英国浪漫主义时期

Chapter III The Romantic Period

（一） 考核知识点

1 浪漫主义时期概述

1） 浪漫主义时期英国社会的政治，经济，文化背景 2） 浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张

3） 英国浪漫主义文学的特色 4） 浪漫主义文学对同时代及后世英国文学的影响

2 浪漫主义时期主要作家的文学创作思想及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，艺术手法及社会意义等。

（二） 考核要求

1 浪漫主义时期概述

1）识记：a.浪漫主义时期的界定 b.历史文化背景

2) 领会：a.浪漫主义思潮的意义与影响。 b.浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张及对后世文学的影响。

3) 应用：a.名词解释：浪漫主义 b.浪漫主义时期文学特点的分析

2 该时期的重要作家

2） 领会：重要作家的创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，社会意义等。

3） 应用：a.浪漫派诗歌（所选作品）的主题，意象分析

b.小说《傲慢与偏见》的主题和主要人物的性格分析。

1. 一般识记 English Romanticism

English Romanticism is generally said to have began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott's death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.

2. 识记 Historical and Cultural background

During this period, England had experienced profound economic and social change. The biggest social change in English history was the transfer of large number of the population from the countryside to the towns. As a result of the Enclosures（圈地运动） and the agricultural mechanization（农业机械化）, the peasants were driven of their land,it caused large-scale workers' disturbances in England.

3 领会

（1） Influences of the Romantic Movement

Romanticism constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit. In essence it designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the center of all life and all experience. It also places the individual at the center of art, making literature most valuable as an expression of man’s unique feelings and particular attitudes and in describing the individual's experiences.

(2) The Romantic views about literature

a. The Romantic period is an age of poetry. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats are the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical

literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution.

b. The Romantic period is also a great age of prose. The two major novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen and Walter Scott.

c. Besides poetry and prose, some writers have tried to write poetic dramas in this period.

4 应用 (1) Literary Terms

a. The Romantic Movement

It expressed a more or less negative attitude towards the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. The Romantics felt that the existing society denied people their essential human needs, so they get rid of the dominant modes of thinking of the 18th-century writers and philosophers.The Romantics saw man essentially as an free and independent individual and emphasized the special qualities of each individual's mind. Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from attention to ….(接上浪漫主义运动的影响)

b. The Gothic novel

It is a type of romantic fiction that predominated in the late 18th century and was one phase of the Romantic movement, its principal elements are violence, horror and the supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader's emotion. With its descriptions of the dark, irrational side of human nature, the Gothic form has a great influence to the writer of the Romantic period. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley are typical Gothic romance.

(2) Characteristics of Romantic literature in English history.

The Romantic period is an age of poetry. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge were the major representatives of this movement. They explored new theories and innovated new techniques in poetry writing. They saw poetry as a healing energy which could purify both individual souls and the society. The Romantics not only praise the imagination, but also stress the concept of spontaneity and inspiration, regarding them as something important for true poetry. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject matter.Wordsworth is the closest to nature. To escape from a rational world that had became materialistic and ugly, the Romantics would turn to other times and places, where the qualities they valued could be convincingly depicted. Romantics also tend to be nationalistic, defending the great poets and dramatists of their own national against the advocates of classical rules who tended to glorify Rome,Italian and French neoclassical art. To the Romantics, poetry should be free from all rules. Romantic writers are always seeking for the absolute and ideal through the transcendence of the actual. They have also made bold experiments in poetic language, versification and design, and constructed a variety of forms on original principles of structure and style.

I. William Blake

English poet ,artist and philosopher, 1757-1827. Blake is the earliest major English Romantic poets. His poems range from lyrics of childlike simplicity to mystical or prophetic(预言的) works of great complexity. As an artist he is best known for his engravings(雕刻).

2. 识记 His political, religious and literary views

Blake never tried to fit into the world,he was a rebel innocently and completely all his life. He was politically of the permanent left, Blake strongly criticized the capitalists' cruel exploitation,

meanwhile he had great expectations and enthusiasm for the French Revolution. Literarily Blake was the first important Romantic poet, showing contempt for the rule of reason, opposing the classical tradition of the 18th century and treasuring the individual's imagination.

3. 领会 His poems

(1) Early works

The Songs of Innocence<天真之歌> His Songs of Experience <经验之歌>

Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell《天堂与地狱的结合》marks his entry into maturity. The poem was composed during the climax of the French Revolution and it plays the double role both as a satire and a revolutionary prophecy. In this poem, Blake explores the relationship of the contraries. Life is a continual conflict of give and take, of good and evil, of innocence and experience, of body and soul. “Without contraries,” Blake states, “there is no progression.”

(2) Later works

In his later period, Blake wrote quite a few prophetic books, which reveal him as the prophet of universal political and spiritual freedom and show the poet himself as the

spokesman of revolt. The major ones are: The Book of Urizen(尤莱森之书),The Book of Los(洛斯之书). And Milton (弥尔顿).

4.领会 Characteristics of Blake’s poems

Blake declare that “ I know that this world is a world of imagination and Vision,” and that “The Nature of my work is visionary or imaginative.” As an imaginative poet, he presents his view in visual images instead of abstract terms. Blake writes his poems in plain and direct

language. His poems often carry the lyric beauty with immense compression of meaning. He distrusts the abstractness and tends to embody his views with visual images. Symbolism in wide range is also a feature of his poetry.

5. 应用 Select Readings:

1) The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Innocence)天真之歌

Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy and innocent world, though not without its evils and sufferings. For example, “ Holy Thursday” with its vision of charity children lit “ with a radiance all their own” reminds us a world of loss and institutional cruelty. The poor child described in “ The Chimney Sweeper,” evokes unbearable poignancy when he finally puts his trust in the order of the universe as he knows it. In this volume, Blake, with his eager quest for new poetics forms and techniques, broke completely with the traditions of the 18th century. He experimented in meter(音步) and rhymes（尾韵）and introduced bold metrical innovations which could not be found in the poetry of his contemporaries.

In the 18th century, small boys sometimes no more than 4 or 5 years old, were employed to climb up the narrow chimney flues and clean them, collecting the soot in bags. Such boys, sometimes sold to the master sweepers by their poor parents .This poem, in fact, is a protest against the harm that society does to its children by exploiting them for labor of this kind, The poem was written in the child's-eye point of view, and the dramatic irony (what the speaker says in the poem is different from what the poet means) arises from the poet's knowing more or seeing more than the child does.

2) The Chimney Sweeper (from songs of Experience<经验之歌>)

His Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war

and repression with a melancholy tone. England becomes the world of the dark wood and hopeless. In \"London\despair. The poem selected here reveals the true nature of religion which helps bring misery to the poor children. The poem also reveals the relation between are economic circumstance, i.e. the exploitation of child labor and an ideological circumstance, i.e. the role played by religion in making people compliant to exploitation.

3) The Tyger ( included in Songs of Experience)

The Tyger is one of Blake's best-known poems. It seemingly praises the great power of tiger, but what the tiger symbolizes remains disputable: the power of man? Or the revolutionary force? Or the evil? Or as it is usually interpreted, the Almighty Maker万能的上帝who created both the meek and gentle lamb and the terrible and awesome tiger? The poem is highly symbolic with a touch of mysticism and it is open to various interpretations. The poem contains six quatrains in rhyming couplets and its language Is brief and forceful with an anvil rhythm.

II. William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (1770-1850) ,He developed a keen love of nature as a youth. Another important influence on his life was the French Revolution. In 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge collaborated on a book of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Colerdge and William Wordsworth are known as the \"Lake Poets.\" In 1842, Wordsworth received a government pension and in the following year he succeeded Southey(骚赛) as Poet Laureate（诗人桂冠）. The Prelude《序曲》 is ranked by many critics as his greatest work.

2. 识记：His poetic outlook

Wordsworth is regarded as a \" worshipper of nature.\" He can penetrate to the heart of

things and give the reader the very life of nature. \"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud\" is perhaps the most great poem in English literature, and one that takes us to the core of Wordsworth's poetic beliefs. To Wordsworth, nature embodies human beings in their diverse circumstances. It is nature that gives him \"strength and knowledge full of peace.\"

Common life is Wordsworth's only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. His sympathy always goes to the suffering poor. Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. Its beginning finally turns out to be its end. Wordsworth's deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and profound poetry which no other poets has ever equaled. Poetry, he maintains that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people are the raw material of which poetry can and should be made.

