专八人文知识英美文学复习材料

专业八级备考英美文学知识纲要

注：黄色部分为往年已考过的内容。

英国文学

Old and Medieval English literature (5th-15th century) 1066

1. Beowulf oldest English epic

2. medieval romance Arthurian romances, knight

3. Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales in heroic couplet

4. popular ballads Robin Hood stories and the ballad meter

The English Renaissance—Humanism, drama (16th century)

1. Edmund Spenser Faerie Queene in the Spenserian stanza, allegorical romance

2.Christopher Marlowe The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great

3.William Shakespeare

a)Major tragedies: Hamlet; Othello; King Lear; Macbeth

b)Major comedies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Merchant of V enice; As You

Like It; The Twelfth Night; Romeo and Juliet

c)Sonnet 18

4.Francis Bacon Essays“Of Studies” some quotes from the essay

5.King James’s or The Authorized Bible (1604)

The 17th Century—Turbulent and gloomy

1.John Donne and Metaphysical Poetry “The Flea”, “Valediction: Forbidding

Mourning”

2.John Milton: Paradise Lost rebellious spirit, Miltonic style, blank verse

3.John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress allegory, satire, Vanity Fair

The 18th Century—Age of Reason and common sense

1.Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders

2.Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal”

3.Neoclassicism and Alexander Pope

4.Samuel Johnson Letter to the Right Honourable The Earl of Chesterfield

5.Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling

6.Robert Burns: “A Red, Red Rose”“Auld Lang Syne”

7.William Blake: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, “The Tyger”

The Age of Romanticism—Poetry, individualism, nature, emotion (1798-1832)

1.William Wordsworth: “The Preface to Lyrical Ballads” as declaration of Romanticism,

nature poet “The Solitary Reaper”, “Tintern Abbey”, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” or

“Daffodils” , “Composed upon Westerminster Bridge”

2.Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan

3.George Gorgon Byron: the Byronic hero; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan

4.Percy Bysshe Shelley: Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, “Ode to the West Wind”

5.John Keats：“Ode to a Nightingale”, “To Autumn”, “Ode on an Grecian Urn”, truth is

beauty, beauty is truth

6.Walter Scott: historical romance, Ivanhoe

7.Jane Austen: realistic writing about family life, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and

Sensibility

The Victorian Age (1832-1901) 19th century

1.general features: utilitarianism, middle class urban literature, conservative morality

2.Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations,

Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Little Dorrit

3.William Thackeray: Vanity Fair

4.The Bronte sisters: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

5.George Eliot: Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch

6.Thomas Hardy: the Wessex novels; Tess of the D’urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The

Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, naturalist ideas

7.Alfred Tennyson: poet

8.Robert Browning: poet, dramatic monologue, “My Last Duchess”

9.George Bernard Shaw: dramatist, 1925 Nobel Prize winner

The Twentieth Century

1.The features of modernism: alienation and loneliness

2.T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Waste Land 1948 Nobel Prize

winner

3.James Joyce: Ulysses, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Irish, Dublin, stream of

consciousness

4.Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

5. D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers(Oedipus Complex), Lady Chatterley’s Lover

6.W. B. Yeats: Irish poet, modernism 1923 Nobel Prize winner

7.Angry Young Men (1950s): Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

8.The Theatre of the Absurd: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

9.Women writers: Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark

10.Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook, 2007 Nobel Prize winner

11.contemporary writers: Martin Amis, Ian McEvan, Julia Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Margaret

Drabble, Anita Brookner, V. S, Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Larkin

(poet), Seamus Heaney (poet), Harold Pinter (dramatist)

12.V. S. Naipaul: Indian-British novelist, 2001 Nobel Prize winner

13.Seamus Heaney: Irish Poet 1995 Nobel Prize winner

美国文学

Colonial Period (1607-1800) –Rise of the American Dream

1.Puritanism, Enlightenment, Independence War

2.Jonathan Edwards

3.Benjamin Franklin:Poor Richard’s Almanac, Autobiography

Romanticism (1800-1865) –Prime of the American Dream

1.Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle”, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

2.James Fenimore Cooper: Leather stocking Tales, American Westward movement

3.New England Transcendentalism: Oversoul

4.Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nature”(The Bible for Transcendentalism), “The American

Scholar” (intellectual independence), prose

5.Henry David Thoreau: Walden, prose

6.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: poet, “A Psalm of Life”

7.Edgar Allan Poe: poet and short story writer, “The Raven”, The Fall of the House of

Usher, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter

8.Walt Whitman: free verse, Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself”, “O Captain! My

Captain!”, national poet of America, social and national topics, strongly influenced by

Emerson

9.Emily Dickinson: poet, regional and inner world, topics on religion, death, love, nature

10.Nathaniel Hawthorn: novelist, dark side of human beings, The Scarlet Letter, “Young

Goodman Brown”, “The Minister’s Black Veil”

11.Herman Melville: novelist, sea life, Moby Dick

Realism and Naturalism (1865-1918)—Questioning the American Dream

1.William Dean Howells: middle class, The Rise of Silas Lapman

2.Mark Twain: Samuel Clemens, lower class, local colorism, The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn/Tom Sawyer, The Gilded Age

3.Henry James: rich class, international theme, psychological descriptions, The Portrait of

a Lady, The Ambassadors, The American, Daisy Miller

4.Stephen Crane: pioneer writing in the naturalistic tradition, Maggie: A Girl of the

Streets, The Red Badge of Courage

5.Frank Norris: McTeague, the first full-bodied naturalistic American novel, a case study

of the inevitable effect of environment and heredity on human lives

6.Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, An American Tragedy

7.Jack London: The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden

8.O Henry: short story writer, the American Maupassant, surprise endings, “The Gift of

the Magi”, “The Cop and the An them”

Modernism (1918-1945)—Disillusionment of the American Dream

1.Imagist poetry: imagism, direct treatment of the thing, use as few words as possible

2.Ezra Pound: “In a Station of the Metro”, The Cantos

3.T. S. Eliot: referring to the British part

4.Wallace Stevens: “Anecdote of the Jar”, “The Idea of Order at Key West”

5.William Carlos Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow”

6.Robert Frost: New England poet, “The Road Not Taken”, “Mending Wall”, “After

Apple-picking”

7.Modernist Novels: the Lost Generation

8. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, the Jazz age

9.Ernest Hemingway: the Lost Generation, Hemingway hero, iceberg theory, The Sun Also

Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, 1954

Nobel Prize winner

10.William Faulkner: the Southern Renaissance/myth, Yoknapatawpha, The Sound and the

Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, stream of consciousness

1949 Nobel Prize winner

11.Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio; describing the grotesque

12.Sinclair Lewis: Main Street, sociological writer, first American Nobel Prize winner,

(1930)

13.Willa Cather: female writer, writing about the Old West in traditional way, My Antonio

14.John Dos Passos: 1930s, Depression, U.S.A.

15.John Steinbeck: 1930s, Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl

1962 Nobel Prize winner

16.Drama: A renaissance of drama in 1920s—Eugene O’Neill, The theatre of the

Depression in 1930s

17.Eugene O’Neill: American dram began in 1916 when O’Neil’s first play Bound East for

Cardiff was produced, The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey into

Night

Post-War American Literature—Multi-faceted

1.The Beat Generation in 1950s: Howl by Allen Ginsberg (poet), On the Road by Jack

Kerouac (novelist)

2.Black Humor: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

3.Post-war Realism: Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

4.Jewish literature: Herzog by Saul Bellow

5.African-American literature: Richard Wright, Native Son; Ralph Ellison, The Invisible

Man; Toni Morrison, Beloved

6.Post-war drama: Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire;

Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman

7.Theatre of the Absurd: George Albee, Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Literary Terms:

1. Alliteration: repetition of the same sound or sounds at the beginning of two or more words

that are next to or close to each other.

2. Iambic pentameter: poetic meters of five iambs or feet. Iambic means the stress is on the

second syllable.

3. Heroic couplet: a pair of rhyming iambic pentameter lines.

4. Blank verse: unrhymed poetic lines in iambic pentameters.

5. Sonnet: a lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked

by an intricate rhyme scheme. Italian or Petrarchan sonnet is composed of an octave and a sestet (rhyming abbaabba cdecde). Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains and a couplet (rhyming abab cdcd efef gg).

6. Assonance: repetition of related vowel sounds

7. Ode: a long lyric poem that is serious in subject and treatment, elevated in style and elaborate

in its stanzaic structure.

