During the 18th century, French and American revolutions weakened monarchies and increased individual liberties. But in such serious times, serious literature was often paralleled with satire. While Defoe’s castaway Robinson Crusoe (1719) reproduced Enlightenment ideals on his remote island, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) satirized Crusoe’s heroic individualism. Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) provided an exaggerated solution for poverty. Raspe’s Baron Munchausen (1785) featured a braggart soldier’s exaggerated tales. While Diderot’s 28-volume Encyclopédie attempted to summarize all knowledge, Toriyama Sekien produced a four-volume parody of Japanese encyclopedias, his illustrated books of yōkai, during a long period of anti-globalization in Japan.
| Era Enlightenment and Neoclassicism (1700 – 1795) |
| Alternative Names 18th Century |
| Total Entries 185 |
| Articles Age of Enlightenment – Wikipedia Robinson Crusoe – Wikipedia Gulliver’s Travels – Wikipedia |
| Description During the 18th century, French and American revolutions weakened monarchies and increased individual liberties. But in such serious times, serious literature was often paralleled with satire. While Defoe’s castaway Robinson Crusoe (1719) reproduced Enlightenment ideals on his remote island, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) satirized Crusoe’s heroic individualism. Swift’s A Modest Proposal (1729) provided an exaggerated solution for poverty. Raspe’s Baron Munchausen (1785) featured a braggart soldier’s exaggerated tales. While Diderot’s 28-volume Encyclopédie attempted to summarize all knowledge, Toriyama Sekien produced a four-volume parody of Japanese encyclopedias, his illustrated books of yōkai, during a long period of anti-globalization in Japan.
The Age of Enlightenment (also the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment) was a European intellectual and philosophical movement that flourished primarily in the 18th century. Characterized by an emphasis on reason, empirical evidence, and scientific method, the Enlightenment promoted ideals of individual liberty, religious tolerance, progress, and natural rights. Its thinkers advocated for constitutional government, the separation of church and state, and the application of rational principles to social and political reform. The Enlightenment emerged from and built upon the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, which had established new methods of empirical inquiry through the work of figures such as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton… The dating of the period of the beginning of the Enlightenment can be attributed to the publication of René Descartes’ Discourse on the Method in 1637, with his method of systematically disbelieving everything unless there was a well-founded reason for accepting it, and featuring his famous dictum, Cogito, ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’). Others cite the publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica (1687) as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment… The movement was characterized by the widespread circulation of ideas through new institutions: scientific academies, literary salons, coffeehouses, Masonic lodges, and an expanding print culture of books, journals, and pamphlets… ~ Age of Enlightenment – Wikipedia
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