EnglishLiterature教案.doc

English Literature
1. What is literature?
This is a quite difficult question to answer, because how to define “literature” is really a too complicated matter, different people in different historical periods have different understandings about “literature”.
There have been various attempts to define literature. You can define it, for example, as “imaginative” writing in the sense of fiction----writing which is not literally true. But even the briefest reflection on what people commonly include under the heading of literature suggests that this will not do. Seventeenth-century English literature includes Shakespeare, Webster, Marvell and Milton; but it also stretches to the essays of Frances Bacon, the sermons of John Donne, Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography etc. Nineteenth-century English literature usually includes Lamb(though not Bentham), Macauly(but not Marx), Mill (but not Darwin or Herbert Spencer).
According to the Russian formalists, perhaps literature is definable not according to whether it is fictional or “imaginative”, but because it uses language in peculiar ways. On this theory, literature is a kind of writing which represents an “organized violence committed on ordinary speech”. Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. For example, “Don’t you know the drivers are on strike?” is not literary, but “My love is like a red red rose” or “Thou still unravished bride of quietness’” is.
Literature is “non-pragmatic” discourse: unlike biology textbooks and notes to the milkman it serves no immediate practical purposes, but is to be taken as referring to a general state of affairs. Literature is a kind of self-referential language, a language which talks about itself.

Literature is a highly-valued kind of writing.
2. The four main literary genres
1) Novel:
The word “novel” in English derived from the Italian word “novella”, which means “tale, piece of news”. Now it is commonly thought that a novel is a piece of story or prose narrative containing characters, action and incident, and, perhaps, a plot. As an extended narrative, it is distinguished from the short story and from the work of middle length called the novelette. Currently the word “novella” is often used as an equivalent for novelette such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In Italy, in the 14th century, there was a vogue for collections of short tales, of which the most famous is Boccaccio’s Decameron(1348-1358)(《十日谈》)，which had much influence on Chaucer. The short stories are extremely important in the history and development of the novel because they were in prose, and because in their method of narration and in their creation and development of character they are forerunners of the modern novel. Spain was ahead of the rest of Europe in the development of the novel form. At the very beginning of the 14th century, it began to produce novels. The greatest of all Spanish novels is Cervantes’s Don Quixote, which was written in the early 17th century. In England，at the end of the 16th century, the novel was in its infancy. From the closing years of the century, there were two important works in the evolution of the extended prose narrative which can be regarded as the embryonic form of novel. They are John Lyly’s Euphues (in two parts, 1578 and 1580) and Sir Philip Sydney’s Pastoral romance Arcadia(1575).
2) Poetry
It is a form of language sung, chanted, spoken, or written according to some pattern of
recurrence that emphasizes the relationships between words on the basis of sound as well as sense: this pattern is almost always a rhythm or metre, which may be supplemented by rhyme or alliteration or both. The demands of verbal patterning usually make poetry a more condensed medium than prose or everyday speech, often involving variations in syntax, the use of special words and phrases(poetic diction) peculiar to poets, and a more frequent and more elaborate use of figures of speech, principally metaphor and simile. All cultures have their poetry, using it for various purposes from sacred ritual to obscene insult, but it is generally employed in those utterances and writings that call for heightened intensity of emotion, dignity of expression, or subtlety of meditation. Poetry is valued for combining pleasures of sound with freshness of ideas, whether these be solemn or comical. The three major categories of poetry are narrative, dramatic and lyric, the last being the most extensive.
3) Prose
It is the form of written language that is not organized according to the formal patterns verse; although it will have some sort of rhythm and some devices of repetition and balance, these are not governed by a regularly sustained formal arrangement, the significant unit being the sentence rather line. Prose has as its minimum requirement some degree of continuous coherence beyond that of a mere list.
Prose poem is a short composition employing the rhythmic cadences and other devices of free verse(such as poetic imageries and figures) but printed wholly or partly in the format of prose, i.e. with a right-hand margin instead of regular line-breaks. A prose poem is a self-contained work usually similar to a lyric, whereas poetic prose may occur intermittently within a longer prose work.
Essay is a short piece of expository prose. The purpose of it is to inform or explain rather than to dramatize or create an experience. It achieves its effects by direct statement rather than by imaginary characters acting out a situation. Its chief quality is its brevity and self-contained unity.
4) Drama
It is the general term for performances in which actors impersonate the actions and
speech of fictional or historical characters (or non-human entities) for the entertainment of an audience, either on a stage or by means of a broadcast; or a particular example of this art, i.e. a play. Drama is usually expected to represent stories showing situations of conflict between characters, although the monodrama is a special case in which only one performer speaks. Drama is a major genre of literature, but includes non-literary forms(in mime) and has several dimensions that lie beyond the domain of the literary dramatist or playwright. The major dramatic genres in the West are comedy and tragedy, but several other kinds of dramatic work fall outside these categories, for example, history play, masque, melodrama, morality play, mystery play, tragicomedy.
Dramatic poetry is a category of verse composition for theatrical performance; the term is now commonly extended, however, to non-theatrical poems that involve a similar kind of impersonation, as in the closet drama and the dramatic monologue.
3. The origin of English literature
1) The earliest settlers in what is now Britain: the Celtic tribes
2) About 55 B.C. the invasion of Britain by roman troops led by Julius Caesar
3) A.D. 43: Roman conquest by Claudius
4) In the mid-5th century: the tribes of angles, Saxons and Jutes migrated to and settled down in England, thus began the Anglo-Saxon period in English history.
5) In 1066: the Norman Conquest of England by William, the Duke of Normandy, thus began the Anglo-Norman period in English history.
The English literature can be originated from the Anglo-Saxon period.
4. English literature in Anglo-Saxon period
1) Oral literature:
It is the origin of the history of literature of all peoples, including English literature. The
earliest poetry of the Anglo-Saxons, like that of many other peoples, originated from the collective efforts of the people, usually while they were working of resting from their labours. Then these stories based on history or legend or contemporaneous events would be narrated orally and often sung, during festivities and other occasions, chiefly for entertainment. Some of the more interesting of these narratives would pass from mouth to mouth, from generation to generation, and as they were told by different singers at different times, additions or deletions were introduced in the successive rehandlings of the oral tradition of each epic.
With the disintegration of tribal society and appearance of class divisions, professional
narrators or singers of these popular stories emerged. They were known as “scops” or “gleemen” among the Anglo-Saxons, the former being poet-singers who sang poetic tales of their own making while the latter merely retellers of epics already in circulation. Two of the earliest Anglo-Saxon lyrics extant, Widsith(《浪游者》，probably 7th century) and Deor’s Lament(《提奥的哀歌》，probably 8th century), are good literary specimens that illustrate the life and social position of the later “scops” or “gleemen”.
2) Beowulf:
Many of the popular narratives of the Anglo-Saxons existed in oral tradition and few of them seemed to have been handed down in written form. Beowulf is possibly the only important single poem of this kind preserved to this day more or less in its entirety and has generally been considered the most monumental work in English poetry of the Anglo-Saxon period.
The characteristics of Beowulf:
Beowulf is an outstanding example of English early narrative literature. It is in the form of poetry, being regarded as the National Epic of the Anglo-Saxons, and is the good specimens of pagan poetry, the main poetic form before the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons into Christianity. Its importance in English literary history lies in its following characteristics:
A. It is a long verse narrative on the theme of “arms and the man” and as such
belongs to the tradition of a national epic in European literature that can be traced back to Homer’s “Iliad” and Vergil’s “Aneid”
B. The origin of its story is part-historical, part-legendary. It’s part-historical as
quite a number of the characters either appearing or mentioned in the poem are real persons lifted from the pages of history. Besides, several digressional episodes in the epic all have their historical basis. And these historical figures and events place the poem in the historical period of the disintegration of tribal society. It’s part-legendary because the hero Beowulf is essentially a legendary figure. His name cannot be found in any historical document.
C. It was written in Anglo-Saxon or Old English which was quite different from modern English. It was written in alliterative verse, employing the device of alliteration instead of the use of rhymes or blank verse that was common to the English poems beginning from the Middle English period. In the use of alliteration, it has the following three features: 1) The number of stress, but not the number of syllables , is important. Normally, there should be four stressed syllables in each line, and at least three syllables should be alliterated. 2) Each line is divided into two parts, each half has two strongly accented syllables, at least one of the stressed syllables in the in the first half-line must alliterate with the first accented syllable in the second half-line. 3) There are frequent use of compound words to serve as indirect metaphors known as “kennings”, for example, “swan-road”, “whale-path” or “seal-bath” are used to refer to the sea; “wave-traveller” is used to indicate a ship; “shield-bearer”, battle-hero” or spear-fighter” are used to substitute the word “soldier”; “sword-clashings’ or “edge-clash” are used to describe battlings or fights; the chieftains are called the “treasure-keepers”; human body is called the “bone-house”; God is described as the “wonder-wielder”; and the monster is called “soul-destroyer”.
The first three lines of the original poem are given here as the specimen, with their translation into modern English provided below:
Hwaet! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum
Péod-cyninga prym gefranon,
Hupa aeð ligas ellen frémedon.
(Lo! We Spear-Danes in days long past
Of warrior kings’ glory have heard,
How the princes wrought deeds of prowess.)
Besides “Beowulf”, other secular poems of the Anglo-Saxon period are of little significance,
most of them short and some fragmentary. Those which can often be mentioned are the narrative verses “Waldhere” and “The Fight at Finnsburg” and the lyrical verses “Widsith”, “Deo’s Lament”, “The Seafarer’, “The Warnder”, “The Wife’s Complaint” and “The Lover’s Message”, among which “The Seafarer” had been rendered by a 20th century American poet Ezra Pound.
3) Caedmon and Cynewulf
The bulk of Anglo-Saxon verse now extant is religious or Christian poetry, also called theocratic literature (僧侣文学) based on Christian mythologies. Caedmon and Cynewulf are the two representative poets of this group of poetry. The life story of Caedmon was only told in the “Ecclesiastical History” of the Venerable Bede, one of the most famous prose writers of the Anglo-Saxon period. Caedmon is mainly famous for his first poem entitled Hymn. Cynewulf is even more of a mythical figure than Caedmon, the only reliable fact about him being the appearance of his signature in runes(古日耳曼字母) in four Anglo-Saxon poems: “Juliana”, “Christ”, “Fates of the Apostles” and “Elene”, among these “Christ” is the best known.
4) Anglo-Saxon Prose
The earliest prose written in Anglo-Saxon England was in Latin, known sometimes as Anglo-Latin writings. Among these early writers of Latin prose, the Venerable Bede in Northumbria in the last part of the 7th and the early half of the 8th century and King Alfred in the south, the kingdom of Wessex in the 9th and 10th centuries were the two most prominent figures.
The Venerable Bede:
He wrote numerous on all kinds of subjects, but his fame rests mainly upon a historical work of his later years, “Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum”(rendered into English as “The Ecclesiastical History of the English People”《英吉利人教会史》) with which he earned his place as “Father of English History”.
King Alfred:
He was the most prominent figure in the later centuries, the 9th and the 10th, of the Anglo-Saxon period when the centre of learning was shifted to the south, to kingdom of Wessex. Alfred is famous for his numerous translations from Latin works for which he is regarded by many critics as “Father of English Prose”, and especially f the important role he played in the launching and compilation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (《盎格鲁---撒克逊编年史》), one of the most important documents in the history of England, the compilation of which lasted from the year 891 to 1154, almost two and a half centuries, and which had the largest scale and the longest time in the writings of all prose works in English literary history.

5. English literature in Anglo-Norman period(11th to mid-14th century)
1) The Norman Conquest
In 1066, William, the Duke of Normandy led the Norman army invaded and conque