The Neoclassical Period

The Neoclassical Period refers to the time period when England asked the son of Charles I to come back to England and become Charles II, with some conditions.

• The Neoclassical Period had three distinct periods:

  • Restoration

    • 1660–1700

  • Augustan age

    • 1700–1745

  • Age of sensibility

    • 1745–1785

Leading into the Restoration Period

• the church of England = England's established national church, the historic mother church of the Anglican Communion

• King Henry VIII

  • April 22, 1509–January 28, 1547

  • Had six wives:

    • Two beheaded

    • Two divorced

    • Two died

      • One did outlive him

• Edward VI

  • October 12, 1537–July 6, 1553

  • Died early

• Mary I

  • Became queen after Edward VI died

  • Dubbed “Bloody Mary” because she killed members of the church of England for heresy

• Elizabeth I

  • Embraced the church of England

    • More tolerant for catholic people

  • Catholics didn’t like her

    • Wanted her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, to become the queen of both Scotland and England

      • Elizabeth made the decision to order Mary Queen of Scots to be executed after tensions got too high

  • Didn’t want to get married

• James VI/James I

  • Mary Queen of Scot’s son

  • When Elizabeth died, she named James VI of Scotland to be her successor

  • Became James I of England

  • Supported the arts

    • Sponsored a group of artists and named them the Kingsman

      • Shakespeare

• Charles I

  • James I’s son

  • Executed in 1649

    • After his execution, England became a commonwealth

    • Cause of the English civil war

• Oliver Cromwell

  • Pretty good for England

  • Had a son named Richard

  • Called himself the Lord Protector of England

• Richard

  • Bad

  • Made England decide they wanted a king once more

  • Crowned Charles Ⅱ king

Glorious Revolution

The Plague

• Spread by fleas, killed a fuckton of people

• Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year

  • These plague stories read much more like reports than journal entries of someone living through a catastrophe. As opposed to the gut-wrenching descriptions found in Pepys’ journal, Daniel Defoe’s more analytical approach led to a much lesser emotional response, and it almost feels as if he wasn’t even there as a child, just watching from as far away as we, the reader, are.

The London Fires

• September 2, 1666–September 5, 1666

• London was so packed with buildings that fire spread quickly

• The fire started in a bakery on Pudding Lane

  “The saddest site of desolation I ever saw.”

• Modern

• Wealthy citizens were more likely to survive as they could leave

Pepys' The Diary

    As Pepys's writings came from a personal journal, the tone tended to reflect whatever he felt at the time: inspired, fearful, or even proud.  This is dramatically different from the more direct, calculating nature of much modern news, and by removing the pre-existing notion of pushing an agenda, it’s more possible to view the truth as he saw it.

    In Pepys’ journal entry for the second of September 1666, he describes hearing the fire run it’s path with “a horrid noise the flames made, and the cracking of houses at their ruins.” with him later looking out towards the fire as “we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire from this to the other side the bridge, and in a bow up the hill for an arch of above a mile long” these help to paint the sheer scale of the great fire and the destruction in its wake, engulfing everything he could see. This is furthered by his description on the fourth of September of the same year, where he describes the view at night as “the whole heaven on fire.” This all helps to provide a visceral look into what the days during the fire were like, and how people coped with it.

The Restoration

The 1660 restoration rebalanced power, fostered a court centered, urban milieu, and elevated wit, arts, and letters.

• Puritans didn’t like color

  • Women who wore color would be accused of witchcraft

• Charles Ⅱ

  • Impacted the Restoration greatly

  • Loved color, music, theatre, and all other arts

    • Reversed many puritan bans

  • Society under him saw relaxed rules, social mobility, and more relaxed public spaces

• John Locke

  • Philosopher who promoted the idea of a social contract in order to ease tension between those who believed in divine right and those who did not

  • Felt that the government’s authority should come with the consent of the governed

Agricultural Advancements

• By the late 1660s, new farm tools made it possible for farmers to plant and harvest a much larger crop.

