Revision Test 2

Survey of English Literature

JAMES I or VI
-Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603, she was Tudor
-James VI of Scotland becomes the king, James I, the first Stuart king of England
-his ascension to the throne was followed by a outbreak of plague that swept through
London and countryside cleaning around a quarter of population
-first actions as a monarch: issuing Order for Plague – a book outlining rules to be followed in
an attempt to stop the spread of the disease and to aid those suffering from it

JACOBEAN ERA
-period of James' reign --- Jacobean era
-James I saw the monarchy as a divinely ordained institution
-financially heedles and created great debt --- cause of the frequent conflicts with the
Parliament
-signed a peace with Spain in 1604 which enabled the English ships safe sailing on the
Atlantic  prerequisite for colonization of the New World
-first permanent English settlements  Jamestown, Bermuda, Plymouth, and Caribbean
-1611  East India Company established England's first foothold in India

THE GUNPOWDER PLOT 1605

-religious tensions rose during the reign of James I
-failed plot of Catholic extremists to blow up the Parliament and the King because of James
I's hesitation to lift Elizabeth's sanctions against them  it caused prolonged anti-Catholic
feeling
-5th November celebrated as Guy Fawkes Day  synonymous with rebellion

KING JAMES BIBLE

-In 1604 James VI and I commissioned a new English translation of the Bible for the Church
of England, which was completed and published in 1611
-it would influence writers for centuries
THE PURITAN DISSENT
-Feeling that the Church of England had not sufficiently completed the necessary work of the
Protestant Reformation, the members of a radical Puritan faction known as the English
Separatist Church had chosen to break with the church altogether
-The group, later known as the Pilgrim Fathers, rejecting the episcopal rule of the Anglican
church, left for Amsterdam in 1608, and, following their voyage on the Mayflower, they
landed at Plymouth, Massachussets in 1620

CHARLES I
-In 1625, James I was succeeded by his son Charles I, who deepened the conflicts with the
Parliament as he tried to rule without summoning the Parliament at all
-He was more pro-Catholic and anti-Puritan-minded than his father because his wife, the
French princess Henrietta Maria, was an ardent Catholic

LEARNING and SCIENCE

-All over Europe, the period was marked with scientific advancements in astronomy,
medicine, and other fields, which were sometimes rejected by the Catholic Church as they
invited new interpretations of the world and the role of humans in it
-1609 Galileo’s telescope
-1633 Galileo forced by the Inquisition to recant the Copernican theory

A BREAK WITH THE PAST

-there are differences between Elizabethan and Jacobean era
-In An Anatomy of the World, a booklength poem, Donne conveys a sense of the world that
is changed due to bewildering innovations
-Donne at the same time wonders at the new world, and feels nostalgia for the stable past
-Hobbes’s Leviathan and Milton’s Areopagitica are foundational texts that helped shape
some of the contemporary ideas about human nature and society

Encyclopedic Interests and Short Literary Forms

-The writers of the period reject ornamental language, mythologization of royal figures and
the world, and long literary forms typical for the previous period, and turn to shorter forms,
which deal with a whole array of subjects (political, social, scientific)
-literary forms:
-essay (pamphlet, tract)
-meditation
-sermon
-lyric, love elegy
-country-house poem
-sonnet (not only as erotic or love poems, but religious ones as well)
-epigram
-verse epistle
-emblem
-satire
-burlesque
-biography and diary

METAPHYSICAL POETS
-John Donne
-George Herbert
-Andrew Marvell

METAPHYSICAL POETRY
-highly intellectualized poetry marked by the use of elaborate figurative language,
specifically metaphors and similes
-marked by complexity and subtlety of thought, and deals with philosophical topics

CAVALIER POETS
-Robert Herrick
-Richard Lovelace
-Sir John Suckling
CAVALIER POETRY
-The poets follow the ideal of the Renaissance Gentleman and mirror the attitudes of
courtiers, avoiding the subject of religion
-The poems are compressed and limited, but with a high aesthetic finish, which is
occasionally more important than intellectual content
-poetry is straight forward, yet refined
-Many of the poems center around sensual, romantic love and the idea of carpe diem (seize
the day)
-To the Cavalier poet, enjoying life was far more important than following moral codes
-lived for the (pleasures of the) moment

