《英美文学选读》自学资料英国文学部分.docx

1、英美文学选读自学资料英国文学部分英美文学选读自学资料（英国文学部分） Contents Introduction The Old English period Poetry Alliterative verse The major manuscripts Problems of dating Religious verse Elegiac and heroic verse Prose Early translations into English Late 10th- and 11th-century prose The Early Middle English period Poetry I

2、nfluence of French poetry Didactic poetry Verse romance The lyric Prose The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods Later Middle English poetry The revival of alliterative poetry Courtly poetry Chaucer and Gower Poetry after Chaucer and Gower Courtly poetry Popular and secular verse Polit

3、ical verse Later Middle English prose Religious prose Secular prose Middle English drama The transition from medieval to Renaissance The Renaissance period: 15501660 Literature and the age Social conditions Intellectual and religious revolution The race for cultural development Elizabethan poetry an

4、d prose Development of the English language Sidney and Spenser Elizabethan lyric The sonnet sequence Other poetic styles Prose styles Elizabethan and early Stuart drama Theatre and society Theatres in London and the provinces Professional playwrights Christopher Marlowe Shakespeares works The early

5、histories The early comedies The tragedies Shakespeares later works Playwrights after Shakespeare Ben Johnson Marston and Middleton Early Stuart drama Early Stuart poetry and prose The Metaphysical poets Donne Donnes influence Jonson and the Cavalier poets Continued influence of Spenser Effect of re

6、ligion and science on early Stuart prose Prose styles Miltons view of the poets role The Restoration Literary reactions to the political climate The defeated republicans Writings of the Nonconformists Writings of the Royalists Major genres and major authors of the period Chroniclers Diarists The cou

7、rt wits Dryden Drama by Dryden and others Locke The 18th century Publication of political literature Political journalism Major political writers Pope Thomson, Prior, and Gay Swift Shaftesbury and others The novel The major novelists Defoe Richardson Fielding Smollett Sterne Minor novelists Poets an

8、d poetry after Pope Burns Goldsmith Johnsons poetry and proseThe Romantic period The nature of Romanticism Poetry Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge Other poets of the early Romantic period The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron Minor poets of the later period The novel: Austen, Scott, and oth

9、ers Miscellaneous prose Drama The Post-Romantic and Victorian eras Early Victorian literature: the age of the novel Dickens Thackeray, Gaskell, and others The Bronts Early Victorian verse Tennyson Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Arnold and Clough Early Victorian nonfictional prose Lat

10、e Victorian literature The novel Verse The Victorian theatre Victorian literary comedy “Modern” English literature: the 20th century From 1900 to 1945 The Edwardians The modernist revolution Anglo-American modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot Celtic modernism: Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDia

11、rmid The literature of World War I and the interwar period The 1930s The literature of World War II (193945) Literature after 1945 Fiction Poetry Drama Additional reading General works The Old English and early Middle English periods The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods The Renaiss

12、ance period, 15501660 Elizabethan poetry and prose Elizabethan and early Stuart drama Early Stuart poetry and prose The Restoration and the 18th century The Romantic period The Post-Romantic and Victorian eras “Modern” English literature: the 20th century From 1900 to 1945 Literature after 1945Natur

13、alism Naturalism is a term of literary history, primarily a French movement in prose 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 ce

14、nts. In France Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the dominant practitioner of Naturalism 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 chara

15、cterized by a refusal to idealize experience and by the persuasion that human life 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 litera

16、ry treatment. Emphasis was laid on the influence of the material and economic environment on behaviour, especially in Zola, on the determining effects of physical and hereditary factors in forming the individual temperament. Sentimentalism I. The nature of SentimentalismvSentimentalism is one of the

17、 important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the 18th century.vAlong 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

18、social duties. vLiterary work of the sentimentalism, marked by a sincere sympathy for the poverty-stricken, expropriated peasants, wrote the simple annals of the poor”.vWriters of sentimentalism justly criticized the cruelty of the capitalist relations and the gross social injustices brought about b

19、y the bourgeois revolutions.vBut they attacked the progressive aspect of this great 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 m

20、iseries and injustices in the aristocratic-bourgeois society andindulges in sentiment, hence the definite signs of decadence in the literary works of the sentimental tradition. II. Social background of Sentimentalism vThe bourgeoisie gaining their ascendancy in national politics in England after the

21、 two revolutions of 1640 and 1688. vThe handicrafts labour gradually transformed to machine industry in the course of the Industrial Revolution in the middle and later decades of the 18th century vThe new capitalist relations were established. vSharp social contradictions began to take shape and to

22、threaten the short-lived social stability in the early decades of the 18th century. vThe continuous, large-scale enclosures of land resulted in rural bankruptcy. vThe poverty and misery of the exploited and unemployed labouring masses in the cities increased. vThe Enlightenment which believed in edu

23、cating the people to be kind and righteous and upheld reason as the cure-all for all social wrongs and miseries declined. vAll this led to skepticism and disbelief in the myth about the bourgeois society as the best of all possible worlds vLack of a better or more sound substitute for reason as the

24、instrument to reform the none-too-satisfactory or even highly unsatisfactory 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 vHence sentimentalism in literature. III. Lit

25、erary Forms in SentimentalismvIn English poetry of the 18th century, 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. vIn English drama of the c

26、entury, the true founder of sentimental comedy has often been traced 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. vin the field of prose f

27、iction that sentimentalism had its most outstanding expression, Oliver Goldsmiths The Vicar of Wakefield may be considered as representative works of this category. vOliver Goldsmiths poetry and prose fiction was quite an exponent of sentimentalism. vLaurence Sterne was the most prominent and the mo

28、st typical of the sentimental tradition among all English novelists and among all English writers of the 18th century.Symbolism in Literature by 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 stor

29、ys external action to the theme. Early in the development of the fictional 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

30、 something else. The protagonist Christian, to no ones surprise, stands 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 we

31、re likely to encounter on their journey to salvation. Even the names 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 reader. 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.