英美文学课总结

英美⽂学课总结
English Romanticism
English Romanticism begins in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s The Lyrical Ballads and ends in 1832 with Walter Scott’s death. William Blake and Robert Burns also belong to this literary genre, though they live prior to the Romantic period.English Romanticism is a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason. The French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution exert great influence on English Romanticism. The romanticists express a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions. They place the individual at the center of art, as can be seen from Lord Byron’s Byronic Hero. The key words of English Romanticism are nature and imagination.English Romantic tend to be nationalistic, defending the greatest English writers. They argue that poetry should be free from all rules.
Lake poets
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were known as Lake Poets because they lived and knew one another in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England. The former two published The Lyrical Ballads together in 1798, while all three of them had radical inclinations in their youth but later turned conservative and received pensions and poet laureateships from the aristocracy.
Karl Marx likes Byron and Shelley very much. MU Dan（穆旦/查良铮），a renowned Chinese poet and translator , did splendid work to popularize Byron and Shelley in China.
Other greatest Romantic poets are: John Keats, P.B. Shelley and G. G. Byron.
Years ago, Wordsworth and Coleridge were labeled “negative romantic poets” while Byron and Shelley were hailed as “positive (revolutionary) Romantic poets”. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s literary achievements were underestimated for a long time.
Feminist works
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.
Gothic novel is a type of romantic fiction that predominates in the late 18th century and continues to show its influence in early 19th century. Its principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural. Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)by Ann Radcliffe are masterpieces of English gothic novel.
English fiction gropes its way amidst the overwhelming Romantic poetry. It revives its popularity in the hands of Jane Austen & Walter Scott.
Walter Scott is noted for his historical novel based on Scottish history and legends. He exerted great influence on European literature of his time.
Jane Austen is the first and foremost English women novelist. Following the neoclassical tradition, she is unsurpassed in the description of uneventful everyday life.
Essayists in English Romanticism
Essayists Representative works
William Hazlitt Familiar essays
Charles Lamb Essays of Elia; Tales from Shakespeare Coleridge Biographia Literaria
William Wordsworth
Wordsworth is the most representative poet of English Romanticism. He was labeled as “negative Romantic poet” by Karl Marx In 1795 he ，his sister Dorothy Wordsworth and Coleridge became “three people with one soul” in literary history.
In 1798, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their Lyrical Ballads.
His major works
Wordsworth’s fame lies chiefly in his short poems. His short poems fall into 2 categories: poems about nature and poems about human life.
His best known poems of nature include: The Daffodils(I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud), Tintern Abbey, To the Cuckoo, My Heart Leaps up, To a Butterfly, An Evening Walk, & The Sparrow’s Nest.
His best known poems about human life include: Lucy Poems, The Solitary Reaper and The Old Cumberland Beggar, Michael, & To a Highland Girl.
Wordsworth wrote many sonnets. His famous sonnets are: Earth Has Not Anything to Show More Fair (Written Upon Westminster Bridge), On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic, & Thought of a Briton on the Subjugation of Switzerland. His best known long poem is The Prelude.
Brief Comments
Wordsworth is the representative poet of English romanticism
Wordsworth’s poetry is distinguished by the simplicity and purity of his
language.
Wordsworth’s theory on versification has exerted profound influence on later
poets. (mimesis模仿--imaginative recreation)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Major works
Demonic poems
●The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
●Kubla Khan
●Christabel
Conversational poems
●Frost at Morning
●Dejection: An Ode (沮丧）
Essays
●Biographia Literaria
●Lectures on Shakespeare
George Gordon Byron (1788-1824)
Major works
Long Poems or Collections
Hours of Idleness
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
Don Juan
Best known single poems in China
When We Two Parted
She Walks in Beauty
The Isles of Greece (from Don Juan)
Sonnet on Chillon
Brief comments
Byron’s poetry is based upon his own experience. His heroes are more or less
pictures of himself. His hero is known as “Byronic Hero”, a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. For such a hero, the conflict is usually one of rebellious individual against outworn social systems and conventions.
The figure is, to some extent, modeled on the life and personality of Byron.
Byron’s poetry exerts great influence on the Romantic Movement. He stands
with Shakespeare and Scott among the British writers who exert great influence over the mainland of Europe.
P. B. SHELLEY (1792-1822)
Percy Bysshe Shelley Shelley is one of the greatest English lyrical poets. His poems abound with personification, metaphor and other figures of speech.
