英国文学术语 Terms

Lecture 1

Epic:1 prevailing form in old English Lit. 2. p2 verse lit. in oral form, author unknown 3 p4 a long poem about a tribal hero 4 alliteration as the device 5 example: Beowulf

Alliteration: usu. the repetition of initial consonants in a sequence of words. Example: landscape-lover, lord of language. (Tennyson) It was once a required element in the poetry of Germanic languages (including Old English and Old Norse) and in Celtic verse (where alliterated sounds could regularly be placed in positions other than the beginning of a word or syllable). Such poetry, in which alliteration rather than rhyme is the chief principle of repetition, is known as alliterative verse. In Old English poetry, it is employed in a line divided into 2 halves with 4 stresses. (source: Baldick, 5). Beowulf is an example.

Romance:p10 1 Prevailing form of medieval lit., 2 verse or prose, 3 adventures of knights, 4 devotion to a lady 5 devotion to the church and king, expose vices praise virtues 6 example: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Heroic couple t: It was introduced by Chaucer from France to English, and first used in his The Legend of Good Women,then fully developed in The Canterbury Tales. Heroic couplet was characterized by rhymed lines in the iambic pentameter. Allegory: a story or visual image with a second distinct meaning partially hidden behind its literal or visible meaning. The principal technique of allegory is personification, whereby abstract qualities are given human shape. (source: Baldick, 5)

Popular Ballad: Ballads flourished in Scotland from the 15th century onward. It is a folk song or oral literary piece, usu. telling a local story or legend with vivid dialogue, in an impersonal tone. Ballads are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three-stress lines, with the second and fourth lines rhyming.

Lecture 2

The Renaissance: 1 Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. The Renaissance was slow in reaching England. The reign of Henry VIII (1509—1547) marked the real flourishing of the Renaissance. 2 the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek Culture, It was the revival of painting, sculpture and literature. Oxford Reformers, the religious reformers at Oxford University, together with scholars and humanists introduced the Bible and classics that were popularized. 3 The literary giants at that time were Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, Sidney, Marlowe, Bacon and Donne. 4 The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. It was, in essence, an attempt of the humanist thinkers and scholars to get rid of the feudalist ideas; recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church; and to introduce new ideas in the interest of the rising bourgeoisie.

Humanism: Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. The Greek and Roman civilization was based on the conception that man is the measure of all things. The

revival of ancient culture not only restored the medieval reverence for classics, but also presented the human values in the works. Humanists saw that human being were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfection, and they had the right to explore and enjoy the world, emphasizing the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. This point of view presented a way to break away from the feudal and Catholic burden of spending a lifetime on preparing souls for the future life. The best representatives of the English humanists are Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.

Reformation: The Medieval religious Reformation came from the Continent. A German Protestant, Martin Luther (1483-1546) initiated the Reformation. It was marked by rejection or modification of much of Roman Catholic doctrine and practice and establishment of Protestant churches. Luther believed that every time Christian was his own priest and was entitled to interpret the Bible for himself. In this sense, reformation is an extreme manifestation of Renaissance individualism. Faith was alone thought competent to save and salvation was regarded a direct transaction with God, without the intermediation by church priests or sacrament. Rituals were simplified. The Protestant movement was seen as a means to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption and superstition of the Middle Ages.

This movement was not initiated in England until a later time, when both the king Henry VIII and the common English people had determined to break away from Rome. When Henry VIII declared himself through the approval of the Parliament as the Supreme Head of the Church of England in 1543, the Reformation in England was in its full swing. The religious reformation was actually a reflection of the class struggle waged by the new rising bourgeoisie against the feudal class and its ideology. Much of the poetry of Spenser and Milton breathes the Reformation spirit.

The Petrarchan Sonnet: Originally invented in Italy, it was introduced to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the 16th century. It is built in 2 parts. The first part is known as “Octave” ,consisting of 8 lines , and the last six lines are “sestet”. There is a break in thought after the eighth line. The octave always rhymes abbaabba, while the rest six lines are cdecde or cdc cdc. Milton uses this but avoids the break in the middle and employs the rhyme cdcdcd in the last 6 lines.

The Shakespearean sonnet:It was first used by the Earl of Surrey. It consists of three quatrains of four lines each and a final independent couplet. Its rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg.

Spenserian stanza: It is a stanza of nine lines, with the first 8 lines in the iambic pentameter, the last line in the iambic hexameter. Its rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.

University Wits: They were a professional set of pre-Shakespearean dramatists. They were called so because nearly all of them were educated at Oxford or Cambridge University. “Wit” was the synonym for “scholar”.

