Outline

Questions for seminar 5

Speak on:

1-The significance of The War of the Roses (1455 – 1485)

2- The introduction of printing and its influence

3- Development of the English language as the language of the English nation

4-The basic dialect of the English languages

5- Why London became the Capital of England

6 -The authors of 14^th-15^th centuries writing in London dialect.

Inner history

7. Phonetics

8. Grammar

9. Word-tock

Topic for Presentation

The War of the Roses (1455 – 1485)

I. Several factors combined to bring about this rise of the novel, the form developed by Daniel Defoe, including:

a new mass literacy - The fact that large numbers of people could read, especially women, was an essential precondition for the emergence of the novel.

urbanization

technological advances in printing. With these came an

infrastructure in the book trade that facilitated manufacture, distribution, and purchasing.

II.

E a r l y Enlightenment (1688 1740)

This period saw the flourishing of journalism which played an important part in the country's public life. Numerous journals and newspapers which came into being.at the beginning of the 18th century not only acquainted their readers with the situation at home and abroad, but also helped to shape people's views and paved the way for the realistic novel which was brought into English literature by Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift.

Daniel Defoe (1659/1661 [?] - April 24 [?], 1731) was an English writer, journalist and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe (genre Robinsonade). Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain.

H e wrote over five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural).

1. With the novel, we encounter for the first time a convention of literary representation known as realism. Is this a true story, or is it a factual fiction? This creative confusion is compounded by the fact that we’re not told what kind of book this is.

The prosaic opening paragraph of the novel, which reads like journalism, doesn’t offer any clues that we are not reading an authentic autobiography. Thus, the novel, we may say, is a genre that looks like something else, a chameleon genre. (Recall that Paradise Lost proclaims Milton’s intention to “sing” from the very beginning. The reader knows exactly what literary form to expect). Defoe, by contrast, is deceptive. This story may be fact, he insinuates, or it may not, but the reader must actually be in that state of confusion to get the maximum benefit from the novel.

2. The novel has also been called the “ bourgeois epic,” meaning that it takes as its subject the middle class, characters from classes in society that have generally been beneath the interest of literature, except for comedy.

In fact, the middle class was rapidly becoming the driving force in society in the early 18century and desired its own literature to express its values. Robinson leaves from home, not because he wants adventure, but because he wants to make his fortune. He must make his own way in the world as an individual, starting from nothing. Life as a merchant seaman presents the prospect of getting rich.

3. As the story progresses, Robinson has a series of adventures. On the simplest of narrative levels, Robinson’s story is exciting. How will he survive against the elements, wild animals, and cannibals without supplies or other people? Below the narrative surface, however, Robinson is homo economicus. He is an economic man, making it himself in the world, without any assistance other than what he has, what he is, and what he does.

4. After many years, Robinson acquires a companion, a native from a neighboring island, who has escaped from cannibals. Robinson names his companion Man Friday, teaches him English, and makes him a servant. More importantly, Friday becomes his chattel. Here, the allegory is of slavery.

As Britain acquired more and more of the globe, it was transformed into the largest empire the world

had ever known. Its vast territories, however benignly or malignly they were ruled, were, in the

geopolitical sense, property of the English Crown.

Robinson refers to himself as the sovereign of his island and all that it contains, including Friday.

Robinson converts his companion to Christianity but retains Friday as his property, and of course, Friday exists principally in Robinson’s terms to turn a profit.

5. Thinkers have also noted that the rise of capitalism was closely connected with Puritanism and Protestantism, with an emphasis in both society and religion on individual responsibility and achievement. We see this theme, too, in Defoe’s work with Robinson’s return from the island as both a good Christian and a wealthy man.

On his island, Robinson, who began his adventures as a version of the prodigal son, gradually becomes a devout and God-fearing Christian. Fear is the key word here. When Robinson finds a single footprint on the shore—not Friday’s—he is terrified. This is a key moment in his moral and religious growth because his terror turns him toward God.

He leaves the island rich and a good Christian. We are to understand that this was God’s plan for Robinson who is finally saved by the rescue vessel and in his soul.

