From the Puritan Age
to the Augustan Age
(1625-1760)
Historical and
Social Background
1625
Charles I became king
Charles Vs. Parliament
1640
Short and Long Parliament
1642
Civil War
1649
Oliver Cromwell and
the Commonwealth
1649
Charles was beheaded
1649
England was proclaimed
a commonwealth
1653
Oliver Cromwell
'Lord protector of the realm'
The end of the Puritan Rule
The presbyterians favoured
the restoration of the Stuarts
1660
The return of the Stuarts
1660 Charles II
1665-1666
Great Plague and Great Fire
1673 Test Act
King is the head of the Church of England
No Catholics in public offices
1685 James II became king
1689 The Glorious Revolution
William of Orange and Act of Settlement (1701)
1702 Queen Anne
1707 Act of union
1714
The Augustan Age
George I became king thanks to
Act of Settlement
1715
Jacobite vs. George I
1727 George II reign
The seven Years War(1756-1763) permit
the British expansion in India and Canada
Literary Background
Cavaliers Poets
Continued the
Elizabethan poetry
Style elegant and smooth
Meditative mood
Metaphysical poets
Describe the complexities
of life
Style complex and
difficult metaphors
Two main topics:
Love and religion
Inspirated by astronomy,
medicine and geography
Puritan Poets
wants to purificated
society and arts
meter: blank verse
epic poem
Poets
John Milton
He was puritan
In favour of Republic
In 1660
monarchy restoration
It was arrested
Wrote Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost
Satan Vs. God
Figure of satan:
From hero to enemy
Style and meter
Grand style and Iambic pentamether
John Donne
Metaphysical poet
Use of conceits:
Difficult metaphors
A Valediction:Forbidding Mourning
Metaphor of compass
Astronomy word: Spheres
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe
The values of society
He learns it after he abandon England
English Model:
Coloniser and Christianity
Robinson Crusoe represents
a middle-class man
Language:
Simple Prose
First-person narrator for a realiatic story
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver's Travel
Critics England politics
Impossibility to create
an utopian society
-Lilliput refuses offers of peace
-Broabdingnag is not humanity city
-Laputa destroyed society with scientific theories
-Houyhnhmns has reason and egalitarianism
Different meanings
-A book of children with adventures
-philosophical tale with no utopian society
-religious,cultural and social truths