Examiners’ commentaries 2017

Examiners’ commentaries 2017

EN3035/2035 Augustans and Romantics

Advice to candidates on how Examiners calculate marks

It is important that candidates recognise that in all papers, three questions
should be answered in order to get the best possible mark (ensuring that the
rubric for the paper has been followed accordingly).
Examiners follow a simple mathematical formula when awarding a final overall
mark: they give each answer a mark out of 100 (up to three answers only, as
required by the examination paper); they then total all available marks; and
finally they divide the total by three, thus giving an average overall mark.
So, if your first answer is given 57%, your second answer is given 56%, and your
third answer 50%, then the calculation will look like this:
57 + 56 + 50 = 163
163 ÷ 3 = 54.3
Overall mark: 54%
Two good essays and no third essay will always bring the mark down. So, if in
the example above a third answer was not given, the calculation would look
like this:
57 + 56 = 113
113 ÷ 3 = 37.6
Overall mark: 38%
In this case, even if the candidate had written a ‘poor’ third answer getting
a mark of 40% their overall mark would be higher than not attempting an
answer at all:
57 + 56 + 40 = 153
153 ÷ 3 = 51
Overall mark: 51%
Note in the example above how the 40% mark, while low, still enables the
candidate to achieve an overall mark in the Lower Second category, which is
in keeping with their first two marks of 57% and 56%. Not answering a third
question would see the candidate lose considerable marks and drop two
whole classes. It could also mean the difference between a pass and a fail.
Candidates are thus strongly advised to give equal attention across the paper,
plan their time accordingly, and attempt to provide three answers of roughly
the same length and as full as possible. Candidates are also reminded that it
is totally unnecessary to copy out the question again into the answer book;
a question number in the margin is sufficient enough, and this will also save
valuable minutes.

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Examiners’ commentaries 2017

EN3035/2035 Augustans and Romantics

General remarks
Candidates who elect to sit the examination for this course are expected
to demonstrate a familiarity with the forms and preoccupations found in
literature written during the 18th century and the early decades of the 19th.
The title of the course, insofar as it suggests a certain opposition, invites critical
discourse which explores the qualities that distinguish the two ‘periods’, while
remaining sensitive to evidence of a common currency between writers of
widely differing attitudes and allegiances. One such example might be the
role of classical culture as a literary inheritance. The so-called ‘Augustans’ were
self-proclaimed heirs to the Rome of Virgil, Juvenal and Horace, and to the epic
world of Homeric Greece. Candidates are usually quick to recognise a shift
in sensibilities that emerges in Romantic writing, especially a move from the
public voice to something more interior. The temptation to identify Romantic
writing as simply a reaction against Augustan classicism is strong and can, in
part, be justified by this sense of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’.
However, candidates should perhaps be cautioned against being too all-
embracing in celebrating Romanticism as a radical rejection of all that had
gone before. By education, Shelley was a natural inhabitant of an ancient
Mediterranean world, writing his own Œdipus Tyrannus and Prometheus
Unbound, and commemorating Keats’s death in Adonais. The latter poet’s
experience of classical story was more dependent upon personal discovery
of the sort described in the sonnet ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’.
Nonetheless, poems like Endymion and The Fall of Hyperion draw their
imaginative resources from exactly the same world that was a second home for
the earlier writers. In a similar manner, candidates will observe the unbending
structures of satire’s heroic couplets and conclude that Romantic prosody is
universally experimental, even describing blank verse (The Prelude) as free
verse. However, it is worth remembering that Byron employed ironic couplets,
and in Childe Harold, he joined Keats (‘Eve of St. Agnes’) and Shelley (The Revolt
of Islam) in adopting the Spenserian stanza. All wrote sonnets, and some flirted
with medieval forms. If they were experimental, it was in their rediscovery of
lyrical verse, and most especially in their original interest in folk ballads.
These caveats are not intended to dissuade candidates from discovering
what is new and radical, merely to draw attention to possible continuities in
a literary culture which may sometimes be masked by the antithetical nature
of the paper’s title. Even the apparent homogeneity of ‘the Augustans’ might
obscure the claims of Defoe and Richardson and, similarly, it might be more
appropriate to speak of ‘Romanticisms’ than ‘the Romantics’.

