New Heloise

Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778), a great Swiss American enlightenment thinker, philosopher, educator, writer, political theorist and composer. He is the preeminent thinker of French Revolution in the eighteenth century and one of the most outstanding representatives of the enlightenment.His main works are Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Du Contrat Social, Emile,ou De l'education and so on. The most important representative of literature includes Les Confessions, The New Heloise and so on.Rousseau's contribution to literature is mainly reflected in his epistolary novel, The New Heloise. In this novel, Rousseau describes beautiful pastoral scenery, customs, free ideas, romantic love... It has greatly promoted the development of later romanticism novels.The New Heloise is an epistolary novel, writing a couple of young people's love tragedy.Saint-Preux, the civilian intellectual, was a teacher in the aristocracy, who was a talented young man from the bottom of the society, with unyielding personality and noble character. He had a love affair with his student, Julie, a noble lady who yearned for pure love but could not be completely divorced from the feudal family. Their love was hindered from Julie's father, resulting in a tragedy.The feudal hierarchy became the root of their misfortune.On the standpoint of bourgeois humanitarianism, Rousseau criticized the feudal marriage based on the class prejudice of a marriage between families of equal social rank, and put forward the ideal of marriage based on the true feelings of nature, and made a strong protest against the feudal hierarchy.The meticulous psychological descriptions in the work and the beautiful chapters of feeling and setting happily blended have won the praise of numerous readers in the past dynasties.