An Excerpt from Act 4, Scene III of The School for Scandal
1) Brief Introductions
The School for Scandal is mainly a story about 2 brothers, the hypocritical Joseph Surface & the good-natured, imprudent, spendthrift Charles Surface.
2) Theme
The School for Scandal is one of the great classics in English drama. It is a sharp satire on the moral degeneracy of the aristocratic-bourgeois society in the 18th-century England, on the vicious scandal mongering among the idle rich, on the reckless life of extravagance & love intrigues in the high society & above all, on the immorality & hypocrisy behind the mask of honorable living & high-sounding moral principles. And in terms of theatrical art, it shows the playwright at his best. No wonder, the play has been regarded as the best comedy since Shakespeare.
VIII. Thomas Gray
1. 一般识记：His life
Thomas Gray (1716-1771), son of a London exchange broker, was born in Cornhill, London on Dec. 26, 1716. He was first educated at Eton. In 1734 he went to Cambridge University & left it in 1738 without taking a degree. In 1768 he was made professor of History & Modern Languages at Cambridge. He died at Cambridge, England, on July 30, 1771.
2. 识记: His major works
In contrast to those professional writers, Gray's literary output was small. His masterpiece, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" was published in 1751. The poem once & for all established his fame as the leader of the sentimental poetry of the day, especially "the Graveyard School." His poems, as a whole, are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or meditation on life, past & present.
In addition to his elegiac masterpiece, Gray is known for his odes, including "Ode on the Spring"(1742), "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College"(1747), "Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat" (1748), "Hymn to Adversity"(1742), & two translations from old Norse: The Descent of Odin(1761) & The Fatal Sisters(1761).
3. 领会His style
A conscientious artist of the first rate, Gray wrote slowly & carefully, painstakingly seeking perfection of form & phrase. His poems are characterized by an exquisite sense of form. His style is sophisticated & allusive. His poems are often marked with the trait of a highly artificial diction & a distorted word order.
4. 应用：Selected Reading
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
1) Theme: It is a meditation on human mortality, the tragic dignity it gives to all mankind, & the stability & serenity of rustic life. The Elegy lies in Gray's perfect expression of what all men feel about life & death. In this poem, Gray reflects on death, the sorrows of life & the mysteries of human life with a touch of his personal melancholy. The poet compares the ordinary people with the great ones, wondering what the commons could have achieved if they had had the chance. Here he reveals his sympathy for the poor & the unknown, but mocks the great ones who despise the poor & bring havoc on them.
2)Language
The poem abounds in images & arouses sentiment in the bosom of every reader. Though the use of artificial poetic diction & distorted word order make understanding of the poem somewhat difficult, the artistic polish-the sure control of language, imagery, rhythm, & his subtle moderation of style & tone-gives the poem a unique charm of its own. The poem has been ranked among the best of the 18th century English poetry.
Chapter III The Romantic Period
一 本章的学习目的和要求
通过本章的学习，了解浪漫主义文学的产生的历史，文化背景，认识该时期文学创作的基本特征，基本主张，及其对时代及后世英国文学用至文化的影响；了解该时期重要作家的文学生涯，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； 同时结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。
二 本章考核知识点及考核要求
（一） 考核知识点
1 浪漫主义时期概述
1） 浪漫主义时期英国社会的政治，经济，文化背景
2） 浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张
3） 英国浪漫主义文学的特色
4） 浪漫主义文学对同时代及后世英国文学的影响
2 浪漫主义时期主要作家的文学创作思想及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，艺术手法及社会意义等。
威廉·布莱克；威廉·华兹华斯；塞·特·科勒律治；乔治·戈登·拜伦；珀·比·雪莱；约翰·济兹；简·奥斯汀
（二） 考核要求
1 浪漫主义时期概述
1）识记：a.浪漫主义时期的界定 b.历史文化背景
2) 领会：a.浪漫主义思潮的意义与影响。 b.浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张及对后世文学的影响。、
3) 应用：a.名词解释：浪漫主义 b.浪漫主义时期文学特点的分析
2 该时期的重要作家
1） 识记：浪漫主义时期的重要作家，代表作品及其主要内容。
2） 领会：重要作家的创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，社会意义等。
3） 应用：a.浪漫派诗歌（所选作品）的主题，意象分析
b.小说《傲慢与偏见》的主题和主要人物的性格分析。
一 概述
1. 一般识记
English Romanticism
English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to have began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth & Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads & to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott's death & the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.
