Eighteenth Century literature is Still Relevant Today

Eighteenth century literature is still relevant today
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Eighteenth century literature is still relevant today
This paper provides an exhaustive discussion of how the literature of the 18th century era is still relevant in today’s era. Thesis statement: eighteenth century literature is a nucleus in a broad spectrum of interests and geographical and historical forte amongst today’s scholars and students. The eighteenth century genre saw the development of the modern novel, which makes it still relevant in today’s learning curriculum. 
Literature of the eighteenth century is essentially understood as literature – which include novels, satire, drama and poetry – that was produced particularly in Europe in this era. According to Wiggin (112), the eighteenth century literature resulted in the development of the contemporary novel as literary genre, actually most candidates for the first English novel date from the 18th century, of which perhaps the best known is Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe. Subgenres of the novel in this period included the libertine novel, the sentimental novel, the epistolary novel, the gothic novel and histories. Eighteenth century Europe, as McDowell (568) pointed out, began in the Age of Enlightenment before moving progressively toward Romanticism. It was actually the epoch of Neoclassicism in terms of the visual arts.
The rise of the novel, seen through 18th century literary works of Jane Austen, Sterne, Richardson, Radcliffe, Smollett, Fielding and Defoe among other writers of the period, led to the development of today’s novel and is pertinent to both literature students and scholars in schools and universities today (Liu 7). It is worth mentioning that in this period, Europe was in The Age of Enlightenment and literature was used to explore many different themes of political satire, reversals of personal status, social upheaval, geographical exploration as well as the comparison between man’s supposed civilized state and man’s supposed natural state (Liu 8). For example, the works of Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744-1746), Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Smollet’s Roderick Random (1748) reinforce potential relationships between the individual focus of social history and government focus of political history of the 18th century.
The essay format in literature first emerged in the 18th century, an epoch commonly recognized for its Romantic Movement. In the current modern era, it offers readers the background from which the literature of today is based. The greatest literature from the eighteenth century forms part of the literary canon, which is vital to the knowledge of modern readers. While 18th century authors wrote from the knowledge which they obtained from prior texts, today’s writers can in the same way learn from the literature of earlier periods (Smith 322). The themes and moods of the texts in the 18th century are not lost over time given that the issues that were mentioned in those texts are still pertinent and important today. In essence, through various writers of that epoch such as Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Sir...