A Brief Introduction to Foreign Literary Aesthetics, Schools and Neo-Romanticism
From the end of 19th century to the beginning of 2th century, it was mainly popular in German, Austrian and British European countries.
the emergence of this trend of thought has its social and historical reasons. At that time, the major countries in Europe were in the transition from liberal capitalism to imperialism, and the basic social contradictions became increasingly intensified, and the bourgeois ideological trend of various forms flooded. The agnosticism of idealism, Schopenhauer's "voluntarism" and Nietzsche's "superman" philosophy provide philosophical soil for the emergence of new romanticism. In terms of artistic and aesthetic principles, it abandoned critical realism and naturalism, and mixed and developed negative romanticism, aestheticism and symbolism, resulting in the new romantic works of Germany and Austria being classified as symbolism again. Generally speaking, German poet Georg, Austrian Hofmannsthal, Rilke and British Stevenson are regarded as the main representatives of this trend of thought.
On the one hand, these writers are pessimistic about the capitalist system and have certain criticisms and attitudes; on the other hand, they ignore the people's revolutionary movement, and their thoughts are contradictory and confused. As a result, they deny that literature and art should reflect reality in art theory, advocate that it should be for the enjoyment of the audience, and claim that the writer's task is only to tell readers interesting events or mysterious inner feelings that people have never experienced. In creative practice, they either focus on expressing the complex and mysterious subjective world and dreamy emotions with confusion, or describe novel and rare environments, events and characters far away from social reality from the abstract concepts of human nature and good and evil. Although some of their works show sympathy and appreciation for the lower class, most of them do not directly expose and reveal social evils and their roots, and do not make clear political and moral evaluations. Such as Stevenson's arabian adventure, Treasure Island and dr. jekyll and mr. hyde. Therefore, people criticized him for "leading the novel back to the road of story telling and legendary literature." In terms of artistic expression, they not only inherited the romanticism, which was subjective first, indulged in imagination, invented bizarre plots, and paid attention to gorgeous language, but also adopted symbolic techniques to pursue mysterious atmosphere, which led to the works (mainly poems) being obscure and divorced from reality.
although the influence of this trend of thought is not extensive, it is a prelude to the all-round rise and rapid development of western modernist literature and art, and it has its significance that cannot be ignored.