Dr. Vijayalayan's Literature Notes

  Preamble       In the literature of England, there are basically two trends to reckon with. These are classicism and romanticism. The established pattern is that in every epoch of English literary history, one of these two trends emerges as a dominant force by which the literature of that age comes to be defined. The difference between the two trends could be understood in the most basic terms as follows. Classicism as a trend can be said to uphold ideals such as order, norms, and critical sensibility as the seminal characteristics to be sought for, while romanticism as promoting ideals such as freedom, unconventionality and imagination. During the renaissance in England, it was the romantic trend that dominated as the major force in the writing of literature. This situation however changed after the renaissance came to its formal conclusion, with classicism taking over as the dominant trend. This change over from romanticism to classicism as the main trend in the literature of E

  Background       The millennium starting from roughly the 5th century B. C., during which European civilization was dominated by the Greeks followed by the Romans, is generally known as the era of classical antiquity. This period exemplifies a significant chapter in the annals of western civilization in that it marked a phase of sustained intellectual and artistic progress. With the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th century A. D., this glorious epoch of Greeco-Roman scholarship drew to a close, casting Europe into a lengthy phase of intellectual dearth known as the dark ages. During the dark ages, it was generally supposed that the texts containing the progressive ideas of classical antiquity, were destroyed by the barbarians. This belief however turned out to be fortunately false, for as it emerged later those texts were found to be preserved in the many libraries of the Byzantine empire. Thus, while western Europe was languishing in ignorance all through the dark ages, its ea