the renaissance 文艺复兴时英国文学

Renaissance(14th—mid 17th

-It’s the rebirth of Greek and Roman cultures. It sprang first in Italy in the 14th century and gradually spread all over Europe. Two features are striking of this movement. One is the thirst for the classical literature and the other is the keen interest in life and human activities.

The Renaissance

A thirsty curiosity for classical literature.Old manuscripts were dug out. There arose a general revival of the study of Greek and Latin authors.. While people learned to admire their works as models of literary form they also caught something very different in spirit from the medieval Catholic dogma.

So the love of classics was in fact also an expression of the general dissatisfaction with the Catholic and feudal ideas.

B. The keen interest in life and human activities. People ceased to look upon themselves as living only for God and a future world. Thinkers, artists, and poets showed their admiration for human beauty and human achievements. So arose humanism—the key-note of the Renaissance, reflecting the new outlook of the rising bourgeois class. Ideas: both man and the world are hindered from infinite improvement by external checks; man could mould the world according to his desires, and attain happiness by removing all external checks by the exercise of human intellect.

The Chief Characteristics of the Background of the Renaissance

This is a greatest and most advanced revolution in the human history. This is the age the giants are needed and produced ------F. Engles

Here from Engels’analysis we may see the chief characteristics of the Renaissance: (1)Politically the feudal nobility lost their power and with the establishment of the great monarchies there was the centralization of power necessary for the development of the bourgeoisie;

(2)The Catholic Church was either substituted by Protestantism as a result of the so-called Reformation (as in Germany and England) or weakened in its dictatorship over men’s minds (as in Italy and France and Spain);

(3)Geographical discoveries opened up colonial expansion and trade routes to distant parts of the world and brought back gold and silver and other wealth and also broadened men’s mental horizons;

(4) In the countryside the peasants were terribly exploited and they either rose in uprisings or ran away and flocked to the cities and added to the proletariat there; (5) In the cities the merchants and the master artisans grew in wealth and in power and became the bourgeoisie while handicraft turned gradually into manufacture and the modern proletariat sprang up among the employed workers in the factories; and finally,

(6) Culturally, as the interest in God and in the life after death was transformed into the exaltation of man and an absorption in earthly life and as materialistic philosophy and scientific thought gradually replaced the church dogmas and religious mysticism of the Middle Ages, a totally new culture rose out of the revival of the old culture of