World Literature 2 Enlightenment in Europe and the Americas – Flashcards

True or False? Answer: False. Through the 17th century, the growing belief in a reason as the best guide to governance, ethics, and morality led to great social change, not least in regards to a faltering belief in the divine right of kings to rule absolutely over the social body-and thus also led to the spirit of rebellion in places like England and France, not to mention America.

Watchmaker: The notion of God as a watchmaker-associate with Deism- suggests the degree to which some thinkers believed the world to be governed by a collection of mechanical laws. God "wound the watch" and the world proceeded to unfold as a result of those governing laws, not by virtue of ongoing divine intervention.

Answer:A hierarchy that put everything in its place. The "Great Chain of Being" was the vast hierarchy that explained every creature's relationship-above or below on the great chain-to all others. God was at the very top, while devils and demons occupied the very bottom. Everything had its place.

Answer: Childern were not understood to possess reason The topic of children is curiously absent from much Enlightenment writing. Largely because the age believed so strongly in the capacity of reason to guide behavior and judgement, and children were seen as lacking in reasoning power.

Answer: Reason Despite this tension between "ancients" and "moderns," both groups believed in the primacy of reason. The Romantic movement, which followed the Enlightenment, out much greater emphasis on imagination, partly as a reaction against what they perceived to be the limits of "reason."

Answer: Upper Class Despite growing wealth in a "middle class," and despite very modest gains in literacy generally, reading and writing were activities confined almost solely to the upper class.

Answer: Tradition and Progress The late 17th and early 18th centuries in England and France in particular were a time of great tension between tradition and progress; i.e. between those who believed in ancient (or classical) ideals and those who believed in progress and modernity, This tension can also be understood in terms of an allegiance to either permanence (tradition) or change (modernity).

Answer: Oroonoko Aphra Behn, a female author, confronted the issue of slavery in her 1688 work, Oroonoko, which tells the tale of an African Prince (Oroonoko the "Royal Slave") who is tricked into slavery and then taken to the New World (specifically, the South American colony of Surinam).

Answer: A Dictionary of the English Language Dr. Samuel Johnson made this declaration about man's reasoning capacity, and its ultimate importance, in his famous Dictionary, which was published in 1755

Answer: True or False. False. Enlightenment authors were rarely concerned to have their art be a direct, unaffected mirror of reality. On the contrary, they understood that art was to take real experience and represent it into a way that conformed to literary convention. As such, Enlightenment writing can often strike modern reader as overly artificial.

Answer: literary subjects must be fitted to their appropriate The 18th century was a time of great emphasis on decorum- proper behavior at the proper time. The idea of decorum extended into the literary world as well. Writers understood that there proper genres and styles that were suitable for certain subjects. It would have been deemed "indecorous- for example, to write about common, domestic subjects in a grand, poetic style. In short, literary decorum means that subjects must be fitted to their appropriate genre.