维多利亚时代文学作品.doc

英国文学史及选读
British Literature-An Introduction

课程名称：英国文学史及选读

教师姓名：谢群 李晶

编写时间：2007――2008年度第一学期

使用教材：新编英国文学教程，彭家海主编，华中科技大学出版社，2006年4月第1版

授课对象：英语专业0601、0602、0603、0604班学生

Teaching Plan for Unit 11
The Victorian Age (3)
Teaching objectives
1. Students should be clear about the literature in The Victorian Age

II. Teaching Strategies
1. Use student-centered teaching method to guide students in their learning; encourage students think themselves and participate in class activities actively.
2. Through group work or discussion in pairs to develop students’ communicative ability.
3. Encourage students to find related information through Internet or other references to develop their self-study ability.

III. Teaching Aims:
1. To provide the learners with a brief outline of the history of British literature up to the end of 19th century;
2. To introduce the learners to imaginative use of English and to help them towards an appreciation of literary language and literature;
3. To consolidate and extend the learners’ knowledge and fluency in English through interaction with literary texts;
4. To further develop the learners’ ability to recognize and express emotional and moral attitudes on a higher level than about daily occurrences so as to facilitate their communication with educated native speakers;
5. To prepare the learners for the study of literature in English at a higher level and to help them to develop interest in and, hopefully, the habit of，reading extensively.

IV. Time Allocation
Introduction to the Victorian Age…………… 1 period
Text Study of Charles Dickens Great Expectations…………………. 1 period
V. Teaching Methods
l lectures on the related historical and cultural background
l textual study
l class discussion or presentation
l reading assignment before each class
l group work
l research work for the term paper

VI. Textbooks
1. Peng Jiahai,2006,《A Course Book of English Literature》，Wuhan: Huazhong University of Science and Technology

VII. Reference books
Baldick, Chris. 2000. Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Zhang, Boxiang.1997-98. British Literature, a Coursebook. Vol.1-3. Wuhan: Wuhan Uni. Press.
VIII. Teaching Procedures
Victorian Literature (3)
Charles Dickens (1812-1870)
1. Life and Career
l Charles Dickens was born in 1812 at Portsmouth, where his father worked as a Navy pay office clerk. As a little boy, Charles was exceptionally bright and articulate, and was often asked to perform before people. The boy had a haphazard primary education, and spent much time alone reading in his little room all kinds of books, especially the eighteenth-century novels such as Humphrey Clinker, Peregrine Pickle, Robinson Crusoe, Roderick Random, Tom Jones, The Vicar of Wakefield, etc. The happy childhood ended in 1822 when the family moved to London. At the age of 12, young Charles had to work at a shoe-blacking factory in the East End because his father was taken to the Marshelsea prison, London, for debt. He worked 12 hours a day wrapping and pasting labels on bottled blacking, for 6 shillings a week. Those lonely, hungry days inflicted so early in life upon such a sensitive boy had left an ineradicable bitter remembrance in the remainder of his life. Years later he wrote: "I never said, to man or boy, how it was I came to be there, or gave the least indication of being sorry that I was there. That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew but I. . . . " ". . . My whole nature was so penetrated with the grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a dear wife and children; even that I am a man; and wander desolately back to that time of my life. " The bitter experience of those years is described at greater length in the semi-autobiographical David Copperfield (1849-1850).
l In 1827, the fifteen-year-old Charles left school for good and entered a lawyer's office and later became a Parliamentary reporter for newspapers. This experience enabled him to get acquainted with the inside knowledge of the British legal and political system, gave him the chance to meet people of all kinds, and prepared him both in art and stuff for his coming literary career.
l Beginning from 1836, the year he married and published his first work Sketches by Boz, the rest of his life was a story of work, of work without rest. Besides writing novels, he was the editor or owner of several newspapers and magazines; he was an enthusiastic participant and organizer of some charity activities. He traveled to America twice and widely on the Continent. In his later years, he also did a lot of recitations of his works and even joined in their performances.
l In 1870, Charles Dickens died of overwork, leaving his last detective novel Edwin Drood unfinished.

2. Main Features of His Work
1) A Master Storyteller
l The greatness of Charles Dickens is of a peculiar kind. He is, at the same time, a great entertainer and a great artist. Though by no means an intellectual, Dickens is a genius in storytelling. With the very first sentence, he engages the readers' attention and holds it to the end. The publication method of installment helps him cultivate an ability to sustain interest through all kinds of literary devices, such as suspension, coincidence, deus ex machina, dramatic dialogues and melodrama, etc. By confining to the bourgeois middle-class life he knows so well, he is able to entertain a large audience who find a lot in common in his interest and concern. By limiting the central world of his creation to the world of his own life, he presents us a London with an extraordinary vividness. The atmosphere of London fog, London smoke, the pale dusty London sunshine, London's shabbiness, variety, intimacy and, vastness are all there in his works. This power of realizing the actual setting never fails Dickens.

