English Literature

Modest Proposal

He was criticise the English government as they were ignoring Irish people and letting this chaotic problem consume them from inside. His criticism is really scientific including scientific research, using numbers, doing the math. He is presenting an argument which proposes babies as food as it would have a beneficial effect on economy, gastronomy and etc. He presents all his arguments in a very reasonable way.

With his disgusting reasonable proposal, he is also criticising his era which is era of reason as when someone solely focuses on reason, that person can think or even do filthy things.

He cared people as individuals not as groups. He may liked Jon but he may hate politicians, lawyers, etc.

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Slowly the age of reason left its place to story-telling and stories. Since the first literature of England, the stories were told in verses, proses (French influence) but shortly evolved into novels.

Novels emerged in the 18th century for a variety of reasons. One of the reasons was to give people ability to expresses themselves in the age of reason. Novels are emotional outlet of for the author. In this century, middle-class was rising and their affluence was getting bigger and bigger and due to this they were able to get educated and learn to read, write. First works of novelty were conducted by women but due to society’s norms, they had to hide their names and use the men’s names to conceal themselves and share their work.

Jane Air – Sherlock Ronte, Emily Ronte, Ann Ronte: They wrote novels, each of them and they were really productive but they each used men’s name. When they went to the publishing firm, nobody believed that their literary works were conducted from a woman.

Journalism were becoming widespread, there was prose writing and it was getting more and more popular as well as biographies and there was the effect of puritanism.
Anything related to an individual could be made into a story.

The first English novel was Robinson Cruise written by Daniel Defo, in the novel people read what an indivuaul able to do when he is stuck in a situation, his survival instincts, what he was able to do in order to continue his life, stranded in an island. In the novel he was alone for some time but then he met a person and named him Friday as he met him on Friday. They were friends but they were not equal. People liked this book because even in the most hard situation an individual is able to rise, survive and etc. Later on there were a lot of references to Robinson Cruise such as “What would you do if you were stranded in an island?”

Robinson had to fight his way to make things for his life, to survive and all these required so much energy and strength. He motivated himself to overcome any hardships that may occur. In this work self-reliance was emphasised. (Puritanism).

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Samuel Richardson – Pamela

He was an educated man and he was very good in writing letters. He made money out of writing letters, he wrote letters for people in business, for lovers and etc. One day a publishing house made him an offer, they wanted him to write letters and teach how to write letters for certain purposes. As he was doing his job, he realised that out of letters you could make a good story by their correspondence in different settings. He started working on his title called Pamela.

The main character is Pamela, she’s working at a very affluent house but she is very virtuous person despite the son’s advances to her. The son is seducted by her virtuous personality and falls in love with her and they live happily after. The main idea of this novel is importance of virtues. The novel is written in epistolary form (by combining letters).

This novel was criticised by H. Fielding, as the novel was focusing too much on virtues and modesty, so he wrote a novel Calle Josef Andrews, and this character was brother of Pamela. He later on wrote a novel calle Tom Jones which is a comic epic in prose work. This character is a very funny character and he puts himself in very difficult situations, he is a womaniser. Opposing Samuel Richardson, H. Fielding didn’t care about morals.

In novels, picaresque, this style emerged in Spain and it mens series of episodes in prose fiction where the hero is forced to seek his fortune outside of stable society. Imagine there is a family and in this family the father tells his son to go away and find his way, his place. Imagine we have a womaniser character and he has an affair with the married woman and the husband finds out and exiles him from the society.

Tom Jones is built with the picaresque style.

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Gulliver’s Travels – J. Swift

• The book basically asks a question: what sort of thing is man?

Identifying with Gulliver, voyaging through imaginary worlds we try tı find ourselves. Are proud insects, or lords of creation? Brutes, or reasonable beings?

Swift defined man not as a arational animal but as an animal capable of reason. He had a keen sense of our capacity for self delusion folly and vice.
He offers us comic and horrific perspectives, which confront us with unpleasant facets of human life, silently recommending proportion, humility and fellow-feeling.
The way others perceive you will you change what you are, you can be a giant in a place but a midget in another.

In this ship we have this man called Gulliver and he starts a voyage on that ship and he travels to imaginary places.

• Four imaginary voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon all of which end disastrously among “several remote nations oft he world.”
• In the first book, Gulliver is shipwrecked in the empire of Lilliput, where he finds himself a giant among diminutive people.
• In the second, Gulliver is abandoned by his shipmates in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, which appears to be a utopia governed by a human prince.
• In the third voyage, to flying island of Laputa, Gulliver is together with scientists who are so occupied with their studies that they cannot see what is right in front of them.
• The final voyage sets Gulliver between a race of horses, Houyhnhnms, who live…

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Lawrance Sterne – The life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

Shandy is a man and this book is about his life story in 9 big divisions of books, but his life story begins in the third book, before that he talks about his parents, society, etc. His life is full of funny incidents and he particularly talks about Uncle Toby

Lawrance had this interesting style, he had an interactive approach as he left some blanks in his books for you to fill them. Such as when he is descrpiting a beatiıful woman he leaves the desrictpion blank and expects you to write it. The book is written in a witty way accompanied with strange stylistic approaches.

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Samuel Johnson – Dictionary of the English Language

The first dictionary of English and it represents the ideology of its era. In this dictionary Samuel Johnson passed his judgment into his work and defined words with his perspective. It is also important that how the vocabulary has changed over time.

Every age has its ideal concept of ideal man and in the age of reason, the ideal man is the person who uses his intelligence but one can not deny the fact that humans have emotions, too and after the age of era, there it comes

The Romantic Era.

