Buchara state university m. Bakoeva, E. Muratova, M. Ochilova english literature

upper classes.
Eighteenth-century literature reflects the ideas and interests
o f the A ge o f Fleason, the Age o f Classicism, the Age o f Elegance.
Works show a sense o f order and moderation; writers display
their “wit”, or cleverness. Prose is calm and logical; poem s are
carefully structured.
In the eighteenth century the subjects o f study to which man
applied him self became more numerous and more systematic, and
il was the good fortune o f England that prose in that age had
becom e a pliant and serviceable medium. It was a century full o f
speculation and fierce questioning, a century with powerful minds
that applied them selves to the problems o f the nature o f life, and
set out sc lutions, which have been the basis o f much laterthought.
It was a century, above all others, when England led Europe in
philosophical speculation. The center o f interest was human
experience, and what could be learned from it o f the nature o f
life. Richardson and Fielding explored human experience in fiction.
Historians were attempting, more ambitiously than before, to
interpret the past o f life, and philosophers to expound the nature
o f reality itself. It w'as natural that in such a century the orthodox
teachings ofthe Church should be open to criticism. Writers widely
accepted those literary forms, in particular, prose forms, which
were understandable to the people as a whole. Manners, fashions,
literature, stories, moral reflections, all took a turn as themes in
brief papers, which were addressed consciously to a middle-class
audience. The periodical essa y w as the eighteenth-century
equivalent of the broadcast talk. Contact between writers and
readers was established by fam ous English essayists Joseph