英美文学名词解释Terms in English Literature
英美文学专有名词术语解释
Literary Terms（文学术语解释）*Legend（传说）: A song or narrative handed down from the past, legend differs from myths on the basis of the elements of historical truth they contain.*Epic（史诗）: 1)Epic, in poetry, refers to a long work dealing with the actions of gods and heroes. 2)Beowulf is the greatest national epic of the Anglo-Saxons. John Milton wrote three great epics: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.*Romance（罗曼史/骑士文学）: 1)Romance is a popular literary form in the medieval England. 2)It sings knightly adventures or other heroic deeds. 3)Chivalry(such as bravery, honor, generosity, loyalty and kindness to the weak and poor) is the spirit of romance. *Ballad（民谣）: 1)Ballad is a story in poetic form to be sung or recited. 2)Ballads were passed down from generation to generation. 3)Robin Hood is a famous ballad singing the goods of Robin Hood. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a 19th century English ballad.*The Heroic Couplet（英雄对偶句）:1)It means a pair of lines of a type once common in English poetry, in other words, it means iambic pentameter rhymed in two lines. 2)The rhyme is masculine. 3)Use of the heroic couplet was first pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer.*Humanism（人文主义）:1)Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It emphasizes the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. 2)Humanists voiced their beliefs that man was the center of the universe and man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of the present life, but had the ability to prefect himself and to perform wonders.*Renaissance（文艺复兴）:1)It refers to the transitional period from the medieval to the modern world. It first started in Italy in the 14th century. 2)The Renaissance means rebirth or revival. 3)It was stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek classics, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion. 4)Humanism is the essence of Renaissance. 5)The English Renaissance didn’t begin until the reign of Henry Ⅷ. It was reg arded as England’s Golden Age, especially in literature. 6)The real mainstream of the English Renaissance is the Elizabethan drama. 7)This period produced such literary giants as Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Bacon, Donne and Milton, etc.*University Wits（大学才子）: 1)It refers to a group of scholars during the Elizabethan age who graduate from either Oxford or Cambridge. They came to London with the ambition to become professional writers. Some of them later become famous poets and playwrights. 2)Thomas Greene, John Lily and Christopher Marlowe were among them. 3)They paved the way, to some degree, for the coming of Shakespeare.*Blank verse（无韵体）:1)It is verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. 2)It is the verse form used in some of the greatest English poetry, including that of William Shakespeare and John Milton.*Spenserian Stanza（斯宾塞诗节）:1)It is the creation of Edmund Spenser. 2)It refers to a stanza of nine lines, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter（六音步）,r hyming ababbcbcc. 3)Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was written in this kind of stanza.*Sonnet(十四行诗)1)It is the one of the most conventional and influential forms of poetry in English.2)A sonnet is a lyric consisting of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter, restricted to a definite rhyme scheme.3)Shakespeare’s sonnets are well-known. *Soliloquy(独白)1)Soliloquy, in drama, means a moment when a character is alone and speaks his or her thoughts aloud. 2)In the line “To be, or not to be, that is the question”, which begins the famous soliloquy from Act3, Scene1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In this soliloquy Hamlet questions whether or not life is worth living and speaks of the reasons why he does not end his life.*Metaphysical Poets（玄学派诗人）：They refer to a group of religious poets in the first half of the 17th century whose works were characterized by their wit, imaginative picturing, compressions, often cryptic expression, play of paradoxes and juxtapositions of metaphor.*Enlightenment Movement(启蒙运动)1)It was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept through Western Europe in the 18th century.2)The movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance from 14th century to the mid-17th century.3)Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas.4)It celebrated reason or nationality, equality and science. It advocated universal education. Literature at the time became a very popular means of public education.5)Famous among the great enlighteners in England were those great writers like John Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Sheridan, etc.Neoclassicism(新古典主义)1)In the field of literature, the 18th century Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism.2)The neoclassicists hold that forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Homer and Virgil and those of the contemporary French ones.3)They believed that the artistic ideas should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity*Sentimentalism(感伤主义文学)1)It is a pejorative term to describe false or superficial emotion, assumed feeling, self-regarding postures of grief and pain.2)In literature it denotes overmuch use of pathetic effects and attempts to arouse feeling by pathetic indulgence.3)The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith is a case in point.*The Graveyard School(墓地派诗歌)1)It refers to a school of poets of the 18th century whose poems are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or meditation on life, past and present, with death and graveyard as theams.2)Thomas Gray is considered to be the leading figure of this school and his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is its most representative work.*Epistolary novel(书信体小说)1)It consists of the letters the characters write to each other. The usual form is the letter, but diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used.2)The epistolary novel’s reliance on subjective poi nts of view makes it the forerunner of the modern psychological novel.3)Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is typical of this kind.*Gothic Romance(哥特传奇)1)A type of novel that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th century in England.2)Gothic romances are mysteries, often involving the supernatural and heavily tinged with horror, and they are usually against dark backgrounds of medieval ruins and haunted castles.*Picaresque novel(流浪汉小说)1)It is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society. 2)As indicated by its name, this style of novel originated in Spain, flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and continues to influence modern literature.*English Romanticism(英国浪漫主义文学)1)The English Romantic period is an age of poetry. Poets started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. They saw poetry as a healing energy; they believed that poetry could purify both individual souls and the society.2)The Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 acts as a manifesto for the English Romanticism.3)The Romantics not only eulogize the faculty of imagination, but also stress the concept of spontaneity and inspiration, regarding them as something crucial for true poetry.4)The natural world comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject matter.*Ode(颂歌)1)Ode is a dignified and elaborately lyric poem of some length, praising and glorifying an individual, commemorating an event, or describing nature intellectually rather than emotionally.2)John Keats wrote great odes. His Ode on a Grecian Urn is a case in point.*Lake Poets(湖畔派诗人)They refer to such romantic poets as William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey who lived in the Lake District. They came to be known as the Lake School or “Lakers”.*Byronic hero（拜伦式英雄）: It refers to a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With immense superiority in his passions and powers, this Byronic hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society, and would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles withunconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies.Terza rima(三行体)1)It is an Italian verse that consists of a series of three-lines stanzas in which the middle line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third lines of the following stanza with the rhyming scheme ab a, bcb, cdc,ded, etc..2)Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” is a case in point*Critical Realism(批判现实主义)1)The Critical Realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and in the beginning of fifties.2)The realists first and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and delineated the crying contradictions of bourgeois reality. But they did not find a way to eradicate social evils.3)Charls Dickens is the most important critical realist.*Psychological novel(心理小说)1)A vague term to describe that kind of fiction which is for the most part concerned with the spiritual, emotional and mental lives of the characters and with the analysis of characters rather than with the plot and the action.2)Thackeray’s charac terization of Rebecca Sharp is very much psychological.*Narration(叙述)1)Like description, narration is a part of conversation and writing. Narration is the major technique used in expository writing, such as autobiography.2)Successful narration must grow out of good observation, to-the-point selection and clear arrangement of details in logical sequence, which is usually chronological.3)Narration gives an exact picture of things as they occur.*Narrator(叙述者)1)It refers to one who narrates, or tells, a story.2)A story may be told by a first-person narrator, someone who is either a major or minor character in the story. Or a story may be told by a third-person narrator, someone who is not in the story at all.3)The word narrator can also refer to a character in a drama who guides the audience through the play, often commenting on the action and sometimes participating in it.*Plot(情节)1)Plot is the first and most obvious quality of a story. Plot is what happens in a story.2)It consists of the phrases of action in a story that are linked together by a chain of casual relationships.Point of view(叙述角度)1)The event of a story may be told as they appear to one or more participants or observers. In first-person narration the point of view is automatically that of the narrator.2)More variation is possible in third-person narration, where the author may choose to limit his or her report to what could have been observed or known by one of the characters at any given point in the action—or may choose to report the observations and thoughts of several characters. The author might choose to intrude his or her own point of view.*Naturalism(自然主义)1)A post Darwinian movement of the late 19th century that tried to apply the laws of scientific determinism to fiction. 2)The naturalist w ent beyond the realist’s insistence on the objective presentation of the details of everyday life to insist that the materials of literature should be arranged to reflect a deterministic universe in which a person is a biological creature controlled by environment and heredity.3)Major writers include Crane, Dreiser in America; Zola in France ; and Hardy and Gissing in England.*The Aesthetic Movement(唯美主义运动)1)It is a loosely defined movement in literature, fine art, the decorative arts and interior design in later nineteenth-century Britain. 2)It belongs to the anti-Victorian reaction and had post-Romantic roots, and as such anticipates modernism. It took place in the late Victorian Period from around 1868 to 1901, and is generally considered to have ended with the trial of Oscar Wilde (which occurred in 1895).3)The aesthetes believed that art did not have any didactic purpose; it need only be beautiful.Dramatic Monologue(戏剧独白)1)In literature, it refers to the occurrence of a single speaker saying something to a silent audience.2)Robert Browning is My Last Duchess is a typical example in which the duke, speaking to a non-responding audience, reveals not only the reasons for his disapproval of the behavior of his former duchess, but some tyrannical and merciless aspects of his own personality as well.。
(完整版)英美文学名词解释最全版
01. Humanism(人文主义)1>Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance.2> it emphasizes the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. Humanists voiced their beliefs that man was the center of the universe and man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of the present life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders.02. Renaissance(文艺复兴)1>The word “Renaissance”means “rebirth”, it meant the reintroduction into western Europe of the full cultural heritage of Greece and Rome.2>the essence of the Renaissance is Humanism. Attitudes and feelings which had been characteristic of the 14th and 15th centuries persisted well down into the era of Humanism and reformation.3> the real mainstream of the English Renaissance is the Elizabethan drama with William Shakespeare being the leading dramatist.03. Metaphysical poetry(玄学派诗歌)1>Metaphysical poetry is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne.2>with a rebellious spirit, the Metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry.3>the diction is simple as compared with that of the Elizabethan or the Neoclassical periods, and echoes the words and cadences of common speech.4>the imagery is drawn from actual life.04. Classicism(古典主义)Classicism refers to a movement or tendency in art, literature, or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism emphasizes the traditional and the universal, and places value on reason, clarity, balance, and order. Classicism, with its concern for reason and universal themes, is traditionally opposed to Romanticism, which is concerned with emotions and personal themes.05. Enlightenment(启蒙运动)1>Enlightenment movement was a progressive philosophical and artistic movement which flourished in France and swept through western Europe in the 18th century.2> the movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance from 14th century to the mid-17th century.3>its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas.4>it celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. It advocated universal education.5>famous among the great enlighteners in England were those great writers like Alexander pope. Jonathan Swift. etc.06.Neoclassicism(新古典主义)1>In the field of literature, the enlightenment movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works.2>this tendency is known as neoclassicism. The Neoclassicists held that forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Homer and Virgil and those of the contemporary French ones.3> they believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity.07. The Graveyard School(墓地派诗歌)1>The Graveyard School refers to a school of poets of the 18th century whose poems are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or meditation on life. Past and present ,with death and graveyard as themes.2>Thomas Gray is considered to be the leading figure of this school and his Elegy written in a country churchyard is its most representative work.08. Romanticism(浪漫主义)1>In the mid-18th century, a new literary movement called romanticism came to Europe and then to England.2>It was characterized by a strong protest against the bondage of neoclassicism, which emphasized reason, order and elegant wit. Instead, romanticism gave primary concern to passion, emotion, and natural beauty.3>In the history of literature. Romanticism is generally regarded as the thought that designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and experience. 