About Me

I am an English Interdisciplinary Major taking a course on English Restoration literature. This will be a weekly blog with which I hope to share insight, along with my interpretation, of The Restoration and Eighteenth Century literature of which I was not very familiar with prior to taking this course.


 

“Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be defence enough against Mortality” 
― Aphra Behn



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It Happens

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I was astonished to see how sexually liberated some of the authors from the mid-seventeenth century were. By then, unlike one hundred years earlier, sex outside of marriage was no longer being punished, and people were taking advantage. Rochester  According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term Libertine, which authors like Aphra Behn and John Wilmot of Rochester identified, as was a person who felt morally liberated, especially concerning sex. Both Behn and Rochester wrote poems about a subject that is to this day, one that is discussed with discretion and in private. ..a man’s mishap in the boudoir. Rochester’s poem “The Imperfect Enjoyment” discusses a man who finds himself in a romantic situation and proceeds to experience an early release leaving his lover disappointed. Rochester’s poem is comedic because he never outright says what happened, but delivers the message quite clearly; "In liquid raptures I dissolved all o’er"  Behn wrote, “The Disappoint...
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Read All ABout It! Print Journalism of the 18th Century

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By the 18 th century Britain was the Empire in which, "the sun never set" and so much information  was available from all parts of the world that it is no wonder journalism experienced a rise in popularity.  What aided the popularization of newspaper was the increase in literacy in the population as the middle class was expanding and flourishing with commerce and trade.  Magazines were made for all audiences such as The Lady's Magazine or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Amusement, Which covered women's fashions and happenings and  The Gentleman's Magazine which was in print for near 200 years from 1731 to 1922, and where Samuel Johnson was first regularly employed as a writer as a parliamentary reporter.  Richard Steele and Joseph Addison wrote about cultural matters in their journalistic print titled The Spectator . I find that there are similarities between The Spectator and modern day publications like ...
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The Age of Enlightenment Has Yet to Come

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In the words of Immanuel Kant, to be “enlightened” is simply to “Dare to know! Have courage to use your own reason!” If we were to simply use this as a guide to determine whether or not we are living in an enlightened era, then I would say that we are most definitely living in a time of enlightenment. One only has to look to the Internet to see just how enlightened people are. People have taken their own understanding of things and run into the sunset with them. In the traditional sense of enlightenment as in the philosophical movement in which great thinkers such as Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke made significant scientific discoveries and questioned authority.  They demanded that citizens be given rights, which, in turn, resulted in the great revolutions from which The United States of America and the American Revolutionary spirit was born. The era of Enlightenment encouraged human thinking and development, something that is still very much at play. But people refusin...
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