• Deeply concerned about humanity, Jonathan Swift ridiculed ideas and habits which he considered bad.
• In Gulliver’s Travels, Swift created a masterpiece which can be read as a children’s fantasy but a sophisticated satire of English life and politics too.
• Gulliver’s Travels describe four voyages that Gulliver, a ship’s doctor, makes to some far-out places.
• Landing in Lilliput where everyone is one-twelfth his size he finds absurd political and religious controversies that mimic those of England. 37/1
• Gulliver travels next to Brobdingnag, where people are 12 times his size; these giants feel badly when they here about life in England.
• In size and nature, the Brobdingnagians contrast sharply with the small-mindedness of petty and selfserving Europeans.
• Gulliver voyages further to lands who’s inhabitants display types of foolishness that Swift condemned.
• To satirize the impracticality of some scientists he describes an academy where scholars spend all their time getting sunbeams from cucumbers. 38/2
• When sir Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and theory of gravitation were published in 1687, it had a profound effect on intellectual life.
• With thrilling suddeness, Newton’s work seemed to reveal the underlying order and harmony of nature’s laws.
• A new age the Enlightenment was dawning in Europe, and science and reason they were its major themes.
• Discoveries in astronomy, physics, and chemistry led to one conclusion humanity would soon perfect their knowledge of the world.
39/3
• Economics were another field that enlightenment thinkers thought should be as rational as pure science.
• {Make active voice, and reposition preposition.} Evidence of the laws that controlled all human activity is what they looked for.
• {Combine} Inventors and investors were encouraged by a growing confidence in human abilities. They designed and builded new technologies.
• Put to work in this way the ideas of the Enlightenment gave rise to the industrial revolution in England.
40/4
• {c-s} Samuel Johnson was a very influential literary figure, in fact the second half of the 18th century in England is called the age of Johnson.
• Was it not for James Boswell, the author’s biographer and friend, much of Johnson’s wit and brilliance might have been lost.
• {insert missing comparative} Better known than any [ ] lexicographer, Johnson is remembered for his massive—and often humorous Dictionary of the English Language.
• {c-s} Johnson compiled his dictionary between 1746 and 1755, during those years he also wrote essays poems and criticism. 41/5
• James Boswell, to who Johnson was a mentor, diligently filled notebooks with his friend’s conversation.
• {verb tense} Then, long after the events [ ] occurred, Boswell adopted his notes into a unified work of art and a new type of biography.
• Unlike earlier biographies, The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell did not glorify it’s subject by hiding his faults.
• {combine} Even the greatest people have shortcomings. Boswell hoped that readers would avoid his follies while copying his virtues.
42/6
• Often called “the voice of scotland Robert Burns was largely self educated and spent most of his life as a farmer.
• Burns many well-known poems and songs include the new year’s eve favorite “Auld Lang Syne.
• Rebeling against formal eighteenth-century poetry, Burns wrote about everyday subjects, farm work, family life, and even mice and lice!
• His use of the Scottish dialect not only brought a much needed freshness to English poetry and honored commoners as well. 43/7
• {make active voice, correct misplaced modifier} Keenly interested in Scottish folk music, poems by Robert Burns were intended to be sung to traditional tunes.
• {c-s} Not all of the poet’s work was in dialect, when dealing with more typical or respectable subject matter, Burns wrote in standard English.
• Robert Burns enjoyed a few seasons of fame, but suffered bad all his life from poverty illness and scandal from his many love affairs.
• No matter what the feelings in his heart, Burns were able to capture them poetically.
44/8
• {c-s} By the late 1700’s, the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and classical studies, had run its course, a new artistic movement had arose.
• Proponents of Romanticism asked why people shouldn’t experience the world through the heart instead of the mind?
• Romantics cheered the French Revolution, which began on July 14 1789 and changed Europe’s political landscape forever.
• That revolution bloody and destructive would improve the lives of common people; a concern of the Romantics. 45/9
• Entirely different than the poetic style it replaced, Romanticism’s spontaneity and excess was legendary.
• The Romantics were interested in local history, folktales, and legends, the mysterious, the imaginative, and the supernatural, and any new form of expression.
• {r-o and misplaced modifier} Romanticism stresses individual freedom the romantic hero often becomes a rebel or outlaw, rejecting restrictive social conventions.
• “Man is born free, the Romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, and everywhere he is in chains.” 46/10
• For William Wordsworth, poetry was an imaginative way for him to express emotions that came from his personal experiences.
