Of islands and of ilanders: the enlightenment

(1736 – 1796)

9.1. Дальнейшее развитие литературы Просвещения. Сэмюэл Ричардсон – создатель семейно-бытового психологического романа.

Richardson, Samuel (1689-1761), English novelist, born in Derbyshire. He was apprenticed to a printer in his youth and later set up his own printing shop in London. Richardson became known as a gifted letter writer, and he began to write a volume of model letters for the use of the country reader that appeared as Familiar Letters. While engaged in writing the form letters he also wrote and published the celebrated novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740), telling, in the form of letters, the story of a young maid-servant's defense of her honor. Clarissa; or the History of a Young Lady (1747-1748), which explores the same events from the points of view of several of the characters, is considered his best work.

Like Pamela, it was praised for its lofty moral tone, sentimentality, and understanding of emotions and the feminine mind. His last important work was The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753-1754), in which he presented his ideal of a true Christian gentleman. All of Richardson's novels are in epistolary form (a series of letters)—a structure that he refined and developed. For this reason, Richardson is considered a founder of the English modern novel.

9.2. Генри Филдинг – основоположник социального романа. Теория романа Филдинга. «История Тома Джонса» как вершина творчества писателя.

Fielding, Henry (1707-1754), English novelist, playwright, and barrister, who, with his contemporary Samuel Richardson, established the English novel tradition. Fielding was educated at Eton College and in law at the Leiden University. He was a theatrical manager and playwright in London. Of his 25 plays, the most popular was the farce Tom Thumb (1730). Later he was called to the bar; as justice of the peace, he worked hard to reduce crime in London.

Meanwhile his career as a novelist began. His first published novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742), was intended as a parody of the sentimental moralism of the popular novel Pamela written by Samuel Richardson. Fielding's talent for characterization and for depicting a lower-class milieu, however, make Joseph Andrews far more than mere parody; it is a great comedy in its own right.

Two volumes of political journalism preceded publication of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749).

Tom Jones, regarded by critics as one of the great English novels, is in the picaresque tradition, involving the adventures and misadventures of a roguish hero. It tells in rich, realistic detail the many adventures that befall Tom, an engaging young libertine, in his efforts to gain his rightful inheritance. Fielding is highly regarded for his innovations in the development of the modern novel. Although he was not the first novelist, he was the first writer to break away from the epistolary method. Fielding devised a new structure and theory that laid the foundation for the works of Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, and the Victorian domestic novelists.

9.3. Деятельность Сэмюэла Джонсона. Первый словарь английского литературного языка и его значение для развития литературы.

Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784), English writer and lexicographer, a major figure in 18th-century literature as an arbiter of taste, renowned for the force and balance of his prose style.

Johnson, usually referred to as Dr. Johnson by his contemporaries and later generations, was the son of a bookseller. He attended the local school, but his real education was informal, conducted primarily among his father's books as he read and studied the classics, which influenced his style greatly.

Johnson entered the University of Oxford. A brilliant but eccentric young man, he was plagued by a variety of ailments from which he suffered the rest of his life. He left in poverty, without taking a degree and having suffered the first of two emotional breakdowns. During this time of despondency his reading of devotional literature led him to a profound religious faith.

After his father died, Johnson tried teaching and later organized a school. His educational ventures were not successful, however, although one of his students, David Garrick, later famous as an actor, became a lifelong friend. At the age of 26 Johnson married Elizabeth Jarvis Porter, a widow about 20 years his senior, who brought a measure of calm and self-confidence to his life.

Johnson, having given up teaching, went to London to try the literary life. Thus began a long period of hack writing for the Gentleman's Magazine. He founded his own periodical, The Rambler, in which he published a considerable number of eloquent, insightful essays on literature, criticism, and moral theory.

While busy with other kinds of writing and always burdened with poverty, Johnson was also at work on a major project — compiling a dictionary commissioned by a group of booksellers. After more than eight years in preparation, the Dictionary of the English Language appeared in 1755. This remarkable work contains about 40,000 entries elucidated by vivid, idiosyncratic, still-quoted definitions and by an extraordinary range of illustrative examples.

“Dictionary Johnson” (as he has been called) was now a celebrity. He and the eminent English portraitist Sir Joshua Reynolds founded the Literary Club; its membership included such luminaries as Garrick, the statesman Edmund Burke, the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan, and a young Scottish lawyer, James Boswell. From their first meeting in 1763 Johnson and Boswell were drawn to each other; for the next 21 years Boswell minutely observed and recorded the conversation and activities of his hero. Boswell's monumental Life of Samuel Johnson is one of the greatest biographies ever written.

Johnson's last major work, The Lives of the English Poets, was begun when he was nearly 70 years old. The work is a distinctive blend of biography and literary criticism. Johnson died three years later.

Nineteenth-century biographers fostered the image of Johnson as an awkward, unkempt eccentric, whose conversation was certainly lively and memorable, but whose literary influence was slight. A full-scale scholarly evaluation of Johnson's contributions as a writer began only in the mid-20th century. In these studies Johnson emerges as a troubled but undaunted man, compassionate to the poor and oppressed, relentless in his quest for truth, a humanist par excellence. His writing, in defense of reason against the wiles of unchecked fancy and emotion, championed the values of artistic and moral order.

