What Was Neo-Classicism?

1969 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
James William Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Matthew Arnold ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Charles Ii ◽  
Vast Range ◽  
Century Literature ◽  
Selection Of

There seems to be no doubt about it: the century-old truisms about the literature variously called “Augustan” and “Neo-Classical” are in the process of dissolution. Premises induced by J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, explored by Oliver Elton, dogmatized by G. E. B. Saintsbury, and summarized by Leslie Stephen now appear inadequate to more recent scholars, whose research and rereading of Neo-Classical texts run counter to the general testimony as well as the specific judgments of their grandfathers. For the past few decades at least, published commentary has increasingly indicated the need to overhaul received ideas about those writers identified with the revival of classicism in England following the Restoration of Charles II and continuing throughout the eighteenth century.The deficiencies in Victorian and Edwardian assumptions about Neo-Classicism revealed by latter-day findings are several, some of them due to false criteria of taste, morality, and literary excellence. But chiefly the research of the present age has disclosed a vast range of literature simply ignored — or, perhaps, suppressed — by earlier critics. Based as they were on a limited, prejudged selection of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, the premises inherited from Victorian criticism have naturally failed to account for the discoveries of twentieth-century scholars.The resulting disparity between limited assumptions and expanded information has called into question the very possibility of formulating any critical schema that accurately describes the characteristics of English literature between 1660 and 1800. The relativistic — not to say atomistic — inclinations of contemporary scholarship enforce the view that indeed no schema is possible.

Alexander Pope in the Making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Hone
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Early Career ◽  
Alexander Pope ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Century Literature

How did Alexander Pope become the greatest poet of the eighteenth century? Drawing on previously neglected texts and overlooked archival materials, Alexander Pope in the Making provides a radical new account of the poet’s early career, from the earliest traces of manuscript circulation to the publication of his collected Works. Joseph Hone illuminates classic poems such as An Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, and Windsor-Forest by setting them alongside lesser-known texts by Pope and his contemporaries, many of which have never received sustained critical attention before. Pope’s earliest experiments in satire, panegyric, lyric, pastoral, and epic are all explored alongside his translations, publication strategies, and neglected editorial projects. By recovering cultural values shared by Pope and the politically heterodox men and women whose works he read and with whom he collaborated, Hone unearths powerful new interpretive possibilities for some of the eighteenth century’s most celebrated poems. Alexander Pope in the Making mounts a comprehensive challenge to the ‘Scriblerian’ paradigm that has dominated scholarship for the past eighty years. It sheds fresh light on Pope’s early career and reshapes our understanding of the ideological landscape of his era. This book will be essential reading for scholars and students of eighteenth-century literature, history, and politics.

Genre in Socialist Realism

Slavic Review ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 992-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greg Carleton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
Century Literature

Of all the things socialist realism has been compared with, perhaps the least pejorative is its characterization as a kind of twentieth-century incarnation of neoclassicism. That is to say, socialist realism can be seen as a system based on clearly defined and delimited genres, and these genres exist in a strict hierarchy. Eighteenth-century literature certainly provides a comfortable metaphor because it invokes a picture of restraint, stasis, clarity and rigidity, in other words, those modifiers that so often characterize the monologic tendency of socialist realism.

III.—Spenser, Thomson, and Romanticism

PMLA ◽  
1911 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-91
Author(s):  
Herbert E. Cory
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
English Literature ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Many ◽  
Century Literature

Many students of English literature are agreed that the Eighteenth Century stands in special need of reconsideration. In earlier days Wordsworth, Keats, and many more, with the new dawn on their lips, consigned their Augustan fathers and grandfathers to an ill-considered damnation. In our own age we have tried to be more tolerant. But our methods have been unfortunate. We admit the Eighteenth Century to be interesting, but interesting only in so far as it anticipates romanticism. In consequence all scholarship on the Eighteenth Century literature of England has become a mad scramble in search of romanticism. Since Professor Beers and Professor Phelps traced its growth in the Eighteenth Century it has become so fashionable to detect signs of revolt against neo-classicism that some brilliant critic of the future may gain distinction by turning the tables and by proving that a school of Pope actually existed. Of the many conceptions of the Eighteenth Century one of the most exaggerated is the notion that the influence of Spenser was one of the main forces that made for romanticism. It is the purpose of this study to examine the Spenserian problem by a brief analysis of those poems which fashion dubbed Spenserian Imitations. My contentions may be made more clear by departing from the strict chronological method and by taking Thomson's Castle of Indolence, a very composite poem, as a climax.

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