英美文学选读英美文学选读1.课程性质与学习目的英美文学选读课是全国高等教育自学考试英语语言文学专业本科段的必修课程,是为培养和检验自学应考者英美文学的基本理论知识和理解、鉴赏英美文学原著的能力而设置的一门专业理论课程.设置本课程旨在使英语自学者对英美两国文学形成与发展的全貌有一个大概的了解；并通过阅读具有代表性的英美文学作品,理解作品的内容,学会分析作品的艺术特色并努力掌握正确评价文学作品的标准和方法.由于本课程以作家作品为重点,因此考生需仔细阅读原作.通过阅读,努力提高语言水平,增强对英美文学原著的理解,特别是对作品中表现的社会生活和人物思想感情的理解,提高他们阅读文学作品的能力和鉴赏水平.2.课程内容与考核目标本课程的考试要求为全日制普通高等学校英语语言文学专业《英美文学选读》课程本科的结业水平.课程的内容和考核目标是根据本课程的性质、学习目的以及自学考试的特点编制而成的.本课程由英国文学和美国文学两部分组成.主要内容包括英美文学发展史及代表作家的简要介绍和作品选读.文学史部分从英美两国历史、语言、文化发展的角度,简要介绍英美两国文学各个历史断代的主要历史背景,文学文化思潮,文学流派,社会政治、经济、文化等对文学发展的影响,主要作家的文学生涯、创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画、语言风格、思想意义等；选读部分主要节选了英美文学史上各个时期重要作家的代表作品,包括诗歌、戏剧、小说、散文等,详见全国高等教育自学考试指导委员会编写的指定用书《英美文学选读》〔X伯香主编,外语教学与研究１９９９年１２月第２版〕.根据本课程考试的大纲,凡要求"识记"的内容,所涉及的知识和理论都与考核点直接相关,考生应熟知其概念和有关知识,理解其原理,并能在语言环境中予以辨认.凡要求"领会"的内容,必须做到掌握有关知识和理论.凡要求"应用"的内容,必须做到在掌握有关知识和理论的基础上使之转换为能力,即能用有关知识和理论来分析解决英美文学中的相关问题,并指导作品的阅读.凡要求"一般识记"的内容,所涉及的知识和理论,一般不直接作为考核时命题的内容,但由于这些内容对于其他相关知识和理论以及作品阅读能力的考核有直接或间接的影响,因此要求考生在自学过程对这些内容也要有所了解.英美文学选读第1章<英国文学>文艺复兴时期第1节Edmund Spenser第2节Christopher Marlowe第3节William Shakespeare第4节Francis Bacon第5节John Donne第6节John Milton第2章新古典主义时期第1节John Bunyan第2节Alexander Pope第3节Daniel Defoe第4节Jonathan Swift第5节Henry Fielding第6节Samuel Johnson第3章浪漫主义时期第1节William Blake第2节William Wordsworth第3节Samuel Taylor Coleridge第4节George Gordon Byron第5节Percy Bysshe Shelley第6节John Keats第7节Jane Austen第4章维多利亚时期第1节Charles Dickens第2节The Bronte Sisters第3节Alfred Tennyson第4节Robert Browning第5节George Eliot第6节Thomas Hardy第5章现代时期第1节George Bernard Shaw第2节John Galsworthy第3节William Butler Yeats第4节T. S. Eliot第5节D. H. Lawrence第6节James Joyce第6章<美国文学>浪漫主义时期第1节Washington Irving第2节Ralph Waldo Emerson第3节Nathaniel Hawthorne第4节Walt Whitman第5节Herman Melville第7章现实主义时期第1节Mark Twain第2节Henry James第3节Emily Dickinson第4节Theodore Dreiser第8章现代时期第1节Ezra Pound第2节Robert Lee Frost第3节Eugene O'Neill第4节F. Scott Fitzgerald第5节Ernest Hemingway第6节William Faulkner<英国文学>文艺复兴时期本章简介<>The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. It first started in Italy, with theflowering of painting, sculpture and literature. From Italy the movement went to embrace the rest of Europe. The Renaissance, which means rebirth or revival, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion. The Renaissance, therefore, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that exssed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. The Renaissance was slow in reaching England not only because of England's separation from the Continent but also because of its domestic unrest. The century and a half following the death of Chaucer is the most volcanic period of English history. The war-like nobles seized the power of England and turned it into self-destruction. The Wars of Roses are examples to show how the energy of England was violently destroying itself. The frightful reign of Richard III marked the end of civil wars, making possible a new growth of English national feelings under the popular Tudors. But it was not until the reign of Henry VIII <from 1509 to 1547> that the Renaissance really began to show its effect in England. With Henry VIII's encouragement, the Oxford reformers, scholars and humanists introduced classical literature to England. Education, based upon the classics and the Bible, was revitalized, and literature, already much read during the 15th century, became even more popular. Thus began the English Renaissance, which was perhaps England's Golden Age, especially in literature. Among the literary giants were Shakespeare, Spenser, Johnson, Sidney, Marlowe, Bacon and Donne. The English Renaissance had no sharp break with the past. Attitudes and feelings which had been characteristic of the 14th and 15th centuries persisted well down into the era of Humanism and Reformation. Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It sprang from the endeavor to restore a medieval reverence for the antique authors and is frequently taken as the beginning of the Renaissance on its conscious, intellectual side, for the Greek and Roman civilization was based on such a conception that man is the measure of all things. Through the new learning, humanists not only saw the arts of splendor and enlightenment, but the human values resented in the works. In the medieval society, people as individuals were largely subordinated to the feudalist rule without any freedom and independence; and in medieval theology, people's relationships to the world about them were largely reduced to a problem of adapting to or avoiding the circumstances of earthly life in an effort to pare their souls for a future life. But Renaissance humanists found in the classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfection, and that the world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy. Thus, by emphasizing the dignity of human beings and the importance of the sent life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of this life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders. Humanism began to take hold in England when the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus <1466-1536> came to teach the classical learning, first at Oxford and then at Cambridge. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best resentatives of the English humanists. The long reign of Henry VIII was marked not only by a steady increase in the national power at home and abroad but also by the entrance of the religious reformation from the Continent. It was Martin Luther <1483-1546>, a German Protestant, who initiated the Reformation. Luther believed that every true Christian was his own priest and was en学习指导d to intert the Bible for himself. Encouraged by Luther's aching, reformers fromnorthern Europe vitalized the Protestant movement, which was seen as a means to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption and superstition of the Middle Ages. The colorful and dramatic ritual of the Catholic Church was simplified. Indulgences, pilgrimages, and other practices were condemned. In the early stage of the continental Reformation, Henry VIII was regarded as a faithful son of the Catholic Church and named "Defender of the Faith" by the Pope. Only his need for a legitimate male heir, and hence a new wife, led him to cut ties with Rome. But the common English people had long been dissatisfied with the corruption of the church and inspired by the reformers' ideas from the Continent. So they welcomed and sup-ported Henry's decision of breaking away from Rome. When Henry VIII declared himself through the approval of the Parliament as the Sume Head of the Church of England in 1534, the Reformation in England was in its full swing. One of the major results was the fact that the Bible in English was placed in every church and services were held in English instead of Latin so that people could understand. In the brief reign of Edward VI, Henry's son, the reform of the church's doctrine and teaching was carried out. But after Mary ascended the throne, there was a violent swing to Catholicism. However, by the middle of Elizabeth's reign, Protestantism had been firmly established, with a certain extent of compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. The religious reformation was actually a reflection of the class struggle waged by the new rising bourgeoisie against the feudal class and its ideology. Strong national feeling in the time of the Tudors gave a great incentive to the cultural development in England. English schools and universities were established in place of the old monasteries. With classical culture and the Italian humanistic ideas coming into England, the English Renaissance began flourishing. And one of the men who made a great contribution in this respect was William Caxton, for he was the first person who introduced printing into England. In his lifetime, Caxton printed about one hundred books in English, including Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales <1483> and Malory's Morte Darthur <1485>. Thus, for the first time in history it was possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole nation in a speedy way. With the introduction of printing, an age of translation came into being. And lots and lots of continental literary works both ancient and modern were translated and printed in English. For instance, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans was translated by North, Ovid's etamorphoses by Golding, Homer's The Iliad by Chapman, and Montaigne's Essays by Florio. As a result, the introduction of printing led to a commercial market for literature and provided numerous books for the English people to read, thus making everything ready for the appearance of the great Elizabethan writers. The first period of the English Renaissance was one of imitation and assimilation. Academies after the Italian type were founded. And Petrarch was regarded as the fountainhead of literature by the English writers. For it was Petrarch and his successors who established the language of love and sharply distinguished the love poetry of the Renaissance from its counterparts in the ancient world. Wyatt and Surrey began engraving the forms and graces of Italian poetry upon the native stock. While the former introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into England, the latter brought in blank verse, i.e. the unrhymed iambic pentameter line. Sidney followed with the sestina and terza rima and with various experiments in classic meters. And Marlowe gave new vigor to the blank verse with his "mighty lines. "From Wyatt and Surrey onwards the goals of humanistic poetry are: skillful handling of conventions, force of language, and, above all, the development of a rhetorical plan in which meter, rhyme, scheme, imagery and argument should all be combined to frame the emotional theme and throw it into high relief. Poetry was to be a concentrated exercise of the mind, of craftsmanship, and of learning. Spenser'sThe Shepheardes Calender showed how the pastoral convention could be adopted to a variety of subjects, moral or heroic, and how the rules of decorum, or fitness of style to subject, could be applied through variations in the diction and metrical scheme. In "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," Marlowe spoke with a voice so innocent that it would be very difficult for us to connect it with the voice in his tragedies. In the early stage of the Renaissance, poetry and poetic drama were the most outstanding literary forms and they were carried on especially by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. But the poetry written by John Donne, George Herbert and others like them <who were later labeled as the metaphysical poets by Dryden and Johnson> resented a sharp break from the poetry by their decessors and most of their contemporaries. The Elizabethan drama, in its totality, is the real mainstream of the English Renaissance. It could be dated back to the Middle Ages. Interludes and morality plays thriving in the medieval period continued to be popular down to Shakespeare's time. But the development of the drama into a sophisticated art form required another influence- the Greek and Roman classics. Lively, vivid native English material was put into the regular form of the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence. Tragedies were in the style of Seneca. The fusion of classical form with English content brought about the possibility of a mature and artistic drama. The most famous dramatists in the Renaissance England are Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, who wrote plays with such universal qualities of greatness. By imitating the romances of Italy and Spain, embracing the mysteries of German legend, and combining the fictions of poetic fancy with the facts of daily life, they made a vivid depiction of the sharp conflicts between feudalism and the rising bourgeoisie in a transitional period. And with humors of the moment, abstractions of philosophical speculation, and intense vitality, this extraordinary drama, with Shakespeare as the master, left a monument of the Renaissance unrivaled for pure creative power by any other product of that epoch. Francis Bacon <1561-1626>, the first important English essayist, is best known for his essays which greatly influenced the development of this literary form. He was also the founder of modern science in England. His writings paved the way for the use of scientific method. Thus, he is undoubtedly one of the resentatives of the English Renaissance.