英国文学各时期文学的特点

Chapter 1 The Renaissance Period

Time: Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. The Renaissance （文艺复兴）: The Renaissance 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 expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.

Humanism (人文主义): Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. “Man is the measure of all things.” Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the English humanists.

Mainstream of Literary Forms: 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. The Elizabethan drama, in its totality, is the real mainstream of the English Renaissance.

Chapter 2 The Neoclassical Period

Time: 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.

Social Events: Glorious Revolution （光荣）; British colonies (Abroad); Acts of Enclosure （圈地运动） (At home); The Enlightenment Movement （启蒙运动）. The Enlightenment Movement: The 18th century England is known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment Movement was a

progressive intellectual movement which 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 oppression was to yield place to “eternal truth,” “eternal justice” and “natural equality”. 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.

Neoclassicism: 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. 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

expression, 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 precise, direct, smooth and flexible. Poetry should be lyrical, epical, didactic, satiric or dramatic; Drama should be written in the Heroic Couplets (英雄双韵体诗).

In the last few decades of the 18th century, the neoclassical emphasis upon reason, intellect, wit and form was rebelled against or challenged by the sentimentalists, and was gradually replaced by Romanticism.

Novel: The mid-century was predominated by a newly rising literary form---the modern English novel. Gothic novels---mostly stories of mystery and horror which take place in some haunted or dilapidated Middle Age castles.

Chapter 3 The Romantic Period

Time: From 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads to 1832 with Sir Walter Scott’s death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament. Social Events: French Revolution; English Industrial Revolution.

Romantic Movement: The Romantics saw man essentially as an individual in the solitary state and 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.

Major Figures: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly and Keats. Theme: Imagination and Nature

Major Literary Forms: Poetry (best), prose, novel (Jane Austen and Walter Scott). Drama is less successful.

Chapter 4 The Victorian Period

Time: Queen Victoria who ruled over England from 1836 to 1901. The period has been generally regarded as one of the most glorious in the English history.

Social Events: Reform Bill （改革法案）；Chartist Movement (宪章运动)； Theme: Common sense and moral propriety, which were ignored by the

Romanticists, again became the predominant preoccupation in literary works. Theory of “art for art’s sake”: Oscar Wilde and Walter Pater

Utilitarianism(功利主义): Utilitarianism was widely accepted and practiced.

Almost everything was put to the test by the criterion of utility, that is, the extent to which it could promote the material happiness. Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and many other socially conscious writers severely criticized the Utilitarian creed, especially its depreciation of cultural values and its cold indifference towards human feelings and imagination

Major Literary Forms:

1. Novel (best): In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most

vital and challenging expression of progressive thought. While sticking to the principle of faithful representation of the 18th century realist novel, they carried their duty forward to the criticism of the society and the defense of the mass. They were all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry with the inhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as represented by the money-worship and Utilitarianism, and the widespread misery, poverty and injustice.

2. Prose: Many of the prose writers joined forces with the critical realist novelists in exposing and criticizing the social reality, and some became very influential in the ideological field.

3. Poetry: The poetry of this period was mainly characterized by experiments with new styles and new ways of expression. “psycho-analytical” element

Chapter 5 The Modern Period Time: 1850-1910

Social Events: First World War; Sun-never-set Empire collapsed New Theories:

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: they put forward the theory of scientific socialism.

2. Darwinism: Darwin’s theory of evolution exerted a strong influence upon the people, causing many to lose their religious faith. The social Darwinism, under the cover of “survival of the fittest,” vehemently advocated colonialism or jingoism. 3. Einstein: Einstein’s theory of relativity provided entirely new ideas for the concepts of time and space.

4. Freud: Freud’s analytical psychology drastically altered our conception of human nature.

5. Arthur Schopenhauer: a pessimistic (悲观主义) philosopher, started a rebellion against rationalism（唯理主义）, stressing the importance of will and intuition. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche: he went further against rationalism by advocating the doctrines of power and superman and by completely rejecting the Christian morality.

7. Henry Bergson: He established his irrational philosophy, which put the

emphasis on creation intuition, irrationality and unconsciousness. The irrationalist philosophers exerted immense influence upon the major modernist writers in Britain.

Modernist Movement: Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist

literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers

concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. Modernism is a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism, which is the

theoretical base of realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers

are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama.

Major Figures: Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Webern, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Major Literary Forms:

1. Modern Poetry: The early poems of Pound and Eliot and Yeats’s matured poetry marked the rise of “modern poetry”, which was a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian poetry. The modernist poets fought against the romantic fuzziness and self-indulged emotionalism, advocating new ideas in poetry-writing such as to use the language of common speech, to create new rhythms as the expression of a new mood, to allow absolute freedom in choosing subjects, and to use hard, clear and precise images in poems. 2. Realistic Novel: The realistic novels in the early 20th century were the continuation of the Victorian tradition, yet its exposing and criticizing power against capitalist evils had been somewhat weakened both in width and depth. Another important aspect of realistic novels in this period is the fact that there rose a few working class writers, who gave a direct portrayal of the working-people’s poverty and sufferings, by singing highly of the heroic struggles against capitalism waged by the working class.

3. Modernist Novel: In stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation, the theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis played a particularly

important role. Writers like Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human consciousness. They had created unprecedented stream-of-consciousness novels such as Pilgrimage by Richardson, Ulysses by Joyce.

4. Drama: Oscar Wilde and G.B. Shaw, who, in a sense, pioneered the modern drama, though they didn’t make so many innovations in techniques and forms as modernist poets or novelists.