For Friday we'll be reading Marilyn Butler's essay, "The Arts in the Age of Revolution" (which begins with 1760, some twenty years later than "our" period). Respond to this post with your reflections on one of the questions below, using text from the course readings to support your claims:
1. How does Butler's essay seem to track with Frye's claims about "the age of Sensibility" and "the literature of process"?
2. What, if anything, in Butler's essay seemed to contradict or complicate the sense of the later C18 that you've been developing thus far?
3. Does Butler's essay say anything significant about the text you selected for the second assignment, or does it largely seem unrelated to the text you selected?
4. What, if any, relevant literary or cultural concerns does Butler seem to leave out?
5. What questions do you have as we come to the end of the introductory, "how-to-read-C18" part of the course and start to embark on more in-depth and independent exploration of the period?
Deadline: Friday (2/20), 10am.
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Through reading Butler's essay, I started to feel like some of my intuitions about later C18 literature were not quite as clear-cut as I had thought. Specifically, she writes prominent authors of the time "show more concern for representative, elemental human responses (love, famil feeling, pity, fear) than for particularizing character." This made me recall The Rambler's claim that perfect virtue should be represented. I'm starting to think that while morality may have figured into Johnson's claims, it was as much an instruction on what creates a compelling character. It seems like a lot of his instructions are not for the strict purpose of creating proper moral examples, but rather a comment on what form literature of that time should be taking.
As I stated in a previous post, I chose a topic for the second assignment that addressed what was considered "important" medical knowledge in the later C18. Surprisingly enough, Butler, within the first two pages of her essay spoke of the "improvements in ... medicine and public health" being directly related to the rise in populations across Europe. The rising populations caused much turmoil and provided subject matter or even anti-subject matter for popular literature.
On the topic of literature, Butler points out that the exotic became an important setting and the savage an important subject in the literature. This is well supported by the "survivors" that we have looked at so far such as the stories on Omai and the Dying Indian.
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