The years 1740–80 were Britain's classical age—an age of art and elegance, of enlightenment and religious tolerance. Wealth and leisure became more widely diffused. In town and country the middle class put up comfortable, dignified homes in the Queen Anne and Georgian styles. Into them went furniture designed by Thomas Chippendale, Thomas Sheraton, and the Adam brothers, and beautiful china, glass, and silver plate made by skilled English handicraftsmen. The dress of the age was extravagant.
Men wore bright-colored silk coats, waistcoats, and breeches; women appeared in hoopskirts and elaborate headdresses or high pompadours. The three great portrait painters of the age—Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and George Romney—pictured the fashionable aristocrats, while William Hogarth caricatured both the fashionable and the common people.
Alexander Pope, a bitter satirist, was the leading poet of the age; but the most characteristic literary figure was Samuel Johnson, who gathered with other writers in London's coffeehouses to discuss and debate. (See also Adam; Chippendale; English Literature; Furniture; Gainsborough; Hogarth; Interior Design; Johnson, Samuel; Painting; Pope, Alexander; Reynolds.)
Plato
The most famous of Socrates’ pupils was an aristocratic young man named Plato. After the death of Socrates, Plato carried on much of his former teacher's work and eventually founded his own school, the Academy, in 385. The Academy would become in its time the most famous school in the classical world, and its most famous pupil was Aristotle.
We know much about Plato's teachings, because he wrote dialogues between Socrates and others that would explore philosophical issues. These dialogues would be used in his school as starting points for discussion; these discussions and Plato's final word on the dialogues have all been lost to us. The Platonic dialogues consist of Socrates asking questions of another and proving, through these questions, that the other person has the wrong idea on the subject. Initially, Plato seems to have carried on the philosophy of Socrates, concentrating on the dialectical examination of basic ethical issues: what is friendship? what is virtue? can virtue be taught? In these early Platonic dialogues, Socrates questions another person and proves, through these questions, that the other person has the wrong idea on the subject. These dialogues never answer the questions they begin with.
However, Plato later began to develop his own philosophy and the Socrates of the later dialogues does more teaching than he does questioning. The fundamental aspect of Plato's thought is the theory of "ideas" or "forms." Plato, like so many other Greek philosphers, was stymied by the question of change in the physical world. Heraclitus had said that there is nothing certain or stable except the fact that things change, and Parmenides and the Eleatic philosophers claimed that all change, motion, and time was an illusion. Where was the truth? How can these two opposite positions be reconciled? Plato ingeniously combined the two; a discussion of Plato's theory of forms is below. The most famous of Plato's dialogues is an immense dialogue called The Republic , and, next to his account of Socrates's trial, The Apology , The Republic is one of the single most influential works in Western philosophy. Essentially, it deals with the central problem of how to live a good life; this inquiry is shaped into the parallel questions (a) what is justice in the State, or what would an ideal State be like, and (b) what is a just individual? Naturally these questions also encompass many others, such as how the citizens of a state should be educated, what kinds of arts should be encouraged, what form its government should take, who should do the governing and for what rewards, what is the nature of the soul, and finally what (if any) divine sanctions and afterlife should be thought to exist. The dialogue, then, covers just about every aspect of Plato's thought. There are several central aspects to the dialogue that sum up Platonic thought extremely well: a.) what the nature of justice is; b.) the nature of an ideal republic; and c.) the allegory of the cave and the divided line, both of which explain Plato's theory of forms.
The Nature of Justice
The question which opens this immense dialogue is: what is justice? Several inadequate definitions are put forward, but the most emphatically presented definition is given by a young Sophist, Thrasymachus. He defines justice as whatever the strongest decide it is, and that the strong decide that whatever is in their best interest is just (review again the Athenian position in Melian Debate). Socrates dismisses this argument by proving that the strong rarely figure out what is in their best interest, and this can't be just since justice is a good thing.
The Analogy of the Ideal Republic
After Thrasy machus leaves in a royal huff, Socrates starts the question all over again. If one could decide what a just state is like, one could use that as an analogy for a just person. Plato then embarks on a long exposition about how a state might embody the four great virtues: courage, wisdom, temperance, and justice. The remainder of the dialogue is a long exposition of what justice in a state is; this section is considered one of the first major, systematic expositions of abstract political theory . This type of thinking, that is, speculating about an ideal state or republic, is called "utopian" thinking (utopia is a Greek word which means "no-place").
Mimetic Theory
The Mimetic Theory is concerned with the art work itself; it is a reflection of nature. The work is a correct representation of reality.
• Thomas Cole "Youth"
• Jaques Louis David "The Oath of the Horatii"
• Chardin "The Return from Market"
• Carraviggio "The Conversion of Saint Paul"
• Leonardo da Vinci "Mona Lisa"
• Jan van Eyck "The Arnolfini Marriage
Assertions
Art Imitates natures, to be a work of art it need to look realistic.
The work needs to copy reality.
The work needs to represent, reflect or copy a section of reality.
One tends to like art that looks real because it can be easily recognized and understood.
To be art it need to be correct, complete, and vivid in it’s representation.
The work of art needs to show that the artist has technical skill.
Realistic art may teach and reform by emphasizing social ugliness and injustice.
Idealistic or realistic art may edify and inspire.
Philosophy
The Mimetic Theory is concerned with the universe (what the art work about)
The philosophers that dealt with the idea of mimetic art were Plato, and Aristotle.
