英国文学术语
1.Sentimentalism：Sentimentalism stresses on material senses as being
spiritual and/or considers soul to be material, thus anything done on sentimental level is more or less materialistic rather than spiritual/transcendental.
2.Ode：a complex lyric poem of some length, dealing with a noble theme in a
dignified manner and originally intended to be sung. Odes are often written for a special occasion, to honor a person or a season or to commemorate an event.
3.Romance：is the prevailing literary form and prospered for about 300 years
(1200-1500). It was a long composition, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose, describing the life and adventures of a noble hero.（It is a popular term in the medieval England. It is concerned with knights, chivalry and courtly love.）^_^
4.Realism：is a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording life as it
really is without sentimentalizing or idealizing it. It may be found as an element in the works of Chaucer or Defoe prior to the 19th century, but as a dominant trend in the novels of the middle- or lower class life in the 19th century.
5.Sonnet：is a lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of 14 iambic pentameter
lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. （A lyric consisting of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter, restricted to a definite rhyme scheme.
Shakespeare’s are well known.）
6.Shakespeare sonnet：(named after its greatest practitioner) comprises three
quatrains and a final couplet, rhyming ababcdcdefefgg. The ‘turn’ comes with the final couplet, which may sometimes achieve an epigram.
7.Spenserian stanza（英国诗人）斯宾塞诗体：Created by Edmund Spencer.
It refers to a stanza of nine lines, with the first 8 lines in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc. The Fearie Queene was a representative.
8.Enlightenment：The Enlightenment was a progressive intellectual
movement throughout the Western Europe in the 18th century. It greatly influenced the English social life and literature. Generally speaking, the Enlightenment movement was an expression of struggle of the bourgeoisie
against feudalism.
9. Allegory: A story told to explain or teach something. It used extended metaphors to convey moral meanings. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
10. Soliloquy: A character is alone and speaks his or her thoughts loudly.
Soliloquy is a speech, often of some length, in which a character, alone on the stage, expresses his thoughts and feelings. In classical drama the soliloquy is rare, but the playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean period used it extensively and with great skill. The soliloquy’s advantages are inestimable because it enables a dramatist to convey directly to audience important information about a particular character: his state of mind and heart, his most intimate thoughts and feelings, his motives and intentions.
11.The Enlightenment Movement: Flourished in France and swept through Western Europe in the 18th century. Its purpose is to enlighten the whole world with the light of philosophical ideas. It celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science.
Enlightenment: is a term used to describe the trends in thought and letters in Europe and the American colonies during the 18th century prior to the French revolution. The phrase was frequently employed by writers of the period itself, convinced that they were emerging from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science, and a respect for humanity. The enlighteners believed in the power of reason, and that is why the 18th century in England has often been called “th e age of reason “.
12 .Neoclassicism: The writers took the ancient Greek and Roman classical works as the literary models. Poetry was held to be an imitation on human life. They tried to control literary creation by some fixed rules. It is elegant in diction and structure. They stressed rules, reasons. Harmony, balance and an appeal to the intellect rather than emotion.
13.Gothic Novel: It is story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle. Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay.
Gothic novel or romances, which enjoyed much popularity in England in the last decades of the 18th century, are novels of terror that employ medieval background and contain gloomy sentiment, superstitious horror and much supernaturalism. They
have been so named because “Gothic” architecture dating from the middle ages is invariably the setting for the elements of horror in them. According to these writers evil forces reign in the world, and it is useless to struggle against one’s fate. The mysterious element plays an enormous role in the Gothic novel; it is so replete (full) with bloodcurdling scenes and unnatural f eelings that it is justly called an “a novel of horrors”
14.Sentimentalism: A direct reaction against the cold, hard commercialism and rationalism. Dissatisfied with reason, they appeal to sentiment to the human heart, particularly pity and sympathy. Sentimentalism turns to the countryside for its material.
15.Romanticism: It occurred in the middle 18th century. It strongly protests against neo-classism, which emphasized reason and order. The general features are: expressiveness, imagination, individual, worship of nature and freedom.
Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.[1] In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature,[2] and was embodied in the visual arts, music, and literature.
16.Critical realism: It occurred in the 1840s. The writers criticized the capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint. They are concerned about the fate of the common people and described what was faithful to reality. Charles Dickens
.Critical Realism The Victorian Age is an age of realism rather than of romanticism-a realism which strives to tell the whole truth showing moral & physical diseases as they are. To be true to life becomes the first requirement for literary writing. As the mirror of truth, literature has come very close to daily life, reflecting its practical problems & interests & is used as a powerful instrument of human progress
17.Dramatic monologue: A single speaker speaks to a silent audience. Such poems reveal not the poet’s own thoughts but the mind of the impersonated character. .
