LITERATURE OF THE

AUGUSTAN/
NEOCLASSICAL AGE
(1700 – 1800)
LECTURE 18 (B)
BY ASHER ASHKAR GOHAR
1.5 CREDIT HRS.
 MAJOR POLITICAL WRITERS:
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)
 Swift was an Anglo-Irish author, who was the foremost prose satirist in the English language.
 He wrote verse of high quality throughout his career. His technical virtuosity allowed him to switch
assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the intricately textured humour of Verses on the Death
of Dr. Swift (completed in 1732; published 1739) and to the delicate humanity of his poems to Stella.
 Swift’s prime distinction, however, is of course as the greatest prose satirist in the English language. His
period as secretary to the distinguished man of letters Sir William Temple gave him the chance to extend
and consolidate his reading, and his first major work, A Tale of a Tub (1704), deploys its author’s learning
to chart the anarchic lunacy of its supposed creator, a Grub Street hack, whose solipsistic “modern”
consciousness possesses no respect for objectivity, coherence of argument, or inherited wisdom from
Christian or Classical tradition.
 Techniques of impersonation were central to Swift’s art thereafter. The Argument Against Abolishing
Christianity (1708), for instance, offers brilliant ironic annotations on the “Church in Danger” controversy
through the carefully assumed voice of a “nominal” Christian.
 MAJOR POLITICAL WRITERS:
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)
 That similar techniques could be adapted to serve specific political goals is demonstrated by The
Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), part of a successful campaign to prevent the imposition of a new, and
debased, coinage on Ireland.
 Swift had hoped for preferment in the English church, but his destiny lay in Ireland, and the ambivalent
nature of his relationship to that country and its inhabitants provoked some of his most demanding and
exhilarating writing — above all, A Modest Proposal (1729), in which the ironic use of an invented persona
achieves perhaps its most extraordinary and mordant development.
 His most wide-ranging satiric work, however, is also his most famous: Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Swift
grouped himself with Pope and Gay in hostility to the Walpole regime and the Hanoverian court, and
that preoccupation leaves its mark on this work.
 Gulliver’s Travels (original title Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World) is a four-part satirical work,
published anonymously in 1726 as Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World.
 MAJOR POLITICAL WRITERS:
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745)

 Considered widely as a keystone of English literature, it was one of the books that gave birth to the novel
form, though it did not yet have the rules of the genre as an organizing tool.
 A parody of the then popular travel narrative, Gulliver’s Travels combines adventure with savage satire,
mocking English customs and the politics of the day.
 However, at its heart, it is also a radical critique of human nature in which subtle ironic techniques work to
part the reader from any comfortable preconceptions and challenge him to rethink from first principles
his notions of man. Its narrator, who begins as a prideful modern man and ends as a maddened
misanthrope, is also, disturbingly, the final object of its satire.
 The text proved so popular upon its publication that several reprints, each with minor changes in text,
were published within a few months. A new edition was released in 1735 that included allegory not found
in the 1726 versions; this edition is generally, though not universally, regarded as the more authentic
version.
 MAJOR POLITICAL/PHILOSOPHICAL
WRITERS OF THE AGE
 More consoling doctrine was available in the popular writings of Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd earl of
Shaftesbury (1671 – 1713), which were gathered in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times
(1711).
 Although Shaftesbury had been tutored by John Locke, he dissented from the latter’s rejection of innate
ideas and posited that man is born with a moral sense that is closely associated with his sense of
aesthetic form.
 The tone of Shaftesbury’s essays is characteristically idealistic, benevolent, gently reasonable, and
unmistakably aristocratic. Yet they were more controversial than now seems likely: such religion as is
present there is Deistic, and the philosopher seems warmer toward pagan than Christian wisdom.
 Shaftesbury’s optimism was buffeted by Bernard de Mandeville (1670 – 1733), whose Fable of the Bees
(1714–29), which includes “The Grumbling Hive; or, Knaves Turn’d Honest” (1705), takes a closer look at
early capitalist society than Shaftesbury was prepared to do.
 Mandeville stressed the indispensable role played by the ruthless pursuit of self-interest in securing
society’s prosperous functioning. He thus favoured an altogether harsher view of man’s natural instincts
than Shaftesbury did and used his formidable gifts as a controversialist to oppose the various
contemporary hypocrisies, philosophical and theological, that sought to deny the truth as he saw it.
 MAJOR POLITICAL/PHILOSOPHICAL
WRITERS OF THE AGE
 Indeed, Mandeville is less a philosopher than a satirist of the philosophies of others, ruthlessly skewering
unevidenced optimism and merely theoretical schemes of virtue. His Treatise Concerning the Principles of
Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous (1713) continued the 17th-
century debates about the nature of human perception, to which René Descartes and John Locke had
contributed.
 The extreme lucidity and elegance of his style contrast markedly with the more-effortful but intensely
earnest prose of Joseph Butler’s Analogy of Religion (1736), which also seeks to confront contemporary
skepticism and ponders scrupulously the bases of man’s knowledge of his creator.
 In a series of works beginning with A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume (1711–1776)
identified himself as a key spokesman for ironic skepticism and probed uncompromisingly the human
mind’s propensity to work by sequences of association and juxtaposition rather than by reason.
 Hume uniquely merged intellectual rigour with stylistic elegance, writing many beautifully turned essays,
including the lengthy, highly successful History of Great Britain (1754–62) and his piercingly skeptical
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published posthumously in 1779.
 MAJOR POLITICAL/PHILOSOPHICAL
WRITERS OF THE AGE
 Edmund Burke (1729 – 1797), a British statesman, parliamentary orator, and political thinker prominent in
public life from 1765 to about 1795 and important in the history of political theory. He championed
conservatism in opposition to Jacobinism in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
 His A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) merged
psychological and aesthetic questioning by hypothesizing that the spectator’s or reader’s delight in the
sublime depended upon a sensation of pleasurable pain.
 An equally bold assumption about human psychology—in this case, that man is an ambitious, socially
oriented, product-valuing creature—lies at the heart of Adam Smith’s (1723 – 1790) masterpiece of
unrestrictive economic theory, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776).
 Smith was a friend of Hume’s, and both were, with others such as Hutcheson, William Robertson, and
Adam Ferguson, part of the Scottish Enlightenment — a flowering of intellectual life centred in Edinburgh
and Glasgow in the second half of the 18th century.
To be continued in the next lecture.
Thank you!