英国文学中的名词解释

Part One: Early and Medieval English Literature1. Beowulf: national epic of the English people; Denmark story; alliteration, metaphors and understatements3. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”: a famous roman about King Arthur’s story4. Ballad（名词解释）5. Character of Robin Hood6. Geoffrey Chaucer: founder of English poetry; The Canterbury Tales (main contents; 124 stories planned, only 24 finished; written in Middle English; significance; form: heroic couplet)7. Heroic couplet (名词解释)Part Two: The English Renaissance8. The Authorized Version of English Bible and its significance9. Renaissance（名词解释）10.Thomas More??Utopia11. Sonnet（名词解释）12. Blank verse（名词解释）13. Edmund Spenser“The Faerie Queene”; Amoretti (collection of his sonnets)Spenserian Stanza（名词解释）15. Christopher Marlowe (“Doctor Faustus” and his achievements)Beowulf is an Old English heroic epic poem of unknown authorship, dating as recorded in the Nowell Codex manuscript from between the 8th[1] to the early 11th century,[2] and relates events described as having occurred in what is now Denmark and Sweden. Commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature, Beowulf has been the subject of much scholarly study, theory, speculation, discourse, and, at 3182 lines, has been noted for its length.3Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th-century Middle English alliterative romance outlining an adventure of Sir Gawain, a knight of King Arthur's Round Table. In the tale, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from a mysterious warrior who is completely green, from his clothes and hair to his beard and skin. The "Green Knight" offers to allow anyone to strike him with his axe if the challenger will take a return blow in a year and a day. Gawain accepts, and beheads him in one blow, only to have the Green Knight stand up, pick up his head, and remind Gawain to meet him at the appointed time4A ballad is a poem usually set to music; thus, it often is a story told in a song[1]. Any myth form may be told as a ballad, such as historical accounts or fairy tales in verse form. It usually has foreshortened, alternating four-stress lines ("ballad meter") and simple repeating rhymes, often with a refrain5Robin Hood is an archetypal figure in English folklore, whose story originates from medieval times but who remains significant in popular culture where he is known for robbing the rich to give to the poor and fighting against injustice and tyranny. His band includes "three score" group of fellow outlawed yeomen – called his "Merry Men".[1] He has been the subject of numerous films, television series, books, comics, and plays. In the earliest sources Robin Hood is a commoner, but he would often later be portrayed as the dispossessed Earl of Huntingdon6Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 – 25 October 1400?) was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished frame narrative The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French or Latin.7heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. The rhyme is always masculine. Use of the heroic couplet was first pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is also widely credited with first extensive use of iambic pentameter8The Authorized King James Version is an English translation of the Christian Bible begun in 1604 and first published in 1611 by the Church of England. The Great Bible was the first "authorized version" issued by the Church of England in the reign of King Henry VIII.[4] In January 1604, King James I of England convened the Hampton Court Conference where a new English version was conceived in response to the perceived problems of the earlier translations as detected by the Puritans, a faction within the Church of England.9The Renaissance (from French Renaissance, meaning "rebirth"; Italian: Rinascimento, from re- "again" and nascere "be born")[1] was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historic era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform, this is a very general use of the term.10Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535) was an English lawyer, author, and statesman who in his lifetime gained a reputation as a leading humanist scholar, and occupied many public offices, including Lord Chancellor (1529–1532), in which he had a number of people burned at the stake for heresy. More coined the word "utopia", a name he gave to an ideal, imaginary island nation whose political system he described in the eponymous book published in 1516. He was beheaded in 1535 when he refused to sign the Act of Supremacy that declared Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church of England.11The sonnet is one of the poetic forms that can be found in lyric poetry from Europe. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song". By the thirteenth century, it had come to signify a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. The conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. The writers of sonnets are sometimes referred to as "sonneteers," although the term can be used derisively. One of the best-known sonnet writers is Shakespeare, who wrote 154 of them. A Shakespearean sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line contains ten syllables, and each line is written in iambic pentameter in which a pattern of a non-emphasized syllable followed by an emphasized syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, in which the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.12Blank 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 (like that which is used in Shakespearean plays13Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 13 January 1599) was an important English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem celebrating, through fantastical allegory, the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy.The Faerie Queene is an English epic poem by Edmund Spenser, published first in three books in 1590, and later in six books in 1596. The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: it was the first work written in Spenserian stanza. It is an allegorical work, written in praise of Queen Elizabeth I. Largely symbolic, the poem follows several knights in an examination of several virtues.Amoretti was first published in 1595 in London by William Ponsonby. It was printed as part of a volume entitled “Amoretti and Epithalamion. Written not long since by Edmunde Spenser.” The volume included the sequence of 89 sonnets, along with a series of s hort poems called Anacreontics and an Epithalamion, a public poetic celebration of marriage 15Christopher "Kit" Marlowe (baptised 26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593) was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. The foremost Elizabethan tragedian next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his own mysterious and untimely death。