They were usually actors as well as dramatists. They understood full well the requirements of the stage and rightly felt the need of the audience. They revised old

plays and wrote new ones. They made rapid progress in dramatic technique. Their dramatic writings laid the foundation for William Shakespeare.

The writers belonging to this group are: John Lyly, Robert Greene; George Peele; Thomas Lodge; Thomas Lodge; Thomas Nashe; Thomas Kyd; and Christopher Marlowe, who was the central man.

Blank verse: Surrey introduced blank verse into English poetry in his translations. Blank verse was characterized by unrhymed lines in the iambic pentameter. (In contrast with heroic couplet which is rhymed.)

Lect. 4

Flat & Round Characters. Flat Characters are those who embody or represent a single characteristic, trait, or at most a very limited number of such qualities. Flat characters are also referred to as type characters, as one-dimensional characters, or when they are distorted to create humor, as caricatures. Flat characters have much in common with the kind of stock characters who appear again and again in certain types of literary works (e.g. the rich uncle of domestic comedy, the hard-boiled private eye of the detective story, the female confidante of romance. ) Round characters are just the opposite. They embody a number of-qualities and traits, and are complex multidimensional characters of considerable intellectual and emotional depth who have the capacity to grow and change. Major characters in fiction are usually round characters, and it is with the very complexity of such characters that most of us become engrossed and fascinated. The terms round and flat do not automatically imply value, judgments.

Metaphysical Poets: txt bk p182

Conceit: The word "conceit" originally means "concept" or "idea", and later came to mean "fanciful idea". It is in this sense that the word is used in discussion of poems. A conceit is a metaphor or simile that is made elaborate (far-fetched), often extravagant. Some would use the term to mean any fanciful poetic image. The difference between a conceit and a metaphor or simile is largely of degree. A metaphor or simile appeals mainly to the reader's five senses and is easier to understand; a conceit appeals mainly to the reader’s intellect and so is difficult to comprehend. A conceit may strike the reader as weird at first glance, but proves appropriate in the end. The use of conceit is especially popular in the 17th century and the metaphysical poetry is characterized by conceits. A ready example would be the one from the poem "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." by John Donne, in which two lovers’ souls are compared to the legs of the compasses.

18th century

Cited from my earlier teaching plans Enlightenment:1. a progressive intellectual movement throughout Western Europe in the 18th century; 2. a struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism in equality and prejudices; 3. assertion: chief means of bettering the society is to enlighten or educate people. Enlighteners were bourgeois democratic thinkers; 4. trust in man’s reason to solve problems and establish social norms and wipe out darkness of superstition, prejudice and barbarity. 5. Pope, Addison and Steele, Defoe and Richardson; radical ones: Swift, Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith and Sheridan.

Neo-classicism: 1. time: glorious revolution to 1730’s, neo-classicism in poetry, Pope. prose (essays) of Addison and Steele; fiction of Defoe and Swift, 40-50’s Richardson, Fielding and Smollett; 2. attempt to revive classical qualities of balance, proportion and restraint, follow classical rules: p86 plays: rimed couplet instead of blank verse, tree unities; poetry falls into lyric, epic, didactic, satiric or dramatic; prose: precise, direct and flexible. 3. Imitation of ancient writers;

4. Treatment of town-life;

5. Pope, Dryden, Addison, Swift, Johnson

Decorum: is the fittingness of a literary genre with its characters, actions, the style of its narration and its dialogue to each other. For example the highest and most serious genre, epic and tragedy, presented characters of the highest social classes, speaking in the “High style”. This theory has its root in Horace’s Art of Poetry.

Essay

Any short composition in prose that undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view, persuade us to accept a thesis on any subject, or simply entertain is an essay. The essay differs from a "treatise" or "dissertation" in its lack of pretension to be a systematic and complete exposition, and in being addressed to a general rather than a specialized audience; as a consequence, the essay discusses its subject in non-technical fashion, and often with a liberal use of such devices as anecdote, striking illustration, and humor to augment its appeal.

A useful distinction is that between the formal and informal essay. The formal essay, or article, is relatively impersonal; the author writes as an authority, or at least as highly knowledgeable, and expounds the subject in an orderly way. Examples will be found in various scholarly journals, as well as among the serious articles on current topics and issues in any of the magazine addressed to a thoughtful audience. In the informal essay ( or "familiar" or "personal essay" ), the author assumes a tone of intimacy with his audience, tends to deal with everyday things rather than with public affairs or specialized topics, and writes in a relaxed, self-revelatory, and sometimes whimsical fashion.

