《英美文学选读》自学笔记Word格式.docx

1、 Shools of Writings1. Naturalism 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

2、 early years of the 20th cents. 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 sp

3、eaking, Naturalism is characterized 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 subjec

4、ts worthy of serious literary 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 temperament2. SentimentalismI. The nature of Sentimentalism S

5、entimentalism is one of the important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the 18th century. 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, tender

6、ness, and benevolence over social duties. Literary work of the sentimentalism, marked by a sincere sympathy for the poverty-stricken, expropriated peasants, wrote the simple annals of the poor”. Writers of sentimentalism justly criticized the cruelty of the capitalist relations and the gross social

7、injustices brought about by the bourgeois revolutions. But 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.Sentimentalism embraces a pessimistic outlook and blames reason and the Industr

8、ial Revolution for the miseries and injustices in the aristocratic-bourgeois society and indulges in sentiment, hence the definite signs of decadence in the literary works of the sentimental tradition. II. Social background of Sentimentalism The bourgeoisie gaining their ascendancy in national polit

9、ics in England after the two revolutions of 1640 and 1688. The handicrafts labour gradually transformed to machine industry in the course of the Industrial Revolution in the middle and later decades of the 18th century The new capitalist relations were established. Sharp social contradictions began

10、to take shape and to threaten the short-lived social stability in the early decades of the 18th century. The continuous, large-scale enclosures of land resulted in rural bankruptcy. The poverty and misery of the exploited and unemployed labouring masses in the cities increased. The Enlightenment whi

11、ch believed in educating the people to be kind and righteous and upheld reason as the cure-all for all social wrongs and miseries declined. All this led to skepticism and disbelief in the myth about the bourgeois society as the best of all possible worlds Lack of a better or more sound substitute fo

12、r reason as the 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 Hence sentimentalism in liter

13、ature. III. Literary Forms in Sentimentalism In 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. In English

14、drama of the century, 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. in the fie

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

16、 and the most typical of the sentimental tradition among all English novelists and among all English writers of the 18th century3. Symbolism in LiteratureJust as characterization and dialogue and plot work on the surface to move the story along, symbolism works under the surface to tie the storys ex

17、ternal 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 some

18、thing 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 were li

19、kely 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

20、 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. Essentially, allegory insults

21、our intelligence.Allegory also, however, limits our perceptions. 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

22、 than the scriptural story on which it was based.To take allegory 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 al

23、legory operates very consciously, symbolism operates on the level 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 ex

24、ample, we discover that Hamlet is fascinated with actors and acting. 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 h

25、is fathers murderer. The motif of the actors is a symbol for the 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 i

26、s clear that the Valley of Ashes represents the real state of Toms 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

27、does, in a grim ashen valley presided over by a billboard decorated 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;

28、Dantes journey into the underworld in The Inferno; and Coleridges 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 a

29、n integral component of fiction, because it enriches the narrative by pulling its message down to the level of our unconscious and anchoring it there.4. RomanticismI. IntroductionRomanticism （the Romantic Movement）, a literary movement, and profound shift in sensibility, which took place in Britain

30、and throughout Europe 1770-1848. Intellectually it marked a violent 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

31、and the value of individual experience （the egotistical sublime）, 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 Taylor 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 183