Enlightenment Literature

Enlightenment literature includes the poetry, drama, fiction, and essays associated with the intellectual life of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Writers adapted classical forms while developing new kinds of social observation, periodical prose, and extended fiction. Satire exposed vanity and abuses of authority; novels examined motives, conduct, and the pressures of money or reputation. Religious belief, moral duty, and the limits of human understanding remained subjects of substantial disagreement. Works by Dryden, Pope, Swift, Defoe, and Johnson therefore belong to a varied literary culture rather than a single uniform doctrine.