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英国文学名词解释

Allegory is a tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities. Thus, an allegory is a story with two meaning, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.Bildungsroman: a novel that traces the initiation, development, and education of a young person. Examples are Dickens’s David Copperfield and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.Byronic hero is a character-type found in Byron’s narrative Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He is a boldly defiant but bitterly self-tormenting outcast, proudly contemptuous of social norms but suffering for some unnamed sin. Emily Bronte’s Heath cliff is a later example.Conceit: a kind of metaphor that makes a comparison between two startlingly different things. A conceit usually provides the framework for an entire poem. An especially unusual and intellectual kind of conceit is the metaphysical conceit, used by certain 17th-century poets, such as John Donne..Comedy of manners is a kind of comedy representing the complex and sophisticated code of behavior current in fashionable circles of society, where appearances count for more than true moral character. Its humor relies chiefly on elegant verbal wit and repartee. In England, the comedy of manners flourished as the dominant form of Restoration comedy in the works of Etheredge, Wycherley and Congreve. It was revived in a more subdued form in the 1770s by Goldsmith and Sheridan, and later by Oscar Wilde.An epic is a long narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating and celebrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the past history of a nation.Epiphany(顿悟): a sudden revelation of truth about life inspired by a seemingly trivial incident Heroic couplet is the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter.Intrusive narrator: an omniscient narrator who, in addition to reporting the events of a novel’s story, offers further comments on characters and events, and who sometimes reflects more generally upon the significance of the story.Iambic pentameter: a poetic line consisting of five verse feet, with each foot an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Iambic pentameter is the most common verse line in English poetry.Metaphysical poetry: the poetry of John Donne and other 17th-century poets who wrote in a similar style. It is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language, elaborate imagery, and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas . Metaphysical PoetryMetaphysical Poetry is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. With a rebellious spirit, the metaphysical poets try to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry. They are characterized by mysticism in content and fantasticality in form. John Donne is the leading figure of the “metaphysical school.”Naturalism: a post--Darwinian movement of the late 19th century that tried to apply the laws of scientific determinism to fiction. The naturalists went beyond the realists’ insistence on the objective presentation of the details of everyday life to insist that the materials of literatureshould be arranged to reflect a deterministic universe in which a person is a biological creature controlled by environment and heredity.Omniscient narrator is a third-person narrator, who is not a character in the story. The narrator is “all-knowing”, who can describe and comment on all the characters and actions in the story.Pre-RomanticismIn the latter half of the 18th century, a new literary movement arose in Europe, called the Romantic Revival. It was marked by a strong protest against the bondage of Classicism, by a recognition of the claims of passion and emotion, and by a renewed interest in medieval literature. In England, this movement showed itself in the trend of Pre-Romanticism in poetry. The sonnet is one of the poetic forms that can be found in lyric poetry originating from Italy, and it originally means “little song”. By the 13th century, it had come to signify a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure.Sonnet is a verse form of fourteen lines, in English characteristically in iambic pentameter and most often in one of the two rhyme schemes: the Italian(or Petrarchan) or Shakespearean ( or English ).William Blake and Robert Burns are the representatives.Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge was published in 1798, and Sir Walter Scott died in 1832. The essence of the Romantic Movement is the glorification of instinct and emotion, a deep veneration of nature, and a flaming zeal to remake the world.In the early 16th century, sonnets were introduced into England by Thomas WyattEnglish RenaissanceIt sprang first in Italy in the 14th century and gradually spread all over Europe. It made its appearance in England in the 16th and 17th centuries. It means the rebirth of Greek and Roman culture. Two features are striking of this movement. The one is a thirsting curiosity for the classical literature. Another one is the keen interest in the activities of humanity. Humanism is the key-note of Renaissance. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the English Renaissance.English Enlightenmen tThe 18th century marked the beginning of an intellectual movement in Europe, known as the Enlightenment, which was, on the whole, an expression of struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism. The enlighteners fought against class inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. They attempt to place all branches of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the actual needs and requirements of people. English enlighteners differed in some way from those of France “cleared the minds of men for the coming revolution,”the English enlighteners set no revolutionary aims before them. They stove to bring it to an end by clearing away the feudal ideas with the bourgeois ideology. The representatives are Joseph Addison, Richard Steele (essayists), Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift (novelists), and Alexander Pope (poet).。

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