The reading for Friday (2/2) is Northrop Frye's influential essay, "Towards Defining an Age of Sensibility." Note that I say "influential" and not "accurate" or "masterful." There are reasons why I'm assigning this essay, but giving you a definitive answer to the question, "What is Later C18 Literature?" is not one of them.
Rather, the essay is one smart, thoughtful answer to that question--but not necessarily the best or most complete one. Testing your observations against it will help you to find answers of your own. When Frye wrote this essay in 1956, Gray and Warton were definitely on his map of relevant writers (note that Gray is one of our "Survivors" and Warton is not). However, the work of Mary Jones ("Holt Waters") or Mary Leapor ("Epistle to Artimesia") probably hadn't crossed his path. He may have heard of Phillis Wheatley (another of our "Survivors"), but she does not appear in his essay.
Do Frye's conclusions about later C18 Lit. apply, even though our data set is different from his?
Think specifically about Frye's remarks about "the literature of process." How does he define that term, and how do you see the poems we've read embodying that definition? Pick one example of a moment, image, or excerpt from one of the poems we've read, and show how it either bears out Frye's claims about later C18 literature as a "literature of process"--or not.
Deadline: Friday (2/4), 10am.
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In Northop Frye's essay, "Towards defining an Age of Sensibility" introduces the "literature of process". Frye describes this to be, "Literature as a process, being based on an irregular and unpredictable coincidence of sound-patterns, tends to seek the brief or even the fragmentary utterance, in other words to centre itself on the lyric, which accounts for the feeling of a sudden emergence of a lyrical impulse of in the age of sensibility" (148). In the poem "The Dying Indian" by Warton, the lines, "...where anana's bloom/ Thrice in each moon; where rivers smoothly glide" (lines 4 and 5). The "o" sounds are subtle, yet they connect the sentences, and just as Frye mentions, they ad an "impulse" into the lines. The sublime importance of the lines set the mood for the natural elements that are important to the success of the poem.
To continue off of Lauren’s post on the Dying Indian, I would like to draw attention to the comment made by Frye at the top of page 146 when he is discussing Richardson’s work. Frye states that his work is “literature of process” earlier in the text, then goes on to describe it as keeping “the emotion at a continuous present”. This comment embodies the mood of The Dying Indian, where rage and anger run rampant through the whole poem, leaving the reader no time to breathe. This gives the poem a sense of urgency, an “in the moment of” type feeling that a piece of literature of “process” would provide. Moreover Frye later speaks of “intensified sound-patterns” that help define “process” literature and the Dying Indian’s haphazard rhymes and alliterations (On heedless hunters; where anna’s bloom/ thrice in each moon;) is a prime example of this. The rhyme scheme, or lack thereof, further provide a sense of urgency, and natural fluidity to the revenge and anger motivated tone.
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