Page 68 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

Unit 9: The Augustan Age or the Triumph of Neoclassicism (Age of Prose and Reason)

Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1714). In The Rape of the Lock, often considered one of the highest Notes
achievements of mock epic poetry, the heroic action of epic is maintained, but the scale is sharply
reduced. The hero’s preparation for combat is transposed to a fashionable boat ride up the Thames,
and the ensuing battle is a card game. The hero steals the titular lock of hair while the heroine is
pouring coffee.
Although the mock epic mode is most commonly found in poetry, its influence was also felt in
drama, most notably in John Gay’s most famous work, The Beggar’s Opera (1728). The Beggar’s
Opera ludicrously mingles elements of ballad and Italian opera in a satire on Sir Robert Walpole,
England’s prime minister at the time. The vehicle is opera, but the characters are criminals and
prostitutes. Gay’s burlesque of opera was an unprecedented stage success and centuries later
inspired the German dramatist Bertolt Brecht to write one of his best-known works, Die
Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928).
One of the most well-known mock epic works in prose from this period is Jonathan Swift’s The
Battle of the Books (1704), in which the old battle between the ancient and the modern writers is
fought out in a library between The Bee and The Spider. Although not a mock epic, the satiric
impulse is also the driving force behind Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), one of the
masterpieces of the period. The four parts describe different journeys of Lemuel Gulliver; to
Lilliput, where the pompous activities of the diminutive inhabitants is satirized; to Brobdingnag,
a land of giants who laugh at Gulliver’s tales of the greatness of England; to Laputa and Lagoda,
inhabited by quack scientists and philosophers; and to the land of the Houhynhnms, where horses
are civilized and men (Yahoos) behave like beasts. As a satirist Swift’s technique was to create
fictional speakers such as Gulliver, who utter sentiments that the intelligent reader should recognize
as complacent, egotistical, stupid, or mad. Swift is recognized as a master of understated irony, and
his name has become practically synonymous with the type of satire in which outrageous statements
are offered in a straight-faced manner.

Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. The .................... was the period after the Restoration era to the death of Alexander pope.
2. The major writers of the age were .................... and John Dryden in poetry.
3. The literary criticism of these writers often sought its justification in .................... .
4. The .................... is a mock epic, a form of satiric writing in which commonplace subjects are
described in the elevated, heroic style of classical epic.
5. .................... is recognized as a master of understated irony.

9.2 The Age of Prose and Reason

The eighteenth century, says Legouis in A Short History of English Literature, “viewed as a whole
has a distinctive character.” It was “the classical age” in English literature, and, as such, held and
practised some basic principles concerning life and literature. Even then one should avoid sweeping
generalizations/the temptation to generalize-the eighteenth century particularly-is hard to
overcome.
“Few centuries,” says George Sherburn in A Literary History of England edited by Albert C.
Baugh, “have with more facility been reduced to a formula than the eighteenth....Few centuries, to
be sure, have demonstrated more unity of character than superficially considered the eighteenth
seems to have possessed.” However, it is fallacious to believe that there is a clear cleavage between
the seventeenth century and the eighteenth. Observes Sherburn: “The ideas of the later seventeenth
century continue into the eighteenth.” At any rate, in the eighteenth century there was the

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