浪漫主义时期历史背景及诗人简介

浪漫主义时期（1798-1832）

历史背景：

Political and social factors:

1. The American and French revolution: an upsurge of national liberation and democratic movements

American revolution (1775-1783)—The formation of the independent United States.

French revolution of 1789—“Liberty, equality and fraternity”

2. The Industrial Revolution

Effect：1. One of the main effects of the rapid and vast economic changes was the urbanization of the growing population.

2. The conditions of the working poor in the cities was intolerable.

3. There were children working in dark, dangerous factories.

4. The working classes and the poor lived in polluted, congested slums. Mass epidemics like typhoid fever afflicted the slums. The romantics, the liberals, the socialists, the anarchists and the communists all emerged with their ideologies at this point in history to criticize these man-made horrors.

3. The Luddite movement （工人运动）

思想文化背景:

1.Rousseau 卢梭(page 2)—the father of romanticism

2.—To rely on feelings, to follow the instincts and emotions.

3.—Return to nature。

4.Edmund Burke 埃德蒙伯克( Page 2)

5.—Reflection on the Revolution in France (1790)《法国革命感想》

6.Thomas Paine 托马斯潘恩(page 3)

7.—Rights of Man (1791)

浪漫主义简介：

+It was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.

+Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.

+ It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural sciences.

+ Its effect on politics was considerable and complex; while for much of the peak Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, in the long term its effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more significant.

+The term was used in Germany and France at the end of 18th and beginning of 19th

C to classify a new movement in literature, especially in poetry.

浪漫主义时期代表人物共同特征：

(1) They cultivated imaginative freedom, though in very various ways, and this encouraged them to use a variety of sometimes very loose poetic forms.

(2) Each of them tended to express the feelings of man in solitude as opposed to those of man in society.

(3) They shared a tendency to be "inward turning" rather than outward-looking.

(4) All, except perhaps Blake, responded vividly to nature and the natural and uncivilized way of life..

(5) They tended to use language with more freedom and information than the 18th C poets, and emphasize the need for spontaneity in thought and action and in the expression of thought.

(6) They were all, but in different ways, profoundly affected by the great historical fact of the French Revolution, and by its various immediate consequences, especially the career of Napoleon; Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge began as warm revolutionary sympathizers, but the Napoleonic wars caused Blake to withdraw and turned the other two into convinced conservatives.

(7) All of them exalted the individual genius.

General characteristic features of the romantic movement（）

1. Subjectivism

2. Spontaneity

3. Singularity

4. Simplicity: everyday language spoken by the rustic people

5. A dominating note of melancholy

6. A freer verse form

浪漫主义诗人派别:

https://www.360docs.net/doc/4111494174.html,ke poet—the passive or escapist romanticists: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey

—detesting the real world, escaping from the reality.

2.Active or radical romanticists: Byron, Shelley, Keats

3.—striving to strengthen man’s will to live and raise him up against the darkness in the

world.

4.

Principles of poetry

1 Subjects:

1). The great subjects of poetry are “essential passions of the heart” and “the great and simple affections.”(Preface to Lyrical Ballads(2nd ed.)).

2). Incidents and situations from common life

2. Source of poetry: feelings

1). “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”

2). Emotion recollected in tranquility

3. Language: “real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” (no poetic diction)

诗人简介：

1．William Wordsworth：

早期经历：

+Both parents had died by the time Wordsworth was 13

+John Wordsworth, his father, was very educated and liberal and encouraged his children to be the same

+Wordsworth’s hometown was in the beautiful Lake District prompting his early love and appreciation of nature, along with imagination

自然和妹妹的影响：

+Believed all individuals have potential to reach a transcendental understanding of nature through his or her relationship with nature

+Believed nature was the glue that binds everything together

+Dorothy, Wordsworth’s sister, was very important to him

–She experienced nature at an early age and her thoughts and impressions influenced Wordsworth.

2.Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

English poet, literary critic and philosopher; a founder of the Romantic Movement in England (with his friend William Wordsworth); a member of the Lake Poets.

