Romance and the Essay

Question 1

When was Johnson’s ‘History of Rasselas’ published?

Answer 1

1759

Question 2

What four things does Johnson associate with his present-day audience in the opening of ‘Rasselas’?

Answer 2

‘fancy’, ‘hope’, ‘youth’, and the ‘present day’

Question 3

What does Imlac the poet say about the value of the past?

Answer 3

‘to judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past’

Question 4

What does Nichol Smith call ‘Rasselas’?

Answer 4

‘an expanded essay’

Question 5

What does Imlac say about literature as a didactic resource?

Answer 5

‘every idea is useful for the inforcement or decoration of moral or religious truth’

Question 6

What does Johnson say is the author’s duty in a 1750 edition of ‘The Rambler’?

Answer 6

‘to vary the dress and situation of common objects’

Question 7

How does Johnson characterise romances in a 1750 edition of ‘The Rambler’?

Answer 7

they ‘are the entertainments of minds unfurnished with ideas, and therefore easily susceptible of impressions’

Question 8

What does Johnson say is the best way of structuring didactic writing in no. 137 of ‘The Rambler’?

Answer 8

‘The chief art of learning… is to attempt but little at a time’

Question 9

What does Stuart Curran says is characteristic of romance as a genre, also applicable to the essay?

Answer 9

‘the universal thirst of humanity for its ideals’

Question 10

What is an example of an aphorism/lesson from Johnson’s ‘The Fountains: A Fairy Tale’?

Answer 10

‘wit was sweeter, than riches, spirit, or beauty’

Question 11

When was Johnson’s ‘Fountains’ fairy tale published?

Answer 11

1766

Question 12

When were the first two cantos of ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ published?

Answer 12

1812

Question 13

When was the third canto of ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ published?

Answer 13

1816

Question 14

When was the fourth canto of ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’ published?

Answer 14

1818

Question 15

How does Byron describe Harold in the preface to cantos 1-2?

Answer 15

‘un-knightly’

Question 16

How does Byron characterise the first two cantos?

Answer 16

‘merely experimental’

Question 17

What does Byron want to do in canto 4, according to his preface?

Answer 17

‘to dissert upon the literature and manners of a nation so dissimilar [Italy]’

Question 18

What changes about the title between the publications of canto 2 and 3?

Answer 18

Byron drops the ‘Romaunt’

Question 19

What does Byron do to the form, according to Peter Manning?

Answer 19

‘Byron empties out the romaunt, writing within the form while depriving it of its sustaining ideology’

Question 20

When were the collected ‘Essays of Elia’ by Lamb published?

Answer 20

1823

Question 21

What does Lamb call himself in the essay ‘Imperfect Sympathies’?

Answer 21

‘a bundle of prejudices’

Question 22

What does Lamb say about Johnson as essayist in a letter?

Answer 22

He ‘deals out of opinion… perpetually obtruding his own particular view of life for universal truths’

Question 23

Where did Lamb get the name ‘Elia’?

Answer 23

from an Italian man with whom he worked in the South Sea house

Question 24

What did William Hazlitt say about Lamb in his ‘Spirit of the Age’?

Answer 24

‘The streets of London are his fairy land… he has contrived to weave its tritest traditions into a bright and endless romance!’

Question 25

What shows the playful fictionality of Lamb’s ‘Dissertation upon Roast Pig’?

Answer 25

‘something like the following dialogue ensued’

Question 26

What does Johnson say about the novelty of literary form in Idler 3, 1758?

Answer 26

‘Nothing is now left to the poet but character and sentiment’

Question 27

What does the essayist do for the ‘idle’ reader, according to Johnson in Idler 3, 1758?

Answer 27

He ‘thinks for’ the reader

Question 28

What does Misargyus’s narrative of excess do in morally didactic terms, in the Adventurer articles, starting in 34 (1753)?

Answer 28

‘their example will animate the pursuit of virtue, and retard the progress of vice.’

Question 29

What does Romance emerge as in my discussion?

Answer 29

A ‘form’ and a ‘mode’

Question 30

What does Bruffee note of the poetic voice in ‘Childe Harold’?

Answer 30

In canto 4, it fuses with Byron’s, and becomes a ‘synthetic voice’

Question 31

What demonstrates the self-aware irrationality of Lamb’s ‘Elia’ essays?

Answer 31

‘I have, in the abstract, no disrespect for the Jews’

Question 32

What does Mulcahy term the state that the Elia essays operate in?

Answer 32

a ‘twighlight borderland’, a ‘retreat from reality’

Question 33

What does Felperin, building on Northrop Frye, say about romance?

Answer 33

It is a ‘displacement’ from mythical unity and towards ‘irony’ and ‘self-consciousness’

Question 34

What does Hazlitt note of Elia’s style?

Answer 34

‘his sentences are cast in the mould of old authors’

Question 35

How does Hazlitt characterise Lamb with regard to other figures of the Romantic age?

Answer 35

‘He does not march boldly along with the crowd, but steals off the pavement to pick his way in the contrary direction’