English literature The 1. The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1. During the next 2. These two factors combined to produce an enormous growth in the publication of political literature. Senior politicians, especially Robert Harley, saw the potential importance of the pamphleteer in wooing the support of a wavering electorate, and numberless hack writers produced copy for the presses. Richer talents also played their part. Harley, for instance, instigated Daniel Defoes industrious work on the Review 1. He also secured Jonathan Swifts polemical skills for contributions to The Examiner 1. Swifts most ambitious intervention in the paper war, again overseen by Harley, was The Conduct of the Allies 1. War of the Spanish Succession. Writers such as Defoe and Swift did not confine themselves to straightforward discursive techniques in their pamphleteering but experimented deftly with mock forms and invented personae to carry the attack home. In doing so, both writers made sometimes mischievous use of the anonymity that was conventional at the time. College Road Trip French. According to contemporary testimony, one of Defoes anonymous works, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters 1. High Church extremist, its supposed narrator, that it was at first mistaken for the real thing. Anonymity was to be an important creative resource for Defoe in his novels and for Swift in his prose satires. Encyclopedia Of English Literature Pdf' title='Encyclopedia Of English Literature Pdf' />Journalism. The avalanche of political writing whetted the contemporary appetite for reading matter generally and, in the increasing sophistication of its ironic and fictional maneuvers, assisted in preparing the way for the astonishing growth in popularity of narrative fiction during the subsequent decades. It also helped fuel the other great new genre of the 1. After Defoes Review the great innovation in this field came with the achievements of Richard Steele and Joseph Addison in The Tatler 1. The Spectator 1. In a familiar, urbane style they tackled a great range of topics, from politics to fashion, from aesthetics to the development of commerce. They aligned themselves with those who wished to see a purification of manners after the laxity of the Restoration and wrote extensively, with descriptive and reformative intent, about social and family relations. Their political allegiances were Whig, and in their creation of Sir Roger de Coverley they painted a wry portrait of the landed Tory squire as likable, possessed of good qualities, but feckless and anachronistic. Contrariwise, they spoke admiringly of the positive and honourable virtues bred by a healthy, and expansionist, mercantile community. Addison, the more original of the two, was an adventurous literary critic who encouraged esteem for the ballad through his enthusiastic account of Chevy Chase and hymned the pleasures of the imagination in a series of papers deeply influential on 1. His long, thoughtful, and probing examen of Miltons Paradise Lost played a major role in establishing the poem as the great epic of English literature and as a source of religious wisdom. Browse and Read South Asian Literature In English An Encyclopedia South Asian Literature In English An Encyclopedia How a simple idea by reading can improve you to be. The success with which Addison and Steele established the periodical essay as a prestigious form can be judged by the fact that they were to have more than 3. The awareness of their society and curiosity about the way it was developing, which they encouraged in their eager and diverse readership, left its mark on much subsequent writing. Later in the century other periodical forms developed. Edward Cave invented the idea of the magazine, founding the hugely successful Gentlemans Magazine in 1. One of its most prolific early contributors was the young Samuel Johnson. Periodical writing was a major part of Johnsons career, as it was for writers such as Fielding and Goldsmith. The practice and the status of criticism were transformed in mid century by the Monthly Review founded 1. Critical Review founded 1. The latter was edited by Tobias Smollett. From this period the influence of reviews began to shape literary output, and writers began to acknowledge their importance. Major political writers. Pope. Alexander Pope contributed to The Spectator and moved for a time in Addisonian circles but from about 1. Tory intellectuals. His early verse shows a dazzling precocity, his An Essay on Criticism 1. This is the first fullscale history of medieval English literature in nearly a century. Thirtythree contributors provide information on a vast range of litera. Encyclopedia english essays pdf. Essay writing practice for gre research. Aqa english literature a level coursework percentage java. Windsor Forest 1. Stuart variation on the 1. The mock heroic The Rape of the Lock final version published in 1. It explores with great virtuosity the powers of the heroic couplet a pair of five stress rhyming lines. Much of the wit of Popes verse derives from its resources of incongruity, disproportion, and antithesis. That he could also write successfully in a more plaintive mode is shown by Eloisa to Abelard 1. Ovids heroic epistles, enacts with moving force Eloisas struggle to reconcile grace with nature, virtue with passion. But the prime focus of his labours between 1. Homers Iliad to be followed by the Odyssey in the mid 1. His Iliad secured his reputation and made him a considerable sum of money. Test Your Knowledge. American Sports Nicknames. From the 1. 72. 0s on, Popes view of the transformations wrought in Robert Walpoles England by economic individualism and opportunism grew increasingly embittered and despairing. English Literature TextbookIn this he was following a common Tory trend, epitomized most trenchantly by the writings of his friend, the politician Henry St. John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Popes Essay on Man 1. God ordained, perfectly ordered, all inclusive hierarchy of created things. But his most probing and startling writing of these years comes in the four Moral Essays 1. Horatian imitations, and the final four book version of The Dunciad 1. Thomson, Prior, and Gay. Britannica Lists Quizzes. James Thomson also sided with the opposition to Walpole, but his poetry sustained a much more optimistic vision. In The Seasons first published as a complete entity in 1. Thomson meditated upon and described with fascinated precision the phenomena of nature. He brought to the task a vast array of erudition and a delighted absorption in the discoveries of post Civil War science especially Newtonian science, from whose vocabulary he borrowed freely. The image he developed of mans relationship to, and cultivation of, nature provided a buoyant portrait of the achieved civilization and wealth that ultimately derive from them and that, in his judgment, contemporary England enjoyed. The diction of The Seasons, which is written in blank verse, has many Miltonian echoes. In The Castle of Indolence 1. Thomsons model is Spenserian, and its wryly developed allegory lauds the virtues of industriousness and mercantile achievement. A poet who wrote less ambitiously but with a special urbanity is Matthew Prior, a diplomat and politician of some distinction, who essayed graver themes in Solomon on the Vanity of the World 1. Priors principal competitor as a writer of light verse was John Gay, whose Trivia or, The Art of Walking the Streets of London 1. English literature The 18th century The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695 halted state censorship of the press. English literature Childrens Encyclopedia. Literature is a group of works of art made up of words. Most are written, but some are passed on by word of mouth. Literature usually means works of poetry and prose. TEXTBOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE PDF EBOOKS. Virgils Georgics. His Fables, particularly those in the 1. The What DYe Call It 1. Three Hours After Marriage 1. John Arbuthnot and Pope, and The Beggars Opera 1. Mittelalter Kleid Schnittmuster more. Swift. Jonathan Swift, who also wrote verse of high quality throughout his career, like Gay favoured octosyllabic couplets and a close mimicry of the movement of colloquial speech. His technical virtuosity allowed him to switch assuredly from poetry of great destructive force to the intricately textured humour of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift completed in 1.