英国文学期末

名词解释：

1. Byronic hero: a variant of the Romantic heroes as a type of character(pursuing freedom),named after the English Romantic Poet Gordon Byron. e.g.

2. Renaissance:The Renaissance indicates a revival of classical arts and sciences in Europe beginning in the 14th and extending to the

17th ,marking the transition from the medieval to the modern world. E.g Shakespeare’s

3. Romanticism: It flourished in literature, philosophy, music, and art in western culture during most in the 19th ,beginning as a revolt against classicism. In it, emotion over reason, spontaneous emotion, a change from the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit. The main works such as George Gordon Byron

4.

Metaphysical poetry： A derogatory term invented by John Dryden(16 31-1700 ) and later adopted by Samuel Johnson(1709-

1784) describing a school of highly intellectual poetry marked by bold an d ingenious conceits,incongruous imagery,complexity of thought,frequent use of paradox,and often by deliberate harshness or rigidity of expression .The main themes of metaphysical poets are love,death,and religion.Acco rding to them,all things in the universe, no matter how dissimilar they are to each other,are closely unified in God.The chief representative of this sc hool was John Donne. The main works “The Flea”.

5. Conceit: A far-fetched simile or metaphor, a literary conceit occurs when the speaker compares two highly dissimilar things. In the following example from Act V of Shakespeare’ s , the imprisoned King Richard compares his cell to the world in the following line: I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live into the world. It occurs in 17th and the examples is J ohn Donne’s .

6. Stream-of –Consciousness: it is a literary technique that presents the thoughts and feelings of a character as they occur without any clarification by the author. It is a narrative mode. It occurred in the

20th ,and the example is James Joyce

7. Critical Realism: Critical realism is one of the literary genres that flourished mainly in the 19th . It reveals the corrupting influence of the cash upon human nature. Here lies the essentially democratic and humanistic character of critical realism. They often start with a powerful

exposure of the ugliness of the bourgeois world in their works, but their novels usually have happy endings or an impotent compromise at the end.

E.g. Charles. Dickens

8. Dramatic monologue: It is a kind of narrative poem in which one character speaker to one or more listeners whose replies are not given in poem. The occasion is a crucial one in the speak’ s life, and the it reveals the speak ’s personality as well as the incident that is the subject of the poem . Robert Browning’ s is a case in point.

9. Epiphany(顿悟)：a moment of illumination, usually occurring at the end of the work. It exists in Modernist novels .E.g James Joyce .

问答题：

1.Robert Browning: Dramatic Monologue: In literature, it refers to the occurrence of a single speaker saying something to a silent audience. “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.

In the poem, a duke speaks about his dead wife. The poem is about murde r,

mystery and intrigue, but all in indirect allusions (暗示).

Writing style: rhythms are too fast, too rough and unmusical. Syntax is clipped and highly compressed. Similes and illustrations appear too profusely. Allusions and implications are odd and far-fetched -obscurity.

2.Stream of consciousness

Virginia Woolf: a rebel brought up in Victorian Age, a new woman formed in Edwardian Days, a great thinker beyond her time.

Mrs. Dalloway:

Theme： 1)Feminine consciousness and sensitivity, difficulty of human relationships: connection and separation, possibilities and limits of communicativeness, life and death, sanity and insanity, criticism on social system. 2) to abolish the distinction between dream and reality by mixing images with gestures, thoughts with impression, visions with pure sensations, and by presenting them as mirrored on a consciousness.