英国文学史重点名词解释-英文版

英国文学史重点名词解释-英文版

The Renaissance Period

1. Renaissance :between 14th and mid-17th century.

2. Renaissance means rebirth or revival, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion.

3. the Renaissance, therefore in essence is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and Scholars made attempt to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in Medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the purity of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic church.

4. Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance

(1) Capable of individual development in the direction of perfection.

(2) They inhabited was theirs not to despise by to question, explore and enjoy.

(3) By emphasizing the dignity of human being and the Importance of the present life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of this life

(4) Tomas More, Christopher Marlow and William Shakespeare are the best representative of the English humanist.

5 Metaphysical poetry: Metaphysical is characterized by passionate thought succession of concentrated image, exercise of elaborate ingenuity and “wit”, John Done was the famous of the Metaphysical poet. The Metaphysical Poets were men of learning and to show their learning was their endeavour.

Edmund Spencer

Masterpiece: The Faerie Queene (allegory)

Christopher Marlowe

University wits

Important plays: Tambulaine, Dr.Faustus, The Jewof Meta Edmund II

Marlowe voiced the supreme desire of the man of the Renaissance of infinite powers and authority

(1) Perfected the blank verse.

(2) Creation of the Renaissance hero to English drama, it embodies Marlowe?s ideal of human dignity and capacity.

Dr.Faustus: aspiring for knowledge, the play?s dominant moral is human rather than religious, it celebrates the human passion for knowledge, power and happiness, it also reveals man?s frustration in realizing the high aspiration in a hostile moral order and the confinement to time is the cruelest fact of man?s condition.

William Shakespeare

1. Works: 154 sonnets, 38 plays, 2 long poems

Comedy: Merchant of Venice.

2. 4 great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth

each portrays some noble hero, who face the injustice of human fate is closely connected with the

fate of the whole nation, each hero has his weakness of nature. Hamlet, the melancholic scholar-prince, faces the dilemma between action and mind: Othello?s inner weakness is made use of by the outside evil force; the old King Lear who is unwilling to totally give up his power makes himself suffer, from t reachery and infidelity; Macbeth?s lust for power stirs up his ambition and leads him to incessant crime.

3. Merchant of Venice

In this play, Shakespeare has created tension: ambiguity, a self conscious and self-delighting artifice that is at once intellectually existing and emotionally engaging. The sophistication derives in part from the play between high, outstanding romance and dark faces of negating and hate the traditional theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to explore insuitable greed and brutality of the Jew.

4 Hamlet.

The play has the qualities of a “blood-and-thunder” thriller and a philosophical exploration of life of life and death, the timeless appeal of his mighty drama lies in its combination of injustice, emotional conflict and searching philosophic melancholy. Hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and action. His life is one of the constant role-playing examining the nature of acting only to deny its possibility. For such a figure, soliloquy is a natural medium, a necessary release of his anguish; and some of his questioning monologue posses surpassing power and insight. By revealing the power-seeking, the jostling for place, the hidden motives, the courteous superficialities that veil lust and guilty, Shakespeare condemns the hypocrisy and treachery and general religious corrupting at the royal count. Francis Bacon

1 Masterpiece: Essay; Novum Organum.

2 Novum Organum: most impressive display of Beacon?s intellect. The argument is for the use of inductiveness of reason in scientific study.

3 Beacon suggests the inductive reasoning, i.e, proceeding from the particular to the general , in place of the Aristotelian method , the deductive reasoning ,i.e. proceeding from the general to the particular.

4 Beacon?s essay are famous for their brevity, compactness and powerfulness.

John Done

Metaphysical poetry

The most str iking feature of Done?s poetry is precisely its tang of reality, in the sense that it seems to reflect life in a real rather than a poetical world..

Done frequently applies conceits.

John Milton

Three major poetical works:

Paradise Lost , Paradise Regained, Samson Agonists

The freedom of the will is the key tone of Minton?s creed.

Paradise Lost

The epic is the masterpiece of John Milton

The story is drawn from the Old Testament of the Bible, which tells how Satan, after being defeated in his rebel against God, temps Adam and Eve to eat the apples for the Forbidden Tree, and causes the Fall of Man.

Satan, in the image of a rebel, still determines to fight back against God when he and his followers are cast into the Hell. The features of the character include his boldness, unbending ambition and his unconquerable will. The poem, as in other writing, is full of biblical and classical allusion, and is in a Latinized style with one sentence running perhaps across several lines. But, the majesty of expr ession suits well the sublimity of the poet?s thought.

