英国文学练习题1

Exercises for English literature （1）

I. Fill in the blanks.（25%）

1. The Old English poetry can be divided into two groups: the_________poetry and the_________poetry.

2. _________ is regarded as the "Father of English Song", the first known religious poet of England.

3. In the second half of the 7th century, the first English poet, _________ by name, began to sing.

4. The history of English literature begins in the__________ century.

5._________, the first English poem, still intact as a whole piece today, is the greatest epic ever left by the ancient Germanic tribes and the most ancient ever since the demise of the Greek and Roman literatures

6.It was __________ who decided that literature should be written in the vernacular or Old English.

7.__________ is the first English poet ever to sign his composition

8._________made the translation of the Bible from the Latin Vulgate Version into Middle English, the first

attempt ever to translate the Holy Scripture into English.

9.The most important work of Alfred the Great is _________, which is regarded as the best monument of the Old

English Prose.

10.__________ is the most prevailing literary form in the Middle Ages.

11.The most magnificent prose work of the 15th century is Morte d' Arthur concerning with _________legend.

12.Critics tend to divide Chaucer's literary career into three periods: the___________period, the__________period

and the_________period.

13.Among the Middle English poets, three are the greatest. One is the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

The other two are _________ and____________

14._________ was the first most significant poet in English history to write in Middle English.

15.The Canterbury Tales contains the________ and 24 tales, four of which are fragments.

16._________ is the author of Decameron, which has the similar way of telling stories to that of The Canterbury

Tales.

17.The framework in The Canterbury Tales is a__________

18.When Chaucer died in 1400, he was the first to be buried in Westminster Abbey and founded ________

19.________, the first English printer, brought the technique of printing from movable type into England from

Italy.

20.The Elizabethan age was one in which Renaissance transformed from Chaucer’s_____England into

Shakespeare’s _______ one.

21.The translation of the Homeric classics, Iliad and Odyssey, won _______ the title “a translator of the prince of

poets”

22.Thomas Wyatt, the first great Englsih sonneteer, introduced the ______ into England. He first used a couplet for

the conclusion of sonnets---a practice followed by Shakespeare.

23.Henry Howard, Earl of Surry, brought the _______ into English poetry in his translation of Virgils’ The Aenied,

and it became the standard meter for Elizabethan and later poetic drama.

24.Edmund Spenser is often referred to as "the poets' _______" because of his considerable influence on later

poets.

25.The word “euphemism” comes from John Lyly’s _________

26.As a sonnet sequence, Sidney’s sonnet cycle ______________ was probably the first of its kind ever to appear

in English literary history.

27.The drama had gone through a number of phases over the centuries including those of the ____, the _____, the

_______, the _______ and the _______drama.

28.________ is considered the first great English dramatist and the most important Elizabethan playwright before