• In an 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads Samuel Taylor Coleridge and him outlined ideas that are now identified with Romanticism.
• Wordsworth’s personality to say nothing of his poetry was shaped by nature.
• {r-o} The human mind was his primary interest however, his poems illustrate how the imagination may create spiritual values from out of nature’s sights and sounds.
47/11
• When Wordsworth revisited Tintern abbey after five years, it looking so different than what he remembered puzzled him.
• {fragment} Struck by the discrepancy between memory and perception. Wordsworth meditated on his past, present, and future.
• At Tintern Abbey, Wordsworth sensed that this world would never really be intelligible for both him and his perceptions were constantly changing.
• Nevertheless, using nature as a guide, Wordsworth sought to see into “the life of things”; an unchanging, underlying world of things in theirselves.
48/12
• In his masterpiece, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells a vivid story with startling affects.
• The running commentary in the margins, added later by the poet, is easy-to-read and serves as a guide to its philosophy.
• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner combines the vivid imagery and intricate symbolism, which you might expect in something based on a dream.
• “I readily believe, read a Latin quotation that opened an early edition of the poem that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe.”
49/13
• The blending of ordinary and supernatural elements in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner show Coleridge’s interest in romantic subjects.
• In light of the consideration of the fact that Coleridge’s other famous poems were unfinished, the skillfully-constructed and unified Rime is all the more striking.
• {Combine as one sentence.} Coleridge uses the stanza format of a ballad. He unfolds the mariner’s complex story. He does so in a direct fashion.
• Coleridge’s six-hundred-and-twenty-five-line narrative poem ends on an optimistic note, love is all important. 50/14
• For John Keats, using the senses to fully appreciate beauty lead to an understanding of ultimate truth.
• {misplaced modifier} The line “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” sums up this understanding at the end of “Ode On a Grecian urn.”
• John Keats took intense delight in objects around him, contemplating it so close that he would seem to lose his own identity.
• Although Keats is considered a poet of sensuous beauty, it was the truth behind his sensations that mattered most to him.
51/15
• “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” expresses Keats’ strong feeling of ecstasy upon reading Homer’s poetry.
• {fragment} “Ode on a Grecian Urn” reveals a Keats haunted by the inevitable passing of beauty. So does “To Autumn.”
• In “Ode to a Nightingale,” a bird’s sweet song literally calls the speaker away from the cares of human life and into the essence of natural beauty.
• In spite of poverty, illness, and being rejected by critics, Keats remained devoted to his poetry and constantly searching for truth in personal experience. 52/16
• The Industrial Revolution, which began in England during the 1700’s and spread to Europe and North America was a historical happening.
• By the mid-1800’s, western society, once rural and agricultural, had become urban and industrial!
• New inventions made the industrial revolution possible, while improvements in transportation and finance allow it to continue.
• The new inventions included the steam engine, textile machinery, such as the spinning jenny and flying shuttle, and puddling furnaces, coke smelters, and other iron making techniques.
53/17
• {revise second part for logic} With its good factories, Britain became a great manufacturer; factory towns grew into large cities when banks and other businesses expanded.
• The British navy to say nothing of fleets of merchant ships were also expanding, allowing the British to acquire new colonies in Africa and Asia.
• {comma splice} Before the 1800’s the upper classes controlled Parlament, after the 1800’s the middle classes did.
• The Industrial Revolution created some monsters; sweatshops, slums, and child labor.
54/18
• In his novels, Charles Dickens sympathizes with the downtrodden in society and waged a literary campaign against cruelty.
• Early crisises in the author’s life may have prompted his desire to improve society; because of his father’s debts, twelve year old Charles had to go to work in a factory.
• The title character of Oliver Twist, Dickens’ second novel is a mistreated orphan involved in Londons criminal underworld.
• {Avoid beginning with There.} There is, always in Dickens, enough of humor to keep the story interesting despite the serious elements. 55/19
• Most critics claim Bleak House is better than any novel by Dickens because of its most unique structure and many levels of meaning.
• An attack on wasteful legal processes, Bleak House also talks about a range of social ills ranging from false humanitarians to poor sanitation.
• In Dombey and Son, Dickens again turns to social injustice, showing how family members become embittered among theirselves over money.
• {comma splice} Great Expectations explore the values of Pip, he gradually learns the virtue of sympathy. 56/20
• The number and types of beats in a line determines a poem’s meter its rhythmic pattern.