The Neoclassic Period

1 Between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the publication of lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798

1. Enlightenment or the Age of reason

The Enlightenment movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept the whole Western Europe at the time

Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationally, equality and science. They called for a reference to order, reason and rule, yield place to “eternal truth” “eternal justice” and “natural equality”

They believed that human beings were limited, dualistic and imperfect literature at the time, heavily didactic and moralizing.

2.They believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work. To work, to economize and to accumulate wealth constitutes the whole meaning of their life. This aspect of social life is best-formed in the realistic novels of the 18th century.

3. In the field of literature, they believed that the artistic should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy. Seek proportion, unity, harmony and grace in literary expression, in an effort to delight, instruct and correct human beings..

4. Neoclassicism. In English literature and, the stylistic trend between the Restoration and the advent of romanticism at the beginning of the 19th century is referred to as Neoclassicism.

5. Heroic: It is a pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The form was introduced into English by Chaucer and widely used subsequently.

John Bunyan

1. Masterpiece: The pilgrim?s progress

2. The “vanity fair” symbol izes human word; for all that comth is vanity. Everything and anything in this world is vanity, having no value and no meaning. The vanity fair, a “market selling

nothingness” of all sorts, is a dirty place originally built up by details, but, this town “lay” in the way to the Celestial City, meaning pilgrims had to resist the temptations there when they made their way through. So, the depiction of the “Fair” in selling things worldly and in attracting people bad, represents John Bunyan?s rejection of the w orldly seekings and pious longing for the pure and charming “Celestial city”, his Christian ideal.

Alexander Pope

Pope, a very sensitive man, would strike back hard, and in the constant verbal battles he developed a style of biting satire.

He was one of the first to introduce rationalism to England, but was not entirely blind to the rapid moral, political and cultural deterioration.

For him the supreme value was order-cosmic order, political order, social order, aesthetic order, and this emphasis an order expression in all of his works. Pope made his name as a great poet with the publication of an Essay on Criticism in 1711.

Pope strongly advocated Neoclassicism, emphasizing that literary works should be judged by classical rule of order, reason, logic, restrained emotion, good taste and decorum.

Daniel Defoe

Masterpiece: Robinson Crusoe

His language is smooth, easy, colloquial and most vernacular. Defoe glorifies human labor and the puritan fortitude. It refers the enterprising sprit of the middle class.

Jonathan Swift

1. Chief works: A Tale of a Tub, The battle of the books, The Drapier?s letters, Gulliver?s Travel and a Modest proposal.

2. Swift is almost unsurpassed in the writing of simple, direct, precise prose. He defined a good style as “proper words in proper places” clear, simple, concrete, diction, uncomplicated sentence structure and economy and concise use of language mark all his writing-essay, poems and novels.

3. As a whole, the book is one of the most effective and devastating criticism and satires of all aspects in the then English and European life- socially, politically, religiously, philosophically, scientifically and morally.

Henry Fielding

1. Masterpiece: A History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

2. Fielding has been regarded by s ome as “Father of the English Novel” for his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel.

3. Fielding?s language is easy, unlabored and familiar but extremely vivid and vigorous.

4. Of all the 18th century novelist, he was the first to set out. Both in theory and practice. To write specially a “comic epic in poem” the first to give the modern novels its structure and story; he use epistolary form and “ the third-person narration”.

5. In planning his stories, he tries to retain the grand, epical of the classical works but at the same time keeps faithful to his realistic presentation of common life as it is.

Samuel Johnson

1. Lexicographer: the author of the first English dictionary by an English man---A Dictionary of

the English Language (1755)

2. To the Right Honorable the Earl of----Chesterfield

3. He was particularly fond of moralizing, and didacticism. His language is characteristically general, often Latinate and frequently polysyllabic.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

1 Masterpiece: The school for Scandal.

2 Sheridan has the only important English dramatist of the 18th century; important link between Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw.

3 In his play, morality is the constant theme.

He is much concerned with the current moral issue and harshly at the social life of the day. Tomas Gray

1. His masterpiece, “ Elegy in a Country Churchyard” was published in 1751, the poem once and for all established his fame as the leader of the sentimental poetry of the day especially” the Graveyard Sc hool”

2. In his poem, Gray reflects on death, the sorrow of life and the mysteries of human life with a touch of his Personal Melancholy.