Major works
Ode to the West Wind西风颂
To a Skylark云雀颂
The Cloud云
Prometheus Unbound 解放了的普罗⽶修斯》
Queen Mab 麦布⼥王
The Masque of Anarchy 专治魔王的化装游⾏》
The Necessity of Atheism《⽆神论的重要性》
A Defence of Poetry《诗辩》
Keats
Major Works
Long poems
●Endymion
●Isabella
●The Eve of St. Agnes
●Lamia
●Hyperion
Odes and sonnets
●Ode to Autumn
●Ode to a Nightingale
●Ode on Melancholy
●Ode on a Grecian Urn
●Bright Star
●When I Have Fear
●The Grasshopper and The Cricket.
Quiz One
1. Who were the earliest inhabitants of Britain
A. Romans
B. Saxons
C. Celts
D. Normans
2. What is another term for Old English
A. Teutonic
B. Celtic
C. Anglo-Saxon
D. Middle English
3. Beowulf fought against all of the following figures EXCEPT _____.
A. Hrothgar
B. Firedrake
C. Grendel
D. Grendel’s mother
4. Which is NOT one of the features of the Song of Beowulf
A. The use of alliteration
B. The use of metaphor
C. The use of understatement
D. A Christian poem
5. Beowulf was written down in the ______.
A. 8th century
B. 9th century
C. 10th century
D. 11th century
6. Which is NOT one of the languages spoken during the Saxon-Norman Period?
A. English
B. Greek
C. French
D. Latin
7. What is the prevailing form of literature in the Middle Ages
A. Legend
B. Romance
C. Epic
D. Ballad
8. Sir Gawain started his adventure from _____.
A. Spring
B. Summer
C. Autumn
D. Winter
9. What are the features that characterize a romance EXCEPT that .
A. It has great resemblance to truth or reality.
B. It exaggerates the vices of human nature and idealizes the virtues.
C. The central figure of the romance is the knight who is devoted to the church and the king.
D. It involves a large amount of fighting as well as a number of perilous adventures.
The 18th Century The AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT General Introduction
Three political parties:
1. The liberal Whigs: 辉格党
2. The Conservative Tories: 托利党
3. Jacobites: ⼆世党⼈
Social Life:
1. public coffeehouses and private clubs
2. sociability
3. its influence on literature
The 18th century is, on the whole, an age of prose rather than of poetry.
The Enlightenment Movement
The first representatives of the English Enlightenment were Joseph Addison (约瑟夫?阿狄森), and Richard Steele (理查德?斯蒂尔爵⼠), the publishers of The Spectator 《观察者》/《旁观者》and the poet Alexander Pope (亚历⼭⼤?蒲柏), who was famous for his caustic wit and metrical skill, particularly his use of the heroic couplet (英雄双韵体). Followed by writers Defoe, Fielding, Smollet, Richardson. The most outstanding figure was Jonathan Swift. Sheridan was the only important playwright known for his comedy School for Scandal《造谣学校》.
Alexander Pope is the representative poet of neoclassical school. Samuel Johnson, the writer of the first English dictionary, also follows the neoclassical Sentimentalism made its appearance in the middle of the tradition.
18th century as the result of a bitter discontent among the enlightened people with social reality.
Sentimentalism also finds its voice in English fiction
(Oliver Goldsmith; Laurence Sterne; Thomas Gray).
Romanticism
Romanticism was a movement in the arts and literature which originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual. It was a reaction against the order and restraint of classicism and neoclassicism, and a rejection of the rationalism which characterized the Enlightenment. William Blake and Robert Burns are the forerunners of the 19th century romanticism.
The Rise of the Novel
literature is novel. England produces three greatest novelists: Daniel Defoe, father of modern novel and the author of Robinson Crusoe; Jonathan Swift, the greatest English satirist and the author of Gulliver’s Travels; and Henry Fielding, the author of The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.
Daniel Defoe ( 1660-1731)
Defoe’s major works include: Robinson Crusoe; Captain Singleton《⾟格顿船长》, Moll Flanders 《摩尔?弗兰德斯》and A Journal of the Plague Year《⼤疫年⽇记》. Besides his novels, he has produced a famous poem Hymn to Pillory《枷邢
颂》and some notable pamphlets such as The Shortest Way with the Dissenters《铲除新教徒的捷径》.
Jonathan Swift (1667--1745) Swift is one of the realist writers.
His major stories include:The Battle of the Books(1704)《书的战争》, A Tale of a Tub (1704)《⼀只桶的故事》, and Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
《格列佛游记》. His most famous essay is A Modest Proposal (1729)《⼀个⼩⼩的建议》. He is also a productive poet.
Fielding & Tome Jones
A brief Introduction:
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, often known simply as Tom Jones, is a comic novel by the English playwright and novelist Henry Fielding. First published on 28 February 1749, Tom Jones is among the earliest English prose works describable as a novel. The novel is divided into 18 smaller books.。