Augustan Age

Neoclassical typographical designs used straight lines, rectilinear forms, and a restrained geometric ornamentation. John Baskerville, an English designer from the period, created book designs and typefaces that offered a transition between Rococo and Neoclassical. In his books he used superbly designed types printed on smooth…

…he published in 1701 a moralistic tract, “The Christian Hero,” of which 10 editions were sold in his lifetime. This tract led to Steele’s being accused of hypocrisy and mocked for the contrast between his austere precepts and his genially convivial practice. For many of his contemporaries, however, its polite…

…century along with that of Augustan poetry in general. His technical achievement in leading away from the dense verse of the Metaphysical poets lies in his incorporation of wit more related to rational judgment and in his replacement of Metaphysical poetry’s dramatic immediacy, argumentative structure, and ethical seriousness with generalizing…

…of the Enlightenment in the 18th century could be expressed coolly and without ambiguity—and thus there was little need for spiritual allegory in the period’s literature. Oblique symbolism was used mainly for satiric purposes. John Dryden and Alexander Pope were masters of verse satire, Jonathan Swift of prose satire. Voltaire…

The last half of the 18th century witnessed the remarkable conjunction of these two remarkable men, from which sprang what is generally agreed to be the world’s supreme biography, Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1791). Dr. Johnson, literary dictator of his age, critic and lexicographer…

The next step in the process came when Sir Richard Steele, bent on reforming comedy for didactic purposes, produced The Conscious Lovers (1722) and provided the English stage with an occasion when the audience at a comedy could derive its chief pleasure not from laughing but…

…or Edward Gibbon (the so-called Augustan plain style in literature became popular in the late 17th century and flourished throughout the 18th, but it was really a special form of rhetoric with antecedent models in Greek and Latin). The first person to write major works of literature in the ordinary…

Early in the 18th century, Pope affirmed in his Essay on Criticism (1711) the classic doctrine of imitation. Prosody was to be more nearly onomatopoetic; the movement of sound and metre should represent the actions they carry: