英国文学简史1.docx

PART ONE: EARLY AND MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE
Chapter 1 The Making of England
1. The early inhabitants in the island now we call England were Britons(primitive people), a tribe of Celts(凯尔特人). From the Britons the island got its name of Britain, the land of Britons.
2. In 55 B.C., Britain was invaded by Julius Caesar, the Roman conqueror.(78A.D--410A.D.)
①The Roman occupation lasted for about 400 years, during which the Romans, for military purposes, built a network of highways, later called the Roman roads.
②Along these roads grew up scores of towns, and London, one of them, became an important trading centre.
③With the Roman conquest the Roman mode of life came across to Britain also. Roman theatres and baths quickly rose in the towns.
④Christianity was introduced to Britain.
3. Three tribes from Northern Europe: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded Britain. By the 7th century, 7 small kingdoms were combined into a united kingdom called England, or, the land of Angles.
The three dialects spoken by them naturally grew into a single language called Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, which is quite different from the English that we know today.
4. The Anglo-Saxon period witnessed a transition from tribal society to feudalism.

Chapter 2 Beowulf
1. English literature began with the Anglo-Saxon settlement in England. Of Old English literature, five relics are still preserved. All of them are poems, or, songs by the Anglo-Saxon minstrels who sang of the heroic deeds of old time to the chiefs and warriors in the feasting-hall. Four are short fragments of long poems.
One long poem of over 3000 lines is Beowulf, the national epic of the English people.
2. The story of Beowulf
Beowulf is the nephew of Hygelac(赫依拉), King of the Geats(高特), a people in Jutland(日德兰), Denmark.
Hrothgar(赫斯加), King of the Danes
Grendel(格伦德尔), a terrible monster
①Beowulf sails for Denmark with fourteen companions and offers to fight Grendel.
②Old she-monster comes to avenge Grendel's death. She is also killed.
③Beowulf bids farewell to his household and goes to seek the fire dragon with eleven companions. The dragon is killed at last. But Beowulf is hopelessly wounded.
3. Analysis of its content
①Beowulf is a folk legend brought to England by Anglo-Saxon from their continental homes.
②It was written down in the tenth century.
③It is partly-historical and partly-legendary.
④Its main stories(the fights with monsters)are evidently folk legends of primitive Northern tribes.
Beowulf reflects the features of the tribal society of ancient times.
4. Features of Beowulf
①the use of alliteration: Certain accented words in a line begin with the same consonant sound. There are generally 4 accents in a line, three of which show alliteration, and it is the initial sound of the third accented syllable that normally determines the alliteration.
②the use of metaphors and of understatements
Characteristics of Anglo-Saxon Literature:
Anglo-Saxon literature, that is, the Old English literature is at most exclusively a verse literature in oral form. It could be passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. Its creator for the most part is unknown. It was only given a written form long after its composition.

Chapter 3 Feudal England
1)The Norman Conquest
1. King Alfred the Great(阿尔弗雷德王)
More important as a literary work is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle(盎格鲁--撒克逊编年史), written under his encouragement and supervision, which begins with Caesar's conquest and is a monument of Old English prose.
2. The French-speaking Normans under Duke William came in 1066.(Norman Conquest)
He pushed England well on its way to feudalism, and the Norman Conquest marks the establishment of feudalism in England.
3. The scholar wrote in Latin and the courtier in French. There were almost no written literature in English for a time. Chronicles and religious poems were in Latin. Romances, the prominent kind of literature in the Anglo-Norman period, were at first all in French.
By the end of the fourteenth century, Normans and English intermingled. English was once more the dominant speech in the country.
2)Feudal England
1. The chief feature of the society was distinct division into classes, mainly two classes: landlords and peasants.
2. The miseries of peasants: Black Death(1348-1349), a Statute of Laborers, war expenditure(the war between England and France for 40 years), a poll-tax
3. The Rising of 1381: Wat Tyler(沃特.泰勒) and John Ball(约翰.保尔)
The peasants' rising had shaken the feudal system in England to the root.
3)The Romance
1. The most prevailing kind of literature in feudal England was the romance. It was a long composition, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose, describing the life and adventures of a noble hero. The central character of romances was the knight, a man of noble birth skilled in the use of weapons. He was commonly described as riding forth to seek adventures, taking part in tournaments, or fighting for his lord in battle. He was devoted to the church and the king. The code of manners and morals of a knight is known as chivalry. One who wanted to be a knight should serve an apprenticeship as a squire until he was admitted to the knighthood with solemn ceremony and the swearing of oaths.
2. The Romance Cycles: ①matters of Britain(adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table亚瑟王和他的圆桌骑士) ②matters of France(Emperor Charlemagne and his peers查理曼大帝和他的贵族) ③matters of Rome(Alexander the Great and so forth亚历山大大帝等等)
The romance of King Arthur is comparatively the most important for the history of English literature, its culmination in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight(高文爵士和绿衣骑士)(metrical romance), and its summing up in Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur(亚瑟王之死）(in English prose).
3.The class nature of the Romance
① The theme of loyalty to king and lord was repeatedly emphasized in romances, as loyalty was the corner-stone of feudal morality.
②The audience was of noble people from the court or the castle.
③The Romance had nothing to do with the common people.
④They composed for the noble, of the noble, and in most cases by the poets patronized by the noble.
4. Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur
Le Morte D'Arthur(the Death of King Arthur) is a collection of stories about King Arthur, translated from French by Sir Thomas Malory.
King Arthur is a romantic hero, whose original may be traced to an ancient Celtic chieftain Arthur of Wales who led victorious battles against the Saxons.
The legends of King Arthur are the foundation of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur.
the Knights of the Round Table at Arthur's court, the quest of the Holy Grail, the illicit love affair of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, the death of Arthur, and the dissolution of the fellowship of the Knights of the Round Table.
Malory treated the Arthurian legends in the spirit of medieval knighthood and chivalry.
King Arthur is the masterpiece of the 15th-century English literature.

Chapter 4 Langland
1. Piers the Plowman, a long poem of over 7,000 lines, was written by William Langland.
It was written in the old alliterative verse: each line contained three alliterative words, two of which were placed in the first half, and the third in the second half.
2. The poem sets forth a series of wonderful dreams, through which we can see a picture of feudal England. (the corruption of the ruling class and the hard life of the poor peasants)
①The exposure of the ruling class
Religion was personified as a rich gentleman, a roamer from manor to manor, a buyer of land, who had no pity for the poor.
②The story of the Cat(king) and Rats(parliament): my counsel is LET THAT CAT BE.
③The marriage of Lady Meed: the corruption of the ruling class is incarnated in a Lady Meed(Bribery), the enemy of Truth.
the quarrel between Lady Meed and Conscience(well-to-do peasants)
④The condition of the peasants: hard life
⑤The search for Truth
Piers is a peasant, whose simple, honest, and straight-forward character enables him to direct the other pilgrims on the way to Truth.
The author considers the toiling peasant to be the nearest to truth and salvation.
⑥He is by no means a representative of the most oppressed section of the peasantry. He is one of the well-to-do peasants. This speaks for the conservatism of his political attitude. He has no intention of upsetting the feudal order of society, only of setting it on a proper course. He accepts the existing social relations, and only asks the landlord to "Do no harm to thy bondsmen, that it may be well with thee."
⑦Social Significance
The poem remains a classic of popular literature. It's popular throughout the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries.
The exaltation of the peasant, of the oppressed, the threat to the powerful and rich of heavenly vengeance, which kindled the toiling people's sense of human dignity and equality before God, had played a part in arousing their revolutionary sentiment on the eve of the Rising of 1381.
3. Artistic features
①Piers the Plowman is one of the greatest of English poems. It is written in the form of a dream vision.
②It is an allegory which uses symbolism to relate truth. Its artistic merit may be shown by its portraits of the Seven Deadly Sins(pride, lechery, envy, wrath, sloth, glutton).

