Neoclassicism

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Neoclassicism

• aka
• The Age of Reason
• The Enlightenment

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Definition

• Neoclassicism is a literary movement of the 17th
  and 18th centuries that stressed the importance
  of using ancient Greek and Roman (the Classical
  period) literature as a guide for creation and
  criticism.
• Hence, there is the paradox of the term neo,
  meaning new and classicism, meaning oldness.

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The Pendulum of Western Literature

• Literature in the Western world can be thought of
  as swinging back and forth between two artistic
  ideals classicism, which stresses following
  tradition and the rules derived thereof, and
  anti-classicism (or romanticism), which stresses
  originality and breaking tradition.
• The Neoclassical period of the 17th and 18th
  centuries was a particularly strong classical
  period. It would, in turn, be followed by a
  particularly strong Romantic period in the latter
  18th and early 19th century.

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Aesthetics of Identity vs. Aesthetics of
Opposition

• This pendulum swing can also be thought in terms
  of the aesthetics of identity versus the
  aesthetics of opposition.
• Aesthetics is the study of beauty in this case,
  beauty in literature
• The aesthetics of identity says that we find
  beauty in the familiar we like art that is like
  what we have seen before. Thus, classicism is an
  aesthetics of identity.
• The aesthetics of opposition says that we find
  beauty in that which is new and different. That
  is the creed of the romantic artist.

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Basic Characteristics of Neoclassicism

• Imitation of the ancients
• Aesthetics of identity
• Rules for all art forms
• Literature as an art/craft
• Importance of reason
• Concern about pride
• Universal nature of humanity
• Perfectibility of humanity

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1 -- Reverence and Imitation of the Ancients

• The explanation of that paradox can be found in
  the first important characteristic of
  neoclassicism.
• It found its artistic models in the classical
  literature of the ancient Greek and Roman writers
  like Homer, Virgil, Horace, etc. and in the
  contemporary French writers such as Voltaire and
  Diderot. It put the stress on the classical
  artistic ideal of order, logic, proportion,
  restrained emotion, accuracy, good taste, and
  decorum.

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Who were those authors again?

• Homer Greek epic poet the Iliad and the Odyssey
• Virgil Roman poet. His greatest work is the epic
  poem Aeneid, which tells of the wanderings of
  Aeneas after the sack of Troy
• Horace Roman lyric poet. His Odes and Satires
  have exerted a major influence on English poetry.
• Voltaire French philosopher and writer whose
  works epitomize the Age of Enlightenment, often
  attacking injustice and intolerance. He wrote
  Candide (1759) and the Philosophical Dictionary
  (1764).
• Diderot French philosopher and writer whose
  supreme accomplishment was his work on the
  Encyclopédie (1751-1772), which epitomized the
  spirit of Enlightenment thought. He also wrote
  novels, plays, critical essays, and brilliant
  letters to a wide circle of friends and
  colleagues.

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Reverence and Imitation of the Ancients

• They believed that writers should strive to
  achieve excellence by imitating those great
  writers of the past, not by trying to be original
  or innovative.
• Thus, art is rediscovery, reinvention, and
  imitation.

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The Neoclassical Era is actually divided into
three ages

• 1660-1700 is the Age of Dryden
• This 40 year period is also called the
  Restoration b/c Charles II has been restored to
  the crown
• John Dryden is especially known for satirical
  poems. They included unflattering portraits of
  real people of his time and used lofty, heroic
  language, so theyre called mock heroic or mock
  epic poems.
• He was the poet laureate and wrote several
  celebratory poems for royal and other public
  events.

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More on the Age of Dryden

• Prose is the dominant style which flourished
  during this time, so lots of authors were writing
  essays. Drydens series of essays about drama
  laid the foundation for British literary
  criticism. These, along with his translations of
  Plutarch and other prose compositions, represent
  what many literary historians consider the first
  modern prose they are clear, plain, direct, and
  colloquial in tone.
• One of the most famous prose works of the time
  was Samuel Pepys (peeps!) journal which began in
  1660 and covered the plague of 1665 and the Great
  Fire of London. (They ask about this guy a lot
  on Jeopardy.)

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The Age of Pope and Swift

• Early 1700s to 1744ish
• Major Political people and parties
• Queen Anne (who makes a rather unflattering guest
  appearance in Gullivers Travels)
• Two parties the liberal Whigs and the
  conservative Tories came into being. However
  another party also existed, the Jacobites, who
  aimed to bring the Stuarts back to the throne.
• George I and his government also play a major
  role in GT, especially in book I, where many
  allegorical characters appear.

