英美文学复习材料

一 莎士比亚 In 1593 and 1594, he published two narrative poems(叙事诗), Venus and Adonis(维纳斯和安东尼斯) and The Rape of Lucrece(鲁克丽斯受辱记).
Four period:
First: The first period of Shakespeare's dramatic career was one of apprenticeship(学徒期). He wrote five history plays: Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (亨利六世上，中，下), Richard III(理查三世), and Titus Andronicus(泰托斯.安东尼); and four comedies: The Comedy of Errors(错误的喜剧), The Two Gentlemen of Verona(维洛那二绅士), The Taming of the Shrew(训悍记), and Love's Labour's Lost(爱的徒劳).
Second: In the second period, Shakespeare's style and approach became highly individualized. By constructing a complex pattern between different characters and between appearance and reality, Shakespeare made subtle comments on a variety of human foibles. In this period he wrote five histories: Richard II(理查二世), King John(约翰王), Henry IV, Parts I and II(亨利四世 上部和下部), and Henry V(亨利五世); six comedies: A Midsummer Night's Dream(仲夏夜之梦), The Merchant of Venice(威尼斯商人), Much Ado About Nothing(无事生非), As You Like It(皆大欢喜), Twelfth Night(第十二夜), and The Merry Wives of Windsor(温莎的风流娘们儿); and two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet(罗密欧与朱丽叶) and Julis Caesar(裘里斯.凯撒).
Third: Shakespeare's third period includes his greatest tragedies and his so-called dark comedies. The tragedies of this period are Hamlet(哈姆雷特), Othello(奥赛罗), King Lear(李尔王), Macbeth(麦克白), Angony and Cleopatra(安东尼与克利奥佩特拉), Troilus and Cressida(克利奥拉纳斯), and Coriolanus(). The two comedies are All's Well That Ends Wells(终成眷属) and Measure for Measure(一报还一报).
Last: The last period of Shakespeare's work includes his principal romantic tragicomedies(浪漫悲喜剧): Pericles(伯利克里), Cymbeline(辛白林), The Winter's Tale(冬天的故事) and The Tempest(暴风雨); and his two final plays: Henry VIII(亨利八世) and The Two Noble Kinsmen(两位贵族亲戚).
Shakespeare's authentic non-dramatic poetry consist of two long narrative poems: Venus and Adonis(维纳斯和安东尼斯) and The Rape of Lucrece(鲁克丽斯受辱记), and his sequence of 154 sonnets. Shakespeare's sonnets are the only direct expression of the poet's own feelings.
With three exceptions (99,126,154) Shakespeare writes his sonnets in the popular English form, first fully developed by Surrey, of three quatrains and a couplet(三节四行诗加一节偶句).
Shakespeare's history plays are mainly written under the principle that national unity under a mighty and just sovereign is a necessity(在一个强大英明的君主统治下的国家，统一是非常必要的).The three history plays on the reign of Henry VI are the beginning of Shakespeare's epic treatment.The first and second

parts of Henry IV are undoubtedly the most widely read among his history plays. It reveals a troubled reign in the 15th century. Shakespeare presents the patriotic spirit when mourning over the loss of English territories in France. He also dramatizes the class struggle between the oppressors and the oppressored during Jack Cade's rising of 1450. Furthermore, he condemns the War of the Roses waged by the feudal barons in which innocent people were killed. Here Shakespeare has liberated himself from any imitations of the contempory example .
In his romantic comedies, Shakespeare takes an optimistic attitude toward love and youth, and the romantic elements are brought into full play.(在他的浪漫喜剧中，莎士比亚以乐观的态度对待爱情与青春，并将流浪色彩渲染到极致。)The most important play among the comedies is The Merchant of Venice, in which Shakespeare has created tension, ambiguity, a self-conscious and self-delighting artifice that is at once intellectually exciting and emotionally engaging. The sophistication derives in part from the play between high, outgoing romance and dark forces of negativity and hate. The traditional theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew. Many people today tend to regard the play as a satire of the Christians' hypocrisy and their false standards of friendship and love, their cunning ways of pursuing worldliness and their unreasoning prejudice against Jews. Compared with the idealism of other plays, The Merchant of Venice takes a step forward in its realistic presentation of human nature and human conflict. Though there is a ridiculous touch on the part of the characters restrained by their limitations, Shakespeare's youthful Renaissance spirit of jollity can be fully seen in contrast to the medieval emphasis on future life in the next world.
The successful romantic tragedy is Romeo and Juliet, which eulogizes the faithfulness of love and the spirit of pursuing happiness. The play, though a tragedy, is permeated with optimistic spirit.
Shakespeare's greatest tragedies are : Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. They have some characteristics in common. Each portrays some noble hero, who faces the injustice of human life and is caught in a difficult situation and whose fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation. Each hero has his weakness of nature.
In the plays of Shakespeare's last period, there is a prevalent Christian teaching of atonement. Shakespeare seems to have entered an imagined pastoral world. Thus, he could achieve what he failed to in the real world, i.e. to right the wrongs and to realize his ideals. The Tempest, an elaborate and fantastic story, is known as the best of his final romances. The characters are rather allegorical and the subject full of suggestion. Th

