9. The XVIII century English literature. Enlightenment.

The 18th century is known as an Age of Elegance. Real civilization not unlike but superior to the old classical civilization of Greece and Rome, to which the 18th century compared itself, had been achieved at last; and now society could settle down to enjoy it. Never in European history do we see men and women so elaborately artificial, so far removed from natural appearance, as these men and women of the 18th century.

The writers and philosophers of this age thought that Man was virtuous by nature, and vice was due to ignorance only. So they started a public movement for enlightening people. To their understanding, this would do away with all the evils of society harmony would be achieved.

And it was for this small and compact society of important and influential people that literature at the beginning of this period was chiefly created. It was very much a public literature, not representing the deeply felt impressions, hopes or fears of one ondividual, but the outlook and values of thus limited society. It was literature that could be read aloud in a drawing room, enjoyed in a theatre or discussed in a coffee-house. Naturally, the atmosphere of this kind encourages comedy, satire, pleasant little essays and criticism, but it's fatal to poetry.

English literature of this period may be characterized by the following features:

• ^{the period saw the rise of the political pamphlet and essay, but leading genre of the Enlightenment became 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.}

• ^{Literature became very instructive: writers tried to teach their readers.}

Daniel Defoe, the founder of the early bourgeois novel, was the first and foremost, a journalist, and in many ways, the father of modern English periodicals. "The Review" which he founded in 1704 and conducted until 1713 is regarded as the first English newspaper.

Jonathan Swift is best known for his satires. He was the most versatile of English satirists.

"Gulliver's Travels" is his masterpiece, is a satire on humanity in general, and shows the truth of Swift's observation about himself: that he hated mankind but loved humans as individuals.

10. Romanticism in English literature.

The new literature belongs not to what is public and classical but to what is essentially private, and this is called romantic. This breakthrough which began about the middle of the 18th century shows itself in various ways: in the curious hothouse sentimentality of Richardson's novels and in the personal mixture of humour and sentiment in Lawrence Stern's work.

But breakthrough is most obvious poetry. Thomas Gray is the author of the best-known poem in the English language: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". Grey represents the transition from classical to romantic literature in England.

Oliver Goldsmith the writer of a comedy ("She Stoops to Conquer"), a novel ("The Vicar of Wakefield"), a poem ("The Deserted Village") in which he describes an Irish village whose people have been driven away by bigger landowners.

Robert Burns the national poet of Scotland. His well-known poem ("The Cotter's Saturday Night") is close in spirit to the poem of Gray and Goldsmith.

William Blake a unique creator who ignored the strict poetic rules of the classicists to follow his own original style (the lamb).

The real flourishing of this literary trend came with the 19th. It's irrational, agitated, dubious and troubled. The romantic poets were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey - also known as the Lake Poets - were eager revolutionaries in the youth. They believed in individual liberty and the brotherhood of men.

George Gordon, Lord Byron was famous as a champion of liberty, and Percy Bysshe Shelly was a revolutionary with a special brand of anarchy all his own, John Keats.

Walter Scott wrote about the Middle Ages because he was interested in the epoch and wanted to tell stories about it. What the real romantic poets wanted to explore and then expressed was their own inner world of dream and desire. The romantics made frequent use of medieval settings because the middle ages of their imagination seemed to them more simpler and magical.

The female characters in romanticism must be strange and mystical. Thus, romantic love poetry is field with nymphs, water sprites. Literature of romanticism is filled with melancholy and regret.