Romance is a long composition

Romance is a long composition, in verse or in prose, describing the life and adventures of a noble hero. It generally concerns knights and involves a large amount of fighting as well as a number of miscellaneous adventures and a series of love stories.

Ballad is an anonymous narrative song, usually in 4-line stanzas, with the second and the fourth lines rhymed.

English Renaissance characteristics：1.The lateness of its impact. 2. Isolated from the Continent results in its independence. 3.The native literature assimilates foreign influences without being subjected. 4.The English Renaissance is rather artistic rather than philosophical and scholarly.

5.The coinciding of the Renaissance and the Reformation of England.

Humanism was a literary and philosophic system of thought which attempted to place the affairs of mankind at the center of its concerns. According to humanists, man should mound the world according to his own desires, and attains happiness by removing all external checks by the exercise of the human intellect.

the significance of More：1.it created a national prose, equally adapted to handling scientific and artistic material. 2.an elegant Latin scholar and the father of English prose: he composed works in English, translated from Latin into English biography, wrote History of Richard III.

Puritanism was the religious doctrine of revolutionary bourgeoisie during the English Revolution. It preached thrift, sobriety, hard work and unceasing labor, with no extravagant enjoyment of the fruits of labor. Worldly pleasures were condemned as harmful. Puritans opposed churches’ squandering property.

Neo-classicism: Modelling itself on the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, neoclassicism exalts the virtues of proportion, unity, harmony, grace, taste, manners, and restraint. It values realism and reason over imagination and emotion. Wit and satire flourished in this period, as did the ode and verse written in heroic couplets.

Writers of Sentimentalism.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) Pamela, Virtue Rewarded the story the significance Pamela was a new thing in these ways.

It discarded the “improbable and marvelous” accomplishments of the former heroic romances, and pictured the life and love of ordinary people.

Its intension was to afford not merely entertainment but also moral instruction.

It described not only the sayings and doings of characters but their also their secret thoughts and feelings. It was, in fact, the first English psycho-analytical novel.

Blake’s influence(romanticism)

Blake is often regarded as a symbolist and mystic, and he has exerted a great influence on

twentieth century writers. His peculiarities of thought and imaginative vision have in many ways proved far more congenial to the 20th century than they were to the 19th.