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Comments on specific questions

Section A
Answer THREE questions, ONE from EACH section (all three questions carry equal marks).
Candidates may NOT discuss the same text in more than one answer, in this examination or in any
other Advanced Level Unit/Level 5/Level 6 examination.
a. Paulus vel Cossus vel Drusus moribus esto. JUVENAL (Sat., viii)
As has been suggested in commentaries from earlier years, attention paid to
a title and/or an epigraph may provide an effective entry into a passage of
verse or prose. In particular, it can initiate a discussion of genre which, through
parallel examples, will provide a literary context. Whitehead unambiguously
declares his poem to be a satire on manners. Satire, of course, crosses genres
and is found in verse, drama and the novel. However, this particular form of
ironic couplet concerned with matters of public behaviour is easily identifiable
as characteristically ‘Augustan’. What is claimed as ‘representative’ is best
demonstrated by comparison and in this case an obvious point of reference
would be Pope. This decade saw the publication of the four Epistles to Several
Persons (on ‘taste’, on ‘the use of riches’ etc.) and The Essay on Man. The latter
title, together with the common citation of the Epistles as the ‘Moral Essays’,
might suggest a kinship with the periodical journals of Addison and Steele.
Discussions of public mores in ‘essay’ form seem to be very much of the period
and the idea that manners and morals are closely related could be profitably
pursued – the figure of Timon in Pope’s Burlington would make a good case
study. Candidates might also want to highlight the quotation from Juvenal
who, with Horace, provided a model for the aspiring 18th-century satirist.
Whitehead’s ironic method, typical of contemporary satire, is to build a series
of antithetical structures. Courts are juxtaposed with madhouses, palaces with
prisons, dungeons with drawing rooms. ‘Moorfields’ gathers together, in a
way reminiscent of The Dunciad, a chaos of madness, sex and criminality, and
the ironic comparison of low-life and high-life takes us into the world of Gay’s
Beggar’s Opera and Fielding’s Jonathan Wild. This is the underside of urban life,
and it is satire’s job to point out how easily the contagion of Haywood’s whores
and White’s thieves could infect the society of St. James’s. .
b. SAMUEL JOHNSON, from Preface to Shakespeare, 1765
Discussions of Romantic individuality, subjective states and imaginative fancy
are frequently couched in terms of a reaction against the ‘generalised’ and
‘universal’ nature of Augustan writing. In considering the excerpt from the
Preface, a sense of this apparent conflict might provide a portal into Johnson’s
critical principles. He dismisses the characters of other poets (dramatists) as
‘too often an individual’ and endorses Shakespeare’s creations as ‘a species’.
This is, perhaps, unexpected, as criticism since the 19th century has lauded
Shakespeare’s ability to create distinct and individual ‘characters’, an approach
that may in some degree have been influenced by analyses of the emergent
novel. However, in the world of prose fiction, Fielding had anticipated this
proposal when he claimed – in Joseph Andrews – that he ‘describe[d] not
men, but manners; not an individual, but a species’. It is instructive to read
the opening couplet of Johnson’s Vanity of Human Wishes, where ‘Mankind’ is
surveyed ‘from China to Peru’, and personifications compete for centre stage
with historical figures. In search of what is typical of the period, candidates
might wish to explore the conservative cast of Johnson’s critical perspectives.
He is suspicious of the prejudices of what is fashionable and subscribes to the
idea that critical judgement is the product of long and repeated scrutiny. The
fleeting novelty of ‘fanciful invention’ is best avoided, a position which explains