3. 领会His poetical works 1) Lyrics <抒情歌谣集>

Lyrical Ballads different from his early poetry, simplicity of much of the language, the strong sympathy with the poor, dramatized examples of them, and the fusion of natural description with expressions of inward states of mind. The poems Wordsworth added to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads are among the best of his achievements. To Wordsworth, nature acts as a substitute for imaginative and intellectual engagement with the development of embodied human beings in their diverse circumstances. It's nature that gives him \"strength and knowledge full of peace.\"

2) The Prelude《序曲》

Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. The Prelude opens with a literal journey .This journey goes through the poet's personal history, carrying the

metaphorical meaning of his interior journey and questing for his lost early self and the proper spiritual home. The poem charts this growth from childhood to manhood. We are shown the development of human consciousness under the sway of an imagination united to the beauty of nature. Later books of The Prelude describe Wordsworth's experiences in France. The ended description of the ascent of Snowdon becomes a symbol of the poet's climb to the height of his inspired powers ,he dedicats致力，献身 himself to humanity and becomes one of the \" Prophets of Nature.\"

4.领会 Characteristics of Wordsworth Poems and His Achievements.

William Wordsworth is the leading figure of the English romantic poetry and a great representative of romantic period. He presents a beautiful world and inspires his audience to see the world freshly, sympathetically and naturally. The most important contribution he has made is that he has not only started the modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self, but also changed the course of English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a return to nature.

5. 应用：Selected Readings 1) I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (我如行云独自游)

Wordsworth is regarded as a \" worshipper of nature.\" He can penetrate to the heart of things and give the reader the very life of nature. \"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud\" is perhaps the most great poem in English literature, and one that takes us to the core of Wordsworth's poetic beliefs. Wordsworth wrote this beautiful poem of nature after he came across a long belt of gold daffodils tossing and dancing along the waterside. There is a vivid picture of the daffodils here, mixed with the poet's philosophical and somewhat mystical thoughts.The poem consists of four 6-lined stanzas of iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ababcc in each stanza. The last stanza describes the poet's recollection in serenity from which this poem arose. The poet thinks

that it is a bliss to recollect the beauty of nature in his mind while he is in solitude.

2) Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (威斯敏斯特桥即景)

This sonnet, written on his way to France, was published in Poems in Two Volumes(双卷诗) .The poem presents the speaker's view of London in the early morning. The speaker is not only profoundly touched by its beauty and serenity of the morning, but even surprised to realize that London is part of Nature just as much as his beloved Lake Country.

Wordsworth is regarded as a \" worshipper of nature.\" Even in this poem, though he is looking at London, he is thinking of home where the sun steeps in his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill.\"

The poem is written after the pattern of the Italian sonnet. The octave recreates the experience of London at morning, and the sestet enlarges on his reaction to the scene. The rhyme scheme of the poem is abbaabba, cdcdcd.(前八行和后六行有严格的划分)

3) She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways (独自幽居)

This is one of the \"Lucy poems\". The \"Lucy Poems\" describe with rare elusive beauty of simple lyricism and haunting rhythm a young country girl living a simple life in a remote village far from the civilized world. They are verses of love and loss which hold within their delicate simplicity a meditation on time and death which rises to universal stature.

4) The Solitary Reaper (孤独的收割女)

Wordsworth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes.\"The Solitary Reaper\" is an example of his literary

views. It describes vividly a young peasant girl working alone in the fields and singing as she works. The plot of the little incident is told with its comparison of the girl's song to the cuckoo and the nightingale ， the impression of the girl's singing on the traveler is heightened through these comparisons. This poem use rural figures to suggest the timeless mystery of sorrowful humanity and radiant beauty.

This poem is an iambic verse. Most of the lines in the poem are octosyllabics. The rhyme-scheme for each stanza is ababccdd.

III Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), poet and critic. He received education at Cambridge but left without a degree. Inspired by the radical thinkers with their idealism, Coleridge joined in a utopian乌托邦 plan of establishing an ideal democratic community in America. In the spring of 1797, Coleridge met with William Wordsworth. The following year, they published Lyrical Ballads.

2.识记 His Literary Outlook and Philosophy

Philosophically and critically, Coleridge opposed the limitedly rationalistic trends of the 18th-century thought. He advocats a more spiritual and religious interpretation of life, based on what he had learnt from Kant and Schelling. He believed that art is the only permanent revelation of the nature of reality. A poet should realize the vague intimations 微妙的启示derived from his unconsciousness without sacrificing the vitality of the inspiration.

3.识记 His Major Works(1)\"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,\" 《古航海家之歌》 It is an adventurous story of a sailor. By neglecting the law, the mariner cruelly shot an albatross which flew to the ship through thick fog. Then disaster fell onto the ship. The other sailors died

of thirst one after another, while the mariner alone was alive, being mistreated all the time with thirst and the horror of death. Only when the mariner finally repented and blessed for the water snake did the spell break and the ship was then able to go back home. The story moves on through a world of wonder, from mysterious preface to inevitable close. Each incident stands out clear and vivid; each corresponding change in the soul of the mariner is registered. The whole

experience is an ordeal of oppressive weariness. (2) \"Kubla Khan\"《忽必烈汗》 (3) \"Christabel\"《克丽丝特贝尔》uses a freer version of the ballad form to create an atmosphere of the Gothic horror. The tale is an old one of a serpent disguised as a beautiful lady to victimize an innocent maiden. The moaning of the owl , the response of the dog and the regular strokes of the clock, produced the effect of mystery and horror in the dead night. Opposed to the nightmarish are images of religious grace and the spring of love that had gushed from the poet's heart. (4) Biographia Literaria《文学传记》, his major prose work is a series of autobiographical notes and dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. The sections in which he expresses his views on the nature of poetry and discusses the works of Wordsworth are especially notable.

4.领会 Characteristics of His Poems

Coleridge was generally recognized today as a lyrical poet and literary critic of the first rank. His poetic themes range from the supernatural to the demonic(魔力诗). His treatises, lectures, and conversational powers made him one of the most influential English literary critics and philosophers of the 19th century.

5.领会:His Achievements

His achievement can be divided into two groups: the demonic and the conversational. The demonic group includes his three masterpieces: \"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,\" \"Christabel\" and \"Kubla Khan.\" Mysticism and demonism with strong imagination are the distinctive features of this group. The conversational group speaks more directly of an theme: the desire to go home, not to the past, but to \" an improved infancy.\" Each of these poems is a kind of satisfaction, in which Coleridge must fail or suffer so that someone he loves may succeed or experience joy.

Coleridge is one of the first critics to give close critical attention to language, maintaining that the aim of poetry is to give pleasure \"through the medium of beauty.\"

6. 应用Selected Reading Kubla Khan (忽必烈汗)

\"Kubla Khan\" is one of the best-known poems written by Coloridge.The poet was reading about Kubla Khan when Coleridge fell asleep. The images of the river, of the magnificent palace and other marvelous scenes deposited in his unconsciousness were expressed into about two or three hundred lines. Only 54 lines survived. Although is a vision, a fragment painting, a magnificent Oriental picture, there is a wholeness in the poem and it is highly symbolic. The places symbolize conflicting forces –Xanadu行宫, which represents a beautifully cultivated and ordered product of the rational will, is opposed to Alph's wild and savage chasm which

represents an irrationally mysterious creative energy or inspiration. The speaker realizes that the opposites can be reconciled through the creative imagination. Either ways不管怎样, however, the description of Xanadu, the pleasure dome, the chasm峡谷which the sacred river Alph bursts out of, along with the speaker's reaction to this vision of them is exotic and vivid. This poem can be a source of pleasure of verbal music or of freely associated and impressive images.

IV George Gordon Byron

His Life (跛足) 1788—1824 死后平反In July 1823, Byron joined the Greek insurgents. The whole Greek nation mourned over his death.

2. 识记 His Literary Career

In 1807, a volume of Byron's poems诗集, Hours of Idleness《闲散的时光》, was published. A very harsh严厉的 review of this work in the Edinburgh Review《爱丁堡评论周刊》prompted引起a satirical reply from Byron in heroic couplets, entitled English Bards and Scotch Reviewers 《英格兰诗人与苏格兰诗评家》, in which Byron lashed抨击 not only his reviewers, but also the conservative schools of contemporary poetry, showing his lasting contempt for what he considered the commonplace and vulgarity of the \" Lake Poets.\" The publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage《恰尔德.哈罗尔德游记》, a poem narrating his travels between 1809 and 1811 in Europe, brought Byron fame. In the following two years. He had written a number of long verse-tales, generally known as the Oriented Tales《东方故事集》, with similar kind of heroes. In 1816, he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold and the narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon《齐伦的囚犯》. From 1816 to 1819, he produced the verse drama Manfred 《曼弗雷德》, the first two cantos of Don Juan《唐璜》, and the fourth and final canto of Childe Harold. In 1821, Byron wrote the verse drama Cain 《该隐》and the narrative poem The Island《岛》. He published, in 1822, one of the greatest political satires, The Vision of Judgment《判断的幻影》, with its main attack on Southey扫赛, the Tory Poet Laureate托利党的桂冠诗人（保守）. Don Juan, a mock epic in 16 cantos, was finished in 1823.

