THE

ENLIGHTMENT
1600-1785
PLAN

• The historical background and major events

• Philosophy
• Main ideas
• Literature of the time
• Big names of the time
THE MAJOR EVENTS OF THE TIME:

• The Industrial Revolution (1750)

• The American Revolution (1776)
• The French Revolution (1789)
PHILOSOPHY
RENAISSANCE ENLIGHTMENT
• Man is good, unlimited • Man is singful, limited
potential potential
• Imagination, invention, • Order, common sense,
mysticism conservatism
• Art is beautiful • Art is pracmatic
• Emotional • Intellectual
MAIN IDEAS:
- Wide-ranging intellectual movement
- Natural world based on reason. Reason is the key to truth
- Faith is nature and belief in human progress through education
- Also called the Age of Reason
- Deism: belief in the existence of God on the evidence of
reason and nature only, with rejection of supernatural
revelation, belief in God who created the world but has since
remained indifferent to it.
LITERATURE OF THE TIME:
• Heroic couplets
• Most literature of that time has a formal structure (5-da-dums)
• Rhyming iambic pentameter
• Masculine rhyme
• Display wit, not emotion
• Concern with social matters
• Making logical arguments
• Use of similies, elaborate metaphors, lofty diction, classical allusions
• Rise of literary magazines
BIG NAMES OF THE TIME:
• Voltaire
• Jonathan Swift
• John Locke
• Thomas Jefferson
• Patrick Henry
• Benjamin Franklin
• Alexander Pope
 THE
ROMANTICISM
1785-1832
PLAN:
• Historical background and roots
• Romanticism (1798–1837)
• Lake poets
• Lord Byron and other writers of his epoch
THERE ARE SEVERAL REASONS OF THE GROWTH OF THE ROMANTIC
M O V E M E N T I N E N G L I S H L I T E R AT U R E I N T H E E A R LY 1 9 T H C E N T U RY

• influence of the Gothic novel, novel of sensibility and graveyard poets of the 18th-century,
whose works are characterized by their gloomy meditations on mortality, “skulls and coffins,
epitaphs and worms” in the context of the graveyard.
• revival of interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry.
• a new emphasis on the beauty and value of nature brought about by a reaction against
urbanism and industrialization.
• the changing landscape and the pollution of the environment, brought about by the industrial
and agricultural revolutions, with the expansion of the city.
• social changes, such as depopulation of the countryside and the rapid development of
overcrowded industrial cities that took place in the period between 1750 and 1850.
• a revolt against the scientific rationalization of nature of the Age of Enlightenment.
ROMANTICISM (1798–1837)
• Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in
Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Most commonly the publishing of Lyrical
Ballads in 1798 is taken as the beginning, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837
as its end. The writers of this period, however, did not think of themselves as
‘Romantics’.
• The poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake (1757–1827) was largely
disconnected from the major streams of the literature of the time, that’s why Blake was
generally unrecognized during his lifetime. Considered mad by contemporaries for his
views, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity,
and for the philosophical and mystical undercurrents within his work. Among his most
important works are Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794).
LAKE POETS
• After Blake, among the earliest Romantics were the
Lake Poets, a small group of friends, including
William Wordsworth ['wɜ:dzwəθ](1770–1850),
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ['kəulridʒ](1772–1834),
Robert Southey [sauði] (1774– 1843).
LORD BYRON AND OTHER WRITERS OF HIS EPOCH

• The second generation of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron (1788– 1824), Percy Bysshe
Shelley (1792–1822) and John Keats (1795–1821).
THAN U FOR YOUR ATTENTION!