Jonathan Swift (November 30, 1667 - October 19, 1745) was an Irish cleric, satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for Whigs then for Tories), and poet, famous for works like Gulliver's Travels, A Modest Proposal, A Journal to Stella, The Drapier's Letters, The Battle of the Books, and A Tale of a Tub. Swift is probably the foremost prose satirist in the English language, although he is less well known for his poetry. Swift published all of his works under pseudonyms such as Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff, M.B. Drapier or anonymously. He is also known for being a master of 2 styles of satire; the Horatian and Juvenalian styles

1. Swift, who was born and spent much of his life in Ireland, may be the first great Irish writer in English literature.

2. Swift was born in Dublin, received his higher education at Trinity College in Dublin. earned a doctorate from Trinity College and became an ordained priest in the Church of Ireland. He was given a series of parishes and enjoyed a comfortable income.

Swift was bitterly disappointed, however, that he didn’t receive more patronage from the court, and this disappointment stoked his anger. Around the turn of the century, his serious writing career began, nurtured by that anger.

3. On various trips to England, Swift formed a friendship with Alexander Pope, and together, they founded, in 1713, the Scriblerus Club. The members vied with one another to see who could write the wittiest satires. It was in the context of the Scriblerus Club that Gulliver’s Travels found its genesis.

Swift was always, unlike Pope, the most political of the 18 -century satirists. Swift served the Tory party (conservatives), which did not bring him the rewards he craved. As the Whigs (liberals) came into ascendancy, Swift returned to Ireland, to live, as he said, “like a rat in a hole.” From Dublin, he fired off the most powerful of his pamphlets demanding justice for Ireland. The most famous of these pamphlets is A Modest Proposal (1729).

4. Around the 1720s, Swift began putting into shape the work for which he is most well known,

Gulliver’s Travels.

In the four books comprised in this work, Swift satirizes the English court, the scientific community, and most powerfully, his own species, the human race. In the end, Gulliver’s Travels

leaves the reader uneasy, even frightened.

A. Gulliver’s Travels encompasses four books, or voyages, the first of which is to Lilliput, where the people are tiny. Here, Swift satirizes the court around Queen Anne. Despite their size, the characters fondly imagine themselves to be people of consequence.

B. The second book takes Lemuel Gulliver to Brobdingnag. Here, the inhabitants are rural giants, and the hero himself is doll-sized. Brobdingnag is the most pleasant of the imaginary countries created by Swift, who hated progress, because it is the most traditional.

C. In the third book, Gulliver travels to Laputa (Spanish for “whore”), a scientific utopia. We should note that Swift also loathed science, which he thought contrary to religion and unnecessary. Here, he pictures the advanced scientific thinkers of his age as geeks, laboring, for example, to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.

The third book also contains the Struldbrugs, who live forever and decay forever, suffering an eternity of pain and mental infirmity as they fall to pieces but cannot die.

D. The fourth book takes Gulliver to Houyhnhnm Land, the pronunciation of which represents the neighing of a horse. Here, the rulers are horses, and homo sapiens are horrific apes. In this final book, Lemuel Gulliver seems to go mad; his madness takes the form of believing that the horse people are wholly admirable and his own species, the Yahoos, as they’re called, are nauseatingly disgusting.

E. When Gulliver returns to England, he becomes a strange sort of satirized figure himself. He can’t bear his wife and family and goes to live in a stable. Five years after his return, he is able to have his wife and children in his presence but much prefers the company of his two horses.

III.

MATURE ENLIGHTENMENT.
The social moralizing novel was born in this period. It was represented by the works of such writers as Samuel Richardson (Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady), Henry Fielding (The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling and other novels), and Tobias Smollett (The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker and other novels)

A quarrel between two major practitioners of fiction in the mid-18 century laid down the main tracks that the form would follow over the ensuing centuries. These two practitioners were Samuel Richardson (1689 - 1761) and Henry Fielding (1707 1754).

A. Richardson was born in 1689 in Mackworth, Derbyshire. At the age of seventeen, in 1706, Richardson was forced to begin a seven-year apprenticeship under John Wilde as a printer, an employment that Richardson felt would "gratify my thirst for reading". By 1715, he had become a freeman of the Stationer's Company and citizen of London, and six or seven years after the expiration of his apprenticeship set up his own business as a printer.

Richardson began writing fiction late in life, but as he was involved in the book trade as a printer and publisher he knew what the public wanted, particularly that silent component in the public, the woman reader.

B. Richardson’s three great works of fiction are Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady (1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753), written to prove that Richardson could produce a novel with a male at its center.

C. All of these were epistolary novels, novels written in the form of letters. This form solves the problem of creating suspense in the novel by giving the appearance of “writing to the moment,” rather than relating events in the past tense.

