英国文学史名词解释

名词解释Old English: the language of Anglo and Saxon people during 5and 11th century

Epic: A long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes. In a grand ceremonious style .The hero, usually protected by or even descended from gods, performs superhuman exploits in battle or in marvelous voyages, often saving or founding a nation.

Romance:the most popular literary form in the Middle Ages in Europe; A tale (in verse or prose) that deals with knightly adventures or other heroic deeds or supernatural or amorous subjects, and usually emphasizes the chivalric love.

Ballad:A folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived form a tragic incident in local history or legend.Ballad are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three- stress lines ,the second and fourth lines rhyming.

Couplet(双行体)a pair of rhyming verse lines of the same length. Chauser established the use of couplet in his Canterbury Tales, using rhymed iambic pentameters later known as heroic couplet

The Renaissance refers to the period between the 14th and 17th centuries.The rebirth of literature, art, and learning that progressively transformed European culture from the mid-14th century in Italy to the mid-17th century in England, strongly influenced by the rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin literature. The Renaissance is commonly held to mark the close of the middle Ages, and the beginning of the modern western world. The term normally refer to the combined intellectual and artistic transformation of the 15th 16th centuries, including the emergency of humanism, protestant individualism, Copernican astronomy, and the discovery of America

Humanism:it stands for devotion to human values represent in classical literature.it is the keynote or the dominate ideology during the Renaissance

Sonnet：A lyric of fourteen lines usually in iambic pentameter. 1. Shakespearean sonnet: Also called English sonnet or Elizabethan Sonnet. It is structured of 3 quatrains and a final couplet with the rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg2. Petrarchan Sonnet: Also called Italian sonnet. It contains an octave with the rhyme pattern abba abba and a sestet of various rhyme Patterns such as cdecde or cdcdcd.

3. Spenserian sonnet: comprising 3 quatrains and a couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme

scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee

Ode is a dignified and elaborately structured lyric poem of some length, praising and glorifying an individual, commemorating an event or describing nature intellectually rather than emotionally.

Elegy Formal lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or a public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject.

Pastoral: a highly conventional mode of writing that celebrates the innocent life of shepherds or shepherdesses in poems, plays, and prose romance.

Tragedies were concerned with the harshness and apparent injustice of life. They involved the trials and eventful death of a hero who was an important person and whose death led to the downfall of others.a. the central characters are always people of importance, like kings, queens, prince, general, nobles.b. a tragic hero often a flawed good man; often the hero’s fall from happiness was due to a weakness in his character, by some great error in his part.c. supernatural beings are often involved in the conflict of human beings, like gods, spirits, witches, ghosts.d. sadness is mixed with horror, murder, treachery, and blood-shedding.

Catharsis or Cathartic effect of tragedies: Tragedies give an outlet for such emotions as greed, hatred, lust, fear and pity. The audience feel relieved or purged when they leave the theatre.

Comedy deals with ordinary people in everyday situations, it deals with ordinary people in a humble style, usually beginning with misfortune and ending with joy. The purpose of comedy is chiefly to entertain people, but some have moral and corrective purposes, to ridicule and satirize human weaknesses.

Comedy of humor according to the comedy of humor, each of characters in the play has some dominating passion or peculiar quality such as jealousy,greedy and comedy of humor mainly satires these humours demonstrated the characters in the play. Ben Jonson has been chefly known for his comedy of humors

Soliloquy is the act of talking to oneself, whether silently or aloud. In drama it denotes the convention by which a character, alone on the stage, utters his or her thoughts aloud. Playwrights have used this device as a convenient way to convey information about a character’s motives and state of mind, or for purpose of exposition, and sometimes in order to guide the judgments and responses of the audience.

Allegory: is a fictional narrative or artistic expression that conveys a symbolic meaning parallel to but distinct from and more important than the literary meaning.

Dramatic irony involves the reader (or audience) knowing something about what's happening in the plot, about which the character(s) have no knowledge. Dramatic irony can be used in comedies and tragedies, and it works to engage the reader, as one is drawn into what is happening. The audience may sympathize with the character, who does not know the true situation. Or, the reader may see the character as blind or ignorant (as with Oedipus). The clues may be rather obvious, but the character may be unwilling to recognize the truth.

The term “metaphysical” indicates a common poetic style, use of figurative language, and way of organizing the meditative process or the poetic argument. This term is now applied to a group of

17th century poets who, whether or not directly influenced by Done, employ similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in secular poetry( Cleveland, Marvell, Cowley) and in religious poetry(Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, and Traherne). The term was coined by John Dryden (1693): \"He affects the metaphysics

Metaphysical Conceit In general, the metaphysical conceit will use some sort of shocking or unusual comparison as the basis for the metaphor. When it works, a metaphysical conceit has a startling appropriateness that makes us look at something in an entirely new way. Draws upon a wide range of knowledge, mainly using highly intellectual analogies; its comparisons are elaborately rationalized

Heroic drama: A kind of tragedy or tragicomedy that came into vogue with the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. Influenced by French classical tragedy and its dramatic unities (time, place, action), it aimed at epic (heroic) grandeur, usually by means of bombast, exotic settings and lavish scenery. The noble hero would typically be caught in a conflict between love and patriotic duty, leading to emotional scenes presented in a manner close to opera. The leading English exponent of heroic drama was John Dryden: hid the conquest of Granada (1670-1) and Aureng-Zebe (1675) were both written in heroic couplets.

the Enlightenment movement

A general term applied to the movement of the intellectual liberation that developed in Western Europe from the late 17th century to the late 18th century( the age of reason)。

Neo-classicism:

the literary principle according to which the writing and criticism of poetry and drama were to be

guided by rules and precedents derived from the best ancient Greek and Roman authors. In a more general sense, in contrast with Romanticism, the term has also been used to describe the

characteristic world-view or value system of the age of reason, denoting a preference for rationality, clarity, restraint, order and decorum, and for general truths rather than particular insights. The central assumption of neo-classicism was that the ancient authors had already attained perfection; the modern author's chief task was to imitate them. Accordingly, the approved genes of classical literature ---epic, tragedy, comedy, elegy, ode, epistle, eclogue, epigram, fable, and satire--- were adopted as the favored forms in this period.

Mock- epic, a poem using the lofty style and the conventions of epic poetry to describe trivial or undignified series of events: thus a kind of satire that mocks the subject by treating it in an inappropriately grandiose manner, usually at some length. The outstanding example is Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock\"

Novel is a highly stylized prose account of fictional reality in the form of story with profundity for the purpose of changing the readers’ mind by the aid of the reader’s active involvement while providing entertainment and superior truth of life.

Sentimentalism: is a literal movement in the middle of the 18th century in England which concentrates on the distressed of the poor unfortunate and virtuous people and demonstrates that effusive emotion was evidence of kindness and goodness. It reveals grief, pains and tears. It came into being as a result of a better discontent on the part of certain enlighteners in social reality.

Elegy The term was usually used in classical times for love poetry written with a specific meter, and in the Renaissance it kept this sense with some variation. However, since the 17th century it has come to mean a formal poem of lament and consolation concerning a particular person's death, or reflection on death in general. Milton's \"Lycia’s\" (1638) is an example of the pastoral elegy, in which

the speaker and the person mourned are shepherds. A less formal and lengthy form of elegy is the dirge, which is usually sung.

The Graveyard School refers to a group of C18 poets whose writings frequently touched on themes of death, mortality, religion, and melancholy. Often elegiac in tone (and title) their poems make frequent use of funereal or gloomy imagery; they were often very Christian writers who used the imagery of night, death, and gloom in spiritual contemplations of human mortality and our relation to the divine.

Picaresque novel a humor novel in which the plot consist of a young knave’s adventures and escapades narrated in comic or satiric scenes. It is usually in nature and realistic in its presentation of the all around aspects of society,eg, Defoe’s Robinson Cruse

Gothic novel emphasizes the grotesque, mysterious and desolate .this novel is filled with scenes of terror and gloom in the medical setting.

Burns stanza or Burns Meter

A six-line﹡ stanza rhyming aaabbb, the first three lines and the fifth having four ﹡stresses, and the fourth and sixth having two stresses.

