The-Enlightenment-Movement.doc

The Enlightenment Movement
The18th-century England is known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason.The Enlightenment Movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France & swept through the whole Western Europe at the time. The movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance of the 15th & 16th centuries. Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modem philosophical & artistic ideas.The enlighteners considered the chief means for the betterment of the society was “enlightenment” or “education” for the people.The Enlightener celebrated reason or ration, equality, science and human beings’ ability to perfect themselves and their society. They called for a reference to order, reason & rules & advocated universal education.
In Britain
1.definition:
The Age of Enlightenment was an anti-feudal and anti-church cultural movement of intellectuals in 17th and 18th century Europe, which made an mental preparation for the bourgeois revolution.
2. Neoclassicism:
In the field of literature, the Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism.
According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek & Roman writers (Homer, Virgil, & so on)& those of the contemporary French ones.
They believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion & accuracy, & that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity. This belief led them to seek proportion, unity, harmony & grace in literary expressions, in an effort to delight, instruct & correct human beings, primarily as social animals.
Thus, a polite, urbane, witty, & intellectual art developed.
3. Sentimentalism:
Sentimentalism is one of the important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the 18th century.
Along with a new vision of love, sentimentalism presented a new view of human nature which prized feeling over thinking, passion over reason, and personal instincts of "pity, tenderness, and benevolence" over social duties. Literary work of the sentimentalism, marked by a sincere sympathy for the poverty-stricken, expropriated（征用） peasants, wrote the "simple annals of the poor”.Writers of sentimentalism justly criticized the cruelty of the capitalist relations and the gross social injustices brought about by the bourgeois revolutions.But they attacked the progressive aspect of this great social change in order to eliminate it and sighed for the return of the patriarchal times which they idealized.
Sentimentalism embraces a pessimistic outlook and blames reason and the Industrial Revolution for the miseries and injustices in the aristocratic-bourgeois society and  indulges in sentiment, hence the definite signs of decadence in the literary works of the sentimental tradition.
4.Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe (1719):Robinson Crouse, an adventure story very much in the spirit of the time, is universally considered his masterpiece.
In the novel, Defoe traces the growth of Robinson from a naive & simple youth into a mature & hardened man, tempered by numerous trials in his eventful life. The realistic presentation of the successful struggle of Robinson single-handedly against the hostile nature proves the best part of the novel.
5.Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels(1726): a masterpiece of satire not only on all parts of Britain but also on the vice, folly and weakness of the whole mankind
Part I: voyage to Lilliput, the land of miniature
Part II: voyage to Brobdingnag , the land of giant
Part Ⅲ: voyage to Laputa
Part IV: voyage to the land of Houyhnhnms, a noble breed of thinking, talking, high-minded horses
filthy inferior creature called Yahoos: the human race
Jonathan’s point of view:
Houyhnhnms: noble and rational yet cold and dull
Yahoos: low yet natural

In American
Revolutionary Period (1775-1783)
1.The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a movement marked by an emphasis on rationality rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and representative government in place of monarchy.
Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man.
The colonists who would form a new nation were firm believers in the power of reason; they were ambitious, inquisitive, optimistic, practical, politically astute, and self-reliant.
The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a movement marked by an emphasis on rationality rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and representative government in place of monarchy.
Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man.
The colonists who would form a new nation were firm believers in the power of reason; they were ambitious, inquisitive, optimistic, practical, politically astute, and self-reliant.
2.Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography