自考英语本科《英美文学选读》英美文学复习笔记整理.doc

英国部分

The Renaissance Period

1. Renaissance :between 14th and mid-17th century.

2. Renaissance means rebirth or revival, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion.

3. the Renaissance, therefore in essence is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and Scholars made attempt to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in Medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the purity of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic church.

4. Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance

(1) Capable of individual development in the direction of perfection.

(2) They inhabited was theirs not to despise by to question, explore and enjoy.

(3) By emphasizing the dignity of human being and the Importance of the present life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of this life

(4) Tomas More, Christopher Marlow and William Shakespeare are the best representative of the English humanist.

5 Metaphysical poetry: Metaphysical is characterized by passionate thought succession of concentrated image, exercise of elaborate ingenuity and “wit”, John Done was the famous of the Metaphysical poet. The Metaphysical Poets were men of learning and to show their learning was their endeavour.

Edmund Spencer
Masterpiece: The Faerie Queene (allegory)

Christopher Marlowe
University wits
Important plays: Tambulaine, Dr.Faustus, The Jewof Meta Edmund II

Marlowe voiced the supreme desire of the man of the Renaissance of infinite powers and authority

(1) Perfected the blank verse.

(2) Creation of the Renaissance hero to English drama ,it embodies Marlowe’s ideal of human dignity and capacity.

Dr.Faustus: aspiring for knowledge, the play’s dominant moral is human rather than religious, it celebrates the human passion for knowledge, power and happiness , it also reveals man’s frustration in realizing the high aspiration in a hostile moral order and the confinement to time is the cruelest fact of man’s condition.

William Shakespeare

1. Works: 154 sonnets, 38 plays, 2 long poems
Comedy :Merchant of Venice.

2 4 great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth

Each portrays some noble hero, who face the injustice of human fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation, each hero has his weakness of nature. Hamlet, the melancholic scholar-prince, faces the dilemma between action and mind: Othello’s inner weakness is made use of by the outside evil force; the old King Lear who is unwilling to totally give up his power makes himself suffer, from treachery and infidelity; Macbeth’s lust for power stirs up his ambition and leads him to incessant crime.

3 Merchant of Venice
In this play, Shakespeare has created tension: ambiguity, a self conscious and self-delighting artifice that is at once intellectually existing and emotionally engaging . The sophistication derives in part from the play between high, outstanding romance and dark faces of negating and hate the traditional theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty , wit and loyalty, and to explore insuitable greed and brutality of the Jew.

4 Hamlet.
The play has the qualities of a “blood-and-thunder” thriller and a philosophical exploration of life of life and death, the timeless appeal of his mighty drama lies in its combination of injustice, emotional conflict and searching philosophic melancholy. Hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world , to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and action. His life is one of the constant role-playing examining the nature of acting only to deny its possibility. For such a figure, soliloquy is a natural medium, a necessary release of his anguish; and some of his questioning monologue posses surpassing power and insight. By revealing the power-seeking, the jostling for place , the hidden motives, the courteous superficialities that veil lust and guilty, Shakespeare condemns the hypocrisy and treachery and general religious corrupting at the royal count.

Francis Bacon

1 Masterpiece: Essay; Novum Organum.

2 Novum Organum: most impressive display of Beacon’s intellect. The argument is for the use of inductiveness of reason in scientific study.

3 Beacon suggests the inductive reasoning, i.e, proceeding from the particular to the general , in place of the Aristotelian method , the deductive reasoning ,i.e. proceeding from the general to the particular.

4 Beacon’s essay are famous for their brevity, compactness and powerfulness.

John Done

Metaphysical poetry
The most striking feature of Done’s poetry is precisely its tang of reality, in the sense that it seems to reflect life in a real rather than a poetical world..

Done frequently applies conceits.

John Milton
Three major poetical works:
Paradise lost , Paradise Regained, Samson Agonists
The freedom of the will is the keytone of Milton.s creed.

Paradise Lost
The epic is the masterpiece of John Milton
The story is drawn from the Old Testament of the Bible, which tells how Satan, after being defeated in his rebel against God, temps Adam and Eve to eat the apples for the Forbidden Tree, and causes the Fall of Man.

Satan, in the image of a rebel , still determines to fight back against God when he and his followers are cast into the Hell. The features of the character include his boldness, unbending ambition and his unconquerable will. The poem, as in other writing, is full of biblical and classical allusion, and is in a Latinized style with one sentence running perhaps across several lines. But, the majesty of expression suits well the sublimity of the poet’s thought.

