新大纲教材重点.doc

PART ONE: ENGLISH LITERATUREChapter 1 The Renaissance Period The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. It first started in Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture and literature. From Italy the movement went to embrace the rest of Europe. The Renaissance, which means rebirth or revival, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion. The Renaissance, therefore, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.The Renaissance was slow in reaching England not only because of Englands separation from the Continent but also because of its domestic unrest. The century and a half following the death of Chaucer is the most volcanic period of English history. The war-like nobles seized the power of England and turned it into self-destruction. The Wars of Roses are examples to show how the energy of England was violently destroying itself.Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It sprang from the endeavor to restore a medieval reverence for the antique authors and is frequently taken as the beginning of the Renaissance on its conscious, intellectual side, for the Greek and Roman civilization was based on such a conception that man is the measure of all things. Through the new learning, humanists not only saw the arts of splendor and enlightenment, but the human values represented in the works. But Renaissance humanists found in the classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfection, and that the world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy. Thus, by emphasizing the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of this life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the English humanists. One of the major results was the fact that the Bible in English was placed in every church and services were held in English instead of Latin so that people could understand. The religious reformation was actually a reflection of the class struggle waged by the new rising bourgeoisie against the feudal class and its ideology.And one of the men who made a great contribution in this respect was William Caxton, for he was the first person who introduced printing into England. In his lifetime, Caxton printed about one hundred books in English, including Chaucers The Canterbury Tales (1483) and Malorys Morte Darthur (1485). Thus, for the first time in history it was possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole nation in a speedy way. With the introduction of printing, an age of translation came into being. And lots and lots of continental literary works both ancient and modern were translated and printed in English.The first period of the English Renaissance was one of imitation and assimilation. Poetry was to be a concentrated exercise of the mind, of craftsmanship, and of learning. In the early stage of the Renaissance, poetry and poetic drama were the most outstanding literary forms and they were carried on especially by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The Elizabethan drama, in its totality, is the real mainstream of the English Renaissance. The most famous dramatists in the Renaissance England are Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson Francis Bacon (15611626), the first important English essayist, is best known for his essays which greatly influenced the development of this literary form. He was also the founder of modern science in England. His writings paved the way for the use of scientific method. Thus, he is undoubtedly one of the representatives of the English Renaissance. III. William ShakespeareWilliam Shakespeare (15641616) is one of the most remarkable playwrights and poets the world has ever known. With his 38 plays, 154 sonnets and 2 long poems, he has established his giant position in world literature.From about 1591 to about 1611, Shakespeare was in the prime of his dramatic career and his plays came out one after another. In 1593 and 1594, he published two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece,Shakespeares sonnets are the only direct expression of the poets own feelings. Shakespeares history plays are mainly written under the principle that national unity under a mighty and just sovereign is a necessity. Shakespeare presents the patriotic spirit when mourning over the loss of English territories in France. Furthermore, he condemns the War of the Roses waged by the feudal barons in which innocent people were killed. In his romantic comedies, Shakespeare takes an optimistic attitude toward love and youth, and the romantic elements are brought into full play. The traditional theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew. The Merchant of Venice takes a step forward in its realistic presentation of human nature and human conflict. The successful romantic tragedy is Romeo and Juliet, which eulogizes the faithfulness of love and the spirit of pursuing happiness. The play, though a tragedy, is permeated with optimistic spirit.Shakespeares greatest tragedies are: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. They have some characteristics in common. Each portrays some noble hero, who faces the injustice of human life and is caught in a difficult situation and whose fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation. Each hero has his weakness of nature: Hamlet, the melancholic scholar-prince, faces the dilemma between action and mind; Othellos inner weakness is made use of by the outside evil force; the old king Lear who is unwilling to totally give up his power makes himself suffer from treachery and infidelity; and Macbeths lust for power stirs up his ambition and leads him to incessant crimes.Hamlet, the first of the great tragedies, is generally regarded as Shakespeares most popular play on the stage, for it has the qualities of a blood-and-thunder thriller and a philosophical exploration of life and death. The play opens with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, appearing in a mood of world-weariness occasioned by his fathers recent death and by his mothers hasty remarriage with Claudius, his fathers brother. While encountering his fathers ghost, Hamlet is informed that Claudius has murdered his father and then taken over both his fathers throne and widow. Thus, Hamlet is urged by the ghost to seek revenge for his fathers foul and most unnatural murder. But Hamlet has none of the single-minded blood lust of the earlier revengers. It is not because he is incapable of action, but because the cast of his mind is so speculative, so questioning, and so contemplative that action, when it finally comes, seems almost like defeat, diminishing rather than adding to the stature of the hero. Trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing and plotting, and apparently bearing the intolerable burden of the duty to revenge his fathers death, Hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and action. His life is one of constant role-playing, examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility, for he is too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger. The Tempest, an elaborate and fantastic story, is known as the best of his final romances. The characters are rather allegorical and the subject full of suggestion. The humanly impossible events can be seen occurring everywhere in the play. The Tempest is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life and society in his late years. The Kings government must be carried on but carried on for the good of the nation, not for the pleasure of the King. Shakespeare is against religious persecution and racial discrimination, against social inequality and the corrupting influence of gold and money. Thus, he finds no way to solve the social problems. In the end, the only thing he can do as a humanist is to escape from the reality to seek comfort in his dream. Shakespeare has accepted the Renaissance views on literature. He holds that literature should be a combination of beauty, kindness and truth, and should reflect nature and reality. Shakespeares major characters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones; they are individuals representing certain types. Each character has his or her own personalities; meanwhile, they may share features with others. By applying a psycho-analytical approach, Shakespeare succeeds in exploring the characters inner mind. The soliloquies in his plays fully reveal the inner conflict of his characters. Shakespeare also portrays his characters in pairs. Contrasts are frequently used to bring vividness to his characters. Shakespeares plays are well-known for their adroit plot construction. Shakespeare seldom invents his own plots; instead, he borrows them from some old plays or storybooks, or from ancient Greek and Roman sources. There are usually several threads running through the play, thus providing the story with suspense and apprehension. Irony is a good means of dramatic presentation. His blank verse is especially beautiful and mighty. He has an amazing wealth of vocabulary and idiom. He is known to have used 16,000 different words. His coinage of new words and distortion of the meaning of the old ones also create striking effects on the reader. Shakespeare is above all writers in the past and in the present time. His influence on later writers is immeasurable. Almost all English writers after him have been influenced by him either in artistic point of view, in literary form or in language Selected Readings:1. Sonnet 18 (Sonnet 18 is one of the most beautiful sonnets written by Shakespeare, in which he has a profound meditation on the destructive power of time and the eternal beauty brought forth by poetry to the one he loves. A nice summers day is usually transient, but the beauty in poetry can last for ever. Thus Shakespeare has a faith in the permanence of poetry.) VI. John Milton In 1671 appeared his last important work Samson Agonistes, the most powerful dramatic poem on the Greek model. Miltons literary achievements can be divided into three groups: the early poetic works, the middle prose pamphlets and the last great poems.Milton wrote his three major poetical works: Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes (1671). Among the three, the first is the greatest, indeed the only generally acknowledged epic in English literature since Beowulf; and the last one is the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English. Paradise Lost is a long epic divided into 12 books. The original story is taken from Genesis 3:124 of the Bible. The theme is the Fall of Man, i.e. mans disobedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause Satan. In his life, Miton shows himself a real revolutionary, a master poet and a great prose writer. He fought for freedom in all aspects as a Christian humanist, while his achievements in literature make him tower over all the other English writers of his time and exert a great influence over later ones. Selected Reading: An Excerpt from Paradise Lost(Paradise Lost is Miltons masterpiece. The story is taken from the Old Testament: Satan and other angels rebel against God, but they are defeated and driven from Heaven into Hell. Even amidst the furnace of Hell, Satan is determined to fight back. He assumes the shape of a snake and comes to the Garden of Eden, a paradise where Adam and Eve live. God, after knowing Satans plot, sends the Archangel Raphael to warn Adam and Eve of Satan. However, Satan still succeeds in seducing Eve to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, which has been totally forbidden by God. As a result, Adam and Eve are exiled by God from the paradise and thereafter live a life full of hardship. The following excerpt is taken from Book I.)Chapter 2 The Neoclassical Period the neoclassical period is the one in English literature between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798. The eighteenth-century England is also known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment Movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept through the whole Western Europe at the time. The movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. They held that rationality or reason should be the only, the final cause of any human thought and activities. They called for a reference to order, reason and rules. At the same time, the enlighteners advocated universal education. As a matter of fact, literature at the time, heavily didactic and moralizing, became a very popular means of public education. In the field of literature, the Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism. According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers (Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, etc.) and those of the contemporary French ones. They believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity. This belief led them to seek proportion, unity, harmony and grace in literary expressions, in an effort to delight, instruct and correct human beings, primarily as racial animals. Thus a polite, urbane, witty, and intellectual art developed. Neoclassicists had some fixed laws and rules for almost every genre of literature. Prose should be precise, direct, smooth and flexible. Poetry should be lyrical, epical, didactic, satiric or dramatic, and 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 and action should be strictly observed; regularity in construction should be adhered to, and type characters rather than individuals should be represented. But it had a lasting wholesome influence upon English literature. The poetic techniques and certain classical graces such as order, good form, unified structure, clarity and conciseness of language developed in this period have become a permanent heritage. The mid-century was, however, predominated by a newly rising literary form the modern English novel, which, contrary to the traditional romance of aristocrats, gives a realistic presentation of life of the common English people. This the most significant phenomenon in the history of the development of English literature in the eighteenth century is a natural product of the Industrial Revolution and a symbol of the growing importance and strength of the English middle class. Among the pioneers were Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Tobias George Smollett, and Oliver Goldsmith. In the theatrical world, Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the leading figure among a host of playwrights. And of the witty and satiric prose, those written by Jonathan Swift are especially worth studying, his A Modest Proposal being generally regarded as the best model of satire, not only of the period but also in the whole English literary history. III. Daniel Defoe Like Pope, he never went to university, but he received a good education in one of the best Dissenting academies. Defoe started as a small merchant and all his life his business underwent many ups and downs, and yet he was never beaten. His quick mind, abundant energy and never-failing enthusiasm always brought him back on his feet after a fall. Defoe also had a zest for politics. He wrote quite a number of pamphlets on the current political issues. at the age of nearly 60, he started his first novel Robinson Crusoe, which was an immediate success. Robinson Crusoe, an adventure story very much in the spirit of the time, is universally considered his masterpiece. As a member of the middle class, Defoe spoke for and to the members of his class and his novels enjoyed great popularity among the less cultivated readers. In most of his works, he gave his praise to the hard-working, sturdy middle class and showed his sympathy for the downtrodden, unfortunate poor. Defoe was a very good story-teller. He had a gift for organizing minute details in such a vivid way that his stories could be both credible and fascinating. His sentences are sometimes short, crisp and plain, and sometimes long and rambling, which leave on the reader an impression of casual na