18th century in literature

See also: 18th century in poetry, 17th century in literature, other events of the 18th century, 19th century in literature, list of years in literature.

Literature of the 18th century refers to world literature produced during the 18th century.

European literature in the 18th century
European literature of the 18th century refers to literature (poetry, drama and novels) produced in Europe during this period. The 18th century saw the development of the modern novel as literary genre, in fact many candidates for the first novel in English date from this period, of which Daniel Defoe's 1719 Robinson Crusoe is probably the best known. Subgenres of the novel during the 18th century were the epistolary novel, the sentimental novel, histories, the gothic novel and the libertine novel.

18th Century Europe started in the Age of Enlightenment and gradually moved towards Romanticism. In the visual arts, it was the period of Neoclassicism.

See also:
 * French literature of the 18th century,
 * The novel and new psychology in the 18th century
 * List of years in literature: the 1800s
 * Literary neoclassicism
 * English literature: Augustan literature, British amatory fiction
 * German literature: German Romanticism, Sturm und Drang

The Enlightenment
The 18th century in Europe was The Age of Enlightenment and literature explored themes of social upheaval, reversals of personal status, political satire, geographical exploration and the comparison between the supposed natural state of man and the supposed civilized state of man. Edmund Burke, in his A Vindication of Natural Society (1757), says: "The Fabrick of Superstition has in this our Age and Nation received much ruder Shocks than it had ever felt before; and through the Chinks and Breaches of our Prison, we see such Glimmerings of Light, and feel such refreshing Airs of Liberty, as daily raise our Ardor for more"

By year
In 1700 William Congreve's play The Way of the World premiered. Although unsuccessful at the time The Way of the World is a good example of the sophistication of theatrical thinking during this period, with complex subplots and characters intended as ironic parodies of common stereotypes.

In 1703 Nicholas Rowe's domestic drama The Fair Penitent, an adaptation of Massinger and Field's Fatal Dowry, was pronounced by Dr Johnson to be one of the most pleasing tragedies in the language. Also in [1703] Sir Richard Steele's comedy 'The Tender Husband'' achieved some success.

In 1704 Jonathan Swift published A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books and John Dennis published his Grounds of Criticism in Poetry. The Battle of the Books begins with a reference to the use of a glass (which, in those days, would mean either a mirror or a magnifying glass) as a comparison to the use of satire. Swift is, in this, very much the child of his age, thinking in terms of science and satire at one and the same time. He was one of the first English novelists and also a political campaigner. His satirical writing springs from a body of liberal thought which produced not only books but also political pamphlets for public distribution. Swift's writing represents the new, the different and the modern attempting to change the world by parodying the ancient and incumbent. The Battle of the Books is a short writing which demonstrates his position very neatly.

From 1704 to 1717, Antoine Galland published the first European translation of the One Thousand and One Nights (also known as The Arabian Nights in English). His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes and exerted a huge influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world. Galland's translation of the Nights was immensely popular throughout Europe, and later versions of the Nights were written by Galland's publisher using Galland's name without his consent.

In 1707, Henry Fielding was born (22 April) and his sister Sarah Fielding was born 3 years later on 8 November 1710. In 1711 Alexander Pope began a career in literature with the publishing of his An Essay on Criticism. In 1712 French philosophical writer Jean Jacques Rousseau born 28 June and his countryman Denis Diderot was born the following year 1713 on the 5 October. Also in 1712 Pope published The Rape of the Lock and in 1713 Windsor Forest.

In 1708, Simon Ockley publishes an English translation of Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan, a 12th-century philosophical novel, as The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan. This was the first English translation directly from the Arabic original.

Horace Walpole was born on 24 September 1717.

Daniel Defoe was another political pamphleteer turned novelist like Jonathan Swift and was publishing in the early 18th century. In 1719 he published Robinson Crusoe, in 1720, Captain Singleton and, in 1722, Moll Flanders.

Other authors publishing in 1722 included Sir Richard Steele, Penelope Aubin and Eliza Haywood.

From 1726 to 1729 Voltaire lived in exile mainly in England.

Also in 1726, Jonathan Swift published Gulliver's Travels, one of the first novels in the genre of satire.

In 1728 John Gay wrote The Beggar's Opera which has increased in fame ever since. The Beggar's Opera began a new style in Opera, the "ballad opera" which brings the operatic form down to a more popular level and precedes the genre of comic operettas. Also in 1728 came the publication of Cyclopaedia, or, A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (folio, 2 vols.), an encyclopedia by Ephraim Chambers. The Cyclopaedia was one of the first general encyclopedias to be produced in English and was the main model for Diderot's Encyclopédie (published in France between 1751 and 1766).

