British LiteratureI。

The Renaissance Period [the 14th & 17th centuries]：Humanism is the essence of theRenaissance.1.The Old English poetry includes: the religious group and the secularone. Eg. The epic Beowulf2.Epic is an extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language,like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey.史诗指古代叙事诗中的长篇作品，常反应重大意义的历史事件或以古代传说为内容，塑造著名英雄人文。

3.Chaucer :The father of English poetry:He was the first to introduce Octosyllabic couplet in The Romaunt the RoseHeroic couplet: The Legend of Good Women; The Canterbury Tales He is the first great poet who wrote in the current English language.4.Miracle play: the medieval中世纪dramatization of a Biblical story(e.g. Cain and Abel ) or of a saint’s life, was chiefly popular from thetwelfth through the fifteenth centuries.5.Morality play: a later medieval development, which remainedpopular well into the sixteenth century, was an allegorical 寓言dramatization of the conflict between good and evil, including suchcharacters as Everyman, Gooddeeds, and Avarice.6.Heroic couplet: is a rhyming韵律couplet of iambic pentameter,often containing a complete thought. Commonly there is a parallel or an antithesis within a line, or between the two lines. It is called heroic because in England, especially in the eighteenth century, it was much used for heroic (epic) poems.双行诗，由两个押韵的抑扬格五音步诗行构成，常包含一个完整的意思。

7.Popular Ballard: 民谣flourished from the 12th century to 15thcentury, reflecting the life of the people then. Major collections of these ballads did not begin until the 18th century and the most credible among them are Thomas Percy’s Relics of Ancient English Poetry, Walter Scott’s Minstrels of the Scottish Border8.Renaissance: it refers to a great bourgeois中产阶级culturalmovement in Europe which began in the 14th century and continued to the mid-17th century. It first started from Italy and then spread all over Europe. The term seems to be a rebirth or revival of ancient Greek and Roman culture. The Renaissance, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars tried to get rid of those old feudalistic封建主义ideas in Medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that express the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic church.9.Humanism is a system of beliefs upheld坚持by writers and artistsof the Renaissance period in their fighting against medieval asceticism 禁欲主义. It puts man at the center of their beliefs and takes man to be the measure of every thing while the former asceticism puts God at the center of their beliefs and takes personal salvation to be the most important thing on the earth for man.欧洲文艺复兴时期形成的一种资产阶级思想，也是一种再次肯定人的价值、智慧、尊严、人对现世幸福的追求的思想和学说。

主张以人为本，反对以神为本。

10.B lank verse:五韵体诗was first introduced into England bySurrey[English Poet]. It is used to name the unrhymed iambic pentameter line in poetry. 格律诗的一种，不押韵，五音步，抑扬格。

11.S onnet十四行诗: is a type of poem consisting of one singlefourteen-line stanza节段. It was perfected by the Italian poet in the 13th century and introduced into England in the early 16th century. It falls into two classes: the Petrarchian of Italian form and the Shakespearian of English form.12.T he poet’s poet: Edmund Spenser(1552-1599), Faerie Queene13.U niversity Wits: is a group of playwrights and pamphleteers in theElizabethan age. Nash, Greene, and Marlowe…14.S hak espeare’s4 great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, andMacbeth15.M etaphysical Poetry玄学派诗: refers to the works of the 17thcentury poets who wrote under the influence of John Donne(1575-1613) leading figures of the school are Marvell, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Henry Vaughan. With a rebellious spirit, the metaphysical poets tried to break away form the conventional fashion of Elizabethan love poetry.THE Leading figure: John Donne; Conceit is a far-fetched metaphor or simile. It means astriking parallel between tow highly dissimilar things.II. The Neoclassical Period ( 1660-1798) between the return of the Stuards to the English throne王位and the full assertion主张of Romanticism which came with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge.Neoclassicists had some fixed laws &rules for almost every genre of literature， prose should be precise， direct， smooth & flexible. Poetry should be lyrical， epical， didactic，satiric or dramatic， & each class should be guided by its own principles. Drama should be written in the Heroic Couplets （iambic pentameter rhymed in two lines）； the three unities of time， space & action should be strictly observed；regularity in construction should be adhered to & type characters rather than individuals should be represented.1.The Enlightenment Movement: was a furtherance of theRenaissance form the 14th to the 17th century. Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. It celebrates reason, equality and science.2.The “Three Unities”三一律: formulated by Renaissance dramatists,are the unities of time, place and action.3.Neoclassical literature: In the field of literature, the EnlightenmentMovement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism, and the typical works are collected as neoclassical literature. Three stages: the reign of so-called classicism; the revival of romantic period; the beginnings of the modern novel4.The main writers:Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe;Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s TravelsSamuel Richardson: Pamela; Clarissa HarloweHenry Fielding: The History of Tom Jones; A Foundling; The Historyof the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great Tobias Smollett: Roderick RandomLaurence Sterne: A Sentimental JourneyRobert Burns: Select Collection of Original Scottish AirsThomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country ChurchyardOliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of WakefieldRichard B. Sheridan: The School of Scandal5.Gothic Novel: A long prose narrative of horror, often involving eerie古怪可怕medieval castles with secret passageways. Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto(1764) was the first one that has stressed horror. More: Ann Radcliffe: The Adventure of Mysteries of Udopho;Mathew Lewis: The Monk; Mary Shelley: Frankenstein…6.Graveyard School墓畔派诗人: refers to the 18th century poets whowrote melancholy忧郁poems on death. Representative: Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.Others: Thomas Parnell, Night Piece on Death; Edward Yang, Night Thoughts; Robert Blair, The Grave7.Father of the English Novel: Henry Fielding, for his contribution tothe establishment of theform of the English modern novel. He was the first to write a “comic epic in prose”戏剧性的散文体史诗. His great contribution to literature is his realistic novels.8.The two famous essayists: Joseph Addison; Richard SteeleIII. The Romantic Period: begins in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s the Lyrical Ballad 抒情歌谣集. English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to have began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth & Coleridge''s Lyrical Ballads & to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott''s death & the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.1.Representatives: William Wordsworth; Samuel Taylor Coleridge;George Gordan Byron; Percy Bysshe Shelley; John Keats; Jane Austen;ke Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Robert Southey3.Worshipper of Nature: William Wordsworth4.Walter Scott: historical novels, Ivanhoe, based on English history.IV. The Victorian Period: roughly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria over England from 1836 to 1901.1.Critical Realism:The first period: Charles Dickens; William Makepeace Thackery;Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskel; Charlote BronteThe second period: Thomas Hardy; George Bernard Shaw;John GalsworthyCritical RealismThe Victorian Age is an age of realism rather than of romanticism-a realism which strives to tell the whole truth showing moral & physical diseases as they are. To be true to life becomes the first requirement for literary writing. As the mirror of truth，literature has come very close to daily life，reflecting its practical problems & interests & is used as a powerful instrument of human progress.2.Dramatic Monologue: a single speaker is saying something tosomeone, even if only to himself. Robert Browning: My last DuchessBy dramatic monologue，it is meant that a poet chooses a dramatic moment or a crisis，in which his characters are made to talk about their lives，& about their minds & hearts. In " listening" to those one-sided talks，readers can form their own opinions & judgments about the speaker's personality & about what has really happened.Robert Browning brought this poetic form to its maturity & perfection & his "My Last Duchess" is one of the best-known dramatic monologues.3.Aestheticism: advocated the independence of art form any moral ordidactic说教end. The implication of its slogan is Art for art’s sake.Representative: Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ballad of Reading Goal …V. The Modern Period1.Modernism: dehumanization of art 艺术的非人格化，it throwsaway almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narrationAll kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared：symbolism，expressionism，surrealism，cubism，futurism，Dadaism，imagism and stream of consciousness.2.Stream of consciousness: James Joyce , he adopted a kind ofmock-heroic嘲讽史诗style.American LiteratureI. The Romantic Period1.Age of Enlightenment: a term used to describe the trends in thoughtand letters in Europe and the American colonies during the 18th century prior to the French Revolution.2.Representatives: Thomas Paine, Common Sense; Franklin, PoorRichard’s Almanack; Thomas Jefferson, Declaration.3.Fireside Poets: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier, they frequently used the hearth as an image of comfort and unity.4.Longfellow: it was with whom that American poetry began itsemergence from the shadow of its British parentage.5.Transcendentalism: In New England, an intellectual movementknown as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. It rejected both 18th-century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Emerson: Nature; The American Scholar; Self-Reliance;Thoreau: Walden6.Symbolism: is a movement in literature and the visual arts thatoriginated in France in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire in the late 19th century. In literature, it was an aesthetic movement that encouraged writers to express their ideas, feelings, and values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct statements.Representatives: Nathaniel Hawthorne; Herman Melville7.Free verse: is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed withoutattention to conventional rules of meter. Walt Whitman: a precursor;Ezra pound, Carl Sandburg8.Puritanism:9.The first American writer of fiction: James Fenimore Cooper, Heinitiated three genres of fiction: the historical, sea novel, and frontier novel10.T he first master of the short story: Edgar Allan Poe;II. The Realistic Period: The period ranging form 1865 to 1914 is the Age of Realism in the literary history of the US.William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James were the pioneers of realism in the U.S.1.Realism: William Dean Howells; Mark Twain are the pioneers ofrealism in the U.S.2.Naturalism: following in general the biological determinism ofDarwin’s theory, or the economic determinism of Karl Marx.Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson; Theodore Dreiser;3.Gilded Age: is a novel by Mark Twain- and C.D. Warner, published in1873 which depicted the boom times of Post-Civil War years.4.Theodore Dreiser: His “Trilogy of Desire” : The Financier, The Titan,The Stoic.IV. The Modern Period:1.The Imagist Movement was led by the American poet: Ezra Pound.Imagist Movement is a poetic movement that flourished in the U.S.and England between 1909-1917.It advances modernism in arts which concentrates on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism，especially Tennyson's worldliness and high-flown language in poetry. Pound endorsed three main principles as guidelines for Imagism，including direct treatment of poetic subjects，elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words，and rhythmical composition should be composed with the phrasing of music，not a metronome. The primary Imagist objective is to avoid rhetoric and moralizing，to stick closely to the object or experience being described，and to move from explicit generalization. The leading poets are Ezra Pound，Wallace Stevens，wrence，etc.Pound was one of the most important poets and critics of his time andhe was regarded as the father of modern American poetry. He is a leading spokesman of the "Imagist Movement"2.F.S. Fitzgerald: His works reflected the Jazz Age.The Jazz Age：It refers to the 1920s，a time marked by frivolity，carelessness，hedonism and excitement in the life of the flaming youth. Fitzgerald is largely responsible for the term and many of his literary works portray it. The Jazz Age is brought vividly to life in The Great Gatsby.The Lost Generation：It refers to，in general，the post-World WarⅠgeneration，but specifically a group of expatriate disillusioned intellectuals and artists，who experimented on new modes of thought and expression by rebelling against former ideals and values and replacing them only by despair or a cynical hedonism.。