9.4. Разнообразие жанров позднего Просвещения. Сентиментализм в литературе. “Готический роман” как один из первых образцов массовой литературы. Творчество Джейн Остин.

The variety of genres is amazing. Some writers, like Sterne, continued the picaresque traditions of earlier novelists. Others, like Walpole, sought to amuse the reader with their "gothic" tales. The influence of sentimentalism was very strong in the writings of the period authors.

Sterne, Laurence (1713-1768), English novelist and humorist, who wrote The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, one of the great 18th-century masterpieces of English fiction.

Sterne settled in London, where, despite suffering from tuberculosis, he lived a social, dissolute life. The first two volumes of his major work, the droll, rambling, and slyly indecorous novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767), caused a literary sensation. They are important more for revealing the thoughts and feelings of the author than for describing external events. Tristram Shandy was a highly original and innovative work; it exploded the budding conventions of the novel and confounded the expectations of its readers. Sterne had unique ideas about perception, meaning, and time that made Tristram Shandy a precursor to the modern novel and stream of consciousness.

In 1765 Sterne made a lengthy tour of France and Italy. A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768) records his appreciation of the social customs he encountered in France.

Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), English poet, who was a forerunner of the romantic movement. At 34 he finished the poem for which he is best known, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and sent it to his friend, the author Horace Walpole, at whose insistence it was published. Since that time the work has remained a favorite.

Walpole, Horace, 4th Earl of Orford (1717-1797), English novelist and letter writer, born in London. After an education at Eton College and the University of Cambridge, he traveled in France and Italy with his friend the English poet Thomas Gray. Walpole entered Parliament in 1741 and remained a member until his retirement in 1768. His political career was limited to minor government posts, which he received primarily through the influence of his father, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole. His estate became a showplace because of its pseudo-Gothic architecture, its fine library, and its collections of art and curios. He established a printing press, and the fine books he produced influenced the development of English printing and bookmaking. Walpole dabbled in all the literary arts and made a real contribution to art history. He is better known, however, for his novel The Castle of Otranto (1764); pervaded by elements of the supernatural, it is one of the first works of the genre known as the Gothic romance.

Jane Austen (1775 – 1817) is the English writer who first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life. Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time in such novels as Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813) and some others.

She was the second daughter and seventh child in a family of eight: six boys and two girls. Her closest companion was her elder sister, Cassandra, who also remained unmarried. Their father was a scholar who encouraged the love of learning in his children. His wife, Cassandra (née Leigh), was a woman of ready wit, famed for her impromptu verses and stories. The great family amusement was acting.

Jane Austen's lively and affectionate family circle provided a stimulating context for her writing. Her earliest-known writings date from about 1787. These contain plays, verses, short novels, and other prose and show Austen engaged in the parody of existing literary forms.

The earliest of her novels, Sense and Sensibility, was begun about 1795 as a novel-in-letters. It came out, anonymously, only in 1811.

Jane Austen's three early novels form a distinct group in which a strong element of literary satire accompanies the comic depiction of character and society.

Sense and Sensibility tells the story of the impoverished Dashwood sisters. Marianne is the heroine of “sensibility”—i.e., of openness and enthusiasm. She becomes infatuated with the attractive John Willoughby, who seems to be a romantic lover but is in reality an unscrupulous fortune hunter. He deserts her for an heiress, leaving her to learn a dose of “sense” in a wholly unromantic marriage with a staid and settled bachelor, Colonel Brandon, who is 20 years her senior. By contrast, Marianne's older sister, Elinor, is the guiding light of “sense,” or prudence and discretion, whose constancy toward her lover, Edward Ferrars, is rewarded by her marriage to him after some distressing vicissitudes.

Pride and Prejudice describes the clash between Elizabeth Bennet, the daughter of a country gentleman, and Fitzwilliam Darcy, a rich and aristocratic landowner. Although Austen shows them intrigued by each other, she reverses the convention of “first impressions”: “pride” of rank and fortune and “prejudice” against Elizabeth's inferiority of family hold Darcy aloof; while Elizabeth is equally fired both by the “pride” of self-respect and by “prejudice” against Darcy's snobbery. Ultimately, they come together in love and self-understanding. The intelligent and high-spirited Elizabeth was Jane Austen's own favourite among all her heroines and is one of the most engaging in English literature.

Although the birth of the English novel is to be seen in the first half of the 18th century in the work of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, it is with Jane Austen that the novel takes on its distinctively modern character in the realistic treatment of unremarkable people in the unremarkable situations of everyday life. Her repeated fable of a young woman's voyage to self-discovery on the passage through love to marriage focuses upon easily recognizable aspects of life. It is this concentration upon character and personality and upon the tensions between her heroines and their society that relates her novels more closely to the modern world than to the traditions of the 18th century. It is this modernity, together with the wit, realism, and timelessness of her prose style; her shrewd, amused sympathy; and the satisfaction to be found in stories so skillfully told, in novels so beautifully constructed, that helps to explain her continuing appeal for readers of all kinds. Modern critics remain fascinated by the commanding structure and organization of the novels, by the triumphs of technique that enable the writer to lay bare the tragicomedy of existence in stories of which the events and settings are apparently so ordinary.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06