American Literature:the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States.
●For more than a millennium, each stage in the development of the English language has produced its
masterworks.
●Following the NormanConquest of 1066, French influence shaped the vocabulary as well as the literary
preoccupations of Middle English.
●The publication of the King James V ersion of the Bible in 1611 infud the literature of the period with
both religious imagery and a remarkably vigorous language, and it rved as an important instrument for the spread of literacy throughout England.
●Gradually ven kingdoms aro in Britain. By the 7th century, the small kingdoms were combined
into a united kingdom called England.
●Angles, Saxons and Jutes usually known as Anglo-Saxons are the first Englishmen. Language spoken
夏季上衣by them is called Old English, which is the foundation of English language and literature. With the Anglo-Saxon ttlement in Britain, the history of English literature began.
Beowulf is the oldest poem in the English language.木瓜的吃法大全
●Thus three languages existed in England at that time. The Normans spoke French, the lower class
spoke English, and the scholars and clergymen ud Latin.
●The romance was the prevailing form of literature in the Middle Ages.
●The central character of the romance is the knight, a man of noble birth skilled in the u of weapons. GEOFFREY CHAUCER乔叟
Chaucer was the reprentative writer of the 14th century, and therefore the 14th century is usually called the Age of Chaucer.
the outstanding English poet before Shakespeare and ―the first finder of our language.‖ His The Canterbury Tales ranks as one of the greatest poetic works in English.
The Canterbury Tales坎特伯雷故事集
The great majority of the words Chaucer us are the same in meaning and function as their Modern English counterparts. They usually differ greatly in spelling. But this initial difficulty soon disappears as one reads through the text -- especially if one reads the text aloud.
Chaucer‘s contribution to English poetry is that he introduced from France the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter, which was later called the heroic couplet, to English poetry, instead of the old Anglo-Saxon alliterative ver.
文艺复兴时期The English Renaissance
●The Renaissance was a European phenomenon. It revived the study of Roman and Greek classics and
marked the beginning of bourgeois revolution.
English literature in the Renaissance period is usually regarded as the high light in the history of English literature. In the Elizabethan period, English literature developed with a great speed and made a magnificent achievement. William Shakespeare 莎士比亚
●Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature. Hamlet is made a hero of the Renaissance
period and the reprentative of humanism. Through him Shakespeare expresd his own humanist ideas, Hamlet is made a hero of the Renaissance period and the reprentative of humanism. Through him Shakespeare expresd his own humanist ideas,
●Shall I compare thee to a summer‘s day?
●Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
●Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
●And summer‘s lea hath all too short a date:
●So long as men can breathe or eyes can e,
●So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
iambic pentameter 抑扬格五音步
●in poetry, a line of ver containing five metrical feet. Bacon‘s essays have a literary style peculiar to
their own. They are noted for their clearness, brevity and force of expression.
●The Faerie Queene is a long poem with sweet melody and its lines are very musical. Spenr
invented a new ver form for this poem. The ver form has been called Spenrian Stanza. Each stanza has nine lines, each of the first eight lines is in iambic pentametre form, and the ninth line is an iambic hexametre line, rhyming a b a b b c b c c.
Metaphysical poet 玄学诗人
John Milton(1608-1674) 弥尔顿
Milton ranks cond only to Shakespeare among English poets; his writings and his influence are an
important part of the history of English literature, culture, and libertarian thought. He is best known for Paradi Lost, which is generally regarded as the greatest epic poem in the English language.
Paradi Lost 失乐园
Paradi Lost is an epic poem written in blank ver—i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter ver. It tells the story of Satan's rebellion against God and his expulsion from heaven and the subquent temptation and expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.
●It is a long epic in 12 books, done in blank ver. All is not lost; the unconquerable will
●And study of revenge, immortal hate,
●And courage never to submit or yield：
The best-known ction in this book is the V anity Fair episode. On the V anity Fair, honors, titles, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures and lives can be sold or bought, and cheating, roguery, murder and adultery are normal phenomena. Enlightenment 启蒙运动
The Enlightenment was a progressive intellectual movement throughout W estern Europe in the 18th century. It was an expression of struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism.
●The main literary stream of the 18th century was realism. What the writers described in their
works were social realities. The main characters were usually common men. Most of the writers concentrated their attention to daily life.
Samuel Johnson 约翰逊博士
●His letter to Chesterfield is often taken as sounding ―the death-knell of patronage,‖ which it did not. But
it did asrt the dignity of the author.
Sentimentalism感伤主义
Daniel Defoe(1660-1731) 笛福
Robinson Crusoe 鲁滨逊飘流记
Robinson Crusoe (1719), an immediate success at home and on the Continent, is a unique fictional blending of the traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography with an insistent scrutiny of the nature of man as social creature and an extraordinary ability to invent a sustaining modern myth.红豆是什么意思
Jonathan Swift(1667-1745) 斯威夫特
如何选枕头
Gulliver‗s Travels 格列佛游记
Numerous obstacles have to be overcome before he achieves this, however, and in the cour of the action the various ts of characters pursue each other from one part of the country to another, giving Fielding an opportunity to paint an incomparably vivid picture of England in the mid-18th century.
Romanticism浪漫主义
Romanticism was marked by inten human sympathy, and by a conquent understanding of the human heart.
The sympathy for the poor, and the cry against oppression grew stronger and stronger.
Spenr, Shakespeare and Milton were inspiration of the romantic movement. W e can hardly read a poem of the early romanticists without finding a suggestion of the influence of one of the great leaders.
Robert Burns 彭斯
●national poet of Scotland, who wrote lyrics and songs in the Scottish dialect of English.