D. The two narratives of Pamela and Clarissa concern young women protecting their virtue. Pamela is successful in this endeavor; Clarissa, not so, although both win through, ultimately, to a kind of marital happiness. The epistolary form gives both novels their immediacy and impact.

1. Clarissa, for instance, is drugged and raped in a brothel. Of course, in her letter written before these events, she doesn’t know what will happen, so the rape comes as a surprise to the reader, too. Its impact is shocking because it is unexpected.

2. In a letter written after the rape, Clarissa describes the drinks that were given to her that led to her loss of purity.

E. The letter form solves the immediacy problem but introduces other problems related to the narrator. Is it likely, for instance, that a recently raped woman would sit down to write composed and intricate letters? Further, wouldn’t an 18-year-old girl lack sophistication and narrative skill? In some sense, Pamela and Clarissa become puppets for Richardson’s own voice.

F. Nonetheless, Pamela was vastly popular. Armies of female fans, who called themselves “Pamelaites,” formed reading groups to share their enthusiasm for the novel.

IV.

Henry Fielding was no Pamela-ite. His career in fiction began as a contradiction to everything that Richardson set out to do in his novels.

A. Fielding believed that the moral of Richardson’s story—be good and you’ll be rewarded—was nothing more than a sermon coated in fictional sugar. It lacked realism, which Fielding thought was the primary purpose of fiction.

B. Fielding’s background was very different from that of Richardson. His family was country gentry and had aristocratic connections. Fielding received a classical education at Eton and wrote a few plays in a gentlemanly amateurish spirit.

C. Professionally, Fielding was a lawyer and a magistrate. One of the advantages of this career was that he came to know life and people, particularly rogues. His fictional career began with

Shamela, a spoof or burlesque of Richardson’s Pamela

.

D. This work was developed into a more thoughtful satire on Richardson, The History of Joseph Andrews (1742); the hero in this book is the brother of Richardson’s Pamela Andrews, an invention of Fielding’s.

1. Like Pamela, Joseph Andrews is a servant, and his virtue, too, is under assault from a lecherous mistress, Lady Booby. Shortly after her husband dies, Lady Booby summons Joseph to her bedroom, where she tries her best to tempt him, but like his sister’s, Joseph’s virtue is invincible.

2. Joseph loses his position in Lady Booby’s house and makes his way back home. The narrative then begins to remind us of Don Quixote, a work that Fielding admired as much as Sterne did.

3. The novel spoofs Richardson hilariously, mocking and contradicting his notion of virtue.

E. Fielding’s career in fiction would, after this anti-Richardsonian launch, develop significantly. In the preface to Joseph Andrews, Fielding ruminates on Aristotle and asserts that comedy can achieve the same greatness as epic and tragedy. He seems to suggest that the novel can be a respectable literary venture.

F. In his masterwork, Tom Jones, the story of a foundling, Fielding gives us a novel that is confident in itself and confident in the power of fiction. It continues, but in a much less polemical way, the quarrel with Richardson.

1. Tom Jones begins life as an illegitimate child; adopted by Squire Allworthy, he grows up to become a scoundrel. He has a good heart, but can’t stop himself from getting drunk, brawling, and wenching. He is no Pamela or Joseph Andrews but a human being.

2. The author led his hero, a charming, cheerful, kind-hearted man, through a number of adventures and brought him in touch with a lot of people representing all classes of society. The scenes of the novel are laid in a poor country-house, in an aristocratic mansion, at an inn, in a court-room, in prison and in the London streets. Such composition of the novel gave the author a chance to create an all-embracing picture of the 18th century England, to write "a comic epopee" as Fielding himself called the novel.
By the end of the novel, Tom wins his love, Sophia, and discovers the identity of his parents. He settles down as a good English squire and magistrate. He will administer justice and look after his estate.

3. Fielding’s point, made with great artistry and irresistible humor, is that virtue is not something to be hoarded. Pamela preserves her virtue, but she does so by not doing anything. Virtue, Fielding demonstrates, is something that one must earn by living, by experiencing life. It must be achieved, not preserved.

4. In the novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling Fielding also worked out the theory of the novel. The main requirements that the novel should meet: to imitate life, to show the variety of human nature, to expose the roots and causes of man's shortcomings and to indicate the ways of overcoming them.

Henry Fielding 's works were the summit of the English Enlightenment prose.

G. Both Richardson’s and Fielding’s doctrines founded great fictional traditions— romance for Richardson and realism for Fielding.

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