英美文学期末复习

第一课

1.这段时间的历史背景：

（1）The early inhabitants on the island we now called England were Britons (a tribe of Celts).（2）三次主要的侵略：

a. The Roman Conquest .(In 55 B. C., Britain was invaded by the Roman general Julius Caesar. In 410, the Romans abandoned the island, which marks the end of “Roman Conquest” (55 B.

C.—410 A.

D.)

b. the English (Anglo-Saxons) Conquest around 449. (England was invaded by three Germanic (Teutonic) tribes: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, who came from the Northeast of Europe. The Anglo-Saxon invaders established some small kingdoms in Britain which by the 7th century were combined into a United Kingdom called England (the land of Angles). Its people were called the English. The three dialects spoken by them naturally grew into a single language called Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. 古英语到Norman Conquest结束，it is the ancestor of the Modern English)

c. the Norman Conquest in 1066

(3) The Anglo-Saxon period witnessed a transition from a tribal society to feudalism.

2.术语：

（1）epic：It’s a long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes, majestic in theme and style. （史诗的例子：Homer’s Epics: Iliad and Odyssey）

（2）Alliteration (头韵)

The repetition of similar sounds, usually consonant or consonant clusters, in a group of words. Sometimes the term is limited to the repetition of initial consonant sounds. (When alliteration occurs at the beginning of words, it is called initial alliteration; when it occurs within words, it is called internal or hidden alliteration. It usually occurs on stressed syllables.)

3. 这一时期的文学：

（1）The literature of this period falls naturally into two divisions---pagan and Christian.

Two major genres: poetry and prose

（2）the pagan represented by Beowulf and the Christian poetry represented by the works of Caedmon and Cynewulf（Caedmon is the first known religious poet of England. He is known as the father of English song.He wrote a poetic Paraphrase of the Bible）

（3）Anglo-Saxon literature, or the Old English literature is almost exclusively a verse literature in oral form. It could be passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation.

4. 关于Beowulf的一些信息：

（1）The Song of Beowulf is the oldest poem in the English language, and also the oldest surviving epic in the English language. The poem consists of 3182 lines. It is considered as the highest achievement of Old English literature and the earliest European vernacular (using the native language of a region, especially as distinct from the literary language) epic. It has achieved national epic status in Britain.

(2). It tells the story of the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, , who gains fame as a young man by vanquishing the monster Grendel and Grendel's mother; later, as an aging king, he kills a dragon but dies soon after, honored and lamented.

(3). The whole epic is to be divide into two parts with an interpolation (添写;插补) between the two. The whole song is pagan in spirit and matter, while the interpolation is obviously an