3. 识记His Major works

(1) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage《恰尔德.哈罗尔德游记》

The poem is about a gloomy, passionate young wanderer who escaped from the society he

disliked and traveled around the continent, questing for freedom. It teems with all kinds of recognizable features of Romantic poetry。It also contains many vivid and exotic descriptive passages on mountains, rivers and seas. With his strong passion for liberty and his intense hatred for all tyrants, he appeals for the liberty of the oppressed nations while exalting the great fighters for freedom in history.

2) Don Juan《唐璜》

Don Juan is Byron's masterpiece, a great comic epic of the early 19th century. It is a poem based on a traditional Spanish legend of a great lover and seducer of women. In the

conventional sense, Juan is immoral, yet Byron takes this poem as the most moral. He invests in Juan the moral positives like courage, generosity and frankness, which, according to Byron are virtues neglected by the modern society. In addition, though Don Juan is the central figure and all the threads of the story are woven around him, he and his adventures only provide the framework: the poet's true intention is, by making use of Juan's adventures, to present a panoramic view 全景of different types of society.

4. 领会Characteristics of Byron's Poems

Byron's poetry was very popular at home and abroad, where it played a great influence on the Romantic Movement. This popularity it owed to the author's persistent attacks on \"cant political, religious, and moral,\" to the novelty of his oriental scenery, to the romantic character of the Byronic hero, and to the easy, fluent, and natural beauty of his verse. Byron's diction though are unequal and faulty. His descriptions are simple and fresh, and often bring vivid objects before the reader. Byron employed the Ottva Rima (Octave Stanza)八行诗体 from Italians mock-heroic poetry讽刺英雄体诗.

5 领会 Byronic Hero拜伦式英雄

As a leading Romanticist, Byron's chief contribution is his creation of the \" Byronic hero,\" a proud and mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. The conflict is usually one of rebellious individuals against outworn social systems and convention. Such a hero appears first in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, s Oriented Tales, Manfred, and Don Juan. The figure is, to some extent, modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself, and makes Byron famous both at home and abroad.

6 领会 His influence 拜伦是当时对欧洲大陆最有影响力的作家

For a long time, there existed two controversial opinions on Byron. He was regarded in England as the perverted man, the satanic poet; while on the Continent, he was praised as the champion of liberty, poet of the people. Byron's poetry has great influence on the literature of the whole world. Across Europe, poets and novelists are profoundly influenced by his works. Actually Byron has enriched European poetry with an abundance of ideas, images, artistic forms and innovations.

7 应用 Selected Readings

1) Song for the Luddites《路德党人之歌》

Luddites smashed machinery in the industrial centers because they believed that machinery was a cause of their unemployment.The poem selected here shows Byron sympathy and support for the workers in their struggle against the capitalist oppression and exploitation. It is composed of three 5-lined stanzas, each with a rhyme scheme of abaab, all of which are strong and vigorous masculine rhymes. The general metrical movement is anapestic trimeter and dimeter with line 3 in iambic dimeter..

2) The Isles of Greece 《哀希腊》(from Don Juan, III)《唐璜》

Don Juan, the masterpiece of Byron, is a long satirical poem. Its hero Juan is an noble libertinel浪荡子, amiable and charming to ladies. Byron puts into Don Juan his rich knowledge of his world and his wisdom. It presents brilliant pictures of life in its various stages of love, joy, suffering, hatred and fear. The unifying principle in Don Juan is the basic ironic theme of appearance and reality, i.e. what things seem to be and what they actually are. The selected section, \"The Isles of Greece哀希腊,\" is taken from Canto III, which is sung by a Greek singer at the wedding of Don Juan and Haidee, the pure and beautiful daughter of a pirate. In the early 19th century, Greece was under the rule of Turk土耳其. By contrasting the freedom of ancient Greece and the present slavery, the poet appealed to people to struggle for liberty.

