Write a short note on
the impact of Neo-Classicism on Literary Thought/ English literature. /Show how
Neo-Classicism influenced the literature of its time in England.
The English
Neoclassical movement, predicated upon and derived from both classical and contemporary
French models, embodied a group of attitudes toward art and human existence —
ideals of order, logic, restraint, accuracy, "correctness,"
"restraint," decorum, and so on, which would enable the practitioners
of various arts to imitate or reproduce the structures and themes of Greek or
Roman originals. Though its origins were much earlier (the Elizabethan Ben
Jonson, for example, was as indebted to the Roman poet Horace as Alexander Pope would later be), Neoclassicism
dominated English literature from the Restoration in 1660 until the end of the
eighteenth century, when the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798)
by Wordsworth and Coleridge marked the full emergence of
Romanticism.
For the sake of
convenience the Neoclassic period can be divided into three relatively coherent
parts: the Restoration Age (1660-1700), in which Milton, Bunyan, and Dryden
were the dominant influences; the Augustan Age (1700-1750), in which Pope was
the central poetic figure, while Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were
presiding over the sophistication of the novel; and the Age of
Johnson(1750-1798), which, while it was dominated and characterized by the mind
and personality of the inimitable Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose sympathies were
with the fading Augustan past, saw the beginnings of a new understanding and
appreciation of the work of Shakespeare, the development, by Sterne and others,
of the novel of sensibility, and the emergence of the Gothic school — attitudes
which, in the context of the development of a cult of Nature, the influence of
German romantic thought, religious tendencies like the rise of Methodism, and political events like
the American and French
revolutions — established the
intellectual and emotional foundations of English Romanticism..............................................
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