自考英美文学选读_TheRomanticPeriod.ppt

English Romanticism English Romanticism ,as a historical phase of literature ,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 Historical and Cultural background 　During this period, England had experienced profound economic and social changes. The biggest social change in English history was the transfer of large masses of the population from the countryside to the towns. As a result of the Enclosures and the agricultural mechanization, the peasants were driven of their land； some emigrated to the colonies； some sank to the level of farm laborers and many others drifted to the industrial towns where there was a growing demand for labor. But the new industrial towns were no better than jungles, where the law was the survival of the fittest. The cruel economic exploitation caused large-scale workers disturbances in England. The Romantic views about literature 　a. 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. The Romantic period is also a great age of prose. The two major novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen and Walter Scott. 　　c. Besides poetry and prose, there are quite a number of writers who have fried their hand at poetic dramas in this period. The Romantic Movement It expressed a more or less negative attitude towards the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. The Romantics felt that the existing society denied people their essential human needs, so they demonstrated a strong reaction against the dominant modes of thinking of the 18th-century writers and philosophers. Where their predecessors