英国文学史名词解释.doc

英国文学史名词解释Romance:The romance was a long composition, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose, describing the life and adventures of a noble hero.The medieval romances were tales of chivalry or amorous adventure occurring in King Arthurs court. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an example of a medieval romance.Ballad:It is a story in poetic form, often about tragic love and usually sung. Ballads were passed down from generation to generation by singers. The medieval ballads are ballads of Robin Hood. Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a 19th century English ballad.Heroic couplet: They are poetry composed in iambic pentameter. In this form of poetry, lines consisting of five iambic feet rime together in pairs. The rime scheme :aabbcc .Renaissance: Renaissance marks the transition from the medieval to the modern world. It first started in Italy in the 14thcentury and gradually spread all over Europe. The word “Renaissance” means rebirth or revival. In essence, it 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 and introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to lift the restriction in all areas placed by the Roman Catholic Church authorities. Two features of renaissance: It is a thirsting curiosity for the classical literature. People learned to admire the Greek and Latin works as models of literary form.It is the keen interest in the activities of humanity.Sonnet:A lyric poem of fourteen lines whose ryhme scheme is fixed. The rhyme scheme in the Italian form as typified in the sonnets of Petrarch is abbaabba cdecde. The Petrarchian sonnet has two divisions: the first is of eight lines (the octave), and the second is of six lines (the sestet). The rhyme scheme of the English, or Shakespearean sonnet is abab cdcd efef gg. The change of rhyme in the English sonnet is coincidental with a change of theme in the poem. The meter is iambic pentameter.Blank verse:A poem written in unrhymed iambic pentameter.Spenserian Stanza:Spenser invented a new verse form for his poem. The verse form has been called Spenserian Stanza since his day. Each stanza has nine lines, each of the first eight lines is in iambic pentameter form, and the ninth line is an iambic hexameter line. The rhythm scheme is abab bcbc c.Enlightenment :The Enlightenment was a progressive intellectual movement throughout Western Europe in the 18th century. It was an expression of struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism. The enlighteners fought against class inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. They thought the chief means for bettering the society was enlightenment or education for the people. The English enlighteners were bourgeois democratic thinkers. They set no revolutionary aim before them and what they strove for was to bring it to an end by clearing away the feudal ideas with the bourgeois ideology.Sentimentalism:Sentimentalismappeared in the middle of the 18thcentury, as a reaction against commercialism and the cold rationalism. Sentimentalists emphasize “the human heart” and show sympathy to the poor. This trend marks the transition form neoclassicism to romanticism in English poetry. Thomas Gray is one of the models. Another sentimentalist poet is Oliver Goldsmith (The Disserted Village). The most outstanding figure of English sentimentalism is Laurence Sterne.Pre-romanticism:The Romantic Movement was marked by a strong protest against the bondage of Classicism, by a renewed interest in medieval literature. In England, this movement showed itself in the trend of Pre-romanticism in poetry.It was represented by Blake and Robert Burns. They struggled against the neoclassical tradition of poetry.Romanticism: Romanticism was in effect a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason, which prevailed from the days of Pope to those of Johnson. The Romantic Movement expressed a more or less negative attitude toward the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. Romantics saw men essentially as an individual in the solitary state and emphasized the special qualities of each individuals mind. In essence it designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and all experience. It also places the individual at the center of art, making literature most valuable as an expression of his or her unique feelings and particular attitudes, and valuing its accuracy in portraying the individuals experiences.The romantics extol the faculty of the imagination,write about nature and they get inspiration form nature,turn to the humble people and the common everyday life for subjects andturn to other times and places, where the qualities they valued would be convincingly depicted.Neo-classicism:A revival in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of classical standards of order, balance and harmony in literature. John Dryden was the first person who started the movement at the end of the 17th century, while Alexander Pope brought it to its culmination.Elegy: it seeks for lament. It is a poem on death or on a serious loss; characteristically a sustained meditation expressing sorrow and, frequently, an explicit or implied consolationRealism:A term used in literature and art to present life as it really is without sentimentalizing or idealizing it. Realistic writing often depicts the everyday life and speech of ordinary people. This has led, sometimes to an emphasis on sordid details.Allegory: A story illustrating an idea or a moral principle in which objects take on symbolic meanings. In Dante Alighieris Divine Comedy, Dante, symbolizing mankind, is taken by Virgil the poet on a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in order to teach him the nature of sin and its punishments, and the way to salvation.Lake Poets:Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey have often been mentioned as the Lake Poets because they lived in the lake district in the northwestern part of England. The three traversed the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and closing as conservatives.Metaphysical Poetry: The poetry of John Donne and other seventeenth-century poets who wrote in a similar style.Metaphysical poetry is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language, elaborates imagery, and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas.Humanism:it refers to the main literary trend and is the keynote of English Renaissance. Humanists took interest in human life and human activities and gave expression to the new feeling of admiration for human beauty, human achievement. They think that man has a potential for culture which distinguishes him from lower orders of beings, and which he should strive constantly to fulfill.Mystery play:The Mystery plays of the Middle Ages were based on the bible and were particularly concerned with the stories of mans creation, Fall and Redemption. They antedate Miracle Plays.Mystery Plays developed out of the Liturgy of the church and in particular out of the Quem Quaeritis trope of Easter Day. The earlier dramatizations were presented on the greater festivals of the church: Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and Corpus Christi. At first they were in Latin and performed by the clergy in the church. There then came an increasing admixture of the vernacular, and lay folk also performed in them. This gradual secularization of the religions drama was accompanied by a corresponding physical move. The drama moved out of the church through the west door. Thus, what had been sacred drama became, literally, profane. From the church yard to the market place was the next logical step.Iambic Pentameter:A poetic line consisting of five verse feet, which each foot an iamb_ that is, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one. Iambic pentameter is the most common verse line in English poetry.Lyric:A poem, brief and discontinuous, emphasizes sound and pictorial imagery rather than narrative or dramatic movement.Miracle Play:A popular religious drama of medieval England. Miracle plays were based on stories of the saints or on sacred history.Morality Play:A form of religious allegorical drama dates from 15th century. Moralities differed from mystery plays in that whereas the latter dramatized known episodes from the Bible or from the lives of the saints, the former dramatized the life of man by personifying the forces of good and evil, such as the seven deadly sins and the corresponding virtues or some representative crisis in his life such as his encounter with the fact of death.Neo-classicism:it is a revival in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of classical standards of order, balance and harmony in literature. John Dryden was