Major Literary Novelist Of Neo- Classical Age.

 "To evaluate my assignment, click here" 

Hitaxi H. Bhatt.

Roll no:-  03

Sem:-    M.A  (Sem -1)

Year :-  2015-16

Enrollment no:- 15101004

Email id:- hitaxidave81@gmail.com

Paper:- 02 (The neo-classical Literature.)

Topic:- Major literary novelist of Neo-classical age.

Submitted to:-  Smt. S. B. Gardi,

Department Of English.

M. K. Bhavnagar University.

Bhavnagar.

Major literary novelist of neo-classical age:-

Neo- classical literature was written between 1660 and 1798. this period is broken down into three parts; Restoration Period, The Augustan Period, and the Age of Johnson. It was a time of both formality and artificiality.  Understanding the neo-classical era helps us better understand its literature. This was a time of comfortableness in England. People would meet at coffee houses to chat about politics, among other topics, and sometimes drink a new, warm beverage made of chocolate! It was also the beginning of British tradition of drinking afternoon tea. And it was starting point of the middle class. People were very interested in appearances but not necessarily in being genuine. Men and women commonly wore wings, and being clever and witty was in vogue. It was a time, too, of British political upheaval as eight monarchs took the throne.

There were four originators foe the development of the novel and they are…

1)    Samuel Richardson.( 1689- 1761)

Major works:- Clarissa Harlowe, Sir Charles G randison, Pamela the Virtue Rewarded.

2)    Laurence Stern. (1713-1768)

Major works:-   The Life And Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent.

3)    Tobias smollett. ( 1721-1771)

Major works:-  The adventure of Roderick random, The adventure of peregrine pickle, The adventure of Ferdinand, Count Fantom)

4)    Henry fielding. (1707-1754)

Major works- joseph Andrews, Tom Jones , Amelia.

 1) Samuel Richardson.

Born:- August 19, 1689.

Died:- July 4 1761.

Samuel Richardson was an 18th-century English writer and printer. He is best known for his three epistolary novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady and The History of Sir Charles Grandison.

Richardson was 50 years old when he wrote Pamela, but of his first 50 years little is known. His ancestors were of yeoman stock. His father, also Samuel, and his mother’s father, Stephen Hall, became London tradesmen, and his father, after the death of his first wife, married Stephen’s daughter, Elizabeth, in 1682. A temporary move of the Richardsons to Derbyshire accounts for the fact that the novelist was born in Mackworth. They returned to London when Richardson was 10. He had at best what he called “only Common School-Learning.” The perceived inadequacy of his education was later to preoccupy him and some of his critics. Richardson was bound apprentice to a London printer, John Wilde. Sometime after completing his apprenticeship he became associated with the Leakes, a printing family whose presses he eventually took over when he set up in business for himself in 1721 and married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his master. Elizabeth Leake, the sister of a prosperous bookseller of Bath, became his second wife in 1733, two years after Martha’s death. His domestic life was marked by tragedy. All six of the children from his first marriage died in infancy or childhood. By his second wife he had four daughters who survived him, but two other children died in infancy. By 1744 Richardson seems to have completed a first draft of his second novel, clarrisa or The History Of Younglady, but he spent three years trying to bring it within the compass of the seven volumes in which it was published. , his dilemma is not so central to the novel as were those of Pamela and Clarissa. He is surrounded with a large cast of characters who have their parts to play in social comedy that anticipates the novel of manners of the late 18th century. Richardson’s Pamela is often credited with being the first English novel. 

2) Laurence Stern.

Born:- Nov. 24,1713,clonmel, country Tippery.

 Died:-March 18, 1768.

Irish-born English novelist and humorist.

Author of Trisam Shandy (1759–67), an early novel in which story is subordinate to the free associations and digressions of its narrator. He is also known for the novel. A Sentimental Journey (1768).

Sterne’s father, Roger, though grandson of an archbishop of York, was an infantry officer of the lowest rank who fought in many battles during the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). In Flanders, Roger married Agnes, the widow of an officer, but of a social class much below Roger’s. The regiment retired tolerend and there Laurence was born. Most of his early childhood was spent in poverty, following the troops about Ireland. Later, Sterne expressed his affection for soldiers through his portraits in Tristram Shandy of the gentle uncle Toby and Corporal Trim.

After graduating he took holy orders and became vicar of Sutton-on-the-Forest, north of York. He soon became a prebendary (or canon) of York Minster and acquired the vicarage of Stillington. Sterne fell in love with Elizabeth Lumley, a cousin to Elizabeth Montagu, the bluestocking. They married in 1741. According to the account of an acquaintance, Sterne’s infidelities were a cause of discord in the marriage.  But Elizabeth, who had several stillborn children, was unhappy. Only one child, Lydia, lived. In 1759, to support his dean in a church squabble, Sterne wrote A Political Romance (later called The history of a good warm watch-coat. He began Trisam Shandy. An initial, sharply satiric version was rejected by Robert Dodsely the London printer, just when Sterne’s personal life was upset. His mother and uncle both died. His wife had a nervous breakdown and threatened suicide. Sterne continued his comic novel, but every sentence, he said, was “written under the greatest heaviness of heart.” In this mood, he softened the satire and told about Tristram’s opinions, his eccentric family, and ill-fated childhood with a sympathetic humour, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sweetly melancholic—a comedy skirting tragedy.

In 1767 he published the final volume of Tristram Shandy. Soon thereafter he fell in love with Eliza Draper, who was half his age and unhappily married to an official of the East India Company. They carried on an open, sentimental flirtation, but Eliza was under a promise to return to her husband in Bombay. After she sailed, Sterne finished A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy, by Mr. Yorick,published it to acclaim early in 1768, and collapseSterne’s second and last novel, A Sentimental Journey, is the story of Yorick’s travels through France; Sterne did not live to complete the part on Italy.

