Az angol próza története a 18. században [antikvár]

I. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BACKGROUND TERMINOLOGY In the history of England the 18th century means the period of a wholesale change-over. This is the century,when - after the long political and religious crisis of the Stuart era - the English aristocrat yielded his place to the English bourgeois /very often he himself changing into a bourgeois/, when agricultural England developed into industrial England, when preceding revolutionary changes and conflicts resulted in a stability favourable for national as well as individual perspectives. When we talk about 18th c. literature on a European scale, we usually call it the Age of Enlightenment. This term is not used or accepted wholeheartedly by English scholars. As a result of matter-of-fact, rather sober pe-riodization, they use a terminology derived from the imminent laws of English social and intellectual developments, disregardful of European theoretical - often German - considerations, thus arriving at terms like The Age of Dryden, The Augustan Age, The Age of Johnson, which tend to indicate the years or decades of the period in question rather than the special spiritual - literary and artistic - quality of it. Terms, like The Age of Reason, The Age of Common Sense are closer to our notion, but even these are not unanimously used as they are often considered misleading or onesided. English scholars most often, or more readily, like to speak about The Augustan Age of English literature, indicating sometimes the whole of the 18th century, sometimes only the happy period of Queen Anne's reign without making any definite distinctions between the various literary movements between 1740-1800. Professor J.L. Clifford in the introduction of Eighteenth Century English Literature /1959, New York/ dealing with 18th c. literary phenomena, on the subject of these problems of terminology, offers a solution in which he suggests a division of 18th c. English literature into three great movements or periods: 1. the age of neoclassic concentration 2. the age of common sense 3. the age of subjective sensibility. /Professor Dobree calls the first two the period of materially didactic, and the third that of morally didactic