名词解释

浪漫主义1appeared at the turn of 18th and 19th century rose and grew under the impetus of the industrial and French revolution2prevail in England during 1798 and 1832.3romanticists expressed the ideology and sentiments of the classes and social strata who were discontent and oppose to the development of capitalism4owing to social and political difference spilt into two school escapists: wordsworth Southey Coleridge; active: byron Shelley keats prose was represented by lamb and de quincey the only great novelist walter scott5the romantic period was one of poetical revival.6characteristc feature spontaneity singularity worship of nature simplicity dominating note of melancholy and the poets outpoured the feelings and emotions

现代主义1flourished between 1910 and early years after WWII 2includes various trends or schools such as imagism expressionism Dadaism stream of consciousness and existentialism.3means a departure from the conventional criteria or established values of the Victorian age.4aliteration and loneliness are the basic themes 5characteristic modernist wrings :complexity and obscurity the use of symbols allusion irony.

批判现实主义1flourished in forties and early fifties of 19th century2critical realists described with much vividness and great artistic skill the English society and criticized the capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint3greatest charles dickens4critical realists not only gave a satirical portral of the bourgeoisie and all the ruling class but also showed profound sympathy for the common people5but they did not find a way to eradicate social evils they did not realize the necessity of changing the bourgeois society they were unable to find a good solution to the social contradictions the chief tendency in their work is not of revolution but rather of reformism6so far as literary form or genre is concerned the major contribution made by the 19th century critical realists lies in their perfection of the novel the 19th century realistic novels become the epic of the bourgeois society

epic 史诗a long narrative poem, grand in style, about heroes and heroic deeds, embodying heroic ideals of a nation or race in the making. Beowulf is the English national epic that was passed from mouth to mouth and written down by many unknown hands.

romance 传奇a type of literature that was popular in the Middle Ages, usually containing adventures and reflecting the spirit of chivalry. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was a great verse romance, but its author remains unknown.

sonnet 十四行诗a fixed form consisting of fourteen lines of 5-foot iambic verse. It first flourished in Italy in the 14th century. William Shakespeare was a great English sonnet writer famous for his 154 sonnets.

blank verse 无韵诗，素体诗unrhymed iambic pentameter, the most widely used of English verse fo rms and usually used in English dramatic and epic poetry. William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet is written in blank verse.

感伤主义Sentimentalism The term sentimentalism is used in two senses: (1) An overindulgence in emotion, especially the conscious effort to induce emotion in order to enjoy it. (2) An optimistic overemphasis of the goodness of humanity (sensibility), representing in part a reaction against Calvinism, which regarded human nature as depraved. The novel of sensibility was developed from this 18th century notion, manifested in the Sentimental novel.European sentimentalism arose during the Age of Enlightenment, at the same time as sentimentalism in philosophy. It lasted from around 1720 until the time of the French Revolution, arising in France and England as

early as 1700.

Ballad民谣

1.A short narrative poem with stanzas of two or four lines and usually a refrain. The story, folklore popular legends. straightforward verse, s with graphic simplicity and force. suitable for singing generally written in ballad meter, with the last words of the second and fourth lines rhyming.

2.the subjects of Ballad:

(1) the struggle of young lovers who are fight against the feudalism

(2) the conflict between love and wealth

(3) the cruelty of jealousy

(4) the criticism of the civil war

(5) the matters of class struggles.

Heroic couplet (名词解释)

A 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.

Troditional form for english poetry, commonly used for epic and narrative poetry, a sequence of rhyming paris of iambic pentameter.

Renaissance. a cultural and artistic movement in England from the early 16th century to the early 17th century.

The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. The Renaissance is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts:

(1)to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe,

(2)to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie,

(3)to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman

Catholic Church.

Pre-romanticism: The Romantic Movement was marked by a strong protest against the bondage of Classicism, by a renewed interest in medieval literature. In England, this movement showed itself in the trend of Pre-romanticism in poetry. It was represented by Blake and Robert Burns. They struggled against the neoclassical tradition of poetry.

Stream-of-consciousness: Stream of consciousness, which presents the thoughts of a character in the random, seemingly unorganized fashion in which the thinking process occurs, has the following characteristics. First, it reveals the action or plot through the mental processes of the characters rather than through the commentary of an omniscient author. Second, character development is achieved through revelation of extremely personal and often typical thought processes rather than through the creation of typical characters in typical circumstances. Third, the action of the plot seldom corresponds to real, chronological time, but moves back and forth through present time to memories of past events and drams of the future. Fourth, it replaces narration, description, and commentary with dramatic interior monologue and free association. Allegory: A story illustrating an idea or a moral principle in which objects take on symbolic meanings. In Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy," Dante, symbolizing mankind, is taken by Virgil the poet on a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise in order to teach him the nature of sin and its punishments, and the way to salvation.

Comedy: A literary work which is amusing and ends happily. Modern comedies tend to be funny,

while Shakespearean comedies simply end well. Shakespearean comedy also contains items such as misunderstandings and mistaken identity to heighten the comic effect. Comedies may contain lovers, those who interfere with lovers, and entertaining scoundrels. In modern Situation Comedies, characters are thrown into absurd situations and are forced to deal with those situations, all the while reciting clever lines for the amusement of a live or television or movie audience. Lake Poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey have often been mentioned as the "Lake Poets" because they lived in the lake district in the northwestern part of England. The three traversed the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and closing as conservatives.

Stanza: A term derived from an Italian word for "room" or "stopping place" and used, loosely, to designate any grouping of lines in a separate unit in a poem: a verse paragraph. More strictly, a stanza is a grouping of a prescribed number of lines in a given meter, usually with a particular rhyme scheme, repeated as a unit of structure. Poems in stanzas provide an instance of the aesthetic pleasure in repetition with a difference that also underlies the metrical and rhyming elements of poetry.

Tragedy:Fundamentally, a serious fiction involves the downfall of a hero or heroine. It is a literary form, a basic mode of drama. Tragedy often involves the theme of isolation, in which a hero, a character of greater than ordinary human importance, becomes isolated from the community. Then there is the theme of the violation and reestablishment of order, in which the neutralizing of the violent act may take the form of revenge. Finally, a character may embody a passion too great for the cosmic order to tolerate, such as the passion of sexual love. Renaissance tragedy seems to be essentially a mixture of the heroic and the ironic. It tends to center on heroes who, though they cannot be of divine parentage in Christianized Western Europe, are still of titanic importance, with an articulateness and social authority beyond anything in our normal experience.

Byronic hero: is an idealized but flawed character exemplified in the life and writings of Lord Byron. It first appears in Byron's semi-autobiographical epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18). The Byronic hero typically exhibits the following characteristics: high level of intelligence and perception; cunning and able to adapt; criminal tendencies; sophisticated and educated; self-critical and introspective; mysterious, magnetic and charismatic; struggling with integrity; power of seduction and sexual attraction; social and sexual dominance; emotional conflicts, bipolar tendencies, or moodiness; a distaste for social institutions and norms; being an exile, an outcast, or an outlaw; "dark" attributes not normally associated with a hero; disrespect of rank and privilege; a troubled past; cynicism; arrogance; self-destructive behavior; a good heart in the end.

satire: An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing( 严厉的)humor, or critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral or social standards. Satire became an especially popular technique used during the Enlightenment, in which it was believed that an artist could correct folly by using art as a mirror to reflect society.