The 18th century is known as The Age of Enlightenment or The Age of

reason, to stress the rational trend of the period and the attitude according to
which reason and judgement should be the guiding principles for human
activities . It saw the birth of a new literary movement:Neoclassicism or
Rationalism. This movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of John
Lockeand Isaac Newton. The importance of Newton is clearly seen in the
epitaph written by Alexander Pope: Nature and Natures laws lay hid in night;
God said, Let Newton be! And all was light. In hisPrincipia Matematica the
scientist showed that the universe was governed by mechanical principles and
exact laws rather than by divine ones as it was believed before. He left little
place for God and we may say that he destroyed the traditional religious view of
the world making God subject to the laws of science. Newton was elected
President of the Royal Society, an association of learned man who wanted to
promote scientific studies and to try new methods of experiment. Thanks to the
research, new discoveries that religion seemed unable to explain, were made
and Science became the new authority. It was believed that science and reason
would have improved mans condition turning him into a social being who
would conform to the rules of civilised life. Reason , the most important mans
ability, enabled him not only to think but also to act correctly. Man, the only
living creature to have it, became important for his power of observation more
than for his power of feelings. Reason became the criterion of everything: what
could be justified by reason was right and what could not be justified or proved
by reason was false and rejected.
Every thing was
regulated by reason, nature too. People were attracted by a reasoned Nature,
as the one we can find in parks or gardens, a nature that reflected order
and harmony. To follow nature meant to represent the world as it was, to
obey reason. Rationalism, stressing out the importance of reason and
observation, started the beginning of the scientific thought and freed man from
ignorance. Enlightenment thinkers mostly tended to atheism. They believed
that principles should only be accepted on the basis of reason and not on the
authority of sacred texts and tradition. In this Age of reason both
government and the king had to justify themselves rationally. The belief that
the king ruled by Divine Right was questioned. The king and the
government ruled by the agreement of the people, by contract which they had
to respect.
The importance of reason was also influential in the literature of the time and
English literary standards were reformed. The artistic creation, like science,
had to follow exact rules and was to be based on reason. The
writers modelled much of their works onClassical writers and referred to
ancient Greece and Rome using subjects from classical mythology and
history. All that brought to the birth of a new movement known
asNeoclassicism. The reform was helped by the French
writer Nicolas Boileau , who published a book, Art Poetique , which provided
the key idea of neoclassicism: in good art inspiration must be controlled by
judgement. He listed the rules of good writing: writing should be clear,
balanced, ordered, elegant and eloquent. Neoclassicism provided the basis for
the Augustan school of writing which dominated the 18th century literature.
THE AUGUSTANS
The Augustans were so called because they compared their period to that of
the Emperor Augustus in ancient Rome, a period of political stability,
splendour and tranquillity. They wanted this period of stability to last and
attacked everything which threatened to upset it. They thought that ancient
art was superior to modern one and often imitated the great Roman classical
authors: Vergil, Ovid, Titus Livius and Horace. The Augustans believed that
their duty was not to try to be original but to re-express universal truths about
mankind. Their Age was characterized by the spirit of the
Enlightenment which implied a new way of thinking characterized by
philosophical, scientific and rational spirit. As to the contents, they mostly
used classical subjects and focused on man in society seen, not as an
individual, but as an important piece of a perfect whole, a piece of a perfect
mosaic. The artist was seen as he who had to express his knowledge of the
world in a rational and objective way. He should not allow his own emotions
and prejudices to influence his writing. In order to achieve objectivity , the
writer had to write clearly and to use a precise and correct language, a
language that all readers had to understand. The language they adopted was
the poetic diction, an artificial language which used uncommon and learned
words, Latinate and periphrasis.Samuel Johnson published his
famous Dictionary and helped to understand the meaning of words. As far as
style the authors were allowed to use wit, that is attractiveness, clever
invention and humour.
Towards the middle of the century there was a reaction against
rationalism and writers focused their attention on the individual and on the
peoples feelings. This new interest found its expression in a new prose form,
the Novelhttp://rosariomariocapalbo.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/the
-18th-century-novelde-foe-swift-richardson-fielding-sterne/. As far as
poetry, we have to say that Augustan poetry was of secondary importance and
continued the restoration trend for satire and mock-heroic poems written
in heroic couplet in which a trivial subject was treated with the seriousness of
epic for comic effect. The most important representative wasAlexander
Pope and his finest work was The Rape of the Lock, telling about a quarrel
between two aristocrat families because of a trivial incident: Lord Petre had cut
a lock of hair of Miss Arabella Fermor and that action was considered as an
insult. Pope wrote it to ridicule the narcissistic attitude of the aristocracy.In the
second half of the century new trends started to emerge and the heroic couplet
lost its dominant position.
THE TRANSITION AGE
The Age of Neoclassicism was followed by a transitional period also known
as Pre-Romanticism. It developed during the last decades of the
18th century. There was areaction against classicism and reason and
a search for new models of poetry taken no longer from ancient Rome and
Greece but from the Middle Ages. The period was greatly affected by the French
Revolution, the American Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. They
provided literature with new themes which began to develop side by side with
the old ones. First of all there was a new interest towards the poor and the
children, who lived at the margin of society during the Augustan Age. Satire and
realism were respectively replaced by sentimentalism and imagination, paving
the way to the flourishing of Romanticism. The Age preserved its main features
with its emphasis on reason, precision, order, clarity and harmony, but some
other features appeared in opposition to them: interest in country life, new way
of seeing Nature, different role of Art, new themes based on feelings and so on.
Poetry was no longer concerned with wit but
with simple feelings and nature. Poetry was pervaded by amelancholic
tone and was often associated withmeditation on Death. This kind of poetry
was remembered as Graveyard Poetry. The poets of theGraveyard
Group were melancholic and seek for solitude. Their thoughts were directed
towards Death, or the fear of Death, suicide and graves. The settings of their
poems were often medieval ruins, caverns, coffins and skeletons. The most
important poet of the group was Thomas Gray and his most famous poem
was Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, based on the concept of the
levelling power of Death. Other poets were Edward Young and Robert Blair,
both church ministers. The Graveyard poetsinfluenced the Gothic Novel and
the Ossian Poetry which became very popular literary forms especially among
they who were unsatisfied with classical novel and poetry and looked
for Gothicism, a mixture of both medieval features(ruins, ancient castle and so
on) and supernatural. Both poems and novels of this kind were melodramatic,
full of horrors and supernatural and set in a medieval context. The most famous
Gothic Novels were Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Castle of Otranto by
Walpole.