Chapter 5 The English Ballads
1. The English people had a literature of their own, not written but oral.
2. The most important department of English folk literature is the ballad. A ballad is a story told in song, usually in 4-line stanzas, with the second and fourth lines rhymed.
They are mainly the literature of the peasants, and in them one is able to understand the outlook of the English common people in feudal society.
The subjects of ballads are various in kind.
Of paramount importance are the ballads of Robin Hood.
3. The various ballads of Robin Hood are gathered into a collection called The Geste of Robin Hood, in which the whole life of the hero is portrayed.
△The character of Robin Hood
①The character of Robin Hood is many-sided. Strong, brave and clever, he is at the same time tender-hearted and affectionate. He is a man with a twinkle in his eye, a man fond of a merry joke and a hearty laugh. But the dominant key in his character is his hatred for the cruel oppressors and his love for the poor and downtrodden. As a counterpart to his hostility towards the upper ranks of society is his tenderness for the peasants.
②his reverence for the king
It was the peasants' traditional illusion for the King that disarmed the peasants in 1381, deluded as they were by the King's false promises of freedom.
△Social significance
①The ballads show the fighting spirit, indomitable courage and revolutionary energy of the English peasantry.
②In them are best exemplified the views of the exploited classes of feudal society.

Chapter 6 Chaucer
1. Geoffrey Chaucer is the founder of English poetry.
His diplomatic missions to Italy enabled him to study the poems of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio, famous Italian writers of the Renaissance period, which were later to have profound influence upon his own writing.
2. His literary career can be divided into three periods.
①works translated from France, as The Romaunt of the Rose(玫瑰传奇). The author is trying his hand on meter, on language, on subject.
②works adapted from the Italian, as Troilus and Criseyde(特罗勒斯和克莱西). The poet's own creativeness shows itself through borrowed themes.
③The Canterbury Tales(坎特伯雷故事集), which is purely English. The poet is no longer the mere interpreter of other poets. He has his own choice of subject, his own grasp of character and his own diction and plot.
3. Troilus and Criseyde is Chaucer's longest complete poem (about 8,000 lines) and his greatest artistic achievement. (Boccaccio)
A tragic love story about Troilus, a son of the King of Troy, and Criseyde, a beautiful widowed daughter of Calchas. Pandarus acts as go-between. But later she gives her love to Diomede, a handsome Greek warrior. Troilus, left in despair, is at last killed in the war.
In this poem Chaucer has not only given us a full and finished romance, but has endowed it with what medieval romance lacked---interest of character as well as of incident.
4. The Canterbury Tales is Chaucer's masterpiece and one of the monumental works in English literature.
①The whole poem is a collection of stories strung together with a simple plan. It should be an immense work of 124 stories. Only 24 were written. These tales cover practically all the major types of medieval literature: courtly romance, folk tale, beast fable, story of travel and adventure, saint's life, allegorical tale, sermon, alchemical account, and others. All these tales but two are written in verse.
②30 pilgrims range from the knight and squire and prioress, through the landed proprietor and wealthy tradesman, to the drunken cook and humble plowman. There are also a doctor and a lawyer, monks of different orders and nuns and priests, and a summoner, a sailor, a miller, a carpenter, a yeoman, and an Oxford scholar. Finally, in the center of the group is the Wife of Bath.
Prologue supplies a miniature of the English society of Chaucer's time. Looking at his word-pictures, we know at once how people lived in that era. That is why Chaucer has been called "the founder of English realism".
③The tales of the Knight, the Pardoner, the Nun's Priest and the Wife of Bath, together with the Prologue, are generally regarded as the best of the whole collection.
④From The Wife of Bath, we may see a very vivid sketch of a woman of the middle class, and a colorful picture of the domestic life of that class in Chaucer's own day.
⑤Social significance
△Chaucer affirms men and women's right to pursue their happiness on earth and opposes the dogma of asceticism.
△As a forerunner of humanism, he praises man's energy, intellect, quick wit and love of life.
△His tales expose and satirize the evils of the time, as the degeneration of the noble, the heartlessness of the judge and so on.
△He attacks the corruption of the Church. This gives us an impression that Chaucer's political viewpoint bears some resemblance with that of John Wycliffe the leader of the Lollards(罗拉德教), who preached reformation against the corruption of the Catholic Church.
⑥His contribution
△Chaucer's contribution to English poetry lies chiefly in the fact that he introduced from France the rhymed stanza(押韵诗节) of various types, especially the rhymed couplet(双韵诗体) of 5 accents in iambic meter(抑扬格韵律) (the "heroic couplet"英雄双行体) to English poetry instead of the old Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.
△He is the first great poet who wrote in the English language.
△The spoken English of the time consisted of several dialects, and Chaucer did much in making the dialect of London the standard for the modern English speech.

PART TWO: THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE
Chapter 1 Old England in Transitio