• Counting and marking the stressed and unstressed syllables in each line a process called scanning allows you to identify a poem’s meter.
• A poems meter is identified with a vertical line dividing the stressed and unstressed syllables into groups called poetic feet.
• Two common types of poetic feet are: the iamb an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, and the trochee, a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one. 57/21
• The number of feet in a line determine the meter; trimeter is written in three foot lines, tetrameter in four foot lines, and so on.
• For an example of a poem written in iambic pentameter—five iambs per line—look at An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope.
• Common measure, the popular meter found in ballads, hymns, and nursery rhymes, alternate four-foot and three-foot lines.
• {comma splice} The rhythm of hardly no poems fits a meter exactly, indeed departure from the meter is often a way to achieve a poetic affect.
58/22
• {misplaced modifier} Virginia Woolf pioneered the stream of conciousness technique, using characters’ feelings, memories, and thoughts.
• {reword/simplify} The random flow of thoughts through a character’s mind is what Woolf’s fiction and novels are all about.
• When reading a stream of consciousness narrative the reader must organize a meaningful whole from the intermingled thoughts memories and dialogue.
• This task demanding and rewarding reveals an intense and psychologically complete portrait of a character. 59/23
• Katherine Mansfield was an innovative writer on account of the fact that she focused on characters’ most innermost states and heightened awareness.
• Even when little happens outward, her story dialogue reveals complex moods and conflicts!
• The powerful novels of Doris Lessing explores the evils of racism the role of women and the complexities of today’s modern-day life.
• Few contemporary novels are more distinguished than them for there breadth of vision. 60/24
• Critics consider William Butler Yeats, the winner of the 1923 nobel prize for literature, to be the finest lyric poet of the 20th century.
• Yeats’s interest in Irish folklore and history led to him joining the Irish National Movement, whose members seeked Ireland’s independence from Britain.
• Yeats once planned to become an artist like his father and his early poems were dreamy pictorial, suggesting lovely landscapes lit by twilight.
• The Lake Isle of Innisfree is from this period, and in it you see Yeats’s mystical inspiration.
61/25
• {Combine as one sentence.} Yeats was essentially a poet and mystic. He believed that truth is reached through beauty. He believed that imagination is stronger than reason.
• The haunting quality of his best poems result from the clarity of their imagery and their being musical.
• In later years, as Yeats tired of the romantic enchantments that [] thrilled him as a young man, he adapted a plainer style.
• Irish nationalism particularly Yeats’s desire for a popular style to express Irish aspirations were also responsible for this change. 62/26
• {misplaced modifier} Pygmalion gradually falls in love with a statue of a woman that he was sculpting in Greek legend.
• {subordination} Aphrodite grants Pygmalion’s wish because she is the goddess of love, and she made the statue become a living woman who the sculptor then marries.
• George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion is a modern retelling of the myth it is named for.
• The play recounts how a girl becomes a elegant lady in Cinderella-like fashion; her fairy godmother, however, is an English gentleman who teaches her to speak and act correct.
63/27
• George Bernard Shaw was both a playright and wanted to reform society.
• Pygmalion is an attack on England’s class system; in other plays, Shaw criticized slumlords war profiteers and the inequities of the industrial age.
• {remove passive voice by using strong verb} Poor flowergirl Eliza Doolittle is transformed into a counterfeit aristocrat and demonstrates the absurdity of class distinctions.
• Pygmalion is Shaw’s most successful work; the play inspired the musical “My Fair Lady.”
64/28
• Long-standing tensions existed between the nations of Europe so in 1914 World War I erupted.
• The bloody conflict decimated an entire generation of young men, and shredded the fabric of British society.
• What caused this vast slaughter which pitted the Allies, including the British Empire and France, against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary.
• Beside the rise of nationalism, widespread military alliances created an atmosphere in which hostilities become inevitable. 65/29
• As if the fighting in France was not enough, the British military was challenged farther in 1916 when nationalists in Ireland rebeled.
• The great upsurge in Irish nationalism led to independence in 1921 and creating the Irish Free State (now the Republic of Ireland.)
• When the armistice was signed in 1918, all Europe is exhausted by what the British once called the “Great War for Civilization.
• {run-on} After World War I, fascist dictators arised in Italy and Germany in Russia communist leaders emerged who cast doubt on the future of a stable Europe. 66/30