The-Romantic Literature

Romantic

Movement
Brief account:
* It start from a number of scholars who showed a great interest in the Middle Age, an age known to the posterity（子孙） for its suppression of human significance and for the monastery（修道院） monopoly（垄断） of learning to keep common people ignorant.
* Literature in the second half of the century shifted from paying attention to human fates and social problems to searching the meaning of life and death, from exploring human nature（人性）, philosophy of human cognition（人生观）, etc., to experiencing and praising nature.
*In the mid-18th-century England, however, tow important works on the literature of the Middle Age appeared. They are Letters on Chivalry and Romance(1762) by Richard Hurd 理查德· 赫德(1720-1808) and Reliques of Ancient English Poetry(1765) by Thomas Percy托马斯· 珀西(1729-1811).Together with other poets, their efforts joined to create a fever in the last quarter of century for medieval culture and literature and laid a foundation for the emergence of the Gothic Novel.
These
poetry are lyrical poems called topographical(地形学的) poetry and are serious in attitude, solemn in tone, and romantic in content. They share something else in common too, that is the poets all acquire inspiration from the natural world around them. Some poets use blank verse（素体诗）, some the Spenserian stanza（斯宾塞诗体）, and some others choose the sonnet form（十四行 诗）. All of them seek new and varied forms and set presentation of feelings as the chief goal.
Chapter 10
Pre-Romantic Literature
Ⅰ.Background Knowledge About Literature at the Turn of the Century 1.A Brief Account of the Historical Situation
*Neoclassicism that upheld reason and emphasized the ancient Greek and Roman classic models had its heyday in the first half of the 18th century. Towards the mid-century popular culture and literature flourished with the growth of cities, the bourgeois class and the book market.

Turning into the 19th century, two poets also marked themselves as bearing the romantic strain.
Robert Burns 罗伯特· 彭斯 (1759―1796)
William Blake威廉· 布莱克 （1757―1Βιβλιοθήκη Baidu27）
2.Chief Literary Achievements of the Period

In the second half of the century poets such as Thomson, Collins and Grey appeared. They wrote poems different from those of heroic couplets written by Pope.
*New genres of literature such as novels, travelogues（游记）, memoirs（回忆录）, life stories, ghost stories, conduct books, manuals(参考书), guide books（指南） and so on were produced in considerable numbers.
*It was under such a circumstance, which replaced the mechanical（无意识的） classic rules of writing with subjective preference in form and content. And this tendency showed itself first and most clearly in the poetry of nature and then in the Gothic fiction which we categorize here as pre-romantic literature.