Dryden and the invention of Augustan culture

The idea that between the Restoration and the middle of the eighteenth century England enjoyed an “Augustan age” may soon be a thing of the past. Historians were the first to jettison the concept, and by and large literary critics have now followed suit: twenty years ago there would have been a Cambridge Companion to Augustan Literature; today we have the Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740. Some have flung off the term Augustan like a straitjacket, delighted to be free at last to stress tendencies in the culture of Restoration and early eighteenth-century England which might be thought of as un- or even anti-Augustan: the persistence of a republican idiom; the development of a rhetoric of sublimity; the rise of British literature (though, as we shall see, the first two of these fall within the pale of what Dryden understood by Augustanism). Others have abandoned it more reluctantly like a favorite item of clothing now sadly rather moth-eaten and unpresentable, knowing it to be true that the careers of a number of the central writers of the period were shaped by their engagements with the culture of Augustan Rome, but fearing that to point out as much may be to give these writers the kiss of death where modern readers are concerned. First, there is the sheer look of the word: “august” is something only the headmasters of old-fashioned boarding-schools want to be. Then there are the pejorative connotations which have attached themselves to it like foul-smelling fungus: of dreary backward-lookingness; of aesthetic conservatism; of toadying to royalty.

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Pejorative · Period (music) · Political science · Power (physics) · Rhetoric · Historical and Literary Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

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