The Rise of the Novel: A Literary History and Analysis
The Rise of the Novel: A Literary History and Analysis
The Prose of the World
A Definition
According to the dictionary, a novel is:
- a fictional prose narrative of considerable length, typically having a plot that is unfolded by the actions, speech, and thoughts of the characters.
- the literary genre represented by novels.
More Definitions
The novel is a worldwide cultural instrument which helped redefine:
- the time and space where we live
- the way we speak and talk
- how we feel
- what we do
Hybrid Genre
The novel:
- encompasses many different sub-genres.
- is always in search of a definition.
- battled with other genres from the very beginning.
- has different theories on its rise.
- Ian Watt, Formal Realism (1957)
- Michael McKeon, Progressive Narrative (1987)
- J. Paul Hunter, Specific Features of the Novel (1990)
Another Definition
A novel (from French nouvelle, Italian novella, “new”) is an extended, generally fictional narrative in prose. Until the 18th century, the word referred specifically to short fictions of love and intrigue as opposed to romances, which were epic-length works about love and adventure. During the 18th century, the novel adopted features of the old romance and became one of the major literary genres.
Origins
The dominant genre in world literature, the novel is a relatively young form of imaginative writing. Only about 250 years old in England—and embattled from the start—its rise to pre-eminence has been striking. After sparse beginnings in 17th century England, novels grew exponentially in production by the 18th century and in the 19th century became the primary form of popular entertainment.
When & Where
- 1st half of the 18th century in England
- Prototypes of the novel date back to Elizabethan literature
- Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia
- Aphra Behn’s Oronooko, or The Royal Slave (1688)
- John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)
Why
- The rise of the novel coincides with the rise of the middle classes in Western Europe.
- Profound social and economic changes brought the novel into popular prominence.
- Advances in the technology of printing made written texts available to a growing population of readers.
- Changes in modes of distribution and in literacy rates brought books and pamphlets to populations excluded from education, working-class men and women of all classes.
- Authors became free agents in the literary marketplace, dependent on popular sales for success and sustenance.
- Reflecting the values of a middle-class readership.
Antinovel Campaign
- Attacks on the new genre
- Identified with French romance
- Derided as a sensationalistic import
- Considered antithetical to English values
- Campaign outcomes
- Selective legitimation of novels that displayed non-romantic features.
- The novel as a genre developed and was valued according to these features
Features
- Realism and drama of individual consciousness has precedence over external drama.
- Focus on the experience of the individual as subject matter.
- Exploration of individual consciousness and perception.
Realism
- Synonymous with veracity
- Denial of fictionality
- Particularity of description
- Rejection of fabulous imaginings and idealism of romances
Subject Matter
- Significant choices in subject matter
- Appearance of probability in character, setting, and event.
- Logical cause-and-effect sequencing.
- Solidity of detail in order to achieve the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief.
- Focus on middle-class protagonists
Who & What
- Daniel Defoe- Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders
- Henry Fielding- Tom Jones
- Samuel Richardson- Pamela
- Jonathan Swift- Gulliver’s Travels
- Laurence Sterne- Tristram Shandy
- Ian Watt – Formal Realism
- Philosophical background – Descartes and Locke, Individual apprehension of reality. – individualist, innovating reorientation
- Rejection of traditional plots
- Self-consciousness about innovation and novelty
- Particularity. (individualisation characters detailed presentation of environment)
- Specificity in setting (place, correlation of time)
- Formal realism as convention. Air of total authenticity – confusion between fact and fiction.
- McKeon – Progressive Narrative
- Categorial instability about how to tell the truth led to”rise of the nove”
- Instability of social categories, how the external social order is related to the internal, moral state of its members
- Novel can be understood as a cultural instrument designed to confront intellectual and social crisis
- Hunter, Before Novels
- Contemporaneity
- Novels are stories of now or about events in a relevant past
- Believability
- Credibility and probability are essential qualities
- Familiarity
- Novels portray everyday existence and common people
- Individualism, subjectivity
- Novels show an intensified consciousness of selfhood
- Object of identification
- Readers of novels”identif” or”empathiz” with the heroes and heroines of novels
- Coherence and unity of design
- Novels have guiding design
- Inclusivity digressivenes, fragmentation
The Mode of the Future
Richardson and Fielding created a consciousness among readers and potential writers that a significant and lasting form had come about and that literary careers could be built upon the genre.
How
- Epistolary novel
- Epic novel
- Realistic novel
- Experimental novel (meta-novel)
- Philosophic novel
- Bildungsromann
Epistolary Novel
- Enjoyed its greatest popularity in England and France from the mid-1700s to the end of the century
- Plot is advanced by letters or journal entries of one or more characters
- Montesquieu in France Lettres persanes
- Richardson’s Pamela (1740)
- the first example of the epistolary novel
- the first mature novel to be written in English
- Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761)
- Laclos 1782 Les Liaisons dangereuses
- Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther (1744)
- Foscolo Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (1802)
Realistic Novel
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
- Regarded as the first novel in English
- A fictional autobiography by a first person narrator
- This device, presenting an account of supposedly factual events, is known as a”false documen”, and gives a realistic frame to the story
- First of an endless series of novels in all world literatures up to modern times
Philosophic Satiric Novel
Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
- A satire on human nature
- A parody of the”travellers’ tale” literary sub-genre
- A philosophical novel
- Almost unique in England
- A satirical view of the state of European government, and of petty differences between religion
- An inquiry into whether man is inherently corrupt or whether men are corrupted
- A restatement of the older”ancients v. modern” controversy
- French equivalents
- Voltaire’s Candide and Zadig
- Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes
Epic Novel
Tom Jones (1749)
- Comic romance rooted in the narrative conventions of romance and epic
- Un-heroic hero – ‘ordinary’ person
- Omniscient, meddling, third person narrator
- Wide social range topics
- Direct show and discussion of narrative devices
- Paved the way for Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and William Thackeray
Experimental Novel (Meta-novel)
Tristram Shandy 1759
- One of the greatest comic novels in English
- Rambling plot
- Meddling and maddening third person narrator
- Digressions as important as main plot
- A forerunner for many modern narrative devices
- stream of consciousness
- self-reflection
- modernist and postmodernist writing
Bildungsromann
A German word for”novel of educatio” or”novel of formatio”, a novel which traces the spiritual, moral, psychological, or social development and growth of the main character from (usually) childhood to maturity.
