Examiners’ report 2010

Examiners’ report 2010

033 E035 Augustans and Romantics

Advice to candidates on how Examiners calculate marks

It is important that candidates recognise that in all papers, three
questions should be answered in order to get the best possible mark
(ensuring that the rubric for the paper has been followed accordingly).
Examiners follow a simple mathematical formula when awarding a final
overall mark: they give each answer a mark out of 100 (up to three
answers only, as required by the exam paper); they then total all available
marks; and finally they divide the total by three, thus giving an average
overall mark.
So, if your first answer is given 57%, your second answer is given 56%,
and your third answer 50%, then the calculation will look like this:
57+56+50 = 163
163 divided by 3 = 54.3
Overall mark: 54%
Two good essays and no third essay will always bring the mark down.
So, if in the example above a third answer was not given, the calculation
would look like this:
57+56 = 113
113 divided by 3 = 37.6
Overall mark: 38%
In this case, even if the candidate had written a ‘poor’ third answer getting
a mark of 40% their overall mark would be higher than not attempting an
answer at all:
57+56+40 = 153
153 divided by 3 = 51
Overall mark: 51%
Note in the example above how the 40% mark, while low, still enables the
candidate to achieve an overall mark in the Lower Second category, which
is in keeping with their first two marks of 57% and 56%. Not answering
a third question would see the candidate drop two whole classes, from
Lower Second to the Pass category.
Candidates are thus strongly advised to give equal attention across the
paper, plan their time accordingly, and attempt to provide three answers
of roughly the same length and as full as possible. Candidates are also
reminded that it is totally unnecessary to copy out the question again into
the answer book; a question number in the margin is sufficient enough,
and this will also save valuable minutes.

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General remarks
In the General remarks of last year’s report, the Examiners suggested
that the critical responses demanded by the contextualising exercise of
Question 1 would provide a crucial foundation for the sorts of literary
commentary required in the second and third sections of the examination.
It was pleasing, therefore, to see that this year’s candidates had been
assiduous in their preparation and, among the better essays, there was
plenty of evidence of the literary allegiances which characterise the
apparently antithetical ‘periods’ contained within this unit. The contrasts
between neo-classical and romantic, between public and private, between
moderation and extreme, and between exterior and interior worlds were
interestingly exploited in discussions of the selected excerpts and in essays
on individual authors and topics. However, the tribal groupings suggested
by the unit’s title, Augustan and Romantics, at best, indicate a series of
loose alliances and candidates are encouraged to be aware of differences
within, and similarities between, these seemingly exclusive coalitions. For
instance, in Tighe’s Psyche, despite an Augustan obsession with Greek and
Roman culture, it was obviously the case that the Romantic imagination
was equally fired by classical myth. The differences between the ‘periods’
are always worth identifying, but the ability to modify simple contrasts
by occasionally locating areas of common ground could bring an added
sophistication to critical discussion. The Examiners’ caveat would be never
to validate one cultural achievement at the expense of another.

Answer THREE questions, ONE from EACH section (all three questions carry equal
marks). Candidates may NOT discuss the same text in more than one answer, in
this examination or in any other Advanced Level Unit examination.

Section A

Question 1
Write on ONE of the following passages, indicating those qualities which you
think make it characteristic of its period. Pay particular attention to the subject,
the form, and the use of language and image. (For the complete question, please
refer to the examination paper.)
Passage a
As is often the case in such exercises, candidates benefitted from a brief
discussion of genre. The periodical essay is an important and characteristic
product of the early eighteenth century and candidates might have cited
Steele’s other venture The Tatler and his joint publication with Addison,
The Spectator. These journals were able to draw upon contributions from
contemporaries like Swift, Pope and Gay, although the authors behind The
Female Tatler are less easily named. As candidates correctly suggested, the
writers of such essays were driven by an ambition to become popularisers
and cultural arbiters, and there is an identifiably didactic quality to the
prose. Steele’s piece is part of the widespread debate on the relative merits
of the Ancients and the Moderns: an ironic dramatisation of which can
be found in Swift’s Battle of the Books. This passage defends the allusive
habit of Augustan writing against claims by pedants and false critics that,
as the Ancients had achieved so much, all else was plagiarism: and it is
worth remembering that the ‘imitation’ possessed the status of a separate
genre during this period. For Steele, if the artist reflects Nature, then
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works will share a common truth, and much of what he says echoes Pope’s
Essay on Criticism (1711): ‘True Wit is Nature to advantage dressed,/What
oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed’ (lines 297–8). Comment might
also have been made on the term ‘easy’ (line 31) which shared a social
and a literary currency. Steele is at pains to free the idea from the world
of facile gentility and to insist upon a more complex notion of literary
‘appropriateness’ (decorum).
Passage b
The immediate starting point for this passage is the tradition of Augustan
verse satire that dominated the early decades of the eighteenth century.
The addressee will provide the most apt of contemporary poets writing in
a similar vein, and the urban squalor, both physical and moral, that Young
describes will find a host of parallels in Pope’s Dunciad. A similarly satiric
vision of the city’s detritus can be found in Swift’s ‘A Description of a City
Shower’. Both these writers make much of the sewage-clogged, noisy,
dangerous and fly-blown environment of London (see also Gay’s Trivia) and
their ‘railing’ (Juvenalian) tone is very close to the tenor of Young’s satirical
voice. Reference can also be made to the general context of early-eighteenth-
century literary life, embodied in the ‘hacks and dunces’ of Grub Street (a
name peculiarly appropriate to the insect images deployed by both Young
and Pope). Most candidates commented upon the use of the heroic couplet
and rightly identified it as the favoured verse form of the period, although
it was not exclusively used by satirists. The better candidates were prepared
to go further than merely spotting the rhyming iambic pentameters, and
to comment on their especial contribution, whether it was the antithetical
structure they supplied, or the suggestion that they offered a rhythmic
orderliness which contradicted the anarchic visions of cultural chaos and
incoherence that were the targets of the writers.
Passage c
The passage from Udolpho prompted some good, detailed essays which
suggested that candidates were familiar with the ‘gothic’ themes and images
that characterise this particular sub-species of Romantic writing. This is
a landscape which is designed to elicit a frisson of nervous, melancholic
awe in its central human figure who, typically, is a young, isolated and
vulnerable woman. The ingredients in this scene are familiar enough:
massive, yet mouldering architecture whose battlements suggest past
glories and perhaps violent memories; mountainous regions which harbour
predatory inhabitants, like wicked Italianate ‘banditti’ – although they are,
of course, in Emily’s mind; a general aura of misty gloom which partially
obscures details, hence making the picture the more ‘terrific’ (and often
‘sublime’) to a susceptible imagination. The general literary context begins
with Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, and it is perhaps worth making the point
that these texts shared a fascination with the non-rational emotions that a
generation earlier might have been deemed a form of madness. Candidates
might also refer to works like Lewis’s The Monk or Beckford’s Vathek: or
again to Austen’s parody of the tradition in Northanger Abbey. There are also
‘gothic’ veins to be mined among the Romantic poets, especially in verse
which reflects the vogue for mediaeval narratives (Coleridge’s Christabel or
Keats’s Isabella (or The Pot of Basil).
Passage d
As was noted in the General remarks, Romantic poets were enamoured with
classical myth just as much as their Augustan counterparts. In this case,
there is an appropriateness to the verb which suggests an attraction to erotic
narrative, found most famously in the verse of Keats. Poems like Endymion,

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Lamia, and his own ‘Ode to Psyche’, were published within a decade of
Tighe’s volume and carry the same charged sensuality. In fact, these lines
could arguably be described as going beyond Keats in their somewhat
overblown imagery, designed to intensify the eroticism of the scene and
being in danger of falling into what might be described as a prurient
delicacy: witness the ‘balmy sighs’, the ‘roseate lip’, the ‘severed lips’,
and especially ‘her polished limbs’ barely concealed by the ‘lucid folds’ of
her ‘transparent veil’. There are times in Romantic poetry on the subject
of love when classical fables seem to grant a certain voyeuristic licence.
Again like Keats (for example ‘Ode on Melancholy’), and others of the
period, Tighe plays upon the exquisite paradoxes of pleasure and pain so
often associated with passion: the ‘pleasing smarts’, the interplay between
the ‘honeyed draught’ and ‘black poison’. Every attempt is made to enrich
the scene with a cascade of sensuous images. Cupid’s quiver is bedecked
with ‘gems and gold’, the zephyrs waft a ‘fragrance’ from his tresses,
and ‘colours’ drop from every ringlet. This carries the sort of sensory
overload that characterises certain Romantic poems. Tighe’s choice of
the Spenserian stanza, the form of The Faerie Queen, is worth a mention.
From the original it arguably brings a ‘mythic’ or magical association,
and although there are examples in the eighteenth century (most notably
Thomson’s Castle of Indolence), it was the Romantics who revived the form
in poems like Keats’s ‘Eve of St Agnes’ and Shelley’s Adonais. The technical
details of this nine-line stanza can be found in any dictionary of literary
terms. At this point the Examiners would like to apologise for the omission
from the excerpt of line 26, which should read: ‘Her bosom’s opening
charms were half-revealed’. It was not felt that any candidate had been
measurably disadvantaged and the text printed here has been amended.

Section B
Answer ONE question. For the purposes of this examination, Jane Austen will be
deemed a nineteenth-century author.

Question 2
‘[Satire is] but a ball bandied to and fro, and every man carries a racket about
him to strike it from himself among the rest of the company’ (JONATHAN SWIFT).
In the light of this comment, consider the ways in which one eighteenth-century
satirist attempts to overcome the problem.
An author has the perennial problem of convincing their readership that
they are among the targets depicted in the satire. It may be the case, of
course, that the reader is flatteringly invited into a critical confederacy
with the satirist and a few favoured friends. For instance, in Pope’s Epistle
to Burlington, it is arguable that we join the writer and his patrician
addressee in laughing at the type of vulgarian that is Timon. We may
be sensitised to a possible similarity between ourselves and the poem’s
subject of self-display, but we are allowed latitude to bat away the ball
without too much residual unease. The relationship between the reader
and a satirist like Swift, on the other hand, is much less comfortable, and
at times hostile. Swift operates through misdirection and a persistent
campaign to thwart our expectations. No one in their right mind would
recognise themselves among the grotesqueries who inhabit the pages
of Gulliver’s Travels, so the temptation to associate with Gulliver, in his
familiar ordinariness, is almost overwhelming. However, as the narrative
reveals to us a man who is unreliable, myopic, bigoted, vainglorious,
unimaginative and, as we leave him in his stable, perhaps certifiably

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insane, we may by this point have become embarrassed by what we

thought was our kinship. In a similar fashion, the Houyhnhnms appear
attractively rational when set beside the malodorous habits of the Yahoos,
yet the absence of those qualities that make us human – imagination,
spirit, emotion – suggest the lunacy of Gulliver’s desire to become a
two-legged quadruped. By this means of ‘entrapment’ Swift leaves us
less and less room to wield the racket. A similar argument could be used
to describe ‘A Modest Proposal’ where the persuasive language of sweet
reasonableness is employed in the service of cannibalism, forcing us to
recognise the divorce between rhetoric and meaning that so often lurks
beneath our own words.

Question 3
‘The [eighteenth-century] novel is surely distinguished [...] by the amount of
attention it habitually accords both to the individualization of its characters and
to the detailed presentation of their environment’ (IAN WATT). To what extent
does the work of one eighteenth-century author confirm, contradict or qualify
this assertion?
Candidates appeared to be too eager to agree with the quotation, perhaps
on the assumption that the novel was a genre characterised by its
inclination for ‘individualization’. For instance, in the light of Fielding’s
declared ambition to ‘describe not men, but manners; not an individual,
but a species’ (Joseph Andrews, III, i), he might have seemed a strange
choice in support of Watt’s assertion. Candidates resorted to lauding
vivid, comic creations which is a slightly different issue. Discussions of
Richardson’s hugely detailed narratives of psychological exploration
(Pamela, Clarissa) met with more success, not least because ideas of self
and identity are so central to the novels. Discussions of Defoe elicited
some enthusiastic demonstrations of his power to create ‘characters’,
although the rather limited horizons of their ‘psychology’ were sometimes
too easily ignored, and there was the added complexity of assuming that
‘individualization’ and Watt’s ‘economic individualism’ were one and the
same. Comment upon detailed environments in the novels rarely got
beyond the descriptive.

Question 4
Consider the use of antithesis in the work of any one writer on this unit. Your
answer should be illustrated with detailed reference to text.
For this question, candidates elected to write on Augustan authors. The
point was well made that the satirical vein of these texts, which set ideal
worlds against a grim present reality, found in antithesis a structural
device which lent itself to ironic exploitation. In the prose narratives
such contrasts are plentiful: midgets and giants, horses and humanoids, a
self-seeking Blifil and a generous-spirited Jones, a benevolent Hanoverian
Allworthy and an irascible Jacobite Western, a society belle unable to
distinguish between honour and new brocade, or Bibles and billet-doux. In
the light of this legitimate focus upon Augustan satire, it is worth drawing
attention to other possibilities, of a very different sort, to be found in, say,
Blake’s vision of a world of ‘contraries’, or Coleridge’s description of the
poetic imagination as a power which ‘reveals itself in the... reconciliation
of opposite or discordant qualities’(Biographia Literaria, xiv).

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Question 5
‘One of the familiar forms of Augustan wit is the adapting, or perverting, of a
classical model to enhance a personal or contemporary subject’ (C.J. RAWSON).
With reference to the work of one writer, discuss the ways in which this device is
employed.
It is something of a truism to observe that the early eighteenth century is
marked by its parodic habit. The mock heroics of The Rape of the Lock, the
urban pastorals and georgics of Swift’s poetry and Gay’s Trivia, and the
burlesque opera of the latter’s Beggar’s Opera, were some among many
works which ‘perverted’ their classical originals for ironic purposes; while
the ‘imitation’ was a popular adaptation in which classical echoes were
celebrated in contemporary events.

Question 6
Consider the treatment of either urban squalor, or disease, or criminal life, or any
combination of the three, in the work of one author on this unit.
The narratives of Defoe provide a rich resource for all three topics. On
some occasions he writes with the detachment of a journalist, on others
as a moralist, but his fiction can also reveal an unorthodox ambiguity,
especially when contemplating criminal activity. There are times (see Moll
Flanders) when criminality in an unequal society takes on a survivalist
excitement which is not far removed from the energy which Defoe
admires in entrepreneurial ambition. One or more of these subjects can
also be found in the mock forms discussed in Question 5: for instance, the
upside-down worlds of Fielding’s Jonathan Wild and Gay’s Beggar’s Opera
where the bottom strata of society become satirical reflections of those at
the top.

Question 7
But though concealed, to every purer eye
The informing Author in his works appears.
(JAMES THOMSON)
How appropriately might these lines be applied to the literary methods and/or
the subject material of any one writer?
Thomson’s words have in mind the observable presence of the Divine
throughout His creation, and material could be found in his own Seasons,
as well as in works like Fielding’s Tom Jones or Goldsmith’s The Vicar of
Wakefield. The notion of a divine presence in Nature is also a common
theme in Romantic poetry, although probably of a less doctrinal cast.
Some candidates chose to read ‘Author’ as the writer of the text. This put
a slight strain on the rubric, but it was an approach which seemed to be
legitimate, if slightly less interesting in the outcome.