4> The English romantic period is an age of poetry which prevailed in England from 1798 to 1837. The major romantic poets include Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.09. Byronic Hero(拜伦式英雄)1>Byronic hero refers to a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin.2> with immense superiority in his passions and powers, this Byronic Hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society. And would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies.3> Byron’s chief contribution to English literature is his creation of the “Byronic Hero”10. Critical Realism(批判现实主义)1>Critical Realism is a term applied to the realistic fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.2> It means the tendency of writers and intellectuals in the period between 1875 and 1920 to apply the methods of realistic fiction to the criticism of society and the examination of social issues.3> Realist writers were all concerned about the fate of the common people and described what was faithful to reality.4> Charles Dickens is the most important critical realist.11. Aestheticism（美学主义）1>The basic theory of the Aesthetic movement--- “art for art’s sake” was set forth by a French poet, Theophile Gautier, the first Englishman who wrote about the theory of aestheticism was Walter Pater.2> aestheticism places art above life, and holds that life should imitate art, not art imitate life.3> According to the aesthetes, all artistic creation is absolutely subjective as opposed to objective. Art should be free from any influence of egoism. Only when art is for art’s sake, can it be immortal. They believed that art should be unconcerned with controversial issues, such as politics and morality, and that it should be restricted to contributing beauty in a highly polished style.4> This is one of the reactions against the materialism and commercialism of the Victorian industrial era, as well as a reaction against the Victorian convention of art for morality’s sake, or art for money’s sake.美学运动的基本原则”为艺术而艺术”最初由法国诗人西奥费尔.高缔尔提出,英国运用该美学理论的第一人是沃尔特.佩特.美学主义崇尚艺术高于生活,认为生活应模仿艺术,而不是艺术模仿生活.在美学主义看来,所有的艺术创作都是绝对主观而非客观的产物.艺术不应受任何功利的影响,只有当艺术为艺术而创作时,艺术才能成为不朽之作.他们还认为艺术不应只关注一些热点话题如政治和道德问题,艺术应着力于以华丽的风格张扬美.这是对维多利亚工业发展时期物质崇拜的一种回应,也是向艺术为道德或为金钱而服务的维多利亚传统的挑战.12.The Victorian period(维多利亚时期)1>In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging expression of progressive thought. While sticking to the principle of faithful representation of the 18th century realist novel, novelists in this period carried their duty forward to criticism of the society and the defense of the mass.2> although writing from different points of view and with different techniques, they shared one thing in common, that is, they were all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry with the inhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as represented by the money-worship and Utilitarianism, and the widespread misery, poverty and injustice.3>their truthful picture of people’s life and bitter and strong criticism of the society had done much in awakening the public consciousness to the social problems and in the actual improvement of the society.4> Charles Dickens is the leading figure of the Victorian period.13. Modernism(现代主义)1>Modernism is comprehensive but vague term for a movement , which begin in the late 19th century and which has had a wide influence internationally during much of the 20th century.2> modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical case.3> the term pertains to all the creative arts. Especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture.4> in England from early in the 20th century and during the 1920s and 1930s, in America from shortly before the first world war and on during the inter-war period, modernist tendencies were at their most active and fruitful.5>as far as literature is concerned, Modernism reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions. fresh ways of looki ng at man’s position and function in the universe and many experiments in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it and with writing itself.14. Stream of consciousness(意识流)(or interior monologue)In literary criticism, Stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes. Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair. Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing as they do a character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Famous writers to employ this technique in the English language include James Joyce and William Faulkner.学术界认为意识流是一种通过直接描述人物思维过程来寻求个人视角的文学写作技巧。
英美文学名词解释
英美文学名词解释(2011-01-04 17:02:14)转载▼标签：分类：英国文学文化01. Humanism(人文主义)Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance.2> it emphasizes the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. Humanists voiced their beliefs that man was the center of the universe and man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of the present life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders.02. Renaissance(文艺复兴)The word “Renaissance”means “rebirth”, it meant the reintroduction into westerm Europe of the full cultural heritage of Greece and Rome.2>the essence of the Renaissance is Humanism. Attitudes and feelings which had been characteristic of the 14th and 15th centuries persisted well down into the era of Humanism and reformation.3> the real mainstream of the english Renaissance is the Elizabethan drama with william shakespeare being the leading dramatist.03. Metaphysical poetry(玄学派诗歌)Metaphysical poetry is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne.2>with a rebellious spirit, the Metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry.3>the diction is simple as compared with that of the Elizabethan or the Neoclassical periods, and echoes the words and cadences of common speech.4>the imagery is drawn from actual life.04. Classcism(古典主义)Classcism refers to a movement or tendency in art, literature, or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism emphasizes the traditional and the universal, and places value on reason, clarity, balance, and order. Classicism, with its concern for reason and universal themes, is traditionally opposed to Romanticism, which is concerned with emotions and personal themes.05. Enlightenment(启蒙运动)Enlightenment movement was a progressive philosophical and artistic movement which flourished in france and swept through western Europe in the 18th century.2> the movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance from 14th century to the mid-17th century.3>its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas.4>it celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. It advocated universal education.5>famous among the great enlighteners in england were those great writers like Alexander pope. Jonathan swift.etc.06.Neoclassicism(新古典主义)In the field of literature, the enlightenment movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works.2>this tendency is known as neoclassicism. The Neoclassicists held that forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Homer and Virgil and those of the contemporary French ones.3> they believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity.07. The Graveyard School(墓地派诗歌)The Graveyard School refers to a school of poets of the 18th century whose poems are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or meditation on life. Past and present, with death and graveyard as themes.2>Thomas Gray is considered to be the leading figure of this school and his Elegy written in a country churchyard is its most representative work.08. Romanticism(浪漫主义)1>In the mid-18th century, a new literary movement called romanticism came to Europe and then to England.2>It was characterized by a strong protest against the bondage of neoclassicism, which emphasized reason, order and elegant wit. Instead, romanticism gave primary concern to passion, emotion, and natural beauty.3>In the history of literature. Romanticism is generally regarded as the thought that designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and experience. 4> The English romantic period is an age of poetry which prevailed in England from 1798 to 1837. The major romantic poets include Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.09. Byronic Hero(拜伦式英雄)Byronic hero refers to a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin.2> with immense superiority in his passions and powers, this Byronic Hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society. And would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies.3> Byron’s chief contr ibution to English literature is his creation of the “Byronic Hero”10. Critical Realism(批判现实主义)Critical Realism is a term applied to the realistic fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.2> It means the tendency of writers and intellectuals in the period between 1875 and 1920 to apply the methods of realistic fiction to the criticism of society and the examination of social issues.3> Realist writers were all concerned about the fate of the common people and described what was faithful to reality.4> Charles Dickens is the most important critical realist.11. Aestheticism（美学主义）The basic theory of the Aesthetic movement--- “art for art’s sake” was set forth by a French poet, Theophile Gautier, the first Englishman who wrote about the theory of aestheticism was Walter Pater.2> aestheticism places art above life, and holds that life should imitate art, not art imitate life.3> According to the aesthetes, all artistic creation is absolutely subjective as opposed to objective. Art should be free from any influence of egoism. Only when art is for art’s sake, can it be immortal. They believed that art should be unconcerned with controversial issues, such as politics and morality, and that it should be restricted to contributing beauty in a highly polished style.4> This is one of the reactions against the materialism and commercialism of the Victorian industrial era, as well as a reaction against the Victorian convention of art for morality’s sake, or art for money’s sake.美学运动的基本原则”为艺术而艺术”最初由法国诗人西奥费尔.高缔尔提出,英国运用该美学理论的第一人是沃尔特.佩特.美学主义崇尚艺术高于生活,认为生活应模仿艺术,而不是艺术模仿生活.在美学主义看来,所有的艺术创作都是绝对主观而非客观的产物.艺术不应受任何功利的影响,只有当艺术为艺术而创作时,艺术才能成为不朽之作.他们还认为艺术不应只关注一些热点话题如政治和道德问题,艺术应着力于以华丽的风格张扬美.这是对维多利亚工业发展时期物质崇拜的一种回应,也是向艺术为道德或为金钱而服务的维多利亚传统的挑战.12.The Victorian period(维多利亚时期)In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging expression of progressive thought. While sticking to the principle of faithful representation of the 18th century realist novel, novelists in this period carried their duty forward to criticism of the society and the defense of the mass.2> although writing from different points of view and with different techniques, they shared one thing in common, that is, they were all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry with the inhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as represented by the money-worship and Utilitarianism, and the widespread misery, poverty and injustice.3>their truthful picture of people’s life an d bitter and strong criticism of the society had done much in awakening the public consciousness to the social problems and in the actual improvement of the society.4> Charles Dickens is the leading figure of the Victorian period.13. Modernism(现代主义)Modernism is comprehensive but vague term for a movement , which begin in the late 19th century and which has had a wide influence internationally during much of the 20th century.2> modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory ofpsycho-analysis as its theoretical case.3> the term pertains to all the creative arts. Especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture.4> in England from early in the 20th century and during the 1920s and 1930s, in America from shortly before the first world war and on during the inter-war period, modernist tendencies were at their most active and fruitful.5>as far as literature is concerned, Modernism reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions. fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe and many experiments in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it and with writing itself.14. Stream of consciousness(意识流)(or interior monologue)In literary criticism, Stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes. Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair. Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing as they do a character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Famous writers to employ this technique in the English language include James Joyce and William Faulkner.学术界认为意识流是一种通过直接描述人物思维过程来寻求个人视角的文学写作技巧。
英美文学名词解释
Metaphysical Poetry玄学派诗歌: The term "metaphysical poetry" is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. Metaphysical poetry is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language, elaborate imagery, and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas. The metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry.Blank Verse素体诗：V erse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse has been the dominant verse form of English drama and narrative poetry since the mid-sixteenth century. It was introduced by Henry Howard from Italy, and then Shakespeare transformed blank verse into a supple instrument, uniquely capable of conveying speech rhymes and emotional overtones.Romance传奇文学: it was a long composition ,sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose, describing the life and adventure of a noble hero. //Any imagination literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with a heroic adventures and battles between good characters and villains or monsters.Heroic Couplet英雄双韵体: Heroic couplet is a rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter. It is Chaucer who used it for the first time in English in his work The Legend of Good Woman.Epic史诗: An epic is a long oral narrative poem that operates on a grand scale and deals with legendary or historical events of national or universal significance. Many epics were drawn from an oral tradition and were transmitted by song and recitation before they were written down.Sonnet十四行诗: abab cdcd efef gg A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter. It was introduced by Wyatt and developed by Surrey and was thereafter widely used, notably in the sonnet sequences of Shakespeare. A sonnet generally expresses a single theme or idea.Puritanism清教主义: Puritanism was the religious doctrine of the revolutionary bourgeoisie during the English Revolution. It stressed the virtue of self-discipline, thrift, hard work and unceasing labour. It advocated a strict moral code which prohibited many worldly pleasures.Naturalism自然主义: naturalism is a literary trend prevailing in Europe, especially in France and Germany, in the second half of the 19th century. According to the theory of naturalism, literature must be “true to life”and exactly reproduce real life, including all its details without any selection. Naturalism writers usually write life of the poor and oppressed, or the “slum life”, but by giving all the details of life without discrimination, they can only present the external appearance instead of the inner essence of real life. Humanism人文主义:Humanism is the key-note of the Renaissance. According the humanists, both man and world are hindered only by external checks from infinite improvement. They emphasizing the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. Man could mould the world according his desire, and attain happiness by removing all the external checks by the exercise of reason.Aestheticism唯美主义: prevailing at the middle of the 19th century. Aestheticism places art above life, and holds that life should imitate art, not art imitate life. All art creation is absolutely subjective and should be free from any influence of egoism. Only when art is for art’s sake, can it be immortal. They believe art should be unconcerned with controversial issues.Sentimentalism感伤主义: Sentimentalism came into being as a result of a bitter discontent among the enlighteners with social reality. The representatives of sentimentalism continued to struggle against feudalism, but they sensed the contradictions in the process of capitalist development at the same time. Dissatisfied with reason, which classicists appealed to, they appealed to sentiment, “the human heart”.Critical Realism批判现实主义：critical realism is one of the literary genres that flourished mainly in the 19th century. The English critical realists of the 19th century not only gave a satirical portrayal of the bourgeoisie and all the ruling classes, but also showed profound sympathy for the common people. Hence the use of humor and satire in the realistic novels. But the trend of their works is not of revolution but rather of reformism.Neo-Romanticism新浪漫主义:a literary trend prevailing at the end of the 19th century. Dissatisfied with the drab and the ugly social reality and yet trying to avoid the positive solution of the acute social contradictions, the neo-romanticists laid emphasis upon the invention of exciting adventures and fascinating stories to entertain the readers.Modernist现代主义：prevailing during the 20s and 30s of the 20th century. It was a movement of experiments in new technique of writing. Modernist fiction put emphasis on the description of character s’psychological activities, and so has sometimes been called modern psychological fiction.Stream of Conscience意识流:a psychological term indicating “the flux of conscious and subconscious thoughts and impressions moving in the mind at any given time independently of the person’s will”. In the 20th century, under the influence of Freud’s theory of psychological analysis, a number of writers adopted the “stream of conscious” method of novel writing. The striking feature of these novelists is their giving precedence to the depiction of the characters’ mental and emotional reaction to external events, rather than the events themselves.。