Features
- The hero or heroine leaves home for a real or metaphoric journey due to some form of loss or discontent
- The process of maturity is long, arduous, and gradual
- Clashes between the protagonist’s needs and desires and the views and judgments of social order.
- In the end, the spirit and values of the social order become manifest in the protagonist who:
- accommodates into society.
- assesses his/her new place in that society
Examples
- The full bloom of Bildungsromann is in 19th century European literature
- Almost all 18th century English novels can be considered Bildungsromann
- Robinson Crusoe is certainly a good one
- Pamela is another good example
- All Jane Austen’s novels are Bildungsromann
- One of the best Bildungsromann is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister
Jonathan Swift
-Jonathan Swift was born on November 30, 1667 in Dublin, Ireland, the son of Protestant Anglo-Irish parents.
– His ancestors had been Royalists, and all his life he would be a High-Churchman.
– His father, also Jonathan, died a few months before he was born, upon which his mother, Abigail, returned to England, leaving her son behind, in the care of relatives.
– In 1673, at the age of six, Swift began his education at Kilkenny Grammar School, which was, at the time, the best in Ireland. Between 1682 and 1686 he attended, and graduated from, Trinity College in Dublin, though he was not, apparently, an exemplary student.
– In 1688 William of Orange invaded England, initiating the Glorious Revolution.
– With Dublin in political turmoil, Trinity College was closed, and an ambitious Swift took the opportunity to go to England, where he hoped to gain preferment in the Anglican Church.
– In England, in 1689, he became secretary to Sir William Temple, a diplomat and man of letters, at Moor Park in Surrey. There Swift read extensively in his patron’s library, and met Esther Johnson, who would become his”Stell” and it was there, too, that he began to suffer from Meniere’s Disease, a disturbance of the inner ear which produces nausea and vertigo, and which was little understood in Swift’s day.
– In 1690, at the advice of his doctors, Swift returned to Ireland, but the following year he was back with Temple in England.
– He visited Oxford in 1691: in 1692, with Temple’s assistance, he received an M. A. degree from that University, and published his first poem: on reading it, John Dryden, a distant relation, is said to have remarked”Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet”.
-In 1694, still anxious to advance himself within the Church of England, he left Temple’s household and returned to Ireland to take holy orders. In 1695 he was ordained as a priest in the Church of Ireland, the Irish branch of the Anglican Church, and the following year he returned to Temple and Moor Park.
-Between 1696 and 1699 Swift composed most of his first great work, A Tale of a Tub, a prose satire on the religious extremes represented by Roman Catholicism and Calvinism.
– In 1700 he was instituted Vicar of Laracor — provided, that is, with what was known as a”Livin” — and given a prebend in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin. These appointments were a bitter disappointment for a man who had longed to remain in England. In 1701 Swift was awarded a D. D. from Dublin University, and published his first political pamphlet, supporting the Whigs against the Tories. 1704 saw the anonymous publication of A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit.
– In 1707 Swift was sent to London as emissary of Irish clergy seeking remission of tax on Irish clerical incomes. His requests were rejected, however, by the Whig government and by Queen Anne, who suspected him of being irreligious. While in London he he met Esther Vanhomrigh, who would become his”Vaness” During the next few years he went back and forth between Ireland and England, where he was involved — largely as an observer rather than a participant — in the highest English political circles.
– In 1708 Swift met Addison and Steele, and published his Bickerstaff Papers, satirical attacks upon an astrologer, John Partridge, and a series of ironical pamphlets on church questions, including An Argument Against Abolishing Christianity.
-In 1710, which saw the publication of”A Description of a City Showe” Swift, disgusted with their alliance with the Dissenters, fell out with Whigs, allied himself with the Tories, and became the editor of the Tory newspaper The Examiner.
– Between 1710 and 1713 he also wrote the famous series of letters to Esther Johnson which would eventually be published as The Journal to Stella. In 1713 Swift was installed as Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin — a promotion which was, again, a disappointment.
– The Scriblerus Club, whose members included Swift, Pope, Congreve, Gay, and Arbuthnot, was founded in 1714.
– In the same year, much more unhappily for Swift, Queen Anne died, and George I took the throne. With his accession the Tories fell from power, and Swift’s hopes for preferment in England came to an end: he returned to Ireland”to die” as he says,”like a poisoned rat in a hole”
– In 1716 Swift may or may not have married Esther Johnson. A period of literary silence and personal depression ensued, but beginning in 1718, he broke the silence, and began to publish a series of powerful tracts on Irish problems.
– In 1720 he began work upon Gulliver’s Travels, intended, as he says in a letter to Pope,”to vex the world, not to divert it”
– 1724-25 saw the publication of The Drapier Letters, which gained Swift enormous popularity in Ireland, and the completion of Gulliver’s Travels. The progressive darkness of the latter work is an indication of the extent to which his misanthropic tendencies became more and more markedly manifest, had taken greater and greater hold upon his mind.
– In 1726 he visited England once again, and stayed with Pope at Twickenham
– In the same year Gulliver’s Travels was published.
– Swift’s final trip to England took place in 1727.
– Between 1727 and 1736 publication of five volumes of Swift-Pope Miscellanies.
-“Stell” died in 1728.
– In the following year A Modest Proposal was published.
– By 1735, when a collected edition of his Works was published in Dublin, his Meniere’s Disease became more acute, resulting in periods of dizziness and nausea.
