p;with the fantastic imagination, especially abounded in his three distinctive supernatural poems. In Wu Haichao’s “‘Imagination and Fancy’: A Comparison Between Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Literary Ideology” (2006), it illustrates the difference between these two Romanticists’ attitudes towards imagination and fancy – one concentrates on the emotional overflow and the other on the reasonable expression, which actually agrees with each other in nature. Hong Fang’s On Coleridge’s Theory of Imagination (2006), conducts a systematically analytical study from the perspective of materialism. She traces back to its social background and philosophical base, and comments on the feature of his imagination, the value of its realistic significance and its historical limitation.
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Chapter 2 Background Information
2.1 The Impact of the French Revolution
In terms of the European history, it is a revolutionary age from the middle-late stage of the eighteenth century to the nineteenth century, during which the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution advance hand in hand, extensively shocking the old society. Upholding the principles of “liberty, equality and fraternity”, the French Revolution unveils with the astounding events in 1789. It is more than a political or historical movement, during which the profound and extensive process in the following decades has developed and advanced drastically. In Britain, with the impact of the French Revolution and the internal conflicts intensified, there are a storm of ideas and voices emerging and blossoming across the country. Just as Thomas Paine perceives in 1791, “It is much. – Much to us as men: Much to us as Englishmen. . . the French Revolution concerns us immediately.”1 It is conceded that almost everything can be concerned with the Revolution in France, not this thing or that, but literally everything is involved in this one process, which is also the same case in the rest of the Europe. In this historical moment, the French Revolutionists determine to create a revolutionary culture, insisting that all traces of the corrupt aristocratic tradition should be eliminated, even to the extent of altering the kings and queens knaves on the playing cards. The political responses of the British radicals, voiced particularly urgently in 1792-3, upset the conservative members in Britain, for the voices develop dramatically and menacingly accompanied by the growing violence and instability in France, and the outbreak of war in Europe. The French Revolution, as a matter of fact, turns out to be the consequence of conceptions and the propa
