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

its melodramatic theme, made a wide and immediate appeal. It
was recognized that a new elem ent had entered into drama, even
i f the dramatist who int roduced it was obviously not o f the first

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rank. The innovation is far more important than the play, for this
way leads, however indirectly, to the modern social and realistic
drama.
The main literary trends o f the age o f the Enlightenment in
England were classicism , realism, sentim entalism and early
romanticism, out o f which, sentimentalism was a very English
phenomenon. Sentiment might be defined as feeling, and in the
eighteenth century, agajnst the background o f its many crudities
and barbarities, there developed both in life and in literature
movements such as Methodism, in social life in an increasing
realization o f the hardships, which the majority o f mankind had to
suffer. Its dangers are obvious, for it leads to emotionalism instead
o f mysticism, and to charity instead o f genuine reform. It clouds
the reason, substitutes pathos for tragedy, and obscures the harder
issues o f iife in a rnist o f tenderness. In literature its effects were
numerous, and, in com edies disastrous. An early exponent o f
sentimentalism was Richard Steele. The depths o f sentimentalism
were reached by som e dramatists who showed how every human
issue could be obscured in the welter o f emotion. From such depths
the drama was rescued by Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan.
The 18th century gave the world such brilliant English writers as
Alexander Pope, Daniel D efoe, Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding,
Samuel Richardson, Tobias Smollett and famous dramatist Richard