英国文学4.docx

1、英国文学4 Introduction The Old English period o Poetry Alliterative verse The major manuscripts Problems of dating Religious 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 Didact

2、ic poetry Verse romance The lyric o Prose The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods o 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 Political verse o Later Middle En

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

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

5、rly comedies The tragedies Shakespeares later works Playwrights after Shakespeare Ben Jonson Marston and Middleton Early 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 scie

6、nce on early Stuart prose Prose styles Miltons view of the poets role The Restoration o Literary reactions to the political 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 Dry

7、den Drama by Dryden and others Locke The 18th century o Publication of political literature Political journalism Major political 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 poe

8、try after Pope Burns Goldsmith Johnsons poetry and prose The Romantic period o The nature of Romanticism o 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 o The novel: Austen, Scott, and o

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

10、al prose o Late Victorian literature The novel Verse o The Victorian theatre o Victorian literary comedy “Modern” English 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, Joyc

11、e, Jones, and MacDiarmid The literature of World War I and the interwar period The 1930s The literature of World War II (193945) o Literature after 1945 Fiction I. The nature of Sentimentalismv Sentimentalism is one of the important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the

12、 18th 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 sym

13、pathy 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 t

14、his 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 miseries and injustices in the aristocratic-bourgeois society and indulges

15、in sentiment, 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 tr

16、ansformed 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

17、18th 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

18、 cure-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 unsa

19、tisfactory 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 cent

20、ury, 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 t

21、raced 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

22、, Oliver 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 nov

23、elists and among all English writers of the 18th centuryModernism is an omnibus term for a number of tendencies in the arts which were prominent in the first half of the 20th c.; In English literature it is particularly associated with the writings of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia W

24、oolf, W. B. Yeats, F. M. Ford and Joseph Conrad. Broadly, Modernism reflects the impact upon literature of the psychology of Freud and the anthropology of Sir J. Frazer, as expressed in The Golden Bough (1890-1915). A sense of cultural relativism is pervasive in much modernist writing, as is an awar

25、eness of the irrational and the workings of the unconscious mind. Technically it was marked by a persistent experimentalism. It rejected the traditional framework of narrative, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose, in favour of stream-of-consciousness presentation of personality,

26、 a dependence on the poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic communication, and upon myth as a characteristic structural principle. Modernist literature is a literature of discontinuity, both historically, being based upon a sharp rejection of the procedures and values of the immediate pa

27、st, to which it adopts an adversary stance; and aesthetically. Although so diverse in its manifestation, it was recognized as representing an abrupt break with all tradition . The aim of five centuries of European effort is openly abandoned. (H. Read) Modernist works (for instance, the poetry of Eli

28、ot and Pound) may have to the unfamiliar reader a tendency to dissolve into chaos of sharp atomistic impressions, and some critics (e.g. Ortega Y Gasset) have deplored their drift towards what he describes as dehumanization, away from the human, all too human elements predominant in romantic and nat

29、uralistic production.The modernist movement in literature around the turn of the century created an incredible change in the way writers viewed their art. This new group of writers were affected by the new perception held of the world and our place in it, and they tried to communicate their fears an

30、d opinions through unique new writing styles. Ezra Pound, one of the foremost figures of this period, told his contemporaries to- Make it new. In order to create new literary forms, the old ones had to be destroyed. Many of the writers chose to radically change their writing to fit a new era. These

31、writers were influenced by World War I, rampant materialism, and depression. As Virginia Woolf said: On or about December 1910 human character changed. All human relations shifted - those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations shift there is at the same