英美文学选读(英国)浪漫主义时期笔记

Chapter 3 The Romantic Period

1. The Romantic Period: The Romantic period is the period 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. It is emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind.

2.Social background:

a. during this period, England itself had experienced profound economic and social changes. The primarily agricultural society had been replaced by a modern industrialized one.

b. With the British Industrial Revolution coming into its full swing, the capitalist class came to dominate not only the means of production, but also trade and world market.

3.The Romantic Movement: it expressed a more or less negative attitude toward the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoise. The romantics demontrated a a strong reaction against the dominant modes of thinking of the 18th-century writers and philosophers. They saw man as an individual in the solitary state. Thus, the Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit.

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. Wordsworth and Coleridge were the major representatives of this movement. Wordsworth defines the poet as a “man speaking to men”, and poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Imagination, defined by Coleridge, is the vital faculty that creates new wholes out of disparate elements. The Romantics not only extol the faculty of imamgination, but also elevate the concepts of spontaneity and inspiration, regarding them as something crucial for true poetry. The natural world comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Nature is not only the major source of the poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject mattre. It is in solitude, in communion with the natural universe, that man can exercise this most valuable of faculties.

Romantics also tend to be nationalistic, defending the great poets and dramatists of their own national heritage against the advocates of classical rules.

Poetry: to the Romantics, poetry should be free from all rules.they would turn to the humble people and the common everyday life for subjects.

Prose: It’s also a great age of prose. With education greatly developed for the middle-class people, there was a rapid growth in the reading public and an increasing demand for reading materials.Romantics made literary comments on the writers with high standards, which paved the way for the development of a new and valuable type of critical writings. Colerige, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey were the leading figures in this new development.

Novel: the 2 major novelists of the period are Jane Austen and Walter Scott.

Gothic novel: a tyoe of romantic fiction that predominated in the late 18th century, was one of the Romantic movement. Its principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader’s emotion. With is description of the dark, irritional side of human nature, the Gothic form exerted a great influence over the writers of the Romantic period.

3. Ballads: the most important form of popular literature; flourished during the 15th century; Most written down in 18th century; mostly written in quatrains; Most important is the Robin Hood ballads.

4. Romanticism: it is romanticism is a literary trend. It prevailed in England during the period of 1798-1832. Romanticists were discontent with and opposed to the development of capitalism. They split into two groups.

Some Romantic writers reflected the thinking of those classes which had been ruined by the bourgeoisie called Passive Romantic poets represented by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey.

Others expressed the aspiration of the labouring classes called Active or Revolutionary Romantic poets represented by Byron and Shelley and Keats.

5. Lake Poets:Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey have often been mentioned as the “Lake Poets” because they lived in the Lake District in the northwestern part of England

6. Byronic Hero a proud, mysterious rebelling figure of noble origin rights all the wrongs in a corrupt society, and is against any kind of tyrannical rules; It appeared first in Childe H arold’s Pilgrimage and then further developed in later works as the Oriental Tales, Manfred and Don Juan; the figure is somewhat modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself, and makes Byron famous both at home and abroad.

7. Main Writers:

A. William Blake(1757-1827):

1. Literarily, Blake was the first important Romantic poet, showing a comtempt for the rule of reason, opposing the calssical tradition of the 18th century,and treasuring the individual’s imagination.

2. His first printed work, Poetic Skelches, is a collection of youthful verse. Joy, laughter, love and harmony are the prevailing notes.

3. The Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of of poems, presenting a happy and innocent world, though not without its evils and sufferings. The wretched child described in “The Chimney Sweeper,”orphaned, exploited, yet touched by visionary rapture, evokes unbearable poignancy when he finally puts his trust in the order of the universe as he knows it. Blake experimented in meter and rhyme and introduced bold metrical innovations which could not be found in the poetry of his contemporaries.

4. The Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a malancholy tone. The little chinmney sweeper sings “notes of woe” while his parents go to the church and praise “God & his Priest & King”—the very intrument of their repression. A number of poems in the Songs of Experience also find a counterpart in the Songs of Experience. The 2 books hold the similar subject-matter, but the tone, emphasis and conclusion differ.

5. Childhood is central to Blake’s concern in the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience, and this concern gives the 2 books a strong social and historical reference. The two “Chimney Sweeper”poems are good examples to reveal the relation between an economic ciecumstance, i.e. the exploitation of child labor, and an ideological circumstance, i.e. the role played by religion in making people compliant to exploitation. The poem from the Songs of Innocence indicates the conditions which make religion a consolation, a prospect “illusionary happiness;”the poem from the Songs of Experience reveals the nature of religion which helps bring misery to the poor children.

6. Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell marks his entry into maturity. The poem plays the double role both as a satire and a revolutionary prophecy. Blake explores the relationship of the contrries. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence. The “Marriage”means the reconciliation of the contraries, not the subordination of the one to the other.

Main works: Poetical Sketches

Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of poems

Holy Thursday reminds us terribly of a world of loss and institutional cruelty.

Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a melancholy tone.

Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The book of Urizen

The Book of Los

The Four Zoas

Milton

7. Language Character: he writes his poems in plain and direct language. His poems often carry the lyric beauty with immense compression of meaning. He distrusts the abstractness and tends to embody his views with visual images. Symbolism in wide range is also a distinctive feature of his poetry.

B. William Wordsworth(1770-1850) In 1842 he received a government pension, and in the following year he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate.

Lyrical Ballads:

But the Lyrical Ballads differs in marked ways from his early poetry, notably the uncompromising simplicity of much of the language, the strong sympathy not merely with the poor in general but with particular, dramatized examples of them, and the fusion of natural description with expressions of inward states of mind.

Short poems:

According to the subjects, Wordsworth’s short poems can be calssified into two groups: poems about nature and poems about human life.

Wordsworth is regarde as a “worshipper of nature.”He can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the very life of nature. “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”is perhaps the most anthologized poem in english literature, and one that takes us to the core of Wordsworth’s poetic beliefs. It’s nature that gives him “strength and knowledge full of peace.”

Wordswoth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. “The Solitary Reaper” and “To a Highland Girl” use rural figures to suggest the timeless mystery of sorrowful humanity and its radiant beauty. In its daring use of subject matter and sense of the authenticity of the experience of the poorest, “Resolution and Independence ” is the triumphant conclusion of ideas first developed in the Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. Its beginning finally turns out to be its end. His philosophy of life is presented in his masterpiece The Prelude.

Wordsworth deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and profoud poetry which no othr poet has ever equaled. He maintained that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people were the raw material of which poetry could and should be made.

Main Works:Descriptive Sketches, and Evening Walk

Lyrical Ballads.

The Prelude

Poems in Two Volumes

Ode: Intimations of Immortality

Resolution and Independence.

The Excursion

Poets: The Sparrow’s Nest, To a Skylark, To the Cuckoo, To a Butterfly, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud( is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature.), An Evening Walk, My Heart Leaps up, Tintern Abbey

The Thorn

The sailor’s mother

Michael,

The Affliction of Margaret

The Old Cumberland Beggar

Lucy Poems

The Idiot Boy

Man, the heart of man, and human life.

The Solitary Reaper

To a Highland Girl

The Ruined Cottage

The Prelude

Language character: he can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the very life of nature. And he thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. His sympathy always goes to the suffering poor.

He is the leading figure of the English romantic poetry, the focal poetic voice of the period. His is a voice of searchingly comprehensive humanity and one that inspires his audience to see the world freshly, sympathetically and naturally. The most important contribution he has made is that he has not only started the modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self, but also changed the course of English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a return to nature

C. Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822)he grew up with violent revolutionary ideas, so he held a lifelong aversion to crulty, injusticce, authority, institutional religion and the formal shams of respectable society, condemming war, tyranny and exploitation. He realized that the evil was also in man’s mind. Even after a revolution, that is after the restoration of human morality and creativity, the evil deep in man’s heart might again be loosed. So he predicated that only through gradual and suitable reforms of the existing institutions couls benevolence be universally established and none of the evils would survive in this “genuin society,”where people could live together happily, freely and peacefully.

Shelley expressed his love of freedom and his hatredtoward tyranny in several of his lyrics. One of the greatest political lyrics is “Men of England.” It is not only a war cry calling upon all working people to risse up against their political oppressors, but an address to them pointing out the intolerable injustice of economic exploitation. The poem was later to become a rallying song of the British Comuunist Party.

Best of all the well-known lyric pieces is Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” here Shelley’s rhapsodic and declamatory tendencies find a subject perfectly suited to them. The autumn wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new spring, becoms an image of Shelley himself, as he would want to be, in its freedom, its destructive-constructive potential, its universality. The whole poem had a logic of feeling,a not easily analyzable progression that leads to the triumphant, hopeful and convincing conclusion: if winter comes, can spring be far behind?

Shelley’s greatest achievement is his four-act poetic drama, Prometheus Unbound. The play is an exultant work in praise of humankind’s potential, and Shelley himself recognized it as “the most perfect of my products.”

