The Romantic Age

“Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.” 
― Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism

The Romanticism

No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetics. Romanticism, then, can best be described as a large network of sometimes competing philosophies, agendas, and points of interest. In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up through about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry, although novelists adopted many of the same themes. In America, the Romantic Movement was slightly delayed and modulated, holding sway over arts and letters from roughly 1830 up to the Civil War. Contrary to the English example, American literature championed the novel as the most fitting genre for Romanticism’s exposition. In a broader sense, Romanticism can be conceived as an adjective which is applicable to the literature of virtually any time period. With that in mind, anything from the Homeric epics to modern dime novels can be said to bear the stamp of Romanticism. In spite of such general disagreements over usage, there are some definitive and universal statements one can make regarding the nature of the Romantic Movement in both England and America.

At the turn of the century, fired by ideas of personal and political liberty and of the energy and sublimity of the natural world, artists and intellectuals sought to break the bonds of 18th-century convention. Although the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau and William Godwin had great influence, the French Revolution and its aftermath had the strongest impact of all. In England initial support for the Revolution was primarily utopian and idealist, and when the French failed to live up to expectations, most English intellectuals renounced the Revolution. However, the romantic vision had taken forms other than political, and these developed apace.

In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a liberating aesthetic: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countryside the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworth's romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, "The Prelude" (1805–50). In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world.

The second generation of romantic poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron. In Keats's great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in language of great power and beauty. Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them, as in his great drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wrote the greatest of the Gothic romances, Frankenstein (1818).

Lord Byron was the prototypical romantic hero, the envy and scandal of the age. He has been continually identified with his own characters, particularly the rebellious, irreverent, erotically inclined Don Juan. Byron invested the romantic lyric with a rationalist irony. Minor romantic poets include Robert Southey—best-remembered today for his story "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"—LeighHunt, Thomas Moore, and Walter Savage Landor.

The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose. Coleridge proposed an influential theory of literature in his Biographic Literary (1817). William Godwin and his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, wrote ground–breaking books on human, and women's, rights. William Hazlitt, who never forsook political radicalism, wrote brilliant and astute literary criticism. The master of the personal essay was Charles Lamb, whereas Thomas De Quincey was master of the personal confession. The periodicals Edinburgh Review and Blackwood's Magazine, in which leading writers were published throughout the century, were major forums of controversy, political as well as literary.

Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter noted for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics.

The Victorian Period´s overview

The Victorian Age

The Reform Bill of 1832 gave the middle class the political power it needed to consolidate—and to hold—the economic position it had already achieved. Industry and commerce burgeoned. While the affluence of the middle class increased, the lower classes, thrown off their land and into the cities to form the great urban working class, lived ever more wretchedly. The social changes were so swift and brutal that Godwinian utopianism rapidly gave way to attempts either to justify the new economic and urban conditions, or to change them. The intellectuals and artists of the age had to deal in some way with the upheavals in society, the obvious inequities of abundance for a few and squalor for many, and, emanating from the throne of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), an emphasis on public rectitude and moral propriety.

The Novel

The Victorian era was the great age of the English novel—realistic, thickly plotted, crowded with characters, and long. It was the ideal form to describe contemporary life and to entertain the middle class. The novels of Charles Dickens, full to overflowing with drama, humor, and an endless variety of vivid characters and plot complications, nonetheless spare nothing in their portrayal of what urban life was like for all classes. William Makepeace Thackeray is best known for Vanity Fair (1848), which wickedly satirizes hypocrisy and greed.

Emily Brontë's (see Brontë, family) single novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), is a unique masterpiece propelled by a vision of elemental passions but controlled by an uncompromising artistic sense. The fine novels of Emily's sister Charlotte Brontë, especially Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), are more rooted in convention, but daring in their own ways. The novels of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) appeared during the 1860s and 70s. A woman of great erudition and moral fervor, Eliot was concerned with ethical conflicts and social problems. George Meredith produced comic novels noted for their psychological perception. Another novelist of the late 19th cent.  It was the prolific Anthony Trollope, famous for sequences of related novels that explore social, ecclesiastical, and political life in England.

Thomas Hardy's profoundly pessimistic novels are all set in the harsh, punishing midland  county he called Wessex. Samuel Butler produced novels satirizing the Victorian ethos, and Robert Louis Stevenson, a master of his craft, wrote arresting adventure fiction and children's verse. The mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, writing under the name Lewis Carroll, produced the complex and sophisticated children's classics Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871). Lesser novelists of considerable merit include Benjamin Disraeli, George Gissing, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Wilkie Collins. By the end of the period, the novel was considered not only the premier form of entertainment but also a primary means of analyzing and offering solutions to social and political problems.

Nonfiction

Among the Victorian masters of nonfiction were the great Whig historian Thomas Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle, the historian, social critic, and prophet whose rhetoric thundered through the age. Influential thinkers included John Stuart Mill, the great liberal scholar and philosopher; Thomas Henry Huxley, a scientist and popularizer of Darwinian theory; and John Henry, Cardinal Newman, who wrote earnestly of religion, philosophy, and education. The founders of Communism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, researched and wrote their books in the free environment of England. The great art historian and critic John Ruskin also concerned himself with social and economic problems. Matthew Arnold's theories of literature and culture laid the foundations for modern literary criticism, and his poetry is also notable.

Poetry

The preeminent poet of the Victorian age was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Although romantic in subject matter, his poetry was tempered by personal melancholy; in its mixture of social certitude and religious doubt it reflected the age. The poetry of Robert Browning and his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, was immensely popular, though Elizabeth's was more venerated during their lifetimes. Browning is best remembered for his superb dramatic monologues. Rudyard Kipling, the poet of the empire triumphant, captured the quality of the life of the soldiers of British expansion. Some fine religious poetry was produced by Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, Christina Rossetti, and Lionel Johnson.

In the middle of the 19th cent. the so-called Pre-Raphaelites, led by the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, sought to revive what they judged to be the simple, natural values and techniques of medieval life and art. Their quest for a rich symbolic art led them away, however, from the mainstream. William Morris—designer, inventor, printer, poet, and social philosopher—was the most versatile of the group, which included the poets Christina Rossetti and Coventry Patmore.

Algernon Charles Swinburne began as a Pre-Raphaelite but soon developed his own classically influenced, sometimes florid style. A. E. Housman and Thomas Hardy, Victorian figures who lived on into the 20th cent., share a pessimistic view in their poetry, but Housman's well-constructed verse is rather more superficial. The great innovator among the late Victorian poets was the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. The concentration and originality of his imagery, as well as his jolting meter ("sprung rhythm"), had a profound effect on 20th-century poetry.

During the 1890s the most conspicuous figures on the English literary scene were the decadents. The principal figures in the group were Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson, and, first among them in both notoriety and talent, Oscar Wilde. The Decadents' disgust with bourgeois complacency led them to extremes of behavior and expression. However limited their accomplishments, they pointed out the hypocrisies in Victorian values and institutions. The sparkling, witty comedies of Oscar Wilde and the comic operettas of W. S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan were perhaps the brightest achievements of 19th-century British drama.

Macbeth´s ...

Initial comments:

I have to admit- Macbeth is not one of my favorite plays by Shakespeare. I do love his comedies, (Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Taming of the Shrew...), but I did enjoy it, for a tragedy.
First, I think that it has important morals in the story. Macbeth was well loved and respected by all at the beginning of the play, but because of his personality flaw and his greed and ambition, he ultimately ended up dead.

Macbeth is so easily influenced by others, i.e. the witches and Lady Macbeth that he became a hero to a hated man.

Lady Macbeth was an interesting character... she was such an evil lady... and it was interesting because in Shakespeare's time, women didn't possess such demonic qualities. I enjoyed the characters, the theme, the whole plot and it was very intense and overall a really great play. 