8. Spenserian stanza: a nine-line stanza of eight lines in iambic pentameter plus an iambic

hexameter. The rhyme scheme is abab bcbc c.

9. Romance: a tale in verse, embodying the life and adventures of knights.

10. Ballad: a narrative poem that tells a story.

11. Ballad meter: a quatrain in alternate four- and three-stress lines; usually only the second and

fourth lines rhyme.

12. Allegory: a story or description in which the characters and events symbolize some deeper

underlying meaning, and serve to spread moral teaching.

13. American Puritanism: Puritanism is a Protestant movement which spread its influence into

the New England colonies in 17th century. The American Puritans believed that the Church should be restored to the “purity” of the Church as established by Christ himself. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement. 14. American Romanticism: American Romanticism is the literary movement stretching from the

end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It was in essence the expression of “a real new experience” and contained “an alien quality”. There was American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. The features can be found in the major works by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.

15. Transcendentalism: Transcendentalism is a literary and philosophical movement, associated

with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcended the empirical and scientific and was knowable through intuition.

16. American Realism: First, American realist authors described life truthfully. Second, they put

the typical characters under typical circumstances. Third, they were objective rather than idealized, in a close observation and investigation life. Finally, realistic works were concerned with social and psychological problems. The famous realistic works include Henry James’s The Ambassadors and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

17. Local Colorism: As a literary trend, local colorism made its presence felt in the late 1860s to

early 70s. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local characters of their regions. The representative works of local colorism include Bret Hart’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and H. B. Stowe’s Oldtown Folks.

18. American Naturalism: American naturalism is a literary tendency that prevailed in 1890s.

Under the influence of social Darwinism and inspired by French naturalism, American naturalists wrote about the helplessness of man in a cold, amoral world, and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of environment and heredity. The features of naturalism can be found in the major works by Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.

19. Lost Generation: The Lost Generation refers to the group of American writers who came of

age during World War I and established their reputations in the 1920s. The writers considered themselves “lost” because their inherited values could not operate in the postwar world. The term is commonly applied to Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.

20.Image(in Pound’s poetry): An image is defined by Pound as that which presents an

intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas”

“endowed with energy”.

21. Stanza: Stanza is a recurrent grouping of two or more lines or more lines of a poem in terms

of length, metrical form, and rhyme-scheme.

22. Code Hero: Code hero is the Hemingwayan hero, an average man of decidedly masculine

tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words.

23. Southern Literature: Southern Literature is defined as American literature about the Southern

United States or by writers from this region. The Southern literature meets its renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, and the famous Southern writers include Ellen Glasgow and William Faulkner.

24. “Anti-hero”(as in William Faulkner’s works): A central character in a work of literature who

lacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, physical prowess, and fortitude. Anti-heroes

typically distrust conventional values and are unable to commit themselves to any ideals.

Anti-heroes usually accept, and often celebrate, their positions as social outcasts.

25. Allusion: Allusion is a figure of speech that makes brief, often casual reference to a historical

or literary, event, or object.

26. Beat Generation: Beat generation is a term applied to a group of American poets and

novelists of the 1950s and 1960s who were in romantic rebellion against the culture and value systems of America. They expressed their revolt through the literary works of loose structure and slang diction. Among the leading members of the loose group were the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist Jack Kerouac.

27. Black Humor: Black humor is a term applied to a large group of American novels beginning

in the 1950s, represented by Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. In the novelists’ opinion, their society is full of institutionalized absurdity. Therefore, all of them hold a cynical attitude toward society and the conventional moral values. This despondency is reflected in their novels by the use of exaggeration as a vehicle for satire.

28. Satire: Satire is a literary manner which blends a critical attitude with humor and with wit for

the purpose of improving human institutions or humanity. Catch-22, satirizes bureaucracy and the military, and is frequently cited as one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.

29. Motif:Motif is a theme, character type, image, metaphor, or any other verbal element that

recurs throughout a single work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time. For example, the disillusionment of “American Drama” is one of the important motifs in Death of a Salesman.

30. Theatre of the Absurd: The Theatre of the Absurd is an avant-garde kind of drama in the

1950s and 1960s that represents the absurdity of the human condition by abandoning rational devices and realistic form. Some playwrights in the school are Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee.