VOL. 2 OVERVIEW - ENLIGHTENMENT IN EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS

Enlightenment in Europe and the Americas

The late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in England and France in particular were a time of great tension between those who believed in ancient (or classical) ideals and those who believed in progress and modernity.
Despite this tension between "ancients" and "moderns," both groups believed in the primacy of reason (as opposed to, say, faith, imagination, or intuition).
Philosophers at this time explored the subjective "I," trying to delineate precisely what it meant to be human (i.e., to be a reasoning, communicating, observing entity).
While some explored the possibility that there was no truth beyond the isolated, individual mind, others (like Newton) asserted that there was a fundamental set of physical laws that governed the universe.
Even when Enlightenment philosophy produced skeptical attitudes about any final knowability in regards to the individual and the world he or she lived in, those in the Enlightenment still privileged the acquisition and accumulation of knowledge about self and world.

Society

Through the seventeenth century, the growing belief in reason as the best guide to governance, ethics, and morality led to great social change, not least in regards to a faltering belief in the divine right of kings to rule absolutely over the social body—and thus also led to the spirit of rebellion in places like England and France, not to mention America.
Despite—or maybe because of—its being an era of social instability, the Enlightenment was equally a time that emphasized rules of decorum and social civility.
Elaborate social hierarchies emerged, with aristocratic elites at the top, a growing "middle" or working class, and the poor or enslaved at the bottom.
Gender roles were rigid, and women, even of the upper class, enjoyed few opportunities for education or a profession.
There were writers, however, in both Europe and the Americas (and both male and female) who argued for women's rights to education. A number of these authors appealed to reason and pointed out that better opportunities for women would make them better partners to men in marriage and thus both genders would benefit from greater equality.
Despite the gender inequality of the time, some women emerged as important literary figures.
Among the many common literary topics of the Enlightenment, authors often looked to expose the gap between social ideals of propriety and actual human behavior.
Satire thus became an important genre, as it could be used to reveal ignorance even in those who otherwise seemed "proper" and could speak or write eloquently. In other words, it was not how they expressed themselves but what they expressed that was truly deplorable.
The topic of children is curiously absent from much Enlightenment writing, largely because the age believed so strongly in the capacity of reason to guide behavior and judgment, and children were not understood to possess a reasoning power developed enough to warrant much attention.

Humanity and Nature

Deism was a belief in God that understood the divine to be revealed only in His works, like the natural world, for example. Thus the "scientific" study of nature could be understood as, in part, the work of understanding the divine.
Many Enlightenment philosophers explored the relationship between the individual and the universe. One widely shared idea posited a "Great Chain of Being": a vast hierarchy that explained every creature's relationship—above or below on the great chain—to all others.
As is evidenced the Great Chain of Being, many Enlightenment ideas depended on a basic belief in the world as a system, even if it was one that we didn't yet understand. Part of understanding the system meant identifying the universals—the constants that would persist regardless of place or time.
Just as Enlightenment thinkers understood the world to be a system, governed by constants, so too did they understand human nature itself to be a constant. Thus, writers could imagine themselves writing ahistorically—in other words, the touchstones of human nature had not changed since ancient times and would not change in the future.

Convention and Authority

The eighteenth century was a time of great emphasis on decorum—proper behavior at the proper time.
The idea of decorum extended into the literary world as well. Writers understood that there were proper genres and styles that were suitable for certain subjects. It would have been deemed "indecorous"—or lacking in decorum—for example to write about common, domestic subjects in a grand, poetic style.
Enlightenment writers—and readers—understood that literature was to both delight and instruct.
Because eighteenth-century literary conventions were highly prescribed, they often strike modern readers as overly artificial.
And modern readers may often feel that eighteenth-century literature, given its emphasis on artifice, does a poor job of representing "reality." However, eighteenth-century writers did not understand art's goal as reproducing reality. On the contrary, they understood that art was to take real experience and represent it in a way that conformed to literary convention.
An important tension for Enlightenment philosophers and writers was that between the value of permanence and change. This manifested itself in almost all aspects of literary, philosophical, and political thinking.