The Greeks Theoparastus and Plutarch and the Romans Cicero and Seneca wrote essays long before the genre was given what became its standard name by Montaigne’s French Essais in 1580. The title signifies "attempts" and is meant to indicate the tentative and unsystematic nature of Montaigne’s commentary on topics such as "Of Illness" and "Of Sleeping", in contrast to formal and technical treatises on the same subjects. Francis Bacon, late in the sixteenth century, inaugurated the English use of the term in his own Essays; most of them are short discussions such as "Of Truth"; "Of Adversity", "Of Marriage and the Single Life" (formal essays). Alexander Pope adopted the term for his expository compositions in verse, the Essay on Criticism and the Essay on Man, but the verse essay has had few important exponents after the eighteenth century. In the early eighteenth century Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steel’s Tatler and Spectator, with their many successors, gave to the essay written in prose its standard modern vehicle, the literary periodical (informal essays) (earlier essays had been published in books).

In the early nineteenth century the founding of new types of magazines, and their steady proliferation, gave great impetus to the writing of essays and made them a major department of literature. This was the age when William Hazlitt, Thomas De Quincy, Charles Lamb, and later in the century, Robert Louis Stevenson brought English essay－and especially the personal essay－to

a level that has not been surpassed. Major American essayists in the nineteenth century include Washington Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, James Russell Lowell, and Mark Twain. In our own era many periodicals pour out scores of essays every week. Most of them are formal in type; Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, E. M. Forster, James Thurber, E. B. White, James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, and Toni Morrison, however, are notable twentieth-century practitioners of the informal essay.

*Graveyard School / Poets”: A term applied to eighteenth-century poets who wrote meditative poems, usually set in a graveyard, on the theme of human mortality, in moods which range from elegiac pensiveness to profound gloom. The vogue resulted in one of the most widely known English poems, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy written in a country churchyard”. The writing of graveyard poems spread from England to Continenta l literature in the second part of the century and also influenced some American poets.

Lecture 17

Aestheticism (art for art's sake)

A term applied to the point of view that art is self-sufficient. It need serve no ulterior purpose, and should not be judged by moral, political or other nonaesthetic standards. Aestheticism in England was influenced greatly by Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin, and Pater and French symbolist poets. Oscar Wilde was one of its major representatives.

It appeared in the late Victorian period. The predecessor of it was the Pre-Raphaelists, who were opposed to the materialism and commercialism and wanted to go back to the medieval age. The movement was influenced by the French symbolists, who used symbols to present an ideal world of which the real world is but a shadow. The first important figure of the movement was Walter Pater, who suggests that the sole duty of an aesthete is to develop his aesthetic sensibility, enjoy all possible varieties of artistic and sensuous experience, and “burns always with a hard gemlike flame. This movement covered a wide range of poets, writers and artists, varying in their attitudes towards life and art.

modernism

A movement of experiment in new techniques in writing. Modernist fiction represented a trend drifting away from the tradition of the 19th century realism. It put emphasis on the description ogoometimes it is called modern psychological fiction. Lawrence is a typical representative of it.

或: It is a rather vague term which is used to apply to the works of a group of poets, novelists, painters, and musicians between 1910 and the early years after the World War Ⅱ. The term includes various trend or schools, such as imagism, expressionism, dadaism, stream of consciousness, and existentialism. It means a departure from the conventional criteria or established values of Victorian age. Its basic themes are alienation and loneliness.

Modernism and Postmodernism. The term Modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts; and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the 20 th century, but especially after World War I . The specific features signified

by "modernism" (or by the adjective modernist) vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art,. but of Western culture in general. Important intellectual precursors of modernism, in this sense, are thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported the traditional ways of conceiving the human self-thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and James G. Frazer, whose The Golden Bough stressed the correspondence between central Christian tenets and pagan, often barbaric, myths and rituals.

Literary historians locate the beginning of the modernist revolt as far back as the 1890s, but most agree that what is called high modernism, marked by an unexampled range and rapidity of change, came after the First World War. The year 1922 alone was signalized by the simultaneous appearance of such monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce's Ulysses, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf' s Jacob's Room, as well as many other experimental works of literature. The catastrophe of the war had shaken faith in the moral basis, coherence, and durability of Western civilization and raised doubts about the adequacy of traditional literary modes to represent the harsh and dissonant realities of the postwar world. T. S. Eliot wrote in a review of Joyce's Ulysses in 1923 that the inherited mode of ordering a literary work, which assumed a relatively coherent and stable social order, could not accord with "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history". Like Joyce and like Ezra Pound in his Cantos, Eliot experimented with new forms and a new style that would render contemporary disorder, often contrasting it to a lost order and integration that had been based on the religion and myths of the cultural past. In The Waste Land, for example, Eliot replaced the standard syntactic flow of poetic language by fragmented utterances, and substituted for the traditional coherence of poetic structure a deliberate dislocation of parts, in which very diverse components are repeated by connections that are left to the reader to discover, or invent. Major works of modernist fiction, following Joyce's Ulysses and his even more radical Finnegans Wake, subvert the basic conventions of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity, departing from the standard ways of representing characters, and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language by the use of, stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of narration. Gertrude Stein–often linked with Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and Woolf as a trail-balzing modernist–experimented with automatic writing (writing that has been freed from control by the conscious, purposive mind) and other modes that achieved their effects by violating the norms of standard English syntax and sentence structure. Among other European and American writers who are central representatives of modernism are the novelists Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, AndreGide, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Richardson, and William Faulkner; the poets Stephane Mallarmee, William Butler Yeats, Rainier Maria Rilke, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens; and the dramatists August Strindberg, Luigi Pirandello, Eugene O' Neil, and Bertolt Brecht. Their new forms of literary construction and rendering had obvious parallels in the violation of representational conventions in the artistic movements of expressionism and surrealism, in the modernist paintings and sculpture of Cubism, Futurism, and Abstract Expressionism, and rhythm by the modernist musical composers Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and their radical followers.

