Unit Seven Romanticism and Robert Burns.doc

Unit Seven Romanticism and Robert Burns Warming-up 常识预习1. How much do you know about Romanticism? What are the major characteristics of Romanticism?2. Do you know of any famous Romantic poets? Do you like reading love poems?3. Who is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide?4. Are you familiar with this sentence My loves like a red red rose? How do you like it?5. John Steinbeck took the title of his 1937 novel Of Mice and Men from a line contained in the second-to-last stanza of “To a Mouse”. Have you ever seen the movie based on this novel before?6. Have you heard of these two people, Wordsworth and Coleridge?Lecturette专题讲座 Romanticism and Robert BurnsRomanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied in the visual arts, music, and literature. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, and argued for a “natural” epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic