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INTRODUCTION
The Enlightenment originated in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries and
later spread throughout the world. Representatives
of this current pay special
attention to knowledge, they believe that the world can be understood intelligently,
it should be changed by thinking. The main feature of this stream of literature is
that it is aimed at rescuing the people from ignorance and backwardness, and calls
for knowledge and enlightenment. Enlighteners believe that the existing social
system is imperfect, while man acknowledges that he is a sinful slave.
But they believe in the human mind. Most enlighteners did not deny the
existence of God. According to them, existence was created by God, but now man
is given the freedom to control it. That is why they valued human power, its
creative power. Representatives of this line believe
that with intellect and
knowledge, man is able to lead the world to goodness. They tried to reconcile
‘sociality’ and ‘naturalness’, ‘nature’ and ‘civilization’. For this reason, the
literature of this period is dominated by such topics as the journey to strengthen the
material basis of culture and enlightenment, the struggle and victory of man with
nature, the test of human thinking.
In the English writer D. Defoe's «Robinson Crusoe»,
the man who landed
on a deserted island reaches the peak of development based on his intellect and
hard work, the death-defying hero does not bow to nature with his boundless love
and understanding for life. At the same time, there are images in Enlightenment
literature that contradict the struggling heroes. They appear more in the image of
non-European heroes. For example, the Uzbek in Montesquieu's «Persian Letters»,
Rick in S. Johnson's «Russell, the Prince of Abyssinia» or the savage in Waiter's
«Simplicity» - is characterized by extreme
simplicity,
innocence, ignorance of the
world. At the same time, there are images in Enlightenment literature that
contradict the struggling heroes.
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They appear more in the image of non-European heroes. For example, the
Uzbek in Montesquieu's «Persian Letters», Rick in S. Johnson's «Russell, the
Prince of Abyssinia» or the savage in Waiter's «Simplicity» - is characterized by
extreme simplicity, innocence, ignorance of the world. Enlighteners oppose
conditionality, artificiality, in the literature of classicism, which,
unlike the
representatives of this current, appeals to the lives of ordinary people, paying
special attention to their daily worries and aspirations. These features of the
English Enlightenment also influenced European literature.
Mesquite drama in
France (D. Diderot, M.J. Seden) and Germany (G. Lessing et al.) Took the form of
English drama.
The 17th century was a period of unceasing disturbance and violent storms,
no less in literature than in politics and society. The Renaissance had prepared a
receptive environment essential to the dissemination of the ideas of the new
science and philosophy. The great question of the century, which confronted
serious
writers from Donne to Dryden, was Michel de Montaigne’s “What do I
know?” or, in expanded terms, the ascertainment of the grounds and relations of
knowledge, faith, reason, and authority in religion, metaphysic
s, ethics,
politics,
economics,
and natural science.
The questioning attitude that characterized the period is seen in the works
of its great scientists and philosophers: Descartes’s Discourse on Method (1637)
and Pascal’s Pensées (written 1657–58) in France; Bacon’s Advancement of
Learning (1605) and Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) in England. The importance of
these works has lain in their application of a skeptical, rationalist mode of thought
not only to scientific problems but to political and
theological controversy and
general problems of understanding and perception. This fundamental challenge to
both thought and language had profound repercussions in man’s picture of himself
and was reflected in what T.S. Eliot described as “the dissociation of sensibility,”
which Eliot claimed took root in England after the Civil War, whereby, in contrast
to the Elizabethan and Jacobean writers who could “devour any kind of
experience,” later poets in English could not think and feel in a unified way.
