英美文学期末Summary 4 of English Literature.doc

Summary 4 of English Literature Chapter Six The Modern PeriodBackground Information: In the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, both natural and social sciences in Europe had enormously advanced. The two world wars destroyed peoples faith in the Victorian values and gave rise to all kinds of philosophical ideas in Western Europe. Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism. It began with the French Symbolism in the late 19th century. Towards the 1920s, different literary trends of modernism converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement. Major figures associated with this movement were Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf. After the Second World War, a variety of modernism, or post-modernism, like existentialist literature, theater of the absurd, new novels and black humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that “the world was absurd, and the human life was an agony. Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. Modernism, is in many respects, a reaction against realism. Drama in the Modern Period The most celebrated dramatists in the last decade of the 19th century were Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest) and George Bernard Shaw, who pioneered the modern drama. Shaw is considered to be the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare, whose works are examples of the play inspired by social criticism. His representative works are Widowers Houses鳏夫之家, Mrs. Warrens Profession华伦夫人的职业 and Heartbreak House伤心之屋.Poetry in The Modern Period The 20th century witnessed a great achievement in English poetry. The early poems of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot and Yeats matured poetry marked the rise of “modern poetry,” which was, in some sense, a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian poetry. William Butler Yeats威廉巴特勒叶芝(18651939) Irish poet and dramatist, the central poet of modern literature His fame rests chiefly with his shorter poems and lyrics. T.S. Eliot considered him to be the greatest English-speaking poet of his age. The three major concerns of his life art, Irish nationalism and occult studies are all central to his poetry and drama. Representative poems: The Lake Isle of Innisfree “茵尼斯弗利岛” Sailing to Byzantium “驶向拜占庭” Leda and the Swan：“丽达与天鹅”Irish National Theater Movement With their joint efforts, the Irish playwrights like W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge brought about the Irish National Theater Movement in the early 20th century, thus starting an Irish dramatic revival. Yeats was the leader of this movement. To write about Ireland for an Irish audience and to recreate a specifically Irish literature-these were the aims that Yeats was fighting for as a poet and a playwright.Summary of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”:The twelve-line poem is divided into three quatrains with a rhyme pattern abab cdcd efef. It is an example of Yeatss earlier lyric poems. The short poem explores the speakers longing for the peace and tranquility of Innisfree while residing in an urban setting. It is typically a pastoral poem.Yeats used sounds found in nature (bees, crickets, and water lapping) to make Innisfree appear to be peaceful and tranquil. There is a pause in the middle of the first three lines of every stanza; Yeats does this to slow the reader down, so that they can feel the calm that his lines are expressing. Alliteration is also used in this poem (cabin, clay; glimmer, glow). He described where the peace comes from through several visual and aural images, like“the veils of the morning”, “purple glow” and “the cricket sings.”He can escape the noise of the city and be lulled by the lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore. On this small island, he can return to nature by growing beans and having bee hives, by enjoying the purple glow of noon, the sounds of birds wings, and, of course, the bees. He can even build a cabin and stay on the island much as Thoreau, the American Transcendentalist, lived on Walden Pond.T.S. Eliot 艾略特 (18881965) one of the most important modernist poets, verse dramatists and prose writers Eliots most important single poem The Waste Land has been hailed as a landmark and a model of the 20th-century English poetry. It is often regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century peoples disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society. Representative works: Murder in the Cathedral教堂里的谋杀案 Tradition and Individual Talent传统与个人天才 Prufrock and Other Observations普鲁弗洛克与其它情况 The Waste Land荒原 The Hollow Men空心人 Four Quartets 四个四重奏“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “阿尔弗瑞德普鲁弗洛克的情歌” Eliots most striking early achievement Written in a form of dramatic monologue, it presents the meditation of an aging young man over the business of proposing marriage. It is a pretended “love song”. The poem is intensely anti-romantic with visual images of hard, gritty objects and evasive hellish atmosphere. Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, is neurotic, self-important, illogical and incapable of action. He is a kind of tragic figure caught in a sense of defeated idealism and tortured by unsatisfied desires.Novels in the Modern Period The realistic novels in the early 20th century were the continuation of the Victorian tradition, yet its exposing and criticizing power had been somewhat weakened. The three trilogies of John Galsworthys Forsyte novels are masterpieces of critical realism in the early 20th century, which revealed the corrupted capitalist world. The first three decades of the 20th century were golden years of the modernist novel. In stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation, the theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis played a particularly important role. Writers like Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human consciousness. They had created unprecedented stream-of-consciousness novels such as Pilgrimage (19151938) by Richardson, Ulysses (1922) by Joyce, and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by woolf. Their works made tremendous impact on the creation of both realistic and modernist novels in this century. In the works of E.M. Foster (A Passage to India，A Room with a View) and D.H. Lawrence, old traditions are still there, but their subject matter about human relationships and their symbolic or psychological presentations of the novel are entirely modern. Modernist novels came to a decline in the 1930s, though Joyce and Woolf continued their experiments. James Joyce 詹姆斯乔伊斯 (18821941) the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness novelist In his lifetime, he wrote altogether three novels, a collection of short stories, two volumes of poetry and one play. The novels and stories have the same setting: Ireland, especially Dublin, and the same subject: the Irish people and their life. Joyces encyclopedia-like masterpiece Ulysses has become a prime example of modernism in literature. The protagonist Leopold Bloom has become the symbol of every-man in the post-World-War Europe. Representative works: Dubliners都柏林人 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man青年艺术家的画像 Ulysses尤利西斯 Finnegans Wake芬尼根的苏 醒 David Herbert Lawrence 大卫赫伯特劳伦斯 (18851930) Enlgish novelist, short-story writer, poet and essayist. one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century, and the greatest from a working-class family He is regarded as revolutionary as Joyce in novel writing; but unlike Joyce, he was not concerned with technical innovations. Lawrences interest lay in the tracing of the psychological development of his characters and in his energetic criticism of the dehumanizing effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature. Representative works: The White Peacock白孔雀 Lady Chatterleys Lover 查特莱夫人的情人 Sons and Lovers儿子和情人 The Rainbow虹 Women in Love恋爱中的女人stream of consciousnessStream of consciousness is a narrative technique that presents thoughts as if they were coming directly from a characters mind.Developed by such writers as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, stream-of-consciousness writing is used to reveal a characters complex psychology and to present it in realistic detail.Lacking chronological order, the events in a stream of consciousness narrative are presented from the characters point of view, mixed in with the characters ongoing feelings and memories.Virginia Woolf (1882 1941)18821941, English novelist and essayist; daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen. A successfu