The ministry of higher and secondary special education of the republic of uzbekistan termez state university

2.2. The representatives of the Enlightenment
in English literature
The writers and philosophers of this age thought that man was virtuous by nature, and vice was due to ignorance only, so they started a public movement for enlightening people. To their understanding, this would do away with all the evils of society, and social harmony would be achieved. But the 18th century in England was also "the age of elegance". Real civilization, superior to the old classical civilization of Greece and Rome, to which the 18th century compared itself, had been achieved at last. Now society (persons of position, wealth and influence) could enjoy it. At the beginning of this period literature was chiefly created for this small society of important and influential people. It was a public literature, which represented the outlook and values of this limited society. It did not represent the impressions, hopes or fears of one individual. It was literature that could be read aloud in a drawing-room, enjoyed in a theatre or discussed in a coffee-house. The literature of the age of the Enlightenment may be divided into three periods:
The first period lasted from the "Glorious Revolution" (1688-1689) till the end of the 1730s. It is characterized by classicism in poetry, the greatest follower of the classic style was Alexander Pope. Alongside with this high style there appeared new prose literature, the essays of Steele and Addison and the first realistic novels written by Defoe and Swift. Most of the writers of this time wrote political pamphlets, but the best came from the pens of Defoe and Swift. The second period of the Enlightenment was the most mature period: the forties and the fifties of the 18th century. It saw the development of the realistic social novel represented by Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. The third period refers to the last decades of the century. It is marked by the appearance of the new trend: Sentimentalism. The representatives of this trend were Goldsmith and Sterne. This period also saw the rise of the realistic drama Sheridan and the revival of poetry.
The great prose representatives of the first half of the eighteenth century, Swift, Addison, Steele, and Defoe, had passed away before the middle of the century. The creators of the novel, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, had done their best work by 1750. The prose writers of the last half of the century were Oliver Goldsmith who published the Vicar of Wakefield in 1766; Edward Gibbon who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edmund Burke, best known to-day for his Speech on Conciliation with America and Samuel Johnson, whose Lives of the Poets is the best specimen of eighteenth-century classical criticism.
The most noteworthy achievement of the century was the victory of romanticism over classicism.In the latter part of the century, romantic feeling won their battle and came into their own heritage in literature. Robert Burns wrote poetry that touched the heart. A classicist like Dr. Johnson preferred the town to the most beautiful country scenes, but William Covper says: "God made the country, and man made the town.