In 1729 Jonathan Swift published A Modest Proposal, a satirical suggestion that Irish families should sell their children as food. Swift was, at this time, fully involved in political campaigning for the Irish.

In 1731 George Lillo's play The London Merchant was a success at the Theatre-Royal in Drury Lane. It was a new kind of play, a domestic tragedy, which approximates to what later came to be called a melodrama.

In 1740 Samuel Richardson published Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.

1744 Alexander Pope died.

1745 Jonathan Swift died.

1749 Henry Fielding published The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.

1751 Thomas Gray wrote Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Denis Diderot began the Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. Over the next three decades Encyclopédie  attracted, alongside of those from Diderot, notable contributions from other great intellectuals of the 18th Century including Voltaire, Rousseau and Louis de Jaucourt

1752 a satirical short story by Voltaire, Micromégas featured space travellers visiting earth. It was one of the first stories leaning toward what later became Science fiction. Its publication at this time is indicative of the trend toward scientific thinking prevalent in the age of enlightenment.

1754 Henry Fielding died 8 October.

1759 Voltaire published Candide. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller was born 10 November.

1760 - 1767 Laurence Sterne wrote Tristram Shandy.

1761 Rousseau published Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse.

1762 Rousseau published Émile.

1764 Horace Walpole published The Castle of Otranto (initially under a pseudonym and claiming it to be a translation of an Italian work from 1529.) The first gothic novel.

1766 Oliver Goldsmith published The Vicar of Wakefield.

1767 August Wilhelm von Schlegel was born 8 September.

1768 Sarah Fielding died.

1770 April  birth of William Wordsworth.

1772 Karl Wilhelm Friedrich von Schlegel was born 10 March.

1773 Oliver Goldsmith's play She Stoops to Conquer, a farce, was performed in London.

1774 Goethe wrote The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel which approximately marks the beginning of the Romanticism movement in the arts and philosophy. A transition thus began, from the critical, science inspired, enlightenment writing to the romantic yearning for forces beyond the mundane and for foreign times and places to inspire the soul with passion and mystery.

1777 the comedy play The School for Scandal, a comedy of manners, was written by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

1778 Death of Voltaire. Death of Jean Jacques Rousseau 2 July. Two major contributors to Diderot's Encyclopédie  dead in the same year.

1783 Washington Irving was born.

1784 Denis Diderot died 31 July. Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot have all died within a period of a few short years and French philosophy had thus lost three of its greatest enlightened free thinkers. Rousseau's thinking on the nobility of life in the wilds, facing nature as a naked savage still had great force to influence the next generation as the romantic movement gained momentum. Beaumarchais wrote The Marriage of Figaro. Maria and Harriet Falconar publish Poems on Slavery. The anti-slavery movement was growing in power and many poems and pamphlets were published on the subject.

1785 William Cowper published The Task

1786 Robert Burns published Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. The mood of literature was swinging toward more interest in diverse ethnicity. Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figaro (Le Nozze di Figaro) was adapted into a comic opera composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte.

1789 James Fenimore Cooper was born 15 September in America.

1791 Dream of the Red Chamber is published for the first time in movable type format.

1792 Percy Bysshe Shelley was born (August 4).

1793 Salisbury Plain by William Wordsworth.

1794 Robert Goldsmith was born.

In 1795 Samuel Taylor Coleridge met William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy. The two men published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads (1798), which became a central text of Romantic poetry.

1796 Thomas Chandler Haliburton was born. Denis Diderot's Jacques le fataliste was published posthumously.

1796 Matthew Lewis published his controversial, anti-catholic novel The Monk.

1796 Charlotte Turner Smith published her novel Marchmont.

See also: List of years in literature:

1700s - 1710s - 1720s - 1730s - 1740s - 1750s - 1760s - 1770s - 1780s - 1790s - 1800s

Selected list of novels

 * Simon Ockley, The Improvement of Human Reason: Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan (British, 1708) - English translation of Ibn Tufail's Hayy ibn Yaqdhan (12th century)
 * Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, (British, 1719) - considered the first novel in English
 * Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, (British, 1719)
 * Samuel Richardson, Pamela, (British, 1740)
 * Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, (British, 1749)
 * Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, (British, 1759–1767)
 * Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, (Scottish, 1771)
 * Ignacy Krasicki, The Adventures of Nicholas Experience (Polish, 1776) - the first Polish novel
 * Frances Burney, Evelina, (British, 1778)
 * Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, (British, 1794)
 * Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, (British, 1796)
 * Matthew Lewis, The Monk, (British, 1796)