自考英美文学资料
英国文学
An introduction to old and medieval English
literature:
1. England was conquered by the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Normans.
2. Language & culture
influence: The Anglo-Saxons brought to England the
Germanic language and culture, while the Normans (most influence)
brought a fresh wave of Mediterranean civilization,
which include Greek culture, Roman law, and the
Christian religion.
3. The period of old English
literature extends from about 450 to 1066, the
year of the Norman conquest of England.
4. The Anglo-Saxons language is the basis of modern English.
5. The old English poetry can
be divided into two groups: the religious group
(宗教诗) and the secular one (世俗诗).
6. Beowulf（贝奥武甫(八世纪初的一篇古英语史诗;
该史诗中的主角)）, a typical example of old English poetry, is regarded today as the national epic (民族史诗) of the Anglo-Saxons. Literary
position: The poem was originally in an oral form, it is written down in
the 10th century. Thematically the poem presents a vivid picture of how the
primitive people wage heroic struggles against the hostile forces of the
natural world under a wise and mighty leader.
7. The Norman conquest starts
the medieval period in English literature, which is from 1066 up to the mid-14th century.
8. Romance (骑士抒情诗)，a popular literary form in the medieval
period) uses narrative verse or prose to sing knightly adventures or other
heroic deeds, whose motifs（主题, 主旨） of the quest is for truth, beauty and kindness.
9. Chaucer(乔叟): whose masterpiece is The
Canterbury Tales《坎特伯雷故事集》. The famous character of his works is the Wife of Bath. Chaucer
employed the heroic coupletverse form (英雄双韵诗形式) with true ease and charm for the first time in the history of English
literature. He is the father of English poetry.
英国文学 The Renaissance Period(文艺复兴时期)
1.
It refers to the period between the 14th and
mid-17th centuries.
2. Humanism
is the essence of the Renaissance: man is the
measure of all things.
3. Renaissance humanists
found in the classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see
that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in
the direction of perfection, and that the world they inhabited was theirs not
to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy. Thus, by emphasizing the
dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life, they voiced
their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of this
life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders. Ideas: entitled to enjoy freedom, life
and happiness; potential to achieve wonders, great things.
4. In the early stage of the
Renaissance, poetry and poetic drama were the most outstanding literary forms
and they were carried on especially by Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. The poetry
is mostly written by John Donne, George Herbert. The
Elizabethan drama is the real mainstream of the English Renaissance.
5. Francis Bacon(弗朗西斯·培根), the first important
English essayist, is the founder of modern science in England.
6. Edmund Spenser (埃德蒙•斯宾塞)
6.1 He is the poets’ poet. He was buried beside his master
Chaucer.
6.2 His masterpiece is The Faerie Queene(仙后). Its purpose is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and
gentle discipline. This poem is written in form of verse and allegory. Its
unifying characters are Arthur, the Redcrosse and Gloriana, the Fairy Queen.
The theme is not Arms and the man, but something more romantic --- fierce wars
and faithful loves.
6.3 The five main qualities of
Spenser’s
poetry are: a perfect melody; a rare sense of beauty; a
splendid imagination; a lofty moral purity and
seriousness; a dedicated idealism.
6.4 Spenser stanza: a stanza of
nine lines, with the first eight lines in iambic(短长格)pentameter(五步格诗), and the last line in iambic hexameter(六步格的诗),
rhyming ABABBCBBCC.
7. Christopher Marlowe(克里斯托夫•马洛)
7.1 He is a man of letters,
playwright, and dramatist. He is praised as University
Wits.
7.2 His the most important plays
are Tamburlaine(帖木耳大帝), Dr. Faustus(浮士德博士的悲剧), and The Jew of Malta(马耳他的犹太人). The character feature of his works is usually passionate and energetic.
Tamburlaine focuses the power. The dominant moral (meaning/message) of Dr.
Faustus is human rather than religious. The theme is to celebrate the human
passion for knowledge, power and happiness; it also reveals man’s frustration in realizing the high
aspirations in a hostile moral order.
7.3 His greatest achievement lies
in that he perfected the blank verse (素体诗：不押韵，iambic, pentameter). He employed
hyperbole (夸张法)as his major figure of speech to achieve the blank verse with mighty
lines. His second achievement is his creation of the Renaissance hero for
English drama.
7.4 The general characteristics of
Marlowe’s
heroes: such a hero is always individualistic(个人主义的)
and full of ambition, facing bravely the challenge from both gods and men. He
embodies Marlowe’s
humanistic ideal of human dignity and capacity. He is against conventional
morality and contrives to obtain heaven on earth through his own efforts. With
the endless aspiration for power, knowledge, and glory, the hero interprets the
true Renaissance spirit.
8. William Shakespeare(威廉•莎士比亚)
8.1 He is one of the most
remarkable playwrights and poets the world has ever known. He creates 38 plays,
154 sonnets and 2 long poems.
8.2 The first period of his
dramatic career was one of apprenticeship, he wrote five history plays: Henry VI, Parts I, II and III,（亨利六世，第一卷，第二卷，第三卷）， Richard III（理查德三世）and Titus Andronicus（泰特斯·安特洛尼克斯）; and four comedies: The Comedy
of Errors（错误的喜剧）, The Two Gentlemen of Verona (维洛那二绅士), The Taming of the Shrew（驯悍记）, and Love’s Labor’s Lost（爱的徒劳）.
8.3 In the second period, he wrote
five histories: Richard II（理查德二世）, King John（约翰王）, Henry IV, Part I and II（亨利四世第一卷，第二卷） and Henry V（亨利五世）; six comedies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream（仲夏夜之梦）, The Merchant of Venice（威尼斯商人）, Much Ado About Nothing,（无事生非） As You Like It（皆大欢喜）, Twelfth Night（第十二夜）, and The Merry Wives of
Windsor（温莎的风流娘们）; two tragedies: Romeo and Juliet（罗密欧与朱丽叶）and JuliusCaesar（裘力斯•凯撒）.
8.4 His third period includes his
greatest tragedies: Hamlet（哈姆雷特）, Othello（奥赛罗）, King Lear（李尔王）, Macbeth（麦克白）, Antony and Cleopatra（安东尼与克莉奥佩屈拉）, Troilus and Cressida（特洛埃勒斯与克蕾雪达）and Coriolanus（考利欧雷诺斯）; and his so-called dark comedies: All’s Well That Ends Well（终成眷属） and Measure for Measure（一报还一报）.
8.5 The last period of his work
includes his principal romantic tragicomedies: Pericles（伯利克里）,
Cymbeline（辛白林）, The Winter’s Tale（冬天的故事） and The Tempest（暴风雨）; and his two final plays: Henry
VIII（亨利八世）and The Two Noble Kinsmen（两位贵族亲戚）.
8.6 Shakespeare writes his sonnets
in the popular English form, first fully developed by Surrey, of three
quatrains(四行诗)
and a couplet(对句).
The couplet usually ties the sonnet to one of the general themes of the series,
leaving the quatrains free to develop the poetic intensity which makes the
separate sonnets memorable.
8.7 Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies are: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. They have some characteristics
in common: 1). Each portrays some noble hero, who faces
the injustice of human life and is caught in a difficult situation and whose
fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation. 2). Each hero has his weakness of nature: Hamlet, the
melancholic scholar-prince, faces the dilemma between action and mind; Othello’s inner weakness is made use of by the outside
evil forces; the old king Lear who is unwilling to totally give up his power
makes himself suffer from treachery(背叛)
and infidelity(失真);
and Macbeth’s
lust for power stirs up his ambition and leads him to incessant (不断的)crimes.
8.8 For Hamlet, he is in a mood of
world-weariness. He has none of the single-minded blood lust of the earlier
revengers because the cast of his mind is so speculative, so questioning, and
so contemplative(祈祷的).
(soliloquy独白,
monologues)
8.9 Shakespeare has accepted the
Renaissance views on literature. He holds that literature should be combination
of beauty, kindness and truth, and should reflect nature and reality. He has
claimed through the mouth of Hamlet that the ‘end’
(purpose) of dramatic creation is to give faithful reflection of the social
realities of the time. He also states that literary works which have truly
reflected nature and reality can reach immortality (the immortality of poetry).
8.10 Techniques: soliloquy (Hamlet); psycho-analytical
approach; irony is a good means of dramatic
presentation, which makes the characters who are ignorant of the truth
do certain ridiculous things; disguise.
9. Francis Bacon（弗兰西斯•培根）
9.1 His Essays is the first example
of that genre in English literature. Philosophy works: The advancement of Learning(学术的进展). Literary works is Essays（论文集）.
9.2 Novum Organum（新工具）is a successful treatise written in Latin on methodology, which is the
most impressive display of Bacon’s intellect. The argument is for the use of inductive method of
reasoning in scientific study. In Bacon’s second book, he suggests the inductive reasoning（归纳推理）, i.e. proceeding from the particular
to the general, in place of the Aristotelian method, the deductive reasoning（演绎推理）, i.e. proceeding from the general
to the particular.
9.3 Montaigne（蒙泰涅）,the first great modern essayist, is the predecessor of Bacon.
9.4 Bacon’s essays are famous for their brevity（简洁）, compactness（紧凑） and powerfulness. Yet there is an obvious stylistic change in the
Essays. The sentences in the first edition are charged and crowded with
symmetries. They are composed in a rather affected way. However, the final
edition not only enlarges the range of theme, but also brings forth the looser
and more persuasive style. The essays are well-arranged and enriched by
Biblical allusions, metaphors and cadence.
10. John Donne（约翰•邓恩）
10.1 ‘Metaphysical poetry’（玄学派诗）is commonly used to name
the work of the 17th-century writers who wrote under the influence of John
Donne. With a rebellious spirit, the metaphysical poets tried to break away
from the conventional fashion of the Elizabeth love poetry.
10.2 The most striking feature
of Donne’s
poetry is precisely its tang (taste/smell:气味)reality.
10.3 The Songs and Sonnets contains most of his early
lyrics. Love is the basic theme.
10.4 In his poetry, Donne
frequently applies conceits(幻想,奇想), i.e. extended metaphors involving dramatic contrasts. His conceits
may be divided into two kinds: easy ones and difficult
ones.
10.5 Donne’s poetry involves a
certain kind of argument, sometimes in rigid syllogistic(演绎的) form. He seems to be speaking to an imaged hearer, raising the topic and
trying to persuade, convince or upbraid (criticize) him with the brief, simple
language.
11. John Milton（约翰·弥尔顿）
11.1 Lycidas（利西达斯） is composed for a collection of elegies (mourning: 挽歌).
11.2 Areopagitica（论出版自由）is his most memorable prose work.
11.3 Paradis Lost（失乐园） is
the only generally acknowledged epic in English literatre since Beowulf, whose
original story is taken from Genesis(创世纪)3: 1-24 of the Bible. To
justify the ways of God to men. The freedom of the will is the keystone of Milton’s creed(信条).
英国文学 The Neoclassical period（新古典主义时期mid-17th century ~ the end of 18th century）
1.
The neoclassical period is the one in English literature between the
return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of
Romanticism which came with the publication of Lyrical Ballads（抒情歌谣集）by Wordsworth（华兹华斯）and Coleridge（科尔律治） in 1798.
2. The eighteenth-century
England is also known as the Age of Enlightenment
or the Age of Reason. The purpose of the
Enlightenment Movement is to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern
philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlighteners celebrated reason or
rationality, equality and science. The literature is used to entertain and
educate. In the field of literature, the Enlightenment Movement brought about a
revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as
neoclassicism.
3. Neoclassical had some
fixed laws and rules for almost every genre of literature. Prose should be
precise direct, smooth and flexible. Poetry should be lyrical, epical, didactic
(constant didacticism), satiric or dramatic, and each class should be guided by
its own principles, drama should be written in the
Heroic Couplets (iambic pentameter rhymed in two lines; the three
unities of time, space and action should be
strictly observed.
4. John Bunyan（约翰·班扬）
4.1 His represented works is The pilgrim’s Progress (religious allegory)（天路历程）.
4.2 Bunyan had a deep hatred for
the corrupted, hypocritical rich who accumulated their wealth ‘ by hook and by crook’. As a stout Puritan, he had made a conscientious
study of the Bible and firmly believed in salvation through spiritual struggle.
5. Alexander Pope（亚历山大·蒲伯）
5.1 He developed a style of biting satire.
5.2 As a representative of the
Enlightenment, Pope was one of the first to introduce
rationalism to England. He assumed the role of
champion of traditional civilization: of reason, classical learning, sound art,
good taste and public virtue. The supreme value was order.
5.3 Pope made his name as a great
poet with the publication of An Essay on
Criticism（论批评）. The Rape of the Lock（卷发遇劫记） is a finest mock epic. The
Dunciad（愚人志）is his best satiric work.
5.4 Pope was the greatest poet of
his time. He strongly advocated neoclassicism,
emphasizing that literary works should be judged by classical rules of order,
reason, logic, restrained emotion, good taste and decorum.
6. Daniel Defoe（丹尼尔·笛福）
Defoe was a very good story-teller. He had a gift for organizing minute details
in such a vivid way that his stories could be both credible and fascinating.
His sentences are sometimes short, crisp and plain, and sometimes long and
rambling(散漫的),
which leave on the reader an impression of casual narration. His language is
smooth, easy, colloquial and mostly vernacular(本国的).
There is nothing artificial in his language: it is common English at its best.
7. Jonathan Swift（乔纳森·斯威夫特）
7.1 Swift is a master satirist. His ‘A modest Proposal’ is generally taken as a perfect model. By suggesting that poor Irish
parents sell their one-year-old babies to the rich English lords and ladies as
food, Swift is making the most devastating protest against the inhuman
exploitation and oppression of the Irish people by the English ruling class.
7.2 He defines a good style as ‘proper words in proper places’.
8. Henry Fielding（享利·菲乐丁）
8.1 His works: The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews（约瑟夫·安德鲁）and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams,
which was first intended as a burlesque（滑稽表演） of the dubious morality and false
sentimentality of Richardson’s Pamela. The History of Jonathan
Wild the Great（大伟人江奈生·魏尔德传）, The History of Tom Jones, a
Foundling,（汤姆·琼斯） which
is a masterpiece on the subject of human nature.
8.2 He firmly believed in the
educational function of literature. He shared the contemporary view of the
English enlighteners that the purpose of the novel was
not just to amuse, but to instruct.
8.3 Fielding has been regarded by
some as ‘Father of the English Novel’. 1). His contribution to the establishment of
the form of the modern novel ‘comic epic in prose’. 2). Before
him, the relating of a story in a novel was either in the epistolary（书信体的）form (a series of letters), or the picaresque（传奇小说）form (adventurous wanderings) through the mouth of the
principal character. But Fielding adopted ‘the third-person narration’, in which the author becomes the ‘all-knowing God’.
9. Samuel Johnson（塞缪尔·约翰逊）
9.1 His works: Lives of the Poets（诗人列传）.
9.2 As a lexicographer, Johnson
distinguished himself as the author of the first English dictionary by a
Englishman – A Dictionary of the English Language（英语大词典）.
10. Richard Brinsley Sheridan（理查德·比·谢立丹）
10.1 He is one of the greatest play writers after Shakespeare.
10.2 His plays: The Rivals（情敌）, The School for Scandal（造谣学校）.
10.3 His manipulation(处理, 操作)
is disguise, mistaken identity(个性;
特性) and dramatic irony is masterly.
Witty dialogues and neat and decent language also make a characteristic of his
plays.
11. Thomas Gray（托马斯·格雷）
He is established his fame as the leader of the
sentimental poetry of the day, especially ‘the Graveyard School’. His poems, as a whole, are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation(悲叹, 哀悼)
or meditation on life, past and present.
英国文学 Romantic Period（浪漫主义时期End of 18th century ~ mid-19th century）
1.
It began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth（华滋华斯） and Coleridge’s（ 柯律维治）Lyrical Ballads（抒情歌谣集） and ended in 1832 with Sir
Walter Scott’s（沃尔特·司·各特）death and the passage of
the first Reform Bill（选举法修正法案后） in the Parliament（国会）. It actually constitutes a change of direction from attention to the
outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit.
2. The Romantic Period is an
age of poetry. Blake（布莱克）, Wordsworth（华滋华斯）, Coleridge（柯律维治）, Byron（拜伦）, Shelley （雪莱）and Keats（济慈） are the major Romantic poets. They start the poetic revolution. The
Romantics not only extol the faculty of imagination, but also elevate the
concepts of spontaneity and inspiration, regarding them as something crucial
for true poetry. The Romantic period is also a great age of prose. William Hazlitt（哈滋里特）(Life of Napoleon（拿破仑的生活）);
Charles Lamb（查尔斯•兰姆）(Essays of Elia（伊利亚随笔）). The two major novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen（珍‧奥斯汀）and Walter Scott（华特‧司各特）.
3. The function of poetry: poetry could purify both individual souls and the society. Wordsworth
defines the poetry in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads as the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings, which originates in emotion recollected in
tranquility. Poetry has been traditionally regarded as an art governed by
rules; but to the Romantics, poetry should be free from all rules. Nature is
not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant
subject matter. Wordsworth is the closest to nature.
