1、自考英语本科英美文学选读英美文学自学资料英美文学选读自学资料(英国文学部份)Contents Introduction The Old English period oPoetry Alliterative verse The major manuscripts Problems of dating Religious verse Elegiac and heroic verse oProse Early translations into English Late 10th- and 11th-century prose The Early Middle English period oPo
2、etry Influence of French poetry Didactic poetry Verse romance The lyric oProse The later Middle English and early Renaissance periods oLater Middle English poetry The revival of alliterative poetry Courtly poetry Chaucer and Gower Poetry after Chaucer and Gower Courtly poetry Popular and secular ver
3、se Political verse oLater Middle English prose Religious prose Secular prose oMiddle English drama oThe transition from medieval to Renaissance The Renaissance period: 15501660 oLiterature and the age Social conditions Intellectual and religious revolution The race for cultural development oElizabet
4、han poetry and prose Development of the English language Sidney and Spenser Elizabethan lyric The sonnet sequence Other poetic styles Prose styles oElizabethan and early Stuart drama Theatre and society Theatres in London and the provinces Professional playwrights Christopher Marlowe Shakespeares wo
5、rks The early histories The early comedies The tragedies Shakespeares later works Playwrights after Shakespeare Ben Jonson Marston and Middleton Early Stuart drama oEarly Stuart poetry and prose The Metaphysical poets Donne Donnes influence Jonson and the Cavalier poets Continued influence of Spense
6、r Effect of religion and science on early Stuart prose Prose styles Miltons view of the poets role The Restoration oLiterary reactions to the political climate The defeated republicans Writings of the Nonconformists Writings of the Royalists oMajor genres and major authors of the period Chroniclers
7、Diarists The court wits Dryden Drama by Dryden and others Locke The 18th century oPublication of political literature Political journalism Major political writers Pope Thomson, Prior, and Gay Swift Shaftesbury and others oThe novel The major novelists Defoe Richardson Fielding Smollett Sterne Minor
8、novelists oPoets and poetry after Pope Burns Goldsmith Johnsons poetry and prose The Romantic period oThe nature of Romanticism oPoetry Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge Other poets of the early Romantic period The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron Minor poets of the later period oThe novel:
9、 Austen, Scott, and others oMiscellaneous prose oDrama The Post-Romantic and Victorian eras oEarly Victorian literature: the age of the novel Dickens Thackeray, Gaskell, and others The Bronts oEarly Victorian verse Tennyson Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning Arnold and Clough oEarly Vict
10、orian nonfictional prose oLate Victorian literature The novel Verse oThe Victorian theatre oVictorian literary comedy “Modern” English literature: the 20th century oFrom 1900 to 1945 The Edwardians The modernist revolution Anglo-American modernism: Pound, Lewis, Lawrence, and Eliot Celtic modernism:
11、 Yeats, Joyce, Jones, and MacDiarmid The literature of World War I and the interwar period The 1930s The literature of World War II (193945) oLiterature after 1945 Fiction Poetry Drama Additional reading oGeneral works oThe Old English and early Middle English periods oThe later Middle English and e
12、arly Renaissance periods oThe Renaissance period, 15501660 Elizabethan poetry and prose Elizabethan and early Stuart drama Early Stuart poetry and prose oThe Restoration and the 18th century oThe Romantic period oThe Post-Romantic and Victorian eras o“Modern” English literature: the 20th century Fro
13、m 1900 to 1945 Literature after 1945 NaturalismNaturalism 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 o
14、f the 19th and 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
15、it. Broadly speaking, 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 p
16、rovided subjects 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 temperament.SentimentalismI. The nature of Sent
17、imentalismvSentimentalism is one of the 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
18、pity, tenderness, and benevolence over 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
19、gross social injustices brought about by 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
20、and the Industrial Revolution for the miseries 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
21、 national politics in England after the 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 cont
22、radictions began to take shape and to 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. vT
23、he Enlightenment which believed in educating 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 mor
24、e sound substitute for 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 vHence s
25、entimentalism in literature. III. Literary 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 Willi
26、am Cowper. vIn English 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 Restora
27、tion period. vin the field 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.vOliver Goldsmiths poetry and prose fiction was quite an exponent of sentimentalism. vLaurence Ster
28、ne was the most prominent and the most 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 wor
29、ks under the surface to tie the storys 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
30、, everything and everyone stands for 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 B
31、unyan felt that Christian readers were 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 emotiona
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