 3) Tobias Smollett.

Tobias George Smollett 

( born:-19 March 1721)

(died:- 17 sep 1771)

Tobias Smallett was a Scottish poet and author. He was best known for his picaresque novels.

The Adventures of Roderick Random(1748) and The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle(1751) and his Epistolary novel,The Expedition of Humphery Clinker (1771). His  first novel Roderick Random, may be taken as evidence, he also studied Greek, mathematics, moral and natural philosophy, logic, and belles lettres. He left the university in 1739 without Smollett came of a family of lawyers and soldiers. His play The Regicide. A year later he was commissioned surgeon’s second mate in the Royal Navy and appointed to HMS Chichester, which reached Port Royal, Jam., on Jan. 10, 1741. It is probable that Smollett saw action in the naval bombardment of Cartagena (now in Colombia). The expedition was disastrous; he would later describe its horrors in Roderick Random. In Jamica he met and was betrothed to—and perhaps there married—an heiress, Anne Lassells. He returned to London alone to set up as a surgeon on Downing Street, Westminster, his wife joining him in 1747. In 1748 Smollett published his novel The Adventure of Rodrick Random in part a graphic account of British naval life at the time, and also translated the great picaresque romance Gil Blas from the French of Alain-René Lesage. In 1750 he obtained the degree of M.D. from Marischal College, Aberdeen. Later in the year he was in Paris, searching out material for The Adventure of perigine pickleThis work contains a great comic figure in Hawser Trunnion, a retired naval officer who, though living on dry land, insists on behaving as though he were still on the quarterdeck of one of his majesty’s ships at sea. In 1752 he published “An Essay on the External Use of Water,” an attack on the medicinal properties of the waters of a popular English health resort, Bath (he would resume the attack in his later novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker). The essay made him many enemies and little money. Smollett is not the equal of his older contemporaries, the novelists Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, but he is unrivaled for the pace and vigour that sustain his comedy. He is especially brilliant in the rendering of comic characters in their externals, thus harking back to the manner of the Jacobean playwright Ben Jonson and looking forward to that of the novelist Chrales Dickens By modern criteria, his art as a satirical novelist is defective, his model being the “picaresque” novel, relating loosely linked episodes in the life of a rogue hero.

4) Henry fielding

Born:- April 22, 1707.

Died:- Oct. 8, 1754.

 Henry Fielding novelist and playwright, who, with Samual Richardson is considered a founder of the English novel. Among his major novels are Joseph Andrew (1742) and  Tom Jones (1749). Fielding was born of a family that by tradition traced its descent to a branch of the Habsburgs. The 1st earl of Denbigh, William Fielding, was a direct ancestor, while Henry’s father, Col. Edmund Fielding, had served under John Churchill, duke of Marlborough, an early 18th-century general, “with much bravery and reputation.” His mother was a daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a judge of the Queen’s Bench, from whom she inherited property at East Stour, in Dorset, where the family moved when Fielding was three years old. His mother died just before his 11th birthday. His father having married again, Fielding was sent to Eton College, where he laid the foundations of his love of literature and his considerable knowledge of the classics. . In 1737 he produced at the Little Theatre in the Hay (later the Haymarket Theatre), London, his history register, 1736.in which the prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole was represented practically undisguised and mercilessly ridiculed. It was not the first time Walpole had suffered from Fielding’s pen, and his answer was to push through Parliament the Licensing Act, by which all new plays had to be approved and licensed by the lord chamberlain before production. The passing of this act marked the end of Fielding’s career as a playwright.

How much he adored her can be seen from the two characters based on her, Sophia Western in Tom Jones and Amelia in the novel of that name: one the likeness of her as a beautiful, high-spirited, generous-minded girl, the other of her as a faithful, much-troubled, hard-working wife and mother. To restore his fortunes, Fielding began to read for the bar, completing in less than three years a course normally taking six or seven.  The history of tom jones a foundling was published on Feb. 28, 1749. With its great comic gusto, vast gallery of characters, and contrasted scenes of high and low life in London and the provinces, it has always constituted the most popular of his works. Like its predecessor, Joseph Andrews, it is constructed around a romance plot. The hero, whose true identity remains unknown until the denouement, loves the beautiful Sophia Western, and at the end of the book he wins her hand. Numerous obstacles have to be overcome before he achieves this, however, and in the course of the action the various sets of characters pursue each other from one part of the country to another, giving Fielding an opportunity to paint an incomparably vivid picture of England in the mid-18th century. The introductory chapters at the beginning of each Book make it clear how carefully Fielding had considered the problem of planning the novel. No novelist up until then had so clear an idea of what a novel should be, so that it is not surprising that Tom Jones is a masterpiece of literary engineering. The characters fall into several distinct groups—romance characters, villainous characters, Jonsonian “humours,” “low” comic characters, and the virtuous Squire Allworthy, who remains in the background and emerges to ensure the conventional happy ending.

Sir Walter Scott called Henry Fielding the “father of the English novel,” and the phrase still indicates Fielding’s place in the history of literature. Though not actually the first English novelist, he was the first to approach the genre with a fully worked-out theory of the novel; and in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones,and Amelia, which a modern critic has called comic epic, epic comedy, and domestic epic, respectively, he had established the tradition of a realism presented in panoramic surveys of contemporary society that dominated English fiction until the end of the 19th century.

 "To evaluate my assignment, click here"