title: Henge

text: Julian Cope, in "The Megalithic European", proposes that the henge was a regional development from the Europe-wide causewayed enclosure. He notes it appeared following a cultural upheaval in around 3000 BC, which inspired the peoples of Neolithic Europe to develop more independently. He notes the 'rondel enclosures' of Bavaria's Isar Valley, which according to investigations by the German archaeologist R. A. Maier, "drew comparisons with the henge monuments and causewayed enclosures of the British Isles." Although still with a multiple-causewayed ditch and entrances at cardinal points, the roundels are described by John Hodgson (2003) as not being positioned with defensive aims in mind. The largest, at Kothingeichendorf, appeared to be "midway between a henge and a causewayed enclosure".


title: Henge

text: Alasdair Whittle (2005) also views the development of the henge as a regional variation within a European tradition that included a variety of ditched enclosures. He notes that henges and the grooved ware pottery often found at them are two examples of the British Neolithic not found on the Continent. Caroline Malone (2001) also says that henges were not built in the rest of Western Europe, but they developed from a broader tradition of enclosure to become "a phenomenon of the British Isles, a native tradition with sophisticated architecture and calendrical functions."


title: Henge

text: Henges may have been used for rituals or astronomical observation rather than day-to-day activity. That their ditches are located inside their banks indicates that they were not used for defence, and that the barrier of the earthworks was more likely symbolic than functional. Following arguments presented for Irish Iron Age enclosures, Barclay suggested that they are 'defensive': that the ditch and bank face something 'dangerous' inside the enclosure. He has also suggested that the considerable range of elements surrounded by the earthworks, and the very long date range, are because henges were designed mainly to enclose pre-existing ceremonial sites that were seen as 'ritually charged' and therefore dangerous to people. It has been conjectured that whatever took place inside the enclosures was intended to be separate from the outside world and perhaps known only to select individuals or groups.


title: Henge

text: The alignment of henges is a contentious issue. Popular belief is that their entrances point towards certain heavenly bodies. But henge orientation is highly variable and may have been determined more by local topography than by desire for symbolic orientation. Statistical analysis showed that Class I henges have a slight tendency to have an entrance set in the north or north-east quarter. Class II henges generally have their axes aligned approximately south-east to north-west or north-east to south-west.


title: Henge

text: It has been suggested that the stone and timber structures sometimes built inside henges were used as solar declinometers to measure the position of the rising or setting sun. These structures do not appear in all henges; and when they do, often they are considerably more recent than the henges. Thus, they are not necessarily connected with the henge's original function. It has been conjectured that the henges would have been used to synchronize a calendar to the solar cycle for purposes of planting crops or timing religious rituals. Some henges have poles, stones or entrances that indicate the position of the rising or setting sun during the equinoxes and solstices, while others appear to frame certain constellations. Additionally, many are placed so that nearby hills either mark or do not interfere with such observations. Finally, some henges appear to be placed at particular latitudes. For example, a number are placed at a latitude of 55 degrees north, where the same two markers can indicate the rising and setting sun for both the spring and autumn equinoxes. But as henges are present from the extreme north to the extreme south of Britain, their latitude could not have been of great importance.


title: Henge

text: Formalisation is commonly attributed to henges: indications of the builders' concerns to control the arrival at, entrance into, and movement within the enclosures. This was achieved by placing flanking stones or avenues at the entrances of some henges, or by dividing the internal space with timber circles. While some henges were the first monuments to be built in their areas, others were added to already important landscapes, especially the larger examples.


title: Henge

text: The concentric nature of many of the internal features, such as the five rings of postholes at Balfarg or the six at Woodhenge, may represent a finer distinction than the inside-out differences suggested by henge earthworks. The ordering of space and the circular movement suggested by the sometimes densely packed internal features indicates a sophisticated degree of spatial understanding.


title: Henge

text: Hengiform monuments, or mini henges, are distributed throughout England and mainland Scotland (with examples as far north as Caithness), though no examples have been found in Wales. Pits, cremations, postholes, stone-sockets, and graves have been found within them, and postholes and cremation pits have also been found to be present close to the site in some cases. They typically have either one entrance or two opposing entrances. In plan, a mini henge can be mistaken for a ploughed-out round barrow, although the former tend to be slightly larger and their earthworks more substantial. As with ordinary henges, they are thought to have served ritual purposes and are thought to be of late Neolithic date.


title: Henge

text: Henge enclosures often contain or lie close to one or more ordinary henges. Finds of animal bone, grooved ware pottery, and evidence of dwellings have been found and coupled with the time and energy needed to build them, it is considered that they must have been important social centres analogous to tribal capitals. Two or four evenly spaced entrances lead through the earthwork to the centre.


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: John Wick: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is the original soundtrack album to the 2014 film "John Wick" starring Keanu Reeves, Michael Nyqvist, Alfie Allen, Adrianne Palicki and Willem Dafoe. It contains twenty-seven tracks from the original film score written and composed by Tyler Bates and Joel J. Richard, with songs performed by Ciscandra Nostalghia, The Candy Shop Boys, and M86 & Susie Q, and features violin player Scott Tixier.


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: Having been friends for some time, as well as having and sharing common interests and taste in music, both Bates and Richard have wanted to work together musically for some period of time. Director Chad Stahelski and producer Dave Leitch approached Bates to write the score for "John Wick" after filming had completed, and it was then that Bates had the thought of working with Richard, explaining, "Joel came to the table with great ideas and a sensibility that was exactly as I felt we should approach the music."


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: On July 11, 2014, it was officially announced that Bates and Richard had composed the score for the film.


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: Both Stahelski and Leitch had expressed to both Bates and Richard they wished for the compositions of the film to be in line with John Wick's alter ego and former life, with Richard describing the two as wanting a "fun, raw, aggressive, unorthodox score", as well as the emphasis on the music of the piece being able to create an atmosphere to differentiate between the set pieces and fight sequences of "John Wick". For the score of "John Wick", Bates explained that the first words of musical direction that came from Stahelski and Leitch was that they wished for a score to "kick ass in the same aesthetic paradigm that IS John Wick's world", the combination of film and musical tonality.


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: To conceptualize the score both Bates and Richard were of the mind that the suitable approach to tackle such a score would be to "get into the headspace of John Wick" as well as understanding the tone and essence of Wick's story too, as opposed to jumping right into composition straight away without any emotional attachment. Of the opening sequence, Richard stated, "[It] was the first scene tackled. It was originally much longer and contained elements from the end of the film." Le Castle Vania, who are long-time collaborators of Bates and Richard, made their film scoring début by contributing several pieces of original music which was written specifically for various high energy scenes in the film.


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of "The A.V. Club" praised the score and Kaleida's "Think", stating, "one of the most effective and eccentric sound track choices in a recent action movie—underscores the sense that what the viewer is watching is essentially a very loud and bloody dance piece."


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: Erik Avellaneda of "Entertainment Voice" highly praised the musical score, for which he stated, "The music is a nod to classic rock and modern techno. This heightens the film’s mystical, playful nature and only strengthens the action of the film." Joe Robberson of "Zimbo" hails the piece as "further [pushing] the wicked mood of the film" as well as being "electric and makes the film crackle with energy". He too praised the score for its diversity and lack of Hans Zimmer-esque pulses. Steve Persall of "Tampa Bay Times" described the piece as a "neo-Giorgio Moroder synth-rock musical score".


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: Peter Debruge of "Variety" acknowledged the importance of cinematography and its "relying on a mix of heavy metal and electronic music from the likes of Marilyn Manson, Tyler Bates and Kaleida to generate propulsive forward energy." Paloma Sharma of "Rediff" wrote of Bates' and Richard's score, "[Bates] and [Richards'] soundtrack makes sure that you understand two things throughout the film: [Wick] is armed, angry and dangerous and [Wick] is the coolest hitman you've seen in a while."


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: Chris Sawin of "Examiner.com" highlights the music in the piece as a "bass-heavy soundtrack", as well as adding to it further by stating, "The dance-fueled soundtrack is an excellent companion to the film and is the ideal sidekick to the film's outstanding action." Neil Miller of "Film School Rejects" described the score as, "[a] pulsing score from Tyler Bates." Jeff Bulmer of "The Phoenix News" professed of the score, "Tyler Bates’ music complements every scene the way a soundtrack should, even becoming a character of its own at points."


