英国文学名词解释
1. epic
An epic is a long narrative poem telling about the deeds of a great hero and reflecting the values of the society from which it originated. The earlier ones concern the history and legends of a country or a region and include stories and information from many anonymous sources. These were oral or folk epics of which some were later written down. The epics of the ancient Greek poet Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and Beowulf, written in old English and found in the late 10th century, are good examples. Later epics were deliberately composed by one author and written down. The ancient Roman Virgil is regarded as the first composer of such epics.
2. sonnet
A Sonnet is a lyric poem comprising 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic pentameters in English, alexandrines in French, hendecasyllables in Italian. The rhyme schemes of the sonnet follow two basic patterns. The Italian sonnet (also called the Petrarchan sonnet after the most influential of the Italian sonneteers) comprises
an 8-line 'octave' of two quatrains, rhymed abbaabba, followed by a 6-line 'sestet' usually rhymed cdecde or cdcdcd. The English sonnet (also called the Shakespearean sonnet after its foremost practitioner) comprises three quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg. Originating in Italy, the sonnet was established by Petrarch in the 14th century as a major form of love poetry, and came to be adopted in Spain, France and England in the 16th century and in Germany in the 17th. The standard subject-matter of early sonnets was the torments of sexual love (usually within a courtly love convention), but in the 17th century John Donne extended the sonnet's scope to religion, while Millton extended it to politics.
3. Stream of consciousness
Stream of consciousness is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted
vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly, particularly the hesitant, misted, distracted and illusory psychology people had when they faced reality. The modern American writer William Faulkner successfully advanced this technique. In his stories, action and plots were less important than the reactions and inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences were often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the stories, rather than an observer. A high degree of emotion can be achieved by this technique.
4. Lake Poets
Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey were also called the Lake Poets, because they lived and knew one another in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England, and shared a community of literary and social outlook in their work. All three of them had radical inclinations in their youth but later turned conservative.
4. Morality play
The Morality plays or Moralities sprang up in England in the 15th century alongside of the Mystery and
Miracle plays. They are different in that the morality play doesn’t tell stories from the Bible nor about the lives of the saints, but is a dramatized allegory in which abstract virtues and vices such as Mercy, Conscience and Shame, appear in personified form, in order to illustrate moral or religious doctrines.。