英国文学史文学术语解释

Allegory: It is a figurative piece of writing conveying a meaning other than the literal. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation. Allegory is generally treated as a figure of rhetoric.

Ballad: a form of verse, often a narrative and set to music.

Epic:a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation.

Romance: as a literary genre, romance refers to a style of heroic prose and verse narrative. The stories always about the marvelous adventures of a chivalrous, heroic knight, often d super-human ability, who goes on a quest.

Blank verse: it is rhyme-less iambic pentameter or a line of ten syllables in five iambs, a rhythmic unit of two syllables with the unstressed followed by the stressed syllable.

Sonnet: is a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter with a carefully patterned rhyme scheme.

A Shakespearean, or English sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line contains ten syllable, 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.

Spenserian stanza: is a nine-line stanza of 8 lines in iambic pentameter plus an iambic hexameter. Heroic couplet:is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a sequence of rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. The rhyme is always masculine.

Neoclassicism: is the name given to quite distinct movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that draw upon western classical art and culture (usually that of ancient Greece or ancient Rome).

Picaresque novel: is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society.

Byronic hero: is an idealized but flawed character exemplified in the life and writings of Lord Byron.

Romanticism:

Romanticism: is the artistic movement of the 18 and 19 centuries, which was concerned with the expression of the individual’s feelings and emotions. The movement is partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. It stresses strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience. Besides, romanticism emphasizes intuition and imagination.

The aesthetic movement:is a loosely defined movement in literature, fine art, the decorative arts, and interior design in later 19-century Britain. It belongs to the anti-Victorian reaction and had post-romantic roots, and as such anticipates modernism.

Bildungsroman: is a novel of growth or development, telling a story about a young person growing from innocence to experience and from immaturity to maturity.

Dramatic monologue: is a piece of spoken verse that offers great insight into the feelings of the speaker.

Imagism: was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. The Imagists rejected the sentiment and artifice typical of much Romantic and Victorian poetry. Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy of language, as well as a

willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms.

Modernism: in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes both a set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Modernism also rejects the lingering certainty of Enlightenment thinking, as well as the idea of a compassionate, all-powerful Creator. A salient characteristic of modernism is self-consciousness. Modernism’s stress on freedom of expression, experimentation, radicalism and primitivism disregards conventional expectations.

Stream of consciousness:is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes, either in a loose inter ior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions.

New criticism: was a dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid-twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. New Critics treat a work of literature as if it were self-contained. They do not consider the reader's response, author's intention, or historical and cultural contexts. New Critics perform a close reading of the text, and believe the structure and meaning of the text should not be examined separately. New Critics especially appreciate the use of literary devices in a text. The New Criticism has sometimes been called an objective approach to literature.

The movement poets: contained a group of writers of the 1950s against the extreme romanticism of Dylan Thomas and his contemporaries. They were concerned with the social changes that postwar laborite Britain was going through, and tried to examine life in an honest, realistic manner.

The angry young men: The epithet was originally a journalistic term used to describe a group of playwrights and novelists of the mid-1950s, but it has also come to refer loosely to the major characters that these authors have created. The writers were normally iconoclastic and anti-established standards. Ambitious and disillusioned, they lashed out against contemporary society. They were in revolt against the high literary ideals of modernism and wrote in a deliberately vulgar, comic, and satirical vein.

The dream of the absurd: absurdity plays explore the absurd nature of the human condition. The world that the drama of the absurd tries to delineate seems to be one in which god no longer smiles upon the humankind, and man is thrown back upon himself for survival. As a result, modern man feels an acute sense of futility and meaninglessness, and sees no light at the end of tunnel.