The play begins with the brief appearance of a trio of witches and then moves to a military camp, where the Scottish King Duncan hears the news that his generals, Macbeth and Banquo, have defeated two separate invading armies—one from Ireland, led by the rebel Macdonwald, and one from Norway. Following their pitched battle with these enemy forces, Macbeth and Banquo encounter the witches as they cross a moor. The witches prophesy that Macbeth will be made thane (a rank of Scottish nobility) of Cawdor and eventually King of Scotland. They also prophesy that Macbeth’s companion, Banquo, will beget a line of Scottish kings, although Banquo will never be king himself. The witches vanish, and Macbeth and Banquo treat their prophecies skeptically until some of King Duncan’s men come to thank the two generals for their victories in battle and to tell Macbeth that he has indeed been named thane of Cawdor. The previous thane betrayed Scotland by fighting for the Norwegians and Duncan has condemned him to death. Macbeth is intrigued by the possibility that the remainder of the witches’ prophecy—that he will be crowned king—might be true, but he is uncertain what to expect. He visits with King Duncan, and they plan to dine together at Inverness, Macbeth’s castle, that night. Macbeth writes ahead to his wife, Lady Macbeth, telling her all that has happened

Characters´descriptions:

Macbeth

As one of King Duncan’s chief generals and closest military advisers, Macbeth is led to perform wicked deeds by the prophecies of three witches and the machinations of his wife. When he is pronounced Thane of Cawdor for his military victories – a prophecy come true before his ascension to the kingship – he is tempted into murder to fulfill the second prophecy. One he is crowned king, his brutal plans are made all the easier as he begins killing indiscriminately to ensure his throne. He is not subtle, nor effective as he riles the entire Scottish nobility against his tyrannous ways and ultimately falls before the might of his own psychological pressure and the might of his opposition.

Lady Macbeth

As Macbeth’s wife, Lady Macbeth is the early instigator of the atrocious plans that lead to Macbeth’s Kingship. She is ambitious and power hungry and her machinations are as cold and vicious as her husband’s actions. However, after the bloodshed begins she is incapable of bearing the weight of what she has done and soon falls victim to the weight of her guilt, eventually going mad and committing suicide. Despite the horrible nature of her and her husband’s crimes, the two are a very close couple very much so in love.

The Witches

There are three witches, plotting mischief against Macbeth through their prophecy and spells. Their predictions are responsible for prompting him to murder Duncan and Banquo, and give him cause to believe his is invincible later on. There are no details as to the origin or nature of the witches, other than that they serve Hecate. Numerous similarities between them and mythological beings have been drawn, but none are of clear relation.

Banquo

A second of Duncan’s generals, he is with Macbeth when the witches tell their first prophecy, foretelling his children to inherit the throne. He is equally ambitious, but does not take the action that Macbeth does in securing his ambitions. Rather, he is the path not chosen, that of inaction and decency. His ghost later haunts Macbeth accordingly for his murder, reminding Macbeth of the choices he made.

Duncan

Duncan is presented as the antithesis to Macbeth in terms of rulers. He is kind, virtuous, and a brilliant leader. His death at Macbeth’s hands throws the nation into disarray until the throne can be rightfully returned to his family.

Macduff

A nobleman who right away opposes Macbeth’s ascension to the throne. After fleeing Scotland to find Malcolm, Macbeth murders his wife and son, creating a personal reason for revenge. He is a principle figure in removing Macbeth from the throne and giving it back to Malcolm and is the only man who can kill Macbeth.

Malcolm

The eldest of Duncan’s two sons, Malcolm immediately flees Scotland after the murder of his father. With Macduff’s help however, he is able to muster the forces he needs to take on Macbeth and regain the throne, thus restoring the order to Scotland that was lost when Duncan was murdered.

Fleance

Important because of his role in the prophecy of the three witches, Fleance survives the murder of his father and attempted murder of himself by Macbeth and goes on to disappear through the play’s ending.

Lennox

A Scottish nobleman.

Ross

A Scottish nobleman.

The Murderers

The men hired by Macbeth to murder both Banquo and his son and Macduff’s family. They fail to kill Fleance.

Porter

The drunken doorman of Macbeth’s castle.

Lady Macduff

Macduff’s wife and victim of yet another of Macbeth’s atrocities. Her household is shown in sharp contrast to that of Lady Macbeth’s, much more tranquil and less violent.

Donalbain

Duncan’s son and Malcolm’s younger brother

The Age of Enlightment:

Initial comments:

The Enlightenment or the Age of Reason are names given to the predominant intellectual movement of the eighteenth century. It was an intellectual movement among the upper and middle class elites. It involved a new world view which explained the world and looked for answers in terms of reason rather than faith, and in terms of an optimistic,  natural, humanistic approach rather than a fatalistic,
supernatural one.

