He is much concerned with the current moral issue and harshly at the social life of the day.
Tomas Gray
1. His masterpiece, “ Elegy in a Country Churchyard” was published in 1751, the poem once and for all established his fame as the leader of the sentimental poetry of the day especially” the Graveyard School”
2. In his poem, Gray reflects on death, the sorrow of life and the mysteries of human life with a touch of his Personal Melancholy.
3. His poem, as a whole are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or mediation on life, past and present. His poems are characterized by an exquisite sense of form. His style is sophisticated and allusive. His poem are often marked with the trait of a highly artificial diction and a distorted word order.
Romantic Period
1. Major Romantic Points
(1) a rebellion against neo-classicism
(2) express on imagination
(3) priorities been given to passion, emotion and feeling
(4) being close to nature for its purity while the society is corrupting
(5) tremendous interest in something remote in term of space and time
(6) favor of modernism
(7) supremacy of freedom
2 Romantic period began in 1798 with the publication of wordsworth and Coleridge’s lyrical Ballads and have ended in 1852 with Sir Walter Scott’s death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.
3. It was in effect a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason which prevailed from the days of Pope to those of Johnson
1. Jean-Roseau: exploration new idea about Nature, society, Education.
Tomas Paine’s Declaration of Rights of Man.
5 The Romantic Movement expressed a more or less negative attitude the existing social and political conditions that came with industria lization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie.
Thus, we can say that Romanticism actually constitute a change of direction attention to the outerworld of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit
6 Nature: for the most influential 18th-century writers, was more something to be seen than something to be known. But for the Romantics, it is just the opposite. Nature to Wordsworth is a source of mental cleanliness and spiritual understanding.
7 Poetry has been traditionally regarded as an art governed by rules; but for Romantics, Poetry should be free from all rules.
8 Gothic novel: its principal elements are violence, horror and supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader’s emotion.
9 How is Romanticism different from Neoclassicism? Provide brief evidence from the literary works you know best.
a. Neoclassicists upheld that artistic ideals should be order, logic , restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature, should be judged in terms of its service to humanity, and thus, literary expressions should be of proportion, unity, harmony and grace. Pope’s An Essay on Criticism advocates grace, wit ( usually though satire/ humour ), and simplicity in language (and the poem itself is a demonstration of those ideals, too); Fielding’s Tom Jones helped established the form of novel; Gray’s Elegry Written in a country Churchyard” displays elegance in style, unified structure, serious tone and moral instructions.
b. Romanticism tended to see the individual as the very center of all experience, including art, and thus, literary work should be “spontaneous overflow of strong of feeling” and no matter how fragmentary those experience were ( Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” or “The Solitary Reaper,) 0r Coleridge’s “ Keble Khan”), the value of the work link lied in the accuracy of presenting those unique feelings and particular altitude.
c. In a word, Neoclassicism emphasized rationality and form but Romanticism attached great importance to the individual’s mind ( emotion, imagination, temporary experience……….)
William Blake
1 (1) The songs of Innocence is a lovely volume poems, presenting a happy and innocent world, though not without its evil and sufferings.
(2) The songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repress with melancholy tone
(1) The two books hold the similar subject-matter, but the tone, emphasis and conclusion differs.
2 Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell(1790) marks his entry into maturity. The Poem was composed during the change of French Revolution and it plays the double role both as a satire and a revolutionary Prophecy. In this Poem, Blake explain the relationship of the contraries.
“without contraries, there is no progression. The marriage to Blake means the reconciliation of the contraries, not the subordination of the one to the other.
3 Blake writes his poem in plain and direct language ,his poem often carries the lyric beauty with immense compressing of meaning. He distrusts the abstractness and tend to embody his views with visual images, symbolism in wide range is also a distinctive feature of his poetry.
William Wordsworth
1 William Wordsworth, Samuel TAYLOR Coleridge and Robert Southey, the three man known as the “ Lake Poets”
2 Wordsworth is regarded as a “worshiper of nature”
3 Wordsworth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest.
4 Wordsworth see the word freshly, sympathetically and naturally.
5 The most important contributionWordsworth has made is that he has not only started the modern 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 reform to nature.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1 Coledrige’s portion(work) was to deal with supernature thing for he wai more interested insomething remote strange on foreign.
