Definitions Flashcards
1
Q
Heroic Couplets
A
- Rhyming: Heroic couplets typically follow an AA rhyme scheme.
- Iambic pentameter: Each line has ten syllables, arranged in five iambs, which are unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables.
- Rhythmic: The rhythmic structure of iambic pentameter is similar to a human heartbeat.
2
Q
Letter to an Eminent Man
A
- The form brings the writer & speaker together in a closed circle, thereby ‘authorizing’ his views
- The form also implies that its readers are, like the author & addressee, disinterested landed gentlemen who share the same views (i.e., civic humanism)
3
Q
Civic Humanism
A
- The idea that full citizenship is tied to the ownership of property
- Because they own land, property-owners have a stake in the future of the country; their status as land-owners ensures their commitment to the nation
- Therefore, only property-owners should have a say on political matters because only they are capable of disinterestedness
- Their individual interests & those of the nation are (theoretically) identical, inseparable
- All others (i.e., those with mobile property, the monied classes) potentially have separate interests or can abandon the nation in times of war, distress
- These disinterested landowners are Pope’s assumed audience and his self-chosen peers
4
Q
Concordia Discors
A
- “Discordant harmony” or “harmonious discord”
- There is (divine) order amongst the (seeming) chaos
- All things happen for a reason, are part of a broader plan we can’t see or understand.
- A recipe for quietism, for submission
- Poverty, abuse, corruption, social inequality = all can be configured as ‘partial evils’ that are part of the ‘larger good’
- Also configures attempts to address those ‘partial evils’ as ignorant, impious
5
Q
The Great Chain of Being
A
- Each living being (species), known or unknown, forms one ‘link’ of God’s great chain of existence.
- Each ‘link’ is a step above or below the other, different in some essential way.
- That difference is crucial; the chain is hierarchical; for one creature to pursue the ‘higher’ status of the one above is to destabilize the whole
6
Q
Palladisn Style
A
- An ‘orderly’ style
- Symmetrical, proportionate, no superficial ornament
- Complementary relationship between house & land
- Extensive, varied prospect views from different vantage points in the house
- Subordinate parts of the house are subordinated architecturally
- I.e., ‘wings’ that break off from the centre, which the servants would occupy
7
Q
Topographical Poetry or Prospect Poetry
A
- An English tradition dating back to the 17th century
- Aemilia Lanyer, “Description of Cooke-ham” (1611), Ben Jonson, “To Penshurst” (1616), John Denham, “Cooper’s Hill” (1642), Pope, “Windsor Forest” (1713)
- Poetry that surveys a particular local landscape, rendering it in metaphorical terms
- In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
- the survey of the landscape often leads to a confirmation of socio-political / cosmological order
- the landscape is allegorized, & the order of the estate reflects the order of the nation / cosmos—re: “this mighty maze but not without a plan” (Essay on Man)
8
Q
Augustan Satire
A
- Begin with difference, contrast
- Then move towards cohesion, closure
- A confrontational structure
- Thesis & antithesis clash, ending finally in the reaffirmation of thesis
9
Q
Noblesse Oblige
A
- “Nobility obliges”
- The obligations of the upper classes to those of the lower classes, esp. tenants and/or vassals
- The nobleman momentarily sets aside his rank/superiority, acts with generosity & honour towards his social inferiors
- The softening of class boundaries, in the name of order & contentment
- (E.g., a tenants’ feast, the waiving of rent owned, Lord Grantham’s honouring of Mrs. Patmore’s nephew)
10
Q
Labouring-class poet
A
- RE: literature moving from a genteel hobby for the upper-classes to a paying vocation for all classes
- Sudden introduction of lower-class writers
- Lower-classes suddenly representing themselves in literature instead of being the objects of representation
- Telling their stories, too
- The concept had a ‘faddish’ or ‘modish’ appeal to it: ‘natural’ poet Romanticized, but also patronizing
11
Q
The Country House Poem
A
- Praises a particular country house / owner
- An identity between the two
- House’s oneness with the place (landscape, tenants) reflects the owner’s & class’s ‘proper place’ in the social hierarchy (harmonious social order)
- Typically celebrates ‘the English way of life’
- ‘Olde England’, noblesse oblige
- As “Epistle to Burlington” suggests, the form has shifted
- Ideal depicted in Jonson’s is now the obscured ideal that is the implied (but absent) corrective contrast in Pope’s poem
- Leapor is writing back directly to Pope’s poem
12
Q
Public Sphere
A
- An extra-political space that facilitated the exchange of ideas & the formation of consensus.
