英国文学史复习题之名词解释

（0091）《英国文学史》复习思考题答案
I. Write out the authors’ names of the following works. (20)
1 William Shakespeare《Romeo and Juliet》
2 Henry Fielding《Tom Jones》
3 Charlotte Bronte《Jane Eyre》
4 Daniel Defoe《Robinson Crusoe》
5 Robert Burns《A Red Red, Rose》
6 Oscar Wilde《The Importance of Being Earnest》
7 George Bernard Shaw 《Mrs. Warren’s Profession》8 Virginia Woolf《To the Lighthouse》
9 Lord Byron《Don Juan》10 John Keats《Ode to the Nightingale》
11 William Shakespeare 《Macbeth》12 Jonathan Swift《Gullive r’s Travels》
13 William Thackery《Vanity Fair 》14 Emily Bronte《Wuthering Heights》
15 Charles Dickens 《A Tale of Two Cities》16 Thomas Hardy《Tess of the D’Urberviles》17 James Joyce《Ulysses》18 George Eliot《Silas Marner》
19 Lord Byron《Don Juan》20 Percy Shelley《Ode to the West Wind》
II. Define the following literary terms. (20)
1、Iambic pentameter is a meter in poetry, consisting of an unrhymed line with five iambs or feet (hence pentameter), felt by many to be the most powerful of all metrical forms in English poetry. Shakespeare excelled in the use of iambic pentameter (as in his famous Sonnet XVIII, beginning "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”
2、Heroic couplet:a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. It is also called riding rhyme, rhymed 5-beat lines, or rhymed decasyllables. It is one of the most popular metrical forms in English poetry. Though its origin is uncertain, heroic couplet is generally assumed to be introduced by Chaucer. Characteristics exhibited by heroic couplet include epigrammatic expression, balanced sentences, parallel construction, concise diction, use of antithesis, and medial pause. Two types of heroic couplets can be distinguished: closed heroic couplet and open heroic couplet. The former is a complete sentence with a full stop at the end of the second rhyme. The latter is one in which a sentence extends from one couplet to another.
3、Courtly love: an idealized love in some medieval literature and chivalric society. It has its origin in the works of Plato, in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, and in Andreas Capellanus’s De Arte Honeste Amandi. It owes its development to the medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary. Courtly love celebrates the beauty, virtues and ennobling power of women. It adds to the rise of women’s
position and offers a philosophical and religious interpretation of love and its function. Apart from noble passions and persistent pursuit, courtly love aims at the moral perfection of the lover. Love is essentially treated as a motivating power, directing the lover toward moral progress and spiritual development. Other elements of courtly love are humility and courtesy on the part of the lover, adultery between the man and his beloved mistress, and a great respect for the lady. Courtly love was popular first in France among the troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries. In England, those who wrote in this tradition were Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Examples are Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the sonnets written by Shakespeare and Spenser.
4、Literature of the Absurd:a term associated with modern literature, criticism, and philosophy. It is applied to describe the meaninglessness of human existence in a world that is alien and incomprehensible. Deprived of their old beliefs and cut off from their past, human beings are in a state of complete isolation and confusion. Literature of the absurd has Existentialism as its philosophical background and is most fruitful in drama and novel. The idea that man and his existence are absurd is best illustrated in the works of Camus, Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, Albee, Heller, Pynchon, and V onnegut.
5、Ballad: a narrative poem in short stanzas about heroic or tragic deeds; or a song that tells a romantic or sentimental story. There are mainly two kinds of ballads: the folk ballad and the literary ballad. The folk or popular ballad is without authorship and is of oral tradition. It might be composed by an individual or a community. It is intended to be sung or recited before the public. Ballads of oral tradition are not written down until many years later. And its language is simple and even unliterary. Folk ballad belongs to the Middle Ages. The literary or art ballad is with known authorship and has a definite moral purpose. Ballads of this type are usually imitations of medieval popular ballads. They are written down at the start. Many Romantic poets of the 19th century wrote literary ballads. Both folk and literary ballads share the following similarities: (a) simple and familiar language; (b) having adventure, love or war as the subject matter; (c) telling story through dialogue; (d) little description; (e) strong supernatural elements; (f) frequent use of repetition and parallelism; (g) having rhyme, assonance and the like; (h) impersonal narrator; (I) lyrical, romantic, sentimental or tragic qualities; and (j) the ballad writer getting his inspiration from folklore, local or national history. In England, many ballads are about the border conflicts between English and Scottish people, or about the legends of Robin Hood and his merry men.
Collections of ballads were once made by Bishop Percy who had Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, Walter Scott who wrote Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and Child who compiled The English and the Scottish Popular Ballads. Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Goal fall in the category of literary ballad. And there were more writers who wrote in the ballad style. They were Scott, Noyes, Macauley and Robert Service. Ballad as a poetic form is still alive today.
6、Blank verse:poetry that does not rhyme but has iambic pentameter lines. Though not originated in England or America, it has been the most important and most widely used English verse form. Blank verse is popular because it is closest to the rhythm of daily English speech. Thus most English poems which are dramatic, reflective or narrative are in the form of blank verse. This verse was probably first used in England by Surrey who translated Aeneid, by Sackville and Norton who composed Gorboduc. It was developed and perfected by Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton. In the 18th century, most poets favored heroic couplets. But Young and Thomson were able to write in the tradition of blank verse. The 19th century saw a renewed interest in this poetic form. Masters of blank verse included Wordsworth, Coleridge and Bryant. The fact that blank verse is still practiced by writers like T.S. Eliot, Yeats, Frost and Stevens shows how influential and favorable it really is.
