英美文学常识汇总)

British：

1.Middle English Literature (449-1485):

(the Anglo-Saxon period to the middle English period 1066, the Norman Conquest) Representative works: National Epic: Beowulf;

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

1.Renaissance ( late 15th C. to Early 17th C.):

Representative figures and works:

Thomas More: Utopia

Francis Bacon: Essays

Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene

William Shakespeare:Poetry: Sonnet

Plays: Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Hamlet;

Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Much Ado about Nothing

2.English literature of 17th C:

Representative figures and works:

1. Metaphysical poets (Conceit):John Donne: Holy Sonnets; Songs and Sonnets

2. John Milton: (poet):Paradise Lost (1667); Paradise Regained (1671); Samson Agonistes

3. John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress

4.Enlightenment (late 17th C. to middle 18th C. ):the Age of Prose Representative figures and works:

Jonathan Swift : Gulliver’s Travels

Samuel Johnson: A Dictionary of the English Language

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (adventurous novels)

Adam Smith: An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Henry Fielding: Tom Jones

Samuel Richardson: Pamela

Lawrence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

5.English Romanticism (1789-1832)**

Representative works and figures: Age of romantic poetry

William Wordsworth: “I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud”in The Prelude; Lyrical Ballads; “The Solitary Reaper”

George Gordon Byron: Don Juan; Cain …

Percy Bysshe Shelley “Ode to the West Wind”; Prometheus Unbound; A Defence of Poetry

John Keats:“Ode on a Grecian Urn”; Endymion

William Blake: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience

Robert Burns (Scottish)

6.English realist literature (1830s to 1918):Also known as the Victorian Age Representative works and figures: (Mainly novels)

Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Sense and sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion

George Eliot (female: Mary Ann Evans): The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch Bronte Sisters: Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

Anne Bronte: Agnes Gray

Charles Dickens;

Thomas Hardy;

Joseph Conrad (Polish)

William Somerset Maugham: Of Human Bondage

William Thackeray: Vanity Fair

Robert Browning (dramatic monologue:“My Last Duchess”), Alfred Tennyson; Matthew Arnold

7.Modernist Period (1918-1945):

Representative works and figures:

dramatists: Oscar Wilde (Irish): Art for Art’s Sake

George Bernard Shaw (Irish): Pygmalion, The Apple Cart

Poet: T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land, The Hollow Man

William Butler Yeats(Irish): The Tower, A Vision

Novelists: Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse; Orlando; Mrs. Dalloway….

James Joyce(Irish): Ulysses, Dubliners

D. H. Lawrence: The Rainbow, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love

E.M. Foster: Howards End; A Passage to India; A Room with a View

William Golding: Lord of the Flies

Doris Lessing (female): The Golden Notebook, The Grass is Singing

Antonia Susan Byatt: Possession, Babel Tower

American

1.Literature of Reason and Revolution (1765-late 18th. C.)

Representative works and figures:

Benjamin Franklin: Poor Richards’s Almanac; Autobiography

Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence

2.Romanticism (1800-1865)

Representative works and figures:

Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow;

Rip Van Winkle; The Sketch Book

James Fenimore Cooper: The Leather Stocking Tales

**Essayist: Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Self-reliance

Henry David Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience

**Poet: Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (Free verse )

Emily Dickinson (female): (concise diction and syntax, abundant in images) Novelis t: Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter ….

Herman Melville: Moby Dick…..

Edgar Allen Poe: The Raven