4. Walter Scott: Waverley;
Rob Roy; Ivanhoe. He is the first major historical novelist.
5. Gothic novel（哥德式小说）, a type of romantic fiction that
predominated in the late eighteenth century, was one phase of the Romantic
movement. Its principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein（玛丽谢利的科学怪人）.
6. William Blake（威廉·布莱克）
6.1 He was a rebel innocently and
completely all his life. Literarily Blake was the first
important Romantic poet, showing contempt(轻视,
轻蔑) for the rule of reason, opposing
the classical tradition of the 18th century, and treasuring the individual’s imagination.
6.2 Works comparison:
Songs of Innocence（天真之歌） & Songs of Experience（经验之歌）: the former is a lovely volume of poems,
presenting a happy and innocent world, though not without its evils and
sufferings. For instance., “Holy Thursday”
with its vision of charity children lit “with a radiance(光辉)
all their own ”
reminds us terribly of a world of loss and institutional(制度上的) cruelty. The wretched(可怜的,
悲惨的) child described in “The Chimney Sweeper”, orphaned，exploited(剥削),
yet touched by visionary rapture(兴高采烈),
evokes unbearable poignancy(辛酸(事))
when he finally puts his trust in the order of the universe as he knows it. In
this volume, Blake, with his eager quest for new poetic forms and techniques,
broke completely with the traditions of the 18th century. He experimented in
meter and rhyme and introduced bold metrical innovations which could not be
found in the poetry of his contemporaries. The latter
paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and
repression with a melancholy tone. The benighted England becomes the
world of the dark wood and of the weeping prophet. The orphans of “Holy Thursday” are now “fed
with cold and usurious(高利贷的)hand”. The little chimney-sweeper sings “notes of woe” while his parents go to church and praise “God & his Priest 7 King”
– the very instruments(手段) of their repression. In “London”,
the city is no longer a paradise, but becomes the seat of poverty ad despair,
of man alienated from his true self. A number of poems from the Songs of
Innocence also find a counterpart in the Songs of Experience. For instance, the
“Infant Joy” is matched with the “Infant Sorrow”; and the pure “Lamb” is paired with the flaming “Tyger”.
The two ‘Chimney Sweeper’
poems are good examples to reveal the relation between
an economic circumstance, i.e. the exploitation of child labor, and an
ideological circumstance, i.e. the role played by religion in making people
compliant to exploitation. The poem from the Songs of
Innocence indicates the conditions which make religion a consolation, a
prospect of ‘illusory happiness’; the poem from the Songs of Experience reveals the true
nature of religion which helps bring misery to the poor children.
6.3 His Marriage of Heaven and Hell（天堂与地狱联姻）
marks his entry into maturity.
6.4 As an imaginative poet, he presents his view in visual images instead of abstract
terms.
7. William Wordsworth（威廉·华滋华斯）
7.1 He is known as the Lake Poets. He succeeded Southey as Poet Literature.
7.2 His works：The
Prelude（序曲）, many critics rank it as Wordsworth’s greatest work.
7.3 He is regarded as a worshipper of nature. Beyond the pleasures of the
picturesque with their emphasis on the eye and the external aspects of nature,
however, lies a deeper moral awareness, a sense of completeness in
multiplicity. Nature becomes an inspiring force of rapture, a power that
reveals the workings of the soul. Nature acts as a substitute for imaginative
and intellectual engagement with the development of embodied human beings in
their diverse circumstances. He becomes on e of the ‘Prophets of nature’ （大自然的膜拜者).
7.4 He thinks that common life is
the only subject of literary interest. The joys and sorrows of the common
people are his themes. Lucy poems
7.5 The most important contribution
he has made is that he has not only started the modern
poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self, but also changed the course of
English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a
return to nature.
8. Samuel Taylor Coleridge（塞·特·科勒律治）
8.1 In 1798, the two men published
a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which
became a landmark in English poetry.
8.2 His three masterpieces; The Rime of the Ancient Mariner（老水手之行）; Christabel（克丽斯塔贝尔）; Kubla Khan（忽必烈汗）. Mysticism and demonism with strong imagination are the distinctive
features of this group. They are set in a strange territory of the poet’s memory and dream, where events are reigned
beyond the control of reason.
8.3 Kubla Khan was composed in a
dream. The images of the river, of the magnificent palace and other marvelous
scenes deposited(存放,
堆积） in this unconsciousness were
expressed.
9. George Gordon Byron（乔治·戈登·拜伦）
9.1 He is considered as Lake Poets.
9.2 His works: Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage（恰尔德·哈罗德游记）; Oriented Tales（东方化的传奇）; The Prisoner’s
of Chillon（锡庸的囚徒）; Don Juan（唐璜）.
9.3 Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: it teems with all kinds of
recognizable features of Romantic poetry – the medieval, the outcast figure, love of nature, hatred of
tyranny, preoccupation with the remote and savage. With
his strong passion for liberty and his intense hatred for all tyrants.
9.4 Don Juan is a poem based on a
traditional Spanish legend of a great lover and seducer of women. He is
immoral. Byron invests in Juan the moral positives like courage, generosity and
frankness, which, according to Byron, are virtues neglected by the modern
society. (P200)
9.5 As a leading Romanticist, Byron’s chief contribution is his creation of the ‘Byronic hero’, a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With immense
superiority in his passions and powers, this Byronic hero would carry on his
shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society, and would
rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government,
in religion, or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible
energies.
10. Perry Bysshe Shelley（珀·比·雪莱）
10.1 His major work: Prometheus Unbound（解放了的普罗米修斯）.
10.2 Shelley expressed his love for freedom and his hatred toward tyranny
(similar to Byron).
10.3 His lyrics(抒情诗, 歌词): The Cloud（云）; To a Skylark（云雀颂）; Ode to the West Wind（西风颂）.
11. John Keats （约翰·济慈）
11.1 One of the best of his
volumes of poetry: The Eve of St. Agnes（圣安尼斯之夜）. His lyric masterpiece is To Autumn（秋颂）.
11.2 The odes are generally regarded as Keats’s most important and mature works. Their subject matter, however, is the
poet’s abiding preoccupation
with the imagination as it reaches to union with the beautiful.
11.3 Ode to Nightingale（夜莺颂） expresses
the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness and human world of
agony.
11.4 His point of view of
poetry: eventually however poetry itself is seen as the
most effective means to release misery, a vehicle to reach paradise.
11.5 Ode to an Grecian Urn（希腊古瓷颂） shows the contrast between the permanence of art and the transience of
human passion.
12. Jane Austen（简。奥斯汀）
12.1 Generally speaking, Jane
Austen was a writer of the 18th-century, though she lived mainly in the
nineteenth century. Her works show clearly her firm belief in the predominance(优势) of reason over passion, the sense of responsibility, good manners and
clear-sighted judgment over the Romantic tendencies of emotion and
individuality. As a realistic writer, she considers it her duty to express in
her works a discriminated and serious criticism of life, and to expose the
follies(愚蠢,
荒唐事) and illusions(幻想) of mankind. She shows contemptuous feelings towards snobbery,
stupidity, worldliness and vulgarity through subtle satire and irony. And in
style, she is neoclassicism advocator, upholding those traditional ideas of
order, reason, proportion and gracefulness in novel writing.
12.2 Stories of love
and marriage provide the major themes in all
her novels, in which female characters are always playing an active part. Jane
Austen tries to say that it is wrong to marry just for money or for beauty, but
it is also wrong to marry without
it.
12.3 Pride and Prejudice（傲慢与偏见）, also called First Impressions.
If to form good relationship is our main task in life, we must first have good
judgment. The characterization in the highest degree memorable, while the irony
has a random shrewdness unmatched elsewhere.
12.4 Her characteristic theme is
that maturity is achieved through the loss of illusions.
英国文学 Victorian Period（维多利亚时期）
1. Chronologically the Victorian
period roughly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria who ruled over
England from 1836 to 1901. The period has been generally regarded as one of the
most glorious in the English history.
2. Oscar Wilde（奥斯卡·王尔德）is a notorious advocator of
the theory of ‘art for art’s sake’.
3. In this period, the novel
became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging expression of
progressive thought. They shared one thing in common, that is, they were all
concerned about the fate of the common people.
4. Charles Dickens（查尔斯·狄更斯）
4.1 The best he can do seems to try to retain an optimism with wishful thinking, as in his
early works, or to express a helpless indignant protest, as in his later works.
At the same time, he hopes to call people’s attention to
the existing social problems, thus affecting some reform or amelioration(改善, 改进).
