English Eighteenth Century What Should We Call This Period?

The Enlightenment May be better applied to Continental tendencies Connotes a degree of religious and social skepticism that we do not find in English writing Remember that England got through the eighteenth century without a revolution

The Age of Reason Misinterprets the real state of things One of the main satiric targets of writers so central as Swift and Johnson is Cartesian reasoning as it interferes with an appropriate empirical response to the actual world Think about Swift’s creation of the Modest Proposer!

Neoclassicism May be applied to some minor poetry, but fails when we try to apply the term to the major works of the period Swift’s A Tale of the Tub Boswell’s Life of Johnson These works owe less to Greek or Roman precedents than most Romantic works

Augustan Age It is true that the imaginations of Dryden and Pope are suffused with a light emanating from the Roman Augustan period, when writers like Virgil and Horace transformed the inherited Greek tradition, but the success of middle-class writers like Defoe and Richardson will not fit neatly under this title

Eighteenth-Century English Literature Perhaps this is the best way to refer to this whole body of work