Question 8
It has been suggested that the most successful exponents of sentiment were
those who saw that sentiment could also be comic. Does the work of any one
writer provide substance for this theory?
For candidates attracted to this question it seemed to point in one
direction only: the dramatic works of Sheridan. The point was made that
while these plays (like those of Goldsmith) offered an ironic commentary
upon the sentimental ‘weeping’ comedy popular among contemporary
audiences, they were not able fully to escape the comforting indulgence
in sentiment which had begun to characterise the second half of the
eighteenth century. It was this sensibility which so clearly distinguished
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them from the more mordant satire of Restoration comedy in the

seventeenth century. Sadly, no answers focused upon similarly ambiguous
perspectives in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or A Sentimental Journey.

Question 9
What justification is there for including one of the following in an anthology of
Romantic verse: Gray, Collins, Smart, Cowper?
Regrettably, the so-called ‘minor’ poets of the eighteenth century languish
unattended.

Question 10
Consider the work of any one writer on this unit whose work might be described
as a revolt against authority.
Given the Augustans’ perceived commitment to authority and convention,
it is not surprising that candidates sought their radical writers among the
Romantics. Blake’s revolutionary credentials never seem to be in doubt,
and he fuelled some interesting discussions of political challenges to the
Ancien Régime (ancient regime), and of unorthodox attitudes to social and
sexual mores. Of equal importance, were the commentaries which looked
at his experiments with form where reinvented pastoral lyric and prose
poems were designed to sever links with an inherited ‘classicism’. Shelley’s
political radicalism also featured in Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam, and
Prometheus Unbound; all of them written, ironically, after the apparent
failure of a revolution in France.

Question 11
An auxiliar light
Came from my mind which on the setting sun
Bestow’d new splendour.
(WILLIAM WORDSWORTH)
The better answers were able to cite Romantic critical texts in support of
discussions of the poetry. This was not a requirement, but to be able to
refer to Wordsworth talking of ‘the modifying powers of the Imagination’
(Preface to Poems (1815)) or Coleridge describing the poet’s ability to
fuse, reconcile and unify disparate experiences (Biographia Literaria, xiv)
provides a point from which to launch a discussion. Transformational
scenes of the sort conjured in the lines quoted can be found in abundance
in The Prelude, while Coleridge supplies a typically hallucinogenic
experience of the countryside in ‘This Lime-tree Bower’. Shelley’s ‘Mont
Blanc’ and ‘To a Skylark’ also found enthusiasts.

Question 12 and Question 13

Discuss the treatment of transgression in the work of any one Romantic writer.
Consider the relationship between convention and innovation in the work of any
one author on this unit.
With sadness the Examiners record a lack of interest in these two
questions. Romantic writers (and one thinks especially of the gothic) seem
to be instinctively fascinated by the breaking of taboos, and the two ‘parts’
of this paper are to a large extent defined by ‘convention’ and ‘innovation’,
which makes it the more strange that these topics provoked no response.

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Section C
Answer ONE question.
Your answer in this section should refer to AT LEAST TWO DIFFERENT authors.
For the purposes of this examination, Jane Austen will be deemed a nineteenth-
century author.

Question 14
It has been suggested that eighteenth-century satire was driven by a vision of ‘a
dark apocalypse, a grotesque parody of classical and Christian ideals of Order and
Art’ (MARTIN C. BATTESTIN). Discuss the work of two satirists whose writings are
illuminated by this observation.
This question offers an opportunity to recommend that all candidates of
Augustan literature read the final 52 lines of the fourth book of Pope’s
Dunciad. These closing couplets embody the poet’s apocalyptic vision of
the collapse of Christian culture, the last triumph of the Philistine. Pope’s
contemporaries shared this vision, and the lexicon of Satanic chaos is not
uncommon (see, for instance, Swift’s ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ where
echoes of Paradise Lost are fused with the myth of Pandora). Writers who
are supposedly devoted to a world of ‘sweetness and light’, to proportion
and order, are also dogged by neurotic obsessions with anarchy. In Gulliver’s
Travels scientists, politicians, ape-like caricatures of humanity, all run
amuck. In Gay’s Trivia the filthy and dangerous streets of London become
a hellish urban chaos reminiscent of Dante. Even the popular use of parody
reflects a sense of disorderly inversions. One paradox worth pondering is
that these glimpses into the hellmouth are also characterised by enormous
creative energy which the satirists seem to relish despite being apostles of
moderation.