     These are characteristics which it shared with the earlier intellectual movement known as the Renaissance. Indeed, the Enlightenment may be understood as a logical continuation of the Renaissance. There is, however, an important difference. While the Renaissance was closely related to a search for the accumulation of past knowledge, the Enlightenment clearly involved a conscious effort to break with the past. 

Analysis:

First of all I like to provide a basic definition of the concept and then build from there up into the main ideas or texts from it.

Definition Neoclassic: of, relating to, or constituting a revival or adaptation of the classical especially in literature, music, art, or architecture (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

After getting the big picture it is safe to say that the neoclassical period there are some evident traits, such as: religious (state and church relation and interaction), economical (production and distribution channels) and political (the wars within the European continent).

This was a time of comfortableness in England. People would meet at coffee houses to chat about politics, among other topics, and sometimes drink a new, warm beverage made of chocolate! It was also the beginning of the British tradition of drinking afternoon tea. And it was the starting point of the middle class, and because of that, more people were literate.

People were very interested in appearances, but not necessarily in being genuine. Men and women commonly wore wigs, and being clever and witty was in vogue. Having good manners and doing the right thing, particularly in public, was essential. It was a time, too, of British political upheaval as eight monarchs took the throne. I read that in the beginning, the Neo-classical period of literature can be divided into three distinct stages: the Restoration Period, the Augustan Period, and the Age of Johnson (Thanasoulas, 2001).

The anxiety for knowledge became general. The court meetings left place to the bourgeois saloons, the coffees or the cultural institutions. A necessity was felt to travel by reasons of study or pleasure, to know other languages, to make sport to keep the body fit or to improve the conditions of life of the citizens.

In this new attitude, the illustrated person is a philanthropist that worries about the others, and proposes and undertakes reforms in the aspects related to the society. They defended the religious tolerance, the skepticism was put into practice and it was even reached to attack the religions. In opposition to the absolute monarchies, Montesquieu defended the bases of the modern democracy and the separation of the legislative, executive and judicial powers. The illustrated people wanted to enjoy freedom and to choose their own governors. All that inspired the motto of the French Revolution: Freedom, Equality, and Brotherhood (Rubens, 2007).

THE EARLY ENLIGHTENMENT: 1685-1730

The Enlightenment’s important 17th-century precursors included the Englishmen Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, the Frenchman Renee Descartes and the key natural philosophers of the Scientific Revolution, including Galileo, Kepler and Leibniz. Its roots are usually traced to 1680s England, where in the span of three years Isaac Newton published his “Principia Mathematica” (1686) and John Locke his “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” (1689)—two works that provided the scientific, mathematical and philosophical toolkit for the Enlightenment’s major advances.

THE HIGH ENLIGHTENMENT: 1730-1780

Centered on the dialogues and publications of the French “philosophes” (Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Buffon and Diderot), the High Enlightenment might best be summed up by one historian’s summary of Voltaire’s “Philosophical Dictionary”: “a chaos of clear ideas.” Foremost among these was the notion that everything in the universe could be rationally demystified and cataloged. The signature publication of the period was Diderot’s “Encyclopédie” (1751-77), which brought together leading authors to produce an ambitious compilation of human knowledge.

THE LATE ENLIGHTENMENT AND BEYOND: 1780-1815

The French Revolution of 1789 was the culmination of the High Enlightenment vision of throwing out the old authorities to remake society along rational lines, but it devolved into bloody terror that showed the limits of its own ideas and led, a decade later, to the rise of Napoleon. Still, its goal of egalitarianism attracted the admiration of the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and inspired both the Haitian war of independence and the radical racial inclusivism of Paraguay’s first post-independence government. Enlightened rationality gave way to the wildness of Romanticism, but 19th-century Liberalism and Classicism—not to mention 20th-century Modernism—all owe a heavy debt to the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

Reaction:

Why do we worry or give concern with the era of enlighten coinciding with the neoclassic period?

