英国文学terms解释考试必备

Epic: it’s an oral narrative poem, majestic both in theme and style. Epics deal with legendary or historical events of national or universal significance, involving action of broad sweep and grandeur. They summarize and express the nature or ideals of an entire nation at a significant or crucial period of its history. Eg: Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy.

Romance: the romance was a long composition, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose, describing the life and adventures of a noble hero. The medieval romances were tales of chivalry or amorous adventure occurring in King Arthur’s court. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight are both examples of a medieval romance.

Renaissance: it first started in Italy in the 14th century and gradually spread all over Europe. The word “Renaissance” means rebirth or revival. In essence, it’s a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe and introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to lift the restriction in all areas placed by the Roman Catholic Church authorities.

Sonnet: a lyric poem of 14 lines whose rhyme scheme is fixed. The rhyme scheme in the Italian form as typified in the sonnets of Petrarch is abbaabba cdecde. The petrarchian sonnet has two divisions: the first is of eight lines, and the second id of six lines. The rhyme scheme of the English, or Shakespearean sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg.

Spenserian Stanza: Spenser invented a new verse form for his poem. The verse form has been called “Spenserian Stanza” since his day. Each stanza has nine lines, each of the first eight lines is in iambic pentameter form, and the ninth line is an iambic hexameter line. The rhythm scheme is abab bcbc c.

Enlightenment: the Enlightenment was a progressive intellectual movement throughout Western Europe in the 18th century. It was an expression of struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism. The enlighteners fought against class inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. They thought the chief means for bettering the society was “Enlightenment”or “education” for the people. The English enlighteners were bourgeois democratic thinkers.

Classicism: a movement or tendency in art, music, and literature to retain the characteristics found in work originating in classical Greece and Rome. It differs from Romanticism in that while Romanticism dwells on the emotional impact of a work, classicism concerns itself with form and discipline.

Sentimentalism:it appeared in the middle of the 18th century, as a reaction against commercialism and the cold rationalism. Sentimentalism emphasize “the human heart” and show sympathy to the poor. Thomas Gray is one of the models.

Pre-romanticism: the romantic movement was marked by a strong protest against the bondage of classicism, by a renewed interest in medieval literature. In England, this movement showed itself in the trend of pre-romanticism in poetry. It was represented by Blake and Robert Burns. They struggled against the neoclassical tradition of poetry.

Gothic novel: the term “gothic” derived from the frequent setting of the tales in the ruined, moss0covered castles of the Middle Ages. Gothic novel exploits the possibilities of mystery and terror. These novels, in rebellion against the increasing commercialism and rationalism, opened up to later fiction the dark, irrational side of human nature - the savage egoism, the perverse impulses, and the nightmarish terror that lie beneath the controlled and ordered surface of the conscious mind.

Stream-of-consciousness: is the continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind: or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue.

Non-classicism: a revival in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of classical standards of order, balance and harmony in the literature. John Dryden was the first person who started the movement at the end of the 17th century, while Alexander Pope brought it to its culmination.

Realism: a term used in literature and art to present life as it really is without sentimentalizing or idealizing it. Realistic writing often depicts the everyday life and speech of ordinary people. This has led, sometimes to an emphasis on sordid details. Allegory: a story illustrating an idea or a moral principle in which objects take on symbolic meanings. In Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy,” Dante, symbolizing mankind, is taken by Virgil the poet on a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in order to teach him the nature of sin and its punishments, and the way to salvation.

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 “Richard II” the imprisoned King Richard compares his cell to the world in the following line: I have been study how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world.

Metaphysical Poetry: the poetry of John Donne and other seventeenth-century poets who wrote in a similar style. Metaphysical poetry is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language, elaborates imagery, and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas.

Iambic Pentameter: is a commonly used metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables

are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is used. The word "pentameter" indicates that a line has five of these "feet."

Heroic Couplet:is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. Use of the heroic couplet was first pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales.

Terza Rima:is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme. It was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, D-E-D. There is no limit to the number of lines, but poems or sections of poems written in terza rima end with either a single line or couplet repeating the rhyme of the middle line of the final tercet.

Soliloquy: is a device often used in drama when a character speaks to himself or herself, relating thoughts and feelings, thereby also sharing them with the audience. Other characters, however, are not aware of what is being said. A soliloquy is distinct from a monologue or an aside: a monologue is a speech where one character addresses other characters; an aside is a comment by one character towards the audience.

Blank verse: is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century"and Paul Fussell has estimated that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.

Byronic Hero: is an idealized but flawed character exemplified in the life and writings of Lord Byron. It first appears in Byron’s semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. It typically exhibits the following characteristics: high level of intelligence and perception, criminal tendencies, sophisticated and educated, ect.