Scarica L'illuminismo e il sublime nel XVIII secolo e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! Enlightenment The 18th century was called Augustan Age and was characterized by traditionalism, elegance and wit. The virtues of politeness, moderation and rationality were praised and they were the values of the Enlightenment. In this period elections were false, they were controlled by land owners. There was a growing tendency to focus on personal gain, based on individualism, seeing opportunities in the sector of the economy to obtain enterprise and enrichment. Britain was very different from the other reigns in terms of freedom, as they were characterized by absolutism. In this period became important the beliefs of the enlightened thinkers, like Locke and Addison: they rejected pessimistic values of Puritanism, like original sin and depravity of man.. They had trust in reason, which means that man is different from 2 2animals and in common sense, so trust in human capability. 18th society The 18th century was a period of social mobility. The population was growing more and more, contemporary to the expansion of the middle class. It was composed of landowners, merchants, tradesmen, manufacturers and they controlled mines and factories. They supported Whigs. It was divided into upper middle class, composed by professionals and merchants and lower middle class, composed by artisans, shopkeepers and tradesmen. They usually worked for long hours, often as apprentices, for low incomes. Below them there were the poor, they worked in rural areas and they had no political right and lived in terrible conditions. Life in rural areas got worse than before because the communal open fields were enclosed(the fencing of the land was entrusted to the large landowners and private to the peasants who no longer had work). For this reason a lot of people left the country to find new job opportunities. Diseases like smallpox, scurvy, typhus affected the poorest areas and killed a lot of children, the ones who survived worked as apprentices for parishes. For adults, parishes built workhouses, which usually turned into places where to drink gin and organize crimes. THE SUBLIME In his “Philosophical Enquiry”, Burke defines the sublime as a quality of art or experience that excites the idea of pain and danger and that produces the strongest emotion that mind is capable of feeling. The feeling of sublime is when you encounter something infinitely large, like a mountain or infinitely powerful, like a tsunami. The first feeling that man experiences is fear, inferiority, terror, but then he realises that he is superior to those things thanks to his mind and he feels relieved. Moreover, the sublime excludes white, green, yellow, blue, pale red and violet and requires sad colours, like black, brown or deep purple. The sublime arises from the feeling of fear and horror created by what is infinite and terrible and prevents you from reasoning or acting. For example: a void, obscurity, loneliness, and silence are sublime; tall oak trees are sublime, flowers are beautiful; the night is sublime, the day is beautiful. The taste for darkness, terror and introspection affected the literature of the end of the 18th century, for example with William Blake, the major exponent of gothic fiction. Burke’s theory also affected Kant in his Critics of Judgement, where he stated that sublime derives from the conflict between sensibility and reason.
