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.

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.

The Pox and Prostitution

2019 ◽  
pp. 62-113
Author(s):  
Noelle Gallagher
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Mobility ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Venereal Disease ◽  
Eighteenth Century Literature ◽  
The Many ◽  
Positive Representations ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Literature

This chapter examines the broad range of connections between venereal disease and prostitution in eighteenth-century literature and visual art. It suggests that this period's imaginative conceptions of the relationship between female sexuality and venereal disease were both more nuanced and more complex than a blanket charge of misogyny allows. If the many sympathetic portraits of infected wives discussed in Chapter 1 constitute a challenge to the scholarly commonplace that women were blamed for the disease, then so too do the many neutral, and even positive, representations of infected prostitutes in this period. While some writers and artists clearly did vilify or ridicule diseased streetwalkers, some sympathized with them or campaigned for them; some celebrated them as examples of social mobility, sexual vigor, or physical resilience.

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