英美文学名词解释
英美文学名词解释英美文学是指英国和美国地区的文学作品和文学传统。
在这个领域中，存在着许多特殊的术语和概念，有助于我们理解和欣赏这些文学作品。
本文将解释和介绍一些常见的英美文学名词，以帮助读者深入理解和掌握这些文学作品。
一、1.文学流派（Literary Genre）：指文学作品按照特定主题、风格或结构的类别进行分类。
常见的文学流派包括小说、诗歌、戏剧、散文等。
不同的文学流派具有独特的特点和写作风格，反映了不同的文学趣味和审美观念。
2.现实主义（Realism）：是19世纪中期兴起的一种文学流派，强调对现实生活的逼真描写和展示。
现实主义文学追求真实、客观和可信的表达方式，通过描绘日常生活和社会环境来反映现实社会的不同层面。
3.自然主义（Naturalism）：自然主义是现实主义的一种延伸，强调环境和遗传因素对人的行为和命运的决定性作用。
自然主义文学突出了人类生存环境对人性的影响，对人类行为进行科学观察和探索。
4.浪漫主义（Romanticism）：浪漫主义强调个体情感、想象力和超验的体验，追求自由和独立的精神境界。
浪漫主义文学追求充满激情、抒发个人感受和探索内心世界的形式。
二、1.象征主义（Symbolism）：象征主义是19世纪末20世纪初出现的一种文学和艺术运动，强调使用象征性的意象和隐喻来表达深层的情感和思想。
象征主义文学倾向于表达个体的情感体验和心灵探索。
2.现代主义（Modernism）：现代主义是20世纪初兴起的一种文学和艺术运动，强调对传统形式和观念的挑战和颠覆。
现代主义文学追求形式上的创新和实验，探索自我意识、哲学思考和社会变革。
3.后现代主义（Postmodernism）：后现代主义是现代主义的继承和超越，强调文化多样性、相对主义和戏仿。
后现代主义文学打破传统的叙事和结构规则，以戏仿和颠覆的方式探索权力、真实性和历史观念。
4.现实主义小说（Realistic Novel）：现实主义小说以真实的描写和社会批判为特征，通过塑造现实人物的经历和命运来反映社会问题。
英国文学名词解释大全(整理版)
名词解释1.Epic(史诗)（appeared in the the Anglo-Saxon Period ）It is a narrative of heroic action, often with a principal hero, usually mythical in its content, grand in its style, offering inspiration and ennoblement within a particular culture or national tradition.A long narrative poem telling about the deeds of great hero and reflecting the values of the society from which it originated.Epic is an extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, like Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey. It usually celebrates the feats of one or more legendary or traditional heroes. The action is simple, but full of magnificence.Today, some long narrative works, like novels that reveal an age & its people, are also called epic.E.g. Beowulf （the pagan（异教徒），secular(非宗教的) poetry）Iliad 《伊利亚特》，Odyssey《奥德赛》Paradise Lost 《失乐园》，The Divine Comedy《神曲》2.Romance （传奇）(Anglo-Norman feudal England)•Romance is any imaginative literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with heroic adventures and battles between good characters and villains or monsters.•Originally, the term referred to a medieval (中世纪) tale dealing with the love and adventures of kings, queens, knights, and ladies, and including supernatural happenings.Form:long composition, in verse, in proseContent:description of life and adventures of a noble heroCharacter:a knight, a man of noble birth, skilled in the use of weapons; often described as riding forth to seek adventures, taking part in tournaments(骑士比武), or fighting for his lord in battles; devoted to the church and the king •Romance lacks general resemblance to truth or reality.•It exaggerates the vices of human nature and idealizes the virtues.•It contains perilous (dangerous) adventures more or less remote from ordinary life.•It lays emphasis on supreme devotion to a fair lady.①The Romance Cycles/Groups/DivisionsThree Groups●matters of Britain Adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table （亚瑟王和他的圆桌骑士）●matters of France Emperor Charlemagne and his peers●matters of Rome Alexander the Great and the attacks of TroyLe Morte D’Arthur （亚瑟王之死）②Class Nature (阶级性) of the RomanceLoyalty to king and lord was the theme of the romances, as loyalty was the corner-stone（the most important part基石）of feudal morality.The romances were composed not for the common but for the noble, of the noble, and by the poets patronized （supported 庇护,保护）by the noble.3. Alliteration（押头韵）: a repeated initial(开头的) consonant(协调,一致) to successive(连续的) words.e.g. 1.To his kin the kindest, keenest for praise.2.Sing a song of southern singer4. Understatement（低调陈述）（for ironical humor）not troublesome: very welcomeneed not praise: a right to condemn5. Chronicle《编年史》（a monument of Old English prose）6. Ballads （民谣）（The most important department of English folk literature ）①Definition:A ballad is a narrative poem that tells a story, and is usually meant to be sung or recited in musical form.An important stream of the Medieval folk literature②Features of English Ballads1. The ballads are in various English and Scottish dialects.2. They were created collectively and revised when handed down from mouth to mouth.3. They are mainly the literature of the peasants, and give an outlook of the English common people in feudal society.③Stylistic （风格上）Features of the Ballads1. Composed in couplets （相连并押韵的两行诗,对句）or in quatrains （四行诗）known as the ballad stanza （民谣诗节）, rhyming abab or abcb, with the first and third lines carrying 4 accented syllables （重读音节）and the second and fourth carrying 3.2. Simple, plain language or dialect （方言，土语）of the common people with colloquial （口语的，会话的）, vivid and, sometimes, idiomatic （符合当地语言习惯的）expressions3. Telling a good story with a vivid presentation around the central plot.4. Using a high proportion of dialogue with a romantic or tragic dimension （方面）to achieve dramatic effect.④Subjects of English Ballads1. struggle of young lovers2. conflict between love and wealth3. cruelty of jealousy4. criticism of the civil war5. matters of class struggle7. Heroic couplet （英雄双韵体）（introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer）Definition:the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter; a verse form in epic poetry, with lines of ten syllables and five stresses, in rhyming pairs.英雄诗体/英雄双韵体：用于史诗或叙事诗，每行十个音节，五个音部，每两行押韵。
英美文学名词解释TermsinEnglishLiterature
1. Epic (史诗)An extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, celebrating the feats of a legendary or traditional hero.史诗：用严肃或庄重的语言写成的叙事长诗，歌颂传奇中或历史上英雄的丰功伟绩2. Romance (传奇故事)An imaginative literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with heroic adventures and battles between good and devil.传奇故事：设定在想象世界中的以英雄冒险和善恶之间的斗争为题材的文学作品。
3. Humanism（人文主义）Humanism is the idea that man has a potential for culture which distinguishes him from lower orders of beings, and which he should strive constantly to fulfill.Rebellious spirit against the Medieval feudal value and blind faith in humbleness, servitude,and after-life. Belief in man’s divinity and capability of self-perfection. Emphasis of the importance of personal worth and enjoyment of the present life.4. Sonnet (十四行诗)A 14-line verse form usually written in iambic pentameter.十四行诗：一种由十四行组成的诗歌形式，通常以五步抑扬格为押韵形式。
英美文学术语
TERMS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE1.Allegory寓言；讽喻A narrative in which the characters and the setting stand for abstract qualities and ideas. The writer of an allegory is not primarily trying to make the characters and their actions realistic, but to make them representative of ideas or truths.2. Alliteration (头韵)The repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants or consonant clusters, in a group of words . Some-times the term is limited to the repetition of initial consonant sounds.3. Assonance（腹韵，半谐音）The repetition of similar vowel sounds , especially in poetry . Here is an example of assonance from John Keat s’s Ode on a Grecian Urn : “Thou foster ch i ld of s i lence and slow t i me .”4. Ballad民谣；叙事诗歌A story told in verse and usually meant to be sung .5. Blank Verse无韵诗，素体诗（不押韵的五音步诗行）Verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter.6. Byronic Hero拜伦的，拜伦风格的，冷笑而浪漫的The hero with the characteristic of Lord Byron or the hero in his poetry, who is contemptuous of and rebelling against conventional morality, or defying fate, and who is a mixture of good and evil, selflessness and sin, isolated, rebellious, passionate and self-reliant, etc.7. Characterization特性描述；（对书或戏剧中人物的）刻画，塑造The personality a character displays; also, the means by which a writer reveals that personality. Generally, a writer develops a character in one or more of the following ways:1)through the character’s actions;2)through the character’s thoughts and speeches;3)through a physical description of the character;4)through the opinions others have about the character;5)through a direct statement about the character telling what the writer thinks of him or her.8. Classicism古典主义，古典风格A movement or tendency in art, literature, or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome . Classicism emphasizes the traditional and the universal, and places value on reason, clarity, balance , and order . Classicism, with its concern for reason and universal themes, is traditionally opposed to Romanticism, which is concerned with emotions and personal themes .9. ClimaxThe point of greatest intensity, interest, or suspense in a narrative . The climax usually marks a story’s turning point.10. ComedyIn general, a literary work that ends happily with a healthy, amicable armistice between the protagonist and society.11. Comedy of MannersA term most commonly used to designate the realistic, often satirical comedy. In the stricter sense of the term, the type is concerned with the manners and conventions of an artificial, highly sophisticated society. The fashions, manners and outlook on life of this social group are reflected. The characters are more likely to be types than individualized personalities. Plot, though ofteninvolving a clever handling of situation and intrigue, is less important than atmosphere, dialogue and satire, The dialogue is witty and finished, often brilliant. Satire is directed against the deficiencies of typical characters.12. Conceit (文学中)巧妙的比喻，别出心裁的对比A kind of metaphor that makes a comparison between two startlingly different things.13. Consonance（谐辅音）The repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words . Sometimes the term refers to the repetition of consonant sounds in the middle or at the end of words, as in this line from Thomas Gray’s “ Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ”: “ And a ll the air a so l emn sti ll ness ho l ds . ”Sometimes the term is used for slant rhyme (or partial rhyme) in which initial and final consonants are the same but the vowels different : l itter/l etter , gree n/groa n .14. Couplet相连并押韵的两行诗，对句Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme.15. Dramatic MonologueA poem in which there is an imaginary speaker, at some specific and critical moment, addressing an imaginary, silent but identifiable audience, thereby unintentionally revealing his or her essential personality or temperament. In Browning’s My Last Duchess,for example, he penetrates to the depth the psychology of his characters and through their own speeches, he analyzes and reveals the innermost secret of their lives.16. Heroic Couplet（两行相互押韵、每行分五音节的）英雄偶句诗An iambic pentameter couplet.17. Elegy悲歌;挽歌;挽诗A poem of mourning, usually over the death of an individual.18. Epic叙事诗；史诗；史诗般的作品A long narrative poem telling about the deeds of a great hero and reflecting the values of the society from which it originated.19. Fable寓言A story with a moral lesson, often employing animals who talk and act like human beings.20 The Graveyard SchoolA group of 18th-century poets, and among them are Thomas Gray, Robert Blair, Thomas Parnell, and Edward Young, who wrote on funeral subjects.21. Iambic Pentameter五音步抑扬格A poetic line consisting of five verse feet (penta-is from a Greek word meaning “five”), 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.22. ImageryWords or phrases that create pictures, or images, in the reader’s mind .23. LyricA poem, usually a short one, that expresses a speaker’s personal thoughts or feelings. The elegy, ode, and sonnet are all forms of the lyric.24. Metaphysical PoetryThe poetry of John Donne and other seventeenth-century poets who wrote in a similar style. Metaphysical poetry is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language , elaborate imagery , and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas .25. MeterA generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry.26. Narrative PoemA poem that tells a story .One kind of narrative poem is the epic, a long poem that sets forth the heroic ideals of a particular society. Beowulf is an epic. The ballad is another kind of narrative poem.27. NarratorOne who narrates, or tells, a story. A story may be told by a first-person narrator, someone who is either a major or a minor character in the story. Or a story may be told by a third-person narrator, someone who is not in the story at all.28. NaturalismAn extreme form of realism. Naturalistic writers usually depict the sordid side of life and show characters who are severely limited by their environment or heredity, two forces beyond man’s control.29. NeoclassicismA revival in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of classical standards of order, balance, and harmony in literature. John Dryden and Alexander Pope were major exponents of the neoclassical school.30. OctiveAn eight-line poem or stanza. Usually the term octave refers to the first eight lines of an Italian sonnet. The remaining six lines form a sestet.31. OdeA complex and often lengthy lyric poem, written in a dignified formal style on some serious subject.32. ParadoxA statement that reveals a kind of truth, although it seems at first to be self-contradictory and untrue .33. Point of viewThe vantage point from which a narrative is told. There are two basic points of view: first-person and third person. In the first-person point of view, the story is told by one of the characters in his or her own words. In the third-person point of view, the narrator is not a character in the story. The narrator may be an omniscient, or “all-knowing” observer.34. PunThe use of a word or phrase to suggest two or more meanings at the same time. Puns are generally humorous.35. RealismThe 19th century literary movement that reacted to romanticism by insisting on a faithful, objective presentation of the details of everyday life.36. The RenaissanceThe period in Europe between the 14th century and the 17th century. During this period, the classical arts and learning were discovered again and widely studied, so the term originally indicates a revival of classical(Roman and Greek) arts and learning after the dark ages of Medieval obscurantism, it also marked the beginning of the bourgeois revolution.In the Renaissance period, scholars and educators called themselves humanists and began toemphasize the capacities of the human mind and they held their chief interest in man’s values and his environment and doings. So humanism became the keynote of the English Renaissance.37. RomanceAny imaginative literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with heroic adventures and battles between good characters and villains or monsters. Originally, the term referred to a medieval tale dealing with the loves and adventures of kings , queens , knights , and ladies , and including unlikely or supernatural happenings . Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the best of the medieval romances.38. RomanticismRomanticism is a literary movement which came into being in England early in the latter half of the 18th century and prevailed in the first half of the nineteenth century . This literary trend began with the publication of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads(抒情歌谣集) and ended with Walter Scott’s death. It is a reaction against the classicism or Neoclassicism of the 18th century. Romantic writing emphasizes emotions and feelings instead of reason and logic. It also focuses on the life of common people and encourages an appreciation of nature instead of society. The subject matters of Romanticism can be listed: sensibility, love of nature, interest in the past ,mysticism , individualism , exotic pictures , strong-willed heroes , sometimes resort to symbolism39. SestetA six-line poem or stanza. Usually the term sestet refers to the last six lines of an Italian sonnet . The first eight lines of an Italian sonnet form an octave.40. SentimentalismThe middle of the 18th century in England sees the inception of a new literary current---that of sentimentalism, which came into being as a bitter discontent in social reality on the part of certain enlighteners who found the power of reason to be insufficient in dealing with social injustices, and therefore, appealed to sentiment as a means of achieving happiness and justice.The term is used in two senses in the study of literature. The first is overindulgence in emotion, especially the conscious effort to induce emotion in order to analyze or enjoy it and the failure to restrain or evaluate emotion through the exercise of the judgement. The second is optimistic overemphasis of the goodness of humanity. Sentimentalism is concerned with the development of primitivism. In the first sense given above, sentimentalism is found in the melancholy verse of the Graveyard School.41. SoliloquyIn drama, an extended speech delivered by a character alone onstage. The character reveals his or her innermost thoughts and feelings directly to the audience, as if thinking aloud.42. SonnetA fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter.43. Stream of ConsciousnessA method of telling a story in which a writer lets the reader know every thought that enters a character’s mind. This method tries to imitate the way in which people actually think. Therefore , the character’s thoughts are presented in the order in which they occur , and this order is not necessarily logical . When the stream-of-consciousness technique is used, the story is always written from the first-person point of view.44. Spenserian StanzaA nine-line stanza with the following rhyme scheme: ababbcbcc. The first eight lines are written iniambic pentameter. The last line is written in iambic hexameter . The Spenserian Stanza was invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Fairie Queen.45. StyleAn author’s characteristic way of writing, determined by the choice of words, the arrangements of words in a sentence, and the relationship of sentences to one another. Style is the total qualities and characteristics that distinguish the writings of one writer from those of another.46. TragedyIn general, a literary work in which the protagonist meets an unhappy or disastrous end. Unlike comedy, tragedy depicts the actions of a central character who is usually dignified or heroic. Through a series of events, this main character, or tragic hero , is brought to a final downfall .47. ForeshadowingA device by means of which the author hints at something to follow.48. Understatement(轻描淡写的陈述)A figure of speech that consists of saying less than what one means, or of saying what one means with less force than the occasion warrants.49. University WitsA name given to a group of Elizabethan playwrights who had studied at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. John Lyly and Thomas Lodge were at Oxford; Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe and Christopher Marlowe came from Cambridge.50. The Wessex NovelsThe Wessex Novels : novels by Hardy of describing the characters and environment of his native countryside. These novels have for their setting the agricultural region of the Southern counties of England. Hardy truthfully depicts the impoverishment and decay of small farmers who became hired fieldhands and roam the country in search of seasonal jobs. These laborers are mercilessly exploited by the rich landowners. The author is pained to see the decline of the idyllic life in rural England. This is one of the reasons for Hardy’s pessimistic tone throughout his novels. His pessimistic philosophy seems to show that mankind is subjected to human life. Determinism is a tendency in his writings. The major Wessex Novels include:1. Under the Greenwood Tree2. Far from the Madding Crowd3. The Return of the Native4. The Mayor of Casterbridge5. Tess of the D’Urbervilles6. Jude the Obscure。
英国文学 下 terms 名词解释 汇总
1.Romanticism: It was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment. It was influenced by three revolution: American and French revolutions, national liberation movements and democratic movements swept across many European countries.The essence of it is the glorification of instinct and emotion, a deep veneration of nature, and a flaming zeal to remark the world.2.Romantic movement: characteristic--subjectivism\spontaneity\singularity\worship of nature\simplicity\dominating note of melancholy\poets outpoured their feelings and emotions3.Luddite movement:it is a machine-breaking movement named after Ned Ludd. With the invention of new machines, many skilled workers were replaced by women and children. Workers organized themselves and gave voice to their distress by breaking machines. The riots lated from 1811 to 1818.4. Ballad:(1)a narrative poet that tells a story.(2) the beginning is often abrupt(3)have strong dramatic elements(4)often told through dialogue and action(5)the theme is often tragic(6) ballad meter:contains four-line stanzas. The odd numbered lines have four feet each and the even numbered lines have three feet each.Rhymes fall on the even numbered lines. And there is often a refrain at the end of each stanza.5. Byronic heroes: are men with fiery passions and unbending will and express the poet's own ideal of freedom. These heroes rise against tyranny and injustice, but they are merely lone fighters striving for personal freedom and some individualistic ends.6. Lyrical poets:the cavaliers were royalists,whose poetry was marked by courtliness,urbanity,and polish.(the theme is carpe diem,17th at the court reflected the extravanvgance and moral looseness of court life)7.Petrarchan sonnet:consists of an octave and a sestet, and the rhyme scheme is abba,abba,cdcdcd. first eight lines--an octave(abba abba)--raise problems;next six lines--a sestet(cde cde)--answer to the theme.8. Ode: in ancient literature, it is an elaborate, lyrical poem composed for a chorus to chant and to dance, to In modern use, it is a rhymed lyric expressing noble feelings, often addressed to a person or celebrating an event.9. Oxymoron: phrase combining two seemingly incompatible elements10. Terza rima: was used by Dante in The Divine Comedy. The first and third lines rhyme second line is in rhyme with the fourth and sixth lines, the rhyme scheme being aba,bab,cdc,ded,ee. This linked chain gives a feeling of onward motion; the verse has a breathless quality which is in keeping with the onward motion of the wind's movement. The metrical pattern of each line is basically iambic pentameter.11.writers at Victorian period:(victorian literature truthfully represents the reality and spirit of the age, vitality, down-to-earth, good natured humor and unbounded imagination--optimistic) Novelist: George Eliot, Thomas HardyProse writer: Thomas Carlyle, Mathew ArnoldPoets: Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browningthe early Victorian Period (ending around 1870) and the late Victorian Period. Writers associated with the early period are: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), Robert Browning (1812-1889), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), Emily Bronte (1818-1848), Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), George Eliot (1819-1880), Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) and Charles Dickens (1812-1870).Writers associated with the late Victorian Period include: George Meredith (1828-1909), Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), Oscar Wilde (1856-1900), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), A.E. Housman (1859-1936), and Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894).12. realism: writing that stresses careful description of setting and trapping of daily life, psychological probability and the lives of ordinary people. Its practitioners believe they are presenting life"as it really is" Ibsen's A Doll House is an example.13. Dramatic monologue: perfected by Robert Browning, a type of poem, consists of a single speaker talking to one or more unseen audience,revealing much more about the speaker than he or she seems to intend, know more the personality of speaker rather than what's talking about. Penetrates to depth the psychology of his characters and through their own speeches, analyze and dissects his characters and reveals the innermost secret of their lives14. anapaestic: in the first two line two unaccented syllables of each foot are omitted,but the time is preserved by the three long pauses / (of a metric foot) characterized by two short syllables followed by a long one15. Aesthetic movement: appeared on the literary scene of England in the late Victorian period. It was influenced by the French symbolists. The predecessor of the movement was the Pre-Raphaelists, a group of young writers and artists who were opposed to the materialism and commercialism of the Victorian age and who wanted to create or recreate literary forms like those before the period of Raphaol,that is ,they wanted to go back to the medieval age.16. Hedonism: the belief that pleasure is the chief good in life1.Allegory: is a story or description in which the characters and events symbolize some deeper underlying meaning, and serve to spread moral teaching.It has a primary meaning and underlying meaning.2.Alliteration: the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of two or more words that are next to or close to each other.3.Alliterative verse: paragraphs of long alliterative lines of varying length are followed by a single line of two syllables,called 'the bob' and a group of four-stressed lines called "the wheel"4.Anglo-Saxon prose: Created by King Alfred, not obscure.5.Ballad: (1)a narrative poet that tells a story.(2) the beginning is often abrupt(3)have strong dramatic elements(4)often told through dialogue and action(5)the theme is often tragic(6) ballad meter:contains four-line stanzas. The odd numbered lines have four feet each and the even numbered lines have three feet each.Rhymes fall on the even numbered lines. And there is often a refrain at the end of each stanza.6.Ballad: a narrative poem that tells a story. It has basic characteristics:the beginning is often abrupt;there are strong dramatic elements;the story is often told through dialogue and action;the theme is often tragic7.Border ballad: a group of ballad dealing with blood strifes on the English-Scottish border.8.Blank verse:unrhymed iambic pentameter.the chief verse used by Shakespeare.9.Caesura(中间休止)：a cutting, break or pause in a line of peotry.10.Epic: a lengthy narrative poem, containing details of heroic deeds,may be oral ofwritten; have been written down at least since Homer, and Virgil, Dante and John Milton.11.Feminine rhyme: the rhymed words with one or more unaccented syllables as in subtle,rebuttal12.Fytte: one section of a poem13.heroic couplet: this verse form was introduce into English by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is traditional form for English poetry,commonly used for epic and narrative poetry;it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs(aa,bb...)of iambic pentameter(the ten-syllable line in rhymed couplets)lines.The rhyme is always masculine.14.Humanism(English Renaissance):man should be given full freedom to enrich their intellectual and emotional life. In religion they demanded the reformation of the church. In art and literature,instead of singing praise to God, they sang in praise of man and of the pursuit of happiness in this life. It shattered the shackle of spiritual bondage and opened his eyes to 'a brave new world' in front of him.15.Iambic: two-syllable foot consisting of an unaccented syllable followed by an accented one.Trochaic: if we reverse the order of accented syllable,placing the stressed syllable to the first, we habe a trochaic.16.Kenning(隐喻): a metaphor usually composed of two words, which becomes the formula for a special object.17.Lyrical poets: the cavaliers were royalists,whose poetry was marked by courtliness,urbanity,and polish.(the theme is carpe diem,17th at the court reflected the extravanvgance and moral looseness of court life)18.Meter: meter is the patterned count of accent of syllable group in the line.19.Metaphysical poetry: describing a school of highly intellectual poetry marked by bold and ingenious conceits,incongruous imagery, complexity of thought,frequent use of paradox, and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression.(the main theme are love,death,religion)tonic style(Latinate): instead of using the common English sentence pattern of subject-verb0object order, Milton uses more elaborate patterns drawn from Latin. He is very fond of using inversion and allusions.(the blank verse, the unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter,is used throughout the epic and is characterized by its employment of long and involved sentences,which run on many lines with a variety of pauses,and achieving sometimes an elaborately logical effect. This richness of poetical style has been called "Mliton style")21.Octave: the first eight lines of a sonnet or a eight-line poemSestet（六行诗节）: the following six lines of a sonnet22.Petrarchan sonnet: consists of an octave and a sestet, and the rhyme scheme is abba,abba,cdcdcd.23.pun(双关):the usually humorous use of a word in such a way as to suggest two or more of its meanings or the meaning of another word similar in sound. It consists of a deliberate confusion of similar words or phrases for rhetorical effect, whether humorous or serious. It can rely on the assumed equivalency of multiple similar words(homonymy), of different shades of meaning of one word (polysemy), or of a literal meaning with a metaphor. Bad puns are often considered to be cheesy.24.Repetition and variation: the same idea is expressed more than once by the use of different words which are more or less synonyms.25.Rhyme: the pulse or beat in the poetic line.26.rhythm:the basic unit of meter is called the foot, a foot is one unit of rhythm.33.Robinson style: words are plain,simple,almost without any imagery of figure speech.monotonous without rhetorical devices27.Romance: 12th and 13th means the vernacular language;means a tale in verse, embodying the life and adventures of knights, about love, chivalry and religion. Motif is quest and test, meeting the evil, attack infidelity and super-natural elements and imagined maiden to accomplish a mission and a happy ending.(structure is lose, episodic;language is simple, straightforward) It falls three categories:(1) France,Charlemagne the Great(Chanson de Roland)(2) Rome, Alexander the Great and the siege of Troy(3) Britain,Arthurian legend,about Sir Gawain, Launcelot,Merlin, the quest for the Holy Grail, and the death of King Arthur.28.Soliloquy(dramatic irony): the audience know everything,but characters don't.(often used in drama)29.Sonnet:a short song in the original meaning of the word, contains 14 lines,usually in iambic pentameter with various rhymimg schemes.It was first written by Petrarch. Petrarch's sonnet: first eight lines--an octave(abba abba)--raise problems;next six lines--a sestet(cde cde)--answer to the theme.Shakespear's sonnet: consists three quantrains(abab cdcd efef)--theme is put forward and developed ; ends with a couplet rhyming(gg)--a surprise conclusion of shift of ideas.30.Spenser stanza:a group of eight lines of iambic pentameter followed by a six-stress iambic line(an Alexandrine),with a rhyme scheme ababbcbcc31.Synecdoche(提喻):when one uses a part to represent the whole.32.The 18th century: 文学- age of Neo-classicism科学-age of reason人文-age of enlightenment34.Three dramatic units: action,place,time35.The ideal of feudal knighthood：chivalry,chastity, piety,friendliness and free-giving36.The four subjects of Medieval knowledge: Theology, Philosophy, Medicine and Law.。
英美文学名词解释最全版
