زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی

Notes:
· The Restoration and the eighteenth century brought vast changes to the island of Great
Britain, which became a single nation after 1707.
· The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought hope to a divided nation, but no
political settlement could be stable until religious issues had been resolved.
· The long reign of George III (1760-1820) saw both the emergence of Britain as a
colonial power and the cry for a new social order based on liberty and radical reform.
· The widespread devotion to direct observation of experience established empiricism, as
employed by John Locke, as the dominant intellectual attitude of the age.
· Publishing boomed in eighteenth-century Britain, in part because of a loosening of legal
restraints on printing.
· The literature appearing between 1660 and 1785 divides conveniently into three lesser
periods of about forty years each.
Summaries
The Restoration and the eighteenth century brought vast changes to the island of Great
Britain, which became a single nation after 1707. The national population nearly doubled in
the period, reaching ten million. Change came most dramatically to cities: in London, new
theaters, coffeehouses, concert halls, pleasure gardens, picture exhibitions and shopping
districts gave life a feeling of bustle and friction. Civil society also linked people to an
increasingly global economy, as they shopped for diverse goods from around the world.
The Restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought hope to a divided nation, but no political
settlement could be stable until religious issues had been resolved. In the 1660s, parliament
reimposed the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and barred Nonconformists from holding
religious meetings outside of the established church. The jails were filled with preachers like
John Bunyan who refused to be silenced. A series of religion-fuelled crises forced Charles to
dissolve Parliament, and led to the division of the country between two new political parties:
Tories, who supported the king, and the Whigs, the king’s opponents. Neither party proved
able to live with the Catholic James II, who came to the throne in 1685 and was soon accused
of filling the government and army with his coreligionists. Secret negotiations paved the way
for the Dutchman William of Orange, a champion of Protestantism and the husband of
James’s Protestant daughter Mary. For more than half a century some loyal Jacobites (from
Latin Jacobus, James), especially in Scotland, continued to support the deposed James II and
his heirs. Nonetheless, the coming of William and Mary in 1688—the so-called Glorious
Revolution—came to be seen as the beginning of a stabilized, unified Great Britain. The
1689 Bill of Rights limited the powers of the Crown and reaffirmed the supremacy of
Parliament, while the Toleration Act of the same year granted a limited freedom of worship
to Dissenters (though not to Catholics or Jews).
In the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), England and its allies defeated France and
Spain. As these commercial rivals were weakened and war gains including new colonies
flowed in, the Whig lords and London merchants supporting the war grew rich. In the
eighteenth century, the Whigs generally stood for the new “moneyed interest,” while the
Tories stood for tradition, affirming landownership as the proper basis of wealth, power and
privilege. The long reign of George III (1760-1820) saw both the emergence of Britain as a
colonial power and the cry for a new social order based on liberty and radical reform. The
wealth brought to England by industrialism and foreign trade had not spread to the great mass
of the poor. New forms of religious devotion sprang up amid Britain’s material success. The
campaign to abolish slavery and the slave trade was driven largely by a passion to save souls.
Following the Restoration, French and Italian musicians, as well as painters from the Low
Countries, migrated to England, contributing to a revolution in aesthetic tastes. The same
period witnessed the triumph of the scientific revolution; Charles II chartered the Royal
Society for the Improving of Human Knowledge in 1662. Encounters with little known
societies in the Far East, Africa, and the Americas enlarged Europeans’ understanding of
human norms. The widespread devotion to direct observation of experience established
empiricism, as employed by John Locke, as the dominant intellectual attitude of the age. Yet
perhaps the most momentous new intellectual movement was a powerful strain of feminism,
championed by Mary Astell. The old hierarchical system had tended to subordinate
individuals to their social rank or station. By the end of the eighteenth century many issues
of politics and the law had come to revolve around rights, rather than traditions.
Publishing boomed in eighteenth-century Britain, in part because of a loosening of legal
restraints on printing. The rise in literacy was also a factor; by the end of the eighteenth
century 60-70 percent of men could read, with a smaller but still significant percentage of
women. The literary market began to sustain the first true professional class of authors in
British history. Aphra Behn was the first woman to make her living from writing, though she
and successors like Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood were denounced for their
scandalous works and lives.
The literature appearing between 1660 and 1785 divides conveniently into three lesser
periods of about forty years each. The first, extending to the death of Dryden in 1700 is
characterized by an effort to bring a new refinement to English literature according to sound
critical principles of what is fine and right. Poetry and prose come to be characterized by an
easy, sociable style, while in the theater comedy is triumphant. The second period, ending
with the deaths of Pope in 1744 and Swift in 1745, reaches out to a wider circle of readers,
with special satirical attention to what is unfitting and wrong. Deeply conservative but also
playful, the finest works of this brilliant generation of writers cast a strange light on modern
times by viewing them through the screen of classical myths and forms. The third period,
concluding with the death of Johnson in 1784 and the publication of Cowper’s The Task in
1785, confronts the old principles with revolutionary ideas that would come to the fore in the
Romantic period. A respect for the good judgement of ordinary people, and for standards of
taste and behavior independent of social status, marks many writers of the age. Throughout
the larger period, what poets most tried to see and represent was nature, understood as the
universal and permanent elements in human experience.

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