4 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
English playwright and poet who was Shakespeare's greatest contemporary — his comedies (Volpone, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair) satirize human greed and folly with unsentimental ferocity — and whose literary criticism and relationship with Shakespeare (admired him as a friend, criticized his carelessness) defines the Elizabethan-Jacobean literary world.
English novelist who wrote Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility, and Persuasion — the supreme comic novelist in the English language — whose ironic comedy of manners masks a rigorous moral psychology of self-deception, vanity, and the education of the heart.
Anglo-Irish satirist who wrote Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal — the greatest satirist in the English language — whose savage irony exposed the stupidity of human pride, political corruption, and the brutal logic of colonialism in Ireland.
Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel following Robinson Crusoe's 28-year survival on a deserted island after a shipwreck — the first English novel — which served as Rousseau's model for Emile's natural education and as the founding myth of Enlightenment individualism and colonial enterprise.