英美文学名词解释最全版01. Humanism(人文主义)1>Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance.2> it emphasizes the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. Humanists voiced their beliefs that man was the center of the universe and man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of the present life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders.02. Renaissance(文艺复兴)1>The word “Renaissance”means “rebirth”, it me ant the reintroduction into western Europe of the full cultural heritage of Greece and Rome.2>the essence of the Renaissance is Humanism. Attitudes and feelings which had been characteristic of the 14th and 15th centuries persisted well down into the era of Humanism and reformation.3> the real mainstream of the English Renaissance is the Elizabethan drama with William Shakespeare being the leading dramatist.03. Metaphysical poetry(玄学派诗歌)1>Metaphysical poetry is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne.2>with a rebellious spirit, the Metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry.3>the diction is simple as compared with that of the Elizabethan or the Neoclassical periods, and echoes the words and cadences of common speech.4>the imagery is drawn fromactual life.04. Classicism(古典主义)Classicism refers to a movement or tendency in art, literature, or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism emphasizes the traditional and the universal, and places value on reason, clarity, balance, and order. Classicism, with its concern for reason and universal themes, is traditionally opposed to Romanticism, which is concerned with emotions and personal themes.05. Enlightenment(启蒙运动)1>Enlightenment movement was a progressive philosophical and artistic movement which flourished in France and swept through western Europe in the 18th century.2> the movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance from 14th century to the mid-17th century.3>its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas.4>it celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. It advocated universal education.5>famous among the great enlighteners in England were those great writers like Alexander pope. Jonathan Swift. etc.06.Neoclassicism(新古典主义)1>In the field of literature, the enlightenment movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works.2>this tendency is known as neoclassicism. The Neoclassicists held that forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Homer and Virgil and those of the contemporary French ones.3> they believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic,restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity.07. The Graveyard School(墓地派诗歌)1>The Graveyard School refers to a school of poets of the 18th century whose poems are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or meditation on life. Past and present ,with death and graveyard as themes.2>Thomas Gray is considered to be the leading figure of this school and his Elegy written in a country churchyard is its most representative work.08. Romanticism(浪漫主义)1>In the mid-18th century, a new literary movement called romanticism came to Europe and then to England.2>It was characterized by a strong protest against the bondage of neoclassicism, which emphasized reason, order and elegant wit. Instead, romanticism gave primary concern to passion, emotion, and natural beauty.3>In the history of literature. Romanticism is generally regarded as the thought that designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and experience. 4> The English romantic period is an age of poetry which prevailed in England from 1798 to 1837. The major romantic poets include Wordsworth, Byron and Shelley.09. Byronic Hero(拜伦式英雄)1>Byronic hero refers to a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin.2> with immense superiority in his passions and powers, this Byronic Hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society. And would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies.3> Byron’s chief contribution to English literature is his creation of the “Byronic Hero”10. Critical Realism(批判现实主义)1>Critical Realism is a term applied to the realistic fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.2> It means the tendency of writers and intellectuals in the period between 1875 and 1920 to apply the methods of realistic fiction to the criticism of society and the examination of social issues.3> Realist writers were all concerned about the fate of the common people and described what was faithful to reality.4> Charles Dickens is the most important critical realist.11. Aestheticism（美学主义）1>The basic theory of the Aesthetic movement--- “art for art’s sake” was set forth by a French poet, Theophile Gautier, the first Englishman who wrote about the theory of aestheticism was Walter Pater.2> aestheticism places art above life, and holds that life should imitate art, not art imitate life.3> According to the aesthetes, all artistic creation is absolutely subjective as opposed to objective. Art should be free from any influence of egoism. Only when art is for art’s sake, can it be immortal. They believed that art should be unconcerned with controversial issues, such as politics and morality, and that it should be restricted to contributing beauty in a highly polished style.4> This is one of the reactions against the materialism andcommercialism of the Victorian industrial era, as well as a reaction against the Victorian convention of art for morality’s sake, or art for money’s sake.美学运动的基本原则”为艺术而艺术”最初由法国诗人西奥费尔.高缔尔提出,英国运用该美学理论的第一人是沃尔特.佩特.美学主义崇尚艺术高于生活,认为生活应模仿艺术,而不是艺术模仿生活.在美学主义看来,所有的艺术创作都是绝对主观而非客观的产物.艺术不应受任何功利的影响,只有当艺术为艺术而创作时,艺术才能成为不朽之作.他们还认为艺术不应只关注一些热点话题如政治和道德问题,艺术应着力于以华丽的风格张扬美.这是对维多利亚工业发展时期物质崇拜的一种回应,也是向艺术为道德或为金钱而服务的维多利亚传统的挑战.12.The Victorian period(维多利亚时期)1>In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging expression of progressive thought. While sticking to the principle of faithful representation of the 18th century realist novel, novelists in this period carried their duty forward to criticism of the society and the defense of the mass.2> although writing from different points of view and with different techniques, they shared one thing in common, that is, they were all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry with the inhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as represented by the money-worship and Utilitarianism, and the widespread misery, poverty and injustice.3>their truthful picture of people’s life and bitter and strong criticism of the society had done much in awakening the public consciousness to the social problems and in the actual improvement of the society.4> Charles Dickens is the leading figure of the Victorianperiod.13. Modernism(现代主义)1>Modernism is comprehensive but vague term for a movement , which begin in the late 19th century and which has had a wide influence internationally during much of the 20th century.2> modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical case.3> the term pertains to all the creative arts. Especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture.4> in England from early in the 20th century and during the 1920s and 1930s, in America from shortly before the first world war and on during the inter-war period, modernist tendencies were at their most active and fruitful.5>as far as literature is concerned, Modernism reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions. fresh ways of looki ng at man’s position and function in the universe and many experiments in form and style. It is particularly concerned with language and how to use it and with writing itself.14. Stream of consciousness(意识流)(or interior monologue)In literary criticism, Stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique whic h seeks to describe an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes. Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair. Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing as they do a character’sfragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Famous writers to employ this technique in the English language include James Joyce and William Faulkner.学术界认为意识流是一种通过直接描述人物思维过程来寻求个人视角的文学写作技巧。
英国文学术语 Terms
Lecture 1Epic:1 prevailing form in old English Lit. 2. p2 verse lit. in oral form, author unknown 3 p4 a long poem about a tribal hero 4 alliteration as the device 5 example: BeowulfAlliteration: usu. the repetition of initial consonants in a sequence of words. Example: landscape-lover, lord of language. (Tennyson) It was once a required element in the poetry of Germanic languages (including Old English and Old Norse) and in Celtic verse (where alliterated sounds could regularly be placed in positions other than the beginning of a word or syllable). Such poetry, in which alliteration rather than rhyme is the chief principle of repetition, is known as alliterative verse. In Old English poetry, it is employed in a line divided into 2 halves with 4 stresses. (source: Baldick, 5). Beowulf is an example.Romance:p10 1 Prevailing form of medieval lit., 2 verse or prose, 3 adventures of knights, 4 devotion to a lady 5 devotion to the church and king, expose vices praise virtues 6 example: Sir Gawain and the Green KnightHeroic couple t: It was introduced by Chaucer from France to English, and first used in his The Legend of Good Women,then fully developed in The Canterbury Tales. Heroic couplet was characterized by rhymed lines in the iambic pentameter. Allegory: a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape. (source: Baldick, 5)Popular Ballad: Ballads flourished in Scotland from the 15th century onward. It is a folk song or oral literary piece, usu. telling a local story or legend with vivid dialogue, in an impersonal tone. Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, with the second and fourth lines rhyming.Lecture 2The Renaissance: 1 Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. The Renaissance was slow in reaching England. The reign of Henry VIII (1509—1547) marked the real flourishing of the Renaissance. 2 the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek Culture, It was the revival of painting, sculpture and literature. Oxford Reformers, the religious reformers at Oxford University, together with scholars and humanists introduced the Bible and classics that were popularized. 3 The literary giants at that time were Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Sidney, Marlowe, Bacon and Donne. 4 The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. It was, in essence, an attempt of the humanist thinkers and scholars to get rid of the feudalist ideas; recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church; and to introduce new ideas in the interest of the rising bourgeoisie.Humanism: Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. The Greek and Roman civilization was based on the conception that man is the measure of all things. Therevival of ancient culture not only restored the medieval reverence for classics, but also presented the human values in the works. Humanists saw that human being were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfection, and they had the right to explore and enjoy the world, emphasizing the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. This point of view presented a way to break away from the feudal and Catholic burden of spending a lifetime on preparing souls for the future life. The best representatives of the English humanists are Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.Reformation: The Medieval religious Reformation came from the Continent. A German Protestant, Martin Luther (1483-1546) initiated the Reformation. It was marked by rejection or modification of much of Roman Catholic doctrine and practice and establishment of Protestant churches. Luther believed that every time Christian was his own priest and was entitled to interpret the Bible for himself. In this sense, reformation is an extreme manifestation of Renaissance individualism. Faith was alone thought competent to save and salvation was regarded a direct transaction with God, without the intermediation by church priests or sacrament. Rituals were simplified. The Protestant movement was seen as a means to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption and superstition of the Middle Ages.This movement was not initiated in England until a later time, when both the king Henry VIII and the common English people had determined to break away from Rome. When Henry VIII declared himself through the approval of the Parliament as the Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1543, the Reformation in England was in its full swing. The religious reformation was actually a reflection of the class struggle waged by the new rising bourgeoisie against the feudal class and its ideology. Much of the poetry of Spenser and Milton breathes the Reformation spirit.The Petrarchan Sonnet: Originally invented in Italy, it was introduced to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the 16th century. It is built in 2 parts. The first part is known as “Octave” ,consisting of 8 lines , and the last six lines are “sestet”. There is a break in thought after the eighth line. The octave always rhymes abbaabba, while the rest six lines are cdecde or cdc cdc. Milton uses this but avoids the break in the middle and employs the rhyme cdcdcd in the last 6 lines.The Shakespearean sonnet:It was first used by the Earl of Surrey. It consists of three quatrains of four lines each and a final independent couplet. Its rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.Spenserian stanza: It is a stanza of nine lines, with the first 8 lines in the iambic pentameter, the last line in the iambic hexameter. Its rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.University Wits: They were a professional set of pre-Shakespearean dramatists. They were called so because nearly all of them were educated at Oxford or Cambridge University. “Wit” was the synonym for “scholar”.They were usually actors as well as dramatists. They understood full well the requirements of the stage and rightly felt the need of the audience. They revised oldplays and wrote new ones. They made rapid progress in dramatic technique. Their dramatic writings laid the foundation for William Shakespeare.The writers belonging to this group are: John Lyly, Robert Greene; George Peele; Thomas Lodge; Thomas Lodge; Thomas Nashe; Thomas Kyd; and Christopher Marlowe, who was the central man.Blank verse: Surrey introduced blank verse into English poetry in his translations. Blank verse was characterized by unrhymed lines in the iambic pentameter. (In contrast with heroic couplet which is rhymed.)Lect. 4Flat & Round Characters. Flat Characters are those who embody or represent a single characteristic, trait, or at most a very limited number of such qualities. Flat characters are also referred to as type characters, as one-dimensional characters, or when they are distorted to create humor, as caricatures. Flat characters have much in common with the kind of stock characters who appear again and again in certain types of literary works (e.g. the rich uncle of domestic comedy, the hard-boiled private eye of the detective story, the female confidante of romance. ) Round characters are just the opposite. They embody a number of-qualities and traits, and are complex multidimensional characters of considerable intellectual and emotional depth who have the capacity to grow and change. Major characters in fiction are usually round characters, and it is with the very complexity of such characters that most of us become engrossed and fascinated. The terms round and flat do not automatically imply value, judgments.Metaphysical Poets: txt bk p182Conceit: The word "conceit" originally means "concept" or "idea", and later came to mean "fanciful idea". It is in this sense that the word is used in discussion of poems. A conceit is a metaphor or simile that is made elaborate (far-fetched), often extravagant. Some would use the term to mean any fanciful poetic image. The difference between a conceit and a metaphor or simile is largely of degree. A metaphor or simile appeals mainly to the reader's five senses and is easier to understand; a conceit appeals mainly to the reader’s intellect and so is difficult to comprehend. A conceit may strike the reader as weird at first glance, but proves appropriate in the end. The use of conceit is especially popular in the 17th century and the metaphysical poetry is characterized by conceits. A ready example would be the one from the poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." by John Donne, in which two lovers’ souls are compared to the legs of the compasses.18th centuryCited from my earlier teaching plans Enlightenment:1. a progressive intellectual movement throughout Western Europe in the 18th century; 2. a struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism in equality and prejudices; 3. assertion: chief means of bettering the society is to enlighten or educate people. Enlighteners were bourgeois democratic thinkers; 4. trust in man’s reason to solve problems and establish social norms and wipe out darkness of superstition, prejudice and barbarity. 