new rule for succession to
  the British throne that would always favor
  Protestantism over sanguinity. This had brought
  William and Mary to the throne instead of James
  II, and was codified in the Act of Settlement
  1701. James had fled to France from where his son
  James Francis Edward Stuart launched an attempt
  to retake the throne in 1715. Another attempt was
  launched by the latter's son Charles Edward
  Stuart in 1745. The attempted invasions are often
  referred to as "the 15" and "the 45". When
  William died, Anne Stuart came to the throne.
  When Anne died without issue, George I, Elector
  of Hanover, came to the throne. George I never
  bothered to learn the English language, and his
  isolation from the English people was
  instrumental in keeping his power relatively
  irrelevant. His son, George II, on the other
  hand, spoke some English and some more French,
  and his was the first full Hanoverian rule in
  England. By that time, the powers of Parliament
  had silently expanded, and George II's power was
  perhaps equal only to that of Parliament.
• In this period middle class people obtained
  importance in fact they tried to acquire a
  proper education in various ways, especially from
  the newspapers and magazines, which from the
  beginning of 18th century became very popular in
  Britain. In them writers taught their writhers
  what to think and how to behave and talk. Clubs
  and coffee-houses were also important for the
  middle class people went to clubs not only to
  drink but to meet, discuss and write.

5
Philosophy and literature

• The 18th century had a vigorous competition among
  followers of Locke. Bishop Berkeley extended
  Locke's emphasis on perception to argue that
  perception entirely solves the Cartesian problem
  of subjective and objective knowledge by saying
  "to be is to be perceived." Only, Berkeley
  argued, those things that are perceived by a
  consciousness are real. For Berkeley, the
  persistence of matter rests in the fact that God
  perceives those things that humans are not, that
  a living and continually aware, attentive, and
  involved God is the only rational explanation for
  the existence of objective matter. In essence,
  then, Berkeley's skepticism leads to faith. David
  Hume, on the other hand, took empiricist
  skepticism to its extremes, and he was the most
  radically empiricist philosopher of the period.
  He attacked surmise and unexamined premises
  wherever he found them, and his skepticism
  pointed out metaphysics in areas that other
  empiricists had assumed were material. Hume
  doggedly refused to enter into questions of his
  personal faith in the divine, but his assault on
  the logic and assumptions of theodicy and
  cosmogeny was devastating, and he concentrated on
  the provable and empirical in a way that would
  lead to utilitarianism and naturalism later.
• The literature of the 18th centuryparticularly
  the early 18th century, which is what "Augustan"
  most commonly indicatesis explicitly political
  in ways that few others are. Because the
  professional author was still not distinguishable
  from the hack-writer, those who wrote poetry,
  novels, and plays were frequently either
  politically active or politically funded. The
  best literary form to express the ideas of the
  time during the Augustan age had been prose . The
  Augustan age so in the novel and journalism the
  better instruments of knowledge for middle class
  people the novel was the cultural expression of
  the new leading class, it sang the deeds of the
  bourgeois hero in order to provide the middle
  class with models teaching them how to behave in
  different situation. In poetry Augustans modelled
  their work on ancient writers such as Virgil,
  Ovid and Horace.

6
The Novel

• What is it?
• The most profoundly innovative genre in 18th
  century literature was the novel. The novel is a
  fictitious prose narrative or tale presenting a
  picture of real life. The novels readers mostly
  came from the ranks of the commercial and
  mercantile middle class, whose outlook was
  practical and realistic. It demanded original
  stories relating ordinary experience. The modern
  idea of realism is reflected in the fact that
  novels deal whit recognizably contemporary
  objects, language and situations, and not whit
  extraordinary, fantastic or magical events told
  in highly-refined language. The language of the
  novel also reflect this realistic trend it is
  plain and factual.
• The characters may be stereotyped or realistic,
  more like real people.

7
The Novel

• Causes of novels rise
• There are several reason that cause the
  novels rise
• The rise of philosophical rationalism. The
  philosophical theories of Rene Descartes and
  John Locke for example, focused on the experience
  of the individual who could discover the reality
  of the world around him through his senses and
  perception. The novel is the form of literature
  which most reflects this individualist approach.
• The influence of Puritanism and later Methodism.
  Puritanism preached the idea that man must save
  himself by living a virtuous life and by own
  efforts. Methodism was the application of the
  Puritanism to ordinary life.
• The expansion of the reading public. The
  increasingly affluent middle class were beginning
  to buy more books and newspaper, which also
  brought with them the advent of fact-based
  journalistic writing on the events of the day.
  The new reading public were not interested in
  romances or in fantastic tales but they wanted to
  read real stories which reflected their own
  interests and problems with characters they could
  more or less identify with.

8
The Novel

• Effects of novels rise on the society
• Novels rebirth caused some effects on the
  society during the Augustan age but the
  principal was peoples life changing. The man
  has always needed to improve himself, not only
  physically, but specially mentally because life
  asked him. So people wanted to read real stories
  which reflected their life, their social position
  because they searched models to follow. They
  wished to pursue the truth, to escape from a
  caotic life, to became independent from the
  tradition of past so they wished to enrich their
  own culture reading these tales. For example
  women realized this because, thanks this devotion
  to read novels, they were free from the prison of
  domesticity (and often from the prison of
  marriage).