4.2 Charles Dickens is a master story-teller. With his fist sentence, he
engages the reader’s attention and holds it to the
end. His humor and wit see inexhaustible. Character=portrayal
is the most distinguishing feature of his works. Among a vast range of various
characters, marked out by some peculiarity in physical traits, speech or
manner, are both types and individuals. His best-depicted characters are those
innocent, virtuous, persecuted, helpless child characters such Oliver Twist（雾都孤儿）, Little Nell(小妮尔),
David Copperfield(大卫·科伯菲尔德) and Little Dorrit(小杜丽). And he is also famous for the
depiction of those horrible and grotesque characters like Fagin, Bill Sikes,
and Quilp.
5. The Bronte Sisters （布朗蒂姐妹）
5.1 Charlotte’s(夏洛特) works are
all about the struggle of an individual consciousness towards self-realization,
about some lonely and neglected young women with a fierce longing for love,
understanding and a full, happy life. But brought up with strict orthodoxy,
Charlotte would usually stick to the Puritanical code. She loves the beauty of
nature but despises worldly ambition and success. In her mind, man’s life is composed of perpetual battle between sin and virtue, good
and evil. All her heroines’ highest joy arises from
some sacrifice of self or some human weakness overcome. Besides, she is a
writer of realism combined with romanticism. On one hand, she presents a vivid
realistic picture of the English society by exposing the cruelty, hypocrisy and
other evils of the upper classes, and by showing the misery and suffering of
the poor. Her works are famous for the depiction of the life of the
middle-class working women, particularly governesses. On the other hand, her
writings are marked throughout by an intensity of vision and of passion. By
writing from an individual point of view, by creating characters who are
possessed of strong feelings, fiery passions and some extraordinary
personalities, by resorting to some elements of horror, mystery and prophesy,
she is able to recreate life in wondrously romantic way. So , whatever weakness
her work may have, the vividness of her subjective narration, the intensely
achieved characterization, especially those heroines who are totally contrary
to the public expectations, and the most truthful presentation of the
economical, moral, social life of the time – all this
renders her works a never dying popularity.
5.2 Charlotte’s work is
Jane Eyre(简爱)；Emily’wingle and unque work is
Wuthering Heignts(呼啸山庄)
6. Alfred Tennyson （阿乐弗雷德·丁尼生）
6.1 He was appointed the Poet Laureate(桂冠诗人).
6.2 His greatest work is In Memoriam(悼念), which is
an elegy(悲歌, 挽歌) on the death of Hallam(哈拉姆). The poet
here does not merely dwell on the personal bereavement(亲人丧亡).
As a poetic diary, the poem is also an elaborate and powerful expression of the
poet’s philosophical and religious thoughts – his doubts about the meaning of life, the existence of the soul and
the afterlife, and his faith in the power of love and the soul’s instinct and immortality. It is one of the
best elegies in English literature.
6.3 Idylls of the King(国王叙事诗): King Arthur and his knights of the Round
Table（亚瑟王与圆桌武士）.
6.4 Tennyson（丁尼生）
is a real artist. His wonderful works manifest(表明, 证明)
all the qualities of England’s great poets. All the
striking qualities are evident on successive pages of Tennyson’s poetry.
7. Robert Browning（罗伯特·布朗宁）
7.1 The Ring and the Book（指环与书）
has its symbolic meaning. It can be explained by the goldsmith’s(金匠) technique of alloying(使成合金)
gold in making rings. The ‘Book’ is the pure gold of objective facts, the hard truth. Yet pure gold
is not workable in making rings unless it is alloyed with other materials. A
poet’s fancy and imagination are just the alloying
ingredients. They brought the dead truth to life.
7.2 The name of Browning is often
associated with the term: dramatic
monologue（戏剧独白）.
7.3 My Last Duchess（我逝去的公爵夫人）:
it is ironical(讽刺的) that the Duke’s own defensive words should betray and condemn himself.
8. George Eliot（乔治·艾略特）
8.1 Works: Adam Bede（亚当·比德）; The Mill
on the Floss（弗洛斯河上的磨坊）。
8.2 She initiates a new type of realism and sets into motion a variety of
developments, leading in the direction of both the naturalistic and
psychological novel. In her works, she seeks to present the inner struggle of a soul and to reveal the motives, impulses and
hereditary(世袭的, 遗传的)
influences which govern human action. She shows a particular
concern for the destiny of women, especially those with great intelligence,
potential and social aspirations, such as Maggie
Tulliver（马吉·塔利维尔）,In The Mill on the Floss(佛洛斯河上的磨坊), Dorothea（多萝西娅）in Middlemarch（米德尔马契）.
9. Thomas Hardy（托马斯·哈代）
9.1 Most of his novels are set in
Wesses（韦塞克斯，在英格兰西南部）.
9.2 His best local-colored works: The Return of the Native（还乡）; The Mayor of Casterbridge（卡斯特桥市长）; Tess of the D’Urbervilles（德伯家的苔丝）; Jude the Obsure（无名的裘得）;
Under the Greenwood Tree（绿荫下）. These works are known as
novels of character and environment. From The Return of the Native on, the
tragic sense becomes the keynote of his novels.
9.3 Hardy is often regarded as transitional writer. In his Wesses novels, there is an
apparent nostalgic touch in his description of the simple and beautiful though
primitive rural life, which was gradually declining and disappearing as England
marched in to an industrial country. He was also influenced by Spenser’s The First Principle, which led him to the belief that man’s fate is predeterminedly tragic, driven by a combined force of ‘nature’. Man proves impotent before Fate. He
is a naturalistic writer.
9.4 The
conflicts between the traditional and the modern, between the old rural value
of respectability and honesty and the new utilitarian commercialism, between
the old, false social moral and the natural human passion, etc. are all
closely set in a realistic background true to the very time and the very place.
英国文学 Modern Period（现代时期2nd half of 19th century ~ early decades of 20th century）
1. Modernism rose out of skepticism
and disillusion of capitalism. Modernism takes the
irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its
theoretical base. Modernism is, in many aspects, a
reaction against realism.
2. In the early years of 20th
century, it is of modern poetry, the
lost generation (迷惘的一代)(Jazz Age爵士乐时代). The 1930s is known as the red thirties, the protest. In the 1960s,
there is the Beat Movement, the Absurd literature (the literature of the
absurdist). In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, there appeared a group of young
novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working class background,
who were known as The Angry Young Men. Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human
consciousness. They had created unprecedented stream-of-consciousness(意识流) novels.
3. Forster’s masterpiece: A Passage to India; D. H. Lawrence: The
Rainbow; Women in Love; Sons and Lovers.
4. Dramatists: Oscar Wilde
and George Bernard Shaw.
5. Yeats is a prominent poet of this
century.
6. T. S. Eliot wrote verse
plays: Murder in the Cathedral.
7. The English dramatic
revolution came in the 1950s under various European and American influences.
This revolution developed in two directions: the
working-class drama and the Theater of Absurd.
8. The most original
playwright of the Theater of Absurd is Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot is
regarded as the most famous and influential play of the Theater of Absurd.
9. George Bernard Shaw （乔治·萧伯纳）
9.1 Shaw was strongly against the
credo(信条) of ‘art for art’s sake’ held by those decadent aesthetic
artists. Shaw held that art should serve social purpose by reflecting human life, revealing social contradictions and
educating the common people.
9.2 Works: Plays Pleasant; Widower’s House(鳏夫的房产); Mrs. Warran’s Profession（华伦夫的职业）; Caesar and Cleopatra; St. Joan.
9.3 The plays he produced explored
his idea of ‘Life Force’, the
power that would create superior beings to be equal to God and to solve all the
social, moral, and metaphysical(形而上学的,
纯粹哲学的) problems of human
society. The Apply Cart（苹果车）; Pygmalion(皮格马利翁).
9.4 Structurally and thematically（主题的）, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. As a realistic
dramatist, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim of
directing social reforms. Most of his plays are concerned with political,
economic, moral, or religious problems, and, thus, can be termed as problem
plays. And his plays have one passion, and one only, i.e. indignation, ‘indignation against oppression and exploitation, against hypocrisy
and lying, against prostitution and slavery, against poverty, dirt and disorder’. Another feature is that Shaw’s characters
are the representatives of ideas, points of view, that shift and alter during
the play, for Mr. Shaw is primarily interested in doctrines.
10. John Galsworthy （约翰·高尔斯华绥）
10.1 His first trilogy（三部曲）: The Man of Property（有家产的人）; In Chancery（骑虎难下）; To Let（出租） ,His second trilogy: A Modern Comedy(现代喜剧).
10.2 He was a conventional writer, he is realistic
writer.
