英国文学选读难点整理

分析哈姆雷特的人物性格特点及其所代表的人文主义思想。

He is a humanist He is freed from medieval prejudices and superstitions, he is against the old religious doctrines.Like other humanists, he cherishes a profound reverence for man, and a firm belief in man’s power and destiny: He loves good and hates evil. His intellectual genius is outstanding.

To be, or not to be

?Main Idea: This is an internal philosophical debate on the advantages and disadvantages of existence, and whether it is one's right to end his or her own life.

It presents a most logical and powerful examination of the theme of the moral legitimacy of suicide in an unbearably painful world.

The Metaphysical poets: the 17th century English poets whose work is noted for its ingenious use of intellectual and theological concepts in wits, surprising conceits, strange paradoxes and far-fetched images, mysticism in content and fantasticality in form. John

Donne(1573-1631) and “The Flea” 【mystical in content and fantastic in form】

讲述〈失乐园〉的故事梗概，分析撒旦的形象及其所表现的作者思想的双重性。

the image of Satan: The real hero of the poem. Like a conquered and banished giant, he remains obeyed and admired by those who follow him down to hell. He is firmer than the rest of the angels. It is always from him that deep counsels, unlooked-for resources and courageous deeds proceed. Though defeated, he prevails. Though wounded, he triumphs.

讲述故事情节并分析鲁滨逊这一人物形象。Q:What are the striking qualities(merits) that we can learn from Robinson? A: Independent; resourceful; energetic; persistent; industrious (hard-working); intelligent; optimistic; religiously pious; courageous(brave); practical; adventurous; rational; pioneering spirit

And say something about his demerits, if there are any.

Sexual apathy; pursuer of money 1. During Defoe’s time, the adventures in the period of developing capitalism were still going on, in order to make big money and wealth, the merchants had made courageous exploration for getting new land and new resources for their foreign markets as well as for materials and wealth. So Robinson, of course, is not an exception. He was one of the representatives of the rising bourgeois. He made several adventures, but never satisfied and content with his temporal conditions. So in his last adventure on the sea he was cast on an uninhabited island for 28 years. 2. He is a laborer and a typical colonizer, exploiter, explorer as well as a foreign trader. Before Friday’s appearance, he did everything himself—to build a shelter for rain and cold, to hunt and dry raisins for his store, to make a pot, baskets and to make a canoe. From this sense, we should say Robinson is a laborer, a hard-working, industrious, intelligent man with some puritan belief. After Friday s appearance, Robinson immediately became the master of Friday. first thing he taught Friday was “master”and let

for both of them.) From Robinson’s activity, we can assert that in him reflects some typical traits of primitive accumulation. 3. He is vigorous, alert and resourceful while fighting with his surrounding: the natural environment and the barbaric tribes. No matter what he is, his image is not a static one, but developed from a laborer and a typical enterprising bourgeoisie to mediocre person with a narrow-minded personality.

The image of Friday

Language: in Robinson Crusoe, Defoe wrote that Robinson taught Friday to speak English for the convenience of communication with him, and at the same time, he needed someone to talk with. But the first word that Defoe taught Friday was "master".

Eating habits: Don't eat man's flesh. Eat bread and stewed meat of the animals. Religion:According to the novel, Robinson spent 3 years to change the cannibal Friday into a pious servant and christian. Robinson and Friday talked about God and the Devil.

Change of Friday from a freeman to a loyal servant: Friday swore to serve Robinson rather than go back to his hometown.

Themes In Robinson Crusoe, the author eulogizes labour and man's indefatigable efforts to conquer nature, but at the same time he beautifies colonialism. 1. Defoe creates a hero struggling against nature and human fate. Through the

characterization of his hero, Defoe seemed to fill him with his indomitable will and hand, and eulogize creative labor, physical or mental, an illusion to the glorification of the bourgeois creativity when it was a rising and more energetic class in the initial struggle of his historical development. 2. At the early stage, Robinson was an individual laborer, and then he became a master, until at last a colonizer. From this character, Defoe really created an image of an enterprising

William Wordsworth诗语言特点

He aim at simplicity and purity of language in poems，he was a passionate love of nature.

ode to west wind

West Wind: Destroyer and preserver Cycles of death and rebirth As a magician the wind works it’s magic throughout nature and it knows no bounds as the earth, water and air all feel its power. The imagery associated with this suggests that Shelley expected his work to also spread over the universe , like the wind, to destroy the old and to preserve the new The poem calls for a mythical power to inspire and induce change or "a new Birth".

ode to nightingale

It expresses the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness and human world of agony. Keats not only expresses his rapture upon hearing the beautiful songs of the nightingale and his desire to go to the ethereal world of beauty together with the bird, but also shows his deep sympathy for and his keen understanding of human miseries in the society in which he lived. The poem explores the paradoxes of immortality and death, beauty and truth, and imagination and reality. Its main concept is about temporary changes in life, such as those brought about by art forms that take one away from reality into a world of imagination and fantasy, only to return the individual to the world. The nightingale in the poem serves as a metaphor for immortality; nature is always dying but always alive, forever changing but always the same.

Critical Realism: the greatness lies not only in their satirical portrayal of bourgeoisie and exposure of greed and hypocrisy ，but also in their profound humanism and sympathy for labouring people ，but they cannot find a way to eradicate social evils.

William Blake的London赏析The poem has four stanzas, and each line has ten syllables. Every stanza has double rhyme. For example, the first stanza has two foots, ‘|I | and |ou|’. It uses some rhetoric methods in the poem, just like trope, parallelism, and metaphor. The three ‘in every’are obvious parallelism in the second line. In the third line, Blake used hyperbole, antitheses and metaphor. The miserable chimney-sweeper contrasts the bright church. The soldier contrasts the palace walls. And the last sentence tells readers that the decayed society will be destroyed eventually.

Robert Burns的a red red rose 赏析“A Red, Red Rose”is written as a ballad with four stanzas of four lines each. Each stanza has alternating lines of four beats, or iambs, and three beats. The first and third lines have four iambs, consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, as in da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah. The second and fourth lines consist of three iambs. This form of verse is well adapted for singing or recitation and originated in the days when poetry existed in verbal rather than written form.

John Keats的Ode to a Nightingale 赏析Ode to a Nightingale is a poem written by John Keats in May 1819. John Keats was one of the well-known English Romantic poets in the 18th century. During his life, he wrote many famous poets, such as On a Greeian Urn、To Psyche and so on, having great influence on the later poets after his death. This poetry has eight stanzas, and when it came to vowel forms, Keats incorporated a pattern of alternating historically "short" and "long" vowel sounds in his ode. In particular, in " And purple-stained mouth" has the historical pattern of "short" followed by "long" followed by "short" and followed by "long". This alteration is continued in longer lines, including this sentence ("Away! away! for I will fly to thee") which contains five pairs of alternations. However, other lines, such as the sentence ("Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains") rely on a pattern of five "short" vowels followed by "long" vowel and "short" vowel pairings until it ends with a "long" vowel. These are not the only combination patterns present, and there are patterns of two "short" vowels followed by a "long" vowel in other lines, which are repeated twice and then followed up with two sets of "short" vowel and then "long" vowel pairs. Ode to a Nightingale describes a series of conflicts between reality and the Romantic ideal of uniting with nature, including the antitheses of pleasure and pain, of

imagination and reality, of fullness and privation, of permanence and change, of nature and the human, of art and life, freedom and bondage, waking and dream. In the Ode, the nightingale's song is the dominant image and dominant "voice". Also the nightingale is the object of empathy and praise