英国文学(二).doc

IV. George G. Byron (拜伦1788~1824 ) 1. Points of view (1) Byron has a strong passion for liberty and an intense hatred for all tyrants. He shows his sympathy for the oppressed Portuguese under French occupation, he gives his strong support to the Spanish people fighting for their national independence. He laments over the fallen Greece, expressing his ardent wish that the suppressed Greek people should win their freedom. He glorifies the French Revolution and condemns the despotic Napoleon period. At the news of the Greek revolt against the Turks, Byron not only gave the insurgent Greeks financial help but also plunged himself into the struggle for the national independence of that country. (2) Byron continued in the tradition of classicism that had been advocated by the writers of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. He eulogized the 18th-century Enlighteners and attacked the conservative schools of contemporary poetry, showing his contempt for what he considered the commonplace and vulgarity of the Lake Poets . 2. Major works (1) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage( 《恰尔德?哈罗德游记》) Byron’s heroes are more or less surrogates of himself. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is such an example. The poem is about a gloomy, passionate young wanderer who escaped from the society he disliked and traveled around the continent, questing for freedom. It teems with all kinds of recognizable features of Romantic poetry—the medieval, the outcast figure, love of nature, hatred of tyranny, preoccupation with the remote and savage. It also contains many vivid and exotic descriptive passages on mountains, rivers and seas. (2) Don Juan( 《唐?璜》 ) Don Juan is Byron’s masterpiece, a great comic epic of the early 19th century. It is a poem based on a traditional Spanish legend of a great lover and seducer of women. In the conventional sense, Juan is immoral, yet Byron takes this poem as the most moral. And Byron invests in Juan the moral positives like courage, generosity and frankness, which, accor