The first half of the 18th century is called

“Augustan age” or “Neoclassicism” because of the attention paid to

the characteristics of the ancient Rome under the Emperor Augustus. The term Augustan comes to

classical Rome and Greece, and the ruling class thought to be the true heir of the Roman

Empire. The real English gentleman had the old

Roman fortitude, perseverance, and self-

control together with Stoic pride.

Neo-classicism became a style of life, that influenced poetry,

sculpture, painting and even gardening and town planning. The

Nature was considered a balanced composition

of objects, a philosophical picture in which men live. the arts of the Augustan Age are

characterized by a desire of balance and

harmony and the imitation of nature

Augustan Age was characterized by the empiricism and by the spirit of the Enlightenment, a philosophical and scientific

movement based on rational spirit and a general skepticism about superstition. This optimistic and positive philosophy contrasts with

the darkness of irrationality of the Middle Age. Man was considered a rational being which had to ban from literature his

emotional and spiritual part because the only guide to good behaviour is the reason. Because of the importance given to

reason during the Augustan Age, this period is also known as the Age of Reason

Poetry was considered an aristocratic genre

Poets re-expressed universal truths about mankind in an objective way and they had to follow strict rules such as order, balance, proportion and above all common sense. The models were the ancient writers, such as Virgil, Horace, Ovid.

Augustan age's poetry was dominated by Alexander Pope. Some of his lines are proverbs to modern English

usage. Pope had few poetic rivals, but he had many personal enemies and political, philosophical, or religious opponents, and the Pope himself was

quarrelsome in print. The Pope and his enemies (often called "the Dunces" because of Pope's successful

satirizing of them in The Dunciad) fought over central matters of the correct subject matter for poetry and the

appropriate pose of the poetic voice.

The best literary form was the prose and the better instrument of knowledge for middle class people were the novel and journalism. For this reason the Augustan Age was also called “the Age of Prose”. The authors of the Augustan Age were mainly interested in real life, in stories that were referred to the lives of their readers, rather than in substitutes for reality; so literature became an entertainment for the raising

classes, and therefore the plots were quit simple and had to appear real.

The word novel means NEW, different from chivalry story in verse, in fact it related traditional experiences in an original way, teaching to the middle class how to

behave in different situations. Middle classes were grown thanks to the trade with colonies, wanted by the Whigs. Before the eighteen century, there were prose fiction or narration, but these certainly did not present

the real life. Don Quixote of Cervantes marks an important turning point and it can be considered a

precursor of the novel, but the theme of this book is the battle between fantasy and reality.

The novel is a fictitious prose narrative or a tale in a considerable length presenting a picture of real life. It was an innovative genre which satisfied the needs of the middle classes, who demanded original stories relating traditional experience in a practical and realistic form.

There were three main reasons why the novel became the dominant literary form of Augustan Age: • The rise of philosophical rationalism; important empirical philosopher, as Descartes or John Locke, wanted to focus on the experience of the individual person, the reality of the people and the world through his senses and perceptions. Novel’s primary criteria were independence from the tradition of past thought and faith only in the individual experience.• Secondly the influence of Puritanism and Methodism: Puritanism preached the idea that man must save himself by his own efforts, and own virtuous life. Methodism stressed the importance of the hard work in daily life; so the practicalities of daily life took precedence over fantasy and imagination.• The rise of novel was also influenced by the increasing circulation of newspapers, which brought the advent of fact based on reality. This changed the tastes of middle classes and in particularly of the new readers, the women, who were no longer interested in stories of chivalry and romance, they wanted to read stories that reflected their own interests, about characters that could more or less identify with. They had more free time to dedicate to reading because they didn’t work and their husbands were generally strange to them. For middle class women reading novel represented a brief escape from prison of domesticity. The novel was becoming more joined to real life, in particular to the experience of the bourgeois class and the settings of the stories became more detailed and realistic.

The hero, how we can see in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson

Crusoe, is a middle class man, the empirical and self-made

man.

Novels by Samuel Richardson show us the respectable, religious side of the middle class.

Also the newspapers were aimed at the middle classes although the first newspapers editors, Joseph Addison (responsible for most of the numbers of The Tatler) and Richard Steele (mostly concerned with The Spectator) were from upper class. Steele was a enthusiastic supporter of morality. With The Spectator, Addison introduced the middle-class public to recent developments in philosophy and literature and thus to educate their tastes. Newspapers were written in a lively and witty but simple style, they were allied with one of the two parliamentary factions, the Whigs or the Tories and they related about issue of relevance for readership. Defoe and Swift were journalist before novelists. Addison and Steele helped to popularize the philosophy of John Locke and promote the literary reputation of John Milton, among others. Although these publications each only ran two years, the influence that Addison and Steele had on their contemporaries was enormous, infact many of the European newspapers were modelled on English newspapers.

In these literary salons also women began to take part in the debates about ideas, literature and politic issue. The new idea of freedom for individual was applied to the women too, they were often heroine of the novels, were also avid readers of them and they started to play in the theatral plays.

Clubs and coffee-houses became the centre of the middle-class culture, here people went to meet, discuss current events and write.

We have seen how this period had been a period of changes in several points of

view: social, cultural and literary; women started to be

emancipated, clubs and coffee houses became

meeting places, thanks to the Enlightenment the reason

was men’s guide, novels had an important rising, while poetry was considered an

aristocratic genre because of its abstraction.