18th century English literature Essay

1. There was a whiz of relief and escape, relief from the strain of living in a obscure universe and escape from the ignorance and barbarism of the Gothic centuries non referring only to Gothic literature. The minatory period provokes that pile want to change and improve their lifestyle when they entered the eighteenth century. There was a general desire to emancipate from the dark aspects of rural and dark living.2. Sanity, culture, and civilization had revived. There was a general tincture of emancipation from historic specters, a sense of security from the upheavals of the Civil war period.3. Dryden wrote in 1668 We have been so long together bad English workforce that we had not leisure to be good poets. This quote exemplifies that seventeenth century men were occupied with complete other things than humanities. Naturephilosophical concept/ spectral concept that rule the eighteenth century. Western thinking has been a supreme idea in the Western thought ever since antiq uity, but it has belike never been so univers eachy active as it was from the Renaissance to the demise of the 18th century. The laws of Nature are the laws of reason they are always and e verywhere, and the axioms of maths they have only to be presented in parade to be acknowledge as just and right by all men. This was the Golden eld of natural theology and deistical freethinking Spinoza, Boyle, Locke, etc. During the Christian centuries religion has be upon revelation now it rested largely upon Nature and even the Orthodox who retain the otherworldly basis felt that faith must be grounded firmly upon Nature before single had recourse t super-Nature. The 18th century is the century of Reason.If we want to apply reason, it has to be stable. Everything ought to be merged in logic axioms. It is the Golden Age of liberal thinking, also in religion which one had the power and gave divine explanations but they will not provide the answers anymore, but information will do. The scientific movement of the 17th and 17th centuries Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Newton produced a climate of opinion in which supernatural and occult explanations of natural phenomena ceased to settle with. The Universe came to be regarded as the Great Machine, running(a) by rigidly determined laws of material causation laws of Physics everything has a cause. The supernatural, in both(prenominal) its divine and its diabolical forms, wasbanished from Nature. Another relevant give up the state power passed from the king gradually to the Parliament and the Cabinet ministers. A huge expansion abroad of British colonies in Asia, Africa and North the States caused the Industrial Revolution.The basis consists of democratic principles. capital of the United Kingdom became more and more the condense of the literary and intellectual life of the country and writers came to look upon polite London society as their chief, if not their sole, auditory sense. The opposite o f natural living, cultivated nation lived in London. Aristocracy in the old sense has been transmuted into gentility and wealth becomes the main motivating power in society aristocracy regarded as gentile educated and cultured people. Wealth becomes the motor of society - crude social gradation that rivets in commercialization. Economics and Ethics are finally separated. The new economists prove to their own satisfaction that the individual desire to crystallize money can produce in the long run goose egg but good, and poverty can only be the result of idleness. In London, the coffeehouse replaces the Court as the meeting place of the men of culture. The diarist makes his appearance, and poetry becomes social and familiar.There was a correlation, mingled with social class and program line and between elegance which was related to education e.g. people went to the star sign of the zodiac and learning that has not always existed in subsequent periods people cherished to b e cultivated so they started reading. The English novel coins in the 18th century thanks to journalism. And if poets were to use references to the Latin and Greek classics as hygienic as to the events in the contemporary world of learning, they had to consider themselves addressing a very limited audience. That is why classic and contemporary studies were mixed in order to have a broader audience. Merchants and mucklesmen of the town came to play a very consequential part in the life of the country. But the middle class were not yet the landed aristocracy, the country gentlemen and big state owners though they control only with the permission of and in alliance with the commercial interests. LondonThe education and the entertainment of the middle classes became a legitimate objective of literature. The period between 1660 and 1785 was a time of amazing expansion for England. The world seemed different in 1785. A sense of new, expanding possibilities transformed the daily life o f the Britishpeople. And offered them saucily ways of thinking intimately their relations to nature. The city of London became the pore of business, entertainment and the emerging consumer society. Samuel Johnson