2. 识记 Historical & Cultural background
During this period, England had experienced profound economic & social change. The biggest social change in English history was the transfer of large masses of the population from the countryside to the towns. As a result of the Enclosures & the agricultural mechanization, the peasants were driven of their land; some emigrated to the colonies; some sank to the level of farm laborers & 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 cruel economic exploitation caused large-scale workers' disturbances in England.
3 领会
（1） Influences of the Romantic Movement
Romanticism 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 & philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life & all experience. It also places the individual at the center of art, making literature most valuable as an expression of this or her unique feelings & particular attitudes & valuing its accuracy in portraying the individual's experiences.
(2) The Romantic views about literature
a. The Romantic period is an age of poetry. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley & Keats are the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution.
b. The Romantic period is also a great age of prose. The two major novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen & Walter Scott.
c. Besides poetry & prose, there are quite a number of writers who have fried their hand at poetic dramas in this period.
4 应用
(1) Literary Terms
a. The Romantic Movement
It expressed a more or less negative attitude towards the existing social & political conditions that came with industrialization & the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. The Romantics felt that the existing society denied people their essential human needs, so they demonstrated a strong reaction against the dominant modes of thinking of the 18th-century writers & philosophers. Where their predecessors saw man as a social animal, the Romantics saw him essentially as an individual in the solitary state & emphasized the special qualities of each individual's mind. Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer.
b. The Gothic novel
It is a type of romantic fiction that predominated in the late 18th century & was one phase of the Romantic movement, its principal elements are violence, horror & the supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader's emotion. With its descriptions of the dark, irrational side of human nature, the Gothic form has exerted a great influence over the writer of the Romantic period. Works like The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe & Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley are typical Gothic romance.
(2) Characteristics of Romantic literature in English history.
The Romantic period is an age of poetry Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley & Keats are the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. Wordsworth & Coleridge were the major representatives of this movement. They explored new theories & innovated new techniques in poetry writing. They saw poetry as a healing energy: they believed that poetry could purify both individual souls & the society. The Romantics not only extol the faculty of imagination, but also stress the concept of spontaneity & inspiration, regarding them as something crucial for true poetry. The natural world comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject matter. Wordsworth is the closest to nature.
To escape from a world that had became excessively rational, as well as excessively materialistic & ugly, the Romantics would turn to other times & places, where the qualities they valued could be convincingly depicted. Romantics also tend to be nationalistic, defending the great poets & dramatists of their own national heritage against the advocates of classical rules who tended to glorify Rome & rational Italian & French neoclassical art as superior to the native traditions. To the Romantics, poetry should be free from all rules. They would turn to the humble people & their everyday life for subjects, Romantic writers are always seeking for the Absolute, the Ideal through the transcendence of the actual. They have also made bold experiments in poetic language, versification & design, & constructed a variety of forms on original principles of structure & style.
二 该时期的重要作家
I. William Blake
1.一般识记： His life
English poet, artist, & philosopher, born in London England, Nov 28, 1757, and died in London, Aug 12,1827. Blake made distinguished contributions to both Literature & art. He ranks with great poets in the English language & may be considered the earliest of the major English Romantic poets. His poems range from lyrics of childlike simplicity to mystical or prophetic works of great complexity. As an artist he is best known for his engravings, which are among the masterpieces of graphic art.
2. 识记 His political, religious & literary views
Blake never tried to fit into the world; he was a rebel innocently & completely all his life. He was politically of the permanent left & mixed a good deal with the radicals like Thomas Paine& William Godwin. Like Shelley, Blake strongly criticized the capitalists' cruel exploitation, saying that the "dark satanic mills left men unemployed, killed children & forced prostitution." Meanwhile he cherished great expectations & enthusiasm for the French Revolution, & regarded it as a necessary stage leading to the millennium predicted by the biblical prophets. Literarily Blake was the first important Romantic poet, showing contempt for the rule of reason, opposing the classical tradition of the 18th century & treasuring the individual's imagination.