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his antipathy to Metaphysical poetry – ‘Life of Cowley’ – and one which would
provoke a reaction among the Romantics. In Shakespeare, Johnson sees an
illustration of general human nature, unfettered by the peculiarities of time
and place. We find the same instinct for ‘type’ and species in, say, Pope’s Essay
on Man and Fielding’s Tom Jones. Johnson, like many 18th-century writers,
cannot resist a taste for the didactic and finds in Shakespeare a repository
of ‘practical axioms’ and systems of ‘civil and oeconomical prudence’. For
him, Shakespeare’s ‘mirrour’ reflects human experience. Later, the Romantic
imagination would ‘illuminate’ it – see Abrams, M.H. The Mirror and the Lamp:
Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972) [ISBN 9780195014715]. Candidates are encouraged to comment upon
style (‘language’), although in the case of prose this is a rare occurrence. This
passage is a fine example of ‘periodic prose’, constructed from a series of
reflective sub-clauses, where repetition of connectives, verbs, nouns (‘though’,
‘please’, ‘poet’) conduct the argument with a certain authority. A poetic
equivalent can be found in the symmetries of the heroic couplet.
c. HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS, from Letters Written in France, 1790
It seems entirely appropriate for candidates to identify this correspondence
as a very early response to the French Revolution, although we would advise
against rehearsing the historical circumstances in too much detail. Despite
these letters being close in date, Williams’s equivocal response to such
tumultuous events will be predictive of wider, national anxieties. Wordsworth’s
enthusiasm for the fall of the Bastille was soon dissipated when faced with the
horrors described here and in his poem ‘France: An Ode’, Coleridge reflects a
similar duality as he declares ‘How I hoped and feared’. The philosophical and
political excitement which embraced ideas about liberty and equality was
qualified by a sense of tragic regret which accompanied news of revolutionary
violence. It has been suggested that accounts of these nightmares and fears
of invasion created a fertile breeding ground for the neurotic excesses of
the Gothic. Williams reveals an emotional landscape where intense feelings
attach themselves to concepts and ideas – we remember Marianne in Sense
and Sensibility who knew what was right because she felt it to be right. That
quality of tearful joy aroused by a land free from the yoke of tyranny carries
echoes of the Age of Sensibility and her lament is couched in the form of a
self-questioning: ‘Are these the images of that universal joy which called tears
into my eyes and made my heart throb with sympathy?’. Like Johnson, she
makes ready use of repetition, but here it seems to be less about the structure
of debate, and more about emotional drama. There is a Romantic emphasis
upon personal reactions: a slightly breathless present tense; the occasionally
staccato syntax; and the self-addressed rhetorical questions. All these habits
seem to invite a sympathetic response by exposing the writer’s inner feelings.
Candidates might also wish to explore the political dimensions of ‘the cottage
of the peasant’, where freedom is instinctively located in a rural environment –
even if the lexicon of ‘verdure’ and ‘lawns’ has the flavour of poetic diction. It is
a small step from here to the upland farms of Wordsworth’s ‘humble and rustic
life’.
d. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, from The Prelude, 1805, pub. 1850
Candidates will immediately recognise all the ingredients which make up
a popular image of Romantic writing. The poet, in search of inspiration,
recollects his childhood years when Nature was his second home. This, after
all, marks the early stages of the ‘Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, the epigraph
to Wordsworth’s Prelude. It is because Nature is so central to this passage
that the examiners would like briefly to amplify this ‘subject’. Too often, the
natural world and Romanticism are seen as indistinguishably synonymous
in discussions of poetry in this period. Anyone who has read Pope’s Windsor
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Forest, Thomson’s Seasons, or Cowper’s Task, will know that nature existed
before the Romantics, so it is important for candidates carefully to define the
role of Nature in any work for which ‘Romantic’ credentials are being claimed.
Even among a common group of poets, the range can be extensive, from
biblical pastoral (Blake), to Gothic (Byron and Coleridge), to transcendental
(Shelley), to sensuous and mythic (Keats). Wordsworth reviews his own ‘zeal’
and ‘ambition’ to write a grand heroic work (fn6, p.5 of the exam paper)
which is frustrated by lack of inspiration, and dogged by feelings of guilt – a
condition not unknown to Coleridge in ‘Dejection’. However, Wordsworth’s
deliverance was to discover that his own odyssey from child to poet was,
in fact, an epic of ‘Autobiography’, and in many ways better suited to the
lyric quality associated with Romantic verse. The lines carry a constant
musical refrain as the Derwent’s ‘voice’ penetrates the child’s dreams, and
‘murmurs’ in unison with his ‘Nurse’s song’, sharing the act of nurture. The
sense of tranquillity is intense in a haven that protects Wordsworth from
the ‘waywardness’ of the busy world. There is ‘ceaseless music’ and a ‘steady
cadence’ in a landscape where Nature ‘breathes’ like an animate presence.
These are scenes of instinctual pleasure in the natural world, of innocence and
perhaps sublimity as a radiance shines from ‘Skiddaw’s lofty height’. The child,
tutored by Nature, is clearly the father of the man. The closing analogy of the
‘naked savage’ is so characteristic of the Romantics as to need no comment.