2 Two divers group: the demonic and the conversational
(1) The demonic group: beyond the control of reason. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner “Christabel” “Kuble Khan”
(2) The conversational group: “Frost at Midnight”
3 Coledrige is one of the firstcritics to give close critical affection to language, maintainng that the true end of poetry is to give pleasure “ through the medium of beauty”
4 He was recongnized as alyrical poet and literary critic of the first rank.
His poetic themes range from the supernature to the domestic. His treatises, lectures, and compelling conversational powers made him one of the most influential English literary critics and philosophers of the 19th century.
George Gordon Byron
1 Masterpiece: Don Juan,Childe Herold’s Pilgrimate
‘ I awake one morning and found myself famous
2 Byron invests in Juan the moral positives like courage, generosity and frankness
The unifying principal in Don Juan is the basic ironic theme of appearance and reality.
3 Byron has enriched European poetry with an abundance of ideas, images, artistic forms and innovation.
4Byronic hero
The creation of the Byronic hero is Byron’s chief contribution to English Poetry, such a hero is a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. Passionate and powerful, he is to right all the wrongs in a corrupt society and he would fight single-handely against all the misdoings, political, religious moral. Thus this figure is a rebellious individual social systems and customs. Because Byron’s poetry is one of texperience on the whoel, such a hero is more or less a surrogate of himself, He appears first in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and then further develops in later works such as the “Oriented Tale” “Manfred” and “Don Juan”.
Persy Bysshe Shelley
1 In 1813 he published his first long serious work. Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem.
2 Masterpiece “The Cenci” “Prometheus unbounded”
lyrics: “The Cloud” “To a Skylark” “Adonais”
3 He held a life-long aversion to cruelty, injustice, authority, institutional religion and the formal shames of respectable society, condemning war, tyranny and exploitation.
4 Shelley expressed his love for freedom and his hatred toward tyranny in several of his lyrics such as : Ode to Liberty,” “Ode to Naples,” “ Sonnet: England in 1819” and so on.
5Best of all the well known lyric pieces is his “Ode to the west wine” it is rhapsodic and declamatory.
6Shelley’s style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figure of speech which describe vividly what we see and feel, or express what passionately moves us.
John Keats
1. Work: Limia, Isabella, The Eve of St.Agne
2. The Odes are generally regarded as Keats’s most important and mature works.
Ode on Melancholy, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Psyche
3. Keats’s poetry is always sensuous, colorful and rich in imagery, which expresses the actuelness of his senses , sights, sound, scent, taste and felling are all taken in to give an entire understanding of an experience of others either human or animal.
4. His realization of the empathetic power of the imagination is of the greatest consequence to his work and is a faculty which, as his thought and technique matured, leads him to his most profound insights. Keats’s poetry, characterized by exact and closely knit construction, sensual description, and by force of imagination, gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.
Jane Austen
Works : Pride and Prejudice. Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey
As a realistic writer, she considers it her duty to express in her works a discriminated and serious criticism of life, and to express the follies and illusions of mankind. She shows contemptuous feelings towards snobbery, stupidity, worldliness and vulgarity through subtle satire and irony. And in style, she is a neoclassicism advocator, upholding those traditional ideals of order, reason, proportion and gracefulness in novel writing.
The Victorian Period
1. The Victorian Period roughly coincides with the reign of Queen Victorian from 1836 to 1901, the most glorious in the English history.
2 Towards the mid-19th century,, England had reached its highly point of development as a world power.
3 Darwin’s The origin of species and The Descent of Man shook theoretical basic of traditional faith. Utilitarianism was widely accepted and practiced . In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging experiences of progress thought
4 Famous novelists like Charles Dickens , William Makepeace Thackery, Charlotte Bronte , Emily Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and Anthony Trollope.
5 Victorian literature has the high-spirted vitality, the down-to-earth earnestness , the good-natured humor and unbounded imagination are all unprecedented
Charles Dickens
1 Dickens is one of the greatest critical realist writers of the Victorian Age
2 In language, he is often compared with Shakespeare for his adeptness with the vernacular and large vocabulary with which he brings out many a wonderful verbal picture of man and scene.
3 His humor and wit seem inexhaustible, character- portrayal is the most distinguished feature of his work.
4His best-depicted characters, are those innocent , virtuous , persecuted helpless child characters.
自考英语本科《英美文学选读》英美文学复习笔记整理
