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Augustan Literature. Epic Machinery. Satire. Royal Society. 4.6.4.1 Historical Novel
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Augustan Literature
The term, ‘Augustan' refers to King George I's desire to be compared to the first Roman Emperor, Augustus Caesar, when poetry and the arts were supported and admired, and thus flourished. Anyone educated in the eighteenth century would be familiar with the original texts, since studying the classics was a central feature of the school curriculum.
Eighteenth century Augustan literature emulates the classical style, tending to be polished and shaped according to rules which governed both Roman and Greek works. However, classical works are not just emulated but also parodied during the Augustan period.
The most representative authors of this era are:
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744), poet
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745), essayist
mock-epic, also called mock-heroic, form of satire that adapts the elevated heroic style of the classical epic poem to a trivial subject. The tradition, which originated in classical times with an anonymous burlesque of Homer, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and the Mice), was honed to a fine art in the late 17th- and early 18th-century Neoclassical period. A double-edged satirical weapon, the mock-epic was sometimes used by the “moderns” of this period to ridicule contemporary “ancients” (classicists). More often it was used by “ancients” to point up the unheroic character of the modern age by subjecting thinly disguised contemporary events to a heroic treatment. The classic example of this is Nicolas Boileau’s Le Lutrin (1674–83; “The Lectern”), which begins with a quarrel between two ecclesiastical dignitaries about where to place a lectern in a chapel and ends with a battle in a bookstore in which champions of either side hurl their favourite “ancient” or “modern” authors at each other. Jonathan Swift’s “Battle of the Books” (1704) is a variation of this theme in mock-heroic prose. The outstanding English mock-epic is Alexander Pope’s brilliant tour de force The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), which concerns a society beau’s theft of a lock of hair from a society belle; Pope treated the incident as if it were comparable to events that sparked the Trojan War.
Most mock-epics begin with an invocation to the muse and use the familiar epic devices of set speeches, supernatural interventions, and descents to the underworld, as well as infinitely detailed descriptions of the protagonist’s activities. Thus, they provide much scope for display of the author’s ingenuity and inventiveness. An American mock-epic, Joel Barlow’s The Hasty Pudding (written 1793), celebrates in three 400-line cantos his favourite New England dish, cornmeal mush.
Epic Machinery
Catalogs (ie: lists) of things like ships, sacrifices, participants on each side of a battle, etc.
Histories and descriptions of significant artifacts (eg: who made a certain sword or shield, how it was decorated, who owned it from generation to generation, etc. ).
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Epic simile (a long simile where the image to which the subject is compared becomes an object of art in its own right as well as serving to clarify special attributes of the subject).
Frequent use of epithets (eg: “Aeneas the true”; “rosey-fingered Dawn”; “tall-masted ship”)
Use of patronymics (calling son by father’s name): “Anchises’ son”
Long, formal speeches by important characters
Journey(s) to the underworld
Previous episodes in the story being later retold
Use of the number three (three attempts, three attacks, etc. )
Satire
a literary work holding up human vices and follies to ridicule or scorn
: trenchant wit, irony, or sarcasm used to expose and discredit vice or folly
Irony
the humorous or mildly sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of what they normally mean
Royal Society
The Royal Society of Literature is a cultural organisation based in London. The aim of the RSL is to nurture, celebrate and defend Britain's outstanding traditional literary works of art.
4. 6. 4. 1 Historical Novel
For the hack novelist, to whom speedy output is more important than art, thought, and originality, history provides ready-made plots and characters. A novel on Alexander the Great or Joan of Arc can be as flimsy and superficial as any schoolgirl romance. But historical themes, to which may be added prehistoric or mythical ones, have inspired the greatest novelists, as Tolstoy's War and Peace and Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma reveal. In the 20th century, distinguished historical novels such as Arthur Koestler's The Gladiators (1939), Robert Graves's I, Claudius (1934), Zoé Oldenbourg's Destiny of Fire (1960), and Mary Renault's The King Must Die (1958) exemplify an important function of the fictional imagination--to interpret remote events in human and particular terms, to transform documentary fact, with the assistance of imaginative conjecture, into immediate sensuous and emotional experience.
There is a kind of historical novel, little more than a charade, which frequently has a popular appeal because of a common belief that the past is richer, bloodier, and more erotic than the present. Such novels, which include such immensely popular works as those of Georgette Heyer, or Baroness Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel stories in England in the early 20th century, and Forever Amber (1944) by Kathleen Winsor in the United States, may use the trappings of history but, because there is no real assimilation of the past into the imagination, the result must be a mere costume ball. On the other hand, the American novelist John Barth showed in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) that mock historical scholarship--preposterous events served up with parodic pomposity--could constitute a viable, and not necessarily farcical, approach to the past. Barth's history is cheerfully suspect, but his sense of historical perspective is genuine.
It is in the technical conservatism of most European historical novels that the serious student of fiction finds cause to relegate the category to a secondary place. Few practitioners of the form seem prepared to learn from any writer later than Scott, though Virginia Woolf--in Orlando (1928) and Between the Acts (1941)--made bold attempts to squeeze vast tracts of historical time into a small space and thus make them as fictionally manageable as the events of a single day. And John Dos Passos' U. S. A., which can be taken as a historical study of a phase in America's development, is a reminder that experiment is not incompatible with the sweep and amplitude that great historical themes can bring to the novel.
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