The Eighteenth Century

Question 1

What are the overarching themes of the fifth session?

Answer 1

1. From Restoration to Sentimental Comedy
2. 18th. Century Contexts: The beginning of the Modern Period
3. 18th. Century Literature: Neoclassicism and Satire

Question 2

What are the important aspects of the 18th centuries historical contexts.

Answer 2

1. Constitutional monarchy began with the ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1688)
2. The Bill of Rights (1689)
3. William of Orange (1688–1702)
   - gets married to the daughter of Charles II (Mary II)
   - had no heir which led to Mary’s sister taking over (Queen Anne)
   - was required to sign the bill of rights
4. The House of Hannover (1717- 1830)
5. Revolutions and evolutions both economic and cultural
6. Agrarian, financial, consumer, industrial revolution – the
   ‘Whig version’ of history (?)
7. Social and cultural contrasts and the age of rules (rationality, sciences, neoclassicism)
8. Bank of England (state would define value of money…Beginning of capitalism and consumer culture [Consuming over subsidence]).

Question 3

What does the Act of settlement in 1701 determine?

Answer 3

It is written into the constitution, that the English monarch always has to be of protestant faith.

Question 4

What are the characteristics of the sentimental comedy?

Answer 4

1. Audiences were more middle class in the 18th century.
2. Bourgeois morality - The education of the middle classes (Morally impeccable heroes. Wit/intrigue was delegated to the lower classes).
3. In later forms: Mixture of comedy of manners and sentimental comedy (Heroes were rogues/rakes reformed [only sentimental comedy became to boring]).
4. It becomes an important part of middle class class consciousness.

Question 5

What is the context of thought development in the 18th century?

Answer 5

1. Enlightenment and erudition: The sciences.
2. Beginning of (Experimental) Natural philosophy.
3. Empiricism
4. Rationality (Kantian reason)
5. Founding of the Royal Society in 1660
6. Sir Isaac Newtons natural philosophy and the laws of nature.

Question 6

What is the social context of tthe 18th century?

Answer 6

1. Knowledge and the public sphere; coffee houses and the newspaper.
2. The self-education of the middle classes: journals and the novel
3. Virtue & Moderation became dominant themes.

Question 7

How did the 18th-Century Literary System look?

Answer 7

1. Print market and the end of the licensing act (1695) (This meant not only royal licensees could print).
2. Circulating libraries and subscription models for financing of literature because the purchase aswell as production of novels was still incredibly expensive.
3. Female readership (and esp. later on authorship) grows
4. Cultural elitism which had to oppose the democratization of culture.
5. Learning was only for male. Women shouldn’t get education according to this belief system.
6. Paper became cheaper because people bought more clothes which lead to more leftover from the textile production that were used to make paper.
7. The book market had become its own market with specific dynamics creating professions.
8. As print was incredibly expensive, the amount of cash you could come up with determined how much (and thus What) you could write.

Question 8

What are the characteristics of 18tht-century literature?

Answer 8

1. The ‘Augustan Age’ of poetry, Neoclassicism (built on classical latin poetry)
2. Didactic and philosophical poems (“Essays”)
3. Satire and social criticism (Trying to get people to stick to virtue)
4. Classical and moral education (Conduct literature)
5. Discussion of Englishness as distinction to a growing world

Question 9

What are the overarching themes of the sixth session?

Answer 9

1. The emergence of the Novel in England (The term was introduced but not necessarily the today known genre)
2. The American Post-Revolutionary Fiction

Question 10

What does the theme of Sentiment & Sensibility refer to?

Answer 10

1. Sensibility and Moral sense
2. Sentimentalism/empathy vs. pure rationalism/selfishness (only if the two work together the human can be complete)
3. Abolitionism (Sensibility taken into political action)
4. Satires of Sentimentalism
5. Conduct Books (How should … act? Often written by men)

Question 11

What are the characteristics of tthe 18th century novel in England?

Answer 11

1. The ‘modern’ novel – breaking with traditions (romance, novella, picaresque narrative) (?)
2. ‘Circumstantial realism’ - Stories set in the here and now of the readership (Unbelievable plot endings are no longer in due to rationality) (Ian Watt)
3. The private experience turned public (using the form or diaries, letters, spiritual autobiographies [confessional writing…conversion from a-moral to perfect citizen]/conversion narratives, travelogues) (All of these formats are genres of privacy…Readers become voyeurs of other peoples laundry).
4. Displaying the active (and frequently failing), conscious, critical, developing self
5. From satire towards sensibility (= feeling + reason)
6. Lives in progress (history = story of human development processes)
7. Verisimilitude, authenticity (vs. Romance)
8. Excentricities as implicit validations of ‘normal’ behaviour.
9. Benevolance and harmony: Individual, Social and Natural
10. Burlesques and Classicisms (Voyeurism sold well and burlesque would attract people to the book stores [leads to sensationalism])
11. The sentimental novel in the 2nd half of the century.
12. The novel as a social panorama and proto-psychological analysis.
13. Authors were still experimenting with the possible forms of the “new” genre.

Question 12

What were themes of the epistolary novel?

Answer 12

Intimacy and the performance of exemplary morality (Young women abducted by noble man).

Question 13

What are characteristics of the American Post-Revolutionary Fiction?

