Augustan Literature

Augustan literature refers to English writing of the early-to-mid eighteenth century, roughly the reigns of Queen Anne, George I and George II, so named because contemporaries likened its poise, order and classical decorum to the literature of Augustan Rome under Virgil and Horace. Its leading figures, Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison and John Dryden, whose late career bridges into the era, favored the heroic couplet, satire, wit and formal correctness, producing landmark works such as Pope's The Rape of the Lock and Swift's Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal. The period's satirical energy targeted what its writers saw as the vulgarity, corruption and bad taste of the age, even as its own prose developed the periodical essay and the early novel through figures such as Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson. Augustan literature is generally treated as the high point of English Neoclassicism, giving way by mid-century to the Age of Sensibility and, later, Romanticism.