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: Sutton Bradbury-Koster of "The Massachusetts Daily Collegian" spoke most highly of the score stating, "The music does all the talking – blending soothing strings with ambient synths to generate a raw, emotional atmosphere that seems nearly misplaced given the movie it resides in. While this atmospheric and emotional presence does not remain throughout much else of the film, it is still worth mentioning." and further expands by expressing, "The rest of the film’s score features a pulsating, intense low-drive bass drumbeat that establishes a tense yet epic feeling."


title: John Wick (soundtrack)

text: Editors of "MSN" heralded the soundtrack by stating, "it's the crunching original score by Marilyn Manson guitarist Tyler Bates and the co-directors' refusal to embrace the post-Bourne Identity shaky-cam action trend that makes John Wick feel like a film from an alternate cinematic universe."


title: Yasmin Paige

text: Yasmin Paige is an English actress who is best known for her roles as Jordana Bevan in "Submarine", Beth Mitchell in "Pramface" and Maria Jackson in "The Sarah Jane Adventures".


title: Yasmin Paige

text: Paige was born in London, to a Jewish mother and Muslim Arab Iraqi father. She has acted since the age of four. She made her screen debut in the 2003 film "Wondrous Oblivion". Paige also starred in "The Mysti Show". She had a reduced role in the second series of "The Sarah Jane Adventures" to accommodate her GCSEs exams.


title: Yasmin Paige

text: Paige appeared in "Ballet Shoes", in which she plays one of the leads, Petrova Fossil, and co-starred as "Jordana Bevan" in the 2010 film "Submarine". In February and March 2012, Paige played Beth Mitchell in the six-part BBC Three comedy "Pramface". She returned to this role for a second series in 2013. She appeared as Nicky in the Channel 4 drama "Spoof or Die", which aired on 30 July 2012. In 2014, she had the main role in the E4 teen drama "Glue". The series saw her reunite with her "The Sarah Jane Adventures" co-star Tommy Knight.


title: Augustan literature

text: Augustan literature (sometimes referred to misleadingly as Georgian literature) is a style of British literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II in the first half of the 18th century and ending in the 1740s, with the deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, in 1744 and 1745, respectively. It was a literary epoch that featured the rapid development of the novel, an explosion in satire, the mutation of drama from political satire into melodrama and an evolution toward poetry of personal exploration. In philosophy, it was an age increasingly dominated by empiricism, while in the writings of political economy, it marked the evolution of mercantilism as a formal philosophy, the development of capitalism and the triumph of trade.


title: Augustan literature

text: The chronological boundary points of the era are generally vague, largely since the label's origin in contemporary 18th-century criticism has made it a shorthand designation for a somewhat nebulous age of satire. Samuel Johnson, whose famous "A Dictionary of the English Language" was published in 1755, is also "to some extent" associated with the Augustan period. The new Augustan period exhibited exceptionally bold political writings in all genres, with the satires of the age marked by an arch, ironic pose, full of nuance and a superficial air of dignified calm that hid sharp criticisms beneath.


title: Augustan literature

text: While the period is generally known for its adoption of highly regulated and stylized literary forms, some of the concerns of writers of this period, with the emotions, folk and a self-conscious model of authorship, foreshadowed the preoccupations of the later Romantic era. In general, philosophy, politics and literature underwent a turn away from older courtly concerns towards something closer to a modern sensibility.


title: Augustan literature

text: Alexander Pope, who had been imitating Horace, wrote an "Epistle to Augustus" that was in fact addressed to George II of Great Britain 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. Later, Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith (in his "History of Literature" in 1764) used the term "Augustan" to refer to the literature of the 1720s and the 1730s.


title: Augustan literature

text: Outside poetry, however, the Augustan era is generally known by other names. Partially because of the rise of empiricism and partially because of the self-conscious naming of the age in terms of ancient Rome, two rather imprecise labels have been affixed to the age. One is that it is the age of neoclassicism; the other is that it is the Age of Reason. While neoclassical criticism from France was imported to English letters, the English had abandoned their structures in all but name by the 1720s. Critics disagree over the applicability of the concept of "the Enlightenment" to the literary history of this period. Donald Greene argued forcefully that the age should rather be known as "The Age of Exuberance", and T. H. White made a case for "The Age of Scandal". More recently, Roy Porter put forward the notion of a distinctively "English Enlightenment" to characterise the intellectual climate of the period.


title: Augustan literature

text: One of the most critical elements of the 18th century was the increasing availability of printed material, both for readers and authors. Books fell in price dramatically and used books were sold at Bartholomew Fair and other fairs. Additionally, a brisk trade in chapbooks and broadsheets carried London trends and information out to the farthest reaches of the kingdom. That was furthered with the establishment of periodicals, including "The Gentleman's Magazine" and the "London Magazine". People in York aware of the happenings of Parliament and the court, but people in London were also more aware than before of the happenings of York. Furthermore, before copyright, pirate editions were commonplace, especially in areas without frequent contact with London. Pirate editions thereby encouraged booksellers to increase their shipments to outlying centres like Dublin, which further increased awareness across the whole realm. That was compounded by the end of the Press Restriction Act in 1693, which allowed for provincial printing presses to be established, creating a printing structure that was no longer under government control (Clair 158–176).


title: Augustan literature

text: All types of literature were spread quickly in all directions. Newspapers began and even multiplied. Furthermore, the newspapers were immediately compromised, as the political factions created their own newspapers, planted stories and bribed journalists. Leading clerics had their sermon collections printed, which were top selling books. Since dissenting, Establishment and Independent divines were in print, the constant movement of these works helped defuse any region's religious homogeneity and fostered emergent latitudinarianism. Periodicals were exceedingly popular, and the art of essay writing was at nearly its apex. Furthermore, the happenings of the Royal Society were published regularly, and they were digested and explained or celebrated in more popular presses. The latest books of scholarship had "keys", "indexes" and "digests" made of them that could popularise, summarise and explain them to a wide audience. The cross-index, now commonplace, was a novelty in the 18th century, and several persons created indexes for older books of learning to allow anyone to find what an author had to say about a given topic at a moment's notice. Books of etiquette, of correspondence and of moral instruction and hygiene multiplied. Economics began as a serious discipline but did so in the form of numerous "projects" for solving England, Ireland and Scotland's ills. Sermon collections, dissertations on religious controversy, and prophecies, both new and old and explained, cropped up in endless variety. In short, readers in the 18th century were overwhelmed by competing voices. Truth and falsehood sat side by side on the shelves, and anyone could be a published author, just as anyone could quickly pretend to be a scholar by using indexes and digests (Clair 45, 158–187).


title: Augustan literature

text: The positive side of the explosion in information was that the 18th century was markedly more generally educated than the centuries before. Education was less confined to the upper classes than it had been in prior centuries so contributions to science, philosophy, economics, and literature came from all parts of the kingdom. It was the first time that literacy and a library were all that stood between a person and education. It was an age of "enlightenment" in the sense that the insistence and drive for reasonable explanations of nature and mankind was a rage. It was an "age of reason" in that it was an age that accepted clear, rational methods as superior to tradition. However, there was a dark side to such literacy as well, which authors of the 18th century felt at every turn, which was that nonsense and insanity were also getting more adherents than ever before. Charlatans and mountebanks were fooling more, just as sages were educating more, and alluring and lurid apocalypses vied with sober philosophy on the shelves. As with the Worldwide Web in the 21st century, the democratisation of publishing meant that older systems for determining value and uniformity of view were both in shambles. Thus, it was increasingly difficult to trust books in the 18th century, as books were increasingly easy to make and buy.


title: Augustan literature

text: The Restoration period ended with the exclusion crisis and the Glorious Revolution, where Parliament set up a new rule for succession to the British throne that would always prefer Protestantism over consanguinity. That had brought William III and Mary II to the throne instead of James II, and that was codified in the Act of Settlement 1701. James had fled to France from where his son, James Francis Edward Stuart, launched an attempt to retake the throne in 1715. Another attempt was launched by the latter's son Charles Edward Stuart in 1745. The attempted invasions are often referred to as "the 15" and "the 45". When William died, Anne Stuart came to the throne. Anne's reign saw two wars and great triumphs by John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough. Marlborough's wife, Sarah Churchill, was Anne's best friend, and many supposed that she secretly controlled the Queen in every respect. With the belief that true power rested in the hands of the leading ministers, the two factions of politics stepped up their opposition to each other, and Whig and Tory were at each other's throats. That weakness at the throne would lead quickly to the expansion of the powers of the party leader in Parliament and the establishment in all but name of the prime minister office in the form of Robert Walpole. When Anne died without surviving issue, George I, Elector of Hanover, came to the throne. George I spoke poor English, and his isolation from the English people was instrumental in keeping his power relatively irrelevant.


title: Augustan literature

text: His son, George II, on the other hand, spoke some English and some more French, and his rule was the first full Hanoverian rule in England. By then, the powers of Parliament had silently expanded, and his power was perhaps only equal to that of Parliament.


title: Augustan literature

text: London's population exploded spectacularly. During the Restoration, it had grown from around 350,000 to 600,000 in 1700 ("Old Bailey") ("Millwall history"). By 1800, it had reached 950,000. Not all of the residents were prosperous, as the Enclosure Acts had destroyed lower-class farming in the countryside, and rural areas experienced painful poverty. Communities of the country poor were forced to migrate or suffer (see Thompson, "Whigs") so young people from the country often moved to London with hopes of achieving success, which swelled the ranks of the urban poor and cheap labour for city employers. It also meant an increase in numbers of criminals, prostitutes and beggars. The fears of property crime, rape and starvation found in Augustan literature should be kept in the context of London's growth and the depopulation of the countryside.


title: Augustan literature

text: Partially because of the population pressures, property crime became a business both for the criminals and those who fed off of the criminals. Major crime lords like Jonathan Wild invented new schemes for stealing, and newspapers were eager to report crime. Biographies of the daring criminals became popular, which spawned fictional biographies of fictional criminals. Cautionary tales of country women abused by sophisticated rakes (such as Anne Bond) and libertines in the city were popular fare, and they prompted fictional accounts of exemplary women abused (or narrowly escaping abuse).