-Pre-1700: the domestic vs the political - Very few people had access to the political sphere, only those at Parliament & at court
- A new cultural space emerges in the late seventeenth & early eighteenth centuries, spurred on by the invention of
- Coffee houses
- Newspapers, pamphlets—the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695
- Circulating libraries, literary clubs
- All these were public spaces / bodies extra to & outside of Parliament / court
- Such spaces allowed people to discuss, comment on, & debate public affairs
- Spaces in which public opinion was shaped & formed, beyond the control of Parliament or court
13
Q
Empiricism
A
The theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke.
Empiricism is a philosophy or theory of knowledge. It posits that no one is born with ‘innate’ knowledge or ideas - instead, we come to all knowledge or ideas, as Locke says, via our senses (touch, smell, sight, taste, hearing) and our reflections on that sensory data. In that sense, it is an explicit rejection of many older theories or philosophies of knowledge that relied on the assumption that some knowledge is ‘beyond the physical’ (‘metaphysical’). Empiricism is very much the foundation of the modern scientific method. Our early slide decks would have on this - probably lectures 2-4 - which I refer you to for more info.
14
Q
Formal Realism
A
A specific technique where authors use literary devices and style choices to accurately depict everyday life and experiences, focusing on detailed, plausible character portrayals and settings, essentially aiming to present a realistic view of the world without embellishment or exaggeration, often including elements like authentic dialogue and social context.
15
Q
The Deserted Village & Elegy Writing in a Country Churchyard
Sensibility
A
- Gray’s poem is drawing on the mid-18thC’s increased interest in interiority, in inwardness (re: Locke & identity)
- “Sensibility”: ‘susceptibility to feelings’; the capacity to feel for others; to identify with & to respond to the sorrows of others; to empathize; to ‘feel the misery of others with inward pain’
- In the mid-eighteenth century, in a reversal of Popeian values, sensibility becomes a socially accepted, even desirable trait
- Whereas the Scriblerians associated a concern with interiority / inwardness as a sign of self-interestedness, at mid-century, the man of sensibility becomes the selfless/polite/moral man
- The social sign of that sensibility, registered through the body: the tear
- “susceptibility to tender feelings”
- Feeling another’s pain ‘inwardly’, to feel empathy
- Closely connected to growing awareness of the “interiority”, to “feelings” as a challenge to an empirical worldview
- ‘Feelings,’ interiority, & emotionality in the older view are lowly, are affiliated with self-interest, with self-display, with a self too obsessed with itself
- Men of sensibility: men who demonstrate this capacity
- Literature of sensibility: works that depict characters with such capacity &/or which elicit a similar response in the reader
16
Q
The Deserted Village
Pastoral
A
- Virgil
- Depictions of shepherds in the fields discussing love & poetry.
- Romanticizes the lives & innocence of country people.
- Conventions: shepherds & shepherdesses, sheep, a refined rustic dialect
- Idealization, prelapsarian/paradisal, ‘golden age,’ nostalgia, (anti) commerce, primitivism.
- Key narratives: unrequited love, the merits of country life, the corruption of urban life.
- Origins: the “ecologue,” Theocritus & Virgil
- Romanticizes the lives & innocence of country people
- While the mode becomes obsolete over time, its basic impulses & tropes (country vs urban, nostalgia, anti-commerce, a ‘lost golden age’) are alive & well
17
Q
hahas
A
A haha is basically a fence, but less obstructive - it is more akin to a ditch, with one side of the ditch being either a wall or at a 90 degree angle to thereabouts. They were used to separate out ‘parts’ of an estate - this section for your horses to graze; this section for your cattle; this section for your sheep and goats; etc. In class, we talked about them doing the same kind of work that Pope’s celebrates in “Epistle to Burlington”: that is, hahas maintain difference, keeping each thing in its ‘proper sphere,’ but to the person looking at the landscape, there are no harsh dividers that call attention to such difference. Hahas are a kind of literal manifestation or example of Pope’s maxim, ‘He gains all points, who pleasingly confounds, / Surprises, varies, and conceals the bounds’.
