| "Freedom" was a keyword throughout the eras of Enlightenment and Romanticism, but the attiude to freedom was not all the same in the two different eras. These philosophers who were dedicated in the Enlightenment, presented the catchword——"freedom,equality and fraternity", demonstrated it in their creations,and shouted it to the world in unison.The authors speaking for the society, the serious plays and philosophical fictions calling for moralities, and the literary figures endowed with ideals of the times,these all proved that freedom in the age of enlightenment was no more than a universal ideal of the public. While during the Romantic Period, these literary authors turned to romatic individuals highly praising passions,they tended to develop their luxuriant imaginations and express their affections for nature in the poems,the loners standing aloof from the society and these exclusive rebels were the typical figures of the romatic times.The universal ideal of the public for freedom in the Enlightenment converted into a personalised volition of the self in the Romantic Period,and ultimately became the central value of the romantic literatures.The reasons of this convertion are comprised of two aspects.On one hand,people lost hope for the Enlightenment and they got down to introspecting the impacts brought by The French Revolution, then they turned their attetions to the individual being and meaning.On the other hand, after a transitory fading,Christianity,although criticized vehemently in the Enlightenment, came back in a new modality in the Romatic Era.It was built on the human morals and emotional appeals.From the external to the internal, Christianity was no longer the chains fetterring people's ideologies, but rather an independently and personally spiritual choice.These factors helped freedom transforming from population to individual,and then freedom became the critical element of the Romantic literature era. |
