The Enlightenment: Ideas, Figures, and Impact
The Enlightenment: An Overview
The Enlightenment, sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason, was a confluence of ideas and activities that took place throughout the eighteenth century in Western Europe, England, and the American colonies.
Enlightenment supporters believed that the advances of science and industry proclaimed a new age of progress for humankind.
Centuries of customs and traditions were brushed aside in favor of exploration, individualism, tolerance, and scientific determination. The developments in industry and politics witnessed the emergence of the ‘modern world.’
Defining Enlightenment
Immanuel Kant defines “enlightenment” in his essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784) as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.”
Key Enlightenment Concepts
For example, John Locke conceived of the human mind as being at birth a tabula rasa, like a blank sheet of paper on which experiences are written, creating an individual character according to its individual experience of the world.
Thomas Hobbes portrayed humans as moved solely by considerations of their own pleasure and pain. The notion of humans as neither good nor bad but interested principally in survival and the maximization of their own pleasure led to radical political theories.
Influential Figures of the Enlightenment
Locke and Jeremy Bentham in England, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, and Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson in colonial America are just some of the most famous writers of this age of reason. They contributed to an evolving critique of the arbitrary, authoritarian state and to sketching the outline of a higher form of social organization, based on natural rights and functioning as a political democracy. Such powerful ideas found expression as reform in England and as revolution in France and America.
English Literature During the Enlightenment
The English literature of this period is characterized by the following features:
- This period saw the rise of the political pamphlet and essay, but the leading genre of the Enlightenment became the novel. The prose style became clear, graceful, and polished.
- The hero of the novel was no longer a prince but a representative of the middle class. This was new, because so far the ordinary people had been depicted as comic characters.
- Literature became very instructive; writers tried to teach their readers what was good and what was bad from their own point of view.
Periods of Enlightenment Literature
The literature of the age of the Enlightenment may be divided into three periods:
- The first period lasted from the “Glorious Revolution” (1688-1689) till the end of the 1730s. It is characterized by classicism in poetry; the greatest follower of the classic style was Alexander Pope. Alongside this high style, there appeared new prose literature, the essays of Steele and Addison, and the first realistic novels written by Defoe and Swift.
- The second period of the Enlightenment was the most mature period: the forties and the fifties of the 18th century. It saw the development of the realistic social novel represented by Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett.
- The third period refers to the last decades of the century. It is marked by the appearance of the new trend: Sentimentalism. The representatives of this trend were Goldsmith and Sterne. This period also saw the rise of the realistic drama (Sheridan) and the revival of poetry.