5. Pope, Addison and Steele, Defoe and Richardson; radical ones: Swift, Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith and Sheridan.Neo-classicism: 1. time: glorious revolution to 1730’s, neo-classicism in poetry, Pope. prose (essays) of Addison and Steele; fiction of Defoe and Swift, 40-50’s Richardson, Fielding and Smollett; 2. attempt to revive classical qualities of balance, proportion and restraint, follow classical rules: p86 plays: rimed couplet instead of blank verse, tree unities; poetry falls into lyric, epic, didactic, satiric or dramatic; prose: precise, direct and flexible. 3. Imitation of ancient writers;4. Treatment of town-life;5. Pope, Dryden, Addison, Swift, JohnsonDecorum: is the fittingness of a literary genre with its characters, actions, the style of its narration and its dialogue to each other. For example the highest and most serious genre, epic and tragedy, presented characters of the highest social classes, speaking in the “High style”. This theory has its root in Horace’s Art of Poetry.EssayAny short composition in prose that undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view, persuade us to accept a thesis on any subject, or simply entertain is an essay. The essay differs from a "treatise" or "dissertation" in its lack of pretension to be a systematic and complete exposition, and in being addressed to a general rather than a specialized audience; as a consequence, the essay discusses its subject in non-technical fashion, and often with a liberal use of such devices as anecdote, striking illustration, and humor to augment its appeal.A useful distinction is that between the formal and informal essay. The formal essay, or article, is relatively impersonal; the author writes as an authority, or at least as highly knowledgeable, and expounds the subject in an orderly way. Examples will be found in various scholarly journals, as well as among the serious articles on current topics and issues in any of the magazine addressed to a thoughtful audience. In the informal essay ( or "familiar" or "personal essay" ), the author assumes a tone of intimacy with his audience, tends to deal with everyday things rather than with public affairs or specialized topics, and writes in a relaxed, self-revelatory, and sometimes whimsical fashion.The Greeks Theoparastus and Plutarch and the Romans Cicero and Seneca wrote essays long before the genre was given what became its standard name by Montaigne’s French Essais in 1580. The title signifies "attempts" and is meant to indicate the tentative and unsystematic nature of Montaigne’s commentary on topics such as "Of Illness" and "Of Sleeping", in contrast to formal and technical treatises on the same subjects. Francis Bacon, late in the sixteenth century, inaugurated the English use of the term in his own Essays; most of them are short discussions such as "Of Truth"; "Of Adversity", "Of Marriage and the Single Life" (formal essays). Alexander Pope adopted the term for his expository compositions in verse, the Essay on Criticism and the Essay on Man, but the verse essay has had few important exponents after the eighteenth century. In the early eighteenth century Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steel’s Tatler and Spectator, with their many successors, gave to the essay written in prose its standard modern vehicle, the literary periodical (informal essays) (earlier essays had been published in books).In the early nineteenth century the founding of new types of magazines, and their steady proliferation, gave great impetus to the writing of essays and made them a major department of literature. This was the age when William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincy, Charles Lamb, and later in the century, Robert Louis Stevenson brought English essay－and especially the personal essay－toa level that has not been surpassed. Major American essayists in the nineteenth century include Washington Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, and Mark Twain. In our own era many periodicals pour out scores of essays every week. Most of them are formal in type; Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, James Thurber, E. B. White, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Toni Morrison, however, are notable twentieth-century practitioners of the informal essay.*Graveyard School / Poets”: A term applied to eighteenth-century poets who wrote meditative poems, usually set in a graveyard, on the theme of human mortality, in moods which range from elegiac pensiveness to profound gloom. The vogue resulted in one of the most widely known English poems, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy written in a country churchyard”. The writing of graveyard poems spread from England to Continenta l literature in the second part of the century and also influenced some American poets.Lecture 17Aestheticism (art for art's sake)A term applied to the point of view that art is self-sufficient. It need serve no ulterior purpose, and should not be judged by moral, political or other nonaesthetic standards. Aestheticism in England was influenced greatly by Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin, and Pater and French symbolist poets. Oscar Wilde was one of its major representatives.It appeared in the late Victorian period. The predecessor of it was the Pre-Raphaelists, who were opposed to the materialism and commercialism and wanted to go back to the medieval age. The movement was influenced by the French symbolists, who used symbols to present an ideal world of which the real world is but a shadow. The first important figure of the movement was Walter Pater, who suggests that the sole duty of an aesthete is to develop his aesthetic sensibility, enjoy all possible varieties of artistic and sensuous experience, and “burns always with a hard gemlike flame. This movement covered a wide range of poets, writers and artists, varying in their attitudes towards life and art.modernismA movement of experiment in new techniques in writing. Modernist fiction represented a trend drifting away from the tradition of the 19th century realism. It put emphasis on the description ogoometimes it is called modern psychological fiction. Lawrence is a typical representative of it.或: It is a rather vague term which is used to apply to the works of a group of poets, novelists, painters, and musicians between 1910 and the early years after the World War Ⅱ. The term includes various trend or schools, such as imagism, expressionism, dadaism, stream of consciousness, and existentialism. It means a departure from the conventional criteria or established values of Victorian age. Its basic themes are alienation and loneliness.Modernism and Postmodernism. The term Modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts; and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the 20 th century, but especially after World War I . The specific features signifiedby "modernism" (or by the adjective modernist) vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art,. but of Western culture in general. Important intellectual precursors of modernism, in this sense, are thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported the traditional ways of conceiving the human self-thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and James G. Frazer, whose The Golden Bough stressed the correspondence between central Christian tenets and pagan, often barbaric, myths and rituals.Literary historians locate the beginning of the modernist revolt as far back as the 1890s, but most agree that what is called high modernism, marked by an unexampled range and rapidity of change, came after the First World War. The year 1922 alone was signalized by the simultaneous appearance of such monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf' s Jacob's Room, as well as many other experimental works of literature. The catastrophe of the war had shaken faith in the moral basis, coherence, and durability of Western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the harsh and dissonant realities of the postwar world. T. S. Eliot wrote in a review of Joyce's Ulysses in 1923 that the inherited mode of ordering a literary work, which assumed a relatively coherent and stable social order, could not accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history". Like Joyce and like Ezra Pound in his Cantos, Eliot experimented with new forms and a new style that would render contemporary disorder, often contrasting it to a lost order and integration that had been based on the religion and myths of the cultural past. In The Waste Land, for example, Eliot replaced the standard syntactic flow of poetic language by fragmented utterances, and substituted for the traditional coherence of poetic structure a deliberate dislocation of parts, in which very diverse components are repeated by connections that are left to the reader to discover, or invent. Major works of modernist fiction, following Joyce's Ulysses and his even more radical Finnegans Wake, subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of, stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of narration. Gertrude Stein–often linked with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Woolf as a trail-balzing modernist–experimented with automatic writing (writing that has been freed from control by the conscious, purposive mind) and other modes that achieved their effects by violating the norms of standard English syntax and sentence structure. Among other European and American writers who are central representatives of modernism are the novelists Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, AndreGide, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson, and William Faulkner; the poets Stephane Mallarmee, William Butler Yeats, Rainier Maria Rilke, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens; and the dramatists August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene O' Neil, and Bertolt Brecht. Their new forms of literary construction and rendering had obvious parallels in the violation of representational conventions in the artistic movements of expressionism and surrealism, in the modernist paintings and sculpture of Cubism, Futurism, and Abstract Expressionism, and rhythm by the modernist musical composers Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and their radical followers.A prominent feature of modernism is the phenomenon called the avan-garde; that is, a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately undertake, in Ezra Pound's phrase, to "make it new". By violating the accepted conventions and proprieties, not only of art but of socialdiscourse, they set out to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and to introduce hitherto neglected, and sometimes forbidden, subject matter. Frequently, avant-garde artists represent themselves as "alienated" from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy; a prominent aim is to shock the sensibilities of.the conventional reader and to challenge the norms and pieties of the dominant bourgeois culture.The term Postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after World War II, when the effects on Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of over-population. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carries to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist "high art" by recourse to the models of "mass culture in film", television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music. Many of the works of postmodern literature–by George Luis, Borges, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and many others–so blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics. And these literary anomalies are paralleled in other arts by phenomena like pop art, op art, the musical compositions of John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors. An undertaking in some postmodernist writings-prominently in Samuel Beckett and other authors of the literature of the absurd-is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying "abyss", or "void", or "nothingness" on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended. Postmodernism in literature and the arts has paralleled with the movement known as poststructuralism in linguistic and literary theory; poststructuralists undertake to subvert the foundations of language in order to show that its seeming meaningfulness dissipated, for a rigorous inquirer, into a play of conflicting indeterminacies or else to show that all forms of cultural discourse are manifestations of the ideology, or of the relations and constructions of power, in contemporary society.Stream of consciousnessIn literature, the thought or feelings of a character without regard to the logical argument or narrative sequences. The writer attempts the stream of consciousness to reflect all the forces, externals or internals, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment. The representatives are James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, William Failkner.或It refers to thought and feelings exactly as they pass through mind, rather than giving them the ordered structure as usual. It coined by William James in <principles of psychology> to denote the flow of inner experiences. Another phrase for it is “interior monologue”. The representatives are James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, William Failkner.Stream of consciousness: “Stream-of-Consciousness” or “interior monologue”, is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts 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 brokethrough 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.Stream of consciousnessIn literature, the thought or feelings of a character without regard to the logical argument or narrative sequences. The writer attempts the stream of consciousness to reflect all the forces, externals or internals, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment. The representatives are James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, William Failkner.或It refers to thought and feelings exactly as they pass through mind, rather than giving them the ordered structure as usual. It coined by William James in <principles of psychology> to denote the flow of inner experiences. Another phrase for it is “interior monologue”. The representatives are James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, William Failkner.existentialismIt's a feature developed during 20C 20S-30S that man is unique and isolated in an indifferent or hostile universe, responsible for his own ations and free to choose his destiny. Existentialism: in existentialist philosophy, existence is the only thing we are certain of; man’s life begins and ends in nothingness, and life is inexplicable, meaningless, and dangerous. The nature of our existence is decided by the choices we make to determine its nature. There are many variations of this philosophy, including even a Christian one, but its main appearance in literature is in the “Theatre of the Absurd”.Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique of using sy mbols. 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 i mage or even one word. It’s one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.。
英美文学名词解释1
