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The
Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (1660-1785)
1.
概論General Introduction and
2. 時代背景Historical Background
The
England to which Charles Stuart returned in 1660 was a nation
divided against itself, exhausted by twenty years of civil wars
and revolution. Early in Charles’s reign, the people were
visited by two frightful calamities that seemed to the
superstitious to be the work of a divine Providence outraged by
rebellion and regicide: the plague of 1665, carried off over
seventy thousand souls in London alone, and in September 1666, a
fire that raged for four days destroyed a large part of the City
(more than thirteen thousand houses), leaving about two-thirds
of the population homeless. Yet the nation rose from its ashes,
in the century that followed, to become an empire. The Glorious
Revolution of 1688-89 established a rule of law, and the Act of
Union of 1707, a political alliance, under which England was
transformed into Great Britain in fact as well as name—a large
country to which people of widely differing backgrounds and
origins felt they owed allegiance.
Many
scholars think of it as properly three discrete literary eras: the
Restoration (1660-1700), dominated by Dryden; the Age of
Satire (1700-1745), dominated by Swift and Pope; and the
Age of Johnson (1745-1790), dominated not only by Johnson
but by a new kind of poetry and a major new literary form, the
novel. n the era of the Restoration, Dryden’s occasional
verse, comedy, blank verse tragedy, heroic play, ode, satire,
translation, and critical essay and both his example and his
precepts had great influence. In the Age of Satire, the
literature is chiefly a literature of wit, concerned with
civilization and social relationships, and consequently, it is
critical and in some degree moral or satiric. Some of the finest
works of this period are mock heroic or humorous burlesques of
serious classic or modern modes.
A
morbid fascination with death, suicide, and the grave
preoccupies the poets of mid-century. In the typical
Gothic romance, set amid the glooms and intricacies of a
medireview castle, the laws of nightmare replace the laws of
probability. Forbidden themes—incest, murder,
necrophilia, atheism, and the torments of sexual desire—are
allowed free play; repressed feelings, morbid fears rise to the
surface of the narrative. The modern novel came into
existence in this century. To a large extent, the development of
the novel is identical with the attempt to interest the growing
number of female readers by shaping their lives into literature.
文體介紹Vocabulary,
Language and Style
Comedy
of manners—its concern is to
bring the moral and social behavior of its characters to the
test of comic laughter. The male hero lives not for
military glory but for pleasure and the conquests that he can
achieve in his amorous campaigns. The object of his very
practical game of sexual intrigue is a beautiful, witty,
pleasure-loving, and emancipated lady, every bit his equal in
the strategies of love. The two are distinguished not for virtue
but for the true wit and well-bred grace with which they conduct
the often complicated intrigue that makes up the plot.
Mock-Heroic/Mock
Epic—A poem in Epic form and manner ludicrously elevating
some trivial subject to epic grandeur, juxtaposing high/grand
style and low/trivial subject, to make fun of somebody or
something.
The
Augustan Poets —A special
feature of eighteenth-century poetic language is its emphasis on
visualizing or personifying. Critics of the time all
argued that poets showed their genius best by imagining or
seeing what they wrote about (not by facility with words or
forms or abstract ideas); and readers were skilled at making
pictures from very small hints.
Text
Source: http://www.liu.se/isk/eng/cs/cs2home5.html#Art |
John
Dryden |
