英国文学史名词解释
1.sonnet
The sonnet is one of the poetic forms that can be found in lyric poetry from Europe. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song". By the thirteenth century, it had come to signify a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. The conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. The writers of sonnets are sometimes referred to as "sonneteers," although the term can be ud derisively. One of the best-known sonnet writers is Shakespeare, who wrote 154 of them. A Shakespearean sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line contains ten syllables, and each line is written in iambic pentameter in which a pattern of a non-emphasized syllable followed by an emphasized syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, in which the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.
2. Iambic pentameter
Iambic pentameter is a commonly ud metrical line in traditional ver and ver drama. The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; the small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is ud (in English, an unstresd syllable followed by a stresd syllable). The word "pentameter" indicates that a line has five of the "feet."
3. Heroic couplet
Heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly ud for epic and narrative poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a quence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. The rhyme is always masculine. U of the heroic couplet was first pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer is also widely credited with first extensive u of iambic pentameter.
4. Stream of consciousness
The continuous flow of n-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind: or a literary method of reprenting such a blending of mental process in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjoint form of interior monologue.
5. The Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also ud more looly to refer to the historic era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not uniform, this is a very general u of the term.
6. Humanism
Humanism is a literary and philosophical view emphasizing humankind as its center concerns. Humanism originated in the Renaissance, the term has been ud many ways, but always suggests humanity as the central concern, with the natural world (science) and the spiritual world (religion) valued for their relation to people.
7. The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement originating in France，which attracted widespread support among the ruling and intellectual class of Europe and North America in the cond half of the 18th century. It characterizes the efforts by certain European writers to u critical reason to free minds from prejudice, unexamined authority and oppression by Church or State. Therefore the Enlightenment is sometimes called the Age of Reason.
8. Romanticism
Roughly the first third of the 19th century makes up English literature’s romantic period. Writers of romantic literature are more concerned with imagination and feeling than with the power of reason. A volume of poems called Lyrical Ballads written by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is regarded as the romantic poetry’s “Declaration of Independence.” Keats, Byron and Shelley, the three great poets, brought t
he Romantic Movement to its height. The spirit of romanticism also occurred in the novel.
9. Critical Realism
Critical realism is a philosophical view of knowledge. On the one hand it holds that it is possible to acquire knowledge about the external world as it really is, independently of the human mind or subjectivity. That is why it is called realism. On the other hand it rejects the view of naïve realism that the external world is as it is perceived. Recognizing that perception is a function of, and thus fundamentally marked by, the human mind, it holds that one can only acquire knowledge of the external world by critical reflection on perception and its world. That is why it is called critical.
10.Aestheticism( 美学主义) The basic theory of the Aesthetic movement----“art for art’s sake”----was t forth by a French poet, Theophile Gautier. The first Englishman who wrote about the theory of aestheticism was Walter Pater, the most important critical writer of the late 19th century. The chief reprentative of the movement in England was Oscar
Wilde,with his Picture of Dorian Gray. Aestheticism places art above life, and holds that life should imitate art, not art imitate life. According to the aesthetes, all artistic creation is absolutely subjective as oppod to objective. Art should be free from any influence of egoism. Only when art is for art’s sake,can it be immortal They believed that art should be unconcerned with controversial issues, such as politics and morality, and that it should be restricted to contributing beauty in a highly polished style. This was one of the reactions against the materialism and commercialism of the Victorian industrial era, as well as a reaction against the Victorian convention of art for morality’s sake, or art for money’s sake.
