THE AGE OF THE ENLIGHTMENT
...ported the divine right of the Monarchy and Church, while the second ones descended from the supporters of the Parliament which were more liberally oriented. These were supported by the commercial classes, which were expanding in this period. Educated people became better informed thanks to the introduction and spread of newspapers: it was in this period that Journalism began to develop. The novel is a ‘fictitious prose narrative or tale presenting a picture of real life’. Before the 18th century (period during which we see the rise of this genre) there were plenty of forms of prose fiction, but these did not present a picture of real life. We have to say that there are four reasons why the novel became the dominant literary form of the Augustan age: 1) rise of philosophical rationalism, with Locke and Descartes who focused on Empirism and Rationalism. The individual can discover reality only through his senses and perceptions; 2) influence of Puritanism and Methodism, where the first one followed the idea that man must save himself by his own efforts and by living a virtuous life, while the second one was the application of the puritan ethic to the sphere of everyday life, that is that if people wanted to achieve salvation they had to work hard; 3) the rise of the middle class and the spread of the educated people. In fact the rise of the novel was encouraged by the growth of the middle classes which had much more money and much more time they could dedicate to reading. As a matter of fact more and more people started to learn reading and writing but also we see that the press is now able to produce thousands of copies of a certain book keeping the low price; 4) invidualism and realism, because there is a spread interest in the individual that actually reflects in the characters of the novel. Moreover these people are in every way the precise description of the social classes of the time, giving to the literary pieces a sort of realism. The new reading public wants to read stories which reflect their real life. DANIEL DEFOE, with ‘Robinson Crusoe’, is considered to be the father of the English novel. His works are usually fictional autobiography or diaries, because this gives a more realistic description of the events. This means that we have adventurous stories or diaries. What’s more is that there aren’t real plots in his works, because they are just sequences of events. The narrator s usually in the first person singular, the characters are not so many because there is a single protagonist with his own heroism based on his personal skills, that thought doesn’t show any psychological development. His objective is to promote the new self made man who must overcome a series of misfortunes using only his physical and mental resources. He is the master o...