3. 领会 His poems
(1) Early works
The Songs of Innocence (1809) is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy & innocent world, though not without its evils & sufferings. For instance, " Holy Thursday" with its vision of charity children lit " with a radiance all their own" reminds us terribly of a world of loss & institutional cruelty. The wretched child described in " The Chimney Sweeper," orphaned, exploited, yet touched by visionary rapture, evokes unbearable poignancy when he finally puts his trust in the order of the universe as he knows it. His Songs of Experience (1794) paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war & repression with a melancholy tone. The benighted England becomes the world of the dark wood & of the weeping prophet. The orphans of " Holy Thursday" are now "fed with cold & usurious hand." The little chimneysweeper sings "notes of woe" while his parents go to church & praise "God & his Priest & King"---the very instruments of their repression. In "London", the city is no longer a paradise, but becomes the seat of poverty & despair, of man alienated from his true self. Blake's Marriageof Heaven & Hell (1790) marks his entry into maturity. The poem was composed during the climax of the French Revolution & it plays the double role both as a satire & a revolutionary prophecy. In this poem, Blake explores the relationship of the contraries. Attraction & repulsion, reason & energy, love & hate, are necessary to human existence. Life is a continual conflict of give & take, a pairing of opposites, of good & evil, of innocence & experience, of body & soul. "Without contraries," Blake states, "there is no progression." The "marriage," to Blake, means the reconciliation of the contraries, not the subordination of the one to the other.
(2) Later works
In his later period, Blake wrote quite a few prophetic books, which reveal him as the prophet of universal political & spiritual freedom and show the poet himself as the spokesman of revolt. The major ones are: The Book of Urizen(1794),The Book of Los(1795).The Four Zoas (1796-1807) & Milton (1804-1920).
4.领会 Characteristics of Blake's poems
Blake who lived in the blaze of revelation, felt bound to declare that " I know that This world is a world of IMAGINATION & Vision," & that "The Nature of my work is visionary or imaginative."
From childhood, Blake had a strongly visual mind; whatever he imagined, he also saw. As an imaginative poet, he presents his view in visual images instead of abstract terms.
Blake writes his poems in plain & direct language. His poems often carry the lyric beauty with immense compression of meaning. He distrusts the abstractness & tends to embody his views with visual images. Symbolism in wide range is also a distinctive feature of his poetry.
5. 应用 Select Readings:
1) The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Innocence)
Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy & innocent world, though not without its evils & sufferings. In this volume, Blake, with his eager quest for new poetics forms & techniques, broke completely with the traditions of the 18th century. He experimented in meter & rhymes & introduced bold metrical innovations which could not be found in the poetry of his contemporaries.
In the 18th century, small boys sometimes no more than 4 or 5 years old, were employed to climb up the narrow chimney flues & clean them, collecting the soot in bags. Such boys, sometimes sold to the master sweepers by their parents were miserably treated by their master & often suffered disease & physical deformity.
This poem, in fact, is a protest against the harm that society does to its children by exploiting them for labor of this kind, The poem was written in the child's-eye point of view, & the dramatic irony (what the speaker says in the poem is different from what the poet means) arises from the poet's knowing more or seeing more than the child does.
2) The Chimney Sweeper (from songs of Experience)
Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war & repression with a melancholy tone, The benighted England becomes the world of dark wood & of the weeping prophet. The poem selected here reveals the true nature of religion which helps bring misery to the poor children. The poem also reveals the relation between are economic circumstance, i.e. the exploitation of child labor & an ideological circumstance, i.e. the role played by religion in making people compliant to exploitation.
3) The Tyger
The Tyger, included in Songs of Experience, is one of Blake's best-known poems. It seemingly praises the great power of tiger, but what the tiger symbolizes remains disputable: the power of man? Or the revolutionary force? Or the evil? Or as it is usually interpreted, the Almighty Maker who created both the meek & gentle lamb & the terrible & awesome tiger? The poem is highly symbolic with a touch of mysticism & it is open to various interpretations. The poem contains six quatrains in rhyming couplets & its language is terse & forceful with an anvil rhythm.
