A Study Guide for "Enlightenment"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for "Enlightenment," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Literary Movements for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Literary Movements for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535822763

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09

Enlightenment

c. 1660

Movement Origin

During the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment emerged as a social, philosophical, political, and literary movement that espoused rational thought and methodical observation of the world. The term Enlightenment refers to the belief by the movement's contributors that they were leaving behind the dark ignorance and blind belief that characterized the past. The freethinking writers of the period sought to evaluate and understand life by way of scientific observation and critical reasoning rather than through uncritically accepting religion, tradition, and social conventions. At the center of the Enlightenment were the philosophes, a group of intellectual deists who lived in Paris. Deists believe in the existence of a creative but uninvolved God, and they believed in the basic goodness, rather than sinfulness, of humankind. Because this view of God contradicted the tenets of the established Roman Catholic Church, the philosophes were considered very dangerous. The Church wielded considerable power, so the philosophes were subjected to censorship and restrictive decrees carrying harsh punishments. Yet the philosophes continued to spread their views, and as the Church's political power was challenged in the decades leading up to the French Revolution, the Enlightenment gained momentum. In fact, by the 1770s, many philosophes collected government pensions and held important academic positions.

Scholars do not agree on the exact dates of the Enlightenment. Most literary historians support the claim that it ended with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789, and they place the beginning somewhere between 1660 and 1685. Although it was centered in France, the Enlightenment had adherents in other European countries and in North America. Contributors to the movement include France's Denis Diderot (who edited Encyclopédie), Voltaire (Candide), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (The Social Contract), Germany's Immanuel Kant (who is also associated with Transcendentalism), England's David Hume, Italy's Cesare Beccaria, and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson in the North American colonies. Most of the major contributors knew one another and were in contact despite great distances. The Enlightenment's influence extended both geographically and chronologically, as reactions to it became evident in subsequent literary movements such as Sturm und Drang and Romanticism.

Representative Authors

Denis Diderot (1713-1784)

Denis Diderot was born on October 5, 1713, in Langres, France. His father was an artist and had a great influence