Ottawa rima

A form of verse ﹡stanza consisting of eight lines rhyming abababcc, usually employed for ﹡

narrative verse but sometimes used in ﹡lyric poems.

Rhyme royal

A ﹡stanza form consisting of seven 5-stress lines (iambic pentameters)rhyming ababbcc, first used by Chaucer and thus also known as the Chaucerian stanza.

Romanticism，it is the modern term applied to the profound shift in western attitude to art and human creativity that dominated much of 19th century. Its chief emphasis was on freedom or individual self-expression, sincerity, spontaneity.

Lake poets,wordsworth,Coleridge and Southey have often been mentioned as the lake poets, because they lived in the lake district in the northwest part of England.the three traversed the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and closing as conservatives.

诗歌鉴赏（Thomas Gray） Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard 墓园挽歌

1. Theme: reflections on death, the sorrows of life, and the mysteries of human life with a touch of his personal melancholy.

2. The sure control of language, imagery, rhythm, as well as his subtle moderation of style and tone give the poem a unique charm of its own.

3. The well-conceived structure and the metrical beauty of the poem won Gray the fame as one of the master poets of the 18th century, and the poem has been considered as one of the best short poems in English literature.

Form

4. Form: a. Iambic pentameter quatrains with alternative rhymes

b. No enjambment: Often lines are miniature clauses with balanced subject and predicate, such as

line 1: \"The curfew\" (subject) and \"tolls the knell of parting day\" (predicate).

c. Alliteration ties successive lines together: \"herd wind\" and \"homeward\" (l. 2-3), \"droning flight\" and \"distant folds\" (l. 7-8), and \"mantl'd tow'r\" and \"moping owl\" (l. 9-10).

d. Parallel syntactic construction across line and stanza boundaries

三The Merchant of Venice Theme: praising true friendship, true love, exposing social evils: greed, malice, racial prejudice, money worship, injustice.

Analysis of major characters:

Shylock: Mean, greedy, cunning, cruel, vengeful, and merciless; a sophist, but also a victim of racial discrimination and religious persecution. An obstacle and an epitome of selfishness, he serves both functions. A Jew of pride and deep religious instincts; suffered more than suffering; loud protest against Antonio’s arrogant treatment.

Portia: beautiful, cultured, learned, witty, courageous, and prudent. She is a new woman of the Renaissance, who not only frees herself from the usual feudal fetters for women but even outshines many men in many ways

Hamlet

The character of HamletHamlet as a typical tragic hero:Good qualities: noble-minded, brave, intelligent, learned, with a strong sense of justice, loved and respected by his people.Weaknesses: rash, impulsive, indecisive, sometimes can be cruel, harsh and coarse.His tragic flaw is lack of emotional

balance; either acts rashly, without thinking, or doesn’t act quickly and firmly enough. His

indecisiveness, his inability to act when action is needed, is one of the major causes for his downfall.

The Rivals（Richard Brinsley Sheridan）

1. It is a satire on the sentimental and pseudo-romantic fancies of many young women of the day, who fell victim to the sentimental novels and to the illusion of harmony between romantic dreams and the real bourgeois world of practical money concerns.

2. Here we find Sheridan following the tradition of Ben Jonson’s comedy of humors, with the exaggeration of a single trait in each of the characters for the purpose of satire.

3. As a whole, it was a purified and moralizing play, or a contrasting study of two brothers and rivals, one a man of principle and the other a hypocrite, and it showed the neoclassical outlook of Sheridan.

The School of Scandal

1. It is a sharp satire on the moral degeneracy of the aristocratic-bourgeois society in

18th-century England, on the vicious scandal-mongering among the idle rich, and above all on the immorality and hypocrisy behind the mask of upright living and high-sounding moral principles.

2. The dialogue in the play is brilliantly witty throughout. The plot is not loosely hung together, but is carefully worked out and shows the playwright’s perfect mastery of stagecraft in his expertly manipulation of disguise and mistaken identity and dramatic irony.

Sheridan vivified the English drama of his day, for which he has been praised as the greatest English playwright of the 18th century.

