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Augustan literature

Users notified: Geogre, Bishonen, Portal talk:England

This article fails 1c and 2c of Misplaced Pages:Featured article criteria

• Criteria 1(c) factually accurate: claims are verifiable against reliable sources, accurately represent the relevant body of published knowledge, and are supported with specific evidence and external citations; this requires a "References" section in which sources are listed, complemented by inline citations where appropriate;

Although there is a list of References at the bottom of the article, they are not specific to statements claimed. Some of the statements seem to be personal opinion or the opinion of a particular group, but not necessarily representative of various opinions given their due weight as in NPOV. The article can be seen as a scholarly essay representing a particular view or evaluation of the subject of the article.

• Criteria 2c: :consistent citations—where required by Criterion 1c, consistently formatted inline citations.

This article was promoted in 2005 when the standards were more lenient. —Mattisse (Talk) 21:18, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

What statements do you believe require inline citation? Christopher Parham (talk) 23:17, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

• This article has no citations whatsoever. Misplaced Pages:OR states: "Citing sources and avoiding original research are inextricably linked: to demonstrate that you are not presenting original research, you must cite reliable sources that are directly related to the topic of the article, and that directly support the information as it is presented."

Examples:

• ' "Augustan" derives from George I wishing to be seen as Augustus Caesar'
• "Alexander Pope, who had been imitating Horace, wrote an Epistle to Augustus that was to George II and seemingly endorsed the notion of his age being like that of Augustus, when poetry became more mannered, political and satirical than in the era of Julius Caesar."
• Outright quotations are not cited; examples,

• 'Thomas Babington Macaulay would say of Anne that "when in good humour, was meekly stupid and, when in bad humour, was sulkily stupid." '
• '"we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been, when the best of men followed the employment" '
• ' "all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery." '

• Seemingly POV comments are not cited: "There were other satirists who worked in a less virulent way, who took a bemused pose and only made lighthearted fun."
• Essay type statements are not cited: "The parodic satire takes apart the cases and plans of policy without necessarily contrasting a normative or positive set of values. Therefore, it was an ideal method of attack for ironists and conservatives—those who would not be able to enunciate a set of values to change toward but could condemn present changes as ill-considered."
• And another essay sample: "These developments can be seen as extensions of Protestantism, as Max Weber argued, for they represent a gradual increase in the implications of Martin Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, or they can be seen as a growth of the power and assertiveness of the bourgeoisie and an echo of the displacement of the worker from the home in growing industrialization, as Marxists such as E.P. Thompson have argued. It can be argued that the development of the subjective individual against the social individual was a natural reaction to trade over other methods of economic production."
• Many words are in quotes "updating", "learned" for no apparent reason. It would be nice to know why.
• Seemingly OR statements are not cited: "To some degree, Pope was adapting Jonathan Swift's habit, in A Tale of a Tub, of pretending that metaphors were literal truths, and he was inventing a mythos to go with the everyday."
• Even if statements are purported facts they should be sourced: "Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) still dominates attempts at writing a history of the novel. Watt's view is that the critical feature of the 18th-century novel is the creation of psychological realism. This feature, he argued, would continue on and influence the novel as it has been known in the 20th century. Michael McKeon brought a Marxist approach to the history of the novel in his 1986 The Origins of the English Novel. McKeon viewed the novel as emerging as a constant battleground between two developments of two sets of world view that corresponded to Whig/Tory, Dissenter/Establishment, and Capitalist/Persistent Feudalist." - Is this the editor of the article's views or whose?
• Another example: 'A particular play of unknown authorship entitled A Vision of the Golden Rump was cited when Parliament passed the Licensing Act of 1737. (The "rump" in question is Parliament, on the one hand, and buttocks on the other.)'

These are just examples. As I said, nothing in the article is cited. The references do not seem to include any current scholarship or reviews of the period. Most of the sources seem primary. Many of the historical ones are dated. And the references are not fully cited. Example

• Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class

—Mattisse (Talk) 00:26, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Comments I agree with Mattisse's comments above and I would like offer some specific references that editors could use to improve the article. While much of this article is excellent, there are two ways in which it fails to meet the current FA criteria: sourcing and POV.

1) The article does not use inline citations in the way that has become standard at FAs (whatever the editors think of that practice). Readers need to be able to verify the information that they find in these articles since they have no idea who wrote them - footnotes and complete reference lists allow them to do that. Moreover, the references at the bottom of the article do not cover the claims being made in the article (most of the sources listed are primary sources) and the list does not include the major secondary works on the period. Some examples that should be included in any article about this topic:

• Pat Rogers, Grub Street
• David Fairer, English Poetry of the Eighteenth Century
• Essays by Maynard Mack
• J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels
• Margaret Doody's Daring Muse

2) The article includes a specific POV on literary history rather than presenting the various scholarly views on the topic. For example, in the novel section, the reader learns that Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding were the important novelists who shaped the development of the genre. This is the view of Ian Watt, who wrote decades ago. While we in literary studies still read his work, his view has been serious challenged by many critics since then. Giving Michael McKeon a few sentences does not begin to address the complexity of the "novel debate". The exclusion of the entire amatory fiction tradition, for example, is egregious. Ros Ballaster's Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 is the seminal work on this genre and should obviously have been the basis for at least a few sentences in the article. To give an example of the extremely controversial statements in this section:

• Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) was the first major novel of the new century
• Although there were novels in the interim, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) is the next landmark development in the English novel.
• The dismissive paragraph on women writers and the novel of sensibility is almost comical. It is as if the article is saying "oh, yeah, I have to say something about those 'scribbling women'". The debates regarding "sensibility" are enormous (there are many volumes written on them) - what is its origin? how far back does the tradition stretch? what does sensibility even mean? are there several traditions of sensibility? is sensibility different than sentiment? etc. See, for example, Barker-Benfield's Culture of Sensibility and Mullen's Sentiment and Sociability. The weight given to Defoe and Fielding in this section and the shortchanging of "feminine" genres such as novels of sensibility and amatory fiction clearly introduces a POV into the text. (Even Sterne, who wrote one of the most popular sentimental novels of the eighteenth century, is discussed as a satirist!)

I hope these comments are useful. Awadewit (talk) 18:41, 12 November 2008 (UTC)