Courtesy of someone named AJ on an e-mail list I read, here's a really nice introduction to English satire:
One key date all students of literature should remember is the year 1660, the date of the Restoration, when the great republican experiment under Oliver Cromwell came to an end and the British reinstated the monarchy by inviting Charles II (the son of the king whom Cromwell had executed about twenty years earlier) to come back as king in a restored monarchy. King Charles and his friends had spent their exile in France and the new court climate was very influenced by French manners and literary styles.Beyond that, the Restoration came at a time when Europe had, after about a century and a half of religious warfare, reluctantly come to the realization that religion could no longer serve as a suitable basis for a shared communal life. Since there was no longer any shared agreement about what the revealed word of God meant or about an authority which might interpret that revealed word for everyone (as the Roman Catholic Church had done for centuries), the social and political life of the nation had to find some other grounding if people were to live together without killing each other over religious questions.
Out of this cultural climate increasingly grew a hope that the basis of social and political life must be a new reasonableness, combined with a concerted attempt to limit emotional excesses that had prompted so much religious bloodshed. Part of this new program of cultural reform stressed paying attention to all forms of language, both in the popular and in the high cultural forums. Language needed to be purified of passionate rhetoric and misleading metaphors, the major features of much of the enthusiastic preaching and general rabble rousing which had accompanied the religious conflicts. Public discussions should use simple, clear language and appeal to the reasonable sentiments of educated people.
Appeals to reform language encouraged certain literary efforts and discouraged others. For example, they led to increasing demands for words which were clearly defined with meanings everyone shared; hence, here begins the great age of dictionaries, attempts to codify the meanings of words in ways that everyone could understand. There were repeated attempts to purge language of complex metaphors, especially religious metaphors. These were incapable of clear exposition in a way that satisfied everyone, and since people could not agree on their meaning they only promoted disagreement. Styles of literature should move from the passionate lyric or the account of visionary religious experience to more public, restrained, and polite forms. The common popularity of the heroic couplet, for example, reflects the desire for a poetic style that is inherently more restrained, incapable of generating the eomotional momentum of an impassioned verse paragraph (for example, in Shakespeare or Milton).
It's important to realize that in this period words like "imaginative," "extraordinary," "visionary," "fanciful," "enthusiastic," and so on are words of serious criticism, indicating a form of thinking or behaviour in which reasonableness has surrendered to passionate feeling. In the vocabulary of Swift, Pope, Johnson, Austen and many others, this value system is built into the language, and you will have trouble understanding some of their texts if you fail to recognize the deep distrust of passionate feeling unaccompanied by reasonable control (e.g., Swift's praise of the horses in Book IV of Gulliver's Travels because they are not "fond" of their children, a phrase which strikes the modern reader as rather odd). The term of the highest praise is "sensible," because it suggests an imagination which confines itself by experience and does not impose visionary schemes on experience or rely upon impassioned metaphors.
Good point, that one. Reading the greats of English literature can be challenging due to the distance in time and attitude as reflected in the language of the day, as mentioned above.
For our purposes here, the important point to observe is that the demands for a new reasonableness in public conduct and literature encouraged a special attention to satire, that form of literature which is most directly concerned with addressing public issues with a strong didactic intention. In one way or another, most of the greatest writers in English literature for the next century (Dryden, Pope, Swift, Defoe, Johnson, among others, up to and including Bryron) directed some of their considerable energies into writing satires. And this age following the Restoration until the early nineteenth century produced some of the greatest satires ever written. In many respects, the great satiric tradition launched by Dryden at the Restoration ends with Lord Byron.
You could also check out this book.
Posted by Craig Ceely at December 26, 2004 04:38 PM