英美文学学习笔记-Period-EL

Chapter 5 The Modern Period_The English LiteratureAn Introduction to the modern period1) Modernism rose out of skepticism and idsillusion of capitalism.2) In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, there appeared a group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working-class background, who were known as "the Angry Young Men."3) James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness movelist. In Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, who becomes the symbol of everyman in the post-World-War-I Europe.4) George Bernard Shaw is considered to be the best-known english dramatist since Shakespeare.5) The English dramatic revolution came in the 1950s under various European and American influences. This revolution developed in two directions: the working-class drama and the Theater of Absurd.6) John Osborne was the man who started the first change in drama by presenting his play, Look Back in Anger, in 1956. Osborne brought vitality to the English theater and became known as the first "Angry Young Man."7) Samuel Beckett, whose Waiting for Godot, is regarded as the most famous and influential play of the Theater of Absurd.George Bernard Shaw1) With great efforts, he wrote five novels in all. The best known is Cashel Byron's Profession.2) His first play is Widowers' Houses which is a grotesquely realistic exposure of slum landlordism; Mrs. Warren's Profession, written in 1893 but published 5 years later, is a play about the economic oppression of women. These two can be regarded as the typical representatives of Shaw's early plays.3) Structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. As a realistic dramaticst, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim of directing social reforms. Most of his ploays can be termed as problem plays. And his plays have one passion, and one only, i.e. indignation, "indignation against oppression and exploitation, against hypocrisy and lying, against prostitution and slavery, against poverty, dirt and disorder."(George Bernard Shaw is the leading playwright of his time. What's Bernard Shaw's viewpoint on literature? (A) His playwrights have a variety of subjects. His early plays were mainly concerned with social problems and directed towards the criticism of the contemporary social, economic, moral and religious evils. (B)Structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. As a realistic dramaticst, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim of directing social reforms. (C) One feature of Shaw's characterization is that he makes the trick of shwoing up one character vividly at the expense of another. Another feature is that Shaw's characters are the representatives of ideas and points of view. (D) Much of Shavian drama is constructed around the inversion of a conventional theatrical situation.John Galsworthy1) whose first book, From the Four Winds(来自四位吹奏者) ( a volume of short stories), in 1897 under the pseudonym of John Sinjohn. His first play, The Silver box, and The Man of Property, established him as a prominent novelist and plyawright in the public mind.2) The Forsyte Sage( 弗尔塞特世家三部曲）, his first trilogy: The Man of Property, In Chancery(骑虎难下), and To Let (出租). His second Forsyte trilogy, A Modern Comedy (现代喜剧), appeared in 1929, and the third, End of the Chapter,（篇章末尾） posthumously in 1934.3) Galsworthy was a conventional writer, having inherited the fine traditions of the great Victorian novelists of the critical realism such as Dicknes and Thackeray.The Man of Property 1) which is the first novel of the Forsyte trilogies which tell the ups and downs of the Forsyte family from 1886 to 1926. Soames Forsyte, a typical Forsyte, represents the essence of the principle that the accumulation of wealth is the sole aim of life, for he consides everything in terms of one's property.2) the Forsyte Sage, a typical Forsyte has a remarkable characteristic, a strong sense of property.William Butler Yeats1) In 1923, he was awarded Nobel Prize for literature.2) In his poem, "No Second Troy," Yeats expressed a strong feeling towards love and towards the Irish reality with scornful irony. In the poem, "September 1913," Yeats, with severe satire, assaulted the bourgeois philistines and their meanness of spirit and selfish materialism.3) In his famous poem, "Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats explored the problems of death, love, old age and art. "Leda and the Swan," his strange but powerful sonnet, expresses a tragic sense of history as a series of patterns of behavior and action.4) His first play, The Countess Catheleen (凯瑟琳伯爵夫人).Cathleen ni Houliham, The Land of Heart's Desire（心欲的土地）, The Shadowy Waters（布满阴影的水城） and Purgatory(炼狱). Later Yeats began experimenting with techniques borrowed from the Japanese Noh plays, such as the use of masks, of ritualized actions, and of symbolic languages together with the conbination of music and dance.The Lake Isle of Innisfree(伊尼斯弗利的湖中沙洲)1) This poem is written in 1893. Tired of the life of his day, Yeats sought to escape into an ideal fairyland where he could live calmly as a hermit and enjoy the beauty of nature. The poem consists of three quantrains of iambic pentameter, with each stanza rhymed abab. Innisfree is an inlet in the lake in Irish legends. Here the autoor is referring to a place for hermitage. ( I will arise and go now, and go to Ininisfree,/ And a samll cabin build there, of clay and wattles amde:/ Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,/ And live alone in the bee-loud glade.D own by the Salley Gardens (走过萨利花园)1) Originally entitled "An Old song Resung," with Yeats's footnote: "This is an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballysodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself.T. S. Eliot1) His first important poem, "The love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," appeared in 1915.2) "Gerontion" is a poem of dramatic monologue in which an old man reminisces about his lost power to live and his lost hope of spiritual rebirth. The poem is a prelude to The Waste Land, helping to point up the continuity of Eliot's thinking. The Hollow Men, which bears a strong thematic resemblance to The Waste Land, is generally regarded as the darkest of Eliot's poems.3) The Waste Land, Eliot's most important single poem, has been hailed as a landmark and a model of the 20th century English poetry, comparable to Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. The Waste Land is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modern civilization in which human life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose. The poem has developed a whole set of historical, culturla and religious themjes; but it's often regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century people's disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society.4) Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets reflect his allegiance to the Churcxh of England.5) who has five full-length plays: Murder in the Cathedral, The Family Reunion, The Cocktail Party, The Confidential Clerk, and The Elder Statesman. All the plays have something to do with Christian themes. (教堂的谋杀，家人团圆，鸡尾酒传报，机要人员，及年长的政客). Generally speaking, Murder in the Cathedral is the best of his plays in the sense that it contains the best poetry and the most coherent drama. The Family Reunion has a modern setting:6) T. S. Eliot was alos an important prose writer. In his famous essay, "Tradition and Individual Talent," (传统与个人天才)Eliot put great emphasis on the importance of tradition both in creative writing and in criticism.The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Ｊ。