3. His poem, as a whole are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or mediation on life, past and present. His poems are characterized by an exquisite sense of form. His style is sophisticated and allusive. His poems are often marked with the trait of a highly artificial diction and a distorted word order.

Romantic Period

1. Major Romantic Points

(1) a rebellion against neo-classicism

(2) express on imagination

(3) Priorities been given to passion, emotion and feeling

(4) Being close to nature for its purity while the society is corrupting

(5) Tremendous interest in something remote in term of space and time

(6) Favor of modernism

(7) Supremacy of freedom

2 Romantic periods began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge?s lyrical Ballads and have ended in 1852 with Sir Walter Scott?s death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.

3. It was in effect a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason which prevailed from the days of Pope to those of Johnson

1. Jean-Roseau: exploration new idea about Nature, society, Education.

Tomas Paine?s Declaration o f Rights of Man.

5 The Romantic Movement expressed a more or less negative attitude the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie.

Thus, we can say that Romanticism actually constitute a change of direction attention to the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit

6 Nature: for the most influential 18th-century writers, was more something to be seen than something to be known. But for the Romantics, it is just the opposite. Nature to Wordsworth is a source of mental cleanliness and spiritual understanding.

7 Poetry has been traditionally regarded as an art governed by rules; but for Romantics, Poetry should be free from all rules.

8 Gothic novels: its principal elements are violence, horror and supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader?s emotion.

9 How is Romanticism different from Neoclassicism? Provide brief evidence from the literary works you know best.

a. Neoclassicists upheld that artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity, and thus, literary expressions should be of proportion, unity, harmony and grace. Pope?s An Essay on C riticism advocates grace, wit (usually though satire/ humor), and simplicity in language (and the poem itself is a demonstration of those ideals, too); Fielding?s Tom Jones helped established the form of novel; Gray?s Elegry Written in a country Churchyard” displays elegance in style, unified structure, serious tone and moral instructions.

b. Romanticism tended to see the individual as the very center of all experience, including art, and thus, literary work should be “spontaneous overflow of strong of feeling” and no matter how fragmentary those experience were (Wordsworth?s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,” or “The Solitary Reaper,) 0r Coleridge?s “Kubla Khan”), the value of the work link lied in the accuracy of presenting those unique feelings and particular altitude.

c. In a word, Neoclassicism emphasized rationality and form but Romanticism attached great importance to the individual?s mind (emotion, imagination, temporary experience……….) William Blake

(1) The Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume poems, presenting a happy and innocent world, though not without its evil and sufferings.

(2) The Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repress with melancholy tone

(1) The two books hold the similar subject-matter, but the tone, emphasis and conclusion differs.

2 Blake?s Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) marks his entry into maturity. The Poem was composed during the change of French Revolution and it plays the double role both as a satire and a revolutionary Prophecy. In this Poem, Blake explains the relationship of the contraries. “Without contraries, there is no progression. The marriage to Blake means the reconciliation of the contraries, not the subordination of the one to the other.

3 Blake writes his poem in plain and direct language, his poem often carries the lyric beauty with immense compressing of meaning. He distrusts the abstractness and tend to embody his views with visual images, symbolism in wide range is also a distinctive feature of his poetry.

William Wordsworth

1 William Wordsworth, Samuel TAYLOR Coleridge and Robert Southey, the three men known as the “Lake Poets”

2 Wordsworth is regarded as a “worshiper of nature”

3 Wordsworth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest.

4 Wordsworth see the word freshly, sympathetically and naturally.

5 The most important contribution Wordsworth has made is that he has not only started the modern poetry of the growing inner self, but also changed the course of English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a reform to nature.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1 Coleridge?s portion (work) was to deal with supernature thing for he was more interested in something remote strange on foreign.

2 Two divers group: the demonic and the conversational

(1) The demonic group: beyond the control of reason. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner “Christabel” “Kubla Khan”

(2) The conversational group: “Frost at Midnight”

3 Coledrige is one of the first critics to give close critical affection to language, maintaining that the true end of poetry is to give pleasure “through the medium of beauty”

4 He was recognized as a lyrical poet and literary critic of the first rank.

His poetic themes range from the supernature to the domestic. His treatises, lectures, and compelling conversational powers made him one of the most influential English literary critics and philosophers of the 19th century.

