The Monk :: essays research papers fc

The monk A Rebellious Offspring of the Age of Reason Understanding the chivalric romance can be accomplished by obtaining a familiarity of the Augustan point of view, which helps to develop a reference point for comparing and secernate the origin of Gothic literature. The thinking that was beingness questioned by the Gothic novel was Augustanism and without some understanding of Augustan principles and their role in eighteenth-century thought it is sticky to understand the purposes of the Gothic revival, either in terms of history or in terms of the federal agency in which it offered a new caprice of the relations between man, nature and a supreme being. David punter describes the governmental relationship of the Augustan thinker to the literary world, It is tempting to see in Augustanism the doctrine of a small cultural elite h sure-enough(a)ing on to power and status under increasing pressure, and that pressure as scarce that exerted by the new reading public on the homo geneity of the old literary establishment (p 31 Punter). This small number of elite would assimilate included, further not limited to, Fielding, Johnson and especially Pope. However, Fielding and Johnson were slowly stepping external of the realm of the Augustan limitations. Fielding was undoubtedly Augustan in his beliefs in the stability of social rules and the necessity of a social and psychological compromise, but his mocking attitude towards literary stipulation represents a more tally Augustan replication. Johnson, on the other hand, was a firm believer in these literary rules and yet it was his Preface to Shakespeare which became the first significant breach in these limitations. Alexander Popes Essay on Man embodies the cosmological, theological and ethical beliefs of the Augustan age while at the same clock exemplifying submission to the rules of literary form. The Augustan approach was intellectual with dress restraint while relying on reason and traditionalism to cr eate literary works. These stipulations were very controlled by their boundaries and could not be exaggerated with out being broken. The Augustan critical attitude condemned spontaneity for its chaotic qualities, imagination for its expostulation to reason and liberalism for its opposition to traditionalism. Gothic fiction appears as a limited response to the Age of Reasons order. During the late eighteenth-century, several polar kinds of new fiction arose to challenge the Augustan tradition leading the way was the Gothic novel. An interest in those things, which cannot be understood, for example religion and the soul, results in an overwhelming expansion of what is accepted as art in the literary world.