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Performer - Culture & LiteratureMarina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2012
Shaping the English character
Bartholomew Dandridge,
A Lady reading Belinda beside
a fountain, 1745. Yale Center for
British Art, New Haven
Shaping the English character
• Queen Anne (1702–1714) had succeeded her brother-in-law, William III, and her sister Mary.
• After her death, her cousin, the Duke of Hanover, became King George I.
During his reign:
1. the powers of the monarchy diminished;
2. Ministers met without the King in the cabinet led by the Prime Minister;
3. the actual power was held by Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister.
1. The first Hanoverian king
Performer - Culture&Literature
George I, c. 1714
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
2. The House of Hanover
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
The majority of Scots accepted their new role in a kingdom united under the title Great Britain.
A renewal of Scottish nationalism must await the 20th century.
3. 1707: The Act of Union
It abolished the Scottish Parliament
It gave the Scots a proportion of the seats at Westminster
The Act of Union
became official during Queen Anne’s reign
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
4. The Whigs and the Tories
The Whigs
Descendants ParliamentariansSupported by the wealthy and commercial classesFought for commercial development a vigorous foreign policy religious toleration
The Tories
Descendants RoyalistsSupported by the Church of England the landownersFought for the divine right of the king
The first political parties in Britain
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
The 18th-century key concepts were:• political stability;
• individualism;
• liberal thought and free will;
• optimism;
• reason and common sense;
• desire for balance, symmetry, refinement.
5. A golden age
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
6. The reading public
The increase of the reading public in the Augustan Age was due to
The growing importance of the
middle class
The individual’s trust in his own
abilities
The practice of reason and self-analysis
Most readers were
middle-class women
They used to borrow books
from circulating libraries
Coffee-houses allowed the
circulation of news, opinions
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
6. The reading public
Coffee-houses
1. were attended by fashionable and artistic people;
2. became gathering points where people exchanged ideas and gossip;
3. let public opinion and journalism evolve;
4. were exclusively attended by men.
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
6. The reading public
where the belief in the power of reason and the individual’s trust in his own abilities found expression
‘The Tatler’and‘The Spectator’the first English newspapersTheir style simple, livelyTheir aim didactic
The interest of middle-class people in literature gave rise to
journalism the novel
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
7. The novelist
1. The spokesman of the middle class.
2. The fathers of the English novel:• Daniel Defoe the realistic novel• Samuel Richardson the sentimental novel• Henry Fielding the mock-epic novel• Jonathan Swift the satirical novel
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
8. The novelist’s aim
• To be understood widely He wrote in a simple way.
• Realism not only linked to the life presented, but to the way it was shown.
• Speed and copiousness His most important economic virtues since it was the bookseller and not the patron who rewarded him.
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
9. The characters
The heroA bourgeois, self-made,
self-reliant man
The reader is expected to sympathise with him
The mouthpiece of the author
They struggle for survival or
social success
have contemporary names and surnames
RobinsonCrusoe
All the characters
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
10. The setting
• Chronological sequence of events.• References to particular times of the year or of the day.
‘I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York’
Robinson Crusoe
• Specific references to names of countries, towns and streets.
• Detailed descriptions of interiors to make the narrative more realistic.
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
11. The narrative technique
1ST-PERSON NARRATOR
3RD-PERSON NARRATOR
PATTERN
Daniel DefoeFictional
autobiographies
Samuel Richardson
Letters exchanged
between the main characters
Henry FieldingThe mock-epic
style
Shaping the English character
Performer - Culture&Literature
12. Themes
1. Real life.
1. Everything that could alter a social status.
1. The sense of reward and punishment
linked to the Puritan ethics of the middle class.