Transcript 投影片 1 - Asia University

Literature in English
1. The Middle Ages (to ca. 1485)
2. The Sixteenth Century (1485-1603)
3. The Early Seventeenth Century (1603-1660)
4. The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (16601785)
5. The Romantic Period (1785-1830)
6. The Victorian Age (1830-1901)
7. The Twentieth Century and After
The Romantic Period
I.
Historical background
1. The French Revolution (1789-1815)
a. The storming of Bastille (1789)
b. King Louis XVI executed (1793)
c. The Reign of Terror under
Robespierre (1793-94)
d. Napoleon crowned emperor (1804)
e. Napoleon defeated at Waterloo (1815)
The Romantic Period
2.
Revolution and reaction
a. The suspension of the right of habeas corpus
b. The frustration of the abolition cause
c. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the
Rights of Men; Tom Paine, Rights of Man;
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution
in France
The Romantic Period
3.
The Industrial Revolution
a. Economic expansion and technological
development: James Watt (the steam
engine)
b. Overpopulated mill towns
c. Enclosure and the creation of a landless
class
d. “Two Nations”: the two classes of capital
and labor, the rich and the poor
e. “Peterloo Massacre” : Shelley, “England in
1819”
The Romantic Period
II. Major authors
1. Anna Barbauld, Charlotte Smith, Mary
Robinson
2. William Blake, Robert Burns, William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats
The Romantic Period
III. The Spirit of the Age: Revolution; new
birth; apocalypse
IV. Poetic theory and poetic practice
1. Definition of poetry and the poet
(Preface to Lyrical Ballads)
a. Poetry as “the real language of men”
b. The poet as a “man speaking to men”
c. Poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings”
The Romantic Period
2.
“Nature poetry”: the landscape endowed
with human life, passion, and expressiveness
3.
The glorification of the ordinary
a. “the rural scenes and rural pleasures of
natal Soil”
b. convicts, female vagrants, gypsies, idiot
boys, mad mothers etc.
The Romantic Period
4. The supernatural, the romance, and
psychological extremes
a. Coleridge: “The Rime of Ancient Mariner,”
“Kubla Khan”
b. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
(Gothic fiction)
c. Dreams, nightmares, strange mixtures of
pleasures and pain, sexuality and death, the
fascination of the forbidden
d. the use of the exotic and archaic landscapes
e. the Byronic hero