英语专业考研英美文学重点

英美文学重点（１）

Old English 450-1066

 Medieval English 1066 - middle 14th century 

 Geoffrey Chaucer - the father of English poetry 

first time to use ’heroic couplet’

 The Renaissance - rebirth or revival 

 Humanism - the essence of the Renaissance, the dignity of human being & the importance of the present life 

Edmund Spenser - the poets’ poet

 Christopher Marlowe - University Wits, the pioneer of English drama 

 Blank verse, hyperbole夸张 

the human passion for knowledge, power and happiness

pastoral life

 William Shakespeare - above all writers in the past and in the present time 

 Four tragedies - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear & Macbeth 

eternal or immortal beauty

to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, to expose the insatiable greed and brutality hesitate between fact and fiction, language and action, too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger To be, or not to be - to live on in this world or to die; to suffer or to take action Soliloquy or monologue - fully reveal the inner conflict of the characters Francis Bacon - brevity, compactness & powerfulness, his essays is an important landmark in the development of English proseInductive method 归纳法 in place of deductive method 演绎法 uses and benefits of study - studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Studies perfect nature, and are perfected by experience. Different ways adopted by different people to pursue studies - studies and experience are complementary 互补 to each other. The correct attitude to reading books - to weigh and consider. How studies exert influence over human character - reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man. 

 John Donne 

 Metaphysical poetry - break away from love poetry, a seemingly unfocused diversity of experiences and attitudes, and a free range of feelings and moodsConceits, syllogism 三段论 

the busy sun is always ready to interfere with other things and everywhere

whatever you are, you can not escape from death. When you are living, you are always in the shadow of death. Death only lasts a moment, our life after death is eternal. The more pleasure the death gives people, not only the pleasure of the rest & the sleep, because ’whom the gods love die young’. Though death is usually considered powerful, it actually provides a rest for a man’s body and a birth for his soul.

 John Milton 

the only generally acknowledged epic in English literature since Beowulf. The conflict is between human love and spiritual duty. In heaven, Satan led a rebellion against God with his unconquerable will.

the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English.

 Neoclassicism - a revival of interest in the old classical works, order, logic, restrained emotion抑制情感 & accuracyEnlightenment - a progressive intellectual movement, reason (rationality), equality & science 

 Gothic novel - mystery, horror & castles 

 John Bunyan 

from , a religious allegory, pursue the truth

 Alexander Pope 

a poem written in heroic couplets, criticize the present poem lack of true taste & call on people to turn to the old Greek and Roman writers for guidance, ’true wit’ is best set in a plain (simple & clear) style.

Daniel Defoe - the first writer study of the lower-class people, praise the human labor and the Puritan fortitude 清教徒坚韧 

 Jonathan Swift - a master satiristIn his opinion, human nature is seriously and permanently flawed 

 Proper words in proper places 

, four parts - Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Flying Island & Houyhnhnm

 Henry Fielding - Father of English novel, Prose HomerComic epic in prose 

 Samuel Johnson - first combine an English dictionary, last neoclassicist enlightener 

 Richard Brinsley Sheridan - the only important English dramatist of the 18th century 

and are regarded as important links between the masterpieces of Shakespeare and those of Bernard Shaw.

 Thomas Gray 

英美文学重点（２）

 Richard Brinsley Sheridan - the only important English dramatist of the 18th century 

and are regarded as important links between the masterpieces of Shakespeare and those of Bernard Shaw.

 Thomas Gray 

 The Graveyard School

 Romantic - emotion over reason, spontaneous emotion, a change from the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit, poetry should be free from all rules, imagination, nature, commonplace 

The romantic period began with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s

 William Blake -engraver雕刻家 

from a happy and innocence world from children’s eye

from a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a melancholy 忧郁的tone from men eyes Childhood, paradoxes, a pairing of opposites 

 William Wordsworth - the leading figure of the English romantic poetry, simple, spontaneous, worshipper of nature’Lake Poets’ - William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge & Robert SoutheyHe defines the poet as a ’man speaking to men’, and poetry as ’the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which originates in ’emotion recollected in tranquillity’. 

the poet is very cheerful with recalling the beautiful sights. In the poem on the beauty of nature, the reader is presented a vivid picture of lively and lovely daffodils 水仙 and poet’s philosophical ideas and mystical thoughts. 

the sonnet describes a vivid picture of a beautiful morning in London, silent, bright, glittering, smokeless & mildly. It is so touching a sight that the poet expressed his religion piety 虔诚for nature. 

thanks to poet’s rich imagination, the mass of associations, this commonplace happening becomes a striking event, the poet succeeds in making the reader’s share his emotion. The poem also shows the poet’s passionate love of nature.

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge - supernatural, remotePoet can be divided into two groups - the demonic (supernatural) & the conversational 

The demonic group includes 3 masterpieces - , , George Gordon Byron ’Byronic hero’ is a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin, against tyrannical rules or moral principles. Such a hero appears first in .

’will die fighting, or live free’ the Luddites destroyed the machines in their protest against unemployment. The poet’s great sympathy of the workers in their struggle against the capitalists is clearly shown.

from (the masterpiece of Byron, a long satirical poem), song by a Greek singer at the wedding of Don Juan and Haidee. ’Fill high the bowl with Samian wine’?

