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1、英美文学复习摘要英国文学IntroductionNaturalismSentimentalismSymbolismRomanticismRealismPessimismModernismTerm Definition newStyle new美国文学IntroductionSummary newInformation英美文学选读自学资料（英国文学部分）Contents Introduction The Old English period o Poetry Alliterative verse The major manuscripts Problems of dating Religious
2、 verse Elegiac and heroic verse o Prose Early translations into English Late 10th- and 11th-century prose The Early Middle English period o Poetry Influence of French poetry Didactic poetry Verse romance The lyric o Prose The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods o Later Middle English
3、poetry The revival of alliterative poetry Courtly poetry Chaucer and Gower Poetry after Chaucer and Gower Courtly poetry Popular and secular verse Political verse o Later Middle English prose Religious prose Secular prose o Middle English drama o The transition from medieval to Renaissance The Renai
4、ssance period: 15501660 o Literature and the age Social conditions Intellectual and religious revolution The race for cultural development o Elizabethan poetry and prose Development of the English language Sidney and Spenser Elizabethan lyric The sonnet sequence Other poetic styles Prose styles o El
5、izabethan and early Stuart drama Theatre and society Theatres in London and the provinces Professional playwrights Christopher Marlowe Shakespeares works The early histories The early comedies The tragedies Shakespeares later works Playwrights after Shakespeare Ben Jonson Marston and Middleton Early
6、 Stuart drama o Early Stuart poetry and prose The Metaphysical poets Donne Donnes influence Jonson and the Cavalier poets Continued influence of Spenser Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose Prose styles Miltons view of the poets role The Restoration o Literary reactions to the politi
7、cal climate The defeated republicans Writings of the Nonconformists Writings of the Royalists o Major genres and major authors of the period Chroniclers Diarists The court wits Dryden Drama by Dryden and others Locke The 18th century o Publication of political literature Political journalism Major p
8、olitical writers Pope Thomson, Prior, and Gay Swift Shaftesbury and others o The novel The major novelists Defoe Richardson Fielding Smollett Sterne Minor novelists o Poets and poetry after Pope Burns Goldsmith Johnsons poetry and prose The Romantic period o The nature of Romanticism o Poetry Blake,
9、 Wordsworth, and Coleridge Other poets of the early Romantic period The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron Minor poets of the later period o The novel: Austen, Scott, and others o Miscellaneous prose o Drama The Post-Romantic and Victorian eras o Early Victorian literature: the age of the no
10、vel Dickens Thackeray, Gaskell, and others The Bronts o Early Victorian verse Tennyson Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Arnold and Clough o Early Victorian nonfictional prose o Late Victorian literature The novel Verse o The Victorian theatre o Victorian literary comedy “Modern” Englis
11、h literature: the 20th century o From 1900 to 1945 The Edwardians The modernist revolution Anglo-American modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot Celtic modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid The literature of World War I and the interwar period The 1930s The literature of World War II
12、(193945) o Literature after 1945 Fiction Poetry Drama Additional reading o General works o The Old English and early Middle English periods o The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods o The Renaissance period, 15501660 Elizabethan poetry and prose Elizabethan and early Stuart drama Earl
13、y Stuart poetry and prose o The Restoration and the 18th century o The Romantic period o The Post-Romantic and Victorian eras o “Modern” English literature: the 20th century From 1900 to 1945 Literature after 1945 Naturalism Naturalism is a term of literary history, primarily a French movement in pr
14、ose fiction and the drama during the final third of the 19th-cent. although it is also applied to similar movements or groups of writers in other countries in the later decades of the 19th and early years of the 20th cents. In France Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the dominant practitioner of Naturalism
15、 in prose fiction and the chief exponent of its doctrines. The emergence of Naturalism does not mark a radical break with Realism, rather the new style is a logical extension of it. Broadly speaking, Naturalism is characterized by a refusal to idealize experience and by the persuasion that human lif
