英美文学术语解释

Humanism is both the keynote of the Renaissance and the intellectual liberation movement. Humanists took interest in human life and human activities and gave expression to the new feeling of admiration for human beauty, human achievements and human reason and passion. The English humanists in this period are Thomas More(Utopia) and dramatists such as Christopher Marlowe( The Jew of Malta),William Shakespeare(The Merchant of Venice) and Ben Jonson(V olpone).

The metaphysical poets were a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them, and whose work was characterized by inventiveness of metaphor (these involved comparisons being known as metaphysical conceits).

The term 'metaphysical poetry' is commonly used to name the work of the 17th-century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne(1572-1631),the author of A Valediction:Forbidding Mourning.

English Romanticism，as a literary movement,took place in Britain and then throughout the whole Europe between 1770 and 1832,emphasized the individual, the subiective, the irrational, the imaginative,the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary and the transcendental.English romantic poets are Byron,Shelley(Ode to the West Wind) , Keats(Ode to a Nightingale) and so on.

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.

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. They argue that poetry should be free from all rules.

The Victorian Age is an age of realism rather than of romanticism-a realism which strives to tell the whole truth showing moral & physical diseases as they are. To be true to life becomes the first requirement for literary writing. As the mirror of truth, literature has come very close to daily life, reflecting its practical problems & interests & is used as a powerful instrument of human progress.

Critical Realism

Critical Realism is a term applied to the realistic fiction in the late19th and early20th centuries.It means the tendency of writers and intellectuals in the period between1875and1920to apply the methods of realistic fiction to the criticism of society and the examination of social issues.Realist writers were all concerned about the fate of the common people and described what was faithful to