2) Characters
l Dickens is a comprehensive novelist. His character-portrayal is the most distinguishing feature of his creation. His world seems to be fuller and richer than many other novelists'. Among his vast range of various characters, there are both types and individuals. They are impressive not because they are true to life. On the contrary, they are mostly larger than life, seldom to be found in real life. Often they are humorous exaggerations of some well-marked human traits-sometimes one's personal manner of speech, sometimes his habitual gesture or behavior and sometimes just some physical peculiarity. In many cases, universal experience becomes individualized in types.
l Dickens is best at child character portrayal. Almost all his child heroes and heroines are innocent, virtuous, persecuted or helpless. They are spotless in their thoughts, intentions and wishes. In the very heart and soul, they are pure, refined and gentle-hearted. Some of the most unforgettable characters like Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Paul Dombey, David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, and Little Pip, have become famous type characters.
l His success with children lies in his writing from a child's point of view. Children are instinctive: they have strong imaginations, vivid sensations; they see life as black and white, and bigger than reality; their enemies seem demons, their friends angels; their joys or sorrows absolute and eternal. They do not look at life with the eye of the wise, the intellectual or the instructed observer; they are not ashamed of sentiment. In fact, they see life very much like Dickens and he certainly does have an extraordinary understanding of them. The first halves of David Copperfield and Great Expectations are among the most profound pictures of childhood in English literature. Here Dickens seems not only living, but life-like, for though the world is more exaggerated, lit by brighter lights, darkened by sharper shadows than those of grown-up's, it is exactly the world as it is seen through the eyes of a child.
l Dickens is also famous for the characterization of horrible and grotesque figures, such as Fagin and Bill Sykes (Oliver Twist), Quilp (The Old Curiosity Shop), Squeers (Nicholas Nickleby), Uriah Heep (David Copperfield), Mr. Tulkinghorn (Bleak House), Wigg (Our Mutual Friend), etc., and the broadly humorous or comical characters like Sam Weller (The Pickwick Papers), Mr. Mieawber (David Copperfield), Mr. Bumble (Oliver Twist), and Mrs. Gamp (Martin Chuzzlewit). With a peculiar power he inherits from Smollett, he is able to portray a character with just a few words or by highlighting or exaggerating some peculiar features of his characters.

3) Humor and Pathos
l Dickens's novels are characterized by a mingling of humor and pathos. He seems to believe that life is itself a mixture of joy and grief; life is delightful just because it is at once comic and tragic. Dickens is a great humorist. Whether he exaggerates a person's physical traits or ridicules his temperamental defects, whether he means to be light-heartedly jocular or bitterly satirical, he is sure to produce roaring laughter or understanding smiles. To match his humorous genius, Dickens is also very good at painting pictures of great pathos. After reading The Old Curiosity Shop and Dombey and Son, one can hardly forget the dying scenes of little Nell and little Paul. So, this is apparently a key to his popularity-giving readers bright merriments and dark gloom at the same time, mingling tears and laughters as in real life. Nevertheless, here also lies the danger for an artist. Sometimes Dickens is so eager to put forth his humorous genius and so anxious to arouse from the readers the same great sympathy and concern as he has that he goes a bit too far. In such cases, the dramatic scenes degenerates into melodrama, and sentiments slip into excessive sentimentality. It weakens the realistic and natural effects , of both his narrative and characterization.

3. Novels
l Altogether, Charles Dickens wrote 17 novels. Their creation covers a range of over twenty years. Most of his novels, especially the early ones, even if they are products of bursting fantasy, are deeply rooted in his knowledge of that petty-bourgeois urban world which he knew under the skin, from its pretentious absurdity to its most sordid squalor. The combination of an optimism about people and a critical realism about the society is present in his works from the very beginning.
l Roughly speaking, Dickens' works can be divided into two groups: the early group and the later group.
A. Early Works (1836-1850)
l The early group includes all those up to David Copperfield, in which he attacks one or more specific social evils: workhouses, debtor's prisons, Yorkshire school, legal fraud, capital punishment, envy and self-righteousness disguised as religion and justice, etc. Here, the techniques, both of the fiction itself and of the social criticism embodied within it are relatively straightforward. The institutions Dickens attacks are easily recognizable, and once the abuse has been overcome, the way is open to a happy conclusion.
l This period is also characterized by the creation of folk heroes such as Pickwick, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Nell, etc. The good, honest people, mostly working-class, are shown at the center of life in a society, which, however corrupted, still works upon the rule that the virtuous be rewarded for their virtue. The structures here are often loose; the plots are wildly improbable; coincidences abound; deeds often lack their natural outcome. Yet the youthful optimism of the young successful author was so effectively contagious that it had at its beckon thousands upon thousands of readers, from the most illiterate to the most intellectual.
B. Later Works (1852-1870)
l The early success with the public gives Dickens not only an assurance that leads to increased powers of poetic expression and narrative technique, but also the confidence to assert his thematic priorities to a point where they contradict the social assumptions of many of his readers, though he never rejects the basic method which has brought him his initial success.
l All the later novels, with the exception of A Tale of Two Cities (1859), present a criticism of the most fundamental institutions of the Victorian England. Here, his attacks on capitalist society become more urgent and passionate, and this urgency creates novels of great compactness and concentration. Though the later books are in places just as funny as the earlier, as Dickens explores more bleakly a bleaker world, there are fewer jokes and the humor becomes more satirical and the comedy becomes "harsher. His laughter ceases to be free, or carefree; it is constantly inhibited by the consciousness of the unfunny side of life.
l This period also marks the development of Dickens towards a highly conscious artist of the modern type. The novels become heavily symbolic, not only providing the work a predominant atmosphere but also highlighting its central concern. The institutions attacked are important not in themselves but as metaphors for a repressive social psychology. Besides, the structures are usually more complex but well framed; the plots, often multiplied, are well developed.
中南财经政法大学外语学院 英语系