SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA

 

1. In Northanger Abbey, the central figure Catherine Morland is naive and excessively fond of reading Gothic fiction.

2. The Female Quixote or The Adventures of Arabella is a novel by Charlotte Lennox published in 1752. It was a parody of Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote. 

3. Samuel Johnson applauded ' The Female Quixote'. Norma Clarke ranked it with Clarissa, Roderick Random and Tom Jones as 'one of the defining texts in the development of novel in the eighteenth century.'

4. Sir Joshua Reynolds was an English painter popular for promoting Grand Style in European painting in the eighteenth century.

5. Sir Reynolds was the key in founding Royal Academy of Arts of which he was the first President. He was Knighted by George the Third in 1769.

6. James Boswell, in 1791, dedicated his work Life of Samuel Johnson to Reynolds. 

7. Philander is a play by Charlotte Lennox. Whereas, ' The Philanderer' is a play by George Bernard Shaw. It is one of the three plays in Plays Unpleasant in 1898, alongside Widowers' Houses and Mrs Warren's Profession. 

8. Another Charlotte Lennox play, 'Old City Manners' was produced by David Garrick at the Royal Theatre, Drury Lane in 1775. It was an adaptation of Ben Jonson's 'Eastward Ho'. 

9. Charlotte Lennox's Sophia published in 1762 was originally published in Lennox's periodical The Lady Museum as Harriet and Sophia between 1760-1. This was the first novel to be published in serialized form by a woman. 

10. A serial literature is a format in which a larger work is published in sequential form. Most Victorian novels appeared in serialized forms in magazines or periodicals. 

11. Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers, first published in 1836 established the popularity of serialized format or instalment publication in monthly or weekly periodicals.

12. Wilkie Collins, another famous writer in serial literature invented the detective novel with The Moonstone. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published the serialization of Sherlock Holmes in Strand Magazine. 

13. Hubris means a quality in our personality that is in excess. Overconfidence,  excessive pride, arrogance are often clubbed in Hubris.

14. Emma( 1915) is a comedy of manners by Jane Austen. It depicts Georgian- Regency era. 

15. The Regency era marks the end of Georgian era. As King George, the Third became unfit to rule, his son Prince Regent became the proxy. The period spans from the latter part of the reign of King George, the Third to the reign of George, the Fourth and William, the Fourth; that is 1795 to 1837.

16. The Regency era marks distinctive features in the works of architecture, literature, fashion, politics and culture. 

17. The Comedy of Manners satirizes the manners and social conventions of an artificial society in the Restoration era(1660-1710).

18. William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing can be considered as the first example of Comedy of Manners. Restoration Comedy was influenced by Ben Jonson's Comedy of Humors. It made fun of affected or artificially assumed manners dubbed sophisticated. 

19. The Comedy of Manners originated from Classical Greece( 510-323 BC) New Comedy (325-260 BC). Pieces of works by Menander influenced the Roman playwright Plautus and Terence. Moliere in the 17th C showed best imitation of the genre in The School for Wives (1662), The Imposter (1664) and The Misanthrope(1666). It imitated French regime hypocrisies. 

20. Some of the examples of the Comedy of Manners are:

         a) The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)- Oscar Wilde

         b) The Country Wife (1675)                        - William Wycherley

         c) The Way of the World (1700)                  - William Congreve

         d) She Stoops to Conquer (1773)                - Oliver Goldsmith

         e) The Rival (1775) and The School of 

            Scandal (1777)                                         - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

21. Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen tells the story of Dashwood sisters: Elinor and Marianne. Published anonymously 'By a Lady' on the title page. 

22. Thomas De Quincey's 'The Literature of Knowledge and The Literature of Power' was first published in The British North Review, August 1848. (PAPER 2, Q20, 2004)

23. Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is considered to be one of the finest English writer, essayist and literary critic. With Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), he founded addiction literature.

24. Other popular essays of De Quincey are:

a) On the Knocking at the Gates of Macbeth (1823)

b) On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts (1827)

c) The English Mail-Coach (1849)

d) Autobiographic Sketches (1853)

25) The finest art critic of his age, William Hazlitt( 1778-1830) is placed in the company of Samuel Jonson and George Orwell. The English essayist was also a painter, social commentator and philosopher.