THE COMMONWEALTH and HOBBES

The English Civil War(s) 1642-51

-Contrary to the turmoil caused by the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) on the European
continent, the British Isles enjoyed relative peace and economic prosperity during the early
1630s
-by the later 1630s, Charles I’s regime had become unpopular because of his so-called
Personal Rule (1629–40), known by his enemies as the “Eleven Year Tyranny” because he
had dissolved the Parliament in 1629
-The tension between his supporters and his opponents resulted in armed conflicts, which
preceded the Civil Wars
-The first English Civil War begun in England in August 1642, when Charles I raised an army
against the wishes of Parliament  to deal with the rebellion in Ireland
-The Parliament rallied the Roundheads: the middle class, the small landowners, and the
Puritans. The Parliamentary forces were led by an ardent Puritan, Oliver Cromwell
-Charles I had the support of the Cavaliers: the nobility, the wealthy landowners, the high
Anglican clergy, and the Catholics

WARS
-As the war begins, the Parliament closes all theatres
-The first English Civil War (1642-46)
 The second English Civil War (1648)
 1648-49 – the Rump Parliament (Parliament purged of royalists),
-1649 the trial and execution of Charles I
 The third English Civil War (1650-51)
-The wars finally ended in 1651 with the flight of Charles II to France, which temporarily
ended the British monarchy

THE COMMONWEALTH  FIRST ENGLISH REPUBLIC 1649-1660

-The period of (Puritan) Commonwealth and Protectorate is also known as Interregnum (the
period between two monarchies)
-The Commonwealth was the political structure during which England and Wales, later along
with Ireland and Scotland, were governed as a republic after the end of the Second English
Civil War and the trial and execution of Charles I
-John Milton was appointed the Latin Secretary (basically, Minister of Foreign Affairs) in
1649, a position which he occupied until 1660 and the restoration of the Stuarts

OLIVER CROMWELL
-In 1653 Oliver Cromwell was appointed Lord Protector of England, Scotland, and Ireland,
which he remained until his death in 1658. Upon his death, his son Richard was made
Protector
-As lord protector, Cromwell raised his country’s status to that of a leading European power,
after the decline it had gone through since the death of Queen Elizabeth I.
-He was a convinced Calvinist
-At Cromwell's state funeral three great poets, Milton, Marvell and Dryden, walked together
behind the Lord Protector's coffin

THE RESTORATION
-The Protectorate ended in 1660 with the restoration of Charles II to the throne
 the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland
-the term Restoration also refers to the period of reign of Charles II (1660–1685) as well as
that of his younger brother James II (1685–1688)

THE PURITAN REVOLT

-the political conflict between the Parliament and Charles I’s absolutistic tendencies bears
the subtext of Cromwell’s Puritanism and Charles’s relative benevolence to Catholicism
-The Parliament abolishes all public plays and sports as being too lascivious and contrary to
Puritan spirit

THE GLORIOUS REVOLUTION

-James II and VII, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland was deposed and replaced by his
daughter Mary II and her Dutch husband, William III of Orange
-James II and VII was the last Catholic monarch of England, Scotland, and Ireland

CHANGE in VALUES
-two major issues:
-In the sphere of religion, the main question was: How far should the reformation of the
Protestant church be carried?
-The solution found in 1688, after the so-called Glorious Revolution, stated that it should be
carried as far as each individual self-defined religious group wants
-In the sphere of constitutional politics, the main question was: How much authority should
the monarch have independent of Parliament?  In 1688 the answer was established as:
”Almost none.”

INTELLECTUAL and SPIRITUAL CHANGE

-One general realization emerged from the revolution and civil wars: no single universal
truth was to be found whether by battle, by prayer or by study, nor was it needed
-This realization made it possible for the idea of humans as fallen creatures who need strict
discipline and control to redeem their faults to start fading into obsolescence
-a nation had passed from a strict authoritarian regime legitimized by the idea of eternal
divine constitutions to a lively, materialistic community of competing pressure groups within
a society that accepts (is forced to accept) a framework of political, religious, and social
differences

INFLUENCES ON LITERATURE AFTER 1660

-During Elizabeth’s reign and in the years after, the power came from court and, therefore,
literature was courtly and decorative
-after 1660 the court was no longer an unchallenged center of intellectual and literary
influence
-new centers: London City (a network of banks and merchants etc.) and The Parliament
-Because the relative strength of both the court and the church (due to the plurality of sects)
declined, the economy seems to have become a major factor
-Corporations, joint-stock companies, cartels and syndicates, credit unions and banks begin
to influence and develop England into a modern capitalist nation
-collapse of censorship, a typical measure of control in Elizabethan period, and the rise of
literacy, increases the number of writers, of published texts, and thus the number of voices
available in literature

LITERATURE
-With the exception of John Milton and Andrew Marvell, not much of the early-seventeenth
high literature was the work of Puritans
-Milton’s deep sense of moral imperative, his heroic ambitions for poetry and his classical
education, as well as his proud Englishness resulted in one of the last – and the most
impressive – monuments to the Renaissance tradition of Christian humanism: Paradise Lost
-The great Puritan art forms of the age were sermon and the religious tract
-Other literary genres seemed to be too earthly or sensual to the Puritans

THEMES
-political struggles (political organization, religion, free expression, distribution of wealth,
relationship between the sexes)
-faith, devotion and religious doubt
-the material and bodily world (science, health, sexuality)

THOMAS HOBBES
-one of the founders of modern political philosophy
-He believes that by nature, man is an individual, not a social being and that in one’s natural
state, an individual is selfish and aggressive
-homo homini lupus (a man is a wolf to another man) to refer to the man’s naturally hostile
state
-he suggests that without a civilized state, there would be a constant war of all against all -
bellum omnium in/contra omnes
SOCIAL CONTRACT
-The state is an artificial construct based on a contract (covenant) between individuals,
whose main purpose is to protect people from war and uphold peace as the ultimate good
-The state can be governed by an individual (monarchy), a group of people (aristocracy) or a
group of representatives of all citizens (democracy). It is an expression of man’s will, not a
divine entity
-Leviathan = (biblical) a sea monster; a thing that is very large or powerful  pictures the
idea of the ”monster” of good government, providing a visual image of his new theory of
”body politic.”
-competition, diffidence, and desire for glory will make people fight one another for gain,
safety or reputation
-War: a state both of actual battle and the period in which there is a danger of battle. If there
is no ruling power to keep men ”in awe” and safe, there will be war

JUSTICE, a SOCIAL VIRTUE

-In war, the notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice do not exist. If there is no
government, there is no law, and if there is no law, there is no injustice. Force and fraud are
major ”virtues” in war

DISTINCTION BETWEEN HUMAN RIGHTS and LAWS

-Right (of nature) = the liberty of each man to use his own power for the preservation of his
own life (the right to do or not to do something)
-Liberty = the absence of external impediments to use one’s own power
-Law = determines and binds a person to do or not to do something

WAR
-War, which is necessarily consequent (as hath been shown in ch. 13) to the natural Passions
of men, when there is no visible Power to keep them in awe

WHY DO PEOPLE NEED LAWS?

-People are in competition for honour and dignity as well as private property out of which
arise envy and greed, and finally war
-Some people think they are better than others and can govern better than others, which
also causes conflict
-Idle men (men at ease) like to criticize those in power, causing trouble
-Animals have a natural agreement, whereas people act by their covenant, so they need a
constant and lasting common power (government/laws) to guide them toward common
benefit

THE RESTORATION and THE 18TH CENTURY

Charles II
-As the eldest son of Charles I, he was proclaimed king immediately after his father’s
execution in 1649
-Cromwell defeated Charles II at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, and Charles fled to Europe,
where he stayed until his restoration in 1660
-Referred to as the Merry Monarch, Charles was well-liked and the vivacity and hedonism of
his court were met with general relief: they were seen as the return to normalcy after the
rule by Cromwell and the Puritans
-the theatres reopened, people went to coffee houses, concert halls, pleasure gardens,
libraries, picture exhibitions and shops

SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS
-In 1662, Charles II charters the Royal Society of London for the Improving of Natural
Knowledge.
-Microscope and telescope invented
-Isaac Newton: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), described universal
gravitation and the three laws of motion
-Colonial travels contribute to the advancement of knowledge as Europeans learn of
unfamiliar societies (cultures), places, flora and fauna
-empiricism as the dominant intellectual attitude of the age  Britain’s great legacy to world
philosophy (Locke, Berkeley, Hume  established on the observation