George Gordon Byron

1 Masterpiece: Don Juan, Childe Herold?s Pilgrimage

‘I awake one morning and found myself famous

2 Byron invests in Juan the moral positives like courage, generosity and frankness

The unifying principal in Don Juan is the basic ironic theme of appearance and reality.

3 Byron has enriched European poetry with an abundance of ideas, images, artistic forms and innovation.

4Byronic hero

The creation of the Byronic hero is Byron?s chief contribution to English Poetry, such a hero is a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. Passionate and powerful, he is to right all the wrongs in a corrupt society and he would fight single-handedly against all the misdoings, political, religious moral. Thus this figure is a rebellious individual social systems and customs. Because Byron?s poetry is one of experien ce on the whole, such a hero is more or less a surrogate of himself, He appears first in Childe Harold?s Pilgrimage and then further develops in later works such as the “Oriented Tale” “Manfred” and “Don Juan”.

Persy Bysshe Shelley

1 In 1813 he published his first long serious work. Queen Mab: A Philosophical Poem.

2 Masterpiece “The Cenci” “Prometheus unbounded”

Lyrics: “The Cloud” “To a Skylark” “Adonais”

3 He held a life-long aversion to cruelty, injustice, authority, institutional religion and the formal shames of respectable society, condemning war, tyranny and exploitation.

4 Shelley expressed his love for freedom and his hatred toward tyranny in several of his lyrics such as : Ode to Liberty,” “Ode to Naples,” “ Sonnet: England in 1819” and so on.

5Best of all the well known lyric pieces is his “Ode to the west wine” it is rhapsodic and declamatory.

6Shelley?s style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figure of speech which describe vividly what we see and feel, or express what passionately moves us.

John Keats

1. Work: Limia, Isabella, The Eve of St.Agne

2. The Odes are generally regarded as Keats?s most important and mature works.

Ode on Melancholy, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Psyche

3. Keats?s poet ry is always sensuous, colorful and rich in imagery, which expresses the acuteness of his senses , sights, sound, scent, taste and felling are all taken in to give an entire understanding of an experience of others either human or animal.

4. His realization of the empathetic power of the imagination is of the greatest consequence to his work and is a faculty which, as his thought and technique matured, leads him to his most profound insights. Keats?s poetry, characterized by exact and closely knit construc tion, sensual description, and by force of imagination, gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.

Jane Austen

Works: Pride and Prejudice. Sense and Sensibility. Northanger Abbey

As a realistic writer, she considers it her duty to express in her works a discriminated and serious criticism of life, and to express the follies and illusions of mankind. She shows contemptuous feelings towards snobbery, stupidity, worldliness and vulgarity through subtle satire and irony. And in style, she is a neoclassicism advocator, upholding those traditional ideals of order, reason, proportion and gracefulness in novel writing.

The Victorian Period

1. The Victorian Period roughly coincides with the reign of Queen Victorian from 1836 to 1901, the most glorious in the English history.

2 Towards the mid-19th century,, England had reached its highly point of development as a world power.

3 Darwin?s The origin of species and The Descent of Man shook theoretical basic of traditional faith. Utilitarianism was widely accepted and practiced . In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging experiences of progress thought

4 Famous novelists like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackery, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell and Anthony Trollope.

5 Victorian literature has the high-spirited vitality, the down-to-earth earnestness, the good-natured humor and unbounded imagination are all unprecedented

Charles Dickens

1 Dickens is one of the greatest critical realist writers of the Victorian Age

2 In language, he is often compared with Shakespeare for his adeptness with the vernacular and large vocabulary with which he brings out many a wonderful verbal picture of man and scene.

3 His humor and wit seem inexhaustible; character- portrayal is the most distinguished feature of his work.

4His best-depicted characters, are those innocent, virtuous , persecuted helpless child characters. 5Dickens works are also characterized by a mingling of humor and pathos. He seems to believe

that life is itself a mixture of joy and grief.