新古典主义时期本章简介<> What we now call the neoclassical period is the one in English literature between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. The English society of the neoclassical period was a turbulent one. Of the great political and social events there were the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, the Great Plague of 1665 which took 70,000 lives in London alone, the Great London Fire which destroyed a large part of the city, leaving two-thirds of the population homeless, the Glorious Revolution in which King James Il was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William, Duke of Orange, in 1689, and so on. There was constant strife between the monarch and the parliament, between the two big parties -- the Tories and the Whigs -- over the control of the parliament and government, between opposing religious sects such as the Roman Catholicism, the Anglican Church and the Dissenters, between the ruling class and the laboring poor, etc. In short, it was an age full of conflicts and divergence of values. The eighteenth century saw the fast development of England as a nation. Abroad, a vast expansion of British colonies in North America, India, the West Indies, and a continuous increase of colonial wealth and trade provided England with a market for which the small-scale handproduction methods of the home industry were hardly adequate. This created not only a steady demand for British goods but also standardized goods. And at home in the country, Acts of Enclosure were putting more land into fewer privileged rich landowners and forcing thousands of small farmers and tenants off land to become wage earners in industrial towns. This coming together of free labor from the home and free capital gathered or plundered from the colonies was the essence of the Industrial Revolution. So, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, England had become the first powerful capitalist country in the world. It had become the work-shop of the world, her manufactured goods flooding foreign markets far and near. Along with the fast economic development, the British bourgeois or middle class also grew rapidly. It was the major force of the Revolution and was mainly composed of city people: traders, merchants, manufacturers, and other adventurers such as slave traders and colonists. As the Industrial Revolution went on, more and more people joined the rank of this class. Marx once pointed out that the bourgeois class of the eighteenth-century England was a revolutionary class then and quite different from the feudal aristocratic class. They were people who had known poverty and hardship, and most of them had obtained their sent social status through hard work. They believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work. To work, to economize and to accumulate wealth constituted the whole meaning of their life. This aspect of social life is best found in the realistic novels of the century. The eighteenth-century England is also known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment Movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept through the whole Western Europe at the time. The movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. They held that rationality or reason should be the only, the final cause of any human thought and activities. They called for a reference to order, reason and rules. They believed that when reason served as the yardstick for the measurement of all human activities and relations, every superstition, injustice and opssion was to yield place to "eternal truth," "eternal justice" and "natural equality." The belief provided theory for the French Revolution of 1789 and the American War of Independence in 1776. At the same time, the enlighteners advocated universal education. They believed that human beings were limited, dualistic, imperfect, and yet capable of rationality and perfection through education. If the masses were well educated, they thought, there would be great chance for a democratic and equal human society. As a matter of fact, literature at the time, heavily didactic and moralizing, became a very popular means of public education. Famous among the great enlighteners in England were those great writers like John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, the two pioneers of familiar essays, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Henry Fielding and Samuel Johnson. In the field of literature, the Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism. According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers <Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, etc.