The Enlightenment helped a new class to come to power in Europe. So we should ask ourselves why the more advanced civilizations of the Islamic world did not develop a similar movement of their own (Unknown, 2012).

In the current Western controversy over Islam, one theme recurs with increasing predictability. Many writers are prepared to acknowledge Muslim cultural and scientific achievements, but always with the caveat that Islamic civilization never experienced an equivalent to the Enlightenment. "Islam never had to go through a prolonged period of critically examining the validity of its spiritual vision, as the West did during the 18th century," writes the historian Louis Dupre. "Islamic culture has, of course, known its own crisis... yet it was never forced to question its traditional worldview."

Christianity was intellectually open and tolerant enough to allow critical thought to emerge, with the result that religion could gradually be superseded, and the separation of church and state brought about. The implication of course is that Islam has been incapable of allowing the same process to take place. The fate of Bruno (who was burned at the stake by the Holy Inquisition) or Galileo (who was threatened with the same fate) for daring to question the doctrines of the Catholic church casts some doubt on the claim that Christianity is intrinsically open to scientific rationality.

It doesn’t matter if consider it from an intellectual, political, or social standpoint, the advancements of the Enlightenment transformed the Western world into an intelligent and self-aware civilization. In addition to this, it directly inspired the creation of the world’s first great democracy, the United States of America. The new freedoms and ideas sometimes led to abuses—in particular, the descent of the French Revolution from a positive, productive coup into tyranny and bedlam. In response to the violence of the French Revolution, some Europeans began to blame the Enlightenment’s attacks on tradition and breakdown of norms for inducing the anarchy (Rubens, 2007).

Montesquieu’s work an early pioneer in sociology, he spent considerable time collecting data from various world cultures, which led him to the rather outlandish conclusion that climate is a major factor in determining the best form of government for a given region.

This small reaction paper could go on and on about details from the period, hence we would extend our interaction paper and reader for along long time so let me have leave you with a quote and then you may tell me as a reader or scholar what you think about my interpretation.

"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth" John Locke 1632 – 1704.

Classroom management!!!!!!!

In those first few minutes, hours and days in the classroom, you are essentially creating a world. And you want a world in which students do things that will keep them or put them on a path to a life replete with meaningful opportunities. Behaviors or actions that will detract from that world should be nipped in the bud. If you only "sweat" major misbehaviors, students will get the sense that minor misbehaviors are OK. If, on the other hand, you lovingly confront even the smallest misbehaviors, then it will be clear to students that, inside the four walls of your classroom, things that detract from what you're trying to achieve – even in small ways – just don’t fly.

Identify Yourself

Tell your students about who you are and why you're there. A classroom where each student deeply trusts the teacher has the potential to be a great environment for learning. To build that trust, tell your students who you are and why you chose to be a teacher. Tell them about your background, what you did when you were their age, and why you want to be their teacher. The more your students know about you and your intentions, the more they'll trust you to lead them.

 Forge a Class Identity

Begin the year by forging a positive, collective identity as a class. During the first few days, I often complimented my classes as a collective. For instance, I'd say something like, "Period 3, everyone I’m looking at is meeting expectations." In many instances, I praised the entire class so that they began to feel they were part of something special in that room. They began feeling a sense of pride at being members of Period 3.

Conversely, I often chose to redirect individual students rather than the whole class. Instead of saying, “Period 3, I'm tired of hearing you talking when you shouldn’t be" -- which would introduce an oppositional tone, creating a divide between teacher and students -- I found more success correcting students individually.

Have a Plan

Your lesson plans need to be crystal clear. You need to begin each day with clarity about what students should know and be able to do by the end of the class period, and every second of your day should be purposefully moving you toward that end.

Gulliver´s Travels

 My teacher assigned us an interesting reading and posted some comments for us to reflect on. Here you have them.

Initial commnets:

I was struck by the part that said , that  when Gulliver arrived to Lilliput , he  felt so bad like : alone and dismissed , because when he arrived to Lilliput , the lilliputians tread him badly.
My opinion is that all the people don’t have to mistreat people that you just met, as we see reflected in the Lilliputians to Gulliver. But Gulliver had no grudge with the Lilliputians, and Gulliver helped them with a canoe. Even though the Lilliputians punished Gulliver.