Charlotte Bronte

1Masterpiece: Jane Eyre

2Jane Eyre is one of the most popular and important novels of the Victorian Age. It is noted to its sharp criticism of the existing society, e.g the religious hypocrisy of charity institution such as Lowood School, where poor girls are treated constant starvation and humiliation, to be humble slave, the social discrimination. Jane experiences first as a dependant at her aunt?s house and later as a governess at Thornfield and the false social convention as concerning love and marriage. At the same time, it is an intense moral fable, Jane, like Mr. Rochester, has to undergo a series of physical and moral tests to grow up and achieve her final happiness

3The success of the novel is also due to its introduction to the English novel the first governess heroine, Jane Eyre, and orphan child with a fiery spirit and a longing to love and be loved, a poor, plain, little governess who dares to love his master, a man superior to her in many ways , and even is brave enough to declare to the man her love for him, cuts a completely new woman images. She represents those middle-class working woman who are struggling for recognition of their basic rights and equality as a human being. That vivid description of her intense feeling and her thought and inner conflicts brings her to the heart of the audience.

Emily Bronte

1 Masterpiece: Wuthering Heights

2 The novel is a riddle of view, it is a story about a poor man abused, betrayed and distorted by his social betters, because he is a poor nobody. As a love story, this is one of the most miseries: the passion between Heathcliff and Cathrine proves the most intense, the most beautiful and at the same time, the most horrible passion is to be found in human being.

Alfred Tennyson

1. His poetry voices the doubt and the faith, the grief and the joy of English people in an age of fast social change.

2. In 1850, Tennyson was appointed the poet laureate.

3. Tennyson is a real artist. He has the natural power of linking visual picture with musical expression, and these two with the feelings.

4. His wonderful works manifest all the qualities of England?s great poets.

The dreaminess of Spencer, the majesty of Milton, the natural simplicity of Wordsworth, the fantasy of Blake and Coleridge, the melody of Keats and Shelley, and the narrative vigor of Scott and Byron.

Robert Browning

1.He is the most original poet of the time.

Masterpiece: The ring and the Book

2. Dramatic Monologue

A kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listens whose replies are not given in the poem. The occasion is usually a crucial one in the speaker?s life, and the dramatic monologue reads the speaker?s personality as well as th e incident that is the subject of the poem, an experience of a dramatic monologue is “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning.

3.“My Last Duchess”: this dramatic monologue is the duke?s speech addressed to the agent who

comes to negotiate the marriage. In thi s talk about “Last Duchess” the duck reveals himself as a self-conceited, cruel and tyrannical man. The poem is written is heroic couplet, but with no regular metrical system. In reading, it sounds like bland verse.

George Eliot

1. Three great popular novel: Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss and Silus Mane. Her mind is always active, instinctively analyzing and generalizing to discuss the fundamental truth about human life. In her works, she seeks to present the inner struggle of a soul and to reveal the motives, impulses and hereditary influences which govern human action.

2. As a woman of exceptional, intelligence and life experience, George shows a particular and social aspiration. In her mind, the pathetic tragedy of women lies in their very birth. Their inferior education and limited social life determine that they must depend on men for sustenance and realization of their goals, and they have only to fulfill the domestic duties expected of them by the society.

Tomas Hardy

1 real success in literature came with “Under Greenwood”

Major works: Tess of the D?Urbevilles , Jude the Obscure

Long epic drama: The Dynasts

2 He is both a naturalistic and a critical realistic writer.

3 Hardy?s heroes and heroines are all vividly and realistically depicted. Th ey all seem to possess a kind of exquisitely sensuous beauty. They are not only individual cases but also of universal truth. Their plight is not just their own; it applies to any one, any age. And finally, all the works of Hardy are noted for the rustic dialect and a poetic flavor which fits well into their perfectly designed architectural structures. They are the product of a conscientious artist.

The Modern Period

1 The catastrophic First World War tremendously weakened the British Empire and brought about great suffering to its people as well. The postwar economic dislocation and spiritual disllusion produced a profound impact upon the British people.

2 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles put forward a guiding principle for the working people, but also inspired them to make dauntless fights for their own emancipation.

Darwinism: “survival of fittest”

Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimistic philosopher. Started a rebellion against rationalism

Henry Bergson established his irrational philosophy

3 Rise of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited writers to make new explorations on human natures and human relationships

4 The French symbolism, appearing in the late 19th century, herald modernism: expressionism, surrealism. Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Webern, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

5 Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective, they are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual. Modernism rejects rationalism, major concern the external, objective, material world.

6. The 1930s witnessed great economic depression, mass unemployment, and the rise of the Nazis.

The red thirties.

7. in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, there appeared a group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working-class background, who were known as “the Angry Young Men.”