Section B
Answer ONE question. For the purposes of this examination, Jane Austen will be deemed a
nineteenth-century author.

Question 2
It has been suggested that ‘Augustanism’ can be characterized by Pope’s instruction to ‘Avoid
Extremes’ (Essay on Criticism). How easily does this principle sit with the violence and excess which
fill the pages of eighteenth-century satire? You should refer to the writings of one author.
The suggestion that 18th-century satire is a difficult mixture of Juvenalian
vituperation and Horatian wry irony provided an interesting gateway into
this question. The tone of a poem like Pope’s Rape is mostly amiable and even
conciliatory. In contrast, the portrayal of Lord Hervey as a ‘painted child of dirt’
who, like a toad, ‘spits himself abroad’ is excoriating and brutal (Epistle to Dr
Arbuthnot). The moderation that informs Pope’s instruction can be found in the
various counterpoints he offers. In the Epistles, characters appear – including
the addressees – who represent an approved alternative to the vanity and
corruption of the world. The love of a parent and the friendship of Arbuthnot,
the charity of the Man of Ross (To Bathurst), the taste and benevolence of
Burlington: all these are set in balance against envy, miserliness, profligacy and
the violent self-display of a Timon. Swiftian excess is more problematic. His
prose and verse satires conjure visions of ordure and violent disorder. There is
perhaps an argument from aversion therapy: for instance, in the way that the
narrative chaos of A Tale provokes a craving for structure. In Gulliver’s Travels
there are also infrequent models of humanity (Glumdalclitch, Lord Munodi,
Pedro de Mendez), but in an ocean of squalor, acquisitiveness and aggression
they are forced to bear an intolerable weight. Swift appears to leave his readers
to navigate between the extremes of his imagined nightmares, between
Houyhnhnm and Yahoo.

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Question 3
Consider the contribution made by one or more other literary forms to the novels of this period.
Reference should be made to one or more works by one author.
For some reason, there were one or two attempts to rewrite this question as
a discussion of the influence of novels upon other novels. We remark upon
this only to emphasise the importance of paying close attention to all rubrics.
There were some good discussions of the ways in which Defoe’s early career
as a ‘journalist’ would support the circumstantial evidence of Crusoe’s daily
survival or Moll’s urban escapades. This so-called ‘faction’, that Ian Watt would
nominate as ‘formal realism’ – The Rise of the Novel. (London: Pimlico, 2000)
[ISBN 9780712664271] – helps to revitalise prose narrative, and marks the
beginning of a new genre. Of a similar cast, are the tales of highwaymen,
pirates, and voyages of discovery which Defoe plundered to give authenticity
to his supposedly true accounts, both in terms of his style and narrative detail.
Richardson, also adopted the pose of ‘editor’ and candidates might explore his
use of correspondence to create a similar illusion of ‘actuality’. A very different
case is that of Fielding, whose approach to fictionality was full disclosure.
He presents ‘himself’ as narrator, an amiable coffee-house companion, who
introduces the books of his tale of Tom Jones in the manner of a periodical
essayist, with his thoughts ‘Of Love’ and on ‘A comparison between the world
and the stage’. He also gives pedigree to this ‘new thing’ by introducing the
mock-heroic into his novels.