title: Augustan literature

text: Increased population also meant that urban discontent was never particularly difficult to find for political opportunists, and London suffered a number of riots, most of them against supposed Roman Catholic provocateurs. When highly potent, inexpensive distilled spirits were introduced, matters worsened and authors and artists protested the innovation of gin (see, e.g. William Hogarth's "Gin Lane"). From 1710, the government encouraged distilling as a source of revenue and trade goods, and there were no licenses required for the manufacturing or selling of gin. There were documented instances of women drowning their infants to sell the child's clothes for gin, and the facilities created both the fodder for riots and the conditions against which riots would occur (Loughrey and Treadwell, 14). Dissenters (Protestants not conforming to the Church of England) recruited and preached to the poor of the city, and various offshoots of the Puritan and "Independent" (Baptist) movements increased their numbers substantially. One theme of the ministers was the danger of the Roman Catholic Church, which they frequently saw as the Whore of Babylon. While Anne tended to favor the High Church faction, particularly towards the close of her reign, the court of George I was more closely allied with Low Church and latitudinarian elements and was warmer to nonconformists. The convocation was effectively disbanded by George I, who was struggling with the House of Lords, and George II was pleased to keep it in abeyance. Additionally, both Georges were concerned with James Francis Edward Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart, who had considerable support in Scotland and Ireland, and many were suspected of being closet Jacobites. Walpole inflated fears of Stuart sympathisers from any group that did not support him.


title: Augustan literature

text: The literature of the 18th century, particularly the early 18th century, which is what "Augustan" most commonly indicates, is explicitly political in ways that few others are. Because the professional author was still not distinguishable from the hack-writer, those who wrote poetry, novels, and plays were frequently either politically active or politically funded. At the same time, an aesthetic of artistic detachment from the everyday world had yet to develop, and the aristocratic ideal of an author so noble as to be above political concerns was largely archaic and irrelevant. The period may be an "Age of Scandal", as authors dealt specifically with the crimes and the vices of their world.


title: Augustan literature

text: Satire, in prose, drama and poetry, was the genre that attracted the most energetic and voluminous writing. The satires that were produced during the Augustan period were occasionally gentle and nonspecific, commentaries on the comically flawed human condition, but they were at least as frequently specific critiques of specific policies, actions and persons. Even the works studiously nontopical were, in fact, transparently political statements in the 18th century.


title: Augustan literature

text: Consequently, readers of 18th-century literature now need to understand the history of the period more than most readers of other literature do. The authors were writing for an informed audience and only secondarily for posterity. Even the authors, who criticised writing that lived for only a day (like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, in "The Dedication to Prince Posterity" of "A Tale of a Tub" and "The Dunciad", among other pieces) were criticising specific authors, who are unknown to those without historical knowledge of the period. Poetry of all forms was in constant dialogue, and each author was responding and commenting upon the others. Novels were written against other novels (like the battles between Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, who, along with Eliza Haywood, wrote a novel satirising Richardson's "Pamela", and between Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett). Plays were written to make fun of plays or to counter the success of plays (like the reaction against and for "Cato" and, later, Fielding's "The Author's Farce"). Therefore, history and literature are linked in a way rarely seen at other times. On one hand, the metropolitan and political writing can seem like coterie or salon work, but on the other hand, it was the literature of people deeply committed to sorting out a new type of government, new technologies and newly-vexatious challenges to philosophical and religious certainty.


title: Augustan literature

text: The essay, satire, and dialogue (in philosophy and religion) thrived in the age, and the English novel was truly begun as a serious art form. Literacy in the early 18th century passed into the working classes, as well as the middle and upper classes (Thompson, "Class"). Furthermore, literacy was not confined to men, though rates of female literacy are very difficult to establish. For those who were literate, circulating libraries in England began in the Augustan period. Libraries were open to all, but they were mainly associated with female patronage and novel reading.


title: Augustan literature

text: English essayists were aware of Continental models, but they developed their form independently from that tradition, and periodical literature grew between 1692 and 1712. Periodicals were inexpensive to produce, quick to read, and a viable way of influencing public opinion, and consequently there were many broadsheet periodicals headed by a single author and staffed by hirelings (so-called "Grub Street" authors). One periodical outsold and dominated all others, however, and that was "The Spectator", written by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele (with occasional contributions from their friends). "The Spectator" developed a number of pseudonymous characters, including "Mr. Spectator," Roger de Coverley, and "Isaac Bickerstaff", and both Addison and Steele created fictions to surround their narrators. The dispassionate view of the world (the pose of a spectator, rather than participant) was essential for the development of the English essay, as it set out a ground wherein Addison and Steele could comment and meditate upon manners and events. Samuel Johnson's command of words and his practical wisdom gained a following as he published more than 200 essays offering insights into the follies of human nature and moral perseverance. Rather than being philosophers like Montesquieu, the English essayist could be an honest observer and his reader's peer. After the success of "The Spectator," more political periodicals of comment appeared. However, the political factions and coalitions of politicians very quickly realized the power of this type of press, and they began funding newspapers to spread rumours. The Tory ministry of Robert Harley (1710–1714) reportedly spent over 50,000 pounds sterling on creating and bribing the press (Butt); this figure is known because their successors publicised it, but they (the Walpole government) were suspected of spending even more. Politicians wrote papers, wrote into papers, and supported papers, and it was well known that some of the periodicals, like "Mist's Journal," were party mouthpieces.


title: Augustan literature

text: The 18th century was a time of enlightenment progression occurring in all intellectual fields. However, the English language was deteriorating into a tangled mess. A group of London booksellers commissioned well-known essayist Samuel Johnson to compile a set of rules governing the English language. After nine years and the help of six assistants the first edition of "A Dictionary of the English Language" was published in 1755. Johnson's great knowledge of letters, words and literature brought uniqueness to his dictionary. Each word defined in detail, with descriptions of their various uses and numerous literary quotes as illustrations. This was the first dictionary of its kind, containing 40,000 words and nearly 114,000 quotes packed together with Johnson's personal touch. A warm reception greeted Johnson's Dictionary as it was the first dictionary that could be read with pleasure. The definitions full of wit and depth of thought supported by passages from beloved poets and philosophers, which a reader could be content spending an evening poring over its pages. Johnson's choice of structure and format has certainly shaped future English dictionaries and lexicons and the role they play in language development.


title: Augustan literature

text: The Augustan period showed less literature of controversy than the Restoration. There were Puritan authors, however, and one of the names usually associated with the novel is perhaps the most prominent in Puritan writing: Daniel Defoe. After the coronation of Anne, dissenter hopes of reversing the Restoration were at an ebb, and dissenter literature moved from the offensive to the defensive, from revolutionary to conservative. Defoe's infamous volley in the struggle between high and low church came in the form of "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church". The work is satirical, attacking all of the worries of Establishment figures over the challenges of dissenters. It is, in other words, defensive. Later still, the most majestic work of the era, and the one most quoted and read, was William Law's "A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life" (1728). The "Meditations" of Robert Boyle remained popular as well. Both Law and Boyle called for revivalism, and they set the stage for the later development of Methodism and George Whitefield's sermon style. However, their works aimed at the individual, rather than the community. The age of revolutionary divines and militant evangelists in literature was over for a considerable time.


title: Augustan literature

text: Also in contrast to the Restoration, when philosophy in England was fully dominated by John Locke, the 18th century had a vigorous competition among followers of Locke. Bishop Berkeley extended Locke's emphasis on perception to argue that perception entirely solves the Cartesian problem of subjective and objective knowledge by saying "to be is to be perceived". Only, Berkeley argued, those things that are perceived by a consciousness are real. For Berkeley, the persistence of matter rests in the fact that God perceives those things that humans are not, that a living and continually aware, attentive, and involved God is the only rational explanation for the existence of objective matter. In essence, then, Berkeley's scepticism leads to faith. David Hume, on the other hand, took empiricist scepticism to its extremes, and he was the most radically empiricist philosopher of the period. He attacked surmise and unexamined premises wherever he found them, and his scepticism pointed out metaphysics in areas that other empiricists had assumed were material. Hume doggedly refused to enter into questions of his personal faith in the divine, but he assaulted the logic and assumptions of theodicy and cosmogeny, and he concentrated on the provable and empirical in a way that would lead to utilitarianism and naturalism later.


title: Augustan literature

text: In social and political philosophy, economics underlies much of the debate. Bernard de Mandeville's "The Fable of the Bees" (1714) became a centre-point of controversy regarding trade, morality, and social ethics. Mandeville argued that wastefulness, lust, pride, and all the other "private" vices were good for the society at large, for each led the individual to employ others, to spend freely, and to free capital to flow through the economy. Mandeville's work is full of paradox and is meant, at least partially, to problematize what he saw as the naïve philosophy of human progress and inherent virtue. However, Mandeville's arguments, initially an attack on graft of the War of the Spanish Succession, would be quoted often by economists who wished to strip morality away from questions of trade.


title: Augustan literature

text: Adam Smith is remembered by lay persons as the father of capitalism, but his "Theory of Moral Sentiments" of 1759 also attempted to strike out a new ground for moral action. His emphasis on "sentiment" was in keeping with the era, as he emphasised the need for "sympathy" between individuals as the basis of fit action. These ideas, and the psychology of David Hartley, were influential on the sentimental novel and even the nascent Methodist movement. If sympathetic sentiment communicated morality, would it not be possible to induce morality by providing sympathetic circumstances?


title: Augustan literature

text: Smith's greatest work was "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" in 1776. What it held in common with de Mandeville, Hume, and Locke was that it began by analytically examining the history of material exchange, without reflection on morality. Instead of deducing from the ideal or moral to the real, it examined the real and tried to formulate inductive rules.


title: Augustan literature

text: The ground for the novel had been laid by journalism, drama and satire. Long prose satires like Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" (1726) had a central character who goes through adventures and may (or may not) learn lessons. However, the most important single satirical source for the writing of novels came from Cervantes's "Don Quixote" (1605, 1615). In general, one can see these three axes, drama, journalism and satire, as blending in and giving rise to three different types of novel.