8 Stream-of consciousness novels: Pilgrimage by Richardson, Ulysses by Joyce, Mrs Dalloway by Woolf.

George Benard Shaw

1 Shaw joined the Fabian Society

2 His criticism was witty, biting, and often brilliant

3 He was strongly against the credo of “art for art?s sake”

4 Shaw wrote more than 50 plays, touching up variety of subjects.

Widow?s House is a grotesquely realistic exposure of slum landlordism” Mrs Warren?s Professor is a play about the economic oppression of women.

5 Structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism.

6 Most of his plays are concerned with political , economic, moral, or religious, problems, and, thus, can be termed as problem plays. And his plays have one passion, and only one, i.e. indignation..

John Galsworthy

1 The Forsyte Saga, his first trilogy

The Man of Property, In Chancery and To Let.

2He regarded human life as a struggle between the rich and the poor. And this sympathy always went out to the suffering poor.

3 By emphasizing the critical element in his writing, he dauntless laid bare the true feature of the good and the evil of bourgeois society. He was also successful in hus attention to present satire and humor in his writing. He wrote in a clear and unpretentious style with a clear and a straight forward language.

William Bultler Yeats

1 He was both the romantic and the modernism writer.

2 His youth has spent during the high tide of the Irish Nationalist Movement led by Parwell.

3 In 1923, he was awarded Noble Prize for Literature.

4 Yeats was a moderate nationalist. He believe that history and life, followed a circular, spiral pattern consisting of long cycles which repeated themselves over and over on different levels.

T.S.Eliot

1. His first important poem: “The love song of J.Alfred Profrod.

2. Masterpiece: The Waste Land

3. In 1927, Eliot took English citizenship and become a devout member of the Anglican Church

4. He expressed a sense of the disintegration of life

5. The waste land not only presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in the modern Western world, the poem is 433 lines long and is dived into five sections.

The waste is a poem concerned with the spiritual break up of a modern civilization in which human life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose.

6. Eliot came to believe that the illness of the modern world was of the sum of individual souls, and that the cure could only be obtained by the change of the individual souls through the religious salvation. Thus, the quest for stability, for order, and for the maintaining of the bourgeois status quo became this primary concern in his later work.

https://www.360docs.net/doc/f05836680.html,wrence

1. The conflict between the earthy, coarse, energetic but often drunken father and the refined, strong-willed and up-climbing mother is vividly presented in his autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers.

2. In Lawrence?s opinion, the mechanical civilization is responsible for the unhealthy development of human personality

3. In Rainbow, it is the first time for Lawrence to make a conscious attempt to combine social criticism with psychological exploration in his novel writing.

4. Woman in love is rich in its symbolic meanings. Gerald Crich, an efficient but ruthless coalmine owner, who makes the machines his god and establishes the inhuman mechanical system in his mining kingdom, is a symbolic figure of spiritual death. The figure is standing for the spontaneous Life Force.

5. In his writing, Lawrence has experienced a strong reaction against the mechanical civilization. It is the agonized concern about the dehumanizing effect of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of human nature that haunts Lawrence?s writing.

6 Lawrence defiantly makes a deliberate use of those “four-letter” words in his novels, especially in Chatterley?s Lover.

James Joyce

1.a consciousness novel writer

first novel: A Portrait of the Artist as a young man

Ulysses(1922), Joyce?s masterpiece, has become a prime example of modernism in literature.

It is a typical example of stream of consciousness novel Dubliners

Finnegans Wake

2 Joyce is not a commercial writer

In Dubliners, each story presents an aspect of “dear dirty Dublin” an aspect of the city?s paralysis—moral, political, or spiritual.

The story are also important as example of Joyce’s theory of epiphany(顿悟) in fiction: each is concerned with a sudden revelation of truth about life inspired by a seemingly trivial incident.

3 In Ulysses , the events of the day seem to be trivial insignificance, or even banal. Bur below the surface of the events, the natural flow of mental reflection, the shifting moods and impulse in the characters? inner world are richly presented in an unprecedented frank and penetration. Way.. In this novel, Joyce intends to present a microcosm of the whole human life by providing an instance of how a single event contains all the events of its kind.

4 Many critics think that Joyce is a great master of innovation. His radical experimentation ranges from …streams of consciousness to his fantastic engagements with rhetoric, sentimental romance, and historical stylistic, counterpoint and expressionist drama