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CONCLUSION
The course paper is intended for English language students at Pedagogical Universities taking the course of English literature and fully meets the requirements of the programme in the subject. It may also be of interest to all readers, whose command of English is sufficient to enable them to read novels and poems of average difficulty and who would like to gain some information about the vocabulary resources of Modern English about the literary peculiarities of English Enlightenment period , about the complex nature of the word's meaning and the modern methods of its investigation, about nonstandard changes that English vocabulary underwent in its historical development and about some other aspects of English literature.
The Enlightenment's emphasis on reason shaped philosophical, political and scientific discourse from the late 17th to the early 19th century.
Having done my course paper , I have been able to know that the place of The Literature of 17th century what exactly is and I will try to justify my opinions by the following features:
works show a sense of order and moderation; writers display their “wit”, or cleverness. Prose is calm and logical; poems are carefully structured;
a century with powerful minds that applied themselves to the problems of the nature of life, and set out solutions, which have been the basis of much later thought;
the centre of interest was human experience, and what could be learned from it of the nature of life. Richardson and Fielding explored human experience in fiction;
historians were attempting, more ambitiously than before, to interpret the past of life, and philosophers to expound the nature of reality itself;
it was natural that in such a century the orthodox teachings of the 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;
contact between writers and readers was established by famous English essayists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. They started and directed several magazines for which they wrote pamphlets and essays;
the rise of the political pamphlet and essay, but the leading genre of this century became the novel. Poetry of the previous ages gave way to the prose age of the essayists and novelists. Poems were also created at this period, but the poets did not deal with strong human passions, they were more interested in the problems of everyday life, and discussed things in verse;
the heroes of the literary works were no longer kings and princes, but the representatives of the middle class;
literature became instructive. The writers dealt with problems of good and evil. They tried to teach their readers what was good and what was bad from their own point of view;
The Literature of the 17th century is defined as the period of rigorous scientific, political and philosophical discourse that characterized European society during the ‘long’ 17th century: from the late 16th century to the ending of the lately 17th century This was a period of huge change in thought and reason, which (in the words of historian Roy Porter) was ‘decisive in the making of modernity’. Centuries of custom and tradition were brushed aside in favor of exploration, individualism, tolerance and scientific endeavor, which, in tandem with developments in industry and politics, witnessed the emergence of the ‘modern world’.
The outcomes of the Literature of the 17th century were thus far-reaching and, indeed, revolutionary. By the early 1600s a new ‘public sphere’ of political debate was evident in European society, having emerged first in the culture of coffee-houses and later fueled by an explosion of books, magazines, pamphlets and newspapers (the new ‘Augustan’ age of poetry and prose was coined at the same time). Secular science and invention, fertilized by a spirit of enquiry and discovery, also became the hallmark of modern society, which in turn propelled the pace of 18th-century industrialization and economic growth.
Evidence of the 17th Century literature thus remains with us today: in our notions of free speech, our secular yet religiously tolerant societies, in science, the arts and literature: all legacies of a profound movement for change that transformed the nature of society forever.
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