A prominent feature of modernism is the phenomenon called the avan-garde; that is, a small, self-conscious group of artists and authors who deliberately undertake, in Ezra Pound's phrase, to "make it new". By violating the accepted conventions and proprieties, not only of art but of social

discourse, they set out to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and to introduce hitherto neglected, and sometimes forbidden, subject matter. Frequently, avant-garde artists represent themselves as "alienated" from the established order, against which they assert their own autonomy; a prominent aim is to shock the sensibilities of.the conventional reader and to challenge the norms and pieties of the dominant bourgeois culture.

The term Postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after World War II, when the effects on Western morale of the first war were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of over-population. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carries to an extreme, of the countertraditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist "high art" by recourse to the models of "mass culture in film", television, newspaper cartoons, and popular music. Many of the works of postmodern literature–by George Luis, Borges, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and many others–so blend literary genres, cultural and stylistic levels, the serious and the playful, that they resist classification according to traditional literary rubrics. And these literary anomalies are paralleled in other arts by phenomena like pop art, op art, the musical compositions of John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors. An undertaking in some postmodernist writings-prominently in Samuel Beckett and other authors of the literature of the absurd-is to subvert the foundations of our accepted modes of thought and experience so as to reveal the meaninglessness of existence and the underlying "abyss", or "void", or "nothingness" on which any supposed security is conceived to be precariously suspended. Postmodernism in literature and the arts has paralleled with the movement known as poststructuralism in linguistic and literary theory; poststructuralists undertake to subvert the foundations of language in order to show that its seeming meaningfulness dissipated, for a rigorous inquirer, into a play of conflicting indeterminacies or else to show that all forms of cultural discourse are manifestations of the ideology, or of the relations and constructions of power, in contemporary society.

Stream of consciousness

In literature, the thought or feelings of a character without regard to the logical argument or narrative sequences. The writer attempts the stream of consciousness to reflect all the forces, externals or internals, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment. The representatives are James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, William Failkner.

或It refers to thought and feelings exactly as they pass through mind, rather than giving them the ordered structure as usual. It coined by William James in to denote the flow of inner experiences. Another phrase for it is “interior monologue”. The representatives are James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, William Failkner.

Stream of consciousness: “Stream-of-Consciousness” or “interior monologue”, is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke

through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly, particularly the hesitant, misted, distracted and illusory psychology people had when they faced reality. The modern American writer William Faulkner successfully advanced this technique. In his stories, action and plots were less important than the reactions and inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences were often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the stories, rather than an observer. A high degree of emotion can be achieved by this technique.

Stream of consciousness

In literature, the thought or feelings of a character without regard to the logical argument or narrative sequences. The writer attempts the stream of consciousness to reflect all the forces, externals or internals, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment. The representatives are James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, William Failkner.

或It refers to thought and feelings exactly as they pass through mind, rather than giving them the ordered structure as usual. It coined by William James in to denote the flow of inner experiences. Another phrase for it is “interior monologue”. The representatives are James Joyce and Virginia Wolf, William Failkner.

existentialism

It's a feature developed during 20C 20S-30S that man is unique and isolated in an indifferent or hostile universe, responsible for his own ations and free to choose his destiny. Existentialism: in existentialist philosophy, existence is the only thing we are certain of; man’s life begins and ends in nothingness, and life is inexplicable, meaningless, and dangerous. The nature of our existence is decided by the choices we make to determine its nature. There are many variations of this philosophy, including even a Christian one, but its main appearance in literature is in the “Theatre of the Absurd”.

Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique of using sy mbols. It’s a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writers, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one i mage or even one word. It’s one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.