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

PART ONE：ENGLISH LITERATUREChapter 3 The Romantic Period 　　The main writers：　　根据新大纲，本章节考核的主要作家为：　　a. William Blake　　b. William Wordsworth　　c. Percy Bysshe Shelley　　d. Jane Austen　　概　述　　（一）标志　　It is a broad movement that affected the whole of Europe, begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridges Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Walter Scotts death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.　　（二）社会经济、文化和政治背景　　国际：　　This urgency was provoked by two important revolutions: the French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution which happened more slowly, but with astonishing consequences.　　Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher, was one of the leading thinkers I the second half of the 18th century. In 1762 he published two books that electrified Europe-Du Contrat Social and Emile, in which he explored new ideas about Nature, Society and Education.　　These ideas of Rousseau have provided necessary guiding principles for the French revolution, for they inspired an implacable resentment against the tyrannical rule in France and an immense hope for the future.　　In 1789 there broke out the epoch-making French Revolution. The news of the revolution, especially the Declaration of Rights of Man and the storming of Bastille, aroused great sympathy and enthusiasm in the English liberals and radicals.　　Patriotic clubs and societies multiplied in England, all claiming Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.　　Thomas Paines Declaration of Rights of Man is the most effective one. Paine had been in France during the revolution, and demonstrated conclusively that by 1789 France was so enmeshed in oppression and misery that nothing short of revolution could set her free.　　If law and government appeared to some contemporaries as one system of injustice, conventional gender roles were another, for women had long been regarded as inferior to men.　　Later when Jacobeans took over power in France and started to pu