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The Renaissance
Shakespeare lived and wrote during a remarkable period of English
history, a time of relative political stability and great development, 1485 1649. Science made it possible to navigate, explorers set out to find a new
world. The ideas of the Renaissance are strongly influenced by the concept of
humanism.
The aim was to restore human values from antiquity by
reintroducing the philosophies, language and literature of the ancient Greece
and Rome. One of the major developments in English literature at this time is
in drama. Some of Shakespeares plays reflect historical and political
tensions, others deal with common life experiences which are described in
comedy as well as tragedy. During this period poetry was another important
literary genre.
Enlightenment 1650 - 1800
The novel was written during the Enlightenment era, a period of
scientific awakening, a time of unprecedented optimism in the potential of
knowledge and reason to understand and change the world. It was believed
that the use of reason and science could improve the human condition. This
period saw the rise of the political pamphlet and essay but the leading genre
of the Enlightenment became the novel. The hero of the novel was the
average man, the middle-class man, with a pragmatic common sense, and
literature became very instructive; writers aimed to educate readers through
their stories, criticizing the flaws of society and individuals. Most of the
writers of this time wrote political pamphlets, but the best came from the
pens of Defoe and Swift. The novel writing was influences by travel
literature, biographies, memoirs, diaries.
Romanticism (1789-1832)
(S. Coleridge , J. Austen, J. Keats, W. Whitman, Hawthorne, Dickinson, Melville)
Born at the end of the Civil war, the literary period in which
wrote, aimed to recreate reality in literature. The years following the war
symbolized a time of healing and rebuilding. In literature this was a time of
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upheaval. As the United States grew rapidly after the Civil War, the
increasing rates of democracy and literacy, the rapid growth in industrialism
and urbanization, an expanding population base due to immigration, and a
relative rise in middle-class affluence provided a fertile literary environment
for readers interested in understanding these rapid shifts in culture.
Realists are concerned with the effect of the work on their reader and
the reader's life, a pragmatic view. Pragmatism requires the reading of a
work to have some verifiable outcome for the reader that will lead to a better
life for the reader. This lends an ethical tendency to realism while focusing on
common actions and minor catastrophes of middle class society.