PERIOD of RELATIVE STABILITY and SATISFACTION

-People shop for diverse goods from around the world, and begin to invest in joint-stock
companies, which causes them to either profit immensely or go broke
-An ethos of politeness prevails as the social standard, distinguishing the privileged from the
rude and vulgar
THE GREAT FIRE of LONDON
-All the civic buildings had been destroyed and hundreds of thousands of people had been
left homeless (about 13 000 houses were destroyed)
-Sir Christopher Wren was given the task of re -building London  St. Paul's Cathedral
THE MONUMENT
-A column in the City of London, just north of London Bridge, commemorates the Great Fire
of London and is called The Monument
-It was most likely designed by the physicist and architect Robert Hooke
-Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn, both of them diarists, gave firsthand accounts of the event

SPHERE of RELIGION
-In 1673, the Test Act required all civil and military officers to take the sacrament in an
Anglican church and deny belief in transubstantiation (the idea that during Eucharist bread
and wine convert into the body and blood of Christ at consecration)
-This excluded Protestant Dissenters and Roman Catholics from public life
-For example, Alexander Pope, who was a Catholic, could not attend university, own land or
vote
-The Catholics were largely seen as potential traitors and conspirators, so many (falsely)
believed that they have set the Great Fire of London
-The Glorious (Bloodless) Revolution of 1688 brought James II’s daughter Mary and William
of Orange (a Protestant) to the throne, settling many of the religious tensions

BILL OF RIGHTS 1689

-Limits the powers of the Crown (ends absolutist monarchy)
 Reaffirms supremacy of the Parliament
 Guarantees certain positive individual rights for citizens of constitutional monarchy
-The Toleration Act of the same year guarantees a limited freedom of worship to Dissenters
(but not to Catholics or Jews) if they swear allegiance to the Crown
-The principles established with the 1689 Bill of Rights endured until the Reform Bill od 1832
THE GREAT BRITAIN 1707
-During the reign of Queen Anne (1702-14), in 1707, the Act of Union joined Scotland to
England and Wales creating Great Britain as a single, united nation
-In 1714, after Anne’s death, the throne goes over to the House of Hanover: George I (1714-
27) is the first Hanoverian king, the king of Great Britain and Ireland
-He was perceived as ”too German” – too reserved at social events, moderate and financially
prudent
-Tories
 the Church Party (guarding the preeminence of Anglican church)
 Traditionalists
 Affirming landownership as the basis of wealth power and privilege
-Whigs
 toleration of Dissenters
 Supporting ”moneyed interests” (as Swift called it)

SIR ROBERT WALPOLE

-the first prime minister of Great Britain, active during the reign of George I, but especially
that of George II (ca. 1721-1742)
-Walpole's policies aimed at a middle path: he spoke for peace, lower taxes, and growing
exports, allowing somewhat more tolerance for Protestant Dissenters
-he achieved his aims by financially ”rewarding” the members of the House of Commons (de
facto by corruption), which was seen as deplorable by many writers of the tim
-Pope uses Walpole in his Dunciad (1728-43) as an emblem of the mercenary
commercialization of society

EXPANSION
-Walpole lost support in 1742 as he refused to go to war against the French and Spanish – he
found it too costly; his opponents saw it as an opportunity for the growth of British wealth
-This marks the turn of British policies toward the expansion of their power, commerce and
influence overseas
-The defeat of the French in the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), especially in North America,
consolidating British rule over Canada and India
-The long reign of George III (1760-1820) further pushes Britain toward the emergence as a
great colonial power

LITERARY PERIODS
1. Restoration Literature (1660-1700)
2. Eighteenth-Century Literature (1700-45)
3. New Literary Themes and Modes (1745-85)

RESTORATION LITERATURE
-Literature attempts to bring a new refinement according to the sound critical principles of
what is fitting and right
-Reacting against the difficulty and extravagance of late Renaissance literature, writers and
critics called for a new restraint, clarity, regularity and good sense
-They find their role models in classical literature
-Neoclassicism coincides with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment
-In England, it is known as the period of Augustan literature, after the writers who flourished
during the reign of Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor: Virgil, Horace and Ovid
-Restoration drama is marked by successful comedies (comedies of manners) that can still
engage audiences as they humorously expose the power struggles among the upper classes,
who use wit and manners as weapons

