In its most abstract sense the perception of a loss of community in modern society refers to changes in both the structure and content of personal relationships. Here community is used to denote a sense of common identity between individuals, and enduring ties of affection and harmony based upon personal knowledge and face-to-face contact. It is often contrasted with the impersonal and dehumanizing aspects of modern life, with the rise of a selfish individualism, a calculative approach to human relationships and the sense of social dislocation present under conditions of rapid social and economic change. These judgments were typified by the pessimistic strand of much eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Romanticism, which stressed the unity of man with nature, opposed reason with sentiment and offered thoroughgoing criticism of the emerging urban, industrial worlD.The concept of community was used in order to come to terms with this new form of society. The scientific and technological advances of the new age were contrasted with man’s spiritual and emotional impoverishment, in which the loss of community was taken as emblematiC.The term was therefore used in a literally reactionary way, as a reaction to both the material squalor and the spiritual degradation which Romanticism associated with the rise of urban industrialism. Community signified a more humane and intimate existence, more stable, more traditional and less tainted by the rational pursuit of self-interest. The term was used by writers like Cobbett and Coleridge to evoke a largely mythical golden age in the pre-industrial world, where organic communities of beneficent landowners and merry rustics lived a happy Arcadian existence in the mainly agricultural villages and small market towns which constituted pre-industrial-society. Rapid urbanization and industrialization were accused of having destroyed this notion of community.
The Industrial Revolution was believed to have changed not only the structure of society by concentrating large numbers of people in cities and in factories, but also the quality of the relationships upon which a sense of community resteD.Out of this perception there emerged a very common literary and cultural theme, fully explored by Raymond Williams in two of his books, Culture and Society and The Country and the City (Williams, 1961, 1973). Since urban industrialism had brought a breakdown of community it followed that real communities could not exist in the new industrial cities but only in the countryside. The village therefore came to be regarded as the ideal community. The romantic assertion of the unit of man with nature found its counterpart in an idyllic view of rural life as consisting of harmony and virtue. Relationships in rural communities were regarded as more indefinably profound and fulfilling, generating a prevailing sense of meaningful social intimacy. In cities, on the other hand, it was believed that the "unnatural" separation of their inhabitants from the land and from one another provoked dislocation and a superficial and alienating way of life. This tendency to identify a sense of community with particular patterns of settlement and particular geographical locations has proved to be an immensely enduring one. As Williams shows, it is a tradition that has penetrated large areas of our culture, including our literature, our aesthetics, our architecture and town and country planning, and even our social science. Such a tradition continues to act as a filter through which the reality of urban and rural life is constantly being interpreteD.Even today there is a tendency to regard only rural villages as real communities where we can find our roots, while life in cities is viewed as a necessary evil to be avoided whenever possible.
1. Which of the following is the best title for the passage?
2.The eighteenth-and-nineteenth-century Romanticism insisted that（ ）.
3.The word "emblematic" ( ParA.1 ) may have the meaning of（ ）.
4.According to the passage, the concept of community（ ）.
5.Which of the following statements is correct according to the passage?
