英美文学术语

TERMS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

1.Allegory

A narrative in which the characters and the setting stand for abstract qualities and ideas. The writer of an allegory is not primarily trying to make the characters and their actions realistic, but to make them representative of ideas or truths.

2. Alliteration (头韵)

The repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants or consonant clusters, in a group of words . Some-times the term is limited to the repetition of initial consonant sounds.

3. Assonance（腹韵，半谐音）

The repetition of similar vowel sounds , especially in poetry . Here is an example of assonance from John Keat s’s Ode on a Grecian Urn : “Thou foster ch i ld of s i lence and slow t i me .”

4. Ballad

A story told in verse and usually meant to be sung .

5. Blank Verse

Verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter.

6. Byronic Hero

The hero with the characteristic of Lord Byron or the hero in his poetry, who is contemptuous of and rebelling against conventional morality, or defying fate, and who is a mixture of good and evil, selflessness and sin, isolated, rebellious, passionate and self-reliant, etc.

7. Characterization

The personality a character displays; also, the means by which a writer reveals that personality. Generally, a writer develops a character in one or more of the following ways:

1)through the character’s actions;

2)through the character’s thoughts and speeches;

3)through a physical description of the character;

4)through the opinions others have about the character;

5)through a direct statement about the character telling what the writer thinks of him or her.

8. Classicism

A movement or tendency in art, literature, or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome . Classicism emphasizes the traditional and the universal, and places value on reason, clarity, balance , and order . Classicism, with its concern for reason and universal themes, is traditionally opposed to Romanticism, which is concerned with emotions and personal themes .

9. Climax

The point of greatest intensity, interest, or suspense in a narrative . The climax usually marks a story’s turning point.

10. Comedy

In general, a literary work that ends happily with a healthy, amicable armistice between the protagonist and society.

11. Comedy of Manners

A term most commonly used to designate the realistic, often satirical comedy. In the stricter sense of the term, the type is concerned with the manners and conventions of an artificial, highly sophisticated society. The fashions, manners and outlook on life of this social group are reflected. The characters are more likely to be types than individualized personalities. Plot, though often

involving a clever handling of situation and intrigue, is less important than atmosphere, dialogue and satire, The dialogue is witty and finished, often brilliant. Satire is directed against the deficiencies of typical characters.

12. Conceit

A kind of metaphor that makes a comparison between two startlingly different things.

13. Consonance（谐辅音）

The repetition of similar consonant sounds in a group of words . Sometimes the term refers to the repetition of consonant sounds in the middle or at the end of words, as in this line from Thomas Gray’s “ Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ”: “ And a ll the air a so l emn sti ll ness ho l ds . ”Sometimes the term is used for slant rhyme (or partial rhyme) in which initial and final consonants are the same but the vowels different : l itter/l etter , gree n/groa n .

14. Couplet

Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme.

15. Dramatic Monologue

A poem in which there is an imaginary speaker, at some specific and critical moment, addressing an imaginary, silent but identifiable audience, thereby unintentionally revealing his or her essential personality or temperament. In Browning’s My Last Duchess,for example, he penetrates to the depth the psychology of his characters and through their own speeches, he analyzes and reveals the innermost secret of their lives.

16. Heroic Couplet

An iambic pentameter couplet.

17. Elegy

A poem of mourning, usually over the death of an individual.

18. Epic

A long narrative poem telling about the deeds of a great hero and reflecting the values of the society from which it originated.

19. Fable

A story with a moral lesson, often employing animals who talk and act like human beings.

20 The Graveyard School

A group of 18th-century poets, and among them are Thomas Gray, Robert Blair, Thomas Parnell, and Edward Young, who wrote on funeral subjects.

21. Iambic Pentameter

A poetic line consisting of five verse feet (penta-is from a Greek word meaning “five”), with each foot an iamb—that is, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Iambic pentameter is the most common verse line in English poetry.

22. Imagery

Words or phrases that create pictures, or images, in the reader’s mind .

23. Lyric

A poem, usually a short one, that expresses a speaker’s personal thoughts or feelings. The elegy, ode, and sonnet are all forms of the lyric.

24. Metaphysical Poetry

The poetry of John Donne and other seventeenth-century poets who wrote in a similar style. Metaphysical poetry is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language , elaborate imagery , and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas .

25. Meter

A generally regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry.

26. Narrative Poem

A poem that tells a story .One kind of narrative poem is the epic, a long poem that sets forth the heroic ideals of a particular society. Beowulf is an epic. The ballad is another kind of narrative poem.

27. Narrator

One who narrates, or tells, a story. A story may be told by a first-person narrator, someone who is either a major or a minor character in the story. Or a story may be told by a third-person narrator, someone who is not in the story at all.

28. Naturalism

An extreme form of realism. Naturalistic writers usually depict the sordid side of life and show characters who are severely limited by their environment or heredity, two forces beyond man’s control.

29. Neoclassicism

A revival in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of classical standards of order, balance, and harmony in literature. John Dryden and Alexander Pope were major exponents of the neoclassical school.

30. Octive

An eight-line poem or stanza. Usually the term octave refers to the first eight lines of an Italian sonnet. The remaining six lines form a sestet.

31. Ode

A complex and often lengthy lyric poem, written in a dignified formal style on some serious subject.