Question 4
In the opening lines of ‘Epistle I’ of An Essay on Man, Pope describes his ambition to ‘Expatiate free
o’er all this scene of Man; / A mighty maze! but not without a plan.’ Discuss the work of one author
of the period whose writing embodies a similar aspiration.
Pope’s words provide a timely reminder that, despite the satirists’ visions of
chaos (Dunciad, IV, Gulliver, III, Gay’s Trivia), they all lived in and subscribed to
a world where the notion of Christian providence had significance. The cited
Essay contains one of the most direct expressions of this belief in the closing
lines of ‘Epistle I’ where Pope asserts that ‘all Nature is but Art, unknown to thee’
and famously concludes ‘whatever is, is right’ (I, 289–94). For a less abstract
rendering of this idea, candidates might also turn to Windsor Forest, where ‘the
Groves of Eden’ reveal a harmony beneath the seeming confusion of the forest
in which the imaginative eye is able to perceive an ‘order in variety’. A plan with
a similar sense of providence at work, furnishes Thomson with a meaningful
structure for his celebration of the natural world in The Seasons. The cyclical
progress of the poem strongly suggests that beneath the breathtaking
profusion of Nature a divine purpose at work. Candidates might also wish
to consider Fielding in his role of ‘omniscient’ narrator. As ‘creator’ of his text,
he seeds the complex narrative of Tom Jones with clues and hints which will
demonstrate his control over the destiny of his hero and over the dispersal
of justice. The symmetries of the plot – the numerology of chapters, the
antithetical pairings of characters and so on – all point to a hidden, but never
absent providence.

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Question 5
Write an essay which considers the nature and treatment of one of the following in the work of
one author of the period:
a. patriotism
b. myth
c. primitivism.
a. ‘Patriotism’, except where it is being exploited for ironic purposes, has a
fairly narrow horizon. Romantic writers mostly adopted radical positions
(Blake, Shelley, Byron) and were usually sceptical of the simplicities of patriotic
fervour. Earlier poets who wrote in the Georgic tradition were less inhibited
in their visions of Britain’s imperial destiny. In The Seasons, Thomson displays
the agricultural fecundity of the nation, seeing in it the rise of Britannia’s ‘solid
grandeur’, a power which allows her to command ‘the exalted stores of every
brighter clime’. This patriotism of empire can be found in works like Philips’s
Cyder, Dyer’s The Fleece and Grainger’s Sugar Cane. Even a young Pope,
in Windsor Forest, can be seen waving a patriotic flag and sublimating the
violence of empire in the blameless rustic sport of hunting.
b. ‘Myth’, in its classical versions, was a part of the educational fabric of every
‘Augustan’ writer. In many ways, the works of Homer and Virgil supplied
a measure of excellence to which English culture aspired. Yet, apart from
translations, the greatest achievements of the age were parodic. Candidates
might like to explore the ways in which the worlds of Achilles, Aphrodite,
Odysseus and Aeneas were both revered and ironically miniaturised in
contemporary mock-heroic satires. Romantic poets like Keats and Shelley
re-invest classical myth with a power and mystery which seem to reflect their
concerns with their own creative imaginations. Such a discussion might look at
The Fall of Hyperion, Lamia, Adonais or Prometheus Unbound.
c. ‘Primitivism’ could be said to appear in an 18th-century vogue for so-called
‘labouring-class poets’ – e.g. Stephen Duck. However, a serious interest in
untutored sensibilities is more the hallmark of Romantic writing. ‘The naked
savage’, popularly associated with Rousseau, who never used the phrase,
makes only an occasional appearance. There is Wordsworth’s alter ego on
‘Indian Plains’ (Question 1 (d)), or Cowper’s lament for the South Sea islander
Omai in The Task (I, 620–77), although he is much less charitable to a bunch
of ‘vagabond’ gypsies (I, 557–91). The question as to whether this term might
include, say, Wordsworth’s peasantry and his rural solitaries, could provoke an
interesting discussion.

Question 6
Consider the ways in which one author of the period explores the distinctions which were
perceived to exist between sentiment, sensibility, and sentimentality.
The Age of Sensibility reveals a complex and frequently ambiguous
relationship between the three terms in the rubric. Candidates might look
at the novels of the later 18th century where there is a growing interest in
emotional sensitivity which is both moral and aesthetic. Richardson’s Clarissa
inspired tears and blushes as the heroine resisted the sexual predation of the
undeniably attractive Lovelace. The excesses of sentimentality can be found
in Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, which reflects a new fascination with masculine
feelings. Reactions, however, had already appeared in Goldsmith’s The Vicar
of Wakefield and Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, although they are works
which undoubtedly share some of the sentiments they mock. Candidates
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can find similar dualities on the stage. Sheridan and Goldsmith both claim
to distinguish between ‘laughing and sentimental comedy’ – see the latter’s
‘Essay on the Theatre’ – but for all they claim to satirise the benevolence of
Honeywood in The Good-Natured Man or the romantic fantasies of Lydia
Languish and Faulkland in The Rivals, the authors are extraordinarily forgiving
of the frailties they claim to pillory. It may be the case that Austen’s judgement
on Marianne in Sense and Sensibility is much more rigorous.

