The Enlightenment Era 1660-1789
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1.1
ABOUT
THE ENLIGHTENMENT ERA 1660-1789
One of the significant
eras in English literary history is
known as The Enlightenment era. This era happened in the year of 1660 until
1798. For your information, this era is also referred with other names such as
The Augustan Age, The Neoclassical Period as well as The Age of Reason. All
these names are given to this era for some specific reasons. The Enlightenment
era began right after the Renaissance era in the region of Europe, England as
well as America. The Enlightenment was a time in
literary history when people became much more interested in trying to
understand the world through rational thought and scientific observation. In
other words, this was a time when some people started to demand that the world
should make sense to their rational minds. They were no longer willing to
accept ideas because those ideas were propounded by the Church or by ancient
authorities such as Aristotle. All these explanations show us the reasons on
why this era was labeled as The Age of Reason. To be clearer, people during
this era had stopped asking “why” and they started to ask “how” which showed us
a great shift in the way of thinking from magical and superstitious to science.
Apart from The Age of
Reason, this era was also marked as The Neoclassical Period. “Neoclassical”
means the new classical literature. It refers to the increased influence of
classical literature upon these centuries. During this time, Neoclassical writers
believed that the writers of ancient Greece and Rome had discovered the
universal truths or ‘rules’ informing about life and literature. They modeled
their works on the classics, imitating their restraint, rationality, and
dignity. Like classical writing, neoclassical prose and poetry was orderly,
clear, concise, unified, and well proportioned. Reflecting the Enlightenment
era which emphasis on the society and on the human intellect, neoclassical
writers chose public rather than private themes and avoided emotionalism,
imaginative speculation, and expression of personal feelings.
The Augustan Age was the other name given to the Enlightenment Era.
This was due to the self-conscious imitation of the original Augustan writers,
Virgil and Horace, by many of the writers during this period. Specifically, the
Augustan Age was the period after the Restoration era to the death of Alexander
Pope. “Augustan” was applied as a term of high praise, because the Age of
Augustus was the golden age of Latin literature
2. LITERATURE
DEVELOPMENT DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT ERA
From the history
that we have discussed above, we could see the way of people thinking during
the Enlightenment era were principally based on scientific rationalism and
exemplified by the scientific method. This can be proved with the existence of
an astronomer who named Edmond Halley who took the terror out of space
phenomena by calculating when the comets were going to occur. He predicted it
would appear in 1758, 1834, 1910, and 1986 and it did. Strangely, how did he
know it would reappear at seventy-six-year intervals? Because that was the time
it took to complete its orbit. From this example, we could notice that, it was
such a reasonable prediction with some help from the mathematical explanation that
could be accepted. Starting from this incident, people had started to change
their mindset from accepting all the ideas to challenging and proving it based
on scientific approaches. Apart from changing the society’s mindset, the
Enlightenment era had also changed the literature history too.
2.1 CHARACTERISTICS OF LITERATURE DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT ERA.
As mentioned
above, the Enlightenment era somehow had changed the literature history which
had been called as the Augustan Age or the Neoclassical period. The literature
in this era could be summed up as “From the Head, Not the Heart”. This was
because most of the literature texts during this period were governed by
reasons and no longer seen from the point of imagination. The founder of
Neoclassical movement was Alexander Pope (1688- 1744). He was the master who wrote
a couple of lines that were rhymed (Heroic Couple). One of his poems was “The
Rape of Lock” (1712) which informed us about the humorous condemnation of the
vanities and idleness of 18th century’s high society. From a literary standpoint, Pope was an innovator on
several fronts. For one, he popularized the heroic couplet, a sophisticated
rhyme scheme that suited his subject matter well. He took ordinary settings and
events and made them grandiose, a kind of irony that anticipated Modernism by
two centuries. He blended formal criticism into his poetry, a diffusion of
generic boundaries that also strikes one as an entirely modern practice. In his
own day, Pope was possibly most admired for his capable and effective translations
of classic literature.
Besides
that, John Dryden (1631-1700) who was also one of the pioneers during the
Enlightenment era had wrote “Aureng- Zebe” which based on a contemporary account of the struggle between the four sons of Shah
Jehan for the succession to the throne. Apart
from that, the work of John Dryden “An Essay of Dramatic Poesy” (1668)
exhibited qualities of order, clarity and stylistic decorum that were
formulated in the major critical documents of the age. All these examples showed
us the differences between the literature from the past and the literature
during the Enlightenment era. One thing for sure was the literature from the
past were more passionate and consisted with a lot of imaginations while the
literature during the Enlightenment era were more reasonable and pointed out
the truth of the society.
Another important event during in
this era was the rise of the novel. One of the best writers or novelists is
Henry Fielding (1707- 1754). He wrote humour and comic novels like “Tom Jones”
(1749), “Joseph Andrews” (1742) and “Shamela” (1741). Moreover, they also had
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761). Most of his works are
sentimental like “Pamela” (1740). Furthermore, Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768)
wrote comic and meta-fictional novel like “Tristram Shandy” (1759). The book
was the narration of his life story. The Gothic novel also lived at this time. All
these novels involved various themes such medieval
tale of love, knights as well as horror and curses.
Last but not least, the existence of
the prose also was one of the important literary events during this era. For
instance, Samuel Johnson was a
“Man of letters”, which means a man whose personality dominates the century. He
had written various proses during this era.
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