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 (1756), 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.
John Lockman, for example, described his French translations as "versions" to indicate the large changes he'd made to the original text.
[3] 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.
1703: Nicholas Rowe's domestic drama The Fair Penitent, an adaptation of Massinger and Field's Fatal Dowry, appeared; it would later be pronounced by Dr Johnson to be one of the most pleasing tragedies in the language.
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.
Daniel Defoe was another political pamphleteer turned novelist like Jonathan Swift and was publishing in the early 18th century.
The book includes heavily fictionalised accounts of English criminals from the medieval period to the eighteenth century.
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).
1729: Jonathan Swift published A Modest Proposal, a satirical suggestion that Irish families should sell their children as food.
Like so many poets of the 18th century, Johnson sought to breathe new life into his favorite classical author Juvenal.
1740: Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded was published and the Marquis de Sade was born.
1748: John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (popularly known as Fanny Hill), arguably the first work of pornographic prose, was published.
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.
1777: The play The School for Scandal, a comedy of manners by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, was first performed in Drury Lane.
This compilation contains short biographies of 52 influential poets (most of whom lived in the 18th century) along with critical appraisals of their works.
[6] His version of the tales appeared in twelve volumes and exerted a huge influence on subsequent European literature and attitudes to the Islamic world.
In 1731, Manon Lescaut, a French novel by the Abbé Prévost that narrates the love affairs of an unmarried couple and inaugurates one of the most common themes of the literature of the time: the sentimental story, taking into account for the first time the female point of view and not only the courtship and the conquest or the failure of man.
1752 Micromégas, a satirical short story by Voltaire, features space travellers visiting Earth.
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.
Also in 1774, Alberto Fortis published his travel book Viaggio in Dalmazia ("Journey to Dalmatia") and started Morlachism.
Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot have all died within a period of a few years, and French philosophy had thus lost three of its greatest enlightened free thinkers.
Rousseau's thoughts 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.