e humanly impossible events can be seen occurring everywhere in the play. The wild storm becomes magic, answering Prospero's every signal. The playwright resorts to the supernatural atmosphere and to the dreams to solve the conflict. The Tempest is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life and society in his late years.
Shakespeare, as a humanist of the time, was shocked by the feudal tyranny and disunity and internal struggle for power at the court which led to civil wars. In his plays, he does not hesitate to describe the cruelty and anti-natural character of the civel wars, but he did not go all the way against the feudal rule. In his dramatic creation, especially in his histories or tragedies, he affirms the importance of the feudal system in order to uphold social order. "The King's government must be carried on" ---- but carried on for the good of the nation, not for the pleasure of the King.
Shakespeare is against religious persecution and racial discrimination, against social inequality and the corrupting influence of gold and money. In King Lear, Shakespear has not only made a profound analysis of the social crisis in which the evils can be seen everywhere, but also criticized the bourgeois egoism. He has shown to us the two-fold effects, exerted by the feudalist corruption and the tourgeois egoism, which have gradually corroded the ordered society. On the other hand , there is also a limit to his sympathy for the downtrodden. He fears anarchy, hates rebellion and despises democracy. Thus, he finds no way to solve the social problems. In the end, the only thing he can do as a humanist is to escape from the reality to seek comfort in his dreams.
Shakespeare has accepted the Renaissance views on literature. He holds that literature should be a combination of beauty, kindness and truth, and should reflect nature and reality. Based on this consideration, he has claimed through the mouth of Hamlet that the "end" of dramatic creation is to give faithful reflection of the social realities of the time. Shakespeare also states that literary works which have truly reflected nature and reality can reach immortality. From his sonnets, we can find quite a few examples in which Shakespeare sings the immortality of poetry.
Shakespeare's major characters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones; they are individuals representing certain types. Each character has his or her own personalities; meanwhile, they may share features with others. By applying a psycho-analytical approach, Shakespeare succeeds in exploring the characters' inner mind.The soliloquies in his plays fully reveal the inner conflict of his charaters. Shakespeare also portrays his characters in pairs.Contrasts are frequently used to bring vividness to his characters.
Shakespeare's plays are well-known for their adroit plot construction. Shakespeare seldom invents his own plots; instead, he borrows them from some old plays or storybooks, or fro

m ancient Greek and Roman sources. In order to make the play more lively and compact, he would shorten the time and intensify the story. There are usually several threads running through the play, thus providing the story with suspense and apprehension.
Irony（反语）is a good means of dramatic prsentation. It makes the characters who are ignorant of the truth do certain ridiculous things.There is so much fun that the audience are immediately amused. Disguise is also an important device to create dramatic irony, usually with woman disguised as man.
Lastly, to understand Shakespeare, it is necessary to study the subtlest of his instruments----the language. Shakespeare can wirite skillfully in different poetic forms, like the sonnet, the blank verse, and the rhymed couplet. His blank verse is especially beautiful and mighty. He has an amazing wealth of vocabulary and idiom. He is known to have used 16,000 different words. His coinage of new words and distortion of the meaning of the old ones also create striking effects on the reader. Shakespeare is above all writers in the past and in the present time.
二 弥尔顿 Milton's literary achievements can be divided into three groups: the early poetic works, the middle prose pamphlets and the last great poems. In his early works, Milton appears as the inheritor of all that was best in Elizabethan literature. Lycidas(1637) is a typical example, composed for a collection of elegies dedicated to Edward King, a fellow undergraduate of Milton's at Cambridge, who was drowned in the Irish Sea. The poem begins with grief and a feeling of immaturity; then the grief is deepened by the sense of irrecoverable loss in the silencing of a young poet. With this bitter sense of loss, Milton asks why the just and good should suffer. These emotions swell to a passionate call for the consolation of art. The poem moves from a sad apprehension of death, through regret, to passionate questioning, rage, sorrow and acceptance. The feelings begin in a low key but move on to the large questions of divine justice and human accountability. The climax of the poem is the blistering attack on the clergy, i.e. the "shepherds", who are corrupted by self-interest
Paradise Lost is a long epic divided into 12 books. The original story is taken from Genesis 3:1-24 of the Bible. The theme is the "Fall of Man", i.e. man's disobedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause ---- Satan. In heaven, Satan led a rebellion against God. Defeated, he and his rebel angels were cast into Hell. However, Satan refused to accept his failure, vowing that "all was not lost" and that he would seek revenge for his downfall. The poem goes on to tell how Satan took revenge by tempting Adam and Eve, the first human beings created by God, to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge against God's instructions. For their disobedience, Adam and Eve were driven out of Paradise. They were sorry for what they had done and prayed to God. In

