Copia - Presentazione Essenziale

The author

Restoration drama

Theatres: structure

The Elizabethan playhouse

The Restorationplayhouse

Roofed Artificially lit with candles A drop curtain Painted movable scenery Footlights

Unroofed Lit by daylight No curtain Absence of any scenery effects

acting

The Elizabethan playhouse

The Restorationplayhouse

Female roles were played by men actors linked by cooperative sharing bonds

First professional actresses Actors and actresses tied to the theatre by a contract Both actors and actresses became public personalities

The comedy of manners

Themes

marriage

infidelty

vices

to excite laughter by making fun of the manners and absurdities of an artificial society.

Aim:

The reading public

The literature of the Augustan Age reflected the economic and intellectual progress of the period. It was characterised by a remarkable output and a growing interest in reading.

• middle-class women
• books were expensive
• coffee- houses allowed the circulation of news and opinions

The reading public

The interest of middle-class people in literature gave rise to

THE NOVEL

JOURNALISM

‘The Tatler’and‘The Spectator’🡺 the first English newspapers Their style 🡺 simple, lively Their aim 🡺 didactic

Where the belief in the power of reason and the individual’s trust in his own abilities found expression

The Augustan poetry

The poet saw his role as one of providing social poetry with models of refined behaviour.

techniques :

satire and mock-heroic verse.

trivial subjects in the heroic style of an epic.

THemes :

🡺

AIM:

to achieve a comic effect

🡺

STYLE : standard phrases and periphrases for everyday objects, apostrophe, inversion and personification, Latinised words and constructions.

The Augustan drama

The middle classes joined the theatre-going public and London audiences began to enjoy PANTOMINE

a kind of ballad opera, a mixture of political satire, picaresque adventures and love interest.

everyday problems

THEMES :

The Restoration Comedy of Manners was replaced by the sentimental comedy.

virtue triumphs over vice

LANGUAGE :

symple

STYLE :

The novelist

THE SPOKESMAN OF THE MIDDLE CLASS the novel was primarily concerned with everything that could affect social status and it was mainly directed to a bourgeois public.

The novelist's aim

The plots which had traditionally formed the backbone of English literature for centuries - plots taken from history, legend and mythology - were abandoned.

To be understood widely he wrote in a smple way The writer aimed at realism speed and copiousness

His most important economic virtues since it was the bookseller and not the patron who rewarded him.

The characters

A bourgeois, self-made, self-reliant man

The reader is expected to sympathise with him

have contemporary names and surnames They struggle for survival or social success

all characters

The narrative technique

1st - person narrator 3rd - person narrator

The writer was omnipresent

• cronological sequence of events

references to particular times of the year or of the day specific references to names of countries, towns and streets detailed descriptions of interiors to make the narrative more realistic

The setting

Themes

real life everything that could alter a social status the sense of reward and punishment

linked to the Puritan ethics of the middle class.

Types of novels

• The realistic novel (Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe) focuses on realistic descriptions of time and place. • The utopian novel (Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels) shows imaginary nations with strange new societies and peoples employed to satirise contemporary English society. • The epistolary novel (Samuel Richardson's Pamela) is told through letters exchanged between different characters. • The picaresque novel (Henry Fielding's Tom Jones) is episodic in structure; it concerns the adventures of a young hero who has to deal with tyrannical masters and misfortunes but generally manages to escape these situations by using his wit. • The anti-novel (Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy) shows that the orderly narratives of events have little relation to the disorder of the human mind, which is not linked to a logical sequence of events.

JONATHAN SWIFT

labelled alternatively as

lover of mankind

misantrophe

concerned with politics and society pessimistic attitude dit not share the same optimism of his age irony and satire suited his interests

REASON

Must be used properly too intensive a use of reason is an error of judgement

Gulliver's travels

sources

Literature of travel The work of the Royal Society Political allegory 17th-century French writers used imaginary voyage as vehicle for their theories 🡺utopias where men lived an uncorrupted life. Moral satire.

Interpretation

- A tale for children 🡺 Gulliver’s amusing and absurd adventures.- A political allegory of Swift’s time. - A parody of voyage literature. - A masterpiece of misanthropy 🡺 a reflection on the aberrations of human reason.

originality

Constant displacement of the hero. Gulliver forced into comparison not with men but with animals. Gulliver both as an object and an instrument of satire.

Style

First-person narration. Matter-of-fact prose style. Free of literary colouring. Record of observed details with the precision of a scientific instrument.