• Landlords began fencing in the land and hiring laborers to work the land for them

• Since few farmhands were needed, many people left the countryside

  • These farmhands would become the factory hands who ran the machines in the early Industrial Revolution

Returning to Sciences

• Isaac Newton

  • Credited of saving the currency of Britain

    • Was Warden of Mint

  • Believed in learning through experiencing

  • Was an Arian in private

    • His career likely would've ended if this cameo out

    • Believed in God, just not the holy trinity

  • Believed that the laws he discovered were revealing God’s design

• British inventions after 1750 made the spinning and weaving of cloth much more efficient (steam engine)

• natural science = a natural philosophy that focuses on understanding the physical universe, mechanics, and living things through observation, mathematics, and experimentation, rather than abstract theory

Returning to the Arts

• The Royal Society

  • Founded by Charles Ⅱ

  • Club for experimental philosopher

    • Mostly those who believed in purism

    • “Nullius in verba.” Translated, this means “Take no one’s word for it.”

• Reopening Theatres

  • Theatres reopened after puritan bans

  • Women were allowed on stage

  • The first woman credited with performing was Margaret Hughes

  • Nell Gwynn was also a popular woman who performed

  • Charles II brought French influence to the stage

Restoration Literature

• Writers favored ordered style, lucid structure, and logical progression

• Observation and experience guide themes, echoing scientific method in character

• Texts question dogma, prefer moderation, and shape norms that prefigure Enlightenment ideals

• Phillis Wheatley

  • Phillis Wheatley was taken from the coast of West Africa sometime around 1760 and shipped to America to become a slave

  • She was actually named after the ship she sailed on, The Phillis

  • The Wheatleys saw that she had an interest and talent for learning, and allowed their daughter Mary to tutor Phillis, first in reading and writing, and then advancing to study works by Homer and Ovid.

  • At the age of 13, she would write “On Messrs. Hussey and Coffin” 

  • By now, the Wheatleys realized that she needed to be published, but they could not find an American publisher willing print her work. Instead, they sent her with their son to London, where she met the Countess of Huntingdon. The Countess admired her work so much she became her patron and even advertised the work, which further increased her popularity.

• Erasmus Darwin

  • Most famous work: Loves of the Plants (1789)

  • In his preface to Loves of Plants, he explains that his purpose was to “inlist imagination under the banner of Science.”

  • After his death, his last poem, “The Temple of Nature”, outlines how life formed spontaneously in water that had been warmed by sunlight

• TWICKENHAM

  • in 1719, Pope moved to a villa with his mother, who had been widowed. He added to the grounds until he had acquired around five acres near Twickenham

  • “Paradigm of the Picturesque Garden”. He described it as an “eloquent expression of the pictorial and poetic sensibility” of the 18th Century.

  • The grotto: he lined the walls and ceiling of the grotto with tiny pebbles, shells, hidden mirrors, alabaster lamps to illuminate pools and fountains, and several types of exotic minerals that were collected by friends all over the world and gifted to Pope

• John Dryden

  • Playwright, poet, and famous literary master

  • Wrote a lot of critiques and essays

  • Mastered the heroic couplet

    • Because of him, the heroic couplet became the standard form of poetry for the time

• Alexander Pope

  • Poet

  • Wrote the Rape of a Lock

• Charlotte Lennox

  • She is more popular for her poetry than her novels, even though some compared her to some of the best and was well-received by the likes of Dr. Samuel Johnson. She is most famous, however, for her poem directed to women, called “The Art of Coquetry”

    • It is written in heroic couplets and is meant to instruct women in the ways to assert more control over a man using manipulative tactics.

• Charlotte Lennox

  • She is more popular for her poetry than her novels, even though some compared her to some of the best and was well-received by the likes of Dr. Samuel Johnson. She is most famous, however, for her poem directed to women, called “The Art of Coquetry”

    • It is written in heroic couplets and is meant to instruct women in the ways to assert more control over a man using manipulative tactics.