18
Q
Literary Loneliness
A
- Life after (Pope’s) Death:
- John Sitter, Literary Loneliness in Mid-Eighteenth Century England: “the particular consciousness mid-century authors had of themselves” is “as solitary writers for solitary readers” (9)
- Pope: the poet is a public voice, giving voice to public concerns; poets & poetry are agents of order; poetry has a public function/role
19
Q
Graveyard Poetry
A
- The “Elegy” is an example of “graveyard poetry”: a school of poetry & a mid-eighteenth century phenomena; begins with Edward Young’s Night Thoughts (1742)
- Mournful, reflective in tone; explores the brevity of life, the fact of mortality
- Emerges as a reaction against Augustan aesthetic principles, which characterized such inwardness, emotionality, & self-display as gaudy & inappropriate
- Graveyard poetry’s interest in interiority is part of a broader reaction that happens in post-Pope British society, which we see in the rise of the novel & of the cult of sensibility
20
Q
An Elegy
A
- A form of lyric poetry
- Augustans eschewed the lyric, for obvious reasons—i.e., it is geared toward the expression of individual emotion
- Typical subjects: a poem of mourning, for a particular person, &/or a meditation on death
- Can have a distinct form (i.e., the elegiac stanza, as in Gray’s poem = a 4-line stanza, decasyllabic, rhyming ABAB), but not absolutely necessary
21
Q
Castle of Otranto by Walpole
The Gothic
A
- Designed to elicit an affective response (fear)
- Tied to the emergence of a “literature of sensation” in the wake of Pope’s death (the cult of sensibility)
- Departs from the realist expectations of the earlier novel
- Old gothic manors & castles
- “Long, long ago, in a place far, far away”
- Locations are usually ancient, foreign, exotic
- Secret, subterranean passageways
- A sense of foreboding, of claustrophobia
- Haunted or cursed figures
- The suggestion or actual manifestation of the supernatural
- Walpole, original Gothic, supernatural manifestations (giant helmets, skeletal hermit-monks, the giant ghost of Alphonse)
Ann Radcliffe, modified gothic, the suggestion of the supernatural, then refuted or rationally explained (“Scooby Doo” gothic) - Dopplegangers, doubling images & characters
- The “lost manuscript” conceit
- Taboo themes (incest, rape, murder)
- As a mode, the Gothic uniquely tends to explore the psychological crises or anxieties of its characters, authors, & ages:
- Frequently pits the rational self against a self driven by secret, dark, or forbidden urges
- Often sexual, lustful, ambitious, domineering
- The hidden, violent, irrational self that rests just below the surface of the social, logical self
- The disorganized, chaotic architecture of the gothic house as metaphor for the non-rational self/mind
- The confused subterranean passageways as emblematic spaces for the inner mind, the rational self struggling with non-rational urges & desires
- Inner psycho-drama of a character/class/culture brought to life, esp. through doppelgangers
- Shelley, Frankenstein; the monster as a manifestation of the twisted, ugly ambitions & actions of his creator
- Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the murderous Hyde as the violent suppressed self of Jekyll
- Stoker, Dracula; Dracula as an inversion of the values of (Stoker’s) modern commercial England
22
Q
New Historicism
A
- The representation of the past ‘on its own terms’
- L. P. Hartley (1956): “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
- Context-specific & relativist (‘Romantic’ sensibility), rather than universalist & rationalist (‘Augustan’ sensibility)
- A uniquely post-Enlightenment development that is beginning to take place in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century
- Walter Scott among the earliest of commentators to accentuate the historicism of Otranto
- “It was [Walpole’s] object to draw a picture of domestic life and manners during the feudal times as might actually have existed, and to paint it chequered and agitated by the action of supernatural machinery, such as the superstition of the period received as matter of devout credulity.”
- Otranto takes part in a broader movement in mid-century Britain towards an historicist understanding of the past
- A development in the period influencing literature across genres
- The new histories of Hume, Robertson, Gibbon
- The ‘ancient’ poems of Macpherson, Chatterton
- The ‘recovery’ of Shakespeare, Chaucer
23
Q
blank verse
A
24
Q
the “Peterloo” Massacre
A
25
Q
An Ode
A
26
Q
Terza Rima
A
27
Q
conversation poem
A
28
Q
the mirror and the lamp
A
