Literary History 2018

• art of preaching
• sermons trained listeners and are historical masterpieces regarding forms and tropes
• The Bay Psalm Book is the first book printed in British North America

•  armed conflict in 1675–78 between American Indian inhabitants of the New England region of North America versus New England colonists and their Indian allies
• wiped out Indian presence in America in Lancaster region
• The war is named for Metacomet, the Wampanoag chief who adopted the name Philip because of the friendly relations between his father Massasoit and the Mayflower Pilgrims. 
• The war continued in the most northern reaches of New England until the signing of the Treaty of Casco Bay in April 1678.

• Mary Rowlandson,  later Mary Talcott was a colonial American woman who was captured by Native Americans during King Philip's War and held for 11 weeks before being ransomed.
• In 1682, six years after her ordeal, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson was published.
• This text is considered a seminal American work in the literary genre of captivity narratives.
•  considered by some the first American "bestseller".

b. circa 1612, Northampton, England; d. 1672, Andover, Massachusetts 

The first Englishwoman to publish poetry in the American colonies, set sail in 1630 in the first great Puritan migration, accompanied by her parents and husband.

Sarah Kemble Knight (1666-1722) made a long and toilsome journey on horseback from Boston to New York -- an unusual thing for a woman to do back then.

Madame Knight was an independent 38-year-old widow of some means; a teacher and a businesswoman.

“In 1500, English was written by a small class of people in an island kingdom on the margin of Europe. By 1800, it was the language of a colonial system that stretched around the earth, from India and Australia to the Caribbean and New Foundland. The Atlantic rim, in particular, had become the scene of a complex Anglophone world.”

William Penn (14 October 1644 – 30 July 1718) was the son of Sir William Penn, and was an English real estate entrepreneur, philosopher, early Quaker, and founder of the English North American colony the Province of Pennsylvania.

He was an early advocate of democracy and religious freedom, notable for his good relations and successful treaties with the Lenape Native Americans. Under his direction, the city of Philadelphia was planned and developed.

Phillis Wheatley was the first published African-American female poet. 

Born in West Africa, she was sold into slavery at the age of seven or eight and transported to North America.

She was purchased by the Wheatley family of Boston, who taught her to read and write and encouraged her poetry when they saw her talent.

- Universe = highly ordered, rational

- empiricism: knowledge is derived from senses and experiences

- Jonathan Edwards: signs in nature of God's  Grace

- William Bartram drew nature to understand its order

- founding fathers created a new government based on rational, self-evident truths --> not the majority of American population could participate

 In 1740, Whitefield traveled to North America, where he preached a series of revivals that came to be known as the "Great Awakening". His methods were controversial and he engaged in numerous debates and disputes with other clergymen.

Common Sense is a pamphlet written by Thomas Paine in 1775–76 advocating independence from Great Britain to people in the Thirteen Colonies.

Written in clear and persuasive prose, Paine marshaled moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government.

It was published anonymously on January 10, 1776, at the beginning of the American Revolution, and became an immediate sensation.

The magazine, published from Philadelphia, was among the most prominent and ornate of the period: issues regularly included engravings, contemporary music, and essays, poetry, and fiction by eminent writers of the time.

• Arminianism

• Personal Rule

• Civil Wars

• Regicide

• Royalists

• Commonwealth, Protectorate, Interregnum

• Oliver Cromwell

• Charles I, Charles II, Duke of Monmouth, Earl of Shaftesbury, James II

• William of Orange and Queen Mary

• Act of Union

• 1603 death of Queen Elizabeth I, accession of James I (= James VI of Scotland); Union of the Crowns

• 1625 accession of Charles I

• Thirty Years’ War in continental Europe (1618-1648)

• Importance of confession for advancement (Arminianism)

• Religious, belief in the divine rights of kings

• Modelling court on Habsburg court ceremonial

• Patron of the arts (Van Dyck, Peter Paul Rubens)

• 1628 Petition of Rights (by Parliament)
  No taxes without consent of Parliament
  No imprisonment without cause
  No quartering of soldiers on subjects
  No martial law in times of peace

• 1629 Parliament dissolved

• 1629 – 1640: “Personal Rule”

• Conflict across the political spectrum, due to:

  — growing distrust of government

  — disagreement about ultimate political sovereignty

  — nomination of royal advisers

  — conflict over finances (king’s war loans declared illegal by chiefjustice)

• from 1637 serious political unrest flaring up across the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland.

• 1642 beginning of the Civil War 
  – king’s army against rebellion in Ireland (but serious conflict began earlier, 1637/39)

• 1645, Battle of Naseby: blow to royalist forces

• 1646 king caught and arrested

• 1649 trial of the King, executed 30 January
  — March: Monarchy and House of Lords abolished
  — May: England declared a Commonwealth

• considered worst of possible crimes
• On 30 January 1649, King Charles I was beheaded outside Banqueting House in Whitehall. The assembled crowd is reported to have groaned as the axe came down.
• Although the monarchy was later restored in 1660, the execution of Charles I destroyed the idea of an all-powerful and unquestionable monarch.

• “The Interregnum”: 1649-1660

• extremely violent time; promises that were made as a part of the revolution were not kept

• Charles II crowned at Scone in 1651, but fled to France

• Oliver Cromwell, general and later Lord Protector

• Political power: a Council of State, the Rump Parliament, and the army

• The military as a permanent part of English government

• Slow or no political reforms

• Diverse constitution of Parliament: pragmatic men, visionaries, utopian idealists, social reformers, agrarian communists, mystics, Society of Friends (Quakers)

• 1652: Rump Parliament dissolved by Cromwell

• 1653 power returned to Cromwell as Lord Protector (when Cromwell died, the commonwealth fell apart, was repeatedly offered the crown but refused)

• Protectorate based on the first British constitution

• Reform, but continuing discontent and opposition within Parliament, disputes

• Social legislation against swearing, drunkenness, and stage plays introduced

• Principle of religious liberty, but monitored by Christian magristrate, and only for variants of Protestant faith

• Nevertheless, religious tolerance: Catholics profited from repeal of laws, less persecuted

• Against licentiousness and sexual freedom => penalised

• A “reformation of manners” supervised by the military: 
  imposition of strict Puritan codes of social and sexual conduct
  (unpopular, soon abolished again)

• 1658 Death of Cromwell, power vacuum

• Civil government resembled monarchy: new House of Lord, court of Whitehall as ceremonious as Stuart court

• 1660 Parliament dissolved itself – prepared the stage for restoration of the monarchy

• Hope for stability and peace after 2 decades of wars and unrest

• Problems of civil wars still unsolved

• Conflicts between the three kingdoms, radical differences in religious and political affiliation, international conflicts in relation with colonial expansion

• But: comparatively peaceful treatment of these issues

• Demonization of Cromwell

• Career and poetry: classical tradition!

• Perfected and transformed genres: pastoral, masque, sonnet, epic

• Puritan, supporter of Cromwell; defended regicide

• Wrote and worked for Cromwell’s government

• Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (April 1660):
  essay directed against restoration of monarchytwo weeks prior to Charles II’s return

• Paradise Lost (1667)

• —  Charles, 1660, granted religious tolerance (“liberty to tender consciences”)

• —  But Parliament didn’t: Act of Uniformity, 1662

• Act of Uniformity excluded both radical Protestants (e.g. Presbyterians) and Roman Catholics

• Political context: Exclusion Crisis

• Points to the great topicality of Restoration literature

• Merging of the literary and the political

• Restoration literature requires familiarity with political context, can seem inaccessible

• Biblical analogue (David and Absalom) used to distance contemporary events and to endow them with additional dignity

• Famous for blending of heroic style and satire, portrayals of contemporary figures involved, for temptation scene, analysis of the current crisis

• stanza form: heroic couplets (rhymed iambic pentameter expressed ideal balance)

• 1685 Death of Charles II – accession of James II, Catholic

• 1688 James II declared he would raise heir as Roman Catholic => Whig and Tory opposition

• “Glorious Revolution”
  — House of Lords invited William of Orange (Holland) and his wife Mary Stuart (daughter of James II) to intervene.