– At the same time, prematurely, his memory was beginning to deteriorate.
– During 1738 he slipped gradually into senility, and finally suffered a paralytic stroke: in 1742 guardians were officially appointed to care for his affairs.
– Swift died on October 19, 1745.
Satire
Satire can be found in:
- Prose
- Poetry
- Drama
Instrument used to criticise:
- a) Politics and politicians.
- b) Church and clerics.
- c) People and society; usually ruling class.
Often used to attack corruption in the political system
- Attacks follies of specific social classes.
- Against abuses of power.
- Against human stupidity.
Can use a number of rhetorical devices:
- a) Wit.
- b) Irony.
- c) Parody.
- d) Indirectness.
- e) Fantasy
- f) Exaggeration.
- g) Distortion.
- h) Grotesqueness.
– Wit
The use of ingenious words or expressions or the manipulation of fixed grammatical or syntactical structures to comply with comical or farcical intentions.
– Irony
Satirist can criticise using irony or sarcasm – “in satire, irony is militant” (Northrop Frye).
– Parody
“a work created to mock, comment on, or make fun at an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation”.
– Indirectness
Lack of explicitness essential to avoid consequences.
– Fantasy
Allows the satirist to activate a series of strategies that empower the overall satiric tone (so animals are often used to criticise human failings and shortcomings)
– Exaggeration
By exaggerating satirist creates comic effect but also draws attention to the subject of the satire.
– Distortion and – Grotesqueness
Satire can include some of the nastiest situations, descriptions or characters that can be found in literature.
Scatological allusions (such as descriptions of bodily functions such as urinating).
In this way satirist reduces the dignity of human beings.
Daniel Defoe
-Born London (1659 or 1660)
-Parents Alice and James Foe (candle-maker or “tallow chandler”)
-Parents Presbyterian dissenters.
-Daniel sent to Charles Morton’s Dissenting Academy in Newington Green for four years, with plans to enter the church.
-Did not enter ministry – instead became a merchant, trading in wines, tobacco, woolen goods and wood.
-Lived through events such as Great Plague (1665); The Great Fire of London (1666) and the invasion of the Thames and Medway by a Dutch fleet (1667).
-Involved in many social, political and religious causes including freedom of religion and the press.
-1684, Defoe married Mary Tuffley, receiving a dowry of £3,700.
-1685 fought with Monmouth’s Rebellion against King James II.
-Supported new king William of Orange after Glorious Revolution of 1689.
-Writer of numerous pamphlets, satirical essays, political tracts.
-1703 sentenced to the pillory for his writings.
–Robinson Crusoe, 1719.
-Perhaps based on adventures of Scottish castaway Andrew Selkirk.
-Importance – considered as first novel in English.
●Robinson Crusoe issues:
- Religion
- Work Ethic
- Colonialism
- Slavery
- Morality
- Economics
● Other novels include:
- Captain Singleton (1720)
- Journal of the Plague Year (1722)
- Moll Flanders (1722)
- Roxana (1724)
Defoe died in 1731
Laurence Sterne
-Born 1713, Clonmel, County Tipperary, Ireland.
-Father in army, so childhood moving around, in England and Ireland.
-1724 in school near Halifax, England.
-Ordained as Anglican Deacon 1737 and Priest 1738.
-Became vicar in Sutton-on -the-Forest (Yorkshire)
-1741-1742 started to write articles in favour of Robert Walpole.
– The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman published in ten volumes over ten years.
– First two volumes published 1759.
– Most adventurous novel of century.
–A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy published 1768, year of Sterne’s death
The Rise of the Newspaper and Periodical Press in the C18th
- 1701 – Sept 6 : Estimated first issue of the Norwich Post: probably the first provincial newspaper.
- 1702 – March 11 : Daily Courant founded, first daily paper. Ceased publication in 1735.
- 1704 : Weekly Review founded by Daniel Defoe.
- 1704 – Aug 12 : Earliest surviving copy of a provincial newspaper: William Bonny’s Bristol Post-Boy (No. 91).
- 1705 : Edinburgh Courant founded.
- 1706 : Evening Post, first evening newspaper, founded.
- 1709 : First Copyright Act.
- 1709 : Tatler founded by Steele and Addison.
- 1709 : Worcester Post-Man founded. Became Berrow’s Worcester Journal in 1753. Britain’s oldest surviving non-official newspaper.
- 1710 : Examiner founded, with Swift briefly as editor.
- 1711 : Spectator founded by Steele and Addison.
- 1712 – Aug : Stamp duty imposed on newspapers and advertisements.
- 1713 : Stamford Mercury founded, second oldest surviving provincial newspaper.
- 1719 : Daily Post founded, with Defoe as contributor.
- 1731 : Gentleman’s Magazine founded by Edward Cave. Ceased publication in 1914.
- 1734 : Lloyd’s List founded.
- 1737 : Belfast Newsletter, the world’s oldest surviving general daily newspaper, founded.
The Romantic Age
Context
- Prosperity and confidence in the 18th century.
- Rejection of ideals of the Enlightenment.
- American and French revolutions – also the disappointment in their bitter and violent ends – Napoleon.
- Agricultural Revolution, Industrial Revolution – emergence of factory towns with demographic shift from country to cities – poverty and squalor.
- Growth of industrial working class.
Characteristics
- Revival of instinctual life (reason became less important
- The search for love and beauty.
- Importance of Revolutions (American, French, the figure of Napoleon).
- New role of the imagination.
- The sublime
- Nature as a source of inspiration.
- Revaluation of myths.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778)
● The French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) argued that civilization was creating a race that was out of step with nature.
● Civilization stripped people of their natural instincts.
● “Everything is good when it leaves the creator,” he argued, “everything degenerates in the hands of men.”
● Rousseau believed human beings had innate intuitive powers; that is, they instinctively knew how to deal with the outside world.