11. William Butler Yeats （威廉·勃特勒·叶芝）
11.1 In 1923, he was awarded Nobel Prize for literature.
11.2 The overall style of his early poetry is very
delicate with natural imagery, dream-like atmosphere and musical beauty.
11.3 Sailing to Byzantium, Yeats explored the problems of death, love, old age and art.
12. T. S. Eliot （T·S·艾略特）
12.1 He won various awards,
including the Nobel Prize.
12.2 Works:
Prufrock(普鲁夫洛克);
The Waste Land（荒原）; The Hollow Men（空心人）.
12.3 The Waste Land, Eliot’s most important single poem, has
been hailed as a landmark and model of the 20th-century English poetry,
comparable to Wordsworth’s
Lyrical Ballads. With bold technical innovations in versification and
style, the poem not only presents a panorama(全景) of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in
the modern Western world, but also reflects the prevalent mood of
disillusionment and despair of a whole post-war generation. It is a poem
concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modern civilization in which human
life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose.
12.4 He is a verse dramatist: Murder in the Cathedral（大教堂谋杀案）; The Cocktail Party（鸡尾酒会）.
12.5 He is also a prose writer:
his famous essay ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’.
13. D. H. Lawrence （D·H·劳伦斯）
13.1 Works: Sons and Lovers（儿子与情人）; The White Peacock（白孔雀）; The Trespasser（侵犯者）; Lady Chatterley’s Lover（查泰莱夫人的情人）; his masterpieces: The
Rainbow（虹）; Women in Love（恋爱中的女人）.
13.2 Themetical concern: in Lawrence’s opinion, the mechanical civilization is responsible for the
unhealthy development of human personalities, the perversion（颠倒, 曲解） of love and the failure of human fulfillment in marital（婚姻的） relationships. In reading the novel, the reader often
feels the threatening shadows of the disintegration and destructiveness of the
whole civilized world which loom（隐现,
迫近） behind the
emotional conflicts and psychological tensions of the characters.
13.3 His short stories: St. Mawsr; The Daughter of the
Vicar; The Horse Dealer’s Daughter; The Captain’s Doll, The Prussian Officer; The Virgin and the Gypsy.
14. James Joyce （詹姆斯·乔伊斯）
14.1 Dubliners(都柏林人)
is a collection of 15 short stories. The stories progress from simple to
complex. Each story presents an aspect of ‘dear dirty
Dublin’, an aspect of the city’s
paralysis – moral, political, or spiritual. Each story
is an action, defining a frustration or defeat of the soul. And the whole
sequences of the stories represent the entire course of moral deterioration in
Dublin, ending in the death of the soul.
14.2 James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness novelist; in Ulysses, his
encyclopedia-like masterpiece, Joyce presents a fantastic picture of the
disjointed（杂乱的）, illogical, illusory, and mental emotional life of Leopold Bloom,
who becomes the symbol of every man in the post-World-War-I Europe. He is
regarded as the most prominent stream-of-consciousness
novelist.
14.3 His first novel is A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man（一个青年艺术家的画像）.
14.4 Ulysses（尤利西斯）, Joyce’s masterpiece, has become a prime example of modernism
in literature. (Leopold Bloom) In Ulysses, Joyce intends to present a microcosm
of the whole human life by providing an instance of how a single event contains
all the events of its kind, and how history is recapitulated（概括, 摘要） in the happenings of one day. With complete objectivity and minute
details of man’s everyday routines and his psychic
processes, Joyce illustrates a symbolic picture of all human history, which is
simultaneously tragic and comic, heroic and cowardly, magnificent and dreary.
Like Eliot’s masterpiece, The Waste Land, Joyce’s Ulysses presents a realistic picture of
the modern wasteland in which modern men are portrayed as vulgar and trivial
creatures with splitting personalities, disillusioned ideals, sordid minds and
broken families, who are searching in vain for harmonious human relationships
and spiritual sustenance in a decaying world.
美国文学 Romantic Period（浪漫主义时期）
1. The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War.
It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book (见闻札记) and ended with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (草叶集). It is also called ‘the American
Renaissance’.
2. Definition: A). the
Americans also placed an increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions
and displayed an increasing attention to the psychic states of their
characters. B). the strong tendency to exalt the
individual and the common man was almost a national religion in America.
3. The American national experience of ‘pioneering into the west’
(西进运动) proved to be a rich source of material for
American writers to draw upon.
4. Washington Irving（华盛顿·欧文）
4.1 He is the father of American
short stories. Represented works: The
Sketch Book（见闻札记） of Geoffrey Crayon. The book contains
familiar essays on the English life and Americanized versions of European folk
tales like ‘Rip
Van Winkle(里普·凡·温克尔)’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow（睡谷传说）’ (get ideas from German legends). A
History of New York
4.2 Irving’s taste was
essentially conservative. Like the two famous personae he created, Diedrich
Knickerbocker and Geoffrey Crayon, Irving remained a conservative and always
exalted a disappearing past. This social conservatism(保守主义) and literary preference for the past is revealed, to some extent, in
his famous story ‘Rip Van
Winkle’. The story is a tale remembered mostly for Rip’s 20-year sleep, set against the background of the inevitably
changing America. In the story Irving skillfully presents to us paralleled
juxtapositions of two totally different worlds before and after Rip’s 20 years’ sleep. (slow-paced tranquil安静的) By moving Rip back and forth from a noisy world with his wife on the
farm to a wild but peaceful natural world in the mountains, and from a
pre-Revolution village to a George Washington era, Irving describes Rip’s response and reaction in a dramatic way, so that we see clearly
both the narrator and Irving agree on the preferability of the past to the
present, and the preferability of a dream like world to the real one. (prefer
village life to town life)
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson （拉尔夫·华尔多·爱默生）
5.1 He is of New England
Transcendentalism, which is the summit of the Romantic period. He is the chief spokesman of this spiritual movement.
5.2 Nature（论自然）, Emerson’s first little book, which established
him ever since as the most eloquent（雄辩的） spokesman
of New England Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalism journal is The Dial.
5.3 Emerson is an essayist. His works are The American Scholar（美国学者）, Self-Reliance（论自立）, and The Over-Soul（论超灵）.
5.4 Emersonian Transcendentalism is actually a
philosophical school. Its belief lies in the following two points: a). it focuses on the intuitive knowledge of human beings to
grasp the absolute in the universe and the divinity of man. He is
affirmative about man’s intuitive knowledge, with which
a man can trust himself to decide what is right and to act accordingly. The
ideal individual should be a self-reliant man. ‘Trust
thyself,’ he wrote in Self-Reliant, by which he means
to convince people that the possibilities for man to develop and improve
himself are infinite. b). go back to nature, sink
yourself back into its influence and you’ll become spiritually whole again. Nature has an ennobling and
healthy influence on human mind.
5.5 Thoreau(梭罗) is the follower and student of
Emerson. He is of simple manner about life. Thoreau practices what Emerson
preaches.
6. Nathaniel Hawthorne （纳撒尼尔·霍桑）
6.1 He has unceasing interest in the
‘interior of the heart’ of man’s being.
6.2 His novels: Mosses
from an Old Manse(古屋青苔); The
Snow-Image(雪影) and Other Twice-Told Tales(尽人皆知的故事); The Scarlet Letter(红字); The House of the Seven Gables(有七个尖角阁的房子); The Blithedate Romance(福谷传奇); The Marble Faun(玉石雕像).
6.3 His works has his ‘black’ vision of life and human beings. ‘There is
evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole
life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.’ A
piece of literary work should ‘show how we are all
wronged and wrongers, and avenge one another.’ So in
almost every book he wrote, Hawthorne discusses sin and evil. Representative
short stories: Young Goodman Brown (年轻小伙子古德曼·布朗everyone
possesses some evil secret); The
Minister’s Black Veil (everyone tries to hold the
evil secret from one another in the way the minister tries to convince his
people with his black veil); The
Birthmark (evil is man’s birthmark,
something he is born with); Rappaccini’s Daughter.
6.4 Hawthorne’s view of man and human history originates, to a great extent, in
Puritanism. He is with the Puritan world or society as a historical
background.
6.5 His masterpiece The Scarlet Letter, he does not intend to tell a love story nor a
story of sin, but focuses his attention on the moral, emotional, and
psychological effects or consequences of the sin on the people in general and
those main characters in particular, so as to show us the tension between
society and individuals. The
Custom-House is an introductory note.