said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life fir there is in London all that life can afford. With growing prosperity, London turned into a city where everything was for sale. Its elegant shops dazzled tourists, supplying not only dozens of goods but also a perpetual source of amusement. Varieties of spectacles and shows pull larger and larger crowds, and theatres expanded to meet the competition. At the London playhouses, the audience itself was often part of the entertainment.The Royal Exchange, in the hart of the city (financial district) of London, was not only a hub for business and shopping but also a symbols for globalization. The increasing importance of inter subject area commerce to the British economy. Addinsons idyllic picture of the Exchang e, written in 1711, celebrates the way in which the full world seems to revolve some the bless(prenominal)ings of trade. But legion(predicate) English people also worried that foreign luxuries might sap the national nature of independence and self-sufficiency (Practice 1). There was a shift in race from the country to the town, and it reveals how far the life of the city, where every daily intelligence agencypaper brought news sources of interest had moved from traditional values (London life is reflected in the newspaper). Formerly, the tastes of the accost had dominated the art () the monarch stands for the nation. But the 18th century witnessed a turn from palaces to pleasure gardens that were open to anyone with the price of admission. New standards of taste were commit by what the people of London wanted, and art joined with commerce to satisfy those desires.Artis Willams Hogarth made his living, not as earlier painters had done through portraits of olympian and noble patrons, but by selling his paints to a large and appreciative public. London itself its beauty and horror, its ever changing moods became a favorite conquer of writers (). The sense that everything was changing was also sparkled by a revolution in science. In earlier periods, the universe had often seemed a small place, less than 6000 years old, where a single sun moved about the earth, center of the cosmos. Now time and space exploded, the microscope and telescope opened new field of vision and the plurality of world, became a doctrine endlessly repeated. The empowerment of Aristotle was broken, their systems could not explain what Galileo and Kepler saw inthe heavens. As discoveries multiplied, it became clear that the advance(a)s knew things of which the ancients had been ignorant. This contend to received opinion was thrilling as well as disturbing. In Paradise Lost, Book 8, the angel Raphael warn Adam to think about what concerns him, not to dream about other worlds.Yet, d espite the warning delicate by Milton through Raphael, many later writers found the new science inspiring. It gave them new images to conjure with and new possibilities of fact and fiction to explore. Explorers were travelling around the earth, where they discovered unknown countries and ways of life. These encounters with other peoples often proved vicious. The trade and conquests that made Europeans powers like Spain and Portugal immensely rich also brought the scourge of racialism and colonial exploitation. In the 18th century, Britains expansion into an empire was supply by slavery and the slave trade, a source of profit that belied the national self-image as a heaven of liberty, and turned British people against one another. Rising prosperity at home had been built on heinousness across the seas. At the end of the 18th century as many writers joined the abolitionist campaign, a new humanitarian ideal was forged. The fresh world invented by the 18th century brought suffering along with progress. We cool off live with its legacies today. England was a nation of shopkeepers. But the stylish and lavish shops that make full 18th century London were also a visible sign of growing national power.The cutting edge of a consumer revolution, they showed the public that the modern world was to be welcomed, not feared. There was something for everyone to desire and possess in this new world of fashion. During the successful run of The Tatler (1709-1711)Germen de la novella de ficcion, Steeles and Addisons predecessor to The Spectator, The Female Tatler was published 3 times a week attributed to an imaginary Mrs. Crackenthrope, a Lady that knows everything. Its authors, who probably included both women and men, aimed to amuse and instruct female readers, as shown in the following fragment on shops from 1709. - Joseph Addison, from The Spectator, No. 69.QuestionsConsider the satisfaction which Addison takes in The Royal Exchange. why does he love so much to visit it? Are you persuaded that his pleasure comes from being a great Lover of Mankind, or is wealth itself what stimulates him?many historians describe what happened in 18th century England as The Birth of a Consumer Society. According to this analysis, the widespread pursuit of good and entertainment turned England into the initiative truly modern nation, in which commercialization drives art as well as the economy. How well does this premise account for what you see in this proposition?