英国文学常识及笔记-English literature

Part One Basic Knowledge of Literature

I. Literature contains fiction and non-fiction.

Under fiction there are four genres --- novels, short stories, plays and poems. Fiction is referred to as creative or figurative expression of life.

Non-fiction is called a literal expression of life or discursive writing. Another term for non-fiction is essay, which has traditionally been classified into four categories. These rhetorical divisions, usually called the forms of discourse, are description, narration, exposition, and argumentation.

II. Novel:

A novel is a highly strained prose account of fictional reality in the form of story with profundity for the purpose of changing the reader’s mind by the aid of the reader’s active involvement while providing entertainment and super truth of life.

Elements of the novel:

Plot, a plot is a plan or groundwork for a story, cased on conflicting human motivation, with the actions resulting from believable and realistic human response. It is response, interaction, opposition, and causation that make a plot out of a simple series of action. (internal conflict and external conflict)

(exposition, complication, climax or crisis, falling action, and resolution)

Characters: the term character applies to any individual in a literary work. For the purpose of analysis, characters in fiction are customarily described by their relationship to plot, by the degree of development they are given by the author, and by whether or not they undergo significant character change. (protagonist and antagonist, flat and round characters, dynamic and static characters)

Setting: the stage against which the story unfolds we call the setting. In its narrowest sense, setting is te place and time of the narration, but eventually it encompasses the total environment of the work. Setting, therefore, in its broadest sense, encompasses the physical locale that frames the action, the time of day or year, the climatic condition, and the historical period during which the action takes place.

Point of view: A story must have a storyteller: a narrative voice, real or implied, that presents the story to the reader. When we talk abou narrative voice, we are talking about point of view, the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story is told.

(first, second, third, and mingling)

Theme: the theme is the cental idea or statement about life that aunifies and controls the total work. Theme is not the issue, or the problem, or subject with which the work deals, but rather the comment or statemnet the author makes about the issue, problem, or subject.

Style: the style is unsterstood to mean the way in which writers assemble words to tell the story, develop the argument, dramatize the play, or compose the poem. Often the definition is extended to distinguuish style from content.

Tone: tone refers to the methods by which writers convey attitudes, although the discussion of tone sometimes on the attitudes themselves.

Symbolism: a symbol is something that stands for something else by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance … a visible sign of something invisible. In literature, symbols --- in the form of words, images, objects, settings,