ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The Enlightenment – the great ‘Age of Reason’ – is defined as the period of rigorous scientific, political and philosophical discourse that characterised European society during the ‘long’ 18th century: from the late 17th century to the ending of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815.

Detailed explanation-2: -The Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, was an intellectual and cultural movement in the eighteenth century that emphasized reason over superstition and science over blind faith.

Detailed explanation-3: -So what was it? The Enlightenment, sometimes called the ‘Age of Enlightenment’, was a late 17th-and 18th-century intellectual movement emphasizing reason, individualism, and skepticism.

Detailed explanation-4: -The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as natural law, liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government, and separation of church and state.

Detailed explanation-5: -The causes of the Enlightenment include the focus on humanism during the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution. These three ideas and events led to new ways of thinking and gave the Enlightenment the momentum needed to influence individuals worldwide.