.Dramatic monologue: A kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listeners whose replies are not given in the poem. The occasion is usually a crucial one in the speaker’s personality as well as the incident that is the subject of the poem.
18.Psychological nove l: A kind of novel that dwells on a complex psychological development and presents much of the narration through the inner workings of the character’s mind.
19.Naturalism: A post-Darwinism movement of the 19th century that tried to apply the laws of scientific determination of fiction. A person is controlled by environment and heredity. Most of the works are pessimistic and detachment from the story
20.Modernism: Began in the late 19th century and flourished until 1950s. It takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between men and men, men and society, man and himself. They are more concerned with the inner world of an individual. They move from the objective to the subjective. It also include: alienation, loss of identity, loneliness, meaningless life, absurdity of the world, dehumanization of the society. Frequent techniques: juxtaposition and multiple points of view.
21.Steam of consciousness: It is used to depict the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events, rather than the events themselves. It adopts the psycho-analytic approach to explore the existence of unconscious and unconscious elements in the mind. The action is presented in terms of images and attitudes within the mind of one or more figures, often to get at the psychic nature of the character.
22.Bildungsroman: A novel of the youthful development of a hero or a heroine. It describes the process by which maturity is achieved through various steps.
23.Feminist criticism: Occurred in the late 1960s. It is an attempt to describe and interpret women’s experience as depicted in various kinds of novel. It attacks male notions of value in literature and challenges the accepted male ideas about the nature of women. Thus, it questions prejudices and assumptions about women made male writers.
24.Post-modernism: Refers to certain radically experimental works of literature and art after WWⅡ. Much of the works reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals the meaningless of human existence. They use new devices, forms.
25.Post-structuralism: An attempt to subvert structuralism and to formulate new theories. It was initiated by deconstructors. Each word exists in a complex web of language and has a variety of denotation and connotation that no one meaning can be final, stable to substitution.
26. The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc."
Spenserian stanza:
Spenserian stanza was invented by Edmund Spenser. It is a stanza of nine lines, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter & the last line in iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc.
27.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 used derisively. One of the best-known sonnet writers is William Shakespeare, who wrote 154 of them (not including those that appear in his plays). A Shakespearean, or English, sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line containing ten syllables and written in iambic pentameter, in which a pattern of an unemphasized syllable followed by an emphasized syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is ababcdcdefef gg; the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.
Traditionally, English poets employ iambic pentameter when writing sonnets. In the Romance languages, the hendecasyllable and Alexandrine are the most widely used metres.
Sonnet: A sonnet is a 14-line poem in iambic pentameter with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme.
28 Romance: it was a long composition, sometimes sin verse, sometimes in prose, describing the life and adventures of a noble hero. The central character of romance was knight and the reasons for their adventures could be love, religious faith, or the mere desire for excitement.
29. Renaissance: in essence, was a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of conservatism in feudalist Europe and introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, to lift the restrictions in all areas placed by the roman church authorities.
30. Iambic pentameter:is a verse form in which a\one line of poem contains 10 syllables, which could be divided into five feet. Two syllables in one feet are stressed syllable followed by a unstressed one.
31.The comedy of manners is a genre of play/television/film which satirizes the manners and affectations of a social class, often represented by stock characters, such as the miles glorious in ancient times, the fop and the rake during the Restoration, or an old person pretending to be young. The plot of the comedy, often concerned with an illicit love affair or some other scandal, is generally less important than its witty and often bawdy dialogue.
The comedy of manners was first developed in the new comedy of the Ancient Greek playwright Menander. His style, elaborate plots, and stock characters were imitated by the Roman playwrights Plautus and Terence, whose comedies were widely known and copied during the Renaissance. The best-known comedies of manners, however, may well be those of the French playwright Molière, who satirized the hypocrisy and pretension of the ancien régime in such plays as L'école des femmes (The School for Wives, 1662), Le Misanthrope (The Misanthrope, 1666), and most famously Tartuffe (1664).
32. The miracle play had as its subject either a story from the bible, or else the life and martyrdom of a saint. In the usage of some historians, however, “miracle play” denotes only dramas based on saints’ lives, and term “mystery play”.
33. The morality play is a genre of Medieval and early Tudor theatrical entertainment. In their own time, these plays were known as "interludes", a broader term given to dramas with or without a moral theme.Morality plays are a type of allegory in which the protagonist is met by personifications of various moral attributes who try to prompt him to choose a godly life over one of evil. The plays were most popular in Europe during the 15th and 16th centuries. Having grown out of the religiously based mystery plays of the Middle Ages, they represented a shift towards a more secular base for European theatre.
Mystery plays and Miracle plays(which are two different things) are among the earliest formally developed plays in medieval Europe. Medieval mystery plays focused on the representation of Bible stories in churches as tableaux with accompanying antiphonal song. They developed from the 10th to the 16th century, reaching the height of their popularity in the 15th century before being rendered obsolete by the rise of professional theatre. The name derives from mystery used in its sense of miracle, but an occasionally quoted derivation is from misterium, meaning craft, a play performed by the craft guilds.