Main works:The Necessity of Atheism, Queen Mab: a Philosophical Poem, Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude

Poem: Hymn to Intellectual Beauty, Mont Blanc

Julian and Maddalo, The Revolt of Islam, the Cenci, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais, Hellas,

Prose: Defence of Poetry

Lyrics:genuine society,“Ode to Liberty”,“Old to Naples”“Sonnet: England in 1819”, The Cloud, To a Shylark, Ode to the West Wind

Political lyrics: Men of England

Elegy: Adonais is a elegy for John Keats’s early death

Terza rima

Personal Characters: he grew up with violent revolutionary ideas under the influence of the free thinkers like Hume and Godwin, so he held a life long aversion to cruelty, injustice, authority, institutional religion and

the formal shams of respectable society, condemning war, tyranny and exploitation. He expressed his love for freedom and his hatred toward tyranny in several of his lyrics such as “Ode to Liberty”,“Old to Naples”“Sonnet: England in 1819”

Shelley is one of the leading Romantic poets, and intense and original lyrical poet in the English language. Like Blake, he has a reputation as a difficult poet: erudite, imagistically complex, full of classical and mythological allusions. His style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figures of speech which describe vividly what we see and feel. Or express what passionately moves us.

D: Jane Austen(1755-1817): born in a country clergyman’s family:

Main Works:

Novel: Sense and Sensibility

Pride and Prejudice(the most popular)

Northanger Abbey

Mansfield Park

Emma

Persuasion

The Watsons

Fragment of a Novel

Plan of a Novel

Personal Characters: she holds the ideals of the landlord class in politics, religion and moral principles; and her works show clearly her firm belief in the predominance of reason over passion, the sense of responsibility, good manners and clear—sighted judgment over the Romantic tendencies of emotion and individuality.

Her Works’ Characters: his works’s concern is about human beings in their personal relationships. Because of this, her novels have a universal significance. It is her c onviction that a man’s relationship to his wife and children is at least as important a part of his life as his concerns about his belief and career. Her thought is that if one wants to know about a man’s talents, one should see him at work, but if one wan ts to know about his nature and temper, one should see him at home. Austen shows a human being not at moments of crisis, but in the most trivial incidents of everyday life. She write within a very narrow sphere. The subject matter, the character range, the social setting, and plots are all restricted to the provincial life of the late 18th century England. Concerning three or four landed gentry families with their daily routine life.

Her novels’ structure is exquisitely deft, the characterization in the hig hest degree memorable, while the irony has a radiant shrewdness unmatched elsewhere. Her works’ at one delightful and profound, are among the supreme achievements of English literature. With trenchant observation and in meticulous details, she presents the quiet, day-to-day country life of the upper-middle-class English.

G: Questions and answers:

1. what are the characteristics of the Romantic literature? Please discuss the above question in relation to one or two examples.

a. in poetry writing, the romanticists employed new theories and innovated new techniques, for example, the preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads acts as a manifesto for the new school.

b. the romanticists not only extol the faculty of imagination, but also elevate the concepts of spontaneity and inspiration.

c. they regarded nature as the major source of poetic imagery and the dominant subject.

d. romantics also tend to be nationalistic.

2.Make a contrast between the two generations of Romantic poets during the Romantic Age

The poetic ideals announced by Wordsworth and Coleridge provided a major inspiration for the brilliant young writers who made up the second generation of English Romantic poets. Wordsworth and Coleridge both became more conservative politically after the democratic idealism. The second generation of Romantic poets are revolutionary in thinking. They set themselves against the bourgeois society and the ruling class.

3.what are Austen’s writing features?

Jane Austen is one of the realistic novelists. Aust en’s work has a very narrow literary field. Her novels show

a wealth of humor, wit and delicate satire.

4. what is the historical and cultural background of English Romanticism?

a. Historically, it was provoked by the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution.

b. Culturally, the publication of French philosopher Rousseau’s two books provided necessary guiding principles for the French Revolution which aroused great sympathy and enthusiasm in England;

c. England experienced profound economic and social changes: the enclosure movement and the agricultural mechanization; the capitalist class grasped the political power and came to dominate the English society.

H. topic discussion:

1. Discuss the artistic features of Shelley’s poems.

A. Percy Bysshe Shelly is an intense and original lyrical poet in the English language.

B. His poems are full of classical and mythological allusions.

C. His style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figures of speech

D. He describes vividly what we see and feel, or expresses what passionately moves us.

2. What does Wordsworth mean when he said “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility”?

This sentence is considered as the principle of Wordsworth’s poetry c reation which was set forth in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth appealed directly on individual sensations, as the foundation in the creation and appreciation of poetry.

3. How do you describe the writing style of Jane Austen? What is the significance of her works?

Jane Austen is a writer of the 18th century through she lived mainly in the 19th century. She holds the ideals of the landlord class in politics, religion, and moral principles. Austen’s main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships. Austen defined her stories within a very narrow sphere.