6.6 As a man of literary craftsmanship, Hawthorne is
extraordinary. The structure and the form of his writings are always carefully
worked out to cater for the thematic concern. With his special interest in the
psychological aspect of human beings, there isn’t much
action, or physical movement going on in his works and he is good at exploring
the complexity of human psychology. So his drama is thought, full of mental
activities. Thought propels action and grows organically out of the interaction
of the characters, as we find in The
Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne is also a great allegorist(寓言作家, 讽喻家) and almost every story can be read allegorically, as is the case in ‘Young Goodman Brown’. Whereas allegory is used to hold fast against the crushing blows
of reality, the symbol serves as a weapon to attack and penetrate it. Hawthorne
is a master of symbolism (color symbol), which
he took from the Puritan tradition and bequeathed(遗赠,把...传下去) to American literature in a revivified form. The symbol can be found
everywhere in his writing, and his masterpiece provides the most conclusive
proof. By using Pearl as a thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence
the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that
community. With the scarlet letter A as the biggest symbol of all, Hawthorne
proves himself to be one of the best symbolists.
As a key to the whole novel, the letter A takes on different layers of symbolic
meanings as the plot develops, but people come up with different
interpretations and they do not know which one is definite. The scarlet letter
A is ambiguous. And the ambiguity is one of the salient(易见的, 显著的)haracteristics of Hawthorne’s art.
7. Walt Whitman （华尔特·惠特曼）
7.1 He creates the ‘single’ poem, initiates a poetic tradition. The poet’s essential purpose was to identify his ego
with the world, and more specifically with the democratic ‘en-masse’ of America, which is established
in the opening lines of ‘Song of Myself’.
7.2 He shows concern for the whole hard-working people
and the burgeoning life of cities. Drum
Taps(桴鼓集), Cavalry Crossing a Ford,
When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.
7.3 New subject and new poetic feeling is ‘free verse’, that is,
poetry without a fixed beat of regular rhyme scheme. By means of ‘free verse’, Whitman believed, he has turned
the poem into an open field, an area of vital possibility where the reader can
allow his own imagination to play. Rather than giving a description of those
concrete things, Whitman catalogues(目录)
them. Parallelism(对句法, 对联)
and phonetic(语音的) recurrence(复发,重现) at the beginning of the lines also contribute to the musicality of his
poems.
8. Herman Melville（赫尔曼·麦尔维尔）
8.1 His mighty(伟大的, 非凡的) book is Moby-Dick（白鲸）.
His short stories are Billy Budd（比利巴德）, Typee（泰比）, Omoo（奥穆）, Mardi（玛地）, Redburn（雷午本）, White Jacket（白外衣）, and Pierre（皮埃尔）,
which are sea adventure stories.
8.2 Moby-Dick is regarded as the first American prose epic. Although it is
presented in the form of novel, at times it seems like a prose poem. It is
difficult to read because much of the talk in the novel is sailor’s talk and must of the language is purposely old-fashioned and
Elizabeth. However, if we can say that there is such a thing as the Great
American Novel, Moby-Dick can well qualify for that distinction. The story is
not complicated, dealing with Ahab, a man with an overwhelming obsession（迷住, 困扰） to kill the whale, which has crippled him, on board his ship Pequod
in the chase of the big whale. The dramatic description of the hazards（冒险, 危险） of whaling makes the book a very exciting sea narrative and builds
a literary monument to an ear of whaling industry in the nineteenth century.
But Moby-Dick is not merely a whaling tale or sea adventure, considering that
Melville is a great symbolist. It turns out to be symbolic voyage of the mind
in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration
into man’s deep reality and psychology.
8.3 Like Hawthorne, Melville
is a master of allegory and symbolism. Instead of putting the battle
between Ahab and the big whale into simple statements, he used symbols, that
is, objects or persons who represent something else. Different people on board
the ship are representations of different ideas and
different social and ethnic groups; facts become symbols and incidents
acquire universal meanings; the Pequod is the microcosm
of human society and the voyage becomes a search
for truth. The white whale, Moby Dick, symbolizes nature for Melville, for it is complex, unfathomable（深不可测的,难解的）, malignant（恶性的）, and
beautiful as well. For the character Ahab, however, the whale represents only
evil. Moby Dick is like a wall, hiding some unknown, mysterious things behind.
Ahab wills the whole crew on the Pequod to join him in the pursuit of the big
whale so as to pierce（刺穿, 突破） the wall, to root out the evil, but only to be destroyed by evil, in
this case, by his own consuming desire, his madness. For the author, as well as
for the reader and Ishmael, the narrator, Moby Dick is still a mystery, an
ultimate mystery of the universe, inscrutable（不能治愈的） and ambivalent（矛盾的）, and the
voyage of the mind will forever remain a search, not a discovery, of the truth.
8.4 Symbolism is not the only way in which Melville has articulated, shaped, and
presented the mighty theme of the book. Melville’s
great gifts of language, invention, psychological analysis, speculative agility（敏捷, 活泼）, and narrative power are used to make Moby-Dick a world classic.
The skillful use of Ishmael both as a character and a narrator gives the novel
a moral magnitude（大小, 数量, 巨大）; the manipulation of the whaling chapters for some philosophical
speculation makes the novel more than symbolic; different levels of language
use and styles turn the whole book into a symphony with all the musical
instruments going on to form a melody; and moreover, Melville’s knowledge of epic and tragedy, the highest literary genres, helps
him produce a great tragic epic, with Ahab at the center as a tragic hero, who
burns with a baleful（有害的, 恶意的）fire, becoming evil himself in his thirst to destroy evil.
美国文学 Realistic Period（现实主义时期）
1. The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has
been referred to as the Age of Realism in the
literary history. It can be described as by a works of
Mark Twain ‘The
Golden Age’.
2. The harsh(粗糙的,苛刻的,刺目的) realities of life as well as the disillusion(醒悟) of heroism resulting form the dark memories of
the Civil War has set the nation against the romance. This new attitude was
characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life.
The content of this age is actualities and the form is truthful treatment of
life.
3. The three dominant figures of
the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and
Henry James. Though the three prominent writers wrote more or less at
the same time, they differed in their understanding of the ‘truth’. a). While Mark Twain and Howells seemed to have paid more
attention to the ‘life’ of the Americans, Henry James had apparently laid a greater
emphasis on the ‘inner world’
of man. He came to believe that the literary
artist should not simply hold a mirror to the surface of social life in
particular times and places. In addition, the writer should use language to
probe the deepest reaches of the psychological and moral nature of human
beings. He is a realist of the inner life. b). Though
Twain and Howells both shared the same concern in presenting the truth of the
American society, they had each of them different emphasis. Howells focused his
discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived, while Twain
preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront(最前部,最活动的中心) of his stories. This
particular concern about the local character of a region came about as ‘local colorism’, a unique
variation of American literary realism.
4. Mark Twain is not the only one
whose works are characterized with local colors. The other local colorists
might include Sarah Orne Jewett, Joseph Kirkland and Hamlin Garland.
5. American naturalism is of Darwin’s evolutionary theory: the survival of the
fittest. Frank Norris – McTeague; Theodore
Dreiser – Sister Carrie. In a word, naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and
less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a different philosophical approach to reality, or
to human existence.
6. Mark Twain （马克·吐温）
6.1 He is considered as ‘the true father of our national literature’.
6.2 His works: Life
on the Mississippi（密西西比河上）, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer（汤姆·索亚历险记）,
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(哈克贝利·费恩历险记), The Golden Age（镀金时代）, A Connecticut
Yankee in King Arthus’s Court（亚瑟王宫廷中的美国佬）, The Tragedy of Pudd’shead Wilson（傻瓜威尔逊）.
6.3 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is usually
regarded as a classic book written for boys about their particular horrors and
joys while Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, being a boy’s book specially written for the
adults, is Twain’s most representative work, describing
a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives（逃亡者）, Huck and Jim. Their episodic（插曲似的，偶尔发生的） set of encounters presents a sample of the small-town
world of America and a survey of the social world from the bank of the river
that runs through the heart of the country.
6.4 Huckleberry
Finn marks the climax of Twain’s literary creativity. It is all modern American literature comes
and the book is significant in many ways.
6.5 The profound portrait of Huckleberry Finn is
another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature.
The novel begins with a description of how Widow Douglas attempts to civilize
Huck and ends with him deciding not to let it happen against at the hands of
Aunt Sally. The climax arises with Huck’s inner
struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces
between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of
the society against those who help slaves escape. Huck’s
final decision is to follow this own good-hearted moral impulse rather than
conventional village morality. With the eventual victory of his moral
conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows.
6.6 Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular（本国语;方言）. His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in
effect, and his sentence structures are simple, even ungrammatical, which is
typical of the spoken language. Mark Twain’s humor is
remarkable.