Question 7
For all that meets the bodily sense I deem
Symbolical [...]
That we may learn with young unwounded ken
The substance from its shadow.
(SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE)
Discuss the verse of ONE Romantic poet whose imagination was engaged with such relationships
between ‘sense’ and ‘symbol’, ‘substance’ and ‘shadow’.
Keats’s verse proved to be popular in discussions of what distinguishes
substance from shadow. In particular, the odes, dealing with transience and
mortality, seemed to be in search of something that would endure, a world
which was not illusory. ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ famously concludes with a litany
of questions, ‘Was it a vision, or a waking dream? [...] Do I wake or sleep?’. The
Grecian urn with all its solidity of marble bas-relief is notable for its imagined
towns whose silent streets are ‘emptied of this folk’. In a sense, the urn is the
shadow of the substance, a moment captured for eternity, but only a moment.
The knight in ‘Belle Dame Sans Merci’ enters a dream-world where nothing
is substantial – except, perhaps ironically, death. He wants to believe that
her gaze betokens love, but she evades his eye – she speaks in a ‘language
strange’ which he fancies he can translate. Such imagined ‘realities’ are at the
core of much of Keats’s work and when, in Lamia, a palace of love is created
for Lycius, who is to say whether it is substance or shadow? Coleridge might
provide material for a similar discussion. The alien uncertainty that plagues the
Mariner’s ship, the magical creation of domes and gardens in Xanadu, and a
female shape-shifter who steals Christabel’s identity: all, in their own way, blur
the senses, and make substance and shadow impossible to disentangle.

Question 8
To what extent does one writer of the period successfully create poetry out of contemporary
issues?
‘Contemporary issues’ was a fairly broad umbrella and candidates may
legitimately spread their net wide, although it does no harm to explain why
a chosen subject might be considered an ‘issue’. Specific events could include
Pope’s Windsor Forest, where a celebration of the Peace of Utrecht and its
imperial benefits is transfigured into a pastoral vision of England as Eden.
Later in the century, the nation’s ambiguous reaction to revolution in France
was described in Wordsworth’s personal experiences in Books 10 and 11 of
The Prelude and in Coleridge’s elegiac poem, ‘France: An Ode’. Discussions of
Blake’s radical denunciations of political oppression, sexual hypocrisy and the
exploitation of children also offered a visionary account of the corruptions that
stigmatised his brazenly self-satisfied society.

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Question 9
Consider the ways in which classical mythology is employed by one writer of the period
In the comments appended to Question 5b, we have already suggested some
of the differences that characterise Augustan and Romantic responses to
classical myth. We would, therefore, like to refer readers to that section.

Section C
Answer ONE question.
Your answer in this section should refer to AT LEAST TWO authors. For the purposes of this
examination, Jane Austen will be deemed a nineteenth-century author.

Question 10
In 1715, Gay published The What d’ye call it which carried the sub-title A Tragi-Comi-Pastoral Farce.
Twenty-seven years later, Fielding would describe Joseph Andrews as ‘a comic epic poem in prose’.
How successfully does eighteenth-century satire exploit this habit of hybridization? Refer to the
works of AT LEAST TWO authors.
It was observed in Question 5 that some of the greatest achievements of
Augustan authors lay in parodies of the classical genres for which they had
such veneration. It is, however, important to avoid any suggestion that
writers were ‘mocking’ their classical originals, a phrase which appears not
infrequently. The works of Homer and Virgil were a guarantee of excellence
and remained untainted even when used in ironic contexts. The inhabitants
of The Rape of the Lock are made to look ridiculous by being dramatised as
miniature versions of epic conflict. In this storm in a tea-cup curls are snipped,
coffee is spilt and trivial lives are laid bare. The comic juxtaposition of Belinda’s
salons and Homer’s world where men bleed and cities are razed to the ground
is an attempt to bring a sense of proportion. Candidates should become
familiar with traditional epic motifs like ritual arming, sacramental feasts, visits
to the Underworld and so on. Other mock genres worth investigating are the
urban pastorals of Swift, where young ‘nymphs’, with names reminiscent of
shepherdesses, have metamorphosed into malodorous city queans, and also
the mock-georgic found in Gay’s Trivia, which is a handbook on how to survive
in the dangerous, purulent streets of 18th-century London.

