英国文学名词解释复习要点

1、romanceRomance, which uses narrative verse or prose to sing knightly adventures or other heroic deeds, is a popular literary form in the medieval period. It has developed the characteristic medieval patterns of the quest, the test, the meeting with the evil giant and the encounter with the beautiful beloved. The hero is usually the knight who sets out on a journey to accompany some missions –to protect the church, to attack infidelity, to rescue a maiden, to meet a challenge, or to obey a knightly command. There is often a liberal use of the improbable, sometimes even supernatural, things in romance such as mysteries and fantasies. Romantic love is an important part of the plot in romance. Characterization is standardized so that heroes, heroines and wicked stewares can be easily moved from one romance to another. While the structure is loose and episodic, the language is simple and straightforward. The importance of the romance itself can be seen as a means of showing medieval aristocratic men and women in relation to their idealized view of the world. If the epic reflects a heroic age, the romance reflects a chivalric one.2. epicAn epic is a long narrative poem telling about the deeds of a great hero and reflecting the values of the society from which it originated. The earlier ones concern the history and legends of a country or a region and include stories and information from many anonymous sources. These were oral or folk epics of which some were later written down. The epics of the ancient Greek p oet Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Beowulf, written in old English and found in the late 10th century, are good examples. Later epics were deliberately composed by one author and written down. The ancient Roman Virgil is regarded as the first composer of such epics.3、folk balladThe folk ballad is a popular literary form; it comes from unlettered people rather than from professional mintrels or scholarly poets. As the main form of medieval folk literature, the folk ballad has an oral tradition which makes it easier to remember and memorize. Therefore, all the stylistic features of the folk ballad have derived from their oral nature. The first is its simple language; the simplicity is reflected both in the verse form and the colloquial expressions. So far as the verse form is concerned, ballads are compose mainly in quatrains, which are known as the ballad stanza, rhyming abcb, with the first and third lines carrying 4 accented syllables and the second and fourth carrying 3. By making use of a simple, plain language or dialect of the common people with colloquial and, sometimes, idiomatic expressions in its narration or dialogues, the ballad leaves a strong dramatic effect to the reader. The second is its wonderful story which deals only with the culminating incident or climax of a plot. Most of the ballads have a romantic or tragic dimension, with a tragic incident, often a murder or an accidental death, as their subject. Like classical tragedy, ballads have an inevitability, which reflects the folk belief that people are lured into the fatally attractive traps just because all human life is shaped by fate. It is a common pattern of romantic tragic balladry that if one lover dies the other must follow suit. So usually the hero would die of his wound, and the heroine of her sorrow. The third is its dominant mood or tone, either tragic like ―Sir Patric Spens‖, which tells a story of treachery, or comic like ―Get up and Bar the Door‖, which presents a funny scene of the domestic life. Furthermore, to strengthen the dramactic effec of the narrative, ballads also make full use of hyperbole; actions and events are much exggerated. This hyperbolic style partly comes from a desire to astonish, for the poor folk would be delighted to hear of the large-than-life exploits of ballad people. Music has an important formative influence on ballads, too. Another impresdsive feature of the ballad is the use of refrainsand other kinds of repetitions. Poetically the refrains are decorative; musically they are absolutely essential. Through refrains and repetitions, the narration is lent a quantity of liturgy, or of incantation. Magic or supernatural force, the perpetual presence of impossibility, is a rich narrative source of balladry. In the ballad world, things happen suddenly and without warning; only the help of magicv or supernatural force can overcome the fatal powers of destruction. Love, adventure, courageous feats of daring, and sudden disaster are frequenly topic of folk ballads.4. Renaissance (P12)5. sonnetA Sonnet is a lyric poem comprising 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic pentameters in English, alexandrines in French, hendecasyllables in Italian. The rhyme schemes of the sonnet follow two basic patterns. The Italian sonnet (also called the Petrarchan sonnet after the most influential of the Italian sonneteers) comprises an 8-line 'octave' of two quatrains, rhymed abbaabba, followed by a 6-line 'sestet' usually rhymed cdecde or cdcdcd. The English sonnet (also called the Shakespearean sonnet after its foremost practitioner) comprises three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg. Originating in Italy, the sonnet was established by Petrarch in the 14th century as a major form of love poetry, and came to be adopted in Spain, France and England in the 16th century and in Germany in the 17th. The standard subject-matter of early sonnets was the torments of sexual love (usually within a courtly love convention), but in the 17th century John Donne extended the sonnet's scope to religion, while Millton extended it to politics.6. Enlightenment (P44)7. Neoclassicism (P45)8. Romanticism (P81)9. Gothic novel (P83)10. Modernism (P136-137)11. Stream of consciousnessStream of consciousness is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attemp ts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly, particularly the hesitant, misted, distracted and illusory psychology people had when they faced reality. The modern American writer William Faulkner successfully advanced this technique. In his stories, action and plots were less important than the reactions and inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences were often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the stories, rather than an observer. A high degree of emotion can be achieved by this technique.13. Blank verseBlank verse is a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter. Blank verse was introduced into English verse by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, who along with his older friend Sir Thomas Wyatt also introduced the sonnet and other Italian poetic forms into English poetry in the sixteenth century. It soon became the standard metre for dramatic poetry and a widely used form for narrative poems. Much of the finest verse in English---by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth---has been written in blank verse.14. The Spenserian stanzaThe Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queen. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc."15.Iambic pentameterIambic pentameter is a poetic line consisting of five verse feet, with each foot an iamb—that is, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Iambic pentameter is the most common verse line in English poetry.16 Lake PoetsWordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were also called the 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, and shared a community of literary and social outlook in their work. All three of them had radical inclinations in their youth but later turned conservative.17. Heroic CoupletHeroic Couplet refers to iambic pentameter lines rhymed in pairs. It is called ―heroic‖ because in England, it is usually used in heroic poems.18. Morality playThe Morality plays or Moralities sprang up in England in the 15th century alongside of the Mystery and Miracle plays. They are different in that the morality play doesn’t tell stories from the Bible nor about the lives of the saints, but is a dramatized allegory in which abstract virtues and vices such as Mercy, Conscience and Shame, appear in personified form, in order to illustrate moral or religious doctrines.19. Theatre of the AbsurdThe Theatre of the Absurd is a designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s, as well as one for the style of theatre which has evolved from their work. Their work expressed the belief that human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down. Logical construction and argument gives way to irrational and illogical speech and to its ultimate conclusion, silence.美国文学1.Transcendentalism (P26)2.Naturalism (P83-84)3.American modernism (P166)4.The Lost Generation (P167)5. SymbolismSymbolism is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writers, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word. It’s one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.。