title: Augustan literature

text: Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719) was the first major novel of the new century and was published in more editions than any other works besides "Gulliver's Travels" (Mullan 252). Defoe worked as a journalist during and after its composition, and therefore he encountered the memoirs of Alexander Selkirk, who had been stranded in South America on an island for some years. Defoe took aspects of the actual life and, from that, generated a fictional life, satisfying an essentially journalistic market with his fiction (Hunter 331–338). In the 1720s, Defoe interviewed famed criminals and produced accounts of their lives. In particular, he investigated Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild and wrote "True Accounts" of the former's escapes (and fate) and the latter's life. From his reportage on the prostitutes and criminals, Defoe may have become familiar with the real-life Mary Mollineaux, who may have been the model for Moll in "Moll Flanders" (1722). In the same year, Defoe produced "A Journal of the Plague Year" (1722), which summoned up the horrors and tribulations of 1665 for a journalistic market for memoirs, and an attempted tale of a working-class male rise in "Colonel Jack" (1722). His last novel returned to the theme of fallen women in "" (1724). Thematically, Defoe's works are consistently Puritan. They all involve a fall, a degradation of the spirit, a conversion, and an ecstatic elevation. This religious structure necessarily involved a "bildungsroman", for each character had to learn a lesson about him or herself and emerge the wiser.


title: Augustan literature

text: The sentimental novel, or "novel of sentiment", developed after 1740, and among the most famous examples in English are Samuel Richardson's "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded" (1740), Oliver Goldsmith's "Vicar of Wakefield" (1766), Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy" (1759–67), "Sentimental Journey" (1768), Henry Brooke's "The Fool of Quality" (1765–70), Henry Mackenzie's "The Man of Feeling" (1771) and Maria Edgeworth's "Castle Rackrent" (1800). Continental examples are Jean-Jacques Rousseau's novel "Julie, or the New Heloise", his autobiography "The Confessions" (1764–70) and Goethe's novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774).


title: Augustan literature

text: Although there were novels in the interim, Samuel Richardson's "Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded" (1740) is the next landmark development in the English novel. Richardson's generic models were quite distinct from those of Defoe. Instead of working from the journalistic biography, Richardson had in mind the books of improvement that were popular at the time. Pamela Andrews enters the employ of a "Mr. B". As a dutiful girl, she writes to her mother constantly, and as a Christian girl, she is always on guard for her "virtue" (i.e. her virginity), for Mr. B lusts after her. The novel ends with her marriage to her employer and her rising to the position of lady. "Pamela", like its author, presents a dissenter's and a Whig's view of the rise of the classes. The work drew a nearly instantaneous set of satires, of which Henry Fielding's "Shamela, or an Apology for the Life of Miss Shamela Andrews" (1742) is the most memorable. Fielding continued to bait Richardson with "Joseph Andrews" (1742), the tale of Shamela's brother, Joseph, who goes through his life trying to protect his own virginity, thus reversing the sexual predation of Richardson and satirizing the idea of sleeping one's way to rank. However, "Joseph Andrews" is not a parody of Richardson, for Fielding proposed his belief in "good nature", which is a quality of inherent virtue that is independent of class and which can always prevail. Joseph's friend Parson Adams, although not a fool, is a naïf and possessing good nature. His own basic good nature blinds him to the wickedness of the world, and the incidents on the road (for most of the novel is a travel story) allow Fielding to satirize conditions for the clergy, rural poverty (and squires), and the viciousness of businessmen.


title: Augustan literature

text: In 1747 through 1748, Samuel Richardson published "Clarissa" in serial form. Unlike "Pamela", it is not a tale of virtue rewarded. Instead, it is a highly tragic and affecting account of a young girl whose parents try to force her into an uncongenial marriage, thus pushing her into the arms of a scheming rake named Lovelace. In the end, Clarissa dies by her own will. The novel is a masterpiece of psychological realism and emotional effect, and when Richardson was drawing to a close in the serial publication, even Henry Fielding wrote to him, begging him not to kill Clarissa. As with "Pamela", Richardson emphasized the individual over the social and the personal over the class. Even as Fielding was reading and enjoying "Clarissa", he was also writing a counter to its messages. His "Tom Jones" of 1749 offers up the other side of the argument from "Clarissa". "Tom Jones" agrees substantially in the power of the individual to be more or less than his or her birth would indicate, but it again emphasizes the place of the individual in society and the social ramifications of individual choices. Fielding answers Richardson by featuring a similar plot device (whether a girl can choose her own mate) but showing how family and village can complicate and expedite matches and felicity.


title: Augustan literature

text: Two other novelists should be mentioned, for they, like Fielding and Richardson, were in dialogue through their works. Laurence Sterne's and Tobias Smollett's works offered up oppositional views of the self in society and the method of the novel. The clergyman Laurence Sterne consciously set out to imitate Jonathan Swift with his "Tristram Shandy" (1759–1767). Tristram seeks to write his autobiography, but like Swift's narrator in "A Tale of a Tub", he worries that nothing in his life can be understood without understanding its context. For example, he tells the reader that at the very moment he was conceived, his mother was saying, "Did you wind the clock?". To clarify how he knows this, he explains that his father took care of winding the clock and "other family business" on one day a month. To explain why the clock had to be wound then, he has to explain his father. In other words, the biography moves backward rather than forward in time, only to then jump forward years, hit another knot, and move backward again. It is a novel of exceptional energy, of multi-layered digressions, of multiple satires, and of frequent parodies. Journalist, translator and historian Tobias Smollett, on the other hand, wrote more seemingly traditional novels. He concentrated on the picaresque novel, where a low-born character would go through a practically endless series of adventures. Sterne thought that Smollett's novels always paid undue attention to the basest and most common elements of life, that they emphasized the dirt. Although this is a superficial complaint, it points to an important difference between the two as authors. Sterne came to the novel from a satirical background, while Smollett approached it from journalism. In the 19th century, novelists would have plots much nearer to Smollett's than either Fielding's or Sterne's or Richardson's, and his sprawling, linear development of action would prove most successful.


title: Augustan literature

text: In the midst of this development of the novel, other trends were also taking place. Women were writing novels and moving away from the old romance plots that had dominated before the Restoration. There were utopian novels, like Sarah Scott's "Millennium Hall" (1762), autobiographical women's novels like Frances Burney's works, female adaptations of older, male motifs, such as Charlotte Lennox's "The Female Quixote" (1752) and many others. These novels do not generally follow a strict line of development or influence.


title: Augustan literature

text: The Augustan era is considered a high point of British satiric writing, and its masterpieces were Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" and "A Modest Proposal", Pope's "Dunciads", Horatian Imitations, and Moral Essays, Samuel Johnson's "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and "London", Henry Fielding's "Shamela" and "Jonathan Wild", and John Gay's "The Beggar's Opera". There were several thousand other satirical works written during the period, which have until recently been, by widespread consensus, ignored. The central group of "Scriblerians"—Pope, Swift, Gay, and their colleague John Arbuthnot—are considered to have had common satiric aims. Until recently, these writers formed a "school" of satire. After Swift and Pope died, the emergent "Age of Sensibility" discouraged the often cruel and abrasive tenor of the Augustans, and satire was rendered gentler and more diffuse.


title: Augustan literature

text: Many scholars of the era argue that a single name overshadows all others in 18th-century prose satire: Jonathan Swift. Swift wrote poetry as well as prose, and his satires range over all topics. Critically, Swift's satire marked the development of prose parody away from simple satire or burlesque. A burlesque or lampoon in prose would imitate a despised author and quickly move to "reductio ad absurdum" by having the victim say things coarse or idiotic. On the other hand, other satires would argue against a habit, practice, or policy by making fun of its reach or composition or methods. What Swift did was to combine parody, with its imitation of form and style of another, and satire in prose. Swift's works would pretend to speak in the voice of an opponent and imitate the style of the opponent and have the parodic work itself be the satire. Swift's first major satire was "A Tale of a Tub" (1703–1705), which introduced an ancients/moderns division that would serve as a distinction between the old and new conception of value. The "moderns" sought trade, empirical science, the individual's reason above the society's, while the "ancients" believed in inherent and immanent value of birth, and the society over the individual's determinations of the good. In Swift's satire, the moderns come out looking insane and proud of their insanity, and dismissive of the value of history. In Swift's most significant satire, "Gulliver's Travels" (1726), autobiography, allegory, and philosophy mix together in the travels. Thematically, "Gulliver's Travels" is a critique of human vanity, of pride. Book one, the journey to Liliput, begins with the world as it is. Book two shows that the idealized nation of Brobdingnag with a philosopher king is no home for a contemporary Englishman. Book four depicts the land of the Houyhnhnms, a society of horses ruled by pure reason, where humanity itself is portrayed as a group of "yahoos" covered in filth and dominated by base desires. It shows that, indeed, the very desire for reason may be undesirable, and humans must struggle to be neither Yahoos nor Houyhnhnms, for book three shows what happens when reason is unleashed without any consideration of morality or utility (i.e. madness, ruin, and starvation).


title: Augustan literature

text: There were other satirists who worked in a less virulent way, who took a bemused pose and only made lighthearted fun. Tom Brown, Ned Ward, and Tom D'Urfey were all satirists in prose and poetry whose works appeared in the early part of the Augustan age. Tom Brown's most famous work in this vein was "Amusements Serious and Comical, Calculated for the Meridian of London" (1700). Ned Ward's most memorable work was "The London Spy" (1704–1706). "The London Spy," before "The Spectator," took up the position of an observer and uncomprehendingly reporting back. Tom D'Urfey's "Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy" (1719) was another satire that attempted to offer entertainment, rather than a specific bit of political action, in the form of coarse and catchy songs.