• Samuel Johnson

  • Hated the idea of government handouts

  • Wrote the first (?) English dictionary in nine years

  • Published in 1755

  • Johnson completed his—containing over 42,000 words—mostly by himself in just nine years.

  • Johnson was the first to include "can’t" or slang words, though he often added notes expressing his disgust for them, hoping to stabilize the language against "low" influences.

  • One of his primary goals was to "embalm" the English language. He feared that without a standardized dictionary, English works from the Restoration would eventually become unreadable to future generations.

    • Oats: "A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people." The Bias: A classic jab at his Scottish neighbors, implying they ate "horse food.“

  • He used quotes to use words in context, "Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." — Samuel Johnson

  • Was very biased as it was being written by one person

The 4 “Wheels” of Restoration Literature (they weren’t worth shit.)

• Samuel Richardson (the epistolary novel)

  • Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded (1740) – 

    • marks the beginning of epistolary fiction.

    • Narrated by the heroine, Pamela Andrews, in letters.

  • Clarrissa

    • Samuel Johnson cites this novel 97 times in his Dictionary

• Henry Fielding (the picaresque)

  • Author of tom thumb

  • Began by writing plays under the pseudonym Scriblerus Secundus.

  • He has been credited with writing Shamela.

• Tobias Smollett (episodic adventure)

  • It’s a literary genre of prose that is characterized by a story following a rogue protagonist (known as a picaro) who tries to navigate a series of adventures in what is a corrupt and chaotic society. The protagonist is almost always of lower class. An American example of this type of novel would be the works of Mark Twain, such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• Laurence Sterne (experimental fragmentation)

  • The book “employs every kind of visual trick (blank pages, strange dashes and asterisks, diagrams, marbled pages, a wavy line… 

  • It is filled with constant digressions, supporting the notion that “while we try to make coherent narratives of our lives, something is always interrupting us”

Themes Found in Restoration Literature

• neoclassicism = a literary movement that imitated the style, structure, and themes of Greek and Roman '“classics”

  • 1660–1798

  • Very mythological

  • Theatrical and comedic

• empiricism = the philosophical belief that all knowledge comes from sensory experience and observation, rather than innate ideas or superstition

• deism = a religious philosophy viewing god as a “clockmaker” who created the universe and its natural laws, but does not intervene in human affairs

• heroic couplet = two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter that express a complete thought

• mock-heroic = a satirical style that applies high, epic language and “heroic” tropes to trivial or insignificant subjects

• antihero = a central character in a story who lacks traditional heroic attributes

• blank verse = unrhymed iambic pentameter

• solipsism = the philosophical idea that only ones’ own mind is sure to exist

  • Comes with a preoccupation with ones’ own feelings or oneself

• decorum = ensuring that style, character behavior, and speech matched the subject matter

• tautology = the unnecessary repetition of words using different words

• dissenters = protestants who separated from the church of England and were often excluded from public officers or universities

• bluestockings = an informal group of intellectual women in the 18th century who met for literary and political discussion, challenging the era’s gender norms

• Satire

  • The use of humor, irony, or exaggeration to expose or criticize human vice or societal folly, often with the intent of provoking reform.

    “Satire is moral outrage transformed into comic art.”

  • Satire requires a target

  • Early satirical examples come from Greek playwriter Aristophanes

  • Three different types of satire:

    • Horatian

      • Overtly comedic and ironic

      • Light in tone

      • Mild in critiques

      • Makes you think after you laugh

      • Examples:

        • Dr. Strangelove

    • Juvenalian

      • Named after Juvenal

      • Similar to Horatian satire in structure

      • Attempts to make the audience angry

      • Examples:

        • Fight Club

        • District 9

        • Parasite

    • Menippean

      • Targets specific moral or political beliefs

      • Presents non-progressive beliefs as ridiculous

      • Can take on many tones

      • Examples:

        • JoJo Rabbit

  • Creating a satirical story:

    1. Identify a target

    2. Choose what type of satire to use

    3. Exaggerate your production