英美文学课总结英美文学课总结.docVIP

English Romanticism English Romanticism begins in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads and ends in 1832 with Walter Scott’s death. William Blake and Robert Burns also belong to this literary genre, though they live prior to the Romantic period. English Romanticism is a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason. The French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution exert great influence on English Romanticism. The romanticists express a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions. They place the individual at the center of art, as can be seen from Lord Byron’s Byronic Hero. The key words of English Romanticism are nature and imagination. English Romantic tend to be nationalistic, defending the greatest English writers. They argue that poetry should be free from all rules. Lake poets Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were known as Lake Poets because they lived and knew one another in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England. The former two published The Lyrical Ballads together in 1798, while all three of them had radical inclinations in their youth but later turned conservative and received pensions and poet laureateships from the aristocracy. Karl Marx likes Byron and Shelley very much. MU Dan（穆旦/查良铮），a renowned Chinese poet and translator , did splendid work to popularize Byron and Shelley in China. Other greatest Romantic poets are: John Keats, P.B. Shelley and G. G. Byron. Years ago, Wordsworth and Coleridge were labeled “negative romantic poets” while Byron and Shelley were hailed as “positive (revolutionary) Romantic poets”. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s literary achievements were underestimated for a long time. Feminist works Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Gothic novel is a type of romantic fiction that predominates in the late 18th century and continues t