英国文学史不同时期概要

1、精选优质文档-倾情为你奉上.Give a brief account of British literature in the romantic period, the Victorian age and the twentieth century. (30)The romantic periodBritain is one of the earliest countries that emerges romantic literature. The British romantic literature represents the highest achievement of the Eu

2、rope romantic literature in the early 19th. The internal thought of the British romantic literature is complicated. There were supernaturalism of Coleridge, legitimism of Wordsworth, Spiritualism of Shelley, and liberalism of Byron and so on.The French Revolution brought human hope and also brought

3、a shock to Britain society. In this background, the British romantic literature rose. It produced in the late 18th and became prosperous in the 19th. The pioneers of the romantic literature were Robert Burns and William Blake. The representative works of them were Poems, chiefly in Scottish dialect

4、and Songs of Innocence. There were two opposing schools in the formation of the romanticism thoughts-active romanticism and passive romanticism. Active romanticism is the progressive trend. It dares to face the reality, criticize the social darkness and it leads people to look ahead. Passive romanti

5、cism is the reactionary trend. It rises against the status quo; yearn for the pas and leads people look back. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey are called “the Lake Poet”. They are the representative personage of the passive romanticism. They hold the contradictory attit

6、ude towards the French Revolution and detest industrial civilization and urban civilization of capitalism. They the rural life and nature of patriarchal clan system. Their representative works are Tintern Abbey, Kubla Khan and so on. Byron, Shelley and Keats are the representative personage of activ

7、e romanticism. The difference from the Lake Poet is its works have combat consciousness and political bias. Their representative works are She Walks in Beauty, Ode to the West Wind, Ode to a Nightingale and and so on.The novel of the romantic period mainly has two types: gothic novel and historical

8、novel. Wolf Scott is the representative personage of the gothic novel. He devotes to gathering and sorting out historical legends and folk songs and wrote many historical novels. His representative work is Ivanhoe. Jane Austin is another excellent novelist in that period. Her representative works ar

9、e Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Manor, Emma and so on.In summary, the features of the works in romantic period are as follows: First, they focus on express the subjective ideal and express their personal intensive feelings. Second, they tend to describe natural scenery and si

10、ng in praise of the nature. Third, they fond of describe the history of the past and the middle age. Fourth, they pay attention to folk literature, especially medieval folk literature.The Victorian ageIn Victorian age, the economy developed rapidly and social problems prevailed. Britain became the “

11、workshop of the world”. England settled down to a time of prosperity and stability and people valued earnestness, respectability, modesty, and democracy. In the last decades, British Empire declined, and Victorian values decayed. This age is a time full of opportunities. It can be divided into three

12、 stages: the Early Victorian period (1832-1848), the Mid-Victorian period (1848-1870) and the Late Victorian period (1870-1891). So is the literature in that time. One of the very important features of the literature in Victorian period is “variety”. The variety embodies the independence of the writ

13、ers in the Victorian period and their desire for the literary experience. On the one hand, poets continue to use the traditional forms of expressions. On the other hand, they also try to find some new and unusual forms of expressions. The ballad is the most prominent in this aspect. Poetry began to

14、tell the story in a new method and pursue the effect of epic. Like the The Princess and the Maud of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and The Ring and the Book of Browning are all the representative works of long narrative poem.  The prose in Victorian age is also outstanding. Like the On Liberty of John S

15、tart Mill, the Evidences as to Mans Place in Nature of Thomas Henry Huxley and so on. They all were gone down in the history of English literature. The Victorian age is almost a time that everyone read novels. Due to the constraint of the puritan moral standards, many works in the Early Victorian pe

16、riod and the Mid-Victorian period have some shackles in the contents to some extent. However, it created the great art in the history of English novel. Such as the Wuthering Heights of Emily Bronte, the Middlemarch of Eliot, the Jane Eyre of Charlotte Bronte and so on. The Victorian age is the devel

17、opment period of the novel and it reflects the humanities spirits of that time.Generally speaking, the achievements of drama in Victorian cannot be compared with the novel, poem and prose. There were almost no works had a long-term value until 1890s. There appeared a famous dramatist named George Be

18、rnard Shaw. He wrote many famous dramas like Arms and the Man, The Apple Cart and so on. Victorian literature and art are great because they reflect the real life in that period. In that period appeared many different schools of literature. There have Ernest Jones who is a chartist poet, Charles Dic

19、kens who is a realist, Christina Georgina Rossetti who is a Pre-Raphaelite poet. There also have “utopia” novels represented by Morris, new romantic novels represented by Stevenson and Aestheticism novels represented by Oscar Wilde. They all had great achievements in the history of English literatur

20、e.The twentieth centuryCompared to the 19th, the English literature in 20th is introverted, irrational and .the twentieth century literature includes two parts: modernist literature and contemporary literature. In early 20th, some novelists inherit the tradition of critical realism, like Galsworthy.

21、 At the same time, other novelists began to find new methods to express something more real, Like Henry James, Joseph Conrad and other novelists; they are called the pioneer of the modernist literature in the 20th.In the 20th, Britain had experienced a lot. Such as world war one, world war two, crisis and so on. Peoples values vary from the change of the society, so is the literature. After the world war one, modernist literature emerged. After the crisis in the 1930s, people have come back to face the reality, realistic literature again became the mainstre