British History and Literature

Theodicy is defined as a theological construct that attempts to vindicate God in response to the problem of evil that appears inconsistent with the existence of an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God.

• The question of how God can love us, when there is os much suffering in the world
• Justification of God's behaviour 

She wanted to climb the Chain of Being by gaining knowledge

He didn't wanna leave Eve alone

Because there were two revolutions

• Age of Augustus
• Neo-classicism
• Age of Enlightenment
• Age of reason

• Major mode in 18th century literature
• Comes from an aggressive attitude
• Seems harmless, but is deadly

• Horation: Light-hearted, funny
• Juvenalian: Cruel, Exaggerated and ironic 

Juvenalian Prose Satire

1. Counter-reaction to drama
2. Growing literacy
3. Women literacy
4. Technological advance in book printing
5. Introduction of public libraries
6. Interest in realism

1. Fictional biography
2. Gothic novel
3. Historical novel
4. Epistolary novel
5. Picaresque novel

• Artist turns his inner pain outside and is despair
  • One aspect of romanticism, poet who has made all the experiences, who knows what the world should be like, knows what the world is like

Somebody who experienced everything in life, but only wants the love of the woman he loved. Nothing matters to him anymore and he becomes cynical.

• Wordsworth
• Coleridge
• Blake

• Byron,
• Shelly
• Keats

• Stability, colonies, infrastructure, science, Protestantism, Urbanization

Retreating from public life and concentrating on a small family nucleus 

Greatest benefit for the greatest number of people 

• Coined by Oscar Wilde
• Art has to be nothing but aesthetically pleasing

An extended metaphor 

• Fabliau: man convinces woman in 3 minutes to have sex with him
• Romance: man convinces woman in 30 years to have sex with him 

Jokes about Sex and Scatology (excrements etc.) 

-> medieval people loved these kind of jokes 

Neo-Platonism is the Christianisation of Plato and is based on the thought, that the world of ideas becomes heaven and heaven is the only place, where true perfection is found. With love, one can be closer to heaven

In English Protestantism, there are Protestant work ethics. You have to work hard for succes, because each individual is responsible for themselves. There is also the belief in predestination: God chooses some people for the hope of life and decides to put others in eternal death. The only way to find out which group you belong to is to have succes in life, which is why people were always working so hard

• First popular in France
• Was about writing love lyrics
• New literary movement, where woman were addressed as superior beings
• The poet is happy only if the woman loves him
• This movement did not mirror reality

E.g.: in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" King Arthur has dinner with his knights, which is an indicator to a more "personal relationship".

• Exploits it by convincing Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge 
• Goes to paradise in the shape of a serpent and shows Eve that he, after eating from the tree, can speak like a human being 
  • Although he is an animal and therefore subordinate to humans

Copy those who were the best at copying nature, so the Latins and the Greeks

• Seen as a transformative process
• Art was the expression of the imagination
  • Artists had more imagination than the others
• Was used to present normal things in an unusual way 
  • Associate ideas in a state of excitement

• General literary rose
  • People had to provide new reading materials for the new readers (mainly women)
• Progress in technology 
  • Books could be printed cheaper than before
• Rise of the middle class
  • Established a democratic movement
• Public libraries 
  • You couöd now borrow books more easily

• Colonies
• Science
• Coal
• Infrastructure
• Enclosure
• Protestanism

• Art never expresses anything but itself
• Life imitates art far more than art imitates life
• Lying and telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of art
• The content of art is irrelevant, but it needs to be beautiful

• It took more than 100 years to start the Christianisation in England
• Celts: Christianised in the 5th century
• Columba, a Scottish priest (Irish free church), started the Christianisation of Britain from the North and the Roman-Catholic church from the south
• The Christianisation of England by Augustine and his followers went rather smoothly 
• Advantage: men were married to already Christian (continental) woman, so it was easier to convince them
• Augustine did not destroy important pagan shrines of the Anglo-Saxons, instead he gave those symbols a new meaning
  • Forced to adopt new worldview/ideology
  • New language, chance of old words via adding new meaning
    • Concept of euhemerismn

Speaker loves a woman, who does not love him back, makes him despair

Misogyny and courtly love

• The protagonist of a Shakespearean tragedy commits an error of judgement which leads to a certain action 
• This action produces inevitability the further actions until the protagonist dies

• In Othello the characters flaw is his inferiority complex/jealousy
• He thought that a white woman would not love him because of his descent and kills her
• He did not believe his wife and killed her
• He kills himself in the end

• Deductive method: 
  • Based on authorities 
  • Somebody set something and you were not allowed to question it
• Inductive method:
  • Based on experiment
  • When you question something, you have to do your own research

• Parliament has the power to pick the monarch who is not chosen by God 
• Glorious Revolution took place from 1688 to 1689 in England
• Involved the overthrow of the catholic King James II, because of the fear that England would become Catholic agai
• Replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband, William of Orange