V. Percy Bysshe Shelley

1. 一般识记 His Life

Shelley (1792-1822) ， At 18, Shelley entered Oxford University, where he had written and circulated a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism 《无神论的必然性》。Early in 1818, Shelley and his wife Mary left England for Italy. During the Remaining four years of his life, Shelley traveled and lived in various Italian cities. Shelley was drowned in 1822 in storm, at the age of 30.

2. 识记 His Literary Outlook

Shelley grew up with violent revolutionary ideas under the influence of the free thinkers, so he held a life-long revolt to cruelty and injustice, authority and religion ,condemning war and exploitation in the society, Shelley took interest in social reforms. He realized that the evil was also in man's mind. So he believe that only gradual and suitable reforms of the existing

institutions could kindness be universally established and none of the evils would survive in this

\"genuine society\

3. 识记 His major works

1) Lyrics: \"To a Skylark\"《致云雀》and \"Ode to the West Wind\"《西风颂》

\"To a Skylark,\" the bird, suspended 悬浮的 between reality and poetic image, pours forth an exultant song which suggests to the poet both heavenly rapture and human limitation. Best

of all the well-known lyric pieces is Shelley's \" Ode to the West Wind \". The autumn wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new Spring, becomes an image of Shelley himself in its freedom。The poem is written in the terza rima form Shelley derived from his reading of Dante 但丁.\"I fall upon the thorns of Life! I bleed!\" calls the Shelley that could not bear being fettered 束缚to the boring realities of everyday!

2) Poetic drama: Prometheus Unbound 《解放了的普罗米修斯》

Shelley's greatest achievement is his four-act poetic drama 四幕诗剧, Prometheus

Unbound. According to the Greek mythology, Prometheus, the champion of humanity, who has stolen the fire from Heaven, is punished by Zeus to be chained on Mount Caucasus and suffering. Shelley based his drama on Prometheus Bound which Prometheus reconciles with the tyrant Zeus. but he gave a totally different interpretation, transforming the compromise into a liberation. Zeus is driven from the throne and Prometheus is unbound. The play is an exultant work in praise of humankind's potential, and Shelley himself recognized it as \" the most perfect of my products.\"

3) Prose: Defence of Poetry

4. 领会 Characteristics of Shelley's Poetry

Shelley is one of the lending Romantic poets, an intense and original lyrical poet in the English language. Like Blake, he has a reputation as a difficult poet: erudite, imagistically complex, full of classical and mythological allusions. His style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figures of speech which describe vividly what we see and feel, or express what passionately moves us.

5. 应用 Selected Readings

1) A Song: Men of England (1)

This poem was written in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre 彼得大屠杀. It is one of Shelley's greatest political lyrics. It is not only a war cry 政治口号calling upon all working people of England to rise up against their political oppressors, but also an address to point out to them the intolerable injustice of economic exploitation. In the poem Shelley pictured the capitalist society as divided into two hostile classes: the parasitic class (\"drones\"雄蜂) and the working class (\"bees\").

The song contains eight quatrains; generally each line contains 4 accented syllables. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is uniformly aabb. The last two stanzas of the poem are ironically addressed to those workers who submit passively to capitalist exploitation. They serve as a warning to the working people, that if the latter should give up their struggle they would be digging graves for themselves with their own hands compared to the preceding stanzas, these lines appear weak and ineffectual.

2) Ode to the West Wind

It was the best known of Shelley's shorter poems. In the poem the poet expresses his envy for the boundless freedom of the West Wind and his wish to be free like the wind and scatter his

words among mankind. The autumn wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new Spring, becomes an image of Shelley himself in its freedom, its destructive-constructive power, its universality, \"I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!\" calls the Shelley that could not bear being fettered to the boring realities of everyday! The whole poem has a logic of feeling, a progression that leads to the hopeful and convincing conclusion: \"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?\"

I. John Keats

John Keats (1795-1821) 9岁丧父，15岁丧母

Keats's first important poem \"On first Looking into Chapman's Homer\" was published in 1816 In 1817, he published his first volume of poems. In 1818, Endymion《安狄弥翁》, was published. From 1818 to 1820, Keats reached the summit of his poetic creation. In July 1820, the third and best of his volumes of poetry,《 Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems》, was published.

