La produzione letteraria del XVIII secolo e il pubblico dei lettori, Schemi e mappe concettuali di Inglese

Scarica La produzione letteraria del XVIII secolo e il pubblico dei lettori e più Schemi e mappe concettuali in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! XVIII CENTURY: THE READING PUBLIC AND THE PROSE One of the elements that affected the literary production of the 18 th century was the reading public, in fact the 18th century saw a considerable increase in the number of readers. This was caused by many different factors:  the desire of the members of the middle-class to gain a refined education and to be informed and to reflect on the world in which they lived  the existence of circulating libraries  the spread of coffeehouses as a place for meeting people for discussing politics and literary issues. Until then eading had been limited by the low level of literacy and books were expensive and a luxury the lower classes couldn’t afford. For them there were cheaper forms of printed materials like ballads, pamphlets and newspaper, where short stories and novels were published in serial form. The two main genres that satisfied the needs of the middle-class reading public were newspaper and novels which flourished in the 18th century. Novels were the most popular prose genre of the 18th century. Novels became popular because there was a reading public who wanted to read them; middle-class readers wanted to read stories written in a simple and realistic style and they wanted to be the ideal protagonists of the stories they read. The most influential novelists of the 18th century are:  Daniel Defoe whose Robinson Crosue is one of the best examples of realistic novels  Jonathan Swift, whose works belong to the sub-genre of “utopian”novels  Samuel Richardson, whose novels are called “epistolary”  Henry Fielding, who continues the tradition of the picaresque novel in England. Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson combined religious and secular interests in their works and this compromise was the most important trend in 18th century literature and found its earliest expression in the establishment of periodicals such as Joseph Addison’s The Spectator.