专八考试之文学常识

Common Sense on English Literature

Author(Comment)Works England’s national epic The Song of Beowulf(3182lines)

Geoffrey Chaucer—“father of English

poetry”

The Canterbury tales General Prologue;Popular Ballads; Robin Hood and Allin-a-Dale;

Get Up and Bar the Door;

Sir Parrick Spens

Humanist Thomas More(Renaissance)Utopia Edmund Spenser(1552-1599)The Fairy Queen

William Shakespeare(1564-1616)

37plays,154sonnets

The4great tragedies:Hamlet,King Lear,Macbeth&Othello

The Comedy of Errors,

Love’s Labour’s Lost,

A Midsummer Night’s Dream,

The Merchant of Venice,(Shylock,evil; Portia,judge)

Much Ado About Nothing

The Merry Wives of Windsor

As You Like It,

All’s Well That Ends Well

Timon of Athens,

The Winter’s Tale,

The Tempest

Francis Bacon(1561—1626)Philosophical works:Advancement of Learning

Literary works(Of Truth;Of Studies; Of death;Of Revenge,Of Friendship)Maxims of the Law; Reading on the Statute of Uses(the largest and most important of his professional works.

John Milton(1608—1774)Paradise Lost(12books)

Paradise Regained

Sonnet:On His Blindness

Sonnet:On His Deceased Wife John Bunyan(1628—1688)The Pilgrim’s Progress Daniel Defoe(1661—1731)Robinson Crusoe(1719) Johnathan Swift(1667—1745)Gulliver’s Travels;A Modest Proposal Joseph Addison(1672—1719)The Tatler;The Spectator Henry Fielding(1707—1754)The History of Tom Jones,a Foundling

Thomas Gray(1716—1771)Elegy Written in a Country

Churchyard(the best poem in Emglish)

Oliver Goldsmith(1728-1774),a versatile author

The Vicar of Wakefield(novel) She Stoops to Conquer(comedy) The Citizen of the World(essays) The Traveler&The Deserted

Village(two poems)

Richard Brinsley Sheridan(1751-1816)The School for Scandal

The Rivals(comedy)The critic(Farce)

William Blake(1757-1827),the most independent and the most original romantic poet of the18th century

The Songs of Experience

The Songs of Innocence London;The Chimney Sweeper

Robert Burns(1759-1796),whose poetry is bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of the Scottish common people My heart’s In the Highland John Anderson,My Jo

A Red,Red Rose

To A Mouse

William Wordsworth(1770-1850)

Romancist Lyrical Ballads:

Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey;The Prelude;

The Excursion;The Solitary Reaper; She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways;

I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud

George Gordon,Lord Byron

(1788-1824)Don Juan(satire masterpiece) She Walks in Beauty Childe Harold’s Pigrimage Manfred,Cain(dramas)

Percy Bysshe Shelley(1792-1822)Ode to the West Wind

To a Sky-lark;Ozymandias;

Men of England

Prometheus Unbound John Keats(1795-1821)Ode to a Nightingale

Ode on a Grecian Urn

On First Looking into Chapman’s

To Autumn;Bright Star;

Homer(sonnet) Walter Scott(1771-1832)Ivanhoe;Rob Roy

Jane Austen(1775-1817)Pride and Prejudice

Charles Lamb(1775-1834)Tales From Shakespeare

(Last)Essays of Elia—

Dissertation on Roast Pig

Dream-Children:a Reverie

Poor Relation

Oliver Twist;Little Dorrit;