● Rousseau believed that there were basic principles, such as liberty and equality, which were innate to human beings.
● Civilization and governments, however, had conditioned man to endure life without them.
● Rousseau’s ideas were influential to many, from the American and French revolutionaries to romantic writers.
● His ideas of nature and intuition were taken even further in the philosophy of Kant.
● He felt that so-called “primitive” people, those who lived closer to and in harmony with nature, had a greater, more refined intuition than “civil” human beings.
Romanticism
Four main pillars:
- Nature
- Equality/egalitarianism
- The Imagination
- Sensibility
Nature
In Nature, Humanity is
- Inspired
- Informed
- Redeemed
- Transformed
- Idealized
Imagination
Power of imagination to “transport”
- Mind heals and/or condemns itself
- Subjective nature of truth
- Spontaneous response
Sensibility
- Idealism
- Intensity of emotions
- Significance of actions
- Worthiness of common person
- Cult of the “noble savage”
Equality
- Egalitarian view of society
- The “social union” among people
- Nationalism (loyalty to “nation” and not to “rulers”)
- Revolution and reform
- Belief that humanity can be perfected.
First Generation-Romantic Poets
William Blake
Blake’s life was spent in rebellion against the restrictive influences of institutions such as government and the church. Blake was aware of the negative effects of the rapidly developing industrial and commercial society.
William Blake was born in London, where he spent most of his life. His father was a successful London hosier and attracted by the doctrines of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Blake was first educated at home, chiefly by his mother. His parents encouraged him to collect prints of the Italian masters, and in 1767 sent him to Henry Pars’ drawing school. From his early years, he experienced visions of angels and ghostly monks, he saw and conversed with the angel Gabriel, the Virgin Mary, and various historical figures. Independent through his life, Blake left no debts at his death on August 12, 1827. He was buried in an unmarked grave at the public cemetery of Bunhill Fields.
Auguries of Innocence
“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour”
The Lamb and the Tiger
Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
In “The Lamb” from the Songs of Innocence Blake presented with an image of a gentle, benevolent, loving God.
In “The Tyger” from Songs of Experience, God is vindictive and terrifying.
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, at Cockermouth on the River Derwent, in the heart of the Lake District that would come to be immortalized in his poetry. The son of a lawyer named John Wordsworth, he was the second of five children. His father was the personal attorney of Sir James Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale, the most powerful (and perhaps the most hated) man in the area.
His first formal education was at Anne Birkett’s school at Penrith, where one of his classmates was his future wife Mary Hutchinson. Wordsworth died on April 13, 1850.
I travelled among unknown men
“I travelled among unknown men, In lands beyond the sea;Nor England did I know till then,What love I bore to thee.’Tis past, that melancholy dream!Nor will I quit thy shore A second time, for still I seemTo love thee more and more.Among thy mountains did I feelthe joy of my desire; And she I cherished, turned the wheel, Beside an English fire.Thy mornings showed, thy nights concealedthe bowers where Lucy played;And thine is too the last green fieldThat Lucy’s eyes surveyed”
William Wordsworth’s poetry emphasies the value of childhood experience and the celebration of nature. He glorifies the spirit of man, living in harmony with his natural environment, far from the spiritually bankrupt city. Nature is identified with a pantheistic deity.
-There is pleasure in beauty, Wordsworth writes. And in this sense, poetry should gratify the senses.
-In striving to capture the eternal beauty, the poet gives rise to romantic expression in all human beings.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
Wordsworth is best known as a nature poet who found beauty, comfort and moral strength in the natural world. For him the world of nature is free from corruption and stress, and offers man a means of escape from industrialised society.
Samuel T. Coleridge
Coleridge’s poetry often deals with the mysterious, the supernatural and the extraordinary. While Wordsworth looked for the spiritual in everyday subjects, Coleridge wanted to give the supernatural a colouring of everyday reality
The Rime of Ancient Mariner
Coleridge describes the natural and supernatural events that occur during the adventurous voyage.The events of the poem take place in an eerie, ghostly atmosphere and the reader often feels he is moving from a real to an unreal world and back again.
Second Generation- Romantic Poets
Lord George Gordon Byron
Byron was the prototype of the Romantic poet. He was heavily involved with contemporary social issues. He, like the heroes of his long narrative poems, was a melancholy and solitary figure whose actions often defied social conventions.
The most notorious Romantic poet and satirist. Byron was famous in his lifetime for his love affairs with women and Mediterranean boys. He created his own cult of personality, the concept of the ‘Byronic hero’ – a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable event in his past. Byron’s influence on European poetry, music, novel, opera, and painting has been immense, although the poet was widely condemned on moral grounds by his contemporaries.
The Destruction of Sennacherib
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
That host with their banners at sunset were seen:
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn hath blown,
That host on the morrow lay withered and strown.
And there lay the rider distorted and pale,
With the dew on his brow, and the rust on his mail:
And the tents were all silent, the banners alone,
The lances unlifted, the trumpet unblown.
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
And the idols are broke in the temple of Baal;
And the might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword,
Hath melted like snow in the glance of the Lord.
Don Juan
Don Juan is seduced by the beautiful and older Donna Julia. She is typical of Byron’s splendid
female portraits: sensual and apparently innocent; always on the verge of tears or ready to faint and
yet strong and aggressive. Above all, she is much more intelligent and cunning than the average
man (especially if he is a husband). No character, not even Don Juan, is free of narrator’s irony.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley was an English Romantic poet who rebelled against English politics and
conservative values. Shelley was considered with his friend Lord Byron a pariah for his life style.
He drew no essential distinction between poetry and politics, and his work reflected the radical
ideas and revolutionary optimism of the era. Like many poets of his day, Shelley employed
mythological themes and figures from Greek poetry that gave an exalted tone for his visions.
Shelley died July 8, 1822.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Shelley was the most revolutionary and non-conformist of the Romantic poets. He was an
individualist and idealist who rejected the institutions of, family,church, marriage and the Christian
faith and rebelled against all forms of tyranny.