THE AGE of SATIRE

18th Century Literature (1700-1745)
-Eighteenth-century literature attempts to reach a wider circle of readers, with special
satirical attention to what is unfitting and wrong
-new writers: Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, Matthew Prior, Sir Richard Steele and
Alexander Pope, all of whom were determined to preserve good sense and civilized values,
turning against fanaticism and innovation
-their works represent a satirical view of the contemporary society relying on incongruities
that reveal what they believe to be the society’s problems:
-In The Rape of the Lock, Pope exposes (and mocks) the frivolity of fashionable London by
writing a verse poem in which the idle rich are represented as epic heroes
-On the one hand, they show how the world has fallen due to the focus on trivialities, but, on
the other hand, they show that, if seen through poetic eyes, the world is also fascinating and
magical
-The Augustans’ effort to popularize and enforce high literary and social values was set
against the reality in which writing, publishing and reading were becoming a massive
phenomenon: a whole array of genres was written, published and read in line with a
multiplicity of tastes of a diverse audience
-blending fact and fiction, cementing the mixture with a good dose of exaggeration,
misrepresentation, and outright lies  birth of the novel
-The period ends with the deaths of Pope in 1744 and Swift in 1745

NEW LITERARY THEMES and MODES

-At this point, literature began to confront the old principles with revolutionary ideas that
would come to the fore in the Romantic movement of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries
-Whereas until the 1740s poetry set the standard, the latter part of the eighteenth century
saw the rise of prose
-intellectual prose (essays) flourished in the works of Samuel Johnson

THE AGE of JOHNSON

-Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) helped codify that type of language, not only with his writings
but with his A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which established him as a national
man of letters
-The Dictionary illustrates its definitions with more than 114,000 quotations from the best
English writers

THE AGE of REASON

-many other writers of the period focus on reason, expressing respect for the judgement of
ordinary people
-Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794) argues for deism – a philosophical position which
rejects the idea that a divine entity must communicate some form of religious truth to
people, but that reason and observation of the natural world are sufficient for people to
recognize the existence of a Supreme Being or creator of the universe
-The focus on reason (intellect) began to burden poets, who felt driven out by the spirit of
prose and uninspiring truth
WOMEN's PROSE
-They begin questioning the traditional principles both in literature and in life, and they do
that by satirizing them
-Much of the satire produced by women or about women results from gender stereotypes
and prejudices, and the attempts to overcome them

-Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs provide insight into both her life and the life of her mentor,
Jonathan Swift
-She was an Irish poetess and a ghostwriter for other poets
-She was known as the „queen of wits” and led an unconventional life which included a
divorce and many different ”suitors.”

-Charlotte Charke, Colley Cibber’s youngest daughter, was an actress, playwright, novelist,
and autobiographer
-She was notorious for being a transvestite

-Frances (Fanny) Burney was famous for her novels about women: Evelina (1778), Cecilia
(1782) and Camilla (1796)

MARY ASTELL
-was a writer and philosopher, one of the earliest feminist thinkers in England
-She advocated for the importance of the education of women
-preceded by Bathsua Reginald Makin with her treatise An Essay To Revive the Ancient
Education of Gentlewomen (1673)
-followed by Mary Wollstonecraft and her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
-In The Tatler, a literary journal, Jonathan Swift satirized Astell’s ideas about women as she
expressed them in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of Their True and
Greatest Interest (1694)

LADY MONTAGU
-She was a writer and a very important cultural figure of her time
-having witnessed the benefits of inoculation against smallpox during her stay in Turkey in
1717, Montagu promoted the introduction of the smallpox inoculation to Britain and
Western Europe, which was the first time in Western medicine that antibodies were created
by inoculation to secure immunity from disease

MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE
-Marriage A-la-Mode is a series of six paintings by Hogarth, made between 1743-45, and
kept now in The National Gallery in London
-visual satire (satirical views were expressed in all forms of art) that illustrates catastrophic
consequences of an arranged marriage (marriage for money or social status)