title: Augustan literature

text: Particularly after Swift's success, parodic satire had an attraction for authors throughout the 18th century. A variety of factors created a rise in political writing and political satire, and Robert Walpole's success and domination of House of Commons was a very effective proximal cause for polarized literature and thereby the rise of parodic satire. 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. Satire was present in all genres during the Augustan period. Perhaps primarily, satire was a part of political and religious debate. Every significant politician and political act had satires to attack it. Few of these were parodic satires, but parodic satires, too, emerged in political and religious debate. So omnipresent and powerful was satire in the Augustan age that more than one literary history has referred to it as the "Age of satire" in literature.


title: Augustan literature

text: In the Augustan era, poets wrote in direct counterpoint and direct expansion of one another, with each poet writing satire when in opposition. There was a great struggle over the nature and role of the pastoral in the early part of the century, reflecting two simultaneous movements: the invention of the subjective self as a worthy topic, with the emergence of a priority on "individual" psychology, against the insistence on all acts of art being "performance" and public gesture designed for the benefit of society at large. The development seemingly agreed upon by both sides was a gradual adaptation of all forms of poetry from their older uses. Odes would cease to be encomium, ballads cease to be narratives, elegies cease to be sincere memorials, satires no longer be specific entertainments, parodies no longer be performance pieces without sting, song no longer be pointed, and the lyric would become a celebration of the individual rather than a lover's complaint. 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. Whatever the prime cause, a largely conservative set of voices argued for a social person and largely emergent voices argued for the individual person.


title: Augustan literature

text: The entire Augustan age's poetry was dominated by Alexander Pope. His lines were repeated often enough to lend quite a few clichés and proverbs to modern English usage. Pope had few poetic rivals, but he had many personal enemies and political, philosophical, or religious opponents, and Pope himself was quarrelsome in print. Pope and his enemies (often called "the Dunces" because of Pope's successful satirizing of them in "The Dunciad") fought over central matters of the proper subject matter for poetry and the proper pose of the poetic voice.


title: Augustan literature

text: There was a great struggle over the nature and role of the pastoral in the early part of the century. After Pope published his "Pastorals" of the four seasons in 1709, an evaluation in the "Guardian" praised Ambrose Philips's pastorals above Pope's, and Pope replied with a mock praise of Philips's "Pastorals" that heaped scorn on them. Pope quoted Philips's worst lines, mocked his execution, and delighted in pointing out his empty lines. Pope later explained that any depictions of shepherds and their mistresses in the pastoral must not be updated shepherds, that they must be icons of the Golden Age: "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" (Gordon). Philips's "Pastorals" were not particularly awful poems, but they did reflect his desire to "update" the pastoral. In 1724, Philips would update poetry again by writing a series of odes dedicated to "all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery." Henry Carey was one of the best at satirizing these poems, and his "Namby Pamby" became a hugely successful obliteration of Philips and Philips's endeavor. What is notable about Philips against Pope, however, is the fact that "both" poets were adapting the pastoral and the ode, both altering it. Pope's insistence upon a Golden Age pastoral no less than Philips's desire to update it meant making a political statement. While it is easy to see in Ambrose Philips an effort at modernist triumph, it is no less the case that Pope's artificially restricted pastoral was a statement of what the ideal should be.


title: Augustan literature

text: Pope's friend John Gay also adapted the pastoral. Gay, working at Pope's suggestion, wrote a parody of the updated pastoral in "The Shepherd's Week." He also imitated the Satires of Juvenal with his "Trivia". In 1728, his "The Beggar's Opera" was an enormous success, running for an unheard-of eighty performances. All of these works have in common a gesture of compassion. In "Trivia," Gay writes as if commiserating with those who live in London and are menaced by falling masonry and bedpan slops, and "The Shepherd's Week" features great detail of the follies of everyday life and eccentric character. Even "The Beggar's Opera," which is a satire of Robert Walpole, portrays its characters with compassion: the villains have pathetic songs in their own right and are acting out of exigency rather than boundless evil.


title: Augustan literature

text: Throughout the Augustan era the "updating" of Classical poets was a commonplace. These were not translations, but rather they were imitations of Classical models, and the imitation allowed poets to veil their responsibility for the comments they made. Alexander Pope would manage to refer to the King himself in unflattering tones by "imitating" Horace in his "Epistle to Augustus." Similarly, Samuel Johnson wrote a poem that falls into the Augustan period in his "imitation of Juvenal" entitled "London." The imitation was inherently conservative, since it argued that all that was good was to be found in the old classical education, but these imitations were used for progressive purposes, as the poets who used them were often doing so to complain of the political situation.


title: Augustan literature

text: In satire, Pope achieved two of the greatest poetic satires of all time in the Augustan period. "The Rape of the Lock" (1712 and 1714) was a gentle mock-heroic. Pope applies Virgil's heroic and epic structure to the story of a young woman (Arabella Fermor) having a lock of hair snipped by an amorous baron (Lord Petre). The "structure" of the comparison forces Pope to invent mythological forces to overlook the struggle, and so he creates an epic battle, complete with a mythology of sylphs and metempsychosis, over a game of Ombre, leading to a fiendish appropriation of the lock of hair. Finally, a deux ex machina appears and the lock of hair experiences an apotheosis. 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. The poem was an enormous public success.


title: Augustan literature

text: A decade after the gentle, laughing satire of "The Rape of the Lock," Pope wrote his masterpiece of invective and specific opprobrium in "The Dunciad." The story is that of the goddess Dulness choosing a new Avatar. She settles upon one of Pope's personal enemies, Lewis Theobald, and the poem describes the coronation and heroic games undertaken by all of the dunces of Great Britain in celebration of Theobald's ascension. When Pope's enemies responded to "The Dunciad" with attacks, Pope produced the "Dunciad Variorum," with a "learned" commentary upon the original "Dunciad". In 1743, he added a fourth book and changed the hero from Lewis Theobald to Colley Cibber. In the fourth book of the new "Dunciad", Pope expressed the view that, in the battle between light and dark (enlightenment and the Dark Ages), Night and Dulness were fated to win, that all things of value were soon going to be subsumed under the curtain of unknowing.


title: Augustan literature

text: John Gay and Alexander Pope belong on one side of a line separating the celebrants of the individual and the celebrants of the social. Pope wrote "The Rape of the Lock," he said, to settle a disagreement between two great families, to laugh them into peace. Even "The Dunciad," which seems to be a serial killing of everyone on Pope's enemies list, sets up these figures as expressions of dangerous and "antisocial" forces in letters. Theobald and Cibber are marked by vanity and pride, by having no care for morality. The hireling pens Pope attacks mercilessly in the heroic games section of the "Dunciad" are all embodiments of avarice and lies. Similarly, Gay writes of political society, of social dangers, and of follies that must be addressed to protect the greater whole. Gay's individuals are microcosms of the society at large. On the other side of this line were people who agreed with the "politics" of Gay and Pope (and Swift), but not in approach. They include, early in the Augustan Age, James Thomson and Edward Young.


title: Augustan literature

text: In the year 1726 two poems were published describing landscape from a personal point of view and taking their feeling and moral lessons from direct observation. One was John Dyer's "Grongar Hill", the other was James Thomson's "Winter", soon to be followed by all the seasons (1726–30). Both are unlike Pope's notion of the Golden Age pastoral as exemplified in his "Windsor Forest". Mythology is at a minimum and there is no celebration of Britain or the crown. Where the octosyllabic couplets of Dyer's poem celebrate the natural beauty of a mountain view and are quietly meditative, the declamatory blank verse of Thomson's winter meditation is melancholy and soon to establish that emotion as proper for poetic expression. One notable successor in that line was Edward Yonge's "Night Thoughts" (1742–1744). It was, even more than "Winter", a poem of deep solitude, melancholy and despair. In these poems, there are the stirrings of the lyric as the Romantics would see it: the celebration of the private individual's idiosyncratic, yet paradigmatic, responses to the visions of the world.


title: Augustan literature

text: These hints at the solitary poet were carried into a new realm with Thomas Gray, whose "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard" (1750) set off a new craze for poetry of melancholy reflection. It was written in the "country", and not in or as opposed to London, and the poem sets up the solitary observer in a privileged position. It is only by being solitary that the poet can speak of a truth that is wholly individually realized. After Gray, a group often referred to as the Churchyard Poets began imitating his pose and almost as often his style. Alternative models were adopted by Oliver Goldsmith ("The Deserted Village"), Thomas Warton, and even Thomas Percy ("The Hermit of Warkworth"), who, also conservative by and large and Classicist (Gray himself was a professor of Greek), took up the new poetry of solitude and loss.


title: Augustan literature

text: When the Romantics emerged at the end of the 18th century, they were not assuming a radically new invention of the subjective self themselves, but merely formalizing what had gone before. Similarly, the later 18th century saw a ballad revival, with Thomas Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry". The relics were not always very ancient, as many of the ballads dated from only the 17th century (e.g. the Bagford Ballads or The Dragon of Wantley in the Percy Folio), and so what began as an antiquarian movement soon became a folk movement. When this folk-inspired impulse combined with the solitary and individualistic impulse of the Churchyard Poets, Romanticism was nearly inevitable.


title: Augustan literature

text: The Augustan era is difficult to define chronologically in prose and poetry, but it is very easy to date its end in drama. The Augustan era's drama ended definitively in 1737, with the Licensing Act. Prior to 1737, however, the English stage was changing rapidly from the Restoration comedy and Restoration drama, and their noble subjects, to the quickly developing melodrama (Munns 97–100).