16、e is strictly subjected to natural laws. The Naturalists shared with the earlier Realists the conviction that the everyday life of the middle and lower classes of their own day provided subjects worthy of serious literary treatment. Emphasis was laid on the influence of the material and economic env
17、ironment on behaviour, especially in Zola, on the determining effects of physical and hereditary factors in forming the individual temperamentSentimentalismI. The nature of Sentimentalismv Sentimentalism is one of the important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the 18th
18、 century.v Along with a new vision of love, sentimentalism presented a new view of human nature which prized feeling over thinking, passion over reason, and personal instincts of pity, tenderness, and benevolence over social duties. v Literary work of the sentimentalism, marked by a sincere sympathy
19、 for the poverty-stricken, expropriated peasants, wrote the simple annals of the poor”.v Writers of sentimentalism justly criticized the cruelty of the capitalist relations and the gross social injustices brought about by the bourgeois revolutions.v But they attacked the progressive aspect of this g
20、reat social change in order to eliminate it and sighed for the return of the patriarchal times which they idealized.v Sentimentalism embraces a pessimistic outlook and blames reason and the Industrial Revolution for the miseries and injustices in the aristocratic-bourgeois society and indulges in se
21、ntiment, hence the definite signs of decadence in the literary works of the sentimental tradition. II. Social background of Sentimentalism v The bourgeoisie gaining their ascendancy in national politics in England after the two revolutions of 1640 and 1688. v The handicrafts labour gradually transfo
22、rmed to machine industry in the course of the Industrial Revolution in the middle and later decades of the 18th century v The new capitalist relations were established.v Sharp social contradictions began to take shape and to threaten the short-lived social stability in the early decades of the 18th
23、century. v The continuous, large-scale enclosures of land resulted in rural bankruptcy. v The poverty and misery of the exploited and unemployed labouring masses in the cities increased. v The Enlightenment which believed in educating the people to be kind and righteous and upheld reason as the cure
24、-all for all social wrongs and miseries declined.v All this led to skepticism and disbelief in the myth about the bourgeois society as the best of all possible worlds v Lack of a better or more sound substitute for reason as the instrument to reform the none-too-satisfactory or even highly unsatisfa
25、ctory society, sentiment or even an over-dose of sentiment was indulged in at least as a sort of relief if not as a salvo for the grieves and heart-aches felt toward the worlds wrongs v Hence sentimentalism in literature. III. Literary Forms in Sentimentalismv In English poetry of the 18th century,
26、sentimentalism first found its full expression in the forties and the fifties; In the later decades of the century, strains of sentimentalism may still be found in a number of the poems of William Cowper. v In English drama of the century, the true founder of sentimental comedy has often been traced
27、 back to Richard Steele whose comedies The Lying Lover (1703) and The Conscious Lovers contained elements of sentimentalism as a sort of reaction to the immoral comedies of manners of the Restoration period. v in the field of prose fiction that sentimentalism had its most outstanding expression, Oli
28、ver Goldsmiths The Vicar of Wakefield may be considered as representative works of this category.v Oliver Goldsmiths poetry and prose fiction was quite an exponent of sentimentalism. v Laurence Sterne was the most prominent and the most typical of the sentimental tradition among all English novelist
29、s and among all English writers of the 18th centurySymbolism in Literatureby Karen BernardoJust as characterization and dialogue and plot work on the surface to move the story along, symbolism works under the surface to tie the storys external action to the theme. Early in the development of the fic
30、tional narrative, symbolism was often produced through allegory, giving the literal event and its allegorical counterpart a one-to-one correspondence.In John Bunyans Pilgrims Progress, for example, everything and everyone stands for something else. The protagonist Christian, to no ones surprise, sta
31、nds for every Christian reader; his goal, the Celestial City, stands for Heaven; the places through which he passes on his way - Lucre Hill, Vanity Fair, and the like - stand for the temptations Bunyan felt that Christian readers were likely to encounter on their journey to salvation. Even the names