the last book they were given the hope for redemption. The poem ended with Adam and Eve walking away from Paradise, hand in hand, and the gates of Eden were closed behind them.
三 丹尼尔?笛福 The Shortest Way with the Dissenters (1702) brought him into jail and made him go through public exposure in the pillory, while his "The True-born Englishman" (1701) won him friendship from the king. He worked, at different times, as a government agent, both for the Whigs and the Tories.
It is a real wonder that such a busy man as Defoe would have found time for literary creation. The fact is that, at the age of nearly 60, he started his first novel Robinson Crusoe(鲁滨逊漂流记), which was an immediate success. In the following years, he wrote four other novels: Captain Singleton(新利顿船长)(1720), Moll Flanders (莫尔.佛朗德斯)(1722), Colonel Jack(杰克上校) (1722) and Roxana(罗克萨那)(1724), apart from the second and the third part of Robinson Crusoe and a pseudo-factual account of the Great Plague in 1664-1665, A Journal of the Plague Year(灾疫之年的日记)(1722).
As a member of the middle class, Defoe spoke for and to the members of his class and his novels enjoyed great popularity among the less cultivated readers. In most of his works, he gave his praise to the hard-working , sturdy middle class and showed his sympathy for the downtrodden, unfortunate poor.
Defoe was a very good story-teller. He had a gift for organzing minute details in such a vivid way that his stories could be both credible and fascinating. His sentences are sometimes short, crisp and plain, and sometimes long and rambling, which leave on the reader an impression of casual narration. His language is smooth, easy, colloquial and mostly vernacular. There is nothing artificial in his language: it is common English and its best.
四 乔纳森 斯威夫特
In 1704 he published two powerful satires on corruption in religion and learning. A Tale of a Tub (1704) and The Battle of the Books (written 1679, published 1704), which established his name as a satirist. In 1726, he wrote and published his greatest satiric work, Gulliver's Travels.
Swift was a man of great moral integrity and social charm. He had many friends in the literary circle and was also admired and loved by many of the distinguished men of his time. A man with a bitter life experience, he had a deep hatred for all the rich oppressors and a deep sympathy for all the poor and oppressed. His understanding of human nature is profound. In his opinion, human nature is seriously and permanently flawed. To better human life, enlightenment is needed, but to redress it is very hard. So, in his writings, although he intends not to condemn but to reform and improve human nature and human institutions, there is often an under- or over- tone of helplessness and indignation.
Swift is a master satirist. His satire is usually masked by an outward gravity and an apparent earnest