title: Augustan literature

text: George Lillo and Richard Steele wrote the trend-setting plays of the early Augustan period. Lillo's plays consciously turned from heroes and kings and toward shopkeepers and apprentices. They emphasized drama on a household scale, rather than a national scale, and the hamartia and agon in his tragedies are the common flaws of yielding to temptation and the commission of Christian sin. The plots are resolved with Christian forgiveness and repentance. Steele's "The Conscious Lovers" (1722) hinges upon his young hero avoiding fighting a duel. The plays set up a new set of values for the stage. Instead of amusing the audience or inspiring the audience, they sought to instruct the audience and to ennoble it. Also, the plays were popular precisely because they seemed to reflect the audience's own lives and concerns (Legouis 782–787, 879–883).


title: Augustan literature

text: Joseph Addison also wrote a play, entitled "Cato", in 1713, which concerned the Roman statesman Cato the Younger. The year of its première was important, with Queen Anne in serious illness at the time, and both the Tory ministry of the day and the Whig opposition (already being led by Robert Walpole) were concerned about the succession. Both groups were contacting the Old Pretender about bringing the Young Pretender over. Londoners sensed the anxiety, as Anne had no heirs, and all of the natural successors in the Stuart family were Roman Catholic or unavailable. Therefore, the figure of Cato was a transparent symbol of Roman integrity, and the Whigs saw in him a champion of Whig values, and the Tories saw in him an embodiment of Tory sentiments or, like the Tory "Examiner", tried to claim that Cato was above political "faction". Both sides cheered the play, but Addison was himself clearly a Whig (Bloom and Bloom 266, 269). John Home's play "Douglas" (1756) would have a similar fate to "Cato" in the next generation, after the Licensing Act.


title: Augustan literature

text: As during the Restoration, economics drove the stage in the Augustan period. Under Charles II court patronage meant economic success and so the Restoration stage featured plays that would suit the monarch and/or court. The drama that celebrated kings and told the history of Britain's monarchs was fit fare for the crown and courtiers. Charles II was a philanderer and so Restoration comedy featured a highly sexualized set of plays. However, after the reign of William and Mary, the court and the crown stopped taking a great interest in the playhouse. Theatres had to get their money from the audience of city dwellers, and plays that reflected city anxieties and celebrated the lives of citizens drew and were staged (Munns 96–99).


title: Augustan literature

text: Thus, there were quite a few plays that were not literary that were staged more often than the literary plays. John Rich and Colley Cibber duelled over special theatrical effects. They put on plays that were actually just spectacles, and the text of the play was almost an afterthought. Dragons, whirlwinds, thunder, ocean waves and even actual elephants were on stage. Battles, explosions and horses were put on the boards. Rich specialized in pantomime and was famous as the character "Lun" in harlequin presentations. The plays put on in this manner are not generally preserved or studied, but their monopoly on the theatres infuriated established literary authors.


title: Augustan literature

text: Additionally, opera made its way to England during this period. Inasmuch as opera combined singing with acting, it was a mixed genre, which violated all the strictures of neoclassicism. Also, high melodies would cover the singers' expressions of grief or joy, thus breaking "decorum". To add insult to injury, the casts and celebrated stars were foreigners, and, as with Farinelli, castrati. The satirists saw in opera the "non plus ultra" of invidiousness. As Pope put it in "Dunciad B":


title: Augustan literature

text: John Gay parodied the opera with his satirical "Beggar's Opera" (1728) and offered up a parody of Robert Walpole's actions during the South Sea Bubble. Superficially, the play is about a man named Macheath who keeps being imprisoned by a thief named Peachum and who escapes prison over and over again because the daughter of the jailor, Lucy Lockitt, is in love with him. That is an obvious parallel with the case of Jonathan Wild (Peachum) and Jack Sheppard (Macheath). However, it was also the tale of Robert Walpole (Peachum) and the South Sea directors (Macheath). The play was a hit, and its songs were printed up and sold. However, when Gay wrote a sequel called "Polly", Walpole had the play suppressed before performance (Winn 112–114).


title: Augustan literature

text: Playwrights were therefore in straits. On the one hand, the playhouses were doing without plays by turning out hack-written pantomimes. On the other hand, when a satirical play appeared, the Whig ministry would suppress it. The antagonism was picked up by Henry Fielding, who was not afraid to fight Walpole. His "Tom Thumb" (1730) was a satire on all of the tragedies written before him, with quotations from all the worst plays patched together for absurdity, and the plot concerned the eponymous tiny man attempting to run things. It was, in other words, an attack on Robert Walpole and the way that he was referred to as "the Great Man". Here, the Great Man is made obviously deficient by being a midget. Walpole responded, and Fielding's revision of the play was in print only. It was written by "Scribblerus Secundus". Its title page announced it was the "Tragedy of Tragedies", which functioned as a clearly Swiftian parodic satire. Anti-Walpolean sentiment also showed in increasingly political plays. A particular play of unknown authorship entitled "A Vision of the Golden Rump" was cited when Parliament passed the Licensing Act of 1737.


title: Augustan literature

text: The Licensing Act required all plays to go to a censor before staging, and only the plays passed by the censor were allowed to be performed. The first play to be banned by the new Act was "Gustavus Vasa" by Henry Brooke. Samuel Johnson wrote a Swiftian parodic satire of the licensers entitled "A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the English Stage". The satire was, of course, not a vindication at all, but rather a "reductio ad absurdum" of the position for censorship. Had the licensers not exercised their authority in a partisan manner, the Act might not have chilled the stage so dramatically, but the public was well aware of the bannings and censorship and so any play that passed the licensers was regarded with suspicion by the public. Therefore, the playhouses had little choice but to present old plays and pantomime and other plays that had no conceivable political content. In other words, William Shakespeare's reputation grew enormously, as his plays saw a quadrupling of performances, and sentimental comedy and melodrama were the only choices.


title: Augustan literature

text: Very late in the 18th century Oliver Goldsmith attempted to resist the tide of sentimental comedy with "She Stoops to Conquer" (1773), and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would mount several satirical plays after Robert Walpole's death.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: Rosalinda González Valencia (; born ) is a Mexican businesswoman and suspected money launderer of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), a criminal group based in Jalisco. She also been known by her alias La Jefa (The Boss). She was married to Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes ("El Mencho"), Mexico's most-wanted man and the CJNG leader until 2018. Born in rural Michoacán, Rosalinda grew up in a family of 18 siblings and was the eldest of her sisters. Her family originally grew avocados, but eventually turned to cultivating marijuana and opium poppy. In the 1970s, her family formed the Milenio Cartel, the predecessor group of the CJNG, and began trafficking narcotics from Mexico to the United States.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: According to Mexico's Secretariat of the Interior, González oversaw the CJNG's financial and legal resources, including over 70 businesses affiliated with the criminal group. Some of them were sanctioned under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. González's defense claims she is not guilty and was a victim of defamation due to her relationship with El Mencho. On 26 May 2018, González was arrested by the Mexican Navy in Zapopan, Jalisco, for her alleged involvement in money laundering. After three months of hearings and legal battles, a judge granted her release from prison after she paid a MXN$1.5 million bail. González's trial is ongoing and held behind closed doors. On 15 November 2021, González was recaptured.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: Rosalinda González Valencia was born in El Naranjo, a rural community in Aguililla, Michoacán, Mexico, in . Her father was J. Abigael González Mendoza and her mother was Estela Valencia Farías. According to the Mexican government, Rosalinda's family includes at least 18 siblings. The males were Abigael, José María, Arnulfo, Ulises Jovani, Elvis, Édgar Edén, Mauricio, Gerardo, José and Luis Ángel. The females were Rosalinda (also known as Rosalía), Noemí, Berenice, Marisa Ivette, María Elena, Érika and Abigaíl. Rosalinda was the eldest of the sisters. People in their hometown nicknamed the clan "Cuinis" in reference to a squirrel ("spermophilus adocetus") from the area that is known as "Cuinique". It is common for this squirrel to have over a dozen babies each time the mother gives birth.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: When González was young, her family was poor and grew avocados for a living in a plantation field they owned in Michoacán. By the 1970s, however, the family began cultivating and trafficking marijuana and opium poppy from Mexico to the United States. González's economic status improved when her siblings emigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s and got involved in the drug trade in California. Her siblings worked for the Milenio Cartel, a criminal group from Michoacán that was formed several members of González's family; their main leader was Armando Valencia Cornelio ("El Maradona" and/or "El Juanito"), who was responsible for large shipments of narcotics to the U.S. from the Mexican states of Michoacán and Jalisco. Though few details are known of her personal life, security forces believe that González was married to Armando. Armando and González eventually separated in the 1990s, and she began dating Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes ("El Mencho").