32. Paradox

A statement that reveals a kind of truth, although it seems at first to be self-contradictory and untrue .

33. Point of view

The vantage point from which a narrative is told. There are two basic points of view: first-person and third person. In the first-person point of view, the story is told by one of the characters in his or her own words. In the third-person point of view, the narrator is not a character in the story. The narrator may be an omniscient, or “all-knowing” observer.

34. Pun

The use of a word or phrase to suggest two or more meanings at the same time. Puns are generally humorous.

35. Realism

The 19th century literary movement that reacted to romanticism by insisting on a faithful, objective presentation of the details of everyday life.

36. The Renaissance

The period in Europe between the 14th century and the 17th century. During this period, the classical arts and learning were discovered again and widely studied, so the term originally indicates a revival of classical(Roman and Greek) arts and learning after the dark ages of Medieval obscurantism, it also marked the beginning of the bourgeois revolution.

In the Renaissance period, scholars and educators called themselves humanists and began to

emphasize the capacities of the human mind and they held their chief interest in man’s values and his environment and doings. So humanism became the keynote of the English Renaissance.

37. Romance

Any imaginative literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with heroic adventures and battles between good characters and villains or monsters. Originally, the term referred to a medieval tale dealing with the loves and adventures of kings , queens , knights , and ladies , and including unlikely or supernatural happenings . Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the best of the medieval romances.

38. Romanticism

Romanticism is a literary movement which came into being in England early in the latter half of the 18th century and prevailed in the first half of the nineteenth century . This literary trend began with the publication of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads(抒情歌谣集) and ended with Walter Scott’s death. It is a reaction against the classicism or Neoclassicism of the 18th century. Romantic writing emphasizes emotions and feelings instead of reason and logic. It also focuses on the life of common people and encourages an appreciation of nature instead of society. The subject matters of Romanticism can be listed: sensibility, love of nature, interest in the past ,mysticism , individualism , exotic pictures , strong-willed heroes , sometimes resort to symbolism

39. Sestet

A six-line poem or stanza. Usually the term sestet refers to the last six lines of an Italian sonnet . The first eight lines of an Italian sonnet form an octave.

40. Sentimentalism

The middle of the 18th century in England sees the inception of a new literary current---that of sentimentalism, which came into being as a bitter discontent in social reality on the part of certain enlighteners who found the power of reason to be insufficient in dealing with social injustices, and therefore, appealed to sentiment as a means of achieving happiness and justice.

The term is used in two senses in the study of literature. The first is overindulgence in emotion, especially the conscious effort to induce emotion in order to analyze or enjoy it and the failure to restrain or evaluate emotion through the exercise of the judgement. The second is optimistic overemphasis of the goodness of humanity. Sentimentalism is concerned with the development of primitivism. In the first sense given above, sentimentalism is found in the melancholy verse of the Graveyard School.

41. Soliloquy

In drama, an extended speech delivered by a character alone onstage. The character reveals his or her innermost thoughts and feelings directly to the audience, as if thinking aloud.

42. Sonnet

A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter.

43. Stream of Consciousness

A method of telling a story in which a writer lets the reader know every thought that enters a character’s mind. This method tries to imitate the way in which people actually think. Therefore , the character’s thoughts are presented in the order in which they occur , and this order is not necessarily logical . When the stream-of-consciousness technique is used, the story is always written from the first-person point of view.

44. Spenserian Stanza

A nine-line stanza with the following rhyme scheme: ababbcbcc. The first eight lines are written in

iambic pentameter. The last line is written in iambic hexameter . The Spenserian Stanza was invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Fairie Queen.

45. Style

An author’s characteristic way of writing, determined by the choice of words, the arrangements of words in a sentence, and the relationship of sentences to one another. Style is the total qualities and characteristics that distinguish the writings of one writer from those of another.

46. Tragedy

In general, a literary work in which the protagonist meets an unhappy or disastrous end. Unlike comedy, tragedy depicts the actions of a central character who is usually dignified or heroic. Through a series of events, this main character, or tragic hero , is brought to a final downfall .

47. Foreshadowing

A device by means of which the author hints at something to follow.

48. Understatement(轻描淡写的陈述)

A figure of speech that consists of saying less than what one means, or of saying what one means with less force than the occasion warrants.

49. University Wits

A name given to a group of Elizabethan playwrights who had studied at the universities of Oxford or Cambridge. John Lyly and Thomas Lodge were at Oxford; Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe and Christopher Marlowe came from Cambridge.

50. The Wessex Novels

The Wessex Novels : novels by Hardy of describing the characters and environment of his native countryside. These novels have for their setting the agricultural region of the Southern counties of England. Hardy truthfully depicts the impoverishment and decay of small farmers who became hired fieldhands and roam the country in search of seasonal jobs. These laborers are mercilessly exploited by the rich landowners. The author is pained to see the decline of the idyllic life in rural England. This is one of the reasons for Hardy’s pessimistic tone throughout his novels. His pessimistic philosophy seems to show that mankind is subjected to human life. Determinism is a tendency in his writings. The major Wessex Novels include:

1. Under the Greenwood Tree

2. Far from the Madding Crowd

3. The Return of the Native

4. The Mayor of Casterbridge

5. Tess of the D’Urbervilles

6. Jude the Obscure