Defence of Poetry
● Defence of poetry contains some of the finest quotes about the nature of poetry and the role of
the poet in the English language.
● “A poet is the author to others of the highest wisdom, virtue, pleasure and glory”
Jhon Keats
Keats’s life makes his literary achievements even more astonishing. The main theme of his poetry
is: the conflict between the real world of suffering, death and decay and the ideal world of beauty,
immagination and eternal youth.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
The Ode describes an ancient Greek urn decorated with classical motifs:
A Dionysian festival with music and ecstatic dances, a piper under the trees in a pastoral
setting, a young man in love pursuing a girl and almost reaching her, a procession of
townspeople and priest leading a cow to the sacrifice.
Keats is fascinated by the fact that art is able to present an ideal world because it can freeze
actions and emotions: The beauty of the girl, the ardent passion of her lover, the pleasure of
the music and the boughs in bloom will never fade.
Romanticism-Characteristics
The predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules
● Primitivism
● Love of nature
● An interest in the past
● Mysticism
● Interest in the Gothic
● Individualism
● Human rights
● Idealisation of rural life
● Enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, Gothic or grotesque in nature
● Enthusiasm for the uncivilised or “natural”
Principles of Romanticism
● Romanticism was a reaction against convention.
● Romanticism asserted the power of the individual.
● Romanticism reflected a deep appreciation of the beauties of nature.
● Romanticism emphasized the importance of the subjective experience.
● Romanticism was idealistic.
Romanticism was a reaction against convention
● As a political movement, this reaction was reflected in the new democratic ideals that opposed
monarchy and feudalism.
● In art, it meant a turn away from Neoclassicism and the ancient models of Greek perfection and
Classical correctness.
● Philosophically, romanticism would contend with Rationalism—the belief that truth could be
discerned by logic and reason.
Romanticism asserted the power of individual
● Romanticism marked an era characterised by an idealization of the individual.
● Politically, the movement influenced democratic ideals and the revolutionary principles of social
equality.
● Philosophically, it meant that the idea of objective reality would give way to subjective
experience; thus, all truth became a matter of human perception.
● In the art world, romanticism marked a fascination with the individual genius, and elevated the
artist, philosopher, and poet above all others.
Romanticism and the beauties of nature
● For the romantics, nature was how the spirit was revealed to humankind.
● The romantic philosophers believed in the metaphysical or spiritual nature of reality.
● They thought that a higher reality existed behind the appearance of things in the physical world.
● Nature appeared to people as a material reality; however, because it evoked such strong feelings
in humankind, it revealed itself as containing a higher, spiritual truth.
● Romantic artists tried to capture in their art the same feelings nature inspired in them.
Romanticism and subjective experience
● The romantics believed that emotion and the senses could lead to higher truths than either reason
or the intellect could.
● Romantics supposed that feelings, such as awe, fear, delight, joy, and wonder, were keys that
could unlock the mysteries of the world.
●The result was a literature that continually explored the inward experiences of the self.
● The imagination became one of the highest faculties of human perception, for it was through the
imagination that individuals could experience transcendent or spiritual truths.
Romanticism was idealistic
● On one hand, romanticism was philosophically rooted in idealism.
● Reality existed primarily in the ideal world—that is, in the mind—while the material world
merely reflected that universe.
● In other words, the ideal world was “more real” than the real world.
● On the other hand, romanticism was literally idealistic; it tended to be optimistic in its outlook
on life.
● Political and social romantics asserted that human beings could live according to higher
principles, such as the beliefs in social equality, freedom, and human rights.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (August 30, 1797-February 1, 1851)
Born August 30, 1797, in London, England, Mary Shelley came from a rich literary heritage. She was the daughter of William Godwin, a political theorist, novelist, and publisher who introduced her to eminent intellectuals and encouraged her youthful efforts as a writer; and of Mary Wollstonecraft, a writer and early feminist thinker, who died of puerperal fever 10 days after her daughter’s birth.
William Godwin (3 March 1756 – 7 April 1836)
William Godwin was an English journalist, political philosopher and novelist
– He is considered one of the first exponents of utilitarianism, and one of the first modern proponents of minarchist philosophy. Godwin is most famous for two books that he published within the space of a year: An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, an attack on political institutions, and Things as They Are: The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which attacks aristocratic privilege, but also is virtually the first mystery novel. Based on the success of both, Godwin featured prominently in the radical circles of London in the 1790s.
– While his work was considered unacceptably radical at the time, it is surprising how many of his radical ideas are now commonly accepted across the West. Examples include:
– People should only be judged on their abilities.
– War should only be allowed to protect a country’s liberties or the liberties of another country.
– Colonialism is immoral.
– Democracy is more efficient than other forms of government, as it allows everyone to voice their opinion, rather than centralising power in a fallible monarch. However, majority rule places individual liberty of those in the minority in jeopardy.
– Government close to the people is best.
– Individuals should give to others in need.
– Rehabilitation should be provided for criminals.
– One should have a sphere of private judgement over issues that do not threaten the security of other people, as opposed to the legislated Christianity of his time.
– Censorship prevents the truth from being recognised and should only be used when there is an immediate security risk.
– 1791: Met Mary Wollstonecraft at a diner at which Paine was also a guest. 1793: In February, first edition of Political Justice. 1794: Published Caleb Williams. 1797: In March, he married Wollstonecraft. 1797: On August 30, Mary Godwin born, ten days later Wollstonecraft died from complications at birth of Mary. 1803: Re-married to Mary Jane Clairmount.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
– Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and feminist.
– During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children’s book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.
– A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society and then proceeds to redefine that position, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they
educate its children and because they could be “companions” to their husbands, rather than mere wives.
– Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men. Large sections of the Rights of Woman respond vitriollically to conduct book writers such as James Fordyce and John Gregory and educational philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who wanted to deny women an education. (Rousseau famously argues in Émile (1762) that women should be educated for the pleasure of men).
– 1797 mother dies giving birth.
– 08/30/1797 Mary is born in Somers Town, Great Britain, to well-known parents: author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin.
– 1807 She published her first poem at the age of ten.
– Approx 1813 When Mary is sixteen she meets the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a devotee of her father`s teachings.
– 1816 they go abroad again, this time spending time with Byron and his friend Polidori in Geneva
– 1816 William was born.
– Approx 1816 in Geneva, Byron suggests that they should all write a ghost story. Mary writes Frankenstein, the only story of the four that was ever to be published as a novel.
– 1816 Percy`s wife drowns herself: Percy and Mary marry in December.
– 1817 History Of Six Weeks` Tour the Shelleys jointly recorded their life.
– 1818 Frankenstein.
– 1818 the Shelleys left England for Italy
– 1819 Mary suffered a nervous breakdown after the death of William
– 1819 Birth of Percy Florence Shelly; only child of Mary`s to survive childhood
– 1819 begins work on Mathilde which draws on her relations with Godwin and Percy Shelley. Yhis work is not published until long after her death (1959).
– 1822 Percy drowns during a sailing trip in the Bay of Spezia near Livorno
– 1822 she has a dangerous miscarriage.
– 1823 she returned with her son to England, determined not to-re-marry.
– 1823 Valperga, which is a romance set in the 14th-century
– 1826 The Last Man, depicts the end of human civilization, set in the 21st century.
– 02/01/1851 Mary Shelley died in London on February 1, 1851, Possibly of a brain tumor.
FRANKENSTEIN
Themes
– Nature
– Knowledge
– Creation
– Women in society
– Good and evil
– Secrets and secrecy
– Texts and textuality
NATURE
– Gives rise to possibility of emotional experience
– Romantic impulse: No restraint to emotion
– Thus “true human soul” can be exposed
-Concept of “unity” – oneness – with nature
– Attitudes toward nature common in the Western world today emerged mostly during the Romantic period.
– The Enlightenment had talked of “natural law” as the source of truth, but such law was manifest in human society and related principally to civic behaviour.
– Unlike the Chinese and Japanese, Europeans had traditionally had little interest in natural landscapes for their own sake. Paintings of rural settings were usually extremely idealized: either well-tended gardens or tidy versions of the Arcadian myth of ancient Greece and Rome.
– Rousseau loved to go for long walks, climb mountains, and generally “commune with nature.” His last work is called Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of a Solitary Walker).
– Europe had become more civilized, safer, and its citizens now felt freer to travel for the simple pleasure of it. Mountain passes and deep woods were no longer merely perilous hazards to be traversed, but awesome views to be enjoyed and pondered.
– The violence of ocean storms came to be appreciated as an aesthetic object in any number of paintings, musical tone poems, and written descriptions, as in the opening of Goethe’s Faust.
– Before Romanticism, people had tended to view the human and the natural as opposite poles, with the natural sometimes exercising an evil power to degrade and dehumanize those who were to drawn to it.
– The Romantics, just as they cultivated sensitivity to emotion generally, especially cultivated sensitivity to nature.
– It came to be felt that to muse by a stream, to view a thundering waterfall or even confront a rolling desert could be morally improving. Much of the nature writing of the 19th century has a religious quality to it absent in any other period.
– It may seem paradoxical that it was just at the moment when the industrial revolution was destroying large tracts of woods and fields and creating an unprecedentedly artificial environment in Europe that this taste arose; but in fact it could probably have arisen in no other time.
– It is precisely people in urban environments aware of the stark contrast between their daily lives and the existence of the inhabitants of the wild who romanticise nature. They are attracted to it precisely because they are no longer unselfconsciously part of it.
– Influence of nature on mood:
– Victor – after creation of monster, after death of William, after execution of Justine, etc
– The Monster – in the woods, living beside the De Lacey family
– Nature eventually offers no solace for Victor – he is haunted by the existence of the monster.
– What is the “meaning” of the Arctic ice which dominates the beginning and end of the novel?
– Is it simply a background, or does it perhaps suggest that nature is eventually of no help?
KNOWLEDGE
– “The characters passionately seek knowledge; this quest means everything to Frankenstein and Walton; they are never disabused. Frankenstein, indeed, praises the voyage of discovery as an honourable and courageous undertaking even as the creature’s hands are about to close around his throat. The constant litigation which takes place in the background represents another kind of quest for knowledge, often erroneous or perverted.” (Brian Aldiss)
– Growth of technology and scientific knowledge
– To what extent is this “progress”?
– How can it be dangerous in the wrong hands?
– Both Walton and Victor want to surpass previous human knowledge.
– Does Walton learn from Victor’s mistakes at the end of the novel?
– Myth of the noble savage:
– Men in a state of nature do not know good and evil, but their independence, along with “the peacefulness of their passions, and their ignorance of vice”, keep them from doing ill (A Discourse…, 71-73).
– Rousseau also makes a sly ideological argument that parallels this: “as every advance made by the human species removes it still farther from its primitive state, the more discoveries we make, the more we deprive ourselves of the means of making the most important of all. Thus it is, in one sense, by our very study of man, that the knowledge of him is put out of our power” (A Discourse…, 43).
– While considered by itself this is an amoral logic, Rousseau finds in civilization not merely a morally edifying outcome, but the very creation of morality among humans, since it is only with the destruction of natural liberty that the need arises to establish civil liberty, that is, the rule of right over that of power.
