Copia - Presentazione Essenziale

The author

Restoration drama

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

The Restorationplayhouse

Unroofed Lit by daylight No curtain Absence of any scenery effects

The Elizabethan playhouse

Theatres: structure

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

The Restorationplayhouse

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

The Elizabethan playhouse

acting

The comedy of manners

vices

infidelty

marriage

Themes

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

Aim:

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

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.

The reading public

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

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

THE NOVEL

JOURNALISM

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

The reading public

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

AIM:

to achieve a comic effect

🡺

🡺

satire and mock-heroic verse.

trivial subjects in the heroic style of an epic.

THemes :

techniques :

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

The Augustan poetry

virtue triumphs over vice

LANGUAGE :

symple

everyday problems

STYLE :

THEMES :

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

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

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

The Augustan drama

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

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

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

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

The novelist's aim

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

all characters

The reader is expected to sympathise with him

A bourgeois, self-made, self-reliant man

The characters

• 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

1st - person narrator 3rd - person narrator

The writer was omnipresent

The narrative technique

linked to the Puritan ethics of the middle class.

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

Themes

• 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.

Types of novels

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

REASON

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

lover of mankind

misantrophe

labelled alternatively as

JONATHAN SWIFT

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.

Gulliver's travels

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.

originality

- 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.

Interpretation

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

Style