1、Romanticism,Definition,a literary trend or movement at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries under the historical background of the Industrial Revolution around 1760 and the French Revolution (1789-1799),Romantic literature,In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or crit

2、icism of the past, the cult cult of sensibility with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and pure nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such asEdgar Allan Poeand Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writi

3、ngs on thesupernatural/occultand humanpsychology. Romanticism tended to regardsatireas something unworthy of serious attention, a prejudice still influential today.,Some Characteristics of Romanticism,1. High esteem for man as individuals individual human personality 2. Romantic optimism an implicit

4、 faith in the innate goodness of human nature 3. The Romantic concept of nature man & nature: complementary parts of a whole 4. The Romantic appeal to imagination and feelings great importance to imagination and feelings,English literature,In English literature, the group of poets now considered the

5、 key figures of the Romantic movement includesWilliam Wordsworth (威廉華茲華斯) ,Samuel Taylor Coleridge(塞繆爾泰勒柯?tīng)柭芍? ,John Keats(濟(jì)慈),Percy Bysshe Shelley（珀西比希雪萊 ）, and the much olderWilliam Blake（威廉布萊克） , followed later by the isolated figure ofJohn Clare. The publication in 1798 ofLyrical Ballads, with ma

6、ny of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the movement.,English literature,The majority of the poems were by Wordsworth, and many dealt with the lives of the poor in his nativeLake District, or the poets feelings about nature, which were to be more fully

7、developed in his long poem The Prelude（前奏曲） , never published in his lifetime. The longest poem in the volume was ColeridgesThe Rime of the Ancient Marinerwhich showed the Gothic side of English Romanticism, and the exotic settings that many works featured.,representative authors,William Wordsworth,representative authors,George Gordon Byron,representative autho