– Chapter 8 of The Social Contract develops a series of antitheses between natural existence and civil society:
– Rousseau’s summary of the contrast between natural and social existence eloquently attests to the underlying, Eurocentric valorization of European civilization in the critical version of the noble savage myth: “Although, in this state [civil society], he deprives himself of some advantages which he got from nature, he gains in return others so great, his faculties are so stimulated and developed, his ideas so extended, his feelings so ennobled, and his whole soul so uplifted, that, did not the abuses of this new condition often degrade him below that which he left, he would be bound to bless continually the happy moment which took him from it forever, and, instead of a stupid and unimaginative animal, made him an intelligent being and a man” (The Social Contract, 195-196).
-So, all humans can be seen as having a “pure soul”.
-This, however, can be corrupted by society.
-To what extent is the monster a “version” of Rousseau’s model?
CREATION
– Victor, in usurping the act of creation, effectively takes over the role of God.
– But the “birth” of the creature is unnatural – and therefore against the natural laws – because no woman is involved in the process.
– Remember the full title of the novel: “Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus”
– Prometheus – mixture of two myths.
-1) Prometheus who stole the fire from Zeus. This fire would later be seen as the “fire of life”.
– This is the Greek pyrophorous Prometheus (Eschylus) who once stole fire from the Gods to compete with their authority and challenge their supremacy (his crime is what is known as hubris). This Prometheus is the one to be found in Percy B. Shelley’s famous poem Prometheus Unbound which celebrates the freeing qualities of human creativity and fancy and Mary Shelley has her own variations on this myth in Frankenstein.
– The second one is the Latin version: Prometheus plasticator (man moulded out of clay) which will be updated by somebody like G.B. Shaw in the nineteenth century in his well-known Pygmalion.
– See also Satan’s rebellion against his own creator – the novel uses the myth of Satan as seen in John Milton’s seventeenth century epic poem Paradise Lost
– The poem concerns the Judeo-Christian story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton’s purpose, stated in Book I, is “to justify the ways of God to men” (l. 26) and elucidate the conflict between God’s eternal foresight and free will.
– Many critics saw in Frankenstein a re-writing of the Faustian myth. Faust as we usually know it comes from Goethe (XVIIIth century) but there are many earlier versions of the confrontation of Dr Faustus with Mephistopheles, among which Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus in the sixteenth century.
-The story concerns the fate of Faust in his quest for the true essence of life (“was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält”). Frustrated with learning and the limits to his knowledge and power, he attracts the attention of the Devil (represented by Mephistopheles), with whom Faust makes a deal to serve him until the moment that Faust attains the zenith of human happiness, at which point Mephistopheles may take his soul. Goethe’s Faust is pleased with the deal, as he believes the moment will never come.
WOMEN
– Passive women
– Surprisingly, there are no strong female characters in the novel.
-Women suffer, and then die
-Does Mary Shelley do this deliberately?
-If so, why?
-To draw attention to the role of women?
-To make a contrast with the obsessive male characters such as Victor?
-Again we must remember the “birth” of the creature is unnatural – and therefore against the natural laws – because no woman is involved in the process.
GOOD AND EVIL
– Relative nature of good and evil
– Who is evil? Victor or the Monster’
– Both?
– Neither?
– Do we judge people by their appearance?
– Note difference between the old De Lacey’s reaction to the monster (he is blind) and that of Felix, who can see it.
– Is the creation itself evil?
– Should man usurp the role of creator?
– Is Victor the real monster?
– Is humanity itself “monstruous” by nature (i.e. execution of Justine, behaviour of Safie’s father etc.)
SECRETS AND SECRECY
-Victor cherishes secrets
-Knowledge is for him, and for him alone
-It is not something to be shared
-But leads to shame, guilt, loneliness, unhappiness
-Confession: Whole novel, in many ways, is a confession – of his guilt?
-Walton is made the recipient of Victor’s secret confession.
-Compare this to the false confession of Justine
-Confession as the sharing of secrets, therefore a truly human (social) action
TEXTS AND TEXTUALITY
-Frankenstein is full of texts:
-Letters
-Notes
-Journals
-Inscriptions
-Books
-Inner texts:
– Story of the De Lacey family
– Story of Elizabeth’s parents
– Love story of Felix and Safie
William Blake (1757-1827)
– Born Soho, London.
– Father hosier.
– Stayed at school long enough to learn how to read but left
at 10.
– Educated at home by mother.
– Parents Dissenters – Non-Conformists, Moravian Church.
– Importance of Bible to Blake.
– Started engraving copies of Greek drawings.
– At 15 apprentice to engraver for 7 years.
– 1779 – Student at Royal Academy.
– Started to show radical political views.
– Gordon Riots 1780 – caught up in mob.
– Married 1782 – taught his wife to read and write.
– First collection – Poetical Sketches published 1783.
– Opened Print Shop 1784; started working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson in whose house
he met leading radical figures of the time – including Mary Wollstonecroft, Thomas Paine and
Wordsworth.
– Supported French Revolution – even wore Phryzzian cap – but was against Robespierre and the
Terror.
– 1800 – moved to Sussex
– Wrote “Milton”: A Poem”
– 1803 in fight with soldier. Tried for saying “Damn the King”. Acquitted.
– 1804- Moved back to London
– Religion – anti-Church, but not anti-religious.
– Created his own mythology – claimed to see visions.
– 1783 Poetical Sketches
– 1789 Songs of Innocence
– 1790 -93 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
– 1793 Visions of the Daughters of Albion
– 1794 Songs of Experience
London
I wandered through each chartered street,
Near where the chartered Thames does flow,
A mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every man,
In every infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear:
How the chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every blackening church appals,
And the hapless soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down palace-walls.
But most, through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.
And Did Those Feet In Ancient Time
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
– 1750: born in Cockermouth, Cumbria, England.
– Wordsworth’s mother died when he was eight–this
experience shapes much of his later work.
– Wordsworth attended Hawkshead Grammar School,
where his love of poetry was firmly established and he
made his first attempts at verse
– While he was at Hawkshead, Wordsworth’s father died leaving him and his four siblings orphans.
– After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John’s College in Cambridge.
– He returned to Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often spent later holidays on
walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape.
