The Eighteenth-Century English Literature

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In the eighteenth-century, there was comparatively peace in the English politics from Anne to the Hanovarian monarch. This period was dominated by the literature of satire and prose through the major figures such as Pope, Swift, Gay, and Johnson. The first decade of the century met the creator of the very influential forms of writing in The Spectator and The Tatler. The eighteenth century from Pope’s Essay on Man to Lyrical Ballads is called the neoclassical or the Augustan age—especially c. 1710-1740—with simplicity in language and the age of sentimentalism in manners such as good-sense, restraint and reasonableness, but the last section of the 18th C.—c. 1740-1790—was the age of sensibility or preromanticism in the literary history. The forms of fiction were most popular in the heyday of “sensibility” poetry with the expansion of the readers.

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Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift is a parody of the journey literature, but the motif makes this work a brilliant satire by giving a wide range of the close observation of the English society. The contrast of the two lands of diminutive and giant people, “Lilliput” and “Brobdingnag”, supports basically the satiric irony. The decent and patriotic character, Lemeul Gulliver, realizes that the human folly and vanity seem as disgusting to the giants as the Brobdingnagians to him in Chapter II. The effective balancing of the narrative structure for satiric irony is shown in the conversation with the prince of Brobdingnag: “he observed how contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as I” (2040). It is noteworthy that the interesting contents like a fairy tale, in spite of that it is an allegory in the sense of literary technique, achieve good effect of satire by the attentive and expecting eyes of the readers.
John Gay is one of the talented writers in the late 18th century. Although he was overshadowed by his close friends, Pope and Swift, he invented new literary genre, and created his own voice, less angry and pessimistic than Swift, more genial and warmhearted than Pope as the precursor of the English comic opera and the modern musical, giving influence

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