Neo Classical Age

 Thinking Activity

The Neo-Classical Age

                                   

• The Neo classical age is divided into three periods.

The restoration age  (1660-1700)

The Augustan age  (1700-1750)

The age of Johnson (1750-1798)

• Neo classical Age is also known as : 

                     The Augustan Age

                     The 18th century literature

                     The Age of prose 

                     The Age of Reason

                     The Age of Enlightenment

                     The Age of satire

                     The Age of sensibility

 

* Write in brief about your favourite Poet of Neo-classical age

                                Jonathan Swift

    " Learn hence for ancient rules a  

                    just esteem;

       To nature copy is to copy them".

                                 -Alexander pope ( An essay on criticism). 

                      

               Jonathan Swift was born in 1667 and died in 1745. He was born in Dublin. He was an Anglo-Irish satirist, Author, Essayist, Political pamphleteer and poet. Jonathan Swift best known for Gulliver’s Travels. His first Major Works, A Tale of Tub (1704), The Battle of Books(1704), Gulliver’s Travel(1726). . His father's name was also Jonathan Swift and he was an attorney. When his father died his mother gave him to his uncle, Godwin Smith. 

                        Besides the celebrated novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726), he wrote such shorter works as A Tale of a Tub (1704) and “A Modest Proposal” (1729). 

 

                 Jonathan Swift was born in 1667, on the 30th of November.  His father was Jonathan Swift, sixth of the ten sons of the Rev. Thomas Swift, vicar of Goodrich, near Ross, in Herefordshire, who had married Elizabeth Dryden, niece to the poet Dryden’s grandfather.  Jonathan Swift married, at Leicester, Abigail Erick, or Herrick, who was of the family that had given to England Robert Herrick, the poet.  As their eldest brother, Godwin, was prospering in Ireland, four other Swifts, Dryden, William, Jonathan, and Adam, all in turn found their way to Dublin.  Jonathan was admitted an attorney of the King’s Inns, Dublin, and was appointed by the Benchers to the office of Steward of the King’s Inns, in January, 1666.  He died in April, 1667, leaving his widow with an infant daughter, Jane, and an unborn child.

                                          

                        “A Tale of a Tub” is the most impressive of the three compositions. This work is outstanding for its exuberance of satiric wit and energy and is marked by an incomparable command of stylistic effects, largely in the nature of parody. Swift saw the realm of culture and literature threatened by zealous pedantry, while religion—which for him meant rational Anglicanism—suffered attack from both Roman Catholicism and the Nonconformist (Dissenting) churches. 

                             

                          Gulliver’s Travels is a first-person narrative that is told from the point of view of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon and sea captain who visits remote regions of the world, and it describes four adventures. In the first one, Gulliver is the only survivor of a shipwreck, and he swims to Lilliput, where he is tied up by people who are less than 6 inches (15 cm) tall. He is then taken to the capital city and eventually released. The Lilliputians’ small size mirrors their small-mindedness. 

                            

              "The Battle of the Books" is the name of a short satire written by Jonathan Swift and published as part of the prolegomena to his A Tale of a Tub in 1704. Because of the satire, "The Battle of the Books" has become a term for the Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. 

                                                  

 

     * The 18th century Women Poets.

                    Aphra Behn(1640-1689)

                        

                                 

                Aphra Behn was an English playwright, poet, prose writer and translator from the Restoration era. As one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing, she broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. 

       Aphra Behn was the first English woman to earn her living solely by her pen. The most prolific dramatist of her time, she was also an innovative writer of fiction and a translator of science and French romance.   

                                

              The novelist Virginia Woolf wrote, “All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn . . . For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” Minds and bodies. Behn was a lyrical and erotic poet, expressing a frank sexuality that addressed such subjects as male impotence, female orgasm, bisexuality and the indeterminacies of gender.

 

                 Jane Austen (1775-1817)

                                

 

       Jane Austen was  the greatest novelist of English Literature. She was born on 16 December 1775 and Died on 18 July 1817. In those times , No woman writer published her work and also wrote domestic novels. Jane Austen was born in a Middle class Family and she had also one handed experience of middle class family, their problems and customs. So, we can see the issue of middle class family and problems of women in her time. 

 

•        Her Notable Works:

Six major novels of Jane Austen are as here: 

• Sense and Sensibility

• Pride and Prejudice

• Mansfield Park

• Emma

• Northanger Abbey

• Persuasion

 

 

                  Jane Austen vividly depicted the English middle class life during the early 19th century. She published four novels during her lifetime and two others novels were published after her death. 

 

 

Thank You… . 

 

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