2. 识记 His Major Poetic Works 颂歌是Keats最重要、最成熟的作品。

The odes are generally regarded as Keats's most important and mature works. 1)\"Ode to a Nightingale\"《夜莺颂》

It expresses the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness and human world of agony. Keats manages to keep a balance between joy and despair, rapture and grief. The ultimate imaginative view of \"faery lands forlorn\" 仙子降落风尘\"toll\" the poet back to the real and human world of sorrow and death.

2) \"Ode on an Grecian Urn\"《希腊古翁颂》

It shows the contrast between the permanence of art and the transience of human passion. The poet has absorbed himself into the timeless beautiful scenery on the antique Grecian Urn: the lovers, musicians and worshippers on the Urn exist for ever in their intensity of joy. They are unaffected by time, stilled in expectation. This is at once the glory and the limitation of the world conjured up by an object of art. The urn celebrates but simplifies intuitions of ecstasy by seeming to deny our painful knowledge of transience and suffering.

3) Endymion《安狄弥翁》

Endymion was a poem based on the Greek myth of Endymion and the moon goddess. In this poem, Keats described his imagination in an enchanted atmosphere-a lovely moon-lit world where human love and ideal beauty were merged into one. Endymion marked a transitional phase in Keats's poetry, though he himself was not satisfied with it.

4) Isabella《伊莎贝拉》

In July 1820, the third and best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Ages, and Other Poems, was published, The three title poems all deal with mythical and legendary themes of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance times. At the heart of these poems lies Keats's concern with how the ideal can be joined with the real, the imagined with the actual and man with woman.

4.领会Characteristics of Keats's Poetry

Keats's poetry is always sensuous, colorful and rich in imagery, which expresses the acuteness of his senses. Sight, sound, scent, taste and feeling are all used to give an entire understanding of an experience. He has the power of entering the feelings of others-either human or animal. With vivid and rich images, he paints poetic pictures full of wonderful color.

Keats's poetry, characterized by exact and closely-knit construction, sensual descriptions, and by force in imagination, gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.

5.应用 Selected Reading: \"Ode on a Grecian Urn\"《希腊古翁颂》

The Grecian Urn that the poem describe is a piece of ancient Greek pottery with a pastoral scene overwrought upon it. The urn represents a piece of artifact, and it has endured a long history, yet remains untarnished, and the pastoral scene on it can still be seen clearly.

On the surface, this ode is about the Grecian Urn, but we can fairly say it is a commentary on nature and art, for art has the power to preserve intense human experiences, so that they may go on being enjoyed by men from generation to generation. Pleasure in life cannot be protected from change, while artifact can remain intact. The Ode consists of 5 stanzas, the first four stanzas describing a pastoral scene on the urn, and the last epitomizing the relation of the timeless ideal world in art to the woeful actual world.

VII Jane Austen

Jane Austen (1775-1817) acquired a thorough knowledge of 18th -century. She lived a quiet, retired and, in public terms, uneventful life, never married. Her works were later published

anonymously匿名due to the prejudice against women writers then.

2.识记 Her Major Works

Pride and Prejudice, The title tells of a major concern of the novel pride and prejudice. If to form good relationships is our main task in life, we must first have good judgment. Our first impressions, according to Jane Austen, are usually wrong, as is shown here by those of Elizabeth. In the process of judging others, Elizabeth finds out something about herself: her blindness,

prejudice and absurdity. In time she discovered her own shortcomings. On the other hand, Darcy too learns about other people and himself. In the end false pride is humbled and prejudice dissolved.

3. 领会 Her Literary creation and literary achievements

In her life-long career, Jane Austen wrote 6 complete novels, which can be divided into two distinct periods. Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility《理智与情感》, tells a story about two sisters and their love affairs; Pride and Prejudice《傲慢与偏见》, the most popular of he novels, deals with the five Bennet sisters and their search for suitable husbands; and Northanger Abbey《诺桑觉寺》satirizes those popular Gothic romances of the late 18th century, Mansfield Park《曼斯菲尔德庄园》presents the antithesis of worldliness and unworldliness; Emma《艾玛》gives the thought over self-deceptive vanity; and Persuasion《劝告》contrasts the true love with the prudential calculations. Several incomplete works were published long after Austen's death. Austen's main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships. Because of this, her novels have a universal significance. She is particularly preoccupied with the relationship between men and women in love. Stories of love and marriage provide the major themes in all her novels.

4、Selected Reading: Pride and Prejudice《傲慢与偏见》