7. Henry James （享利·詹姆斯）
7.1 His achievements: 1). James took great interest in international themes. He
treated with great care the clashes between two different cultures and the
emotional and moral problems of American in Europe, or European in America. The
international theme centers on the confrontation of the two different value
systems, American innocence versus European corruption. 2). His literary criticism. His essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ is the representation.
3). James’ realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his
subject manner. This emphasis on psychology and
on the human consciousness proves to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and
has great influence on the coming generations. That is why James is generally
regarded as the forerunner of the 20th-century ‘stream-of-consciousness’ novels and
the founder of psychological realism. 4). His narrative
‘point of view’. He avoids the authorial omniscience and makes his characters
reveal themselves with his minimal intervention.
7.2 His masterpiece: The Portrait of A Lay (贵夫人的画像) 。
7.3 His works: The American;The
Bostonians（波士顿人）; The Turn of the Screw; The Wings of the Dove（鸽翼）; The Ambassadors（大使们）; The Golden Bowl（金碗）.
8. Emily Dickinson （艾米莉·狄金森）
8.1 Dickinson called the stream
of tiny, aphoristic(格言的) poems as a continuous fragmented ‘letter to the world’, a way to bridge her
private world with the public.
8.2 Most of her poems include
religion, death, immortality, love and nature. Closely related to
Dickinson’s religious poetry are her poems concerning
death and immortality, ranging over the physical as well as the psychological
and emotional aspects of death. She looked at death from the point of view of
both the living and the dying. She even imagined her own death, the loss of her
own body, and the journey of her soul to the unknown.
8.3 Dickinson’s poetry is
unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no titles, hence are
always quoted by their first lines. In her poetry there is a particular stress
pattern, in which dashes(猛掷,
冲撞)are used a musical
device to create cadence(节奏,
韵律) and capital
letters as a means of emphasis. Her poetic idiom is noted for its laconic(简洁的, 简明的) brevity, directness and plainness.
9. Theodore Dreiser （西奥多·德莱塞）
9.1 He is
America’s literary
naturalist.
9.2 His works:
Sister Carrie（嘉莉妹妹）; Jennie Gerhard(珍妮姑娘); The Financier（金融家）; The Titan（巨头）; The Stoic (Trilogy of
Desire—欲望三部曲); An American Tragedy（美国悲剧）.
9.3 Naturalism emphasized heredity(遗传) and environment as important deterministic(确定性的) forces shaping individualized characters who were
presented in special and detailed circumstances. In his words, man is a victim of forces over which he has no control.
Survival of the fittest, kill or to be killed.
美国文学 Modern Period（现代时期）
1. General features of this period: 1). Its booming industry and material prosperity, there was a
sense of unease and restlessness underneath. Fear, loss, disorientation and
disillusionment are the general moods of the period. 2). Between the mid-19th century and the first decade of the 20th
century, there had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both
social and natural sciences. Darwinism has a big influence over the
writers of this period. Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud. Carl Jung is noted for his
collective unconscious and archetypal symbol. 3). There
was a spiritual crisis in this period, but a full blossoming of literary
writings. The twentieth century American literature or the second
American Renaissance is the expatriate movement. The Lost Generation.
2. Poets: Ezra Pound（埃兹拉·庞德）; William
Carlos Williams; Robert Frost（罗伯特·弗洛斯特）; E. E.
Cummings.
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald; Ernest Hemingway;
William Faulkner; Sherwood Anderson; Sinclair Lewis; John Steinbeck. Anderson
explores the motivations and frustrations of his fictional characters in terms
of Freud’s theory of
psychology, particularly in one boo, Winesburg, Ohio, in which individuals in
the small community are depicted as socially alienated and emotionally
suppressed, unable to love or to be loved. Lewis is a sociological writer and
his Babbit presents a documentary picture of the narrow and limited middle
class mind, especially that of the middle class businessmen. John Steinbeck is
good at novels of social protest, The Grapes of Wrath.
4. Playwright: O’Neil（尤金·奥尼尔）; Arthur Miller; Tennessee Williams.
5. The postwar poets, whose poems are
confessional(自白的,
忏悔的): Robert Lowell; Allen Ginsberg, whose
Howl became the manifesto of the Beat Movement.
6. The postwar fiction writer: Flannery O’Conner followed Faulkner’s（福克纳） footsteps in portraying the decadence and evil in
the Southern society in a Gothic manner. Jewish-American, Saul Bellow is noted for his black fiction. Richard Wright, Ralph
Ellison; J. D. Salinger, whose
The Catcher in the Rye is regarded as students’ classic. Updike Rabbit
7. Ezra Pound （埃兹拉·庞德）
7.1 He is
a leading spokesman of the Imagist Movement.
7.2 His works: The
Cantos（诗章）; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley（休·塞尔温·莫伯利）.
7.3 Pound’s affinity to the Chinese and his strenuous effort in the study of Oriental literature.
7.4 Imagist Movement(意象主义运动) is
from 1909 to 1917 and involves quite a number of British and American writers
and poets. This is a movement that advanced modernism in arts which
concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism,
especially Tennyson’s wordiness and high-flown(颇具野心的, 夸大的,
夸张的) language in
poetry. Three main principles are direct treatment of
poetic subjects; elimination（消除） of merely ornamental or
superfluous words and rhythmical
composition in the sequence（顺序） of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence
of a metronome(节拍器). The point
of imagism is that it does not use images as ornaments.
The image itself is the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated（明确地表达,
作简洁陈述） language.
8. Robert Lee Frost（罗伯特·弗洛斯特）
8.1 Robert Frost is a serious poet. He is generally considered a regional poet whose subject matters mainly focus on
the landscape and people in New England.
8.2 His works:
A Boy’s Will(少年心愿); North of Boston（波士顿以北）; Mountain Interval（山间）; New Hampshire（新罕普什尔）.
8.3 He is hardly to be classified with the old or the
new. A poem is a momentary stay against confusion. It would be a mistake to
imagine that Frost is easy to understand because he is easy to read. Most of
his poems are simple in the way that they are dramatic monologues or dialogues.
9. Eugene O’Neil（尤金·奥尼尔）
9.1 He is the America’s
greatest playwright. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times and was the only dramatist ever to win a Nobel Prize. He is the founder of the American drama.
9.2 His works: Bound
East for Cardiff; Beyond the Horizon（天边外）;
Anna Christie（安娜·克里斯蒂）; The Emperor Jones（琼斯皇帝）; The Hairy Ape(毛猿); All God’s Chillum Got Wings; Desire Under
the Elms（榆树下的欲望）;
The Iceman Cometh（卖冰的人来了）;
Long Day’s Journey Into Night（长夜漫漫路迢迢）.
9.3 His plays are mostly
tragedies, dealing with the basic issues of human existence and predicament(困境). His characters are seeking meaning and purpose
in their lives in different ways, through love, religion, revenge, but all meet
disappointment and despair.
9.4 Expressionism（表现主义）. In expressionism
plays, abstract and symbolic stage sets（布景） are used to
set off against the emotional inner selves and subjective states of mind.
10. F. Scott Fitzgerald （司各特·菲兹杰拉德）
10.1 He is of the 1920s, who was
the mirror of the exciting age in almost every way. Dollar Decade（金元时代） or the Jazz Age（爵士时代）.
10.2 His works（novels）: The Beautiful and Damned(美丽的与倒霉的); This Side of
Paradise（人间天堂）;
The Great Gatsby（了不起的盖茨比）;
Tender is the Night（夜色温柔）;
Short
Story: Flappers and Philosophers（姑娘们与哲学家）; Tales of the Jazz Age（爵士时代的故事）; All the
Sad Young Men（所有悲伤的年轻人）.
10.3 Most critics have agreed that
Fitzgerald is both an insider and an outsider of the Jazz Age with a double
vision.
10.4 His fictional world is the best embodiment of the
spirit of the Jazz Age, in which he shows a particular interest in the upper-class
society, a sense of reckless confidence not only about money but about life in
general. Beneath their masks of relaxation and joviality（快活） there was only sterility（不育）, meaninglessness and futility（无用, 轻浮的言行）, and amid the grandeur（庄严,
伟大） and extravagance
a spiritual wasteland and a hint of decadence and moral decay. This undeniable（不可否认的） juxtaposition of appearance with reality, of the
pretense（主张,
要求） of gaiety（作乐, 乐事） with the tension underneath. The bankruptcy of the American Dream.
11. Ernest Hemingway（欧内斯特·海明威）
11.1 His style: the particular type of hero in his novels; his life attitudes
11.2 His works: The Toronto Star; In Our Times（在我们的时代里Hemingway hero – Nick Adams;
exposed to and victimized by violence in various forms, Nick becomes the
prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could
master, confronts situations which are not of his own choosing yet threaten his
destruction); The Sun Also Rises (太阳照样升起The Lost Generation); Farewell to Arms（永别了，武器）; For Whom the Bell Tolls（丧钟为谁敲响）; The Old
Man and the Sea (老人与海Cuban fisherman Santiago and his losing battle with
a giant marlin.)