Conclusion

1. Sheridan vivified the English drama of his day, for which he has been praised as the greatest English playwright of the 18th century.

2. In fact, his two plays serve as important links between the masterpieces of Shakespeare and those of Bernard Show, as true classics in English comedy.

Analysis of Paradise Lost

Theme and Characterization

The theme of the poem is a revolt against God’s authority.What do the main characters resemble?1. God: selfish despot,cruel, unjust2. Adam and Eve embody Milton’s belief in the powers of man craving (longing) for knowledge 3. God’s angels are foolish, resembling the court of an absolute monarch.

4. Satan is a rebel against tyranny and Satan and his followers resemble a republican Parliament

The Image of Satan

1. Satan is the real hero of the poem.

2. He is firmer than the rest of the angels.

3. He has an invincible heart.

4. Satan remains superior in nobility and welcomes his defeat and his torments as a glory, a liberty

and a joy;

5. Satan is the spirit questioning the authority of God.

6. Milton makes Satan as his own mouthpiece.

7.However, Satan’s image as a glorious rebel is short-lived. He becomes more and more vicious, treacherous and debased, and finally is transformed into a crawling snake consuming dust and ashes. Milton’s attitude also changed from admiration to condemnation. Satan spirit: defiance of authority and capable of evil doing.

The Image of Adam and eve

1.They are responsible for man’s losing paradise and immortality, but not portrayed as failures and wretches.

2. their dignity, innocence and beauty are stressed and they show the best qualities of humanity such as love, compassions, temperance and devotion. Adam falls by consciously choosing human love, rather than obeying God. In the fall of man Adam discovered his full humanity. They leave with the knowledge that faith in the redeemer (Christ) can lead them back to paradise.

Milton is a great stylist. His poetry is of grand style. He has made a life-long study of classical and Biblical literature. His poetry is noted for sublimity of thought and majesty of expression. But he was the most successful in the use of blank verse, and he is the forerunner to introduce blank verse into non-dramatic poetry.

Milton is a prominent figure in politics in the 17th century England. He makes great contribution to the English Revolution.

Milton is a great poet and important prose writer. His Paradise Lost is the only generally acknowledged English epic since Beowulf. His Areopagitica serves as one of the most powerful declarations on freedom of press.

Robinson Crusoe: 1. An adventure story, moral tale, commercial account, the personal history of Robinson & the history of the expansion of Britain, a reflection of the 18th century western civilization

2. It is an interesting picaresque novel about the 18th century English adventure-hero who is a true empire builder, being at once a colonizer and a foreign trader. Robinson Crusoe as a hero and Robinson Crusoe as a book have been widely known and read, chiefly because in these brilliant scenes of the hero's adventures alone on the desert island for 28 years we see the glorification of the bourgeois man who has the courage and will to face the have the hardships and the ingenuity and determination to preserve himself and improve on his livelihood by struggling against nature. And here there is even the glorification of labor, physical as well as mental, which alone enables the hero first to make a bare living for himself and later to improve gradually upon his living conditions.

The very detailed description of the steps taken, one after another, by the hero to provide for himself a shelter and food and clothing and then simple comforts of life, are managed with great skill by the author, not elaborated with exaggerations or romantic colorings but told in a simple, straightforward style, and this adds to the realistic effect of the story.,

Robinson Crusoe, as an 18th century individual who seems to have gone through the development of human civilization with all his own efforts, could not have succeeded in making a living on the desert island without having in the first place taken as much as he could from the wrecked ship of the products of human civilization of many centuries. Thus Defoe's story differs fundamentally from the cult of primitivism or the return to nature such as was advocated by many

18th century European Enlighteners including chiefly Jean Jacques Rousseau, for Robinson Crusoe never for a moment wants to give up the civilization of his age and go back to the primitive existence.

Gulliver’s Travels

1. Swift’s highest achievement in literature is thus a satire on the whole English society of the early 18th century, touching upon the political, religious, legal, military, scientific, philosophical as well literary institutions therein and the men who makes their careers there. Artistically, Gulliver’s Travels is at once a fantasy and a realistic work of fiction. Though the story about the Lilliputians and the Brobdingnagians and the Laputians and the Houyhnhnms is quite frankly invented and unreal,

2it is told in a very vivid and convincing way and it contains some very direct descriptions of men and things in 18th century England besides the numerous indirect references to conditions of the author’s own day.

3The four parts of the book project the author’s satire in different ways: in Part one the vices in the English society of Swift’s day are indirectly satirized by comparing them with similar ridiculous practices in the Lilliputian world;

in Part II the satire is more directly given, though the hero’s narration of the English society and the Brobdingnag king’s horror upon hearing it;

in Part III, obtuse scientific researches and philosophical discussions in early 18th century England are ridiculed via the description of the Academy of Projectors in Lagado;

In Part IV the satire is directed at the aristocratic- bourgeois society of the early 18th-century both directly through the hero’s narration of the English society which resembles that of the Yahoos and indirectly by contrasting the English scene with the descriptions of nobility of the Houyhnhnms.

Significance of Pamela

1. It pictures the life and love of ordinary people.

2. Its intention is to afford not merely entertainment but also moral instruction.

3. However, the moral advocated here is essentially bourgeois morality which fixes a price for every thing, and in Pamela the price for the virtue of woman’s chastity is honorable marriage, plus wealth and a high social position resulting from the marriage. This reveals the moral hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie as Puritanism enters into a compromise with bourgeois reality.

4. The chief contribution of Pamela to the development of the English novel lies in the penetrating psychological study of the heroine employed for the first time in English prose fiction.

5. he employs the skill of “write to the moment”

Psychological study

The thoughts and feelings of Pamela are revealed through the series of letters, in the successive stages of her reaction towards Mr B’s attempts to seduce her, are therefore extremely complicated and full of contradictions, for her repulse to her amorous advances are both determined and wavering and transition from her declaration that she can not hate him in spite of her rough handling of her, to her eventual revelation of rapturous love for the man after his proposal of marriage, is indeed a most subtle study of bourgeois psychology and a most penetrating satire on the so called bourgeois moral standards which are ever on ulterior considerations of wealth and social position concealed behind the thin veil of bourgeois moral hypocrisy.

Tome Jones （Henry Fielding）

1. Tom Jones is an illegitimate child brought up by the benevolent squire Mr. Allworthy with Allworthy’s sister’s child Blifil. Blifil is a hypocrite while Tom is a good-natured youth

2. As one of the pioneers of English realistic literature, Fielding portrays the real life of men without disguise. He exposes the hypocrisy and depravity of the ruling class, and pictures the poverty of the working masses that are driven by want to crime. For a time, Tom became a national hero. People were fond of this young fellow with manly virtues and yet not without fault. The full-blooded characters are realistically depicted in brilliant, witty and highly artistic language.

Structure

1 .Greatly influenced by classicism that stressed order, balance and symmetry

2. Its 18 books of epic form are equally divided into 3 sections, 6 books each, clearly marked out by the change of schemes: in the country, on the road and in London.

3. Symmetrical arrangement

4. Characters are also balanced Tom vs. Blifil, Allworthy vs. Western.

Fielding’s contribution

1. In both theory and practice, Fielding establishes once and for all the from of the English novel. He has held a unique position in the history of English literature by being called the “father of the English novel”, for his contribution to the establishment of the form of modern novel. Fielding set up the theory of realism in literary creation. He wrote specifically \"comic epic in prosehe modern novel its structure and style.

2.Before him, the relating of a story in a novel was either in the epistolary form (a series of letters) as in Richardson's Pamela, or the picaresque form (adventurous wanderings ) through the mouth of the principal character, as in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but Fielding adopted \"the third-person narration\". In planning his stories, he tries to retain the grand epical form of the classical works but at the same time keeps faithful to his realistic presentation of the common life as it is.

3. He started the panoramic novel tradition followed by Dickson and Thackeray

Fielding’s language

1. Easy, smooth and familiar, but extremely vivid and vigorous;

2. His sentences are always distinguished by logic and rhythm

3. His structure is carefully planned towards a natural ending.

4. Lively, dramatic dialogues and other theatrical devices such as suspense, coincidence and unexpectedness

Edmund Spenser

Spenser's contribution to English literature.