The art movement and artists were from the Renaissance. Artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others of that time period.
It does not exclude other artists from other art movements.
Canterbury Tales, the narrator tells his audience that he will describe the "condicioun" of the pilgrims, their "degree" (social rank), "which they were," and also "what array that they were inne"; at the end he says that he has now told their "estaat" and "array" and apologizes if he has not arranged them in the "degree . . . as that they sholde stonde," i.e., their correct social order (NAEL 8, 1.219, lines 38–41; 235, line 718; 236, lines 745–47). This professed concern for putting people in their proper place is obviously of great interest to the poet and his audience. It should also be a matter of interest and amusement to modern readers, especially if they realize that the poet's ostensible concern for propriety is a mask he puts on. What is interesting about Chaucer's Prologue is not that it portrays an archaic and closed social order but that it reveals that order in the process of breaking down. Most of Chaucer's pilgrims are by no means content to stay in their proper places but are engaged in the pursuit of wealth, status, and respectability. The conflict between the old and the new, between tradition and ambition is evident not only in the General Prologue but throughout The Canterbury Tales in the individual pilgrims' prologues and tales.The Church was in itself a complex social structure and inevitably constituted one of the divisions made in medieval social theory, which was written in Latin by churchmen. An obvious division is the bipartite one between the clergy and the laity — those belonging to the Church and those outside it. Another — one of several tripartite divisions — which stems from the Roman Church's doctrine of celibacy of the clergy, is based on sexual activity: virgins, widowers and widows, and married people. This is a classification that the Wife of Bath in her Prologue professes to accept while defending her right to remarry as often as she pleases (NAEL 8, 1.256–60).
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the nobility developed a taste for romances of chivalry — many of them about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. The Round Table itself came to be thought of as an "order," in some respects like a religious order. Ramón Lull's The Book of the Order of Chivalry, one of the most popular works of the Middle Ages, lays out that concept in the form of a book of instruction presented like a rule by an older knight to a young squire who is about to be dubbed into the order of knighthood.
Summery of the Middle Age:
• The Middle Ages was a period of enormous historical, social, and linguistic change, despite the continuity of the Roman Catholic Church.
• Linguistic and cultural changes in Britain were accelerated by the Norman Conquest in 1066, when words from French began to enter the English vocabulary.
• Christian writers like the Beowulf poet looked back on their pagan ancestors with a mixture of admiration and sympathy.
• Four languages co-existed in the realm of Anglo-Norman England.
• The second half of the fourteenth century saw the flowering of Middle English literature in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, and the Gawain poet.
Summery OF Romantic Age:
Writers working in the time period from 1785 to 1830 did not think of themselves as “Romantics,” but were seen to belong to a number of distinct movements or schools. For much of the twentieth century scholars singled out five poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, and Keats—and constructed a unified concept of Romanticism on the basis of their works. Some of the best regarded poets of the time were in fact women, including Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Robinson. Yet educated women were targets of masculine scorn, and the radical feminism of a figure like Mary Wollstonecraft remained exceptional.
The Romantic period was shaped by a multitude of political, social, and economic changes. Many writers of the period were aware of a pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which some called “the spirit of the age.” This spirit was linked to both the politics of the French Revolution and religious apocalypticism. The early period of the French Revolution evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and radicals alike. But support dropped off as the Revolution took an increasingly grim course. The final defeat of the French emperor Napoleon in 1815 ushered in a period of harsh, repressive measures in England. The nation’s growing population was increasingly polarized into two classes of capital and labor, rich and poor. In 1819, an assembly of workers demanding parliamentary reform was attacked by sabre-wielding troops in what became known as the “Peterloo Massacre.” A Reform Bill was passed in 1832, extending the franchise, though most men and all women remained without the vote.
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s sense of the emancipatory opportunities brought in by the new historical moment was expressed in their Lyrical Ballads (1798), which revolutionized the theory and practice of poetry. Wordsworth influentially located the source of a poem not in outer nature but in the psychology and emotions of the individual poet. In keeping with the view that poetry emphasizes the poet’s feelings, the lyric became a major Romantic form. It was held that the immediate act of composition must be spontaneous—arising from impulse and free from rules. For Shelley, poetry was not the product of “labor and study” but unconscious creativity. In a related tendency, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and later Shelley would all assume the persona of the poet-prophet.
Romantic poetry for present-day readers has become almost synonymous with “nature poetry.” Romantic poems habitually endow the landscape with human life, passion, and expressiveness. Wordsworth’s aim was to shatter the lethargy of custom to renew our sense of wonder in the everyday. Coleridge, by contrast, achieved wonder by the frank violation of natural laws, impressing upon readers a sense of occult powers and unknown modes of being. The pervasiveness of nature poetry in the period can be linked to the idealization of the natural scene as a site where the individual could find freedom from social laws.
Books became big business, thanks to an expanded audience and innovations in retailing. A few writers became celebrities. Although we now know the Romantic period as an age of poetry, the prose essay, the drama and the novel flourished during this epoch. This period saw the emergence of the literary critic, with accompanying anxieties over the status of criticism as literature. There was a vibrant theatrical culture, though burdened by many restrictions; Shelley’s powerful tragedy The Cenci was deemed unstageable on political grounds. The novel began to rival poetry for literary prestige. Gothic novelists delved into a premodern, prerational past as a means of exploring the nature of power. Jane Austen, committed like Wordsworth to finding the extraordinary in the everyday, developed a new novelistic language for the mind in flux.
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