英美浪漫主义比较

 

British Romanticism

American Romanticism

Time

1798—1832 Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads; death of Walt Scotts and the passage of the Reform Bill in the Parliament

1782—1861 Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass

 

Historically

 

 

 

Background: Economically

 

 

 

Politically

1.       The French Revolution

2.       The English Industrial Revolution

Westward expansion

1.       agricultural society had been replaced by a modern industrialization one

2.       economic exploitation of the workers by the capitalists

Booming economy: experiencing industrial transformation

1.       Rousseau’s new idea about Nature, society, education

2.       radicals sympathized the French Revolution, claiming Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Two-party system:

freedom and democracy

Definition

Revolt of the English imagination against of the neo-classical reason

Revolt against classicism

Theme

Bitterness, melancholy

A strong sense of optimism and a mood of “feeling good” of the whole country

Contents

1.       spontaneous outflow of power feelings

2.       imagination

3.       nature

4.       escape from society and return to nature

1.       free expression of emotions and psychic states of the charter

2.       emphasis on imaginative qualities: picturesque, exotic, sensuous, the supernatural

3.       the wildness and American Puritanism; more moralizing

4.       escape from society and return to nature

Characteristics

1.         nature images, dream-like atmosphere, music beauty,

2.         Gothic elements

1.       derivative

2.       Puritanism: moralizing

3.       Calvinistic view of original sin

Literary Movement

 

Transcendentalism

Writers

William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George G. Byron, P. B. Shelley, John Keats

Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville

 

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