Question 15
‘The novel is the most natural literary form because in a sense it has no form; it is
the nearest thing to a conversation, whether between friends or acquaintances’
(GABRIEL JOSIPOVICI). In a discussion of the works of two writers, indicate
whether you agree, disagree, or would wish to qualify this statement.
Unfortunately candidates appeared unsure about ‘form’ and narrative
structure in answering this question, which enticed too many into story-
telling. The idea of a conversational relationship worked well enough
when discussing Fielding’s ‘narrator’, but to ignore the highly wrought
complexities of the fiction that contained these conversations seemed
perverse. Defoe’s linear and episodic first-person accounts were used to
advance the idea that the novels had no form, and there is a case to be
made, but to fail to consider his inheritance from a tradition of spiritual
autobiography undermines the argument. Discussion of Sterne would have
supplied an interesting essay.

Question 16
Write an essay which analyzes what is distinctive about representations of
‘Nature’ in the work of one Augustan and one Romantic writer.
Evidence from other answers suggested that candidates were well-versed
in Romantic creations of Nature, however this question’s demand for an
Augustan writer seems to have discouraged them. A discussion of Pope’s
Windsor Forest or Thomson’s Seasons by way of a contrast with the work of
those who claimed to have ‘discovered’ the English countryside could have
been fruitful.

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Question 17
‘Women have served [...] as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious
power of reflecting the figure of man as twice its natural size’ (VIRGINIA
WOOLF). To what extent does this quotation illuminate the work of any two
novelists on this unit?
The Examiners hope that the frequent inclusion of a question that
highlights a female perspective is not deemed to be tokenism. Happily
the lack of interest in this area will not discourage us from offering the
opportunity in future papers.

Question 18
‘You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond
the present and tangible object’ (PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY). Discuss the work of
two Romantic poets whose verse would seem to support this idea.
As was suggested in Question 11, some familiarity with Romantic
critical theory could supply useful support for a discussion of the sort of
transcendental poetry that Shelley is describing in this declaration. His
own Defence of Poetry would be appropriate, as would the critical texts
by Wordsworth and Coleridge cited in the earlier question. At the time of
writing the Defence, Shelley had been translating Plato, and his belief that
poetry has the power to ‘bare the naked and sleeping beauty’ of the world,
to discover its forms, carries strong echoes of the Greek’s philosophy (even
if he might have denied the poet that power). Platonic images crop up
in ‘Mont Blanc’, although Shelley’s certainty about ‘gleams of a remoter
world’ is not always sustained. In the same way, Coleridge claims that the
experience of ‘bodily sense’ is no more than an alphabet of metaphors for
a higher reality (‘Destiny of Nations’).

Question 19
Write an essay on the nature and treatment of one of the following in the work
of two authors: periodical essays; travel writing; mediaevalism.
In a manner that is all too familiar, the invitation to discuss essayists,
travel writers or the Romantic enthusiasm for things mediaeval was
wholly ignored.

Question 20
Write a critical account of the language of poetry which distinguishes between
what is characteristically Augustan and what Romantic. Refer to the work of at
least two writers.
Discussions of language on a paper of this sort are not solely the province
of linguists, but it will be impossible to do justice to such an enquiry
without a fund of material which can be used as detailed evidence to
back-up an argument. In other words, a genuinely close familiarity with
particular poetic texts is a prerequisite.