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History of English Literature Jayatee Bhattacharya, Lovely Professional University

Notes Unit 7: The Restoration Period or Beginning of

Neoclassicism, Comedy of Manners

CONTENTS

Objectives
Introduction
7.1 Romanticism of Neoclassicism
7.2 Origins of Neoclassicism
7.3 Comedy of Manners
7.4 Summary
7.5 Keywords
7.6 Review Questions
7.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After Studying this unit, you will be able to:
Define romanticism of neoclassicism.
Explain origins of neoclassicism.
Describe comedy of manners.

Introduction
The English Neoclassical movement, predicated upon and derived from both classical and
contemporary French models, embodied a group of attitudes toward art and human existence —
ideals of order, logic, restraint, accuracy, “correctness,” “restraint,” decorum, and so on, which
would enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or reproduce the structures and themes of
Greek or Roman originals. Though its origins were much earlier (the Elizabethan Ben Jonson, for
example, was as indebted to the Roman poet Horace as Alexander Pope would later be),
Neoclassicism dominated English literature from the Restoration in 1660 until the end of the
eighteenth century, when the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge
marked the full emergence of Romanticism.
For the sake of convenience the Neoclassic period can be divided into three relatively coherent
parts: the Restoration Age (1660-1700), in which Milton, Bunyan, and Dryden were the dominant
influences; the Augustan Age (1700-1750), in which Pope was the central poetic figure, while
Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were presiding over the sophistication of the novel; and
the Age of Johnson (1750-1798), which, while it was dominated and characterized by the mind and
personality of the inimitable Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose sympathies were with the fading Augustan
past, saw the beginnings of a new understanding and appreciation of the work of Shakespeare, the
development, by Sterne and others, of the novel of sensibility, and the emergence of the Gothic
school — attitudes which, in the context of the development of a cult of Nature, the influence of
German romantic thought, religious tendencies like the rise of Methodism, and political events
like the American and French revolutions — established the intellectual and emotional foundations
of English Romanticism.

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