文学术语汇编

1、文学术语汇编(考研用)1 Literature of the absurd: (荒诞派文学) The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the sense that the human condition is essentially absurd, and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absu

2、rd. The current movement emerged in France after the Second World War, as a rebellion against essential beliefs and values of traditional culture and traditional literature. They hold the belief that a human being is an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe and the human life in its f

3、ruitless search for purpose and meaning is both anguish and absurd. Theater of the absurd: (荒诞派戏剧) belongs to literature of the absurd. Two representatives of this school are Eugene Ionesco, French author of The Bald Soprano (1949) (此作品中文译名), and Samuel Beckett, Irish author of Waiting for Godot (19

4、54) (此作品是荒诞派戏剧代表作). They project the irrationalism, helplessness and absurdity of life in dramatic forms that reject realistic settings, logical reasoning, or a coherently evolving plot. Black comedy or black humor: (黑色幽默) it mostly employed to describe baleful, nave, or inept characters in a fantas

5、tic or nightmarish modern world playing out their roles in what Ionesco called a “tragic farce”, in which the events are often simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd. Joseph Hellers Catch-22 (美国著名作家约瑟夫海勒) can be taken as an example of the employment of this technique. 文学术语汇编2 4. Aestheticism o

6、r the Aesthetic Movement（唯美主义）: it began to prevail in Europe at the middle of the 19th century. The theory of “art for arts sake” was first put forward by some French artists. They declared that art should serve no religious, moral or social purpose. The two most important representatives of aesthe

7、ticists in English literature are Walt Pater and Oscar Wilde. 5. Allegory（寓言）: a tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities, such as John Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress. An allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a

8、 symbolic meaning. 6. Fable（寓言）: is a short narrative, in prose or verse, that exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behavior. Most common is the beast fable, in which animals talk and act like the human types they represent. The fables in Western cultures derive mainly from the

9、 stories attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave of the sixth century B. C. 7. Parable（寓言）: is a very short narrative about human beings presented so as to stress analogy with a general lesson that the narrator is trying to bring home to his audience. For example, the Bible contains lots of parables empl

10、oyed by Jesus Christ to make his flock understand his preach. (注意以上三个词在汉语中都翻译成语言，但是内涵并不相同，不要搞混) 8. Alliteration（头韵）: the repetition of the initial consonant sounds. In Old English alliterative meter, alliteration is the principal organizing device of the verse line, such as in Beowulf. 9. Consonance

11、 is the repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants but with a change in the intervening vowel, such as “live and love”. 10. Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowel, especially in stressed syllables, in a sequence of nearby words, such as “child of silence”. 11. Allusion （典故

12、）is a reference without explicit identification, to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage. Most literary allusions are intended to be recognized by the generally educated readers of the authors time, but some are aimed at a special group. 12. Ambigu

13、ity（复义性）: Since William Empson（燕卜荪） published Seven Types of Ambiguity（复义七型）, the term has been widely used in criticism to identify a deliberate poetic device: the use of a single word or expression to signify two or more distinct references, or to express two or more diverse attitudes or feeling.

14、文学术语汇编3 13. Antihero（反英雄）：the chief character in a modern novel or play whose character is totally different from the traditional heroes. Instead of manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or heroism, the antihero is petty, passive, ineffectual or dishonest. For example, the heroine of Defoes Moll Fl

15、anders is a thief and a prostitute. 14. Antithesis（对照）：(a figure of speech) An antithesis is often expressed in a balanced sentence, that is, a sentence in which identical or similar syntactic structure is used to express contrasting ideas. For example, “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy（独身生活）ha

16、s no pleasures.” by Samuel Johnson obviously employs antithesis. 15. Archaism（拟古）：the literary use of words and expressions that have become obsolete in the common speech of an era. For example, the translators of the King James Version of Bible gave weight and dignity to their prose by employing ar

17、chaism. 16. Atmosphere（氛围）: the prevailing mood or feeling of a literary work. Atmosphere is often developed, at least in part, through descriptions of setting. Such descriptions help to create an emotional climate to establish the readers expectations and attitudes. 文学术语汇编4 17. Ballad（民谣）：it is a s

18、ong, transmitted orally, which tells a story. It originated and was communicated orally among illiterate or only partly literate people. It exists in many variant forms. The most common stanza form, called ballad stanza is a quatrain in alternate four- and three-stress lines; usually only the second

19、 and fourth lines rhyme. Although many traditional ballads probably originated in the late Middle Age, they were not collected and printed until the eighteenth century. 18. Climax：as a rhetorical device it means an ascending sequence of importance. As a literary term, it can also refer to the point

20、of greatest intensity, interest, or suspense in a storys turning point. The action leading to the climax and the simultaneous increase of tension in the plot are known as the rising action. All action after the climax is referred to as the falling action, or resolution. The term crisis is sometimes

21、used interchangeably with climax. 19. Anticlimax（突降）：it denotes a writers deliberate drop from the serious and elevated to the trivial and lowly, in order to achieve a comic or satiric effect. It is a rhetorical device in English. 20. Beat Generation（垮掉一代）：it refers to a loose-knit group of poets an

22、d novelists, writing in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s, who shared a set of social attitudes antiestablishment, antipolitical, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, literary, and moral values, and in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression. Representat

23、ives of the group include Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. And most famous literary creations produced by this group should be Allen Ginsbergs long poem Howl and Jack Kerouacs On the Road. 文学术语汇编5 21. Biography（传记）：a detailed account of a persons life written by another person, su

24、ch as Samuel Johnsons Lives of the English Poets and James Boswells Life of Samuel Johnson. 22. Autobiography（自传）：a persons account of his or her own life, such as Benjamin Franklins autobiography. 24. A parody（模仿）imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work,

25、 or the distinctive style of a particular author, or the typical stylistic and other features of a serious literary genre, and deflates the original by applying the imitation to a lowly or comically inappropriate subject. 第23个应该是blank verse但系统总说含有不允许的关键字，所以一直发不上来，很郁闷，我把目前编好的一起发到公开邮箱去，大家到那里下载。 文学术语汇编

26、6 25. Celtic Revival also known as the Irish Literary Renaissance （爱尔兰文艺复兴）identifies the remarkably creative period in Irish literature from about 1880 to the death of William Butler Yeats in 1939. The aim of Yeats and other early leaders of the movement was to create a distinctively national liter

27、ature by going back to Irish history, legend, and folklore, as well as to native literary models. The major writers of this movement include William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge and Sean OCasey and so on. 26. Characters（人物）are the persons represented in a dramatic or narrative w

28、ork, who are interpreted by the reader as being endowed with particular moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities by inferences from the dialogues, actions and motivations. E. M. Forster divides characters into two types: flat character, which is presented without much individualizing detail; and

29、 round character, which is complex in temperament and motivation and is represented with subtle particularity. 27. Chivalric Romance (or medieval romance) （骑士传奇或中世纪传奇）is a type of narrative that developed in twelfth-century France, spread to the literatures of other countries. Its standard plot is t

30、hat of a quest undertaken by a single knight in order to gain a ladys favor; frequently its central interest is courtly love, together with tournaments fought and dragons and monsters slain. It stresses the chivalric ideals of courage, loyalty, honor, mercifulness to an opponent, and elaborate manne

31、rs. 28. Comedy:（喜剧）in general, a literary work that ends happily with a healthy, amicable armistice between the protagonist and society. 29. Farce （闹剧）is a type of comedy designed to provoke the audience to simple and hearty laughter. To do so it commonly employs highly exaggerated types of characte

32、rs and puts them into improbable and ludicrous situations. 30. Confessional poetry（自白派诗歌） designates a type of narrative and lyric verse, given impetus by Robert Lowells Life Studies, which deals with the facts and intimate mental and physical experiences of the poets own life. Confessional poetry w

33、as written in rebellion against the demand for impersonality by T. S. Elliot and the New Criticism. The representative writers of confessional school include Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and so on. 31. Critical Realism:（批判现实主义）The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the

34、 fouties and in the beginning of fifties. The realists first and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and delineated the crying contradictions of bourgeois reality. But they did not find a way to eradicate social evils. Representative writers

35、 of this trend include Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray and so on. 32. Drama: （戏剧）The form of composition designed for performance in the theater, in which actors take the roles of the characters, perform the indicated action, and utter the written dialogue. (The common alternative na

36、me for a dramatic composition is a play.) 文学术语汇编7 33. Dramatic Monologue:（戏剧独白）a monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person. Dramatic monologue does not designate a component in a play, but a type of lyric poem that was perfected by Robert Browning. By using dramatic monologue, a single person

37、, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment. For example, Robert Brownings famous poem “My Last Duchess” was written in dramatic monologue. 34. Elegy（哀歌或挽歌）：a poem of mourning, usually over the death of an indivi

