专八英美文化大纲.doc

第 9 页 共 9 页大家论坛An Outline of British Literary HistoryEarly and Medieval English Literature1. Beowulf, epic in old Briton2. Romance3. Ballads4. Geoffrey Chaucer, the founder of English poetry, “The Canterbury Tales”The English Renaissance (16thfirst half of 17th)1. Characteristic of Renaissance: 1) a thirsting curiosity for the classical literature; 2) keen interest in the activities of humanity (humanism)2. Thomas More, the greatest of the English humanists, “Utopia”3. Poets in this period: (The sonnet, an exact form of poetry in 14 lines of iambic pentameter intricately rhymed, was introduced to England from Italy by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard) Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86), love sonnets: “Astrophel and Stella” Walter Raleigh (1552-1618), “Discovery of Guiana” Edmund Spenser (1552-99), “The Shepherds Calendar” (a pastoral poem in 12 books); “The Faerie Queene” (his masterpiece dedicated to Queen Elizabeth). He is the first master to make Modern English the natural music of his poetic effusions. John Lyly (1554-1606), a romance writer for the gentle reader, “Euphues”4. Prose Writer: Francis Bacon (1561-1626), “Essays” (58 ones). It covers a wide variety of subjects, such as love, truth, friendship, parents and children, beauty, studies, riches, youth and age, garden, death, and many others. They have won popularity for their precision, clearness, brevity and force.5. Drama (the highest glory of English Renaissance) university wits: Lyly, Peele, Marlowe, Greene, Lodge and Nash. They made rapid progress in dramatic technique because they had a close contact with the actors and audience. Christopher Marlowe (1564-93): 1) Tamburlaine; 2) The Jew of Malta; 3) Doctor Faustus Ben Jonson (1572-1637): 1) Every man in His Humor; 2) Volpone, or the Fox”; 3) The Alchemist; William ShakespeareFour Tragedies: 1) Hamlet 2) Othello 3) King Lear 4) MacbethCelebrated comedies: 1) The Merchant of Venice 2) The Taming of the Shrew 3) A Midsummer Nights Dream 4) Alls Well That Ends Well other celebrated ones: 1) Titus Andronicus 2) Romeo and Juliet 3) Henry V 4) Twelfth Night 5) Julius Caesar 6) Timon of Athens 7) The Tempest 8) Antony and CleopatraThe Neoclassical Period1. John Milton (1608-1674): 1) Paradise Lost 2) Paradise Regained 3) Samson Agonistes2. John Bunyan (1628-1688): The Pilgrims Progress3. Metaphysical Poets (mysticism in content and fantasticality in form): 1) John Donne (1572-1631), the founder of the Metaphysical school of poetry. 2) George Herbert (1593-1633), “the saint of the Metaphysical school”, sings the glory of God 3) Andrew Maevell, a Puritan4. John Dryen (1631-1700): 1) All for Love (a tragedy) 2) An Essay of dramatic Poesy (It established his position as the leading critic of the day.)5. Richard Steele (1672-1729), a representative of the Enlightenment in English literature, the founder of “The Tatler” (a newspaper)6. Joseph Addison (1672-1719), another representative of the Enlightenment in English literature, the founder of “The Spectator” (a daily paper)7. Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the most important poet and classicist in the first half of the 18th century. 1) Essay on Criticism (didactic poem in heroic couplets) 2) The Rape of the Lock 3) Popes Homer (his translation of “Illiad” and half of “Odyssey” in heroic couplets)8. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745): Gullivers Travels9. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731): 1) Robinson Crusoe 2) Captain Singleton 3) Moll Flanders 4) Colonel Jacque10. Samuel Richardson (1680-1761): Pamela, or, Virtue Rewarded11. Henry Fielding (1707-1754): 1) Tom Jones 2) Joseph Andrews12. Tobias Smollett (1721-1771): Roderick Random13. Laurence Sterne (1713-1768): 1) Tristram Shandy 2) A Sentimental Journey14. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816), a playwright: The School for Scandal15. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), a lexicographer critic and poet: Dictionary16. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774): The Vicar of Wakefield17. Edward Gibbon, historian: The Decline and Fall of the Roman EmpireAppendix:Classicism: it is a literary trend that dominated French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a significant influence on English writing, especially from 1660 to 1780. The classicists modeled themselves on Greek and Latin authors, and tried to control literary creation by some fixed laws and rules drawn from Greek and Latin works.Sentimentalism and Pre-Romanticism in PoetrySentimentalist poetry marks the midway in the transition from classicism to its opposite Romanticism in English poetry. Dissatisfied with reason, which classicists appealed to, sentimentalism appealed to sentiment, “to the human heart”. Sentimentalism turned to the countryside for its material, and so is in striking contrast to classicism, which had confined itself to the clubs and drawing-rooms, and to the social and political life of London.1. Thomas Gray (1716-1771): Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard2. William Cowper (1731-1800): The Task (a long poem)Pre-Romanticism:1. William Blake (1757-1827): 1) Songs of Innocence 2) Songs of Experience2. Robert Burns (1759-1796): 1) The Scots Musical Museum 2) Selected Collection of Original Scottish Airs3.Romanticism in British Literature1. William Wordsworth (1770-1850), pilot and leader of Romanticism in England: Lyrical Ballads (the manifesto of the English Romantic Movement in poetry)2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): 1) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 2) Kubla Khan 3) Christabel. Coleridge is also the first critic of the Romantic school.3. George Gordon Byron (1788-1822): 1) Childe Harolds Pilgrimage 2) Don Juan (masterpiece)4. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): 1) Queen Mab 2) The Revolt of Islam 3)Prometheus Unbound 4) Lyrics: Ode to the West Wind To a Skylark Loves Philosophy etc. 5) A Defence of Poetry ( literary criticism on poetry)5. John Keats (1795-1821): long poems: Isabella Endymion The Eve of St. Agnes ODES: Ode to Melancholy Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode to a Nightingale Ode to Autumn6. Charles Lamb (1775-1834), an essayist: 1) The Essays of Elia 2) Tales from Shakespeare7. Walter Scott (1771-1832), founder of historical novel: 1) Ivanhoe 2) Woodstock etc.8. Jane Austen (1775-1817): 1) Pride and Prejudice 2) Sense and Sensibility 3) Northanger Abbey 4) Emma 5) Mansfield parkThe Victorian Period (roughly realism)1. Charles Dickens (1812-1870): 1) the Pickwick papers 2) Oliver Twist 3) Nicholas Nickleby 4) The Old Curiosity Shop 5) American Notes 6) Dombey and Son 7) David Copperfield 8) Hard Times 9) A Tale of Two Cities 10) Great Expectations2. Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855): Jane Eyre3. Emily Bronte (1818-1848): Wuthering Heights4. Anne Bronte (1820-1849): The Tenant of Wildfell Hall5. William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863): Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero6. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865): Mary Barton, a Tale of Manchester Life7. George Eliot (1819-1880): 1) Silas Marner 2) Adam Bede 3) The Mill on the Floss8. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), a prose writer: 1) The French Revolution 2) Hero and Hero-Worship9. Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859): History of England10. Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), poet: 1) In Memoriam 2) The Idylls of the King11. Robert Browning (1812-1889), introducing to English poetry the dramatic monologue: 1) The Ring and the Book 2) short lyrics such as “the pied Piper of Hamelin”; “Home-thoughts, from Abroad”Literary Trends at the Turn of the 19th-20th Century1. George Gissing (1857-1903), under the influence of naturalism: New Grub Street2. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894): 1) Treasure Island 2) Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde etc.3. Aestheticism: “art for arts sake”-representatives: 1) Walter Pater 2) Oscar Wilde4. Oscar Wilde (1856-1900): 1) The Picture of Dorian Gray (novel) 2) A Woman of No Importance 3) Lady Windermeres Fan 4) An Ideal Husband 5) The Importance of Being Earnest 6) Salome (tragedy)English Literature in the 20th CenturyRealists1. Henry James (1843-1916): 1) The Portrait of a Lady 2) The Ambassadors 3) The Golden Bowl2. Herbert George Wells (1866-1946): 1) The Time Machine 2) The Island of Dr. Moreau 3) Tono Bungay (social satire)3. John Galsworthy (1867-1933): The Forsyte Saga 2) A Modern Comedy4. William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965): 1) Of Human Bondage 2) The Moon and Sixpence5. Jeseph Conrad (1857-1924): 1) The Nigger of the Narcissus 2) Lord Jim 3) Heart of Darkness6. E. M. Forster (1879-1970): 1) Howards End 2) A Passage to India7. David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930): 1) The White Peacock 2) Sons and Lovers 3) The Rainbow 4) Women in Love 5) Lady Chatterleys Lover8. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950): 1) Mrs. Warrens Profession 2) Major Barbara 3) Heartbreak HouseModernismStream of consciousness1. James Joyce (1882-1941): 1) Dubliners 2) A Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man 3) Ulysses 4) Finnegans Wake2. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): 1) Mrs. Dalloway 2) To the Lighthouse 3) The WavesImagism1. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish poet and dramatist, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 19232. T. S. Eliot (1888-1965): 1) Four Quartets 2) The Waste LandOutline of American Literary History (1) colonial period (early 17thlate 18th) American Puritanism Jonathan Edwards, (both represent American Puritanism) Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography; Poor Richards Almanac(2)Romantic period (first half of 19th) background (political independence; hopes everywhere; ideals of democracy, equality; industrialization; westward expansion; variety of foreign influence etc.) Washington Irving“The Sketch Book” (Rip Van Winkle) James Fenimore Cooper“Leatherstocking Tales” 1840s, new England Transcendentalism (Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nature”;The PoetThe American Scholar; Henry David Thoreau and “Waldon” Walt Whitman“Leaves of Grass” Emily Dickinson Edgar Allan PoeIsrafel; Annabel Lee; his horror stories Nathaniel Hawthorne“Scarlet Letter”, The House of the Seven Gables, his short stories Herman Melville“Moby Dick” New England PoetsWadsworth Longfellow (3) Realism (after 1865, against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism) William Dean HowellsThe Rise of Silas Lapham Mark TwainLocal Colorism; The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Life on the Mississippi; The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County Henry JamesPortrait of a Lady; Ambassador (international theme; psychological realism); Golden Bowl(4) Naturalism (last decade of 19th century; seeing helpless and hopeless of the world) Stephen Crane1)Maggie, a Girl of the Streets 2) The Red Badge of Courage Frank NorrisThe Octopus Theodore DreiserSister Carrie; An American Tragedy Sherwood AndersonWinsberg, Ohio (The Triumph of the EggHorses and MenDeath in the Woods) O. Henry“20 Years”; “Gift of Magi”; “The Last Leave” Jack LondonSea Wolf; Martin Eden Upton Sinclair- Muckraking Movement; The Jungle; The Slaughterhouse(5) Imagism (after 1st World War)Economy of expression; use of a dominant image Ezra Pound1) Cantos; 2) The River Merchants Wife: A Letter 3) The Station of the MetroThe apparition of these faces in the crowdPetals on a wet, black bough Williams Carlos Williams; e. e. cummings; Carl Sanburg; Hart Crane (The Bridge); Wallace Stevens T. S. EliotWaste Land; The Sacred Wood Robert FrostFiction writing on the postwar scene Sinclair Lewis-(first American Nobel winner for literature) Main Street; Babbitt Arrowsmith Dodsworth Willa Cather- (hanging onto the traditional values)My Antonia The Song of the Lark The Professors House Thomas Wolfe-Look Homeward, Angel Of Time and the River You Cant Go Home Again(6) Lost Generation (the 1920s) Ernest HemingwayThe Sun also Rises; Farewell to Arms; For Whom the Bell Tolls F. Scott FitzgeraldThe Great Gatsby William FaulknerAs I lay Dying; Light in August; Go Down, Moses; Absolom, Absolom;(7) the 1930ssocialist-oriented; new naturalism John Dos PassosU. S. A John SteinbeckThe Grapes of Wrath James T. FarrellStuds Lorrigan Trilogy John OHaraAppointment in Samarra (hard-boiled novels)(8) Post-war Literature social backgroundvitiated by “Cold War”; Mccarthyism; civil rights movement; Vietnam war(1968-1973) Saul BellowHumboldts Gift; Herzog Norman Ma