18th Century Poetry free essay sample

Part One Introduction Almost every day, the long eighteenth century seems to be getting longer. And wider. It’s all a matter of where to draw the artificial boundaries between the stages of time over which human culture continues to change. This volume offers just one version of a period of history many refer to as the ‘long eighteenth century’, especially as it relates to the literature and culture of England. This version of the long eighteenth century begins in 1660, when a particularly momentous historical event offers a convenient place to begin this story.The Restoration of Charles II marks a point when the nation – or, at least, some of the most powerful and influential individuals alive at the time – decided to ‘restore’ to England a form of national government which combined monarchical rule with an elected parliament. The cultural impact of the Restoration, and how authors anticipated its effect on the country’s future, is widely evident in contemporary literature. We will write a custom essay sample on 18th Century Poetry or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page So, too, are authors’ meaningful reflections on previous periods of English history, and how depictions of that history could be refashioned to suit new ideas about England’s national culture. Looking back to the beginning of the long eighteenth century, it is worth noting that the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 itself presents the culmination of ongoing political debates from earlier periods in English history, notably the period of religious and civil unrest which erupted into civil war from about 1642. The long eighteenth century The Long 18th Century starts to get a little bit longer, in other words, as soon as we seek to understand specific events in relation to cultural developments over time. In Part Two, a more detailed overview of such events is provided to give a fuller sense of this period’s rich, but necessarily complex, cultural history as a whole. A Cultural Overview Different strands of religious, economic, political, artistic and social issues are woven together throughout this volume to give a broad nderstanding of the long eighteenth century. It would not be an exaggeration to say that religion plays a fundamental role in all of the momentous cultural events of the period (the English Civil War, the Restoration and even the Industrial Revolution), but each event also has its political, economic and – vital to our understanding of the period’s literature – its artistic dimension. We must also consider precisely what it is we mean by the ter m ‘literature’ (the primary focus of artistic consideration in this volume).Several decades of critical debate about the kinds of writing that scholars should study in order to understand the past have questioned the formal boundaries that have long existed between ‘history’ and ‘literature’. There is no doubt that the imaginative writing of the past (poetry, fictional narratives, essays and so on) help us to understand past cultures, but so, too, do other forms of extant writing (including, but not restricted to, private correspondence, household accounts, ecclesiastical records, menus, legislation and so on). The increasingly recognised value of these alternative sources of cultural history, sometimes referred to as ‘historicism’, is one that is taken for granted in this volume although the principal subjects for discussion here are works of imaginative literature in the traditional sense. This book is intended to help students gain a better understanding of the long eighteenth century but also invites its readers to think about the ways in which we study the past, and past literature, in order to understand our own culture.The period between 1660 and 1790 witnessed the acquisition of many aspects of daily life that we now take for granted as ‘modern’. This is a cultural feature of the period which makes its study especially interesting to social historians and others keen to explore what ‘modernity’ really means. Indeed, the end of our period is also frequently described as the culmination of the ‘Early Modern Period’ of English history .Already apparent, in the last stages of our long eighteenth century, are some of the social and economic developments that enable further profound cultural changes to be wrought by England’s Industrial Revolution from early in the nineteenth century. Such developments include the much-improved social status of the mercantile and middle classes and the huge growth of urban centres of population. In late 1688, another momentous event in English political history occurred when the Roman Catholic King James II abdicated from the throne and was replaced by his Protestant son-in-law and daughter, William III and Mary II.Although this event did not incur the devastating losses of life that took place in the country between 1642 and 1649, it is still referred to as a ‘revolution’ because of its profound impact in shaping the structure and balance of political power in English government. The roots of the ‘Glorious Revolution’ (as it is sometimes called) go back to the Protestant Reformation which began during the reign of Henry VIII. The Bill of Rights brought in under William and Mary (and further ratified by the passage of the 1701 Act of Settlement) stipulated that no Roman Catholic could succeed to the English throne.