英国Renaissance：The term originally indicated a revival of classical(Greek and Roman) artsand sciences after the dark ages of medieval obscurantism(蒙昧主义）. Humanism is the essence of Renaissance. The real mainstream of English Renaissance is the Elizabethan drama with William Shakespeare being the leading dramatist.Humanism:Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It emphasizes the dignity ofhuman beings and the importance of the present life. Humanists voiced their beliefs that man was the center of the universe and man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of the present life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders.Romance:Any imagination literature that is set in an idealized world and deals with heroicadventures and battles between good characters and villains or monsters. Originally, the term referred to a medieval tale dealing with the loves and adventures of kings, knights and ladies, and including unlikely or supernatural happenings. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the best of medieval romances.University Wits: University Wits refers to a group of scholars during the Elizabethan Agewho graduated from either Oxford or Cambridge. They came to London with the ambition to become professional writers. Some of them later became famous poets and playwrights. They were called “University Wits”. Christopher Marlowe is the most gifted of the University Wits.Metaphysical Poetry:Metaphysical poetry is a derogatory(贬义的）term invented byJohn Dryden and later adopted by Samuel Johnson describing a school of highly intellectual poetry marked by bold(大胆的) and ingenious (有独创性的）conceits, imagery, complexity of thought, frequent use of paradox. The main themes are love, death, and religion. The chief representative of this school was John Donne.Cavalier Poets:The cavaliers are royalists, whose poetry was marked by courtliness,urbanity(雅致，礼貌）, and polish（优雅）. They were lyrical poets, and dealt chiefly with the theme of love and the theme of “carpe diem”(及时行乐）. The chief representative of this school was Ben Jonson.Neoclassicism: A revival in the 17th and 18th centuries of classical standards of order ,balance, and harmony in literature, John Dryden and Alexander Pope were major exponents of the neoclassical school.British Romanticism:A movement that flourished in literature, philosophy, music, andart in Western culture during most of the 19th century, beginning as a revolt against classicism. Romanticism gave primary concern to passion, emotion, and natural beauty. The English Romantic period is an age of poetry. Characteristics: subjectivism; spontaneity; singularity; worship of nature; simplicity.Modernism:It is an international movement in literature and arts, especially in literarycriticism, which began in the late 19th century. Modernism takes the irrational philosophy(非理性哲学) and the theory of psycho-analysis(精神分析) as its theoretical base. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private and subjunctive than on the public and objective, mainly concerned with the inner of an individual. The characteristics of modernists writings are as below: complexity and obscurity(晦涩); the use of symbols; allusion; irony.Stream of consciousness:“Stream-of-Consciousness”or “interior monologue”, isone of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts 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 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(模糊的）, distracted（心烦意乱的）and illusory（错觉的）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（沉思）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.Black Humor: It is mostly employed to describe baleful(恶意的), naive, or inept(笨拙的)characters in a fantastic or horrible modern world playing out their roles in a“tragic farce(闹剧)”，in which the events are often simultaneous comic, horrifying, and absurd. Joseph Heller’ s Catch-22 can be taken as an example of the employment of this technique.The Theater of the Absurd: It refers to a kind of drama that explains an existentialideology and presents a view of the absurdity of the human condition by abandoning of usual or rational devices and the use of nonrealistic form.The Angry Young Man: The Angry Young Men is a journalistic catchphrase(标语)applied to a number of British playwrights and novelists from the mid-1950s. Their works mainly express the bitterness of the lower classes towards the established sociopolitical system and hypocrisy of the middle and upper classes. The playwright John Osborne was the example of these angry young men with his play Look Back in Anger.美国American Romanticism: The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century.A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, the booming economy, the flourishing publications and a variety of foreign influences made its literary expansion possible and inevitable. Romantics shared some characteristics: moral enthusiasm, individuality and intuitive perception. Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War.American Transcendentalism: American Transcendentalism is more than an attitudeof Transcendentalists. To transcend something is to rise above(克服) it , to pass beyond its limits. The transcendentalists speak for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. The major features of the American Transcendentalism can be summarized as follows : First, transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in Universe; Second, they stressed the importance of individuals; Third, they offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God.American Naturalism: The American Naturalism accepted the more negativeinterpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits were conditioned by social and economic forces. American Naturalism was evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing became less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It was no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence. Dreiser is a leading figure of this school.American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period toan end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering(表现) of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of Puritans . TheAmerican puritans, like their English Brothers, are idealists. They accept the doctrine and practice of predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. But due to the grim struggle for living in the new continent, they become more and more practical. American Puritanism is so much a part of the national atmosphere rather than a set of tenets.Local Colorism: Local Colorism or regionalism as a trend to first made its presence feltin the late 1860s and early 1870s in America. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to write or to present local characters of their regions in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.Determinism: Determinism is the philosophical belief that events are shaped by forcesbeyond the control of human beings. Determinism, important to the literature at the end of the 19th century, assigns control especially to heredity and environment, without seeking their origins further than science can trace. Determinism usually leads to the tragic fate of the characters in novel.Psychological realism: It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into(探究） the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. Henry James’s novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism. And He nry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware.Imagism:Imagism was a poetic vogue(流行) that flourished in England, and even morevigorously in America. It was planned and exemplified by a group of English and American writers in London as a revolt against the sentimental and discursive(散漫的) poetry at the turn of the century. The typical imagist poetry likes to express the writers’momentary impression of a visual object or scene and often the impression is rendered(提出) by means of metaphor without indicating a relation. The most imagist poem, In a station of the Metro is written by Ezra Pound.Southern Renaissance: The Southern Renaissance is the revival of American Southernliterature that began in the 1920s and 1930s until the 1950s. Much of the writings in this unit featured the struggle between those who embraced social changes and those who were more skeptical or challenged social change outright. The writers and intellectuals of the South after the late 1920s were engaged in an attempt to come to terms not only with the inherited values of the Southern tradition, but also with a certain way of perceiving and dealing with the past. The Lost Generation:This term has been used to describe the people of the postwaryears. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates”or exiles. Writers like Hemingway were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. The Beat Generation: The Beat Generation refers to a loosely-knit group of poets andnovelists, writing in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s. They shared a set of social attitudes——anti-establishment, anti-political, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, literal, and moral values, and were in favor of unfettered(无拘无束的）self-realization and self-expression.Hemingway Code Hero: As a concept from Hemingway’s works, code hero is definedby Hemingway as a man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honour, courage and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic(混乱的）,often stressful, and always painful.A code hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, a man who is sensitive and intelligent, a man of actions and of few words. This kind of people are usually spiritually strong,with certain skills, and most of them encounter death many times.Jazz Age: The Jazz Age describes the period from 1918 to 1929, the years after the end ofWorld War I, continuing through the Roaring Twenties and ending with the rise of the Great Depression in America. Among the prominent concerns and trends of the period are the public embrace of technological developments as well as new modernists trends in social behavior, arts and culture. The representative writer is F·Scott Fitzgerald with his novel The great Gatsby.Waste Land Painters: Waste Land Painters refer to such writers as F·Scott Fitzgerald,T·S Eliot, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. With their writings, all of them paintsthe post-war western world as a waste land, lifeless and hopeless.。
英国文学名词解释大全(整理版)
名词解释1.Epic(史诗)（appeared in the the Anglo-Saxon Period ）It is a narrative of heroic action, often with a principal hero, usually mythical in its content, grand in its style, offering inspiration and ennoblement within a particular culture or national tradition.A long narrative poem telling about the deeds of great hero and reflecting the values of the society from which it originated.Epic is an extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, like Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey. It usually celebrates the feats of one or more legendary or traditional heroes. The action is simple, but full of magnificence.Today, some long narrative works, like novels that reveal an age & its people, are also called epic.E.g. Beowulf （the pagan（异教徒），secular(非宗教的) poetry）Iliad 《伊利亚特》，Odyssey《奥德赛》Paradise Lost 《失乐园》，The Divine Comedy《神曲》2.Romance （传奇）(Anglo-Norman feudal England)•Romance is any imaginative literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with heroic adventures and battles between good characters and villains or monsters.•Originally, the term referred to a medieval (中世纪) tale dealing with the love and adventures of kings, queens, knights, and ladies, and including supernatural happenings.Form:long composition, in verse, in proseContent:description of life and adventures of a noble heroCharacter:a knight, a man of noble birth, skilled in the use of weapons; often described as riding forth to seek adventures, taking part in tournaments(骑士比武), or fighting for his lord in battles; devoted to the church and the king •Romance lacks general resemblance to truth or reality.•It exaggerates the vices of human nature and idealizes the virtues.•It contains perilous (dangerous) adventures more or less remote from ordinary life.•It lays emphasis on supreme devotion to a fair lady.①The Romance Cycles/Groups/DivisionsThree Groups●matters of Britain Adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table （亚瑟王和他的圆桌骑士）●matters of France Emperor Charlemagne and his peers●matters of Rome Alexander the Great and the attacks of TroyLe Morte D’Arthur （亚瑟王之死）②Class Nature (阶级性) of the RomanceLoyalty to king and lord was the theme of the romances, as loyalty was the corner-stone（the most important part基石）of feudal morality.The romances were composed not for the common but for the noble, of the noble, and by the poets patronized （supported 庇护,保护）by the noble.3. Alliteration（押头韵）: a repeated initial(开头的) consonant(协调,一致) to successive(连续的) words.e.g. 1.To his kin the kindest, keenest for praise.2.Sing a song of southern singer4. Understatement（低调陈述）（for ironical humor）not troublesome: very welcomeneed not praise: a right to condemn5. Chronicle《编年史》（a monument of Old English prose）6. Ballads （民谣）（The most important department of English folk literature ）①Definition:A ballad is a narrative poem that tells a story, and is usually meant to be sung or recited in musical form.An important stream of the Medieval folk literature②Features of English Ballads1. The ballads are in various English and Scottish dialects.2. They were created collectively and revised when handed down from mouth to mouth.3. They are mainly the literature of the peasants, and give an outlook of the English common people in feudal society.③Stylistic （风格上）Features of the Ballads1. Composed in couplets （相连并押韵的两行诗,对句）or in quatrains （四行诗）known as the ballad stanza （民谣诗节）, rhyming abab or abcb, with the first and third lines carrying 4 accented syllables （重读音节）and the second and fourth carrying 3.2. Simple, plain language or dialect （方言，土语）of the common people with colloquial （口语的，会话的）, vivid and, sometimes, idiomatic （符合当地语言习惯的）expressions3. Telling a good story with a vivid presentation around the central plot.4. Using a high proportion of dialogue with a romantic or tragic dimension （方面）to achieve dramatic effect.④Subjects of English Ballads1. struggle of young lovers2. conflict between love and wealth3. cruelty of jealousy4. criticism of the civil war5. matters of class struggle7. Heroic couplet （英雄双韵体）（introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer）Definition:the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter; a verse form in epic poetry, with lines of ten syllables and five stresses, in rhyming pairs.英雄诗体/英雄双韵体：用于史诗或叙事诗，每行十个音节，五个音部，每两行押韵。
英美文学术语解释 文档
