• 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 onetwelfth 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.
54/18
• The Industrial Revolution created some
monsters; sweatshops, slums, and child labor.
• 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
57/21
followed by an unstressed one.
• 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
59/23
a character.
• 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
62/26
also responsible for this change.
• {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
65/29
which hostilities become inevitable.
• 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
66/30
the future of a stable Europe.