《英美文学选读》英国文学The Neoclassical Period.docVIP

PART ONE：ENGLISH LITERATUREChapter 2 The Neoclassical Period 　　概述：　　一、关于新古典主义时期 　　（一）新古典主义时期的标志　　Neoclassical period：Between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798.　　（二）新古典主义时期的社会背景 　　The English society of the neoclassical period was a turbulent one; conflicts and divergence of values.　　1.The Great London Fire: destroyed a large part of the city, leaving two-thirds of the population homeless.　　2.The Great Plague: took 70,000 lives in London alone in 1665.　　3.The great political and social events: the Restoration of king Charles in 1660.　　4.The Glorious Revolution: King James was replaced by his protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William, Duke of Orange, in 1689.　　5.There was constant strife 　　（1）between the monarch and the parliament, 　　（2）between the two big parties: the Tories and the Whigs.　　（3）between the ruling class and the laboring poor.　　6.The opposing religious sects such as the Roman Catholicism, the Anglican Church and the Dissenters.　　（三）18th世纪的英国　　The 18th century saw the fast development of England as a nation.Towards the middle of the 18th, it had been come the work-shop of the world, her manufactured goods flooding foreign markets far and near.　　1.Abroad　　A vast expansion of British colonies in North America, India, the West Indies, and a continuous increase of colonial wealth and trade provided England with a market for which the small-scale hand production methods of the home industry were hardly adequate, this created a steady demand for British goods and standardized goods.　　2.Home　　Acts of Enclosure were putting more land into fewer privileged rich landowners and forcing thousands of small farmers and tenants off land to become wage earners in industrial towns.　　This coming together of free labor from the home and free capital gathered or plundered from the colonies was th