Casey Robinson
Professor Jordan
EH 236
11 October 2017
                                          The Enlightenment: The Last Great Literary Movement
	The Enlightenment was an intellectual and philosophical movement in the 18th century that championed the ideals of reason, progress, and individual liberty. Philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and others put forth questions about the progress of society and the role of the individual within that society. It was during this time that the ideas of existentialism and liberalism first began to blossom and change how individuals placed themselves in the world. For the first time people began to truly question the world around them and began changing the value that was placed on the individual. These ideas are greatly reflected in the literature of the time. For instance, the value of the individual is especially evident in works like Mary Wollstonecraft’s, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which Wollstonecraft argues, rather radically for the time, that marriage is slavery and that the woman, as an individual, should be valued and allowed to grow as such. It is works like this that embody the ideas of the Enlightenment. As the questioning of government and the individual grew, ideas began to shift and by the end of the 18th century almost an entirely new world had emerged. For the first time nature was truly valued by many, the role of the individual and their existence came into question, and governments across the world disintegrated from their societies. This is why, in my opinion, that the Enlightenment was the last great philosophical and literary movement and all the following literary movements were either a product of, or a response to, the Enlightenment.
	The ideas following this movement are vast but most, if not all, of them can be traced directly back to Enlightenment and the ideas it presented. Immediately following the Enlightenment was Romanticism with writers such as William Wordsworth and John Keats. Romanticism, which subscribed to the ideas of emotion and individualism as well as an exaltation of nature and the past, was an obvious product of the Enlightenment and was a natural response to the ideas it presented. Following this came more abstract movements such as Transcendentalism and Existentialism which questioned human existence and the role of the individual within the world. Authors from this period, which include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Søren Kierkegaard, are great examples of the movements and owe much of their ideas to Enlightenment authors Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, who first began to question and value human existence. Even more modern movements like Surrealism would also have been impossible without the Enlightenment. Surrealist author André Breton, who presented ideas of the rational versus the irrational, is indebted to Enlightenment author Thomas Hobbes, who first brought forth the ideas of individual rationalism. Without the ideas brought forth by the Enlightenment, nearly all the literary movements following would have been impossible. It was during this time that individuals first valued the ideas of rationalism and individualism; and without ideas such as this, movements from Romanticism to Surrealism would have been impossible.