专八人文知识英美文学复习材料

专业八级备考英美文学知识纲要