38、dual. An elegy is a type of lyric poem, usually formal in language and structure, and solemn or even melancholy in tone. 35. Enlightenment（启蒙运动）：The name applied to an intellectual movement which developed in Western Europe during the seventeenth century and reached its height in the eighteenth. The

39、 common element was a trust in human reason as adequate to solve the crucial problems and to establish the essential norms in life, together with the belief that the application of reason was rapidly dissipating the remaining feudal traditions. It influenced lots of famous English writers especially

40、 those neoclassic writers, such as Alexander Pope. 36. Epic（史诗）：it is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or the human race. 37. Epiphany:（顿悟）In the e

41、arly draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce employed this term to signify a sudden sense of radiance and revelation that one may feel while perceiving a commonplace object. “Epiphany” now has become the standard term for the description, frequent in modern poetry and prose fic

42、tion, of the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. 38. Epithet: as a term in criticism, epithet denotes an adjective or adjectival phrase used to define a distinctive quality of a person or thing. This method was widely employed in ancient epics. For example, in Homers epic, t

43、he epithet like “the wine-dark sea” can be found everywhere. 39. Essay:（散文）any short composition in prose that undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view, persuade us to accept a thesis on any subject, or simply entertain. The essay can be divided as the formal essay and the informal es

44、say (familiar essay). 40. Euphemism（委婉语）: An inoffensive expression used in place of a blunt one that is felt to be disagreeable or embarrassing, such as “pass away” instead of “die” 41. Expressionism（表现主义）：a German movement in literature and the other arts which was at its height between 1910 and 1

45、925 that is, in the period just before, during, and after WW. The expressionist artist or writer undertakes to express a personal vision usually a troubled or tensely emotional vision of human life and human society. This is done by exaggerating and distorting. We recognize its effects, direct or in

46、direct, on the writing and staging of such plays as Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman as well as on the theater of the absurd. 42. Free verse（自由体诗）：Like traditional verse, it is printed in short lines instead of with the continuity of prose, but it differs from such verse by the fact that its rhyth

47、mic pattern is not organized into a regular metrical form that is, into feet, or recurrent units of weak and strong stressed syllables. Most free verse also has irregular line lengths, and either lacks rhyme or else uses it only occasionally. Walt Whitman is a representative who employed this poem f

48、orm successfully. 文学术语汇编8 43. Gothic novel:（哥特式小说）It is a type of prose fiction. The writers of this type of fictions mostly set their stories in the medieval period and in a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle. The typical story focused on the suffering

49、s imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel villain. This type of fictions made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other supernatural occurrences. The principle aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror and the best of this type opened up to the fiction the realm of the ir

50、rational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind. Some famous novelists liked to employ some Gothic elements in their novels, such as Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights. 44. Graveyard poets（墓园派诗歌）: A term applied to eighteenth-cent

51、ury poets who wrote meditative poems, usually set in a graveyard, on the theme of human mortality, in moods which range from pensiveness to profound gloom. The vogue resulted in one of the most widely known English poems, Thomas Grays “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. 45. Harlem Renaissance（哈

52、莱姆文艺复兴）：a period of remarkable creativity in literature, music, dance, painting, and sculpture by African-Americans, from the end of the First World War in 1917 through the 1920s. As a result of the mass migrations to the urban North in order to escape the legal segregation of the American South, an

53、d also in order to take advantage of the jobs opened to African Americans at the beginning of the War, the population of the region of Manhattan known as Harlem became almost exclusively Black, and the vital center of African American culture in America. Distinguished writers who were part of the mo

54、vement included Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. The Great Depression of 1929 and the early 1930s brought the period of buoyant Harlem culture which had been fostered by prosperity in the publishing industry and the art world effectively to an end. 46. Heroic Couplet（英雄双韵体）refers to lines of iambic

55、pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on. The adjective “heroic” was applied in the later seventeenth century because of the frequent use of such couplets in heroic poems and dramas. This verse form was introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer. From the age of John Dryden thr

56、ough that of Samuel Johnson, the heroic couplet was the predominant English measure for all the poetic kinds; some poets, including Alexander Pope, used it almost to the exclusion of other meters. 47. Hyperbole（夸张）:this figure of speech called hyperbole is bold overstatement, or the extravagant exag

57、geration of fact or of possibility. It may be used either for serious or ironic or comic effect. 48. Understatement（轻描淡写）：this figure of speech deliberately represents something as very much less in magnitude or importance than it really is, or is ordinarily considered to be. The effect is usually ironic. 49. Imagism（意象派）：it was a po