32、 of Christians fellow travelers - Mr. Feeble-mind, Great-heart, and the like - represent not individual characters but states of being.Allegory is undoubtedly the simplest way of fleshing out a theme, but it is also the least emotionally satisfying because it makes things a little too easy on the re
33、ader. We feel that we are being lectured to; its almost as if the author is stopping every sentence or two to say, Now pay special attention to this, because if you dont remember it, you wont get the point. Essentially, allegory insults our intelligence.Allegory also, however, limits our perceptions
34、. The best works of literature are those in which an element of mystery remains - those which lend themselves to a variety of interpretations. Strict allegory seldom does this, which is why religious allegory is generally less satisfying than the scriptural story on which it was based.To take allego
35、ry to the next higher level, we arrive at something that for want of a better term can be called symbolism. At this level, there is still a form of correspondence, and yet it is not so one-to-one, and certainly not so blatant. Whereas allegory operates very consciously, symbolism operates on the lev
36、el of the unconscious. This does not mean that the author himself is unconscious of the process of creating symbolism - merely that we, as readers, accept its input without really understanding how it works.In Shakespeares Hamlet, for example, we discover that Hamlet is fascinated with actors and ac
37、ting. Upon reflection, an astute reader realizes that this is because Hamlets whole life has become unreal; he is being haunted by the ghost of his father, his father turns out to have been murdered by his uncle, his mother has married his fathers murderer. The motif of the actors is a symbol for th
38、e unreality of Hamlets life.Similarly, near the beginning of F. Scott Fitzgeralds novel The Great Gatsby, there is the famous scene of the Valley of Ashes where Tom Buchanans mistress Myrtle lives. Although Fitzgerald never says so, it is clear that the Valley of Ashes represents the real state of T
39、oms soul; although to the outside world his residence is in a mansion on the beautiful bay at East Egg, where everything is opulent and expensive and tasteful, the inwardly rotten, spiritually desiccated Tom really lives where his heart does, in a grim ashen valley presided over by a billboard decor
40、ated with a huge pair of bespectacled eyes. The eyes represent God, who sees Toms actions and knows the interior of his heart, but ominously seems powerless to intervene.Other famous symbols are Melvilles great white whale in Moby Dick; Dantes journey into the underworld in The Inferno; and Coleridg
41、es albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. All these concrete objects or places carry within them a wide range of associations that stand for something so ineffable it would spoil the magic to explain it. Symbolism, therefore, is an integral component of fiction, because it enriches the narrat
42、ive by pulling its message down to the level of our unconscious and anchoring it there.RomanticismI. IntroductionRomanticism (the Romantic Movement), a literary movement, and profound shift in sensibility, which took place in Britain and throughout Europe 1770-1848. Intellectually it marked a violen
43、t reaction to the Enlightenment. Politically it was inspired by the revolutions in America and France and popular wars of independence in Poland, Spain, Greece, and elsewhere. Emotionally it expressed an extreme assertion of the self and the value of individual experience (the egotistical sublime),
44、together with the sense of the infinite and transcendental. Socially it championed progressive causes, though when these were frustrated it often produced a bitter, gloomy, and despairing outlook. As an age of romantic enthusiasm, The Romantic Age began in 1798 when William Wordsworth and Samuel Tay
45、lor published Lyrical Ballads, in the Preface of the 2nd and 3rd editions of which Wordsworth laid down the principles of poetry composition, and ended in 1832 when Walter Scott (1771-1832) died. At the beginning the literature reflected the political turmoil of the age stirred by French Revolution.
46、 The glory of the age is notably seen in the Poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, who were grouped into two generations: Passive Romantic poets represented by the Lakers / Lake Poets Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, and Blake though introspective 18th-cent. poets such as Thomas Gr
47、ay (1716-71) and William Cowper (1731-1800) show pre-Romantic tendencies, as well as Gothic novelists such as Horace Walpole (1717-97) and Monk Lewis (1775-1818, Matthew Gregory Lewis), who reflected those classes which had been ruined by the bourgeoisie, but later grew conservative and turned to the feudal past and idealized