The Neoclassic Period
1 Between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the publication of lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798
1.      Enlightenment or the Age of reason
The Enlightenment movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept the whole western Europe at the time
Its propose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlightenmenters celebrated reason or rationally, equality and science. They called for a reference to order, reason and rule , yield place to “eternal truth” “eternal justice” and “natural equality”
They believed that human beings were limited , dualistic and imperfect literature at the time , heavily didactic and moralizing.
They believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work. To work , to economize and to accumulate wealth constitute the whole meaning of their life. This aspect of social life is best-formed in the realistic novels of the 18th century.
3 In the field of literature , they believed that the artistic should be order,logic, restrained emotion and accuracy . seek proportion, unity, harmony and grace in literary expression, in an effort to delight, instruct and correct human beings..
4 Neoclassicism. In English literature and, the stylistic trend between the Restoration and the advent of romanticism at the beginning of the 19th century is referred to as Neoclassicism.
5 Heroic: It is a pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The form was introduced into English by Chaucer and widely used subsequently.
John Bunyan
1.      Masterpiece: The pilgrim’s progress
2.      The “vanity fair” symbolizes human word, for all that comth is vanity Everything and anything in this world is vanity, having no value and no meaning. The vanity fair, a “market selling nothingness” of all sorts, is a dirty place originally built up by details, but, this town “lay” in the way to the Celestial City, meaning pilgrims had to resist the temptations there when they made their way through. So, the depiction of the “Fair” in selling things worldly and in attracting people bad, represents John Bunyan’s rejection of the worldly seekings and pious longing for the pure and charming “Celestial city”, his Christian ideal.
Alexander Pope
Pope, a very sensitive man, would strike back hard, and in the constant verbal battles he developed a style of biting satire.
He was one of the first to introduce rationalism to England, but was not entirely blind to the rapid moral, political and cultural deterioration.
For him the supreme values was order-cosmic order, political order , social order, aesthetic order, and this emphasis an order expression in all of his works. Pope made his name as a great poet with the publication of an Essay on Criticism in 1711.
Pope strongly advocated Neoclassicism, emphasizing that literary works should be judged by classical rule of order, reason, logic, restrained emotion, good taste and decorum.
Daniel Defoe
Masterpiece: Robinson Crusoe
His language is smooth , easy, colloquial and most vernacular. Defoe glorifies human labor and the puritan fortitude. It refers the enterprising sprit of the middle class.
Jonathan Swift
1. Chief works: A Tale of a Tub, The battle of the books, The Drapier’s letters, Guilliver’s Travel and a Modest proposal.
2.Swift is almost unsurpassed in the writing of simple, direct, precise prose. He defined a good style as “proper words in proper places” clear, simple, concrete, diction, uncomplicated sentence structure and economy and concise use of language mark all his writing-essay, poems and novels.
3.      As a whole , the book is one of the most effective and devastating criticism and satires of all aspects in the then English and European life- socially, politically, religiously, philosophically, scientifically and morally.
Henry Fielding
1.      Masterpiece : A History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
2.      Fielding has been regarded by some as “Father of the English Novel” for his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel.
3.      Fielding’s language is easy, unlaboured and familiar but etremly vivid and vigorous.
4.      Of all the 18th century novelist, he was the first to set out. Both in theory and practice. To write specially a “comic epic in poem” the first to give the modern novels its structure and story; he use epistolary form and “ the third-person narration”.
5.      In planning his stories, he tries to retain the grand, epical of the classical works but at the same time keeps fatithful to his realistic presentation of common life as it is.
Samuel Johnson
1.      Lexicographer: the author of the first English dictionary by an English man---A Dictionary of the English Language(1755)
2.      To the Right Honorable the Earl of----Chesterfield
3.      He was particularly fond of moralizing, and didacticism. His language in characteristically general, often Latinate and frequently polysyllabic.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
1 Masterpiece: The school for scandle.
2 Sheridan has the only important English dramatist of the 18th century; important link between Shakespeare and Benard Shaw.
3 In his play, morality is the constant theme
He is much concerned with the current moral issue and harshly at the social life of the day.
Tomas Gray
1.      His masterpiece, “ Elegy in a Country Churchyard” was published in 1751, the poem once and for all established his fame as the leader of the sentimental poetry of the day especially the Graveyard School”
2.      In his poem, Gray reflects on death, the sorrow of life and the mysteries of human life with a touch of his Personal Melancholy.
3.      His poem, as a whole are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or mediation on life, past and present. His poems are characterized by an exquisite sense of form. His style is sophisticated and allusive. His poem are often marked with the trait of a highly artificial diction and a distorted word order.
Romantic Period
1.      Major Romantic Points
(1)   a rebellion against neo-classicism
(2)   express on imagination
(3)   priorities been given to passion, emotion and feeling
(4)   being close to nature for its purity while the society is corrupting
(5)   tremendous interest in something remote in term of space and time
(6)   favor of modernism
(7)   supremacy of freedom
2 Romantic period began in 1798 with the publication of wordsworth and Coleridge’s lyrical Ballads and have ended in 1852 with Sir Walter Scott’s death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.
3. It was in effect a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason which prevailed from the days of Pope to those of Johnson
1.      Jean-Roseau: exploration new idea about Nature, society, Education.
Tomas Paine’s Declaration of Rights of Man.
5 The Romantic Movement expressed a more or less negative attitude the existing social and political conditions that came with industria lization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie.
Thus, we can say that Romanticism actually constitute a change of direction attention to the outerworld of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit
6 Nature: for the most influential 18th-century writers, was more something to be seen than something to be known. But for the Romantics, it is just the opposite. Nature to Wordsworth is a source of mental cleanliness and spiritual understanding.
7 Poetry has been traditionally regarded as an art governed by rules; but for Romantics, Poetry should be free from all rules.
8 Gothic novel: its principal elements are violence, horror and supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader’s emotion.
9 How is Romanticism different from Neoclassicism? Provide brief evidence from the literary works you know best.
a.       Neoclassicists upheld that artistic ideals should be order, logic , restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature, should be judged in terms of its service to humanity, and thus, literary expressions should be of proportion, unity, harmony and grace. Pope’s An Essay on Criticism advocates grace, wit ( usually though satire/ humour ), and simplicity in language (and the poem itself is a demonstration of those ideals, too); Fielding’s Tom Jones helped established the form of novel; Gray’s Elegry Written in a country Churchyard” displays elegance in style, unified structure, serious tone and moral instructions.
b.      Romanticism tended to see the individual as the very center of all experience, including art, and thus, literary work should be “spontaneous overflow of strong of feeling” and no matter how fragmentary those experience were ( Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” or “The Solitary Reaper,) 0r Coleridge’s “ K