专八考试重要文学术语.doc

Important Literary Terms
I Literary Schools & Groups
Beat Generation is a term used to describe a group of American writers who came to prominence in the late 1950s, and also the cultural phenomena that they wrote about and inspired (later sometimes called "beatniks"): a rejection of mainstream American values, experimentation with drugs and alternate forms of sexuality, and an interest in Eastern spirituality.The major works of Beat writing are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957).

Formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate the inherent features of a text. The formalist approach reduces the importance of a text’s historical, biographical, and cultural context.Two important schools of formalism are Russian formalism and Anglo-American New Criticism.

Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery, and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and discursiveness typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. British poet Richard Aldington and American poet Ezra Pound are major imagist poets.

Lost Generation is a phrase made popular by American author Ernest Hemingway in his first published novel The Sun Also Rises.[1] Often it is used to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris and other parts of Europe, some after military service in the First World War. Figures identified with the "Lost Generation" include authors and poets Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Waldo Peirce, and John Dos Passos.

Metaphysical Poets were a loose group of British lyric poets of the 17th century, who shared an interest in metaphysical concerns and a common way of investigating them. Major metaphysical poets are John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell.

Modernism 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 Woolf, W. B. Yeats, F. M. Ford and Joseph Conrad.

Naturalism is a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality. Naturalism is the outgrowth of Realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere. In the United States, the genre is associated principally with writers such as John Steinbeck, Jack London, Edith Wharton, and most prominently Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser . The term naturalism operates primarily in counter distinction to realism, particularly the mode of realism codified in the 1870s and 1880s, and associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James.

Neoclassicism is predicated upon and derived from both classical and contemporary French models, (see Boileau's L'Art Poetique (1674) and Pope's "Essay on Criticism" (1711) as critical statements of Neoclassical principles) embodied a group of attitudes toward art and human existence — ideals of order, logic, restraint, accuracy, "correctness," "restraint," decorum, and so on, which would enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or reproduce the structures and themes of Greek or Roman originals. Though its origins were much earlier (the Elizabethan Ben Jonson, for example, was as indebted to the Roman poet Horace as Alexander Pope would later be), Neoclassicism dominated English literature from the Restoration in 1660 until the end of the eighteenth century, when the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge marked the full emergence of Romanticism.

Post-Modernism

Realism is defined as "the faithful representation of reality" or "verisimilitude," realism is a literary technique practiced by many schools of writing. In American literature, the term "realism" encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the century during which William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, Mark Twain, and others wrote fiction devoted to accurate representation and an exploration of American lives in various contexts

Romanticism (the Romantic Movement), a literary movement which expressed an extreme assertion of the self and the value of individual experience.As an age of romantic enthusiasm, The Romantic Age began in 1798 when William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor published Lyrical Ballads and ended in 1832 when Walter Scott (1771-1832) died. The glory of the age is notably seen in the Poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats, who were grouped into two generations: Passive Romantic poets represented by the Lakers / Lake Poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Burns, and Blake. Active / Revolutionary Romantic poets represented by those younger poets — Byron, Shelley and Keats.

Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller.

Symbolism

University Wits were members of a group of notable English playwrights of the late 16th century. Notable institutions associated with the University wits are the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. This diverse and talented loose association of London writers and dramatists set the stage for the theatrical Renaissance of Elizabethan England. The chief University Wits include Christopher Marlowe Robert Greene Thomas Nashe Thomas Lodge George Peele Thomas Middleton John Lyly Thomas Kyd.

II Literary Genres

Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. Example: Fairie Queen by Spenser; Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan; Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Analogy is the comparison of two pairs which have the same relationship. The key is to ascertain the relationship between the first so you can choose the correct second pair. Part to whole, opposites, results of are types of relationships you should find. Example: hot is to cold as fire is to ice OR hot:cold::fire:ice

Deus ex Machina (literally "god out of a machine") is an improbable contrivance in a story. The phrase describes an artificial, or improbable, character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot (such as an angel suddenly appearing to solve problems).

Epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. The best known epics in English literature is John Milton's Paradise Lost and the Anglo-Saxon story Beowulf.

Dystopia:

Aside is an actor’s speech, directed to the audience, that is not supposed to be heard by other actors on stage.

Ballad is a narrative folk song.

Couplet is a style of poetry defined as a complete thought written in two lines with rhyming ends. The most popular of the couplets is the heroic couplet. The heroic couplet consists of two rhyming lines of iambic pentameter usually having a pause in the middle of each line. One of William Shakespeare’s trademarks was to end a sonnet with a couplet, as in the poem “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long as lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Denouement is literally meaning the action of untying, a denouement is the final outcome of the main complication in a play or story.
Dramatic monologue is a literary device that is used when a character reveals his or her innermost thoughts and feelings, those that are hidden throughout the course of the story line, through a poem or a speech.The most famous examples of this special type of monologue can be found within the poems of Robert Browning, poem such as "My Last Duchess".

Elegy is a type of literature defined as a song or poem, written in elegiac couplets, that expresses sorrow or lamentation, usually for one who has died. Two famous elegies include Thomas Gray’s "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and Walt Whitman’s "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d".

Irony is an implied discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. Example:"A fine thing indeed!" he muttered to himself.

Juxtaposition In literature, it's when one theme or idea or person or whatever is paralleled to another.

lyric is a lyric is a song-like poem written mainly to express the feelings of emotions or thought from a particular person, thus separating it from narrative poems. Some of the more note-worthy authors who have used the lyric include William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats.
Malpropism is the incorrect use of a word by substituting a similar-sounding word with different meaning, usually with comic effect.

Metaphor is a comparison of two unlike things using the verb "to be" and not using like or as as in a simile. Example: He is a pig. Thou art sunshine.

Metonymy is substituting a word for another word closely associated with it. Example:
bowing to the sceptered isle. (Great Britain)

Oxymoron is putting two contradictory words together. Examples: hot ice, cold fire, wise fool, sad joy, eloquent silence.

Paradox reveals a kind of truth which at first seems contradictory. Two opposing ideas. Example: Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage.

Personification is giving human qualities to animals or objects. Example: a smiling moon, a jovial sun

Satire is a literary tone used to ridicule or make fun of human vice or weakness, often with the intent of correcting, or changing, the subject of the satiric attack.

Simile is the comparison of two unlike things using like or as. Related to metaphor Example: He eats like a pig. Vines like golden prisons.

Sonnet is a sonnet is a distinctive poetic style that uses system or pattern of metrical structure and verse composition usually consisting of fourteen lines, arranged in a set rhyme scheme or pattern.

stanza is a unified group of lines in poetry.

Stream of consciousness is a special mode of narration that undertakes to capture the full spectrum and the continuous flow of a character's mental process.