English Literature

Defoe was a journalist, before he was novelist and he practice journalism and his very famous journal was about a very horrible set of events, a period which actually ruined a lot of things for the English people. This plague caused a lot of deaths and this man wrote a journal which was titled The journal of the plague year, in that journal, normally a journalist would report what is happening but this journal was in almost in the form of a diary, it was called a journal because there was no certain dates and this man did more than a journalist do when he would report a horrible disease. Normally a journalist report a situation like this starting from how it started, how many people have it killed so far, how it is contagious but Defoe took a different approach to this and he wrote about how horrible the event was but he looked psychological aspect, he looked at the social aspect, he talked about how horrified people become, how paranoid that become after the disease, how upset they were, how they didn’t trust anyone and what they felt about the origin of this disease. (17th cent)

After the restoration there was still puritan ideas that were alive in that century and such ideas fed the flame of divine punishment idea of the plague.

Pypes wrote daily entries – Defoe didn’t.
Pypes wrote about everything from his daily life to what he ate – Defoe didn’t focus on these but the disease itself and its effects.

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The introduction starts with personal word choices which is contrary to general newspaper language.

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Alexander Pope

A very important figure and representative writer in the 18th century. He was a catholic, he wasn’t actually allowed to do a lot of things when he was young, catholics were not nicely received and this man born into a catholic family although he had some good education he was not allowed show himself in the field he was working on, when he started writing in his youth at the age of 25 he established himself as a writer all these facts. He was mostly known for his work Rape of the Lock and Essay of Man

Essay on man

Despite its title, it is more of a poem than it is an Essay, which makes it an Epistle which means a letter which gives news. He believed in order of things, in the universe there was a grand order and everything that is alive and exists has a place in this order and he wanted to talk about this order and he mostly wanted to talk about the place of man in this order. Although this work is not in letter form as it is in verse form, it was still called an essay.

He is known for his heroic coplet, he was very skilful in expressing an idea expressing it in two lines and emphasising it.

He says “do not judge God” and emphasizes on finding ourselves by knowing ourselves. He says do not study God, do not presume what you can’t understand, know your place and study mankind, its limitations, its capabilities and etc.

This essay contains definition of the Man.

He is defining, men is in the middle of order of things, the god is at the top and animals are at the bottom. Man is darkly wise, a man can be wise and plan very harmful things unlike animals without free will and whatever God does, he cannot be labeled as bad. Man hangs between in doubt to himself and the beasts. Man is between to act or to rest. Man doesn’t know which choose, whether to choose mind or the beast (desires). Man is born to die and he has a talent of reasoning but he can make errors. He states that man was created half to rise and half to fall. Man is the glory but he is also a riddle, why does a human being does the things he does. Man is between his heart and his mind. He is talking about rising but as he man rises his guiding companion should be science. He also states that do not follow the people who imitate the god. Discover yourself, engage with yourself, not with the things that you can not understand. You would be amazed to discover what you are made of.

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18th Century

• While 17th century was the age of political dnd religious conflict, 18th centıry was tea ge of stability.
• The age was characterised by a rational, scientific and secular attitude to life. Social laws (like universal laws) depended on reason and order. The age rejected intuition and mysticism.
• The dominant intellectual attitude was empiricism (knowledge comes from experience) – direct observation of experience (John Locke’s argument of “tabula rasa”)
• The key philosophy of The age is Deism, which united all men under one God and brotherhood. The deists argued that god revealed himself in nature rather than in books.
• God is the supreme Architect, The Great Reason, The Great mathematician who built a relational universe for the benefit of man.
• God is benevolent and his laws are kind and for the goodness of man.

Reason
Mind > Ruling powers of the 18th Century
Logic

Passion
Emotions > These are limited as they were seen harmful due to the harmful experience of the 17ht century

• Concept of man: Man is a limited creature but he is perfectible because he has faculty of reason. He is no longer corrupt beyond repair because of the Fall (from Paradise).

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Satire
Satire
Satire

The Rape of the Lock

The rape here is used in a metaphorical way and it is mocking the Epic genre. This is an example of mocking Epic. This work makes fun of all of the Epic features. The situation here is based on real events

    * Was written as an attempt to end a quarrel between two families. The quarrel had started when Lord Peter cut off a lock of hair, which he wished to “possess”, from the had of Miss Arabelle Fermor, the lady to whom he was engaged.
    * Pope wrote the poem in mock-epic style, in imitation of Homer, to “make a jest” of the indecent and to laugh with the two families.

He wanted to end this quarrel, so he wrote this mocking-epic story. He made these characters supernatural such as Belinda’s power of nymphs flying around her. He exaggerated everything such as Belinda’s beauty.

It is a poetry and this work is divided into Cantos which is a derived style from Italy. Throughout the work, Pope wants us to see idleness of the British people at that time, their foolishness and wasting the time away with various meaningless acts. People were snorting snuff which is a drug that is smelled and gives a good feeling.

Belinda is a thot who wants fame.

In epics some kind of narrator appears and warns you that everything is going to change.

With this work we see the element of “laughter”, he is making fun of English idleness. Here Pope is trying to make a point, he is saying that English people’s lives are very idle and meaningless and this led to a new genre which is called Satire.

Satire

Jonathan Swift – Modest Proposal

Swift detected a very important problem in Irish society.Ireland at the time was neglected, suppressed and English did not care about Irish. A population got out of control and there was not enough food to eat, there were horrible rulers and Ireland wasn’t doing good. Swift, he was an Irish and a weird man, he had interesting ideas, he saw that Irish had to help themselves and this problem that affected everything in Ireland, swift felt that something had to be done and he wrote a modest proposal. He chose to write in a satire genre because in this proposal he suggested eating babies, he stated there were way too many of them. The way he is doing it very scientific and logical, he presents it as a reasonable offer.