1. Firstly, Spenser is courageous in experimentation with the meters. In the Calendar, he used 13 different kinds of meters: three kinds of couplets, three kinds of 4-line stanzas, and three kinds of 6-line stanzas in addition to stanzas of eight, nine and ten lines and a sestina. Some of these he invented, some he adapted, but most were new. Further innovations appeared in the special rhyme scheme of the Spenserian sonnets, and in the Spenserian stanza in his The Faerie Queen.

2. Secondly, the publication of The Shepherd’s Calendar marked the budding of the Renaissance flower in the northern island of England.

3. Thirdly, in the meantime, the language had undergone sufficient changes as to be called Modern English. Spenser is the first master to make that language the natural music of his poetic effusions.

4. Fourthly, his sonnets in Amoretti (a series of 88 sonnets printed with Epithalamion in 1595), together with Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella and Shakespeare’s Sonnets, are the most famous sonnets sequences of the Elizabethan Age.

5. Lastly, although many of the allusions in the Faerie Queene lost their meaning to modern readers, but Spenser has held his position as model of poetical art among the Renaissance English poets. His influence can be traced in the works of Milton (Milton calls him his “poetical father”), Shelley, and Keats.

He is called the poet＇s poet The Canterbury Tales （Geoffrey Chaucer）

His master piece The Canterbury tales contains a general prologue and 24 tales, unfinished at the author＇s sudden death

The total effect of the poem: a general picture of social reality of poet＇s day asp the pilgrims portrayed include men and women of all different profession , the high and the low, the lay and the clerical, the learned and the ignorant , the roguish and the upright all except the very highest and the lowest in social rank at the time

Artistic features of Canterbury Tales

1. Chaucer displays his humor and irony as he condemns these vicious characters and their culpable deeds. These all- pervading humor mix with the satire constitutes C’s high artistic achievement and enables him to tower above his contemporaries as a poet and a teller of tales

2. London dialect as effective weapon for satire and humor for poetry

3. the first use of heroic couplet (rhyming pairs in iambic pentameter

4.Chaucer creates in the general prologue and to the tales a whole gallery of vivid characters from all walks of life and then assigns to each of them some appropriate tales capable of shedding light on the respective narrator＇s distinctive personality.

Chaucer’s contribution to the English poetry

1Father of English poetry introduced heroic couplet in to English poetry

2 Establishment of English as the literary language of England based on London dialect

Sir Gawain and the Green knight

Artistic features

1. The use of alliteration. It is an alliterative Romance about King Arthur and his round table knight. Each fit consists of 2 parts, the first part contains alliterative long lines of more than 10 and the second part contains bob (two or three syllables) and four rhymed wheel. This kind of special fit makes the narrative rhythm changeable and variable; it combines the strong alliteration with musical rhyme so as

to come to the effect of musical melody.

2. Images and figures contain mysterious meaning and color and foreground the theme of this poem.

Five star picture- five symbols, five senses, five fingers, five wounds. Three days in castle, three seductions, three test

Artistic feature in Beowulf

1. The use of alliteration, words beginning with the same consonants alliterate with each other within each line, or a word beginning with a vowel alliterates with another word beginning with the same or another vowel. e.g.

a. Thus made their mourning the men of Geat land,

b. For their hero’s passing ,his heath-companion

c. Quoth that of all the kings of earth,

e. Of men he was the mildest and most beloved

f. To his kin the kindest, keenest to praise

2. The use of indirect metaphor (kennings)

e.g. sea: swan-road, whale-path or sea-bath

Ship-- wave-traveler

Soldier: shield-bearer, battle-hero, spear-fighter

Fights: sword-clashing, edge-clash

Armor: ring-mail, limb-sark, breast-net

3. the use of understatement(低调，轻描淡写地陈述）：a negative expression usually in the form of an understatement creating

aNot troublesome, for very welcome

b. Need not praise, for a right to condemn

4. Parallel and antithesis

5. Episodes and digression