He coined many familiar words and phrases, including the celebrated suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence on Emerson, and American transcendentalism.

3.George Gordon Byron

Personal Image:

a leader of the era's poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master;

a worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality;

a deist and freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin;

a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds, giving money,

time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of independence

Writing forms：

satire, verse narrative, ode, lyric, speculative drama, historical tragedy, confessional poetry, dramatic monologue, seriocomic epic, and voluminous correspondence, written in Spenserian stanzas, heroic couplets, blank verse, terza rima, ottava rima, and vigorous prose

terza rima三行诗节押韵法（象旦丁《神曲》中所用的诗体，三行为一节，每节的第二行与下一节的第一、三行押韵）

ottava rima（意）八行体（一种诗体，每行十或十一个音节，前六行交替押韵，后两行另成一组同脚韵）

拜伦式英雄：

Definition：

Byron’s chief contribution to English poetry. Such a hero i s a proud, rebellious figure of

noble origin. Passionate and powerful, he is to right all the wrongs in a corrupt society, and he would fight single-handedly against all the misdoings. Thus this figure is a rebellious individual against outworn social systems and conventions.The Byronic hero first appears in Byron's semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–1818).

Characteristics：

The Byronic hero typically exhibits several of the following traits:

Arrogant

Cunning and able to adapt

Cynical

Disrespectful of rank and privilege

Emotionally conflicted, bipolar, or moody

Having a distaste for social institutions and norms

Having a troubled past or suffering from an unnamed crime

Intelligent and perceptive

4.Percy Bysshe Shelley

Shelley is one of the leading Romantic poets, an intense and original lyrical poet in the English language. He has a reputation as a difficult poet: erudite (learned), complex (difficult), full of classical and mythological allusions. His style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figures of speech.

Shelley loved the people and hated their oppressors and exploiters.

He called on the people to overthrow the rule of tyranny and injustice and prophesied a happy and free life for mankind.

He stood for this social and political ideal all his life.

He and Byron are regarded as the two great poets of the younger generation in English Romanticism.

5.John Keats

Major features of Keats’ poetry

1.Characterized by exact and closely-knit construction, emotional descriptions, and by

force of imagination, gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.

2.Always sensuous, colorful and rich in imagery.

3.Major subjects: love & beauty, suffering & death.

His artistic aim is to create a beautiful world of imagination as opposed to the miserable reality of his day. His leading principle is “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty.”

6.Charles Lamb

Literature career：

Lamb lived under the poetic shadow of his friend Coleridge. In the final years of the

18th century Lamb began to work on prose with the novella entitled Rosamund Gray,

a story of a young girl who was thought to be inspired by Ann Simmonds, with whom

Charles Lamb was thought to be in love. Although the story is not particularly successful as a narrative because of Lamb's poor sense of plot, it was well thought of by Lamb's contemporaries and led Shelley to observe “what a lovely thing is Rosamund Gray! How much knowledge of the sweetest part of our nature in it!”

In the first years of the 19th century Lamb began his fruitful literary cooperation with his sister Mary. Together they wrote at least three books for William Godwin’s Juvenile Library. The most successful of these was of course Tales From Shakespeare.

Works：

Lamb also contributed a footnote to Shakespearean studies at this time with his essay "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare," in which he argues that Shakespeare should be read rather than performed in order to gain the proper effect of his dramatic genius.

Lamb also contributed to the popularization of Shakespeare's contemporaries with his book Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets Who Lived About the Time of Shakespeare.

Although he did not write his first Elia essay until 1820, Lamb’s gradual perfection of the essay form for which he eventually became famous began as early 1802 in a series of open letters to Leigh Hunt’s Reflector. The most famous of these is called "The Londoner" in which Lamb famously derides the contemporary fascination with nature and the countryside.

7.Walter Scott

A Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Popular throughout much of the world during his time

The first English-language author to have a truly international career in his lifetime