Brief Question of “The Rise of English”

Answer

Brief Question of “The Rise of English”

• What kind of writing is The Rise of English?

Ans: An essay, the first chapter after the introduction in Eagleton’s Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983).

• What did “literature” mean in the 18th century?

Ans: All valued writing—philosophy, history, essays, letters, and poems—meeting “polite letters” standards.

• What writing was not counted as literature then?

Ans: Street ballads, popular romances, and drama.

• What did 18th-century didactic literature include?

Ans: Periodicals, coffee-house talk, treatises, sermons, translations, and moral guidebooks.

• When did literature in the modern sense emerge?

Ans: Around the 19th century, in the Romantic period.

• What is A Defence of Poetry?

Ans: Shelley’s 1821 essay defending poetry’s role in society and imagination in industrial culture.

• What did poetry mean in the Romantic period?

Ans: Human creativity opposed to utilitarian industrial capitalism.

• What is An Apology for Poetry?

Ans: Sidney’s 1579–80 essay praising poetry’s antiquity and moral power above philosophy and history.

• What kind of society did the Romantics live in?

Ans: One valuing imagination over reality, and poetry over prose.

• How was England a police state then?

Ans: By repressing opposition while fearing revolution abroad.

• What did “poetry” imply in the Romantic period?

Ans: Social, political, and philosophical meaning—not just verse technique.

• How was the Romantic artist’s life?

Ans: Marginal in society, unpaid for truth-telling work.

• What is the improbability of art and artefact?

Ans: Ancient Greeks didn’t see the Iliad as “art” like we see modern works.

• What was the effect of aesthetics?

Ans: It hid historical differences in art and artefacts.

• How does the symbol become a panacea?

Ans: It unites conflicts between subject and object, mind and