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More in the Pope and Swift Era

• Famous stylistic elements wit, aphorisms,
  epigrams, antithesis, rhyming couplets, great
  fondness for satire
• First literary periodicals appear The Tatler,
  The Spectator. Written by Joseph Addison and
  Richard Steele (famous names!), these one-page
  papers included crisply written reflective essays
  and news. The essays quickly became models for
  other prose writers
• First English novel published Robinson Crusoe by
  Daniel Defoe in 1719
• That novel led the way to other types of novels
  such as

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Types of Novels

• Gothic novel the novel which exploits the
  possibilities of mystery and terror in gloomy
  landscapes, decaying mansions with dark dungeons,
  secret passages, instruments of torture, ghostly
  visitations ghostly music behind which lurks no
  one knows what as the central story, the
  persecution of a beautiful maiden by an obsessed
  and haggard villain. The real originator of
  English Gothic novel was Horace Walpole, with his
  famous Castle of Otranto (1764) .
• These novels, which rebel against the increasing
  commercialism and rationalism of the era, opened
  up to later fiction the dark, irrational side of
  human nature.

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More Types of Novels

• Epistolary novel a type of novel in which the
  narrative is carried on through a series of
  letters. Samuel Richardsons Pamela (1740) and
  Clarissa Harlowe (1748) are among the best known
  epistolary novels.
• These can be classified into two kinds the
  monologue epistolary novel and the dialogue
  epistolary novel

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The Age of Johnson

• 1744ish to 1798
• Alexander Pope died in 1744 and Swift in 1745, so
  the dominant figure of the next generation was
  Samuel Johnson, who wrote poetry, literary
  criticism, and a novel, but what hes known for
  is writing a dictionary.
• Yes, a dictionary Dictionary of the English
  Language, in 1755. His definitions are amusing
  and witty.
• Patron One who countenances, supports or
  protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with
  insolence, and is paid with flattery.
• Hatchet-face An ugly face such, I suppose, as
  might be hewn out of a block by a hatchet.

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Age of Johnson

• Another big name of the era is James Boswell
  because he is known for writing the biography of
  Dr. Samuel Johnson. It gives a vivid portrait
  not only of Johnson but of life in London in the
  1700s.
• Though the other slide had epistolary novels on
  it (b/c I was doing this whole novels section),
  Pamela and Clarissa were actually of this era.
  They were written by Samuel Richardson.
• Authors to know in case youre on Jeopardy and
  the category is The Age of Reason Henry
  Fielding, who wrote Tom Jones, and Lawrence
  Sterne, who wrote Tristram Shandy, which I dont
  recommend unless you like experimental novels
  that get carried away with their own wittiness.

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The Transition of an Era the PreRomantics

• The pendulum begins its major swing to the other
  sidesome of this began around 1750, when Britain
  was launched on a course of rapid
  industrialization w/the development of mills and
  factories belching filth into the skyfamilies
  start moving to the cities and toil at machines
  for 12-14 hours a day
• Writers and intellectuals began to lose faith in
  the ability of human reason to solve every
  problem. The thinkers in this Age had looked to
  science to make life better for humanity (see G.
  Travels, book 3), yet at what cost comes this
  progress?
• William Blake, Thomas Gray, and Robert Burns are
  the poets who exemplify the transition from the
  formal, classical poetic styles of the early 18th
  century to the more emotional manner of the
  romantic era.

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End of the ?
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2 -- Aesthetics of Identity

• Aesthetics is the study of beauty in this case,
  beauty in literature.
• There are two conflicting views on aesthetics
  the aesthetics of identity and the aesthetics of
  opposition.
• The aesthetics of identity is when we find beauty
  in those works of art that are familiar to us,
  while the aesthetics of opposition is when we
  find beauty in the new and the different.

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Aesthetics of Identity

• By looking back to the ancient world for
  standards, the neoclassical writer was working
  within the aesthetics of identity.

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3 -- Rules for Art

• Neoclassical writers believed there were rules
  for all forms of art.
• These rules were derived by looking at the texts
  from the ancient world.

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Rules for Art

• For example, in France in 1635, Cardinal
  Richelieu established the Academie Francaise to
  establish rules for the use of the French
  language and to preserve the purity of the
  language.
• The Academy is still a powerful organization in
  France.

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4 -- Literature as Art

• Neoclassical writers tended to view literature as
  something artificial or artificed, something
  created by craft and study.
• Thus, craft and study are more important than
  talent or genius.

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5 -- Importance of Reason

• The most important human faculty was reason.
• Reason was the spark of the divine within human
  beings.
• The path to knowledge and virtue was through the
  exercise of reason.

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Importance of Reason

• For example, one of the important religious
  movements of the Neoclassical age was the Deist
  movement.
• Deism is a completely rational form of
  Christianity.

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Deism

• Traced from Lord Herberts De Veritate in 1624,
  Deists believed
• Nature is the inherent order of the universe (The
  Great Chain of Being).
• God is the clockmaker who built this perfect
  universe to work according to certain immutable
  laws.
• God does not perform miracles and did not tinker
  with the watch after its creation.
• The Bible is a great moral authority, but all
  irrational aspects within it (such as miracles
  and the divinity of Christ) are superstitions.
• Reason guides men to virtue

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6 -- Concern About Pride

• The greatest bane to reason and the greatest
  danger to humanity is pride.
• All sins, in some fashion or another, are sins of
  pride.

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7 -- Universality

• People are the same, no matter what country or
  age in which they live.

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8 -- Perfectabilty

• Perfection (artistic, personal, social) is
  possible through the proper use of reason.