![]() ![]() The Age of Johnson was dominated by Samuel Johnson and the consummate work of his is The Dictionary of the English Language (1745-1755). ![]() ![]() In this second period flourished the poetry of Alexander Pope, with his exquisite mastery of the couplet in Essay on Man (1734) many of Pope's lines became famous sayings that are familiar in modern times such as this one from Essay on Criticism (1711): "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Also in the Augustan Age the rise of journalism and its way of evolving into and shaping fiction writing is visible in the work of Daniel Defoe, who began as a pamphleteer and ended by securing his place in the canon of great novelists with such famous works as Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722), which are fictions appearing to be autobiographical. But Dryden's works, lesser by comparison to those by Milton and Bunyan, more anticipated the Augustan Age to follow. Major works include Milton's Paradise Lost (although it spans both baroque and restoration in its style and subject) and Paul Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. With the opening of the theaters appeared plays written in couplets and others in prose that fell in the category of the comedy of manners. ![]() In the Restoration Age, in poetry, the classical forms of the heroic couplet and the ode became popular. The brooding social unrest that culminated in the revolutions in the American colonies and in France toppled this artificial refinement, and in the wake of those wars emerged portraits of the single common worker or wanderer sketched against the vast natural landscape, a character that came to be one of the chosen subjects of the Romantics in the nineteenth century. Their manner was elitist, erudite, and sophisticated. They resurrected the classical values of unity and proportion and saw theirĪrt as a way to entertain and inform, a depiction of humans as social creatures, as part of polite society. Their clothes were complicated and detailed, and their gardens were ornately manicured and geometrically designed. Additionally, they sought to achieve a sense of refinement, good taste, and correctness. In style, neoclassicists continued the Renaissance value of balanced antithesis, symmetry, restraint, and order. In part as a reaction to the bold egocentrism of the Renaissance that saw man as larger than life and boundless in potential, the neoclassicists directed their attention to a smaller scaled concept of man as an individual within a larger social context, seeing human nature as dualistic, flawed, and needing to be curbed by reason and decorum. Seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Neoclassicism was, in a sense, a resurgence of classical taste and sensibility, but it was not identical to Classicism. Neoclassical writers modeled their works on classical texts and followed various esthetic values first established in Ancient Greece and Rome. Regarding English literature, the Neoclassical Age is typically divided into three periods: the Restoration Age (1660-1700), the Augustan Age (1700-1750), and the Age of Johnson (1750-1798). Throughout it all, Revolutionary America's founding Enlightenment thinkers championed the expansion of knowledge, viewing ignorance as a mortal danger to the Republic.In England, Neoclassicism flourished roughly between 1660, when the Stuarts returned to the throne, and the 1798 publication of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, with its theoretical preface and collection of poems that came to be seen as heralding the beginning of the Romantic Age. And French thinking in turn helped spur the Enlightenment to begin with. Without the very active help of France, the United States may well have lost the Revolutionary War against Britain. Jefferson and Franklin were also Revolutionary America's first two ministers to France. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Drawing on Renaissance humanism and the emerging scientific revolution, Enlightenment thinkers rejected royalism, feudalism, and superstition, urging an egalitarian approach and expanding human rights, applying the reason of science to a society to be marked by a separation of church and state. The Enlightenment was a watershed period in political thought, a time of very creative philosophical development in Europe and North America which ran from the late 17th century through the whole of the 18th century and into the early 19th century. ![]()
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