Thomas Gray and Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard lhy墓园派诗人托马斯格雷.ppt

Sentimentalism In the first half of the 18th century, Pope was the leader of English poetry and the heroic couplet the fashion of poetry. By the middle of the century, however, sentimentalism gradually made its appearance. Sentimentalism came into being as the result of a bitter discontent among the enlightened people with social reality. The representatives of sentimentalism continued to struggle against feudalism, but they sensed at the same time the contradictions in the process of capitalist development. Dissatisfied with reason, which classicists appealed to, sentimentalists appealed to sentiment, to the human heart. Sentimentalism turned to the countryside for its material, and so is in striking contrast to classicism, which had confined itself to the clubs and drawing-rooms, and to the social and political life of London. Sentimentalist Fiction Sentimentalist fiction was engraved on psychoanalysis of human mind. Sentimentalism also finds its voice in English fiction (Richardson; Goldsmith; Sterne). The representative writers are: Samuel Richardson, the author of Pamela; Laurence Stern, the author of Tristram Shandy and Oliver Goldsmith, the author of The Vicar of Wakefield. Sentimentalism in English Poetry The appearance and development of sentimentalist poetry marks the midway in the transition from classicism to its opposite, Romanticism, in English poetry. Thomas Gray was the most widely read sentimentalist poet, whose Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard established his reputation as the spokesman of Graveyard School. Biographical Introduction Thomas Gray :son of a London exchange broker, born in Cornhill, London on 26 December, 1716. He was first educated at Eton, where he befriended Horace Walpole, author of the famous Gothic novel The Old Castle of Otranto (1764) and Richard West whose early death in 1742 caused him years of deep grief. In 1734 he went to Cambridge University and left it in 1738 without taking a degree. From 1739 to 1741 he toured