 Percy Bysshe Shelley 

terza rima, destructive-constructive potential, hopeful, ’I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’, ’If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’

 John Keats 

4 great odes - , , ,

the contrast between the permanence of art and the transience 短暂of human passion, ’Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’, ’Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ 

 Jane Austen 

The Victorian Period

 Darwin’s and shook the traditional faith, everything is created by GodUtilitarianism 功利主义 was widely accepted and practiced Critical realists were all concerned about the fate of the common people 

 Charles Dickens - one of the greatest critical realist writers of the Victorian Age 

 Character-portrayal is the most distinguishing feature of his worksA mingling of humor and pathos 悲伤 

 The Bronte Sisters - Charlotte, Emily & AnneEmily, a rather reserved and simple girl, was very much a child of nature. 

 Alfred Tennyson - invents dramatic monologue, Poet Laureate 桂冠诗人, a real artist 

the death of his best friend, his sadness feeling are contrasted with the carefree, innocent joys of the children and the unfeeling movement of the ship and the sea waves

we can feel his fearlessness towards death, his faith in God and an afterlife. ’Crossing the bar’ means leaving this world and entering the next world

not endure the peaceful commonplace everyday life, old as he is, he persuades his old followers to go with him and to set sail again to pursue a new world and new knowledge, dramatic monologue, ’Myself not least, but honour’d of them all’ means I am not the least important, but

 honoured by all of them 

 Robert Browning - the most original poet, who improve and mature the dramatic monologue 

his masterpiece

this dramatic monologue is the duke’s speech addressed to the agent who comes to negotiate the marriage, the duke is a self-conceited, cruel and tyrannical man

 George Eliot:As a woman of exceptional 特有的intelligence and life experience, she shows a particular concern for the destiny of women 

a sharp contrast is set between the cold, lifeless, dull house and Dorothea who is full of youthful life and vigor

 Thomas Hardy - both a naturalistic and a critical realist writerLocal-colored, Wessex, ’novels of character and environment’ 

experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration

 American Romantic Period 

Started with Washington Irving’s and ended with Whitman’s , also called ’the American Renaissance’Free expression of emotion, escapes from society, and return to nature New England Transcendentalism

 Washington Irving - father of the American short stories, the American Goldsmith 

 Perfected the best classic style that American literature ever produced 

First novel

contains German folk tales ,

 Ralph Waldo Emerson - the spokesman of New England Transcendentalism movement 

, ,

a reflection upon the aesthetic problems in terms of the present state of literature in America

a discussion about the conflict between idealism and ordinary lifeAmerican Puritanism, European Romanticism, intuitive knowledge, over-soul, individual, nature

is regarded as the Bible of New England Transcendentalism

 Nathaniel Hawthorne 

 Interior of the heart, there is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole life, but circumstances may rouse it to activity 

 Walt Whitman 

 Openness, freedom, individualism 

 I - me, my nation (society), Free verse, Envelope structure, Catalogue (Listing) 

 A new ideal, a new world, a new life-style 

how a child is greatly influenced by his growing environments

a scene of the American Civil War, all the movements described in this picture are frozen.

Whitman is a man bubbling with energy and laden with ideas, spontaneous expression of his original ideas

Herman Melville - a master of allegory and symbolism, like Hawthorne the first American prose epic, Ishmael both as a character and a narrator, the captain, Ahab is a monomaniac

 Realistic period - the Gilded Age, the poor poorer and the rich richer, people’s attention was now directed to the interesting features of everyday existence 

 Local colorism, social Darwinism, bestiality, beyond man’s control 

 Mark Twain - the true father of American literature 

 Local colorist, vernacular, simple sentence, ’the damned human race’ The Gilded Age 

3 boyhood books , ,

Huck’s inner conflict about whether or not he should write a letter to tell Miss Watson where Jim is.

 Henry James - international theme, psychological realistStream of consciousness, interior monologue, free association 

the narrator is an American expatriate, named Winterbourne. Daisy is the most innocent girl. The clash is between two different cultures.

 Emily Dickinson 

 Based on her own experiences, her sorrows and joys 

express Dickinson’s anxiety about her communication with the outside world.

description of a moment of death

Dickinson makes the train part of nature by animalizing it, like a horse.

personify death and immortality so as to make her message strongly felt

Theodore Dreiser - America’s literary naturalists Case history including everything Determinism (heredity biological & environment), survival of the fittest, the jungle law Trilogy of Desire - , , ’who shall cast the first stone?’

 The modern period - the second American Renaissance, the expatriate movement, the Lost Generation, a transformation from order to disorder 

 Seize the day, enjoy the present, spiritual wasteland, collective unconscious, psychoanalysis 

 Imagist movement, Jazz Age 

 Ezra Pound - a leading spokesman of the ’Imagist Movement’ 

Pound attempts to produce the emotion he felt when he walked down into a Paris subway station and suddenly saw a number of faces in the dim light. To capture the emotions, Pound uses the image of petals on wet, black boughs.

agreement with Whitman’s free verse

 Robert Lee Frost - four times awarded Pulitzer Prize, pastoral life and scene 

 Eugene O’Neill - founder of the American drama, won the Pulitzer Prize four times 

 F. Scott Fitzgerald - spokesman of the Jazz Age, Dollar Decade, 1920s 

 A double vision of the Jazz Age, both an insider and an outsiderAmerican Dream 

 Ernest Hemingway - awarded the Nobel Prize 

 Iceberg style, Code hero, the lost generation, grace under pressure 

from birth and death coexist

 William Faulkner - awarded a Nobel Prize 

 South, imprisonment in the past 

 Stream of consciousness, multiple points of view 

 Yoknapatawpha Country 

Emily is regarded as the symbol of tradition and the

 old way of life. Thus her death is like the falling of a monument.