Major Concepts and Genres: the Eighteenth Century

The Eighteenth Century: Major Concepts and Genres

Providers: Marguerite Connor / 康慕婷; Cecilia Liu / 劉雪珍;

Kate Liu / 劉紀雯; Raphael Schulte / 蕭迪雷

Vocabulary, Language and Style
The Eighteenth-Century Poetry

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

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The Eighteenth-Century Poetry

Disciplined Invention: "The poet must have 'invention,' the gift of finding materials for his poems--fictional, but representative, images of human actions and of the world in which those actions take place; and he must vivify, heighten, and order those materials that they seem true pictures of what is, or might or ought to be, or of the evil and folly that we should avoid.

Nature--the universal, permanent, and representative elements in the moral and intellectual experience of men. External nature--the landscape--both as a source of aesthetic pleasure and as an object of scientific inquiry or religious contemplation attracted the attention of Englishmen throughout the 18th century, But Pope's injunction to the critic, 'First follow Nature,' has primarily human nature and human experience in view." Scientifically, Newton also reinforced the idea of Nature as order.(1685)

Wit--quickness and liveliness of mind, inventiveness, a readiness to perceive resemblances between things apparently unlike and so to enliven literary discourse with appropriate images, similes, and metaphors. An excess of imagination was considered dangerous to sanity, and in literature to lead away from Nature and truth to falsehood and such violent and farfetched conceits as we find in the poetry of Donne of Crashaw at their boldest. One task of the age was to tame what seemed the wildness of metaphysical wit into the more reasonable and decorous wit ...So Pope insists in the Essay on Criticism ll. 80-83, on the necessity of a harmonious union of judgment and fancy (which he calls "wit") in a work of literature. (1687)

Heroic Couplet
"The simplest form of stanza is the couplet; it is simply two lines rhyming together. . . . when [a single couplet] includes a complete unified thought, ending with a terminal mark of punctuation, it is called a closed couplet. [Heroic couplet] is a strictly iambic pentameter couplet, strongly end-stopped, and with the couplets prevailingly closed. Heroic couplets generally are varied by means of a decided caesura (strongly grammatical pause within a line), and limited to precisely ten syllables per line. The heroic couplet is the principle form of English neoclassical style("Poetic Forms and Literary Terminology" The Norton Anthology of English Literature vol. 1. 3rd ed. p. 2471).

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(external) English Literature I: the Eighteenth Century;English Literature and Culture From Medieval Period to the Eighteenth Century;Introduction to Literature, Spring 1999 (Ray);Introduction to Literature: Society and Identity (Kate)