> and those of the contemporary French ones. They believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity. This belief led them to seek proportion, unity, harmony and grace in literary exssions, in an effort to delight, instruct and correct human beings, primarily as social animals. Thus a polite, urbane, witty, and intellectual art developed.Neoclassicists had some fixed laws and rules for almost every genre of literature. Prose should be cise, direct, smooth and flexible. Poetry should be lyrical, epical, didactic, satiric or dramatic, and each class should be guided by its own principles. Drama should be written in the Heroic Couplets <iambic pentameter rhymed in two lines>; the three unities of time, space and action should be strictly observed; regularity in construction should be adhered to, and type characters rather than individuals should be resented. In the last few decades of the 18th century, however, the neoclassical emphasis upon reason, intellect, wit and form was rebelled against or challenged by the sentimentalists, and was, in due time, gradually replaced by Romanticism. But it had a lasting wholesome influence upon English literature. The poetic techniques and certain classical graces such as order, good form, unified structure, clarity and conciseness of language developed in this period have become a permanent heritage. The neoclassical period witnessed the flourish of English poetry in the classical style from Restoration to about the second half of the century, climaxing with John Dryden, Alexander Pope and the last standard-bearer of the school, Samuel Johnson. Much attention was given to the wit, form and art of poetry. Mock epic, romance, satire and epigram were popular forms adopted by poets of the time. Besides the elegant poetic structure and diction, the neoclassical poetry was also noted for its seriousness and earnestness in tone and constant didacticism. The mid-century was, however, dominated by a newly rising literary form -- the modern English novel, which, contrary to the traditional romance of aristocrats, gives a realistic sentation of life of the common English people. This -- the most significant phenomenon in the history of the development of English literature in the eighteenth century -- is a natural product of the Industrial Revolution and a symbol of the growing importance and strength of the English middle class. Among the pioneers were Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Tobias George Smollett, and Oliver Goldsmith. And from the middle part to the end of the century there was also an apparent shift of interest from the classic literary tradition to originality and imagination, from society to individual, and from the didactic to the confessional, inspirational and prophetic. Gothic novels -- mostly stories of mystery and horror which take place in some haunted or dilapidated Middle Age castles -- were turned out profusely by both male and female writers; works such as The Castle of Otranto <1765> by Horace Walpole, The Mysteries of Udolpho <1794> and The Italian <1797> by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic Story <1777> by Clara Reeve, and The Monk <1796> by M.G. Lewis became very popular. Eulogizing or lamenting lyrics by nature poets like James Thomson, William Collins, and William Cowper, and by such sentimentalists as the "GraveyardSchool" were widely read. The romantic poems of the Scottish peasant poet, Robert Burnsand William Blake also joined in, paving the way for the flourish of Romanticism early the century. In the theatrical world, Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the leading figure among a host of playwrights. And of the witty and satiric prose, those written by Jonathan Swift are especially worth studying, his A Modest Proposal being generally regarded as the best model of satire, not only of the period but also in the whole English literary history.浪漫主义时期本章简介<> The movement which we call Romanticism is something not so easy to define, especially concerning its characteristics or dates. For it is a broad movement that affected the whole of Europe <and America>. However, English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to have begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's LyricalBallads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott's death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament. However, these dates are arbitrary and, to some extent, conventional, for a new current of literature, in fact, had started long before the publication of the Lyrical Ballads. In the works of the sentimental writers, we note a new interest in literatures and legends other than those of Greece and' Rome. It was in effect a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason which vailed from the days of Pope to those of Johnson. And some of the great imaginative writings in English literature sprang from the confrontation of radicals and conservatives at the close of the 18th century, as the history in England started to move with a new urgency. This urgency was provoked by two important revolutions: the French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution which happened more slowly, but with astonishing consequences. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher, was one of the leading thinkers in the second half of the 18th century. In 1762 he published two books that electrified Europe -- Du Contrat Social and Emile, in which he explored new ideas about Nature, Society and Education. These ideas of Rousseau's provided necessary guiding principles for the French Revolution, for they inspired an implacable resentment against the tyrannical rule in France and an immense hope for the future. In 1789 there broke out the epoch-making French Revolution. The news of the Revolution, especially the Declaration of Rights of Man and the storming of Bastille, aroused great sympathy and enthusiasm in the English liberals and radicals. Patriotic clubs and societies multiplied in England, all claiming Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Then, in October, 1790, Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke's pamphlet was designed as a crusade against the sad of such radical innovations and the overthrow of the established privileges he saw enshrined in the church, the hereditary power of the monarchy and the greater landed families. By pouring scorn