Restoration & 18th Century: Change & Cultural Vigor in Britain, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica Restoration & 18th Century: Change & Cultural Vigor in Britain e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Restoration and 800th century → Introduction: The Restoration and the eighteenth century brought vast changes in Great Britain, which became a single nation after 1707. After a series of civil and religious strife of the 700th century, Britain had a stability and unprecedented commercial vigor. Changes came most dramatically to cities: The theaters (reopened at the Restoration) coee-houses,concert halls … gave life in London a feeling of friction. The cohesion of the nation also depended on ideas of social order. The order and hierarchy, liberty and rights ecc. helped determine the ways in which an expanding diversity of people could seek to participate in cultural life. → Religion and politics: → The Restoration: Charles II: The Restoration of 1660 - the return of Charles Stuart and the monarchy to England - brought hope to a divided nation. The restoration of the monarchy meant that the established church would also be restored - Charles was willing to pardon or ignore many former enemies. - In 1673 the Test Act required that all take the sacrament of the Angelic Church, and that the Protestants and Catholics were excluded from public life → Alexander Pope, a Catholic, could not attend a university or vote, for instance. Yet the triumph of the established church didn’t resolve the political issues that had divided Charles I and Parliament. Charles II: Charles II had promised to govern through Parliament but slyly tried to consolidate royal power. He tried to hide his Catholic sympathies to get along with Parliament, except on one occasion ↴ In 1678 the report of the Popish Plot, in which Catholics had to kill Protestants, even if everything turned out to be a fraud. The House of Commons used fear to force Charles to exclude his cattoic brother, James, Duke of York, from succession to the throne. Finally, Charles defeated the Exclusion Law by dissolving the Parliament. But the crisis resulted in a basic division of the country between 2 new political parties: - The Tories → who supported the king - The Whigs → the king’s opponents Neither of them could live with James II. James II: James II came to the throne in 1685, suspended the Test Act, and began to fill the army and government with fellow Catholics. But the situation changed when the Protestant William of Orange, husband of the Protestant daughter of James II, Mary, made secret negotiations and marched to London, and James fled to a permanent exile in France. But the house of Stuart would be heard from again. For more than half a century some loyal people supported James, his son and his grandson as legitimate rulers of Britain. William and Mary: In their reign was the Glorious Revolution - and these came to be seen as the beginning of stabilized Great Britain. In 1689 a Bill of Rights revoked James’s action, and they introduced the Toleration Act to decrease religious tensions, as it allowed the people to have dierent religions, but with the obligation to be faithful to the crown. . The passage of the Act of Settlement, in 1701, put Sophia, electress of Hanover, and her descendants (as the granddaughter of James but is USEFUL. + The ‘monster’, with his awesome power, permette agli uomini di non combattere (?). - Other materialist philosophers derived from ancient Epicurean. → Scientific findings: Charles II gave ocial approval to the scientific revolution by chartering the Royal Society (1662) ↴ where the goal was to develop knowledge through scientific experiments, with direct observation, experience and accumulation of data. In fact, travels to unfamiliar regions of the globe enlarged understandings of what nature could do: - Behn’s classifying and collecting of South American flora and fauna. - Swift in “Gulliver's travels” shows the comical ways in which the discovery of new cultures. There was 2 wonderful inventions: 1. Microscope 2. Telescope → Religions: Religion mixes with politics. Scientific discovery and exploration also aected religions attitudes. There was: - Natural history - Natural philosophy - Natural religion ↴ Newly discovered natural laws, seemed evidence of a universal order in creation, which implied God’s hand in the design of the universe. Expanded knowledge of peoples around the world who had never heard of Christianity led theologians to formulate supposedly universal religious tenets available to all rational beings. The school curriculum began with years of Latin and Greek, inculcating a long-established humanistic tradition that many authors, including Swift and Pope, still cherished. The intellectual Mary Astell initied a powerful strain of modern feminism, arguing for the establishment of women’s educational institutions and decrying the tiranny that husbands exercised over their wives. She and another early feminists embraced the Tory principle of obedience to royal and church authority. ↓ The struggle seemed distinct from public political denunciations of the tyranny of some relatively recent Charles or James. They want the freedom to become fully educated, practice their religion, and marry (or not) according to their own. New forms of religious devotion sprang up amid Britain's spectacular material success. Sentimentalism, evangelicalism, and the pursuits of wealth and luxury in dierent ways all placed a new importance on individuals—the gratification of their tastes and ambitions or their yearning for personal encounters with each other or a personal God. Literature: Condition of literary production Publishing boomed as never before in the 800th century Britain, this expansion in part resulted from a loosening of legal restraints on printing. After the Restoration - the Printing Act (1662) reinforced licensing controls - but in 1695 during the reign of William III, the last in a series of printing acts was not renewed. After, as the two-party system consolidated, both Whigs and Tories seemed to realize that the pre-publication censorship could be dangerous when their own side happened to be out of power. This didn’t end the persecutions of authors. ù This freedom allowed 800th century Britain to build an exemplary version of what historians have called “the public sphere” → consisting of not just published comment on matters of national interest but also the public venues - coeehouses,clubs, taverns - where readers circulated, discussed and conceived responses to it. After 1695, the legal status of printed matter became ambiguous, and in 1710 Parliament enacted the Statute of Anne → the first copyright in Britain History not tied to government approval of works’ contents. Their copyrights were held by booksellers and the booksellers paid an author for the work's copyright. But the writers the better educated were better placed to be taken seriously: many eminent male writers had at least some university education. ↓ Pope, a Catholic, obtained his education privately - because he was a Catholic and in this period could not participate in public life. As all women were barred from universities and faced innumerable other disadvantages and varieties of repression, the story of virtually every woman author in the period is one of self-education, courage, and extraordinary initiative. Yet women did publish widely for the first time in the period. During the Restoration and early eighteenth century, a few aristocratic women poets were hailed as marvelous exceptions and given fanciful names. Many women writers after the mid-century were determined to be more moral than their predecessors. In 1758 Elizabeth Carter published her translation of the Greek philosopher Epictetus, while Hannah More won fame as a poet, abolitionist, and educational theorist. → Readers' abilities and inclinations to consume literature helped determine the volume and variety of published works. While historians disagree about how exactly the literacy rate changed in Britain through the early modern period, there is widespread consensus that by 1800 between 60 and 70