英国文学中涉及到的一些术语

1.Romance: It is a popular term in the medieval England. It is concerned with knights, chivalry and courtly love.2.Alliteration: A repetition of the initial sounds of several words in a line on group3.Ballad: It is also known as the folk ballad. It is a song, transmitted orally and passed from generation to generation. Robin Hood is a famous ballad.4.Couplet: A pair of rhymed lines that are equal in length.5.Heroic couplet:refers to lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on. The adjective “heroic” was applied in the later seventeenth century because of the frequent use of such couplets in heroic poems and dramas. This verse form was introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer. From the age of John Dryden through that of Samuel Johnson, the heroic couplet was the predominant English measure for all the poetic kinds; some poets, including Alexander Pope, used it almost to the exclusion of other meters.6.Humanism: It is the essence of Renaissance. It emphasizes the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. Man was the center of the universe7.Spenserian stanza: Created by Edmund Spencer. It refers to a stanza of nine lines, with the first 8 lines in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc. The Fearie Queene was a representative.8.Metaphysical poetry: 17th century writers under the influence of John Donne. The diction is simple. The imaginary is drawn from actual life.9.Sonnet: A lyric consisting of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter, restricted to a definite rhyme scheme. Shakespeare’s are well known.10.Blank Verse: Verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It is the verse form used in some of the greatest English poetry, including that of Shakespeare and John Donne.11.Allegory: A story told to explain or teach something. It used extended metaphors to convey moral meanings. John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.12.Soliloquy: A character is alone and speaks his or her thoughts loudly. Hamlet13.The Enlightenment Movement: Flourished in France and swept through Western Europe in the 18th century. Its purpose is to enlighten the whole world with the light of philosophical ideas. It celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science.14.Neoclassicism: The writers took the ancient Greek and Roman classical works as the literary models. Poetry was held to be an imitation on human life. They tried to control literary creation by some fixed rules. It is elegant in diction and structure. They stressed rules, reasons. Harmony, balance and an appeal to the intellect rather than emotion.15.Gothic Novel: It is story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle. Prominent features of Gothic fiction include terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay.16.Sentimentalism: A direct reaction against the cold, hard commercialism and rationalism. Dissatisfied with reason, they appeal to sentiment to the human heart, particularly pity and sympathy. Sentimentalism turns to the countryside for its material.17.Romanticism: It occurred in the middle 18th century. It strongly protests against neoclassism, which emphasized reason and order. The general features are: expressiveness, imagination, individual, worship of nature and freedom.18.Byronic hero: A proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With immense superiority in his passions and powers, the hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society.19.Critical realism: It occurred in the 1840s. The writers criticized the capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint. They are concerned about the fate of the common people and described what was faithful to reality. Charles Dickens.20.Dramatic monologue: A single speaker speaks to a silent audience. Such poems reveal not the poet’s own thoughts but the mind of the impersonated character. .21.Psychological novel: A kind of novel that dwells on a complex psychological development and presents much of the narration through the inner workings of the character’s mind.22.Naturalism: A post-Darwinism movement of the 19th century that tried to apply the laws of scientific determination of fiction. A person is controlled by environment and heredity. Most of the works are pessimistic and detachment from the story23.Modernism: Began in the late 19th century and flourished until 1950s. It takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between men and men, men and society, man and himself. They are more concerned with the inner world of an individual. They move from the objective to the subjective. It also include: alienation, loss of identity, loneliness, meaningless life, absurdity of the world, dehumanization of the society. Frequent techniques: juxtaposition and multiple points of view.24.Steam of consciousness: It is used to depict the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events, rather than the events themselves. It adopts the psycho-analytic approach to explore the existence of unconscious and unconscious elements in the mind. The action is presented in terms of images and attitudes within the mind of one or more figures, often to get at the psychic nature of the character.25.Bildungsroman: A novel of the youthful development of a hero or a heroine. It describes the process by which maturity is achieved through various steps.26.Feminist criticism: Occurred in the late 1960s. It is an attempt to describe and interpret women’s experience as depicted in various kinds of novel. It attacks male notions of value in literature and challenges the accepted male ideas about the nature of women. Thus, it questions prejudices and assumptions about women made male writers.27.Post-modernism: Refers to certain radically experimental works of literature and art after WWⅡ. Much of the works reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals the meaningless of human existence. They use new devices, forms.28.Post-structuralism: An attempt to subvert structuralism and to formulate new theories. It was initiated by deconstructors. Each word exists in a complex web of language and has a variety of denotation and connotation that no one meaning can be final, stable to substitution.。