英美文学鉴赏

1.The work that presented, for the first time in English literature, a comprehensive realisticpicture of the medieval English society and created a whole gallery of vivid characters from all walks of life is Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.2.Geoffrey Chaucer is regarded as the father of English poetry.3.The verse form of heroic couplet was introduced into English poetry and employed in thepoem with true ease and charm for the first time in the history of English literature by Geoffrey Chaucer.4.The Canterbury Tales presents a whole gallery of vivid characters, the team of pilgrims,people from all walks of life, including 31 members altogether.5.Generally, Renaissance refers to the intellectual movement during the period between 14thand mid-17th centuries, its essence was humanism.6.English Renaissance Period was an age of poetry and drama.7.William Shakespeare’s writing is widely regarded as one of the three main sources of theEnglish literature, while the other two are Greek and Roman myths, and the Bible.8.William Shakespeare leaves a great body of literary works to the world, including 37 plays,154 sonnets and 2 narrative poems.9.In reading Shakespeare, you must have come across the line “To be or not to be – that is thequestion” by Hamlet in Hamlet.10.“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,/ So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”(Shakespeare, “Sonnet 18”) The word “this”refers to poetry.11.Shakespeare’s four great tragedies include Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, usuallyconsidered as some of the finest works in the English language.12.In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare’s humanism is evidently seen in his praise of human loveand in his defiance of feudal discord.13. A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter,with rhymes arrangedaccording to a certain definite patterns.14.Francis Bacon’s words, “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some fewto be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention,” describes the importance of reading, and different ways to deal with different books as well.15.The Glorious Revolution in 1688meant the supremacy of Parliament, the beginning ofmodern England and the triumph of the principle of political liberty.16.Metaphysical poetry refers to the works of the 17th-century writers who wrote under theinfluence of John Donne, with the general theme of carpe diem.17.John Donne in his poem“The Flea” claim that killing the lover, the flea and thus committingsacrilege constitute “three sins”.18.Epic is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, andcentered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, nation or the human race.19.Enlighteners believed that freedom, democracy, and reason are the primary values of society.20.In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe traces the growth of Robinson from a naive & simple youth intoa mature & hardened man, tempered by numerous trials in his 28 years of living on anisolated island.21. In Robinson Crusoe, the hero Crusoe teaches a slave named Friday to speak English and believe in God and eat like a civilized man.22.The revolutionary enthusiasm of the bourgeois revolution and the bitter hatred for the despotic ruler are best shown in the works of John Milton.23.Gulliver’s Travels written by Jonathan Swift is one of the most effective and devastating criticism and satires of all aspects of the English and European life of the time.24. According to Swift, Gulliver made voyages to Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Laputa, the Country of the Houyhnhnms, etc.25. The 18th century witnessed that in England there appeared two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories, which were satired by Swift in His Gulliver’s Travels.26.Jonathan Swift defines a good style as “proper words in proper places.”27.Jonathan Swift in his“A Modest Proposal” exposes a fact that the English are devouring the Irish.28.One of the characteristics of neo-classicism is that reason rather than emotion, and form rather than content are emphasized.29.Paradise Lost is actually a story taken from the Old Testament.30.Romanticism emphasized individual values and aspirations above those of society with its keynote intensity and watchword imagination.31.Romanticism as a main literary trend prevailed in England during the period of 1798-1832, beginning with the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, ending with Walter Scott’s death in 1832.32.William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,and Robert Southey were known as “Lake Poets” because they lived and knew one another in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England.33.William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).34.As a worshipper of nature, William Wordsworth’s famous poems include “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, “Tintern Abbey”, and “The Solitary Reaper”.35.William Wordsworth defines a good poetry as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.36. In“I wandered lonely as a cloud”, the poet says “my heart with pleasure fills,/And dances with the daffodils.”37.Byron’s influence was manifested by many authors and artists of the Romantic movement during the 19th century and beyond. An example of Byronic hero is Heathcliff from Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.38.Percy Bysshe Shelley in his poems called on the people to overthrow the rule of tyranny and injustice and prophesied a happy and free life for mankind.39.Percy Bysshe Shelley, through the speaker in his “Ode to the West Wind”, imagines himself to be a leaf, a cloud and a wave under the influence of the west wind.40.Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, was supposed to be the first science fiction in the world.41.Byron and Shelley are usually considered as the Second Generation of the Romantic Movement.42.In the poem“Ode to a Nightingale”, Keats identifies himself with the ideal beauty and hopesthat the song of the bird will help him to escape from the world of suffering, where “to think is to be full of sorrow”, into the world of eternal happiness.43.The prose writing of the romantic period was represented by Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, and Thomas de Quincey.44.John Keats wrote such immortal odes as“Ode to a Nightingale”, “Ode to Autumn” and “Ode o n a Grecian Urn”.45.Shelley wrote an elegy “Adonis” lamenting the early death of his fellow-poet John Keats.46.“Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is from Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn”.47.The dominant theme of John Keats’ poems is that the world of nature is beautiful, the realm of art and poetry is wonderful, but the human society is full of miseries.48.Robert Burns collected, edited, restored, and imitated traditional Scottish songs, or wrote verses of his own too traditional tune. Thus, he rescued and preserved the literary heritage.49.Robert Burns often wrote with light-hearted humor and in Scottish dialect.50.“Auld Lang Syne”, originally a Scottish folksong edited and collect by Robert Burns, was incorporated into the classic Hollywood movie Waterloo Bridge in 1940.51.Jane Austen’s novels include Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion.52.Jane Austen, although living and writing in the “age of poetry”, was an novelist instead.53.Pride and Prejudice is about the love and marriage story of five daughters in one family.54.Jane Austen wrote six novels all through her life.55.Jane Austen’s novels are mainly about love and marriage, mainly focusing on everyday country life of the upper middle class, and successful in the employment of irony.56.Dances figure prominently in Jane Austen’s novels. Whether performed in public assembly rooms or in private, dances offered social opportunities for young people to mix and mingle and converse in an acceptable fashion.57.Austen sets all of her novels during the Regency Period when the new landed gentry who came into money through commercial enterprise and ascended from the middle class.58.Pride and Prejudice portrays life in the genteel rural society of the day, and tells of the initial misunderstandings and later mutual enlightenment between Elizabeth and the haughty Darcy. 59.Austen, employing irony, begins her most famous novel Pride and Prejudice with this sentence “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”60.In the 19th century English literature, a new literary trend, critical realism, appeared, and flourished in the forties and early fifties.61.Jane Austen’s writing, drawing vivid and realistic pictures of everyday life of the country society in her novels, was consider to be “a fine engraving made upon a little piece of ivory”. Chronologically, the Victorian Period refers to 1837—1901.62.Although writing from different points of view and with different techniques, writers in the Victorian Period shared one thing in common, that is, they were all concerned about the fate of the common people.63.Pip, Estella, Havisham, Magwitch, and Joe Gargery are names of characters from the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.64.“Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? …And if God had gifted me with some beauty, and much wealth, I should have made it as hard as foryou to leave me, as it is now for me to leave you.” The passage is taken from Jane Eyre.65.English critical realism found its expression chiefly in the form of novel.66.One of the greatest English critical realist novelist was Charles Dickens, who criticized the bourgeois civilization and showed the misery of the common people.67.David Copperfield is often regarded as the semi-autobiography of the author Charles Dickens, in which the early life of the hero is largely based on the author’s early life.68.In the novel Oliver Twist, Dickens gives a truthful presentation of the sufferance of the poor, and makes a complete exposure of the terrible conditions in the English workhouse of the time and the brutality and corruption of the oppressors under the mask of philanthropy 慈善事业. 69.Charles Dickens begins his famous novel A Tale of Two Cities this way: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…”.70.Hardy is one of the representatives of English critical realism at the turn of the 19th century.71.As to Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Tess was a pure woman; Tess was a victim of economic oppression and social injustice; the author's pessimistic and naturalistic view of life is fully expressed in it.72.Alec, Clare, Angel, all are characters appearing in the novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles.73.Emily Brontë wrote only one novel entitled Wuthering Heights.74.Brontë Sisters were all talented writers, they all died young and all went to charity school.75.Jane Eyre is one of the most popular and important novels of the Victorian age. It is noted for its sharp criticism of the existing society, especially the bourgeois system of education.76.Thomas Hardy was once an architect, born in Dorsetshire, a county in the south of England, and his principle works are the Wessex novels.77.Novels of character and Environment are also called Wessex novels, taking the southwest counties of England for their setting, which include The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure.78.Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the D’Urbervilles is the daughter of a poor villager.One of the chief representative figures of the School of Aestheticism is Oscar Wilde.79.Most of Hardy’s novels are set in Wessex, the fictional primitive and crude region which is really the home place he both loves and hates.80.James Joyce’s representative works are Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.81.James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner all belong to the school of the Stream of Consciousness.82.Washington Irving is the first American writer to earn an international reputation, and regarded as an early famous Romantic writer in American Literary history.83.Irving was best known for his famous short stories such as “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.84.The finest example of H awthorne’s symbolism is reflected in his The Scarlet Letter.85.Nathaniel Hawthorne depicts the prison as a symbol for puritanical severity of law and the rigorous enforcement of law and the impossibility to break free of it, while the rosebush tosymbolize the passionate wilderness in the form of Hester Prynne.86.As a leading spokesman of the Imagist Movement, Ezra Pound wrote a famous one-image poem “In a Station of the Metro”, which has been regarded as a classic specimen of Imagist poetry.87.Postmodernism can be described as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, simulacrum, and hyper reality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, and epistemic certainty.88.Postmodernism upholds the belief that there is no absolute truth and the way in which different people perceive the world is subjective.89.Representative writers of postmodernism are Derrida, Foucault, Kristiva, Lacan, etc.90.Examples of intertextuality can be found in Ulysses retelling Homer's Odyssey,The Dead Fathers Club retelling Hamlet, A Thousand Acres retelling King Lear,and Wide Sargasso Sea retelling Jane Eyre.91.Principal characters in Bellow’s fiction have heroic potential, and many times they stand in contrast to the negative forces of society. Often these characters are Jewish and have a sense of alienation or otherness.92.Death of a Salesman tells us a story abut an American tragedy, but the tragedy rooted in the American Dream.93.Pynchon品钦’s novels are broad in scope and use scientific theories, historical facts, and details of popular culture with great accuracy.94.There is only one scene, in Waiting for Godot of Samuel Beckett, throughout both acts: two men are waiting on a country road by a tree.95.In 1993, Toni Morrison, “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality”, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. 96.Enormously important in shaping the artistic contributions of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Langston Hughes is the most popular and versatile of the black writers. (Dreams)97.“Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair; and his only alternative, to escape from the labor of the farm and the clamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand, and stroll away into the wood.” This sentence vividly describes the characteristics of Rip Van Winkle, especially unwilling to engage himself in labor as well as slow response to what happened around.98. “To wage by force or guile eternal war,/ Irreconcilable to our grand Foe”, here the Foe refers to God. (In Paradise Lost)。