34. Rationalism：It is used to describe the political belief that the world political order is not as chaotic as suggested by realists, but maintains a certain degree of order where nation-states do not violate others' sovereignty unless absolutely necessary.
35.The sublime is a form of expression in literature in which the author refers to things in nature or art that affect the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power. It is calculated to inspire awe, deep reverence, or lofty emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur. When thinking of the literary sublime, most scholars point to the Romantic Period as the age in which it flourished. In Romantic poetry, authors often referred to mountains or deep crags, things that they considered both awe-inspiring and terrifying, in order to express the literary sublime.
36.Empiricism is one of several competing views that predominate in the study of human knowledge, known as epistemology. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or tradition[1] in contrast to, for example, rationalism which relies upon reason and can incorporate innate knowledge.
37.Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern. Some poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, must still display some elements of form. Most free verse, for example, self-evidently continues to observe a convention of the poetic line in some sense, at least in written representations, thus retaining a potential degree of linkage, however nebulous, with more traditional forms. Some poets have considered free verse restrictive in its own way.
38.Tragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of Western civilisation.
39. In poetry, a stanza is a unit within a larger poem. In modern poetry, the term is often equivalent with strophe. A stanza consists of a grouping of lines, set off by a space, that usually has a set pattern of meter and rhyme. In traditional English-language poems, stanzas can be identified and grouped together because they share a rhyme scheme or a fixed number of lines (as in distich/couplet, tercet, quatrain, cinquain/quintain, sestet). In much modern poetry, stanzas may be arbitrarily presented on the printed page because of publishing conventions that employ such features as white space or punctuation.
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29.Dramatic Monologue
By dramatic monologue, it is meant that a poet chooses a dramatic moment or a crisis, in which his characters are made to talk about their lives, & about their minds & hearts. In " listening" to those one-sided talks, readers can form their own opinions & judgments about the speaker's personality & about what has really happened. Robert Browning brought this poetic form to its maturity & perfection & his "My Last Duchess" is one of the best-known dramatic monologues.
39. The Gothic novel
It is a type of romantic fiction that predominated in the late 18th century & was one phase of the Romantic movement, its principal elements are violence, horror & the supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader's emotion. With its descriptions of the dark, irrational side of human nature, the Gothic form has exerted a great influence over the writer of the Romantic period. Works like The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe & Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley are typical Gothic romance.
40.Epic(史诗)An epic is a long oral narrative poem that operates on a grand scale and deals with legendary or historical events of national or universal significance .Most epics deal with the exploits of a single individual and also interlace the main narrative with myths, legends, folk tales and past events; there is a composite effect, the entire culture of a country cohering in the overall experience of the poem . Epic poems are not merely entertaining stories of legendary or historical heroes; they summarize and express the nature or ideals of an entire nation at a significant or crucial period of its history. 史诗是长篇口头叙事诗，内容广泛，通常以重要传说或者重大历史事件为题材。大部分的史诗歌颂个人的英雄事迹，同时也在叙述中插入神话、传说、民间故事以及历史事件；一个民族的整体文化与全诗所讲的经历紧密联系，造成一种复合的效果。史诗不仅仅是愉悦人的传奇故事或者历史英雄事迹，它们总结以及表达了一个民族在其历史上一个重要或者关键时期的本质或者理想。
41.Ballad(民谣)In more exact literary terminology, a ballad is a narrative poem consisting of quatrains of iambic tetrameter alternating with iambic trimeter. Common traits of the ballad are that(a) the beginning is often abrupt ,(b) the story is told through dialogue and action (c) the language is simple or “folksy,” (d) the theme is often tragic---though comic ballads do exist, (e) the ballad contains a refrain repeated several times. The ballad became popular in England in the late 14th century and was adopted by many writers. One of the most important anthologies of ballads is F. J. Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads. 在更为精确的文学术语中，民谣指的是抑扬格四音步与抑扬格三音步诗行交替出现的四行叙事诗。民谣的共同特色包括：（a）诗歌的起首通常十分出其不意。（b）故事通过对话和行为讲述。（c）语言简单，民风十足。（d）尽管存在喜剧民谣，但大多数民谣的主题具有悲剧意味。（e）民谣通常包含重复多遍的叠句。民谣这种诗歌形式在14世纪晚期的英格兰十分盛行，从此以后许多作家对其进行模仿创作。历史上最为知名的
民谣集之一为恰尔德收集出版的《英格兰和苏格兰流行歌谣》。
42. Byronic belonging to or derived from Lord Byron(1788-1824)or his works. The Byronic hero is a character-type found in his celebrated narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812-18),his verse drama Manfred(1817),and other works: he is a boldly defiant but bitterly self –tormenting outcast, proudly contemptuous of social n orms but suffering for some unnamed sin. Emily Bronte’s Heath cliff in Wuthering Heights (1847) is a later example.