Question 11
‘One of the special pleasures of neo-classical art — and, for many in a time of howling anarchy,
perhaps its chief consolation — is the sense conveyed of the triumph of form, a dynamic variety of
materials having been reduced to order by the shaping intelligence’ (MARTIN BATTESTIN). Consider
the work of AT LEAST TWO eighteenth-century authors who might, to a greater or lesser extent, lay
claim to such an achievement.
Perhaps the immediate perception of the ‘triumph of form’ in ‘neo-classical’
literature, is the dominance of the heroic couplet, and, to a lesser extent, the
symmetries of periodic prose described in the comments on Question 1b.
Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that, in The Seasons, where Thomson
is concerned to discover a divine orderliness in the chaotic fecundity of the
world, the poet employs the more discursive form of blank verse. In his work,
profusion is given shape by the cyclical progress of the seasonal round.
Candidates might wish to compare this with the opening lines of Windsor
Forest, where the couplet structure offers ‘order in variety’. As the quotation
suggests, ‘the shaping intelligence’ is most dramatically observable in the
world of satire. Pope’s Dunciad, set among anarchic scenes of urban squalor,
records a vision of the death of Christian civilisation. Yet even as the Goddess
of Dulness smothers every art and science, Pope’s wit, imagination and poetic
form give a guarantee of survival. Writers like Swift – ‘A Description of a City

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Shower’ – and Gay – Trivia – seem to relish ‘containing’ the energy and the
detritus of a grimy city landscape. Candidates might wish to see Tom Jones
from a similar perspective, where the confusions of a convoluted plot are
always subject to the authority of its creator.

Question 12
‘“He is a gentleman; I am a gentleman’s daughter; so far we are equal”’ (JANE AUSTEN). To what
extent do the novels of AT LEAST TWO authors of the period challenge AND/OR affirm the class
structures of their society?
It has been said of Defoe that he had no desire to change society, merely to
own it. This may be a criticism of or tribute to the entrepreneurial spirit of his
characters, but there is no doubt that social mobility is seen to be the reward
of economic power. In fact, Moll always considers herself to be set apart
from the riff-raff of the underworld, yet ironically the first ‘gentlewoman’ she
identifies as a role-model, turns out to be a whore. Richardson offers some
curiously voyeuristic narratives on the subject of class and sex. His orthodoxy
is offended by the stereotype of the aristocratic predator, yet the social status
remains attractive and can, on the right terms, be acquired. More complex,
perhaps, are the attitudes found in Fielding and Austen. Their ironic novels
share a sharp-eyed awareness of the hypocrisies, and the inequalities of a
self-interested class system. However, the structures of most of their works
reflect a reinforcement of the status quo: lessons have been learned, but the
conservative impulse is strong. Tom Jones has proved his ‘moral’ worth and
his reward is the discovery of a paternity which renders him a legitimate heir.
The sense and integrity of Austen’s heroines justify their newfound status and
security, and their role as chatelaine to a country estate.

Question 13
‘Fictional encounters with real or imaginary spirits provided opportunities for representing
feelings excited by fear, horror, madness and even ecstasy’ (J. R. de J. JACKSON). In the light of this
quotation, discuss the works of AT LEAST TWO authors writing in verse AND/OR prose.
This topic is probably best suited to Romantic writing, and we would highlight
the rubric where the subject is ‘spirits’. A talking horse is an imaginary
‘character’, but Matilda, who seduces Ambrosio in Lewis’s The Monk, is a ‘spirit’.
In the same Gothic vein, candidates could pursue an enquiry into the vampiric,
shape-shifting Geraldine in Coleridge’s Christabel or into the identity of Keats’s
‘Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Another encounter, magically engineered by the latter
poet, is the meeting between Lamia and Lycius, and gradually there emerges a
common theme of possession and dread and alienation. That frisson of terror
we associate with the supernatural needs no justification, but the Romantic
poet’s obsession with ‘the Muse’ bears speculation. So often the excitement of
being enchanted, spellbound gives way to feelings of loss and rejection.