ness which renders his satire all the more powerful. His " A Modest Proposal" is generally taken as a perfect model. By suggesting that poor Irish parents sell their one-year-old babies to the rich English lords and ladies as food, Swift is making the most devastating protest against the inhuman exploitation and oppression of the Irish people by the English ruling class. The apparent eagerness, sincerity and detachment of the author adds force to the bitter irony and biting sarcasm.
Swift is one of the greatest masters of English prose. He is almost unsurpassed in the writing of simple, direct, precise prose. He defined a good style as "proper words in proper places." Clear, simple, concrete diction, uncomplicated sentence structure, economy and conciseness of language mark all his writings ---- essays, poems and novels.
Swift's chief works are : A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books, The Drapier's Letters (1724-1725), Gulliver's Travels and A Modest Proposal (1729).
五 亨利 菲尔丁 Of all his plays, the best known are The Coffee-House Politician (1730), The Tragedy of Tragedies (1730), Pasquin (1736), and The Historical Register for the Year 1736 (1737). These successful plays not only contributed to a temporary revival of the English theatre but also were of great help to the playwright in his future literary career as a novelist.
Fielding started to write novels when he was preparing himself for the Bar. In 1742 appeared his first novel. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams, Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, which was first intended as a burlesque of the dubious morality and false sentimentality of Richardson's Pamela. In this novel, Joseph, supposedly the young handsome and chaste brother of Richardson's virtuous heroine Pamela, is tempted by his amorous mistress, supposedly aunt of Pamela's husband, Mr. B. Here , instead of being rewarded for his virtue, Joseph is turned out of doors by his mistress. But the burlesque ends here; the book quickly turns into a great novel of the open road, a "comic epic in prose", whose subject is "the true ridiculous(可笑的，荒谬的)" in human nature, as exposed in all its variety as Joseph and the amiable quixotic parson journey homeward through the heart of England. The dominating qualities of the novel are its excellent character-portrayal, timely entrances and exits, robustness of tone and hilarious, hearty humor.
The novel was followed by The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) and The History of Amelia (1751). The former is a masterpiece on the subject of human nature and the latter the story of the unfortunate life of an idealized woman, a maudlin picture of the social life at the time.
Fielding has been regarded by some as "Father of the English Novel", for his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel. Of all the eighteenth-century novelists he was the first to set out, both

in theory and practice, to write specifically a "comic epic in prose," the first to give the modern novel its structure and style.
Fielding's language is easy, unlaboured and familiar, but extremely vivid and vigorous. His sentences are always distinguished by logic and rhythm, and his structure carefully planned towards and inevitable ending. His works are also noted for lively, dramatic dialogues and other theatrical devices such as suspense, coincidence and unexpectedness.
Tom Jones brings its author the name of the "Prose Homer"
六 威廉 布莱克. The Songs of Innocence (1889) is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy and innocent world, though not without its evils and suffering. The wretched child described in "The Chimney Sweeper", orphaned, exploited, yet touched by visionary rapture, evokes unbearable poignancy when he finally puts his trust in the order of the universe as he knows it. In this volume, broke completely with the traditions of the 18th century. He experimented in meter and rhyme and introduced bold metrical innovations which could not be found in the poetry of his contemporaries. A number of poems from the Songs of Innocence also find a counterpart in the Songs of Experience. The two books hold the similar subject-matter, but the tone, emphasis and conclusion differ.
Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) marks his entry into maturity.
In his later period, Blake wrote quite a few prophetic books, which reveal him as the prophet of universal political and spiritual freedom and show the poet himself as the spokesman of revolt. The major ones are : The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795), The Four Zoas (1796-1807) and Milton (1804-1820).

七 威廉 华兹华斯 According to the subjects, Wordsworth's short poems can be classified into two groups: poems about nature and poems about human life.
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature, and one that takes us to the core of Wordsworth's poetic beliefs.
八 简 奥斯汀 Her first novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), tells a story about two sisters and their love affairs; Pride and Prejudice (1813), the most popular of her novels, deals with the five Bennet sisters and their search for suitable husbands; and Northanger Abbey (1818) satirizes those popular Gothic romances of the late 18th century. Austen's second period of productivity began in 1811 after the publication of Sense and Sensibility. All her last three novels deal with the romantic entanglements of their strongly characterized heroines. Mansfield Park (1814) presents the antithesis of worldliness and unworldliness; Emma (1815) gives the thought over self-deceptive vanity; and Persuasion (1818) contrasts the true love with the prudential calculations. Several incomplete works were published long after Austen's death. These include The Watsons (1923), Fragment of a Novel (1925), and Plan of a Novel (1926).
九