11.3 Short novels: Men Without Women; The Undefeated; The
Killers; Fifty Grand; Death in the Afternoon; The Green Hills of Africa; The
Snows of Kilimanjaro; To Have and Have Not.
11.4 Hemingway’s world is
limited. He deals with a limited range of characters in quite similar
circumstance, and measures them against an unvarying code, known as ‘grace under pressure’, which is Hemingway Code heroes (They are tough, strong. They
obey the rule very control.). In the general situation of his novels, life is
full of tension and battles. Man can be physically destroyed but never defeated
spiritually.
11.5 The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to
only one-eighth of it being above water. Typical of
this ‘iceberg’ analogy is Hemingway’s style, which he had been trying hard to get. According to
Hemingway, a good literary writing should be able to make readers feel the
emotion of the characters directly and the best way to produce the effect is to
set down exactly every particular kind of feeling without any authorial
comments, without conventionally emotive language, and with a bare minimum of
adjectives and adverbs. Seemingly simple and natural, Hemingway’s style is actually polished and tightly controlled, but highly
suggestive and connotative(隐含的,
内涵的). While rendering
vividly the outward physical events and sensations Hemingway expresses the
meaning of the story and conveys the complex emotions of his characters with a
considerable range and astonishing intensity of feeling. Besides, Hemingway
develops the style of colloquialism(俗话,白话, 口语) initiated by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms of human speech
are so well presented that the characters are full of flesh and blood and the
use of short, simple and conventional words and sentences has an effect of
clearness, terseness and great cares. This ruthless economy in his writing
stands as a striking application of Mies
van der Rohe’s architectural
maxim: ‘Less is more.’ No
wonder Hemingway was highly praised by the Nobel Prize
Committee for ‘his powerful style-forming mastery of
the art’ of creating modern fiction.
12. William Faulkner （威歉·福克纳）
12.1 His works: Soldiers’ Pay(士兵的报酬); Sartoris(萨托里斯); The Bear（熊）; In 1950,
he was awarded the Nobel Prize for the
anti-racist Intruder in the Dust(坟墓的侵入者).
12.2 Most of Faulkner’s works are set in the American South, with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness. Of the
nineteen novels and seventy-five short stories, fifteen novels and many of his
stories are about people from a small region in Northern Mississippi,
Yoknapatawpha Country, which is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkner’s childhood memory about the place where he grew up, the two of
Oxford in his native Lafayette Country. With his rich imagination, Faulkner
turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary
creation and a mythical kingdom. The Yoknapatawpha(虚构一个地方：约克纳帕塔法郡)stories deal,
generally, with the historical period from the Civil War up to the 1920s when
the First World War broke out, and people of a stratified society, the
aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the blacks. As a result,
Yoknapatawpha Country has become an allegory or a parable of the Old South,
with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama(全景) of the experience and consciousness of the whole
Southern society.
12.3 Of Faulkner’s literary works, four novels are masterpieces by any standards: The Sound and the Fury (喧哗与骚动)a story of lost innocence, which proves itself to be an intensification
of the theme of imprisonment in the past);
Light in August(八月之光); Absalom, Absalom!( 押沙龙,押沙龙!); Go Down, Moses(去吧,摩西)。
ENGLISH LITERATUR
时期
author
Selected Reading
文
艺
复
兴
时
期
Edmund Spenser
The Faerie Queene(仙后)
Christopher Marlowe
Dr.Faustus(浮士德)
The Passionate Shepher to His Love(多情的牧羊致情人)
William Shakespeare
Sonnet18(莎士比亚十行诗第18首)
The Merchant of Venice(威尼斯商人)
Hamlet(哈姆莱特)
Francis Bacon
Of studies(论读书)
John Donne
The Sun Rising（太阳升起）
Death,Be Not Pround(死神，莫骄傲)
John Milton
Paradise Lost（失乐园）
新
古
典
主
义
时
期
John Bunyan
The Pilgrim’s Progress(天路历程)
Alexander Pope
On Critcism(论批评)
Daniel Defoe
Robinson Crusoe(罗宾逊漂流记)
Jonathan Swift
Gulliver’s Travels（格列佛游记）
Henry Fielding
Tom Jones(汤姆·琼斯)
Samuel Johnson
To the Rignt Honorable the Earl of Chesterfield（致可敬的吉士菲伯爵书）
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
The School of Scandal（造谣学校）
Thomas Gray
Elegy Written in a country Churchyard(墓园挽歌)
浪
漫
主
义
时
期
浪
漫
主
义
时
期
William Blake
The Chimney Sweeper from The Song of Innolcence（《扫烟囱的孩子》选自《天真之歌》）
The Chimney Sweeper from The Song of Experience（《扫烟囱的孩子》选自《经验之歌》）
The Tyger(老虎)
Willam Wordsworth
I Wandered Lonely ae a cloud（我孤独地漂泊犹如一片浮云）
Composed upon Westminster Bridge,Sep.3,1802（作于西敏寺桥上）
She Dwell Among the Untridden Ways（他居住在人迹罕至的地方）
The Solitary Reaper( 孤独的割麦女)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Kubla Khan（忽必烈汗）
George Cordon Byron
Song for the Luddites (为卢得派歌唱)
The Isles of Greece from Don Juan(《哀希腊》选自《唐璜》)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
A Song :Men of England（英国人民之歌）
Ode to the West Wind（西风颂）
John Keats
Ode On a Grecian Urn(希腊古瓮颂)
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice（傲慢与偏见）
维
多
利
亚
时
期
Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist(奥利弗·特维斯特)
The Brote Sisters
Jane Eyre（简·爱-Charlotte）
Wuthering Heignt（呼啸山庄-Emily）
Alfred Tennyson
Break,Break,Break(冲激，冲激，冲激)
Crossing the Bar（过沙洲）
Ulysses（尤利西斯）
Robert Browing
My Last Duchess(我的前公爵夫人)
Meeting at Night（夜会）
Parting at Morning（晨别）
George Eliot
Middlemarch,aStudy kf Provincia Life(米德尔马契，外省行活研究)
Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D’Urbervilles（德伯家的苔丝）
现
代
时
期
George Bernard Shaw
Mrs.Warren’s Profession(华伦夫人的职业)
John Galsworthy
The man of Property（有产者）
Willian Butler Yeats
The Lake Isle of Innisfree (茵纳斯弗利岛)
Down by the Sally Garden(在阔叶柳花园旁边)
T.S.Eliot
The Love Song of J.Afred Prufrock（阿尔弗瑞德·普鲁弗洛克的情歌）
D.H.Lawrence
Song and Lovers(儿子与情人)
James Joyce
Araby from Dubliners（《阿拉伯节》选自《都柏人人》）
AMERICAN LITERATURE
时期
author
Selected Reading
浪
漫
主
义
时
期
Washington Irving
Rip Van Winkle(里·普凡·温克尔)
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Nature（论自然）
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Young Goodman Brown(年轻小伙子古德曼·布朗)
Walt Whitman
There Was a Child Went Forth from Leaves of Grass（《从前有个出门的孩子》选自《草叶集》）
Cavalry(1) Crossing a Ford（《涉水过河的骑兵队》选自《桴鼓集》）
Song of Myself（自我之歌）
Herman Melville
Movy Dick(白鲸)
现
实
主
义
时
期
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(哈克贝利·费恩历险记)
Hery James
Daisy Miller（苔瑟·米勒）
Emily Dickinson
This is my Leetter to The world(这是我给世界写的信)
I heard a Fly buzz—when I died（我死时听到苍蝇的嗡嗡声）
I like to see it lap the Miles（我喜欢看见它拍击许多英里）
Becauce I could not stop for Death（因为我不能停下等待死神）
Theodore Dreiser
Sister Carrie(嘉莉妹妹)
现
代
时
期
Ezra Pound
In a Station of the Metro（在地铁站里）
The River-Merchant’s Wife:A Letter（船商的妻子：一封信）
A Pact（合同）
Robert Lee Frost
After Apple-Picking(摘了苹果之后)
The Road Not Taken(没有走的的路)
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening（雪夜林边逗留）
Eugence O’neil
The Hairy Ape（毛猿）
F.Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby(了不起的盖茨比)
Ernest Hemingway
Indian（印第安营寨）
William Faulkner
A Rose For Emily(纪念爱米丽的一朵玫瑰花)
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