Question 14
In 1742, Gray declared that ‘the language of the age is never the language of poetry’. Some sixty
years later, Wordsworth dismissed much eighteenth-century poetry as marked by its ‘gaudiness
and inane phraseology’ and vowed to employ ‘the real language of men’. Explore these apparently
contradictory attitudes in a discussion of the poetic language of one Augustan poet and ONE
Romantic.
Questions of this sort are not specialised in a linguistic sense, but they do
demand a familiarity with texts that will allow a theory to be demonstrated
by detailed quotation. Most candidates will have come across the sort of
periphrasis that Wordsworth has in mind (birds who become ‘plumy people’),
but there is no reason why the named ‘protagonists’ should not supply the
chosen texts, especially as Wordsworth clearly has Gray in his sights.
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 Examiners’ commentaries 2017

Question 15
‘Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it
adds beauty to that which is most deformed; it marries exultation and horror, grief and pleasure,
eternity and change’ (PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY). Discuss the verse of AT LEAST TWO Romantic poets
who attempted to reconcile such opposites
Shelley’s description of the transformational power of the poetic imagination
is strongly flavoured with Platonic theory, and it prompts us to recommend
the reading of his Defence of Poetry where he claims that ‘poetry lifts the veil
from the hidden beauty of the world’. His reference to reconciliation recalls the
Biographia Literaria where Coleridge speaks of the poet diffusing ‘a tone and
spirit of unity that blends and (as it were) fuses, each into each [and] reveals
itself in the balance and reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities’. It is
his idea of ‘the one life’ (‘Eolian Harp’), which allows the Mariner to perceive the
beauty of slimy sea-snakes, or makes a unity of the ‘sunny pleasure-dome’ and
‘caves of ice’ in ‘Kubla Khan’.

Question 16
Discuss the verse of AT LEAST TWO writers whose work is illuminated by Keats’s insistence that
the poet should be ‘capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable
reaching after fact and reason’.
Keats’s subscription to his own theory can be demonstrated in the
uncertainties of a poem like ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. At a time when,
traditionally, the natural and the supernatural inhabited the same world, the
knight’s meeting with ‘a faery’s child’ should have prompted caution. However,
he submits all too willingly to enchantment. She looks at him ‘as [if ] she did
love’; he gazes at her steadfastly although her ‘sidelong’ body evades his
eye; and, in a strange language, he is ‘sure’ that she said ‘I love thee true’. This
elusive medieval tale could be a simple ballad, it could be autobiographical, it
could be a miniature allegory of Keats’s troubled relationship with his poetic
imagination. Its power lies in its ambiguities and equivocations. Much the
same may be said of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. It is a poem whose explicit
language, especially in the marginal glosses, leads one to expect a simple
Christian allegory of sin and expiation. However, it is also a work where
alienation, guilt and anxiety are unlikely to be contained in blithe couplets
about God’s love. The Mariner remains significantly unshriven.

Question 17
Consider the nature and treatment of ONE OR MORE of the following in the works of AT LEAST TWO
authors:
a. Orientalism
b. the cult of the South
c. mediaevalism.
None of these three subjects was able to attract any interest. A fascination
with Eastern cultures, with the Mediterranean and with the medieval past
supplied a desire for exotica that marked part of the Romantic ‘revolution’.
Gothic literature milked these strange environments because of the emotional
intensity associated with these largely imagined worlds. Extreme experiences
and transgression could be located in worlds beyond the light of common
day: murder in Keats’s ‘Isabella or ‘The Pot of Basil’; incest and demonology in
Lewis’s The Monk; possession by vampires in Coleridge’s Christabel; and Celtic
epic in Macpherson’s Ossian.

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