Answer the questions.

1. Say everything you know about Swift's life?

2. What was Swift's satire directed at?

3. Prove that Gulliver's Travels is the summit of Swift's creative work.

4. Characterize the literary language of Swift.

5. What contribution did Swift make into the development of European literature?

13. Henry Fielding (1707-1754)

Best known today as a novelist, Fielding also had a busy literary career as a comic playwright, a satirist and a journalist. But whatever his choice of expressive means, his main business was reform: as a critic and writer always concerned with the identity and integrity of the various literary kinds, he wanted to reform stage tragedy, the novel, and even the travel book; as a journalist and as a practicing London police magistrate he laboured to amend manners, morals, and the administration of criminal jurisprudence.

Henry Fielding was born in 1707 in Somerset. He attended Eton, where he was given good knowledge of Greek and Latin classics. He next went to Leyden, in Holland, where he studied law and literature at the university for two years, returning to England оnly when his money ran out. For the rest of his life he struggled against poverty.

He established himself in London and, at the age of twenty, began writing for the stage. Between 1728 and 1737 he wrote twenty-four plays and became the most famous dramatist of the day. He managed his own theatre, the New Theatre in the Haymarket, where he produced his Congrevian comedies of intrigue, his farces, his ballad operas, and, most successfully, his dramatic burlesques, of which "Tom Thumb" (1730), "The Tragedy of Tragedies" (1731) are the best known. Even his success as a comic dramatist didn’t not bring him a sufficient living, and he turned next to the law as a livelihood. Resuming his legal studies, this time at the Middle Temple, he emerged as a barrister in 1740. To help support himself while he read law, he conducted a thrice-weekly anti-Jacobite periodical, "The Champion" (1739—41), most of whose essays he wrote himself.

His masterpiece, the huge but lively and highly plotted "History of Tom Jones, a Foundling", appeared in six volumes in 1749. Unlike most of his earlier work, it bore its author's name. One of the innovations in "Tom Jones" is Fielding's frequent regular interruption of the narrative to theorize in brief essays about his genre ("our labours have sufficient title to the name of history"); about his theory of character ("it is often the same person who represents the villain and the hero"); and about the talents required for novel writing (genius, learning—a hit at Richardson—and "a good heart").

Although his health had been failing since his mid-thirties, Fielding somehow found the energy to conduct during 1752 "The Covent-Garden Journal", his last journalistic venture. But his body was wearing out. Emaciated from years of gout, asthma, and dropsy, he set off for Portugal in 1754 in search of a healthier climate. His experiences on the trip are recorded in his posthumously published "Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon" (1755).

Fielding died in 1754 and was buried in the English cemetery in Lisbon.

1. Topical vocablulary:

amend, v – исправлять foster, v – воспитывать

jurisprudence, n – юриспруденция notorious,adj.–печально известный,

burlesque, n – пародия, фарс conscientious,adj-добросовестный

censorship, n – цезура villain, n – злодей

sufficient, adj – достаточный gusto, n – удовольствие, рвение

barrister, n – барристер somber, adj. – темный

prudential, adj – расчетный emaciated, adj – истощенный

riotous, adj – буйный gout, n – подагра

sycophancy, n – лесть dropsy, n – водянка

assault, v – атаковать posthumously, adv – посмертно

assume, v – принимать, приобретать engraftment, n – прививка

2. Translate into Russian:

to labour to amend manners, morals, and the administration of criminal jurisprudence, to struggle against poverty, to manage one's own theatre, to subject new plays to censorship, to bring smb. a sufficient living, notorious criminal, to represent the villain and the hero, journalistic venture, domestic distress, Justice of Peace.

3. Translate into English:

изучать право и литературу в университете, выпускать периодические издания, вызывать отвращение, признать авторство, энергичный и добросовестный судья, толпа воров, разбойников и убийц, наводнивших Лондон, неустанно писать на юридические, криминальные и социальные темы, таланты, необходимые для написания романов, прекрасная и добродетельная женщина, отправиться в Португалию в поисках более здорового климата, нововведение, напечатать посмертно.

4. Match the synonyms:

talent Justice of Peace

emaciated pleasure

magistrate gift

gusto exhausted

notorious correct

sycophancy well-known

amend felon

criminal flattery

5. Choose the right version:

Дата добавления: 2015-08-03