– Before his final term, he set out on a walking tour of Europe, an experience that influenced both
his poetry and his political sensibilities.
– This experience as well as a subsequent period living in France, brought about Wordsworth’s
interest and sympathy for the life, troubles and speech of the “common man”
– These issues proved to be of great importance to Wordsworth’s work.
– Wordsworth’s earliest poetry was published in 1793 in the collections An Evening Walk and
Descriptive Sketches.
– While living in France, Wordsworth conceived a daughter, Caroline, with a French mother, .
– He left France, however, before she was born. Because of lack of money and Britain’s tensions
with France, he returned alone to England the next year In 1802, he returned to France with his
sister on a four-week visit to meet Caroline.
– In 1795 he met Coleridge.
– Wordsworth’s financial situation became better in 1795 when he received a legacy and was able to
settle at Racedown, Dorset, with his sister Dorothy.
– Encouraged by Coleridge and stimulated by the close contact with nature, Wordsworth composed
his first masterwork, Lyrical Ballads, which opened with Coleridge’s “Ancient Mariner.”
– About 1798 he started to write a large and philosophical autobiographical poem, completed in
1805, and published posthumously in 1850 under the title The Prelude.
– Wordsworth spent the winter of 1798-99 with his sister and Coleridge in Germany, where he wrote
several poems, including the enigmatic ‘Lucy’ poems.
– After return he moved Dove Cottage, Grasmere, and in 1802 married Mary Hutchinson.
– They cared for Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy for the last 20 years of her life.
– Wordsworth’s second verse collection, Poems, In Two Volumes, appeared in 1807.
Poetry
An Evening Walk (1793)
Descriptive Sketches (1793)
Borders (1795)
Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey (1798)
Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Upon Westminster Bridge (1801)
Intimations of Immortality (1806)
Miscellaneous Sonnets (1807)
Poems I-II (1807)
The Excursion (1814)
The White Doe of Rylstone (1815)
Peter Bell (1819)
The Waggoner (1819)
The River Duddon (1820)
Ecclesiastical Sketches (1822)
Memorials of a Tour of the Continent (1822)
Yarrow Revisited (1835)
The Prelude Or Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850)
– Wordsworth’s central works were produced between 1797 and 1808.
– In later life Wordsworth abandoned his radical ideas and became a patriotic, conservative public
man
I wandered lonely as a cloud
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
The Solitary Reaper
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
– Will no one tell me what she sings?–Perhaps the plaintive numbers flowFor old, unhappy, far-off
things,And battles long ago:Or is it some more humble lay,Familiar matter of to-day?Some natural
sorrow, loss, or pain,That has been, and may be again?
– Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sangAs if her song could have no ending;I saw her singing at her
work,And o’er the sickle bending;–I listened, motionless and still;And, as I mounted up the hill,The
music in my heart I bore,Long after it was heard no more.
From the Prelude
One evening (surely I was led by her)
I went alone into a Shepherd’s Boat,
A Skiff that to a Willow tree was tied
Within a rocky Cave, its usual home.’
Twas by the shores of Patterdale, a Vale
Wherein I was a Stranger, thither come
A School-boy Traveller, at the Holidays.
Forth rambled from the Village Inn alone
No sooner had I sight of this small Skiff,
Discover’d thus by unexpected chance,
Than I unloos’d her tether and embark’d.
-“The moon was up, the Lake was shining clearAmong the hoary mountains; from the ShoreI
push’d, and struck the oars and struck againIn cadence, and my little Boat mov’d onEven like a Man
who walks with stately stepThough bent on speed. It was an act of stealthAnd troubled pleasure; not
without the voiceOf mountain-echoes did my Boat move on,Leaving behind her still on either
sideSmall circles glittering idly in the moon,Until they melted all into one trackOf sparkling light”
“A rocky Steep uprose
Above the Cavern of the Willow tree
And now, as suited one who proudly row’d
With his best skill, I fix’d a steady view
Upon the top of that same craggy ridge,
The bound of the horizon, for behind
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky”
“She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily
I dipp’d my oars into the silent Lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan;
When from behind that craggy Steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Uprear’d its head. I struck, and struck again
And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measur’d motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me”
“With trembling hands I turn’d,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the Cavern of the Willow tree.
There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark,
And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave
And serious thoughts; and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Work’d with a dim and undetermin’d sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms that do not live
Like living men mov’d slowly through the mind
By day and were the trouble of my dreams”
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
Part One: A Voyage to Lilliput.
Part Two: A Voyage to Brobdingnag.
Part Three: A Voyage to Laputa.
Part Four: A Voyage to the Houyhnhnms.
Two main themes:
1) Satire on government and importance given to small and insgnificant religious differences.
2) Whether human nature is inherent or whether it is created by circumstances; is man “naturally”
corrupt or do circumstances corrupt him.
● Novel as allegory of Oxford and Bolingbroke and their Treaty of Utrecht.
● Swift had been Public Relations Officer for these Tory ministers and was in danger when they
were charged with treason by new Whig Government in 1715.
● Gulliver in Lilliput satire on these – after stopping war, Gulliver is treated badly.
● Emperor of Lilliput George I who favoured Whigs.
● Satire also on contemporary scientific discovery.
● Swift against “useless” scientific research for its own sake.
● Criticism of Royal Academy – makes fun of scientists.
● Humanity viewed from four different standpoints – Gulliver’s views seem to harden as book
progresses.
● 1) As huge being seeing mankind as small.
● 2) As tiny being – mankind as huge.
● 3) From common sense – rest of mankind seems mad and evil.
● 4) From point of view of rational animal – all human race seems irrational.
● Progress of Gulliver – initial optimism and cheerful nature – expects good from everybody.
● Becomes increasingly pessimistic.
● Gulliver becomes obsessed with generic faults of mankind, but cannot accept individual virtues.
● Gulliver th character should not be confused with Swift.