Main Source: Maynard Mack, Howard Hugo, Patricia M. Spacks et al., ed., Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Expanded Edition (New York: W.W. Norton,1995)

General Characteristics

Age of Reason, Neo-Classic Period, 1660-1770, powers of the mind, Roman models, awareness of limitation, moderation, correctness, "human nature's struggle with itself"; Reason vs. Passion; rigid class system, traditional social order challenged; commerce, new wealth, new possessors, claims on social power; sense of obligation to society; hierarchical social structures; public over private life; codes of behavior, self-presentation, concealed operations;

inconsistencies of word and fact, deceptiveness and misuse of social forms as well as their necessity; marriage as social microcosm; social law and pressures; insignificance of women and children; natural order, harmony, system; continuity of human nature; common aspects of humanity; universality; conventions, manners, decorum.

Philosophy and Science

Philosophical attempts at defining possibilities and limitations of humanity; Rene Descartes (1596-1650) "I think therefore I am," mind as source of being; problem of isolation of the mind; Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651); Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716), no communication between consciousnesses; David Hume (1711-1776), individual identity as result of mind's activity on discontinuous memories; idea of impossibility of knowing the outside world; also idea of existence of rational and moral universe beyond ourselves, Isaac Newton (1642-1727); Nature, rationality of a divine plan; Deism, depersonalized deity, logicality of universe; separation ethics from religion; ethics as matter of reason; Samuel Johnson (1709-1784): "he that thinks reasonably must think morally";

Literature

Literature produced by cultural elite; classical assumption of literature as delight and instruction; genres: comedy and tragedy, early novel, prose and verse satire, didactic poetry, philosophical tale; situations requiring moral choice; unities of time and place; search for verisimilitude, intensified emotional/moral effect; artifice, stylization, artistic transformation, imposition of formal order on flux of events and feelings, art as maker of stability; classical past, standard of permanence and stability; quarrel Ancients and Moderns; authority and satire, presence of the irrational; Moliere's Tartuffe (1664); Milton's Paradise Lost (1667); Jean Racine's Phaedra (1677); Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719); Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726); Alexander Pope's Essay on Man (1733); first edition of French Encyclopedie, ed. Denis Diderot (1751); Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755); Voltaire's Candide (1759);

Society and Politics

English executed king in 1642, instability of the social order; contingencies of the human condition; strife Protestants vs. Catholics; struggle of Cavaliers and Puritans in England, restoration of Charles II in 1660, end of Civil War; Protestant English depose king for marrying Catholic princess (1688); Louis XIV revocation of Edict of Nantes (1685); religious, class and political differences; eighteenth century in England, two rebellions on behalf of deposed Stuarts, American Revolution, French Revolution, primacy of internal divisions.