The Romantic Age began in 1798 and came to an end in 1832. The publication of the L yrical Ballads marked the break with classicism and the beginning of the Romantic Age.In 1832, the last romantic writer Walter Scott died, so in that year, the Romantic Age came to an end.
●This age is emphatically an age of poetry. Many young enthusiastic writers turned to poetry as a
happy man to singing. The glory of the age lies in the poetry of W ordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats.
●W omen as novelists appeared in this age. It was during this period that women assumed, for the
first time, an important place in English literature. Jane Austen offered us her charming descriptions of everyday life in her enduring works, which raid woman to the high place in literature she has ever since maintained.
William Wordsworth华兹华斯
●major English Romantic poet and poet laureate of England (1843–50). His Lyrical Ballads (1798),
written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement.
●I wandered lonely as a cloud
●That floats on high o‘er vales and hills,
●When all at once I saw a crowd,
●A host of golden daffodils:
●Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
●Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Lake Poet 湖畔派诗人
贩卖毒品罪Jane Austen 奥斯丁
English writer who first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life. Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time in such novels
●Although the birth of the English novel is to be en in the first half of the 18th century in the work
of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, it is with Jane Austen that the novel takes on its distinctively modern character in the realistic treatment of unremarkable people in the unremarkable situations of everyday life.
In her six novels—Sen and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time, revealing the possibilities of ―domestic‖ literature.
George Gordon Byron 拜伦
Percy Bysshe Shelley 雪莱
Ode to the W est Wind 西风颂
满腔怒火●Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
●Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!黄色的英语怎么写
●Be through my lips to unawakened earth
●The trumpet of a prophecy!O Wind,
●If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?
John Keats 济慈
●English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry marked by
vivid imagery, great nsuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend.
维多利亚时代English Literature in the Victorian Age
Critical Realism 批判现实主义
English critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and the early fifties. It foun d its expression in the form of novel. The critical realists, most whom were novelists, described with much vividness and artistic skill the chief traits of the English society and criticized the capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint. The greatest English realist of the time was Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens 狄更斯
Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity than had any previous author during his lifetime. Much in his work could appeal to simple and sophisticated, to the poor and to the Queen, and technological developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very quickly.
The range, compassion, and intelligence of his apprehension of his society and its shortcomings enriched his novels and made him both one of the great forces in 19th-century literature and an influential spokesman of the conscience of his age.
In his own time Thackeray was regarded as the only possible rival to Dickens. His pictures of contemporary life were obviously real and were accepted as such by the middle class.
V anity Fair 名利场
The main plot centers on the story of two women Amelia Sedley and Rebecca Sharp.
The Bronte sisters 勃朗特三姐妹
●Jane Eyre, the heroine of the novel, maintains that women should have equal rights with men. In this
nove l, Gaskell shows great sympathy for the workers. She highly prais the workers‘ struggle against capitalists
●He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
●Clo to the sun in lonely lands,
●Ringed with the azure world, he stands.
Robert Browning 布朗宁
Browning's dramatic monologues must, as he himlf insisted, be recognized as the utterances of fictitious persons drawing their strength from their appropriateness in characterizing the speaker, and not as expressions of Browning's own ntiments.
The play is about the training Higgins gives to a Cockney flower girl to enable her to pass as a lady and is also about the repercussions of the experiment's success.
●The W aste Land(1922), traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization that, on the
evidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence.
William Butler Y eats 叶芝
T.S.Eliot 艾略特
●If one figure had to be named as the pivotal leader among writers in English during the first half
of the twentieth century, it would be Thomas Sterns Eliot. Not only was he a great poet, a great
critic, a fine playwright, and a far-reaching influence on others, but he became the conscience of his generation, deliberately fitting himlf for this role, which he summed up in a celebrated phra when he defined his belief as ―classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion‘.
●What Eliot achieved was an exact expression for the spiritual dia of the twentieth century.
After the unquenchable optimist of the Victorian Age had burned itlf out in W orld W ar I, a period of inten questioning began. One by one, what had emed established certainties were questione
d; a society that had appeared both stable and progressive for ove r a century broke into fragments. Eliot‘s classic expression of the temper of his age is ‗The W aste Land‖, a poem which, despite its extreme difficulty, brought him immediate fame.
The Waste Land 荒原
●April is the cruelest month, breeding
●Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
●Memory and desire, stirring
●Dull roots with spring rain.
Seamus Heaney 希尼
Bogland 沼泽地
林彪简介
●W e have no prairies
●To slice a big sun at evening—
●Everywhere the eye concedes to
●Encroaching horizon.
Modernist novelists 现代主义小说家
V irginia Woolf 伍尔夫
●In her long essay, A Room of One's Own (1929), she described the difficulties encountered by
women writers in a man's world.
William Golding 戈尔丁
●Golding's first published novel was Lord of the Flies (1954; film 1963 and 1990), the story of a group
of schoolboys isolated on a coral island who revert to savagery.Its imaginative and brutal depiction of the rapid and inevitable dissolution of social mores aroud widespread interest. Doris Lessing 莱辛
●The Golden Notebook (1962), in which a woman writer attempts to come to terms with the life of
her times through her art, is one of the most complex and the most widely read of her novels.
美国文学American Literature
American literature is the youngest of all national literatures. English literature in the United States is therefore only about more than 200 years old. In spite of this fact, the people of the United States have produced some of the world‘s best literature.
Bradstreet
She wrote her poems while rearing eight children, functioning as a hostess, and performing other domestic duties.
▪The English colonies in North America ro in arms against their parent country and the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The W ar of the Independence lasted till 1783, and the United States of America was founded.
The 18th century was the age of the Enlightenment. Rationalism was the dominant spirit. The enlighteners were oppod to the colonial order fighting against the Puritan tradition, brought to life cular literature
