زبان و ادبیات انگلیسی

The period between 1660 and 1785 was a time of amazing expansion for England — or for
"Great Britain," as the nation came to be called after an Act of Union in 1707 joined Scotland
to England and Wales. Britain became a world power, an empire on which the sun never set.
But it also changed internally. The world seemed different in 1785. A sense of new,
expanding possibilities — as well as modern problems — transformed the daily life of the
British people, and offered them fresh ways of thinking about their relations to nature and to
each other. Hence literature had to adapt to circumstances for which there was no precedent.
The topics in this Restoration and Eighteenth Century section of Norton Topics Online
review crucial departures from the past — alterations that have helped to shape our own
world.
One lasting change was a shift in population from the country to
the town. "A Day in Eighteenth-Century London" shows the
variety of diversions available to city-dwellers. At the same time, it
reveals how far the life of the city, where every daily newspaper
brought new sources of interest, had moved from traditional
values. Formerly the tastes of the court had dominated the arts. In
the film Shakespeare in Love, when Queen Elizabeth's nod decides
by itself the issue of what can be allowed on the stage, the
exaggeration reflects an underlying truth: the monarch stands for
the nation. But the eighteenth century witnessed a turn from palaces to pleasure gardens that
were open to anyone with the price of admission. New standards of taste were set by what the
people of London wanted, and art joined with commerce to satisfy those desires. Artist
William Hogarth made his living not, as earlier painters had done, through portraits of royal
and noble patrons, but by selling his prints to a large and appreciative public. London itself
— its beauty and horror, its ever-changing moods — became a favorite
subject of writers.
The sense that everything was changing was also sparked by a revolution
in science. In earlier periods, the universe had often seemed a small
place, less than six thousand years old, where a single sun moved about
the earth, the center of the cosmos. Now time and space exploded, the
microscope and telescope opened new fields of vision, and the "plurality
of worlds," as this topic is called, became a doctrine endlessly repeated.
The authority of Aristotle and Ptolemy was broken; their systems could
not explain what Galileo and Kepler saw in the heavens or what Hooke
and Leeuwenhoek saw in the eye of a fly. As discoveries multiplied, it
became clear that the moderns knew things of which the ancients had
been ignorant. This challenge to received opinion was thrilling as well as disturbing. In
Paradise Lost, Book 8, the angel Raphael warns Adam to think about what concerns him, not
to dream about other worlds. Yet, despite the warning voiced by Milton through Raphael,
many later writers found the new science inspiring. It gave them new images to conjure with
and new possibilities of fact and fiction to explore.
Meanwhile, other explorers roamed the earth, where they discovered
hitherto unknown countries and ways of life. These encounters with
other peoples often proved vicious. The trade and conquests that made
European powers like Spain and Portugal immensely rich also brought
the scourge of racism and colonial exploitation. In the eighteenth
century, Britain's expansion into an empire was fueled by slavery and
the slave trade, a source of profit that belied the national self-image as
a haven of liberty and turned British people against one another. Rising
prosperity at home had been built on inhumanity across the seas. This
topic, "Slavery and the Slave Trade in Britain," looks at the experiences
of African slaves as well as at British reactions to their suffering and
cries for freedom. At the end of the eighteenth century, as many writers joined the abolitionist
campaign, a new humanitarian ideal was forged. The modern world invented by the
eighteenth century brought suffering along with progress. We still live with its legacies today.

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