on the feverish violence of rebellion and prophesying mob-rule and military dictatorship in France, Burke raised the most authoritative voice in Britain in denouncing the Revolution. Burke's Reflections provoked many replies from the radical writers who argued for the rights of the people to fight against tyranny and to overthrow any government of opssion; but none was so effective as Thomas Paine's Declaration of Rights of Man <1791-1792>. Paine knew what he was talking about: he had been in France during the Revolution, and demonstrated conclusively that by 1789 France was so enmeshed in opssion and misery that nothing short of revolution could set her free. William Godwin, who exerted a great influence on Wordsworth, Shelley and other poets, wrote passionately against the injustices of the economic system and the opssion of the poor in his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice <1793>. Fighting against Burke's conservative ideas was also William Cobbet whom Marx once extolled as "an instinctive defender of the masses of the people against the encroachment of the bourgeoisie." If law and government appeared to some contemporaries as one system of injustice, conventional gender roles were another, for women had long been regarded as inferior to men. After the Declaration of Rights of Man was released, Mary Wollstonecraft urged the equal rights for women in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman <1792>, thus setting out the earliest exposition of feminism based on a comhensive system of ethics. But later when Jacobeans took over power in France and started to push a policy of violent terror at home and aggressive expansion abroad, most of the English sympathizers dropped their support. And the English government even waged wars against France till the fall of Napoleon in 1815. During this period, England itself had experienced profound economic and social changes. The primarily agricultural society had been replaced by a modern industrialized one. The biggest social change in Englishhistory was the transfer of large masses of the population from the countryside to the towns. The prosperous peasant farmers had long been considered the solid base of English society; but by the 19th century they had largely disappeared. As a result of the Enclosures and the agricultural mechanization, the peasants were driven out of their land: some emigrated to the colonies; some sank to the level of farm laborers; and many others drifted to the industrial towns where there was a growing demand for labor. But the new industrial towns were no better than jungles, where the law was "the survival of the fittest." The workers were herded into factories arid overcrowded streets, and reduced to the level of commodities, valued only according to the fluctuating demand for their labor. Women and children were treated no differently in this respect from the men. With the British Industrial Revolution coming into its full swing, the capitalist class came to dominate not only the means of production, but also trade and world market. Though England had increased its wealth by several times, it was only the rich who owned this wealth; the majority of the people were still poor, or even poorer. After the Napoleonic War, the English people suffered severe economic dessions. While the price of food rose rocket high, the workers' wages went sharply down; sixteen hours' labor a day could hardly pay for the daily bread. This cruel economic exploitation caused large-scale workers' disturbances in England; the desperation of the workers exssed itself in the popular outbreaks of machine-breaking known as the Luddite riots. The climax of popular agitation and government brutality came in August 1819 at St. Peter's Field, Manchester, where a huge but orderly group of peaceful protesters were charged by mounted troops who killed nine and wounded hundreds more. This was the notorious "Peterloo Massacre'' which roused indignation even among the upper class. However, the workers' strong demands for reform, for their own political and economic rights did not die down. The industrial bourgeoisie made use of this struggle to fight for its own sumacy in political power against the landed aristocrats. In 1832, the Reform Bill was enacted, which brought the industrial capitalists into power; but the workers who played the major role in the fight got nothing. Consequently, there arose sharp conflicts between capital and labor. The Romantic Movement, whether in England, Germany or France, exssed a more or less negative attitude toward the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. The Romantics, who were deeply immersed in the most violent phase of the transition from a decadent feudal to a capitalist economy, saw both the corruption and injustice of the feudal societies and the fundamental inhumanity of the economic, social and political forces of capitalism. They felt that the society denied people their essential human needs. So under the influence of the leading romantic thinkers like Kant and the Post-Kantians, they demonstrated a strong reaction against the dominant modes of thinking of the 18th century writers and philosophers. Where their decessors saw man as a social animal, the Romantics saw him essentially as an individual in the solitary state. Where the Augustans emphasized those features that men have in common, the Romantics emphasized the special qualities of each individual's mind. Thus, we can say that Romanticism actually 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 very center of all life and all experience. It also places the individual at the center of art, making literature most valuable as an exssion of his or her unique feelings and particular attitudes, and valuing its accuracy in portraying the individual's experiences. 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。