43. Heroic couplet a rhymed pair of iambic pentameter lines:
Let Observation with extensive View
Survey Mankind, from China to Peru (Johnson)
Named from its use by Dryden and others in the heroic drama of the late 17th century, the heroic couplet had been established much earlier by Chaucer as a major English verse-form for narrative and other kinds of non-dramatic poetry: it dominated English poetry of the 18th century, notably in the couplets of Pope, before declining in importance in the early 19th century.
44. Lake poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey became known as the Lake Poets, because they lived in the Lake District in the northwestern part of England. According to the critics, such as, Francis Jeffrey, Thomas De Quincey, the Lake Poets shared only friendship and brief periods of collaboration, not similar philosophies or poetic styles. Wordsworth used his imaginative powers to idealize nature; Coleridge explored the philosophical aspects of poetry, Southey's Romantic efforts centered on travel and adventure.
The Lake Poets are a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known, although their works were uniformly disparaged by the Edinburgh Review[citation needed]. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.
The three main figures of what has become known as the Lakes School are William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. They were associated with several other poets and writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lloyd, Hartley Coleridge, John Wilson, and Thomas De Quincey.
The beauty of the Lake District has also inspired many other poets over the years, beyond the core Lake Poets. These include James Payn, Bryan Procter, Felicia Hemans and
45. Blank verse (uncountable)
A poetic form with regular meter, p articularly iambic pentameter, but no fixed rhyme scheme.
Blank verse is a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter (as used in Shakespearean plays).
The first known use of blank verse in the English language was by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in his interpretation of the ?neid (c. 1554). He was possibly inspired by the Latin original, as classical Latin verse (as well as Greek verse) did not use rhyme; or he may have been inspired by the Italian verse form of Versi Sciolti , which also contained no
rhyme. The play, Arden of Faversham (circa 1590 by an unknown author) is a notable example of end-stopped blank verse.
Christopher Marlowe was the first English author to make full use of the potential of blank verse, and also established it as the dominant verse form for English drama in the age of Elizabeth I and James I. The major achievements in English blank verse were made by William Shakespeare, who wrote much of the content of his plays in unrhymed iambic pentameter, and Milton, whose Paradise Lost is written in blank verse. Miltonic blank verse was widely imitated in the 18th century by such poets as James Thomson (in The Seasons) and William Cowper (in The Task). Romantic English poets such as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats used blank verse as a major form. Shortly afterwards, Alfred, Lord Tennyson became particularly devoted to blank verse, using it for example in his long narrative poem "The Princess", as well as for one of his most famous poems: "Ulysses". Among American poets, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens are notable for using blank verse in extended compositions at a time when many other poets were turning to free verse.
Characteristics of Neoclassical Literature
According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek & Roman writers (Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, etc,)& those of the contemporary French ones. Neoclassicists had some fixed laws &rules for almost every genre of literature, prose should be precise, direct, smooth & flexible. Poetry should be lyrical, epical, didactic, satiric or dramatic, & each class should be guided by its own principles. Drama should be written in the Heroic Couplets (iambic pentameter rhymed in two lines); the three unities of time, space & action should be strictly observed; regularity in construction should be adhered to & type characters rather than individuals should be represented.
Characteristics of Romantic literature in English history
The Romantic period is an age of poetry Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley & Keats are the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. Wordsworth & Coleridge were the major representatives of this movement. They explored new theories & innovated new techniques in poetry writing. They saw poetry as a healing energy: they believed that poetry could purify both individual souls & the society. The Romantics not only extol the faculty of imagination, but also stress the concept of spontaneity & inspiration, regarding them as something crucial for true poetry. The natural world comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject matter. Wordsworth is the closest to nature.
To escape from a world that had became excessively rational, as well as excessively materialistic & ugly, the Romantics would turn to other times & places, where the
qualities they valued could be convincingly depicted. Romantics also tend to be nationalistic, defending the great poets & dramatists of their own national heritage against the advocates of classical rules who tended to glorify Rome & rational Italian & French neoclassical art as superior to the native traditions. To the Romantics, poetry should be free from all rules. They would turn to the humble people & their everyday life for subjects; Romantic writers are always seeking for the Absolute, the Ideal through the transcendence of the actual. They have also made bold experiments in poetic language, versification & design, & constructed a variety of forms on original principles of structure & style.
Features of the Victorian Literature
Victorian literature, as a product of its age, naturally took on its quality of magnitude & diversity. It was many-sided & complex, & reflected both romantically & realistically the great changes that were going on in people's life & thought. Great writers & great works abounded.