An Age of Satire

Literature during this period was often considered a tool for the advancement of knowledge. Writers were often found observing nature in their attempts to express their beliefs. Human nature was considered a constant that observation and reason could be applied to for the advancement of knowledge. Within these circumstances, the Age of Satire was born. Satire was the most popular literary tool that was utilized by writers of the time. With the help of satire, writers were better able to educate the public through literature. Its function was to acknowledge a problem in society and attempt to reform the problem in a comical manner while still educating the public. Its effectiveness can be seen in literary pieces by Jonathan Swift such as A Modest Proposal where he addresses and criticizes the problem of a growing famine in Ireland. Playwrights of the time were also known to incorporate satire in their plays. Through the use of satire, they were able to expose and critique social injustices. “Over the thirty years of its triumphs, Restoration comedy, in an astounding fugue of excesses and depravities, laid bare the turbulence and toxins of this culture” (Longman). Satire was a highly successful literary tool that worked to promote social awareness through literature, the theater and periodicals of the time.

To call the 18th century the Age of Reason^[1] is to seize on a useful half-truth but to cause confusion in the general picture, because the primacy of reason had also been a mark of certain periods of the previous age. It is more accurate to say that the 18th century was marked by two main impulses: reason and passion. The respect paid to reason was shown in pursuit of order, symmetry, decorum, and scientific knowledge; the cultivation of the feelings stimulated philanthropy, exaltation of personal relationships, religious fervour, and the cult of sentiment, or sensibility. In literature the rational impulse fostered satire, argument, wit, plain prose; the other inspired the psychological novel and the poetry of the sublime.

The cult of wit, satire, and argument is evident in England in the writings of Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson, continuing the tradition of Dryden from the 17th century. The novel was established as a major art form in English literature partly by a rational realism shown in the works of Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, and Tobias Smollett and partly by the psychological probing of the novels of Samuel Richardson and of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In France the major characteristic of the period lies in the philosophical and political writings of the Enlightenment, which had a profound influence throughout the rest of Europe and foreshadowed the French Revolution. Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles de Montesquieu, and the Encyclopédistes Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert all devoted much of their writing to controversies about social and religious matters, often involving direct conflict with the authorities. In the first part of the century, German literature looked to English and French models, although innovative advances were made by the dramatist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The great epoch of German literature came at the end of the century, when cultivation of the feelings and of emotional grandeur found its most powerful expression in what came to be called the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement. Associated with this were two of the greatest names of German literature, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, both of whom in drama and poetry advanced far beyond the turbulence of Sturm und Drang.

Read this excerpt from An Essay on Man (1732-1734) by Alexander Pope for an example of Enlightenment era poetry:

Read this excerpt from Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift for an instance of Enlightenment era fiction: