The name given to the historical period in Europe from roughly the latter half of the seventeenth century and the eighteenth century.

Background & Context

• Enlightenment Ideas
• Neoclassicism
• The Heroic Couplet

Literary Texts

• Molière’s Tartuffe
• Voltaire’s Candide

Commentaries and Criticism

• Pope: Essay on Critical Man
• Allusion in Neoclassical Poetry

Other Pages of Relevance

• Satire