The conclusion is that in the life everyone feels like Gulliver, but we never have to forget that God is always with us in any situation, and God never fails us. Also, sometimes it is difficult for us to forgive and forget but the best solution is to have no grudge and forgive!  

Gulliver’s Travels

Discussion Questions by Oscar Víquez

Who was Jonathan Swift? What is he best known for?

Jonathan Swift was an Irish author and satirist. Best known for writing Gulliver's Travels, he was dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin.

Born on November 30, 1667, Irish author, clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift grew up fatherless. Under the care of his uncle, he received a bachelor's degree from Trinity College and then worked as a statesman's assistant.

In 1704, Swift anonymously released A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books. Tub, although widely popular with the masses, was harshly disapproved of by the Church of England. Ostensibly, it criticized religion, but Swift meant it as a parody of pride. Nonetheless, his writings earned him a reputation in London, and when the Tories came into power in 1710, they asked him to become editor of the Examiner, their official paper. After a time, he became fully immersed in the political landscape and began writing some of the most cutting and well-known political pamphlets of the day, including: The Conduct of the Allies, an attack on the Whigs. Privy to the inner circle of Tory government, Swift laid out his private thoughts and feelings in a stream of letters to his beloved Stella. They would later be published as The Journal to Stella.

What literary period does he represent?

Jonathan Swift belongs to the Enlightenment period, sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason, was a confluence of ideas and activities that took place throughout the eighteenth century in Western Europe, England, and the American colonies. Scientific rationalism, exemplified by the scientific method, was the hallmark of everything related to the Enlightenment. Following close on the heels of the Renaissance, Enlightenment thinkers believed that the advances of science and industry heralded a new age of egalitarianism and progress for humankind. More goods were being produced for less money, people were traveling more, and the chances for the upwardly mobile to actually change their station in life were significantly improving. At the same time, many voices were expressing sharp criticism of some time-honored cultural institutions. The Church, in particular, was singled out as stymieing the forward march of human reason.

Define Satire.

Satire is a technique employed by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of an individual or a society by using humor, irony, exaggeration or ridicule. It intends to improve humanity by criticizing its follies and foibles. A writer in a satire uses fictional characters, which stand for real people, to expose and condemn their corruption.

A writer may point a satire toward a person, a country or even the entire world. Usually, a satire is a comical piece of writing which makes fun of an individual or a society to expose its stupidity and shortcomings. In addition, he hopes that those he criticizes will improve their characters by overcoming their weaknesses.

Why do you think Swift used this genre?

Swift himself admitted to wanting to "vex" the world with his satire, and it is certainly in his tone, more than anything else, that one most feels his intentions. Besides the coarse language and bawdy scenes, probably the most important element that Dr. Bowdler deleted from the original Gulliver's Travels was this satiric tone. The tone of the original varies from mild wit to outright derision, but always present is a certain strata of ridicule.

Thomas Bowdler  was an English physician and philanthropist, best known for publishing The Family Shakspeare, and other works from writers like Jonathan Swift an expurgated edition of William Shakespeare's work, edited by his sister Henrietta Maria Bowdler, intended to be more appropriate for 19th century women and children than the original. Although early editions of the work were published with the spelling "Shakspeare", after Bowdler's death, later editions (from 1847) adopted the spelling "Shakespeare", reflecting changes in the standard spelling of Shakespeare's name.

What do you think Swift's view of humanity is? Do you agree with it? Why or why not?

Swift´s perception of the world is represented in fourth trip in his work, Gulliver returns to England before a final journey, to the land of the Houyhnhnms, who are a superior race of intelligent horses. But the region is also home to the Yahoos, a vile and depraved race of ape-like creatures. Gulliver is eventually exiled from Houyhnhnm society when the horses gently insist that Gulliver must return to live among his own kind. After this fourth and final voyage, he returns to England, where he has great difficulty adjusting to everyday life. All people everywhere remind him of the Yahoos. For me Yahoos represent a satiric way of representing the human side of hate and violence.

What do you think the controversy between the Big-Endians and the Small-Endians represents?

The Big-Endian/Little-Endian controversy reflects, in a much simplified form, British quarrels over religion. England had been, less than 200 years previously, a Catholic (Big-Endian) country; but a series of reforms beginning in the 1530s under King Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547), Edward VI (1547–1553), and Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) had converted most of the country to Protestantism (Little-Endianism), in the Episcopalian form of the Church of England. At the same time, revolution and reform in Scotland (1560) had also converted that country to Presbyterian Protestantism, which led to fresh difficulties when England and Scotland were united under one ruler, James I (1603–25).

Swift was satirizing the fact that often wars are fought over the most trivial of things (breaking eggs at the opposite ends) and some take this to mean that he was ridiculing the wars between England and France. However, more credence is given to the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, essentially they are both Christian, just like Lilliput and Blefescu are the same race, but they have trivial differences that are blown out of all proportion. England had previously been a Catholic country (big-endian) but was now a Protestant country (little-endian). 

In Lilliput eggs were originally broken at the big end but then one particular Emperor decreed that eggs should be broken at the little end. This later led to uproar and six rebellions between the big endians and the little endians, and one Emperor was actually killed over it. The neighbouring island of Blefescu still adhere to Big-endianism and insist on breaking their eggs at the big end, while Lilliput are Little- endians. They are presently at war over the matter. 

What do we learn about the Lilliputians with the knowledge that they believe no other kingdoms exist except those of Lilliput and Blefuscu?

The idea of a perfect world calls the attention of different people. Like many narratives about voyages to nonexistent lands, Gulliver’s Travels explores the idea of utopia—an imaginary model of the ideal community. The idea of a utopia is an ancient one, going back at least as far as the description in Plato’s Republic of a city-state governed by the wise and expressed most famously in English by Thomas More’s Utopia. Swift nods to both works in his own narrative, though his attitude toward utopia is much more skeptical, and one of the main aspects he points out about famous historical utopias is the tendency to privilege the collective group over the individual. The children of Plato’s Republic are raised communally, with no knowledge of their biological parents, in the understanding that this system enhances social fairness. Swift has the Lilliputians similarly raise their offspring collectively, but its results are not exactly utopian, since Lilliput is torn by conspiracies, jealousies, and backstabbing.

Why does Gulliver have such a strong reaction against the Yahoos when he first sees them?

This idea that people living outside of Europe were somehow closer to nature or less tainted by civilization was a common one in Swift's day. Gulliver returns to the sea as the captain of a merchantman as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage he is forced to find new additions to his crew, whom he believes to have turned the rest of the crew against him. His crew then mutiny, and after keeping him contained for some time resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across and continue as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes upon a race of hideous, deformed and savage humanoid creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly afterwards he meets a race of horses who call themselves Houyhnhnms (which in their language means "the perfection of nature"); they are the rulers, while the deformed creatures called Yahoos are human beings in their base form. Gulliver becomes a member of a horse's household, and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their lifestyle, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization, and expels him. He is then rescued, against his will, by a Portuguese ship, and is surprised to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous and generous person. He returns to his home in England, but he is unable to reconcile himself to living among 'Yahoos' and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, largely avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables; in effect becoming insane. This book uses coarse metaphors to describe human depravity, and the Houyhnhms are symbolized as not only perfected nature but also the emotional barrenness which Swift maintained that devotion to reason brought.

Who are the Struldbruggs? Are they happy to have eternal life? Why or why not?

“That which I do not fear a problem will never be” Oscar Víquez. I tried to find a quote that might represent why they do not fear death, since I did not find any I created my own.

Swift's work depicts the evil of immortality without eternal youth. They are easily recognized by a red dot above their left eyebrow. They are normal human beings until they reach the age of thirty, at which time they become dejected. Upon reaching the age of eighty they become legally dead, and suffer from many ailments including the loss of eyesight and the loss of hair.

What was your favorite voyage in the story? Why?

Definitely when there is personal growth that would be my favorite part. The second voyage is to Brobdingnag, a land of Giants where Gulliver seems as small as the Lilliputians were to him. Gulliver is afraid, but his keepers are surprisingly gentle. He is humiliated by the King when he is made to see the difference between how England is and how it ought to be. Gulliver realizes how revolting he must have seemed to the Lilliputians.