勃朗特 两姐妹
Emily Bronte As far as Emily's literary creation is concerned, she is, first of all, a poet. Her 193 poems, mostly devoted to the matter of nature with its mysterious workings and its unaccountable influence upon people's life, are works of strange sublimity and beauty. But , to the common readers, she is better known today as the author of that most fascinating novel, Wuthering Heights.
Charlotte Bronte Jane Eyre Charlotte's works are all about the struggle of an individual consciousness towards self-realization, about some lonely and neglected young women with a fierce longing for love, understanding and a full, happy life. All her heroines' highest joy arises from some sacrifice of self or some human weakness overcome. Besides, she is a writer of realism combined with romanticism. Her works are famous for the depiction of the life of the middle-class working women, particularly governesses（家庭教师）.
十 托马斯 哈代 Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) In 1871, his first novel Desperate Remedies was published and well received. However, the real success came with Under the Greenwood Tree (1872). The publication of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874 finally enabled him to give up architecture for writing. In the following twenty-three years he produced over ten local-colored novels until 1896 when he was tried of all those hostile criticism against his last two novels: Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896). From then on, Hardy abandoned novel-writing and returned to his first love---poetry. Of the eight volumes by Hardy ---- 918 poems in all ---- the most famous is The Dynasts, a long epic-drama about the Napoleonic Wars.
Hardy's novels are all Victorian in date. Most of them are set in Wessex, the fictional primitive and crude rural region which is really the home place he both loves and hates.
His best local-colored works are his later ones, such as The Return of the Native (1878), The Trumpet Major (1880), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. These works, known as "novels of character and environment", are the most representative of him as both a naturalistic and a critical realist writer.
十一 纳撒尼儿 霍桑 Nathaniel Hawthorne most ambivalent writers in the American literary history. The Scarlet Letter (1850), always regarded as the best of his works
十二 马克吐温 Mark Twain (1835-1910) is a giant of America, whom H. L. Mencken considered "the true father of our national literature". Life on the Mississippi tells a story of his boyhood ambition to become a riverboat pilot, this time up and down the Mississippi. Two of the best books during this period are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are colloquial , concrete and direct in eff

ect, and his sentence structures are simple, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken language. And Twain skillfully used the colloquialism to cast his protagonists in their everyday life. What's more, his characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his local colorism. Besides, different characters from different literary or cultural backgrounds talk differently, as is the case with Huck, Tom, and Jim. Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular, Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country. His style of language was later taken up by his descendants, Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, and influenced generations of letters.
Mark Twain's humor is remarkable, too. It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall tales. By considering his experience as a newspaperman, Mark Twain shared the popular image of the American funny man whose punning, facetious, irreverent articles filled the newspapers, and a great deal of his humor is characterized by his puns, straight-faced exaggeration, repetition , and anti-climax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective. However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.
十三 亨利 詹姆斯 In the first period (1865-1882), James took great interest in international themes. The Portrait of A Lady (1881) is generally considered to be his masterpiece, which incarnates the clash between the Old World and the New in the life journey of an American girl in a European cultural environment.
In his last and major period, James returned to his "international theme". From 1895 to 1900, he wrote some novellas and stories dealing with childhood and adolescence, the most famous of which is What Maisie Knows (1897).
Moreover, Jame's realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter. One of Jame's literary techniques innovated to cater for this psychological emphasis is his narrative "point of view".
Daisy Miller is one of Jame's early works that dealt with the international theme.
十三 尤金 奥尼尔Eugene O'Neill He is widely acclaimed "founder of the American drama,"。Between 1920 and 1924 came his prominent achievements in symbolic expressionism: The Emperor Jones (1920), The Hairy Ape (1922), All God's Chillun Got Wings (1924),and Desire Under the Elms (1924). Long Day's Journey Into Night (1956) has gained its status as a world classic and simultaneously marks the climax of O'Neill's literary career and the coming of age of American drama.
十四 西奥多 德莱塞 Dreiser is a prolif

ic writer and many of his works are familiar to us Chinese readers. Among them, Sister Carrie (1900) is the best known. Carrie Meeber is the protagonist of the story. Penniless and "full of the illusion of ignorance and youth", she leaves her rural home to seek work in Chicago. On the train, she becomes acquainted with Charles Drouet, a salesman. In Chicago, she lives with her sister and brother-in-law, and works for a time in a shoe factory. Meager income and terrible work condition oppress her imaginative spirit. After a period of unemployment and loneliness, she accepts Drouet and becomes his mistress. During his absences, she falls in love with Drouet's friend George Hurstwood, a middle-aged, married, comparatively intelligent and cultured saloon manager. They finally elope, first to Montreal and then to new York. They live together for more than three years. Carrie becomes mature in intellect and emotion, while Hurstwood, away from the atmosphere of success on which his life has been based, steadily declines. So their relations become strained. At last, she thinks him too great a burden and leaves him. Hurstwood sinks lower and lower. After becoming a beggar, he commits suicide, while Carrie becomes a star of musical comedies. But in spirit of her success, she is lonely and dissatisfied.
In 1911, Jennie Gerhardt came out, followed by two volumes of his "Trilogy of Desire", The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), the third, The Stoic, being published psothumously in 1947.
In 1925 Dreiser's greatest work An American Tragedy appeared. But it was banned in Boston in 1927.