Civilization Rescue Strategies: Enlightenment Realism and Its Projects

Abstract

The main aim of this article is to examine the utopian projects for the revival of civilization and its rescue from negative social and cultural phenomena by the case of the worldwide Enlightenment movement in the second half of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. The main methods are historical and typological, historical and functional, genetic, comparative and typological, system-integrated. The authors prove that the central role of this phenomenon in the development of literary culture in the 18th- 19th centuries is its syncretic directional nature. Based on extensive historical-literary and literarytheoretical material, the authors draw the conclusions about the holistic realism ideology, from the point of view of the dominant concepts of rational/emotional origins, duty/virtue, the extra-class value of the human personality, progress/better promising future. The article outlines the prospects for considering the ideologemes of realism and the Enlightenment in the context of the goals of the so-called traditional culture during its genesis and development. The given article is the first to consider comprehensively the issue of realism as a system in literary culture and social processes of the 1760s-1820s.