Definition
In English literary history, the second half of the 18th century, a period dominated by the poet, critic, editor, and lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson. Traditionally regarded as a merely transitional phase in the movement from neoclassicism to Romanticism, the age now commands more respect for a unique literary character of its own. The critic Northrop Frye has argued that a more accurate title for the period would be the Age of Sensibility, to emphasize that the poetry of Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, William Cowper, and William Blake offered a form of literature rooted in feeling and, in the case of Blake, the sense of the poet as a visionary. The poetry of the period also represents the movement toward nature and the power of the human mind when in contact with nature.
The great nonfiction prose works of the era were Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–87) and Boswell's Life of Johnson (1791). In drama the comedy of manners flourished in the hands of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (The School for Scandal, 1777) and Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer, 1773). The development of the novel, begun earlier in the century, was enriched by Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker (1771) and Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy (1760–67), one of the great comic novels in English.The age also saw the production of two works that have been extremely influential in the development of modern rhetoric, George Campbell's The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1776) and Hugh Blair's Lectures on Rhetoric (1783).
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