7、Comedy: In its literary sense, three meanings may be distinguished: (a) drama that amuses, written in the tradition of Greek and Roman comedy; (b) any work of literature in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance that has a happy ending; (c) by natural extension, works in every literary form that provoke laughter and smiles.
Generally speaking, comedy is thought to be a less important form than tragedy. Thus, dramatic theories concerning comedy are small in number. Aristotle in his Poetics briefly defines comedy as “an imitation of men worse than the average.” It seeks to entertain and deals with “some defect…that is not painful or destructive.” Plato in his “Philebus” explains that “When we laugh at the folly of our friends,” we experience “pleasure.” Our la ughter is provoked by the harmless ignorance and absurdity of the comic character. Philip Sidney in Apologie for Poetrie says “Comedy is an imitation of the common errors of our life.” Walpole of the 18th century wrote: “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.” And Byron had a famous statement: “All tragedies are finished by a death, / All comedies are ended by a marriage.” Other
scholars and critics who responded to comedy in one way or another include Henry Fielding, Sigmund Freud and George Meredith.
8、Antihero:a main character in a story, novel, play or film who behaves in a completely different way from what people expect a hero to do. A non-hero is without the qualities and features of a traditional or old-fashioned hero. He is doomed to fail. Antiheroes of early days were Don Quixote, Macbeth, Rip Van Winkle, and Tristram Shandy. Examples of antiheroes in modern literature include Leopold Bloom, Jim Dixon, Jimmy Porter, Herzog, and Yassarian.
III. Give brief answers to the following questions. (20)
1.What is the national epic of the English people? And what was the most famous
medieval romance? (Beowulf; King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table)
2.Who were the Lake Poets? (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey)
3.What is Metaphysical poetry?
The poetry written by John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and many other 17th century English poets. Their poetic works were characterized by original images, elaborate conceits, strange paradoxes, far-fetched imagery, wit, ingenuity, dialectical argument, complex themes, elliptical thoughts, flexibility of rhythm and meter, terse expression, and colloquial speech. These poets were similar in their attitude against the established conventions of Elizabethan love poetry. Broadly speaking, the term refers to any poetry that displays these qualities, any poetry that discusses metaphysics or the philosophy of knowledge and existence. Preoccupied with thoughts of death, sexual love and religious devotion, metaphysical poetry is philosophical, intellectual, psychological, analytical and bold.
The term was used by John Dryden in his criticism of Donne’s overuse of philosophy. In Discourse of the Original and Progress of Satire Dryden thus spoke of Donne: “He affects the metaphysics not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign, and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy.” Later Dr Johnson chose the term to designate a peculiar poetic manner that he did not really approve. In Lives of the Poets, he regarded the metaphysical imagery as a sort of discordia concors through which “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.” What offended Johnson w as its pretension and lack of spontaneity. Discordia concors is, Johnson remarked, “a combination of dissimilar images or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike.” Ben Jonson said Donne
“deserved hanging” for not recognizing accent. Th e intentional roughness, obscurity, strain and some other extremes of metaphysical poets had given them a bad reputation.
John Donne was no doubt the leader of the school. But the most metaphysical were Cowley and Crashaw. Other important metaphysical poets included Traherne, Carew, Lovelace, Cleveland, Edward Taylor, Baudelaire, Rilke, T. S. Eliot, J. C. Ransom, Allen Tate, John Hollander, and so on.
4. What are major women writers in English literature?
(Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Browning, Virginia Woolf, and so on)
5. What was Wordsworth’s definition for poetry?
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquility.
6. What is Art for Art’s Sake?
The theory that the fine arts are independent of social-historical reality and have nothing to do with moral or religious purposes. A work of art is free to seek beauty and its values are aesthetic. Aestheticism:a literary movement in the 19th century with “art for art’s sake” as its major doctrine. One of its important advocates was Oscar Wilde, who insisted upon the self-reliance, self-government, self-completeness and self-autonomy of literature. The origin of aestheticism can be traced back to the writers and philosophers of Germanic Romantic period—Goethe, Kant, Schiller, and Schelling. They held it to be true that art should be autonomous and independent of morality, politics, social reality, and other non-aesthetic standards. Kant emphasized the value of pure art and its disinterested existence. The idea that art must be separated from other things was advocated earlier in England by Coleridge, Carlyle, and Pater. In America there were Emerson and Allan Poe. Poe defined poetry as the “rhythmical creation of beauty” and condemned the “heresy of the didactic.” The Pre-Raphaelites such as Tennyson, Morris, Swinburne and Rossetti were closely related to aestheticism. They worked hard for the musical effects of pure poetry. They had a tendency to withdraw, or live i n the “ivory tower.” Gautier has been regarded as the first to experiment with aestheticism in a self-conscious manner. Other aesthetes were Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Dowson, etc. Aestheticism was a reaction against the 19th century English and American capitalism, industrialism, materialism, commercialism and realism.。