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Sentimentalism and Pre-romanticism Sentimentalism is one of the important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the 18th century. ????? Along with a new vision of love, sentimentalism presented a new view of human nature which prized feeling over thinking, passion over reason, and personal instincts of pity, tenderness, and benevolence over social duties. ????? Literary work of the sentimentalism, marked by a sincere sympathy for the poverty-stricken, expropriated peasants, wrote the simple annals of the poor”. ? Writers of sentimentalism justly criticized the cruelty of the capitalist relations and the gross social injustices brought about by the bourgeois revolutions. But they attacked the progressive aspect of this great social change in order to eliminate it and sighed for the return of the patriarchal times which they idealized. ????? ?Sentimentalism embraces a pessimistic outlook and blames reason and the Industrial Revolution for the miseries and injustices in the aristocratic-bourgeois society and? indulges in sentiment, hence the definite signs of decadence in the literary works of the sentimental tradition. Pre-romanticism A general term applied by modern literary historians to a number of developments in late 18th‐century culture that are thought to have prepared the ground for romanticism in its full sense. It covers the years from approximately the middle of the eighteenth century to the early 1790s. In this period rigid notions about style and the absolute authority of religion and science began to yield to an emphasis on personal thoughts and feelings, the search for meaning, to the probing of the mind and a focus on the inner self, and to an individual, personal interpretation of the world. Robert Burns; William Blake William Blake(1757-1827) 1. His life Throughout his life, Blake had been both a poet and an engraver. He strongly criticized the capitalists’ cruel exploitation, and cherish