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: El Mencho was a close associate of his siblings and grew up in the same rural community as González's. He worked as a guard for the clan's marijuana plantations and eventually joined González's siblings in the drug trade in the U.S. After Oseguera was deported to Mexico, he joined a local police force and married González in 1996. Their matrimony helped strengthen Oseguera's relationship with González's clan. They had three children: Laisha, Jessica Johana, and Rubén Oseguera González ("El Menchito"). Oseguera was one of the founders of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), a criminal group that sprung in the 2010s after the Milenio Cartel splintered. In the 2000s, several of González's family members were arrested by security forces, which splintered the Milenio Cartel into two factions, Los Torcidos and La Resistencia. Los Torcidos was headed by Oseguera and several of González's family members, and they eventually consolidated their influence after defeating La Resistencia. After Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán was extradited to the U.S. in 2017, Oseguera became Mexico's most-wanted man.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: According to Mexico's Secretariat of the Interior (SEGOB), a branch of the federal government, González was responsible for overseeing the CJNG's financial and legal resources. Her role was to reportedly manage multiple CJNG-affiliated business and oversee fines and taxes owed by these firms. Within the CJNG, González was reportedly referred to by her alias "La Jefa" (English: The Boss). Authorities suspect she took over these activities after the arrest of her brother Abigael on 28 February 2015. With Abigael behind bars, the government began a crackdown on Los Cuinis, the name of the clan's group, and was successful at arresting or charging several of González's siblings. Following the arrests of González's brothers, Los Cuinis, which previously served as a sister organization to the CJNG, ceased to exist as a separate cartel and came into the fold of the CJNG. It also played a vital role in the CJNG's rise as a prominent drug cartel.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, Justice, and State, Los Cuinis is the financial bloc of the CJNG and is made up of members of González's clan, with Abigael as its main figurehead. Both the CJNG and Los Cuinis are intertwined through drug trafficking activities, money laundering networks, and familial ties. They have dealings in multiple parts of the world, including the United States, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: Since 2015, authorities suspected that González headed a network of over 70 businesses affiliated with the CJNG. They stated that González was responsible for laundering over MXN$1 billion (over US$50 million) between 2015 and 2016. Her suspected role within the CJNG was similar to those of the other women within her immediate and extended family. Her sisters María Ivette and Noemí, in addition to Jennifer Beaney Camacho Cázares, the wife of her brother Abigael, and Wendy Delaithy Amaral Arévalo, wife of her brother Gerardo, were also suspected of money laundering for their alleged role in heading multiple businesses owned by the CJNG. Among the businesses they owned included companies in the following industries: healthcare, tourism, hospitality, retail, consulting, agriculture, advertising, real estate, and international trade.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: From 8 April 2015 to 12 February 2018, González and her daughter Jessica Johana issued six writs of "amparo" in courts based in Jalisco and Mexico City to prevent law enforcement from arresting them. González began this legal procedure because she feared for their arrest and suspected authorities were looking to apprehend them. This suspicion began on 8 April 2015, when Oseguera and Abigael were sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act ("Kingpin Act"). Over the years leading to 2018, González's siblings and in-laws were also sanctioned under the Kingpin Act for their alleged involvement in the CJNG. However, her writs of "amparos" were denied by the courts, which cited that there were no active arrests warrants against her in Mexico.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: On the evening of 26 May 2018, González was arrested by the Mexican Navy outside a 7-Eleven convenience store in Puerta de Hierro, an upscale neighborhood in Zapopan, Jalisco. She was living in Torre Aura Altitude , a luxurious tall residential building, close to where she was arrested. Authorities filmed a video showing the moment when González was apprehended; when authorities approached her, they asked for her name, to which she responded positively. They then asked for her daughter Jessica, and González confirmed she was not with her. Authorities then proceeded to apprehend her, and told her about the arrest warrant and the money laundering and organized crime charges against her. González was told to give her car keys to the friend that was with her, and was told by her detainers that she would be taken to Mexico's Office of the General Prosecutor (PGR). González's companion said she would go with them, and González asked her to call her lawyer.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: Upon her arrest, she was transported to the Estadio Akron, a multipurpose stadium in Zapopan, and taken via helicopter to Mexico City. Once in Mexico City, she was taken to the offices of the Assistant Attorney General's Office for Special Investigations on Organized Crime (SEIDO), Mexico's organized crime investigatory agency, for her legal declaration. On 28 May, González was imprisoned at the Federal Social Readaptation No. 16, a female maximum-security prison in Coatlán del Río, Morelos. A large security surveillance measure was erected at the prison when González was taken there. Mexico's National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) stated that the prison had multiple deficiencies, including insufficient number of personnel, lack of adequate healthcare, personnel oversight, prisoner activities and rehabilitation, and inmate categorization.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: On 29 May, a court granted González a writ of "amparo" and allowed her to communicate with her defense. González issued this because she claimed that the PGR was not allowing her to speak with her defense and was violating Article 14, Article 16, and Article 22 of the Constitution of Mexico, which cites violations of due process, law arrest, and cruel and unusual punishment as unconstitutional. On 31 May, a court from the Federal Social Readaptation Center No. 1 (also known as "Altiplano"), a maximum-security prison in the Almoloya de Juárez, State of Mexico, confirmed that González's first case hearing would be held there the next day, and that she would be transferred from Morelos to attend it.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: On 27 May 2018, SEGOB's head Alfonso Navarrete Prida confirmed González's arrest in a press conference. He stated that the operation that led to her arrest was part of a law enforcement-led campaign known as Operation Escudo Titán, which was launched on 28 January 2018 to combat organized crime. The operation that led to González's arrest was specifically led by Mexico's National Security Commission (CNS) , the Mexican Federal Police, and other law enforcement institutions. During the press conference, Navarrete Prida highlighted the fact that the arrest was not conducted "in flagrante delicto", but rather was part of an in-depth investigation and had the support of the court. Authorities confirmed that they had increase the presence of security forces in Jalisco on 21 May, when affiliates of the CJNG attempted to murder Luis Carlos Nájera Gutiérrez de Velasco, Jalisco's Secretary of Labor and former State Attorney General. He survived with non-threatening injuries, but multiple civilians were wounded and one eight-month-old baby was killed. Shootouts and roadblocks broke out in Guadalajara that day.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: Authorities also confirmed that the arrest occurred without a single shot fired, and that she was suspected of heading the CJNG's financials. Navarrete Prida stated that González had an arrest warrant for money laundering and organized crime involvement charges, but that she was not part of Mexico's 122 most-wanted people, a list that was created in the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto (2012–2018). Along with González, authorities also confirmed the arrest of Gerardo Botello Rosales ("El Cachas"), a suspected high-ranking member of the CJNG. Navarrete Prida did not confirm if security forces were close to arresting Oseguera when González was apprehended.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: The Government of Jalisco raised their security measures across Jalisco the following morning as a preventative measure for González's arrest. They worked together with municipal and federal forces to prevent a response from the CJNG. However, Governor Aristóteles Sandoval discarded that the measures were part of the state's "red code" alert, a designation used to warn citizens of risk situations across the state. This is the highest level in the alert system and is used when the state is considered to be under great danger. Rumors had surfaced earlier that day among the local press that the governor had ordered the activation of the red code alert. However, as precaution updates and rumors spread on social media among the citizens of Jalisco, the governor stepped in to clarify no alert had been issued, and asked citizens to not spread rumors on social media.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: On 1 June 2018, González's hearing was held in private after her lawyers and the government mutually agreed to it. The plaintiff asked the judge to hold the hearing behind closed doors because much of the evidence they were presenting that day against González was also being used against the CJNG in other investigations, and they said they did not want for it to be released to the public. González as stated she feared for her physical integrity and did not want the press during the hearing. When asked why she feared for her life, González explained that the media was negatively portraying her and claiming she was a criminal. "Yes, your honor ... I am not a criminal, I've been defamed", she told the judge in her defense. The judge granted this decision and ordered journalists and her family out of the court. The hearing began at 1 p.m. and lasted for approximately twelve hours. During the hearing, the judge considered that the evidences provided by the plaintiff accusing González of money laundering were sufficient. Her organized crime involvement charge was dropped after the judge did not consider that the evidences presented were strong enough to link her directly with the CJNG.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: Specifically, the plaintiff cited a company that González reportedly managed on the CJNG's behalf, JJGON, S.P.R. DE R.L. DE C.V., as evidence of her link to the criminal group. They also cited over 70 firms reportedly owned by the CJNG that González was accused of managing. Some of these businesses were sanctioned under the Kingpin Act. The plaintiff stated she made over MXN$1 billion (over US$50 million) from these firms between 2015 and 2016. Her defense tried to discredit this claim, but the judge stated that he was convinced González received illegal funds from the CJNG to purchase and liquidate assets on their behalf. The money made from these investments was then believed to be transferred by González to private bank accounts owned by the CJNG. As this decision was finalized, the judge ordered González back to Morelos' prison under pre-trial detention status. He stated that González was considered a flight risk if granted bail.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: González's defense issued two writs of "amparos" after her first hearing to request her release from prison. On 6 June 2018, a federal judge in Mexico City rejected one of them that attempted to revert her detention status. The second request was issued to ask for her release from prison on bail; the defense cited that money laundering was not a "serious crime" under Mexican federal law, and that she should be allowed to be released while the trial continues. On 6 September 2018, this request was granted by a federal judge. González was released from prison after paying around MXN$1.5 million in bail (approximately US$78,000). The case tilted in her favor because a judge considered that González's sentimental ties with Oseguera were not evidence of wrongdoing, and because she was not legally obligated to know the origins of her husband's funds.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: On 27 October 2018, her defense issued a writ of amparo asking an appeals court to notify them if the PGR had opened new investigations against her since she was released from prison on bail. This request was previously issued by her defense on 26 July, and admitted into court on 5 November. An appeals court initially rejected González's motion, but a tribunal ordered the judge to reconsider the request.


title: Rosalinda González Valencia

text: On 15 November 2021, members of the Mexican military arrested González in the Zapopan municipality in Jalisco. At the time of this arrest, González was found to be chief of the CJNG's financial operations. The Mexican Ministry of Defense released a statement which described her arrest as "a significant blow to the financial structure of organized crime in the state." At this time, her five brothers and two of her children were still incarcerated. With so many family members arrested, González was also regarded as one of the last links in the CJNG-Los Cuinis alliance.


title: ZBrush

text: Pixologic ZBrush is a digital sculpting tool that combines 3D/2.5D modeling, texturing and painting. It uses a proprietary "pixol" technology which stores lighting, color, material, orientation and depth information for the points making up all objects on the screen. The main difference between ZBrush and more traditional modeling packages is that it is more akin to traditional sculpting.


title: ZBrush

text: ZBrush is used for creating "high-resolution" models (able to reach 40+ million polygons) for use in movies, games, and animations, by companies ranging from ILM and Weta Digital, to Epic Games and Electronic Arts. ZBrush uses dynamic levels of resolution to allow sculptors to make global or local changes to their models. ZBrush is most known for being able to sculpt medium- to high-frequency details that were traditionally painted in bump maps. The resulting mesh details can then be exported as normal maps to be used on a low poly version of that same model. They can also be exported as a displacement map, although, in that case, the lower poly version generally requires more resolution. Or, once completed, the 3D model can be projected onto the background, becoming a 2.5D image (upon which further effects can be applied). Work can then begin on another 3D model which can be used in the same scene. This feature lets users work within complicated scenes without a heavy processor overhead.


title: ZBrush

text: ZBrush was developed by the company "Pixologic Inc", founded by Ofer Alon (also known by the alias "Pixolator") and Jack Rimokh. The software was presented in 1999 at SIGGRAPH. The demo version, 1.55, was released in 2003, and version 3.1 was released in 2007. ZBrush 4 for Windows and Mac systems was announced on April 21, 2009 for an August release, but was later postponed. Version 3.5 was made available in September the same year, and includes some of the newer features initially intended for ZBrush 4.


title: ZBrush

text: Through "GoZ" ("Go ZBrush"), available starting in Version 4, ZBrush offers integration with other 3D graphics programs such as Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, LightWave 3D, Poser Pro, Daz Studio, EIAS, Modo and Blender.


title: ZBrush

text: After being bought by Maxon in January 2022, they instantly dropped the model of free upgrades, which had always been part of Pixologics philosophy, leaving the perpetual license holders stranded with version 2022.0.5 from February 2022, which still has some critical bugs and issues, which cause the application to crash.


title: ZBrush

text: Like a pixel, each "pixol" contains information on X and Y position and color values. Additionally, it contains information on depth (or Z position), orientation and material. ZBrush-related files store pixol information, but when these maps are exported (e.g., to JPEG or PNG formats) they are flattened and the pixol data is lost. This technique is similar in concept to a voxel, another kind of 3D pixel.


title: ZBrush

text: The initial ZBrush download comes with thirty 3D sculpting brushes with more available for download. Each brush offers unique attributes as well as allowing general control over hardness, intensity, and size. Alphas, used to create a specific pattern or shape, and textures are also editable brush features.


title: ZBrush

text: Polypainting allows users to paint on an object's surface without the need to first assign a texture map by adding color directly to the polygons.


title: ZBrush

text: ZBrush also gives the ability to sculpt in 2.5D and comes with several brushes for that purpose. A pixol put down when sculpting or illustrating in 2.5D contains information on its own color, depth, material, position and lighting information.


title: ZBrush

text: ZBrush also has a feature that is similar to skeletal animation in other 3D programs. The transpose feature allows a user to isolate a part of the model and pose it without the need of skeletal rigging.


title: ZBrush

text: A user can create a base mesh with uniform topology and then convert it into a sculptable model by starting out with a simple sphere and extracting more "ZSpheres", until the basic shape of the desired model is created.


title: ZBrush

text: Introduced in ZBrush 3.2 OS X, GoZ automates setting up shading networks for normal, displacement, and texture maps of the 3D models in GoZ-enabled applications. Upon sending the mesh back to ZBrush, GoZ will automatically remap the existing high-resolution details to the incoming mesh. GoZ will take care of operations such as correcting "points & polygons order". The updated mesh is immediately ready for further detailing, map extractions, and transferring to any other GoZ-enabled application.


title: ZBrush

text: Also included is a full render suite known as Best Preview Render, which allows use of full 360° environment maps to light scenes using HDRI images. BPR includes a new light manipulation system called LightCaps. With it, one can not only adjust how the lights in the scene are placed around the model, but also generate environments based on it for HDRI rendering later on. It also allows for material adjustments in real-time. Material properties such as subsurface scattering are supported as are environmental and scan-line reflections. BPR also includes a set of built-in filters that can be used in realtime to create dramatic effects and corrections without even touching another photo-manipulation program.


title: ZBrush

text: This allows ZBrush to quickly generate a new model with uniform polygon distribution, to improve the topology of models and eliminate polygon stretching.


title: ZBrush

text: Fibermesh is a feature that allows users to grow polygon fibers out of their models or to make various botanical items. It is also a way to edit and manipulate large amounts of polygons at once with Groom brushes.


title: ZBrush

text: It is an automatic retopology system previously called QRemesher that creates new topology based on the original mesh. The new topology is generally more clean and uniform. This process can also be guided by the user to make the new topology follow curves in the model and retain more detail to specified areas.


title: ZBrush

text: Shadowbox allows the user to draw a rough silhouette of what they want to model, onto the inside of a virtual box. In real-time, any changes to the drawings are applied to a 3D model, upon which further details can be applied. The feature can best be utilized for hard surface modeling.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: The Task Force is a light and medium duty truck series by Chevrolet, their first major redesign since 1947. Its GMC counterpart was the GMC Blue Chip series. It was billed as being more stylish compared to the earlier Advance Design Series while still maintaining its rugged durability. First available on March 25, 1955, these trucks were sold with various minor changes over the years until 1959, when the C and K Series trucks replaced the Task Force models for 1960.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: GM redesigned their truck line for the 2nd half of 1955, but sold both designs that year; the older design became known as the 1st series, and the newer design as the 2nd Series. Commercial trucks and various other heavy duty models were also available. Chevrolet and GMC named their new series independently.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: The cousins were differentiated by running gear and interiors; Chevrolet used Chevrolet engines, and GMC used GMC inline Sixes and Pontiac V8s (Oldsmobile V8s in the Heavy-Duty trucks).


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: For the first time in GM history, trucks were available with optional power steering, power brakes, and V8s. A column-shifted 3-speed manual transmission was standard, with an optional floor-shift-4 speed manual or Hydramatic automatic. The electrical system got an upgrade to 12 volts.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: The new body featured the truck industry’s first wrap-around windshield, and an optional wrap around rear window for Deluxe cab models. Headlights became integrated into the fenders. The cab got taller, and in-cab steps replaced the running boards of previous models. A "step" between the cab and rear fender aided access to items inside the pickup bed. Redesigned bed fenders were carried through the next generation body that ended in 1966.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: 1955 Second Series: First year for new body style. Fenders have single headlights and a one-piece emblem is mounted below horizontal line on fender.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: Beds are and ; 1955 was the only year for the mid-length 7-foot bed. The GMC inline-6 remained 6V for 1955 only.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: 1956: Wider hood emblem. Two-piece fender emblems are mounted above horizontal fender line. Last year for eggcrate grille.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: 1957: Only year for more open grille. Hood is flatter with two spears on top, similar to the 1957 Bel Air. Fender emblems are still above fender line, but are now oval-shaped, as opposed to previous versions in script.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: 1958: All light-duty trucks are now called "Apache", medium-duty trucks called "Viking", and heavy-duty trucks called "Spartan". First year for factory-equipped air conditioning. Significant redesign of front end, featuring a shorter/full-width grille, four Headlights instead of the previous two, and Parking lights are now in the grille instead of being in the front of the fender. The hood is similar to 1955/1956 models, but with a flat "valley" in the middle. A new "style-side" all-steel bed replaces the Cameo/Suburban versions; called "Fleetside" by Chevrolet and "Wideside" by GMC, available in and lengths. For 1958, GM was promoting their fiftieth year of production, and introduced Anniversary models for each brand (Cadillac, Buick, Oldsmobile, Pontiac, and Chevrolet); the trucks also received similar attention to appearance, but staying essentially durable, with minimal adornment.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: 1959: Minimal changes from 1958, the most apparent was a larger and more ornate hood emblem and redesigned badging on the fenders. This was the last year that the NAPCO (Northwestern Auto Parts Company) "Powr-Pak" four-wheel drive conversion could be factory ordered.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: The mid-1955 introduction of Chevrolet's Cameo Carrier pickup truck helped pave the way for the Fleetside. The Cameo offered an array of car-like features that included passenger-car styling, fiberglass rear fenders, two-tone paint, a relatively luxurious interior, as well as an optional V8 engine, automatic transmission, and power assists. As always, there was a GMC version offered during the same time, called the GMC Suburban, with the same features offered on the Chevrolet. In 1957, a special version was made for GMC to be shown at national car shows called the Palomino, which had a Pontiac V8 installed, borrowed from the 1957 Star Chief.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: Other pickup truck producers, including Dodge, Ford, Studebaker, and International, began to offer flush-side cargo boxes on some of their 1957 models, such as the Dodge C Series, and the 1960 Studebaker Champ.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: Though GM replaced the Cameo Carrier and Suburban with the Fleetside and Wideside before the '50's were over, in time, pickup trucks with flush bodies and wider beds would become the dominant standard throughout the industry.


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: The Task Force trucks formed the basis of the fourth-generation Chevrolet Suburban/GMC Carryall. Competing against the International Travelall and the Dodge Town Panel and Town Wagon, the Suburban became a Chevrolet nameplate (as GMC adopted the Carryall nameplate).


title: Chevrolet Task Force

text: While marketed solely as a two-door utility wagon, the Suburban was offered in -ton 3100 and a 1-ton 3800 Suburban panel van was offered as an option. -ton 3600 Suburbans and Panel trucks were not available. Unlike the Advance Design-era trucks, there were no Canopy Express models offered.