Define the literary termsEnglish literature1.Old and medieval English literature & the renaissance periodRenaissance：The renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. It first started in Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture and literature. From Italy the movement went to embrace the rest of Europe. The renaissance, which means rebirth or revival, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion. The renaissance, therefore, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.Humanism:Humanism is the essence of the renaissance. It sprang form the endeavor to restore a medieval reverence for the ancient authors and is frequently taken as the beginning of the renaissance on its conscious, intellectual side, for the Greek and Roman civilization was based on such a conception that man is the measure of all things. Through the new learning, humanists not only saw the arts of splendor and enlightenment, but the human values represented in the works. Renaissances humanists found in the classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfection, and that the world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy. Thus, by emphasizing the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to perfect himself and to perform wonders. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the English humanists.Spenserian stanza:Spenserian stanza was invented by Edmund Spenser. It is a stanza of mine lines, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc.Metaphysical poetry:The term “metaphysical poetry” is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. With a rebellious spirit, the metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry. The diction is simple as compared with that of the Elizabethan or the neoclassic periods, and echoes the words and cadences of common speech. The imagery is drawn from the actual life. The form is frequently that of an argument with the poet’s beloved, with God, or with himself.2. The Neoclassical periodThe Enlightenment movementThe 18th century England is known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The enlightenment movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept through the whole Western Europe at the time. The movement was a furtherance of the renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. They called for a reference to order, reason and rules and advocated universal education. Famous among the great enlighteners in England were those great writers like John Dryden, Alexander Pope and so on.Neoclassicism:In the field of literature, the enlightenment movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism. According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers(Homer, V irgil, and so on) and those of the contemporary French ones. They believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should by judged in terns of its service to humanity. This belief led them to seek proportion, unity, harmony and grace in literary expressions, in an effort to delight, instruct and correct human beings, primarily as social animals. Thus, a polite, urbane, witty, and intellectual art developed.The Graveyard School:It refers to a school of poets of the 18th century whose poems are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or meditation on life, past and present, with death and graveyard as themes. Thomas Gray is considered to be the leading figure of this school and his “Elegy written in a country churchyard” is its most representative work.The heroic couplet:It means a pair of lines of a type once common in English poetry, which rhyme and are written with five beats each.Gothic Novel:It is a school of novel that appeared in the 18th century. Such a novel is often of mystery and horror which takes place in some haunted or dilapidated Middle Age Castles.3.The romantic periodThe Romantic Movement:It expressed a more of less negative attitude toward the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. The romantics felt that the existing society denied people their essential human needs, so they demonstrated a strong reaction against the dominant nodes of thinking of the 18th-century writers and philosophers. Where their predecessors saw man as a social animal, the romantics saw him essentially as an individual in the solitary state and emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind. Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer world of socialcivilization to the inner world of the human spirit. In essence, it designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and all experience. It also places the individual at the center of art, making literature most valuable as an expression of his or her unique feelings and particular attitudes, and valuing its accuracy in portraying the individual’s experiences.The “Byronic hero”A “Byronic hero” is a proud and mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. To some extent, such a hero is modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself. With immense superiority in his passions and powers, the “Byronic hero” would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in corrupt society, and would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies. The conflict is usually one of rebellious individuals against outworn social systems and conventions.4.The Victorian period5.The Modern periodModernism:It is a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism which is the theoretical base of realism, it excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world, which is the only creative source of realism; by advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, it casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base.Stream of Consciousness:In Joyce’s opinion, the artist, who wants to reach the highest stage and to gain the insights necessary for the creation of dramatic art, should rise to the position of a godlike objectivity; he should have the complete conscious control over the creative process and depersonalize his own emotion in the artistic creation. He should appear as an omniscient author and present unspoken materials directly from the psyche of the characters, or make the character tell their own inner thoughts in monologues. This literary approach to the presentation of psychological aspects of characters is usually termed as “stream of consciousness”.American literature1.The Romantic periodNew England T ranscendentalism:It is the summit of the Romantic Movement in the history of American literature. It was started in New England in the 1830s. Gradually its influence began to spread all over the country. The most important representatives are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Basically, transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the sense.”Transcendentalists place emphasis on the importance of the over soul, the individual and Nature. The concepts that accompanies transcendentalism include the idea that nature in ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and therefore, self-reliant. New England transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European romanticism.Free verse:Free verse means poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. A looser and more open-ended syntactical structure is frequently favored. Lines and sentences of different lengths are left side by side just as things are, undisturbed and separate. There are few compound sentences to draw objects and experience into a system of hierarchy.2.The realistic periodThe age of realism:The literacy climate after the Civil War proved to be quite different. A new generation of writers, dissatisfied with the romantic ideas in the older generation, came up with a new inspiration. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the realities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. So writers began to describe the integrity of human character reacting under various circumstances and picture the pioneers of the Far West, the new immigrants and the struggles of the working classes. This literary interest it the “reality” of life started a new period in American literature known as the age of realism.Naturalism:The impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters helped another school of realism: American naturalism take root in America. The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of this theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces. Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.Darwinism:The term comes from Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Darwinists think that those who survive in the world are the fittest and those who can not adapt themselves to the environment will perish. They believe that man has evolved from lower forms of life. Humans are special notbecause God created them in His image, but because they have successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and have passed on their survival-making characteristics generically. Influenced by this theory, some American naturalist writes apply Darwinism as an explanation of human nature and social reality.Local colorism:The particular concern about the local character of a region is called “local colorism”, a unique part of American literary realism. Major local colorists include Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain, etc. Generally, their writings are concerned with the truthful color of local life. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. Local colorists were consciously nostalgic about a vanishing way of life and tried to record a present that faded before their eyes. They dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the locale.3.The modern periodThe lost generation:When the First World War broke out, many young men volunteered to take part in “the war to end wars”. But they found that modern warfare was not as honorable or heroic as they thought it to be. Disillusioned and disgusted by the materially merry-making and spiritually empty life in America, they were basically expatriates who left America and started a community of writers and artists in Paris. They experimented on new modes of thought and expression. These writers were later named by an American writer, Gertrude stein, “the lost generation”.The imagist movement:The imagist movement flourished from 1909 to 1917 and involved quite a number of British and American writers and poets. The movement advanced modernism in arts and concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to romanticism. As one of the leaders of the imagists, Pound laid down the three imagist poetic principles: direct treatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, and rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome.。
英美文学术语(英文版) literary terms
英国文学Alliteration:押头韵repetition of the initial sounds（不一定是首字母）Allegory:寓言a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.Allusion:典故a reference in a literary work to person, place etc. often to well-known characters or events. Archetype:原型Irony:反讽intended meaning is the opposite of what is statedBlack humor:黑色幽默Metaphor: 暗喻Ballad: 民谣about the folk logeEpic:史诗in poetry, refers to a long work dealing with the actions of gods and heroes.Romance: 罗曼史/骑士文学is a popular literary form in the medieval England./ChivalryEuphuism: 夸饰文体This kind of style consists of two distinct elements. The first is abundant use of balanced sentences, alliterations and other artificial prosodic means. The second element is the use of odd similes and comparisons.Spenserian stanza: It refers to a stanza of nine lines, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter. 斯宾塞诗节新诗体，每一节有9排，前8排是抑扬格五步格诗，第9排是抑扬格六步格诗。
英美文学名词解释TermsinEnglishLiterature
英美文学名词解释Terms in English Literature1.Allegory (寓言)A tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities.寓言，讽喻：一种文学、戏剧或绘画的艺术手法，其中人物和事件代表抽象的观点、原则或支配力。
2.Alliteration (头韵)Alliteration is the repetition of the same initial consonant sound within a line or a group of words. 头韵：在一组词的开头或重读音节中对相同辅音或不同元音的重复。
3.Allusion (典故)A reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to.典故：作者对某些读者熟悉并能够作出反映的特定人物，地点，事件，文学作品的引用。
4.Analogy (类比)A comparison made between two things to show the similarities between them.类比：为了在两个事物之间找出差别而进行的比较。
5. Antagonist (反面主角)The principal character in opposition to the protagonist or hero or heroine of a narrative or drama.反面主角：叙事文学或戏剧中与男女主人公或英雄相对立的主要人物。
6. Antithesis (对仗)The balancing of two contrasting ideas, words, or sentences.对仗：两组相对的思想，言辞，词句的平衡。
考研英美文学名词解释
英美文学名词解释Terms in English and American Literature1。
Aestheticism/the Aestheticism Movement (唯美主义）A European phenomenon during the middle of the 19th century that had its chief headquarters in France. This movement was introduced to late Victorian England mainly Walter Pater as a reaction against the materialism and commercialism of an industrialized society。
It was also a reaction against the Victorian convention of art for morality’s sake, or art for money’s sake. The major tenets of this movement include the belief in the autonomy of a work of art, the emphasis on craft and artistry-—the theory of “art for art’s sake”。
The most outstanding Victorian representatives of this movement included Oscar Wilde.2。
Allegory（寓言）A tale in verse or prose in which characters， actions， or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities。
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英美文学名词解释T erms in English Literature1.Allegory (寓言)A tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities.寓言，讽喻：一种文学、戏剧或绘画的艺术手法，其中人物和事件代表抽象的观点、原则或支配力。
2.Alliteration (头韵)Alliteration is the repetition of the same initial consonant sound within a line or a group of words.头韵：在一组词的开头或重读音节中对相同辅音或不同元音的重复。
3.Allusion (典故)A reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to.典故：作者对某些读者熟悉并能够作出反映的特定人物，地点，事件，文学作品的引用。
4.Analogy (类比)A comparison made between two things to show the similarities between them.类比：为了在两个事物之间找出差别而进行的比较。
5. Antagonist (反面主角)The principal character in opposition to the protagonist or hero or heroine of a narrative or drama.反面主角：叙事文学或戏剧中与男女主人公或英雄相对立的主要人物。
6. Antithesis (对仗)The balancing of two contrasting ideas, words, or sentences.对仗：两组相对的思想，言辞，词句的平衡。
7. Aphorism (警句)A concise, pointed statement expressing a wise or clever observation about life.警句：蕴含关于人生真理的明智的看法的精练的语句。
8. Aside (旁白)A piece of dialogue intended for the audience and supposedly not heard by other actors on stage.旁白：只说给观众而认为不会让台上其他演员听到的一段对话。
9.Apostrophe (呼语)The direct address of an absent or imaginary person or of a personified abstraction, especially as a digression in the course of a speech or composition.呼语：直接称呼不在场或虚构的人物或称呼拟人的事物，尤指作为演讲或作文过程中的离题话。
10.Assonance (类韵)The repetition of similar vowel sounds, especially in poetry.类音，类韵：相同或相似元音的重复，尤其指在诗歌中的重复。
11.Atmosphere (氛围)The prevailing mood or feeling of a literary work.12. Autobiography (自传)A person‘s account of his or her own life.13. Ballad (民谣)A narrative poem, often of folk origin and intended to be sung.14. Ballad Stanza (民谣诗节)A type of four-line stanza, the first and the third lines have four stressed words or syllables; the second and fourth lines have three stresses.15. Biography (传记)A detailed account of a person‘s life written by another person.传记：由他人篆写的关于某人生平的详细记录。
16.Blank Verse (无韵体诗)Verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter.17. Caesura (休止)A break or pause in a line of poetry.18. Canto (章)One of the principal divisions of a long poem..诗章：一首长诗的主要部分之一。
19. Caricature (夸张讽刺)The use of exaggeration or distortion to make a figure appear comic or ridiculous.夸张讽刺：为了使文中的人物显得可笑而使用的夸张或扭曲人物形象的手法。
20. Characterization (人物刻画)The means by which a writer reveals the personality of a character.人物刻画：作者表现作品中人物性格的方法。
21. Classicism (古典主义)A movement or tendency in art, literature, or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome.古典主义：一种在文学，艺术，音乐领域体现古代希腊，罗马风格的运动。
22. Climax (高潮)The point of greatest intensity, interest, or suspense in a narrative.23. Comedy (喜剧)A dramatic work that is often humorous or satirical in tone and usually contains a happy resolution of the thematic conflict.喜剧：轻松的和常有幽默感的或在调子上是讽刺的戏剧作品，常包括主题冲突的愉快解决24. Conceit (奇想)A kind of metaphor that makes a comparison between two startlingly different things.奇想：一种在截然不同的事物之间建立起的比喻。
25. Conflict (冲突)A struggle between two opposing forces or characters in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem.冲突：故事，小说，戏剧中相对的力量和人物之间的对立。
26. Connotation (外延)All the emotions and associations that a word or phrase may arouse.外延：包括单词字面意思之外的或被该词汇唤起的全部内涵的意义。
27. Consonance (辅音韵)The repetition of consonants or a consonant pattern, especially at the ends of words.辅音韵：辅音或辅音模式的重复，尤指位于词尾的。
28. Couplet (双韵体)A unit of verse consisting of two successive lines, usually rhyming and having the same meter and often forming a complete thought or syntactic unit.双韵体：包括两个相连的诗行的一种诗的单位，通常压韵并具有同样的格律，经常组成一个完整的意思和句法单位29. Heroic couplet (英雄双韵体)A couplet written in iambic pentameter is called a heroic couplet.英雄双韵体：五步抑扬格的双韵体称英雄双韵体。
30. Denotation (内涵)The literal or dictionary meaning of a word.直接意义：一个词的字面意义或词典意义。
31. Denouement (结局)The final resolution or clarification of a dramatic or narrative plot.结局：戏剧或叙事场景的最后结果。
32. Diction (措辞)A writer‘s choice and use of words in speech or writing, particularly for clarity, effectiveness, and precision.措词：讲话或书写中，出于表述清晰，言简意赅对词语的使用或选择。
33. Dissonance (不协和)A harsh or disagreeable combination of sounds; discord.34. Dramatic monologue (戏剧独白)A kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listeners whose replies are not given in the poem.35. Elegy (挽歌)A poem or song composed especially as a lament for a deceased person.挽歌，挽诗：专门为悼念某一死者所写的诗或歌.36. Emblematic Image (象征)A verbal picture of figure with a long tradition of moral or religious meaning attached to it.37. Epic (史诗)An extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, celebrating the feats of a legendary or traditional hero.史诗：用严肃或庄重的语言写成的叙事长诗，歌颂传奇中或历史上英雄的丰功伟绩38. Epigram (隽语)A concise, clever, often paradoxical statement, susally in the form of a poem.隽语：一个简明，机智，常常似是而非的陈述,经常以诗的形式出现39. Epigraph (引语/开场白)A motto or quotation at the beginning of a literary composition, setting forth a theme.引语：在一部文学作品开头的引言，警句，阐明主题40. Epilogue (结语/收场白)A short addition or concluding section at the end of a literary work, often dealing with the future of its characters. Also called In this sense, also called afterword结语：文学作品结束时简短的附加或总结性章节，常常关于作品人物的未来也作在此意义上也可称作afterword.41. Epiphany(顿悟)A moment of illumination, usually occurrs at or near the end of a work.顿悟:对现实真谛的顿悟或洞察,通常出现在作品的结尾.42. Epitaph(墓志铭)An inscription on a tombstone or in a short poem in memory of someone who has been dead.墓志铭：刻于墓碑上用以怀念死者的碑铭.43. Epithet (表述词语)A term used to characterize a person or thing。