Answer 13

1. Increasing distance from religious fervour in 18th century writing.
2. There was political writing (pamphlets) and poems during the revolution.

Question 14

What is the context of the American Post-Revolutionary Fiction?

Answer 14

The American Revolution and subsequent Wars of Independence 1775-1783

Question 15

What were the take-home messages after the sixth session?

Answer 15

1. 18th-century Britain saw the development of a modern society
2. The age of Enlightenment; tensions between classicist notions of harmony, moderation and stability on the one hand, and agency, adventure, and extremes on the other
3. The value systems, modes of communication and self-education of the middle classes came to dominate cultural production
4. In this context, the novel emerged as multifaceted popular genre, beside the ‘Augustan’ forms of literature (fictional and non-fictional)
5. The novel was more interested in ‘authenticity’ than previous prose fiction, but not ‘realist’ in our contemporary sense, and
   experimented with styles, themes, and narrative strategies.

Question 16

What were the three main notions in the 18th century?

Answer 16

1. The evolution of science
2. The rise of the middle class
3. The rise in production of literature

Question 17

How does consumer culture impact society?

Answer 17

The whole culture starts to turn around overproduction.
- Development of class consciousness (Working and Middle class)
- Bourgiosie tries to immitate the Nobles
- Introduction of the Proletariat
- Major social and cultural contrasts

Question 18

Who are the Wigs and Tories?

Answer 18

1. Wigs = non-conservative party
2. Tories = conservative party

Question 19

What is the Act of Union?

Answer 19

The creation of Great Britain by fusion of England and Scotland.

Question 20

Why did people hate the house of Hannover?

Answer 20

1. They were perceived as foreigners doing little against it.
   - George I wouldn’t learn English speaking only French (Thus he introduced a PM ro rule for them)
   - George II send many troops to England
   - George III lost the british american colonies
   - George IV was considered as “Mad George” (He was hated by the people as a fat personification of consumer culture). Due to his mental illness his son took over as prince regent (regency period).

Question 21

How did middle class style himself?

Answer 21

Gentility and Moderation:

1. Copies of aristocratic consumer culture became in.
2. Yet also trying to bring together gentility and moderation (because capitalism requires greed and greed is bad. A kind of Middle-class Selbstbeweihräucherung).

Question 22

What is typical of Sentimental Comedy characters?

Answer 22

1. Hero is morally impeccable.
2. Capitalistic pretention
3. Wit and intrigue is now a lower class characters affair.
4. Protagonists are often located within capitalist businesses.
5. Middle class is always morally good in comparison to the others.
6. The desires and demands of people have changed due to consumer culture.

Question 23

What were the characteristics of the beginning of the Enlightenment period?

Answer 23

1. Scientists were considered to be natural philosophers.
2. People started experimenting
3. The promotion of rational though lead to the promotion of the individual (Kant)
4. Empiricism
5. Royal society of sciences was founded by James II in 1660
6. Scientists had to fight the church on every ground challenging the belief of god as the allmighty ruler. This conflict shapes this era in its core.
7. Through secularization and loss of religion a new interest in how the world works was developed.

Question 24

In which sense was the public sphere an invention of the 18th century?

Answer 24

1. Middle class (and especially middle class wives had the leisure)
2. Women would be doing the shopping
3. To keep it modest there was a need for shopping windows to make sure nothing nasty happens in there
4. English coffee houses would become the main place of political discussion (as well as [mis-] information).
5. A self-education of the middle class was taking place.
6. Publishing a news paper was often done by individual authors (e.g. Defoe)
7. There were often tales of misbehavior by the upper class reinvigorating middle class readers in their belief and identity.
8. It was the age of virtue and moderation and you had to show off your control of instincts and impulses. Your moral superiority.

Question 25

What is Satire?

Answer 25

Going back to antiquity it is criticism (often social) by exageration.

Question 26

What is the notion of Sensibility?

Answer 26

Through our sense impressions we make the morally correct decisions. We inherently carry a morally good compass. (Easy to say for a capitalist and very wealthy middle class to legitimize any behavior)

Question 27

What does romance refer to?

Answer 27

To narratives told in the romans languages playing in portugal, spain, france and italy.

Question 28

What does Contingency (Zufälligkeit) refer to?

Answer 28

1. People at the time realised you must accept that things could also turn out differently.
2. Room for failure opens up.
3. Destiny becomes less prevelant in the world view (You can see this conflict in Crusoe imo)

Question 29

What are common features of Defoe’s writing?

Answer 29

1. Mix of sensation and conversion
2. Individuals in distress and the success of modern society; plain style, no ‘inside views’.
3. Often depicts “Underdogs” who shoe life from the view of those that haven’t made it yet.
4. Very little internal focalisation (Really?)
5. Claims truth to his tales.
6. He was also a journalist.
7. He wrote analogies of England moving into a life of middle class.
8. He wrote excuses for slavery.
9. He poured out imperialist ideologies.

Question 30

What is the function of the novel in the 18th century?

Answer 30

1. To affirm middle class belief systems and identity (Middle-class wanted to place itself as superior to the nobles).
2. The novel as a social panorama and proto-psychological analysis.

Question 31

What does the novel Pamela depict?

Answer 31

Middle class mentality and morality