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    Neoclassicism

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    Maricris Blgts
    This document provides an overview of Neoclassicism as a historical period and literary movement in England from 1660 to around 1800. It can be divided into three ages: Restoration, Augustan, and Age of Johnson. Key aspects of Neoclassicism included masking the immediate past through imitation of classical Roman styles, conscious self-awareness of one's role in society, and an emphasis on order, reason, restraint, and correctness over imagination and emotion in literature. Common literary genres included essays, letters, satires, and verse using rhymed couplets.

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    Neoclassicism

    Uploaded by

    Maricris Blgts
    32 views27 pages
    This document provides an overview of Neoclassicism as a historical period and literary movement in England from 1660 to around 1800. It can be divided into three ages: Restoration, Augustan, and Age of Johnson. Key aspects of Neoclassicism included masking the immediate past through imitation of classical Roman styles, conscious self-awareness of one's role in society, and an emphasis on order, reason, restraint, and correctness over imagination and emotion in literature. Common literary genres included essays, letters, satires, and verse using rhymed couplets.

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    This document provides an overview of Neoclassicism as a historical period and literary movement in England from 1660 to around 1800. It can be divided into three ages: Restoration, Augustan, and Age of Johnson. Key aspects of Neoclassicism included masking the immediate past through imitation of classical Roman styles, conscious self-awareness of one's role in society, and an emphasis on order, reason, restraint, and correctness over imagination and emotion in literature. Common literary genres included essays, letters, satires, and verse using rhymed couplets.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    32 views27 pages

    Neoclassicism

    Uploaded by

    Maricris Blgts
    This document provides an overview of Neoclassicism as a historical period and literary movement in England from 1660 to around 1800. It can be divided into three ages: Restoration, Augustan, and Age of Johnson. Key aspects of Neoclassicism included masking the immediate past through imitation of classical Roman styles, conscious self-awareness of one's role in society, and an emphasis on order, reason, restraint, and correctness over imagination and emotion in literature. Common literary genres included essays, letters, satires, and verse using rhymed couplets.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    of 27

    NEOCLASSICISM: AN understand the

    politics, sociology, and

    INTRODUCTION economics of the period if you


    want to understand its literature.
    façade, complacency, wit, reason, decorum,
    self-examination, self-publicizing non-
    conformist politeness, taste, self-control

    --------------------

    diary, prose essay, periodical, ode, satire, novel


    • predicated upon and derived from both classical and
    contemporary French models,
    • critical statements of Neoclassical principles) embodied a group
    of attitudes toward art and human existence — ideals of order,
    logic, restraint, accuracy, "correctness," "restraint," decorum, and
    so on, which would enable the practitioners of various arts to
    imitate or reproduce the structures and themes of Greek or Roman
    originals.
    Chronologically the period covers from 1660 to around 1800 (usual date is
    1798, publication date of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads). It is a period where
    counterfeiting and façades are very important; in some ways the country was trying to act
    like the Interregnum and English civil wars had not happened, and there is both a willful
    suppression of the immediate past and a glorification of the more distant, classical Roman
    past--which is why it is called the Neoclassical period. It is also a period of conscious
    self-awareness—people looked at themselves and kept asking "Am I playing my role
    correctly?" After the Great Fire of London, too, they had the chance to totally reinvent
    their capital and did so in a way that let them mask their past. You need to understand the
    politics, sociology, and economics of the period if you want to understand its literature.
    divided into three relatively
    coherent parts: the Restoration Age (1660-1700), in which Milton, Bunyan, and Dryden
    were the dominant influences; the Augustan Age (1700-1750), in which Pope was the
    central poetic figure, while Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were presiding
    over the sophistication of the novel; and the Age of Johnson(1750-1798), which, while it
    was dominated and characterized by the mind and personality of the inimitable Dr.
    Samuel Johnson, whose sympathies were with the fading Augustan past, saw the
    beginnings of a new understanding and appreciation of the work of Shakespeare, the
    development, by Sterne and others, of the novel of sensibility, and the emergence of the
    Gothic school — attitudes which, in the context of the development of a cult of Nature,
    the influence of German romantic thought, religious tendencies like the rise of
    Methodism, and political events like the American and French revolutions — established
    the intellectual and emotional foundations of English Romanticism.
    represented a reaction against the optimistic,
    exuberant, and enthusiastic Renaissance view of man as a being fundamentally good and
    possessed of an infinite potential for spiritual and intellectual growth. Neoclassical
    theorists, by contrast, saw man as an imperfect being, inherently sinful, whose potential
    was limited. They replaced the Renaissance emphasis on the imagination, on invention
    and experimentation, and on mysticism with an emphasis on order and reason, on
    restraint, on common sense, and on religious, political, economic and philosophical
    conservatism. They maintained that man himself was the most appropriate subject of art,
    and saw art itself as essentially pragmatic — as valuable because it was somehow useful
    — and as something which was properly intellectual rather than emotional.
    Favorite prose literary forms were the essay, the letter, the satire, the parody, the
    burlesque, and the moral fable; in poetry, the favorite verse form was the rhymed
    couplet, which reached its greatest sophistication in heroic couplet of Pope

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