  — William and Mary ascended to throne – for the length of their lives only

• 1701 Act of Settlement to provide for Protestant succession –House of Hanover

• Queen Anne

• 1703 Act of Security: attempt by Scotland to elect their own monarch

• 1707 Act of Union: formal merging of Scottish and English Parliaments – Great Britain

• Looks back to English past, but also models itself on European trends

• Search for an English style

• Development of ideal of a plain and rational prose style

• Baroque aesthetics

• Heroic plays

• Topicality of poetry

• Manuscript culture

• Catachresis: the use of a word in a sense remote from its normal meaning, extension of meaning in a surprising and illogical manner
• Hyperbole: Exaggeration for the sake of emphasis, not meant literally, As inflated dramatic style of speech: “bombast”

• 1642 theatres closed by Parliament.

• Other, shorter forms of entertainment developed, such as dances or comedies which were performed, sometimes illegally, on improvised stages.

• A droll: a short theatrical scene, usually comic, taken and adapted from existing popular plays.

• Quasi-performances: “declamations” interspersed with instrumental music and songs, story in recitative music, performed in hired spaces (=> development of the English dramatic tradition of the opera)

• Indoor theatre
  — With proscenium stage and perspective scenery
  — Acting mainly in front of proscenium arch (asides!)

• Dramatic opera

• Caroline censorship scheme restored:
  — Master of the Revels
  — Surveyor of the Press

• Royal Patent: Thomas Killigrew and the King’s Men (Theatre Royal, Drury Lane) and William Davenant and the Duke’sMen

• Normalisation of women acting

• Most original innovation of Restoration drama

• Stylised vocal delivery

• Heroic couplets, some blank verse

• Historical or mythical plots – as expressions of ideological conflict

• Spiritual void: anti-clerical, anti-Christian

• Sensationalist, verging on the surreal— E.g. Nathaniel Lee’s Nero (1675)

• Style and plot: the extreme verging on the absurd

• But also: action suspended for scholastic disputations

• Rewriting of older plays

• Often as “machine plays” (involving much stage machinery)

• Expansion of musical element

• Changing world view, changing aesthetic values

• Analysis of social behaviour – satire, farcical

• Focus on upper classes and their power struggles

• Wit and manners used as social weapons – conversational brilliance, elegance and artificiality

• Pace of performance is fast!

• Human nature: selfish, false, obscenity, sexual intrigues, pleasure and exploitation

• Men and women portrayed as equally exploitative

• Double entendre; asides used for comic effect and to expose hypocrisy

• Concerned with court and city and a new style of living

• Plays as a form of philosophical interrogation

• Exploration of pressure of constant exposure to pleasure and

  company on institutions such as courtship and marriage

• How to maximise pleasure without behavioural excess?

• Central question: how are identities, hierarchies and relationships to be established within the new social formation of the town?

• Recurrent themes that engage with this:

  — country innocent newly arrived in town – learns lesson or fails

  — inappropriate commitment to country virtues (frankness, honesty, fidelity in a milieu which operates on the premises of distrust and self-disguise)

• Darker tone in 1690s

• Romance genre: quest structure

• novel works to establish its “realism”

• Epic: extended fictional narrative in verse, looks backward; novel: extended fictional narrative in prose, concerned with the contemporary

• Travelogue: era of exploration, colonisation, empire-building
  (Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe, 1719; Jonathan Swift –Gulliver’s Travels, 1726)

Invokes various genres

• Memoir (personal account of what narrator heard and saw)

• Travel narrative (new colony – Africa – Middle Passage)

• Biography (of Oroonoko – hero)

• Novel as genre involved with empire building from inception

• Abolitionism

• Tragic hero

• Colony as broken paradise

• Collapse of distinctions between friend – foe, tenderness –brutality, savageness – civilisation; values, European treachery

• Taught audiences to feel with and for victims of slave trade