1. 时间界定
English Romanticism is generally said to have begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott’s death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.
2. 文化思想背景:
A. The ideas of Rousseau: Rousseau published two books that electrified Europe – Du Contrat Social and Emile, in which he explored new ideas about Nature, Society and Education. After that,
Patriotic clubs societies multiplied in England, all claiming Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
B. The literary sources: The Romantic Movement expressed a more or less negative attitude toward the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie.
C. The differences between neoclassicism and Romanticism:
a. Where their predecessors saw man as a social animal, the Romantics saw him essentially as an individual in the solitary state.
b. Where the Augustans emphasized those features that men have in common the Romantics emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind.
D. The literary views:
a. Romanticism constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit.
b. In the theory. It tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and all experience. It also places the individual at the center of art.
3. 文学形式:
A. 诗歌
A). 诗人运动
The Romantic period is an age of poetry. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats are the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution.
B). 诗歌理论
They explored new theories and innovated new techniques in poetry writing. They saw poetry as a healing energy, the believed that poetry could purify both individual souls and the society.
a. Wordsworth’s theory of poetry is calling for simple themes drawn from humble life. He defines the poet as a “man speaking to men,” and poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.
b. Imagination, defined by Coleridge, is the vial faculty that creates new wholes out of disparate elements. The Romantics not only extol the faculty of imagination, but also elevate the concepts of spontaneity and inspiration, regarding them as something crucial for true poetry.
c. The natural world comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject matter.
d. To escape from a world. Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey chose to live by the lakeside so as to escape from the “madding crowd,” while Byron and Shelley rejected the entire English society by their self-imposed exile.
e. Romantics also tend to be nationalistic.
B. 散文
The Romantic period is also a great age of prose. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey were the leading figures.
A). William Hazlitt is a great critic on Shakespeare, Elizabethan drama, and English poetry. His last book is a four-volume Life of Napoleon.
B). Charles Lamb is a lovable essayist. Lamb’s Essays of Elia is a good work that leads to a delightful interpretation of the life of London.
C). De Quincey is one of the keenest intellects of the age. The great literary merit of his Confessions of an English Opium Eater lies in his subtle revelation of the potentiality of human dreams.
C. 小说
A). Austen is of the 18th-century in her moral outlook. Her view of life is a totally realistic one. The major theme of her novels is love and marriage.
B). After establishing himself as a writer of romantic historical narrative poetry, Scott switched to novel writing. Waverley, Old Martality, The Heart of Midlothian, Rob Roy, and Ivanhoe are among the most popular ones of his novels. He is the first major historical novelist.
C). Gothic novel:
a. Nature:
Gothic novel, a type of romantic fiction that predominated in the late eighteenth century, was one phase of the Romantic movement.
b. Subject matters:
Its principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural.
c. Works:
Works like The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley are typical Gothic romance.
D. 戏剧
Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, Byron’s Manfred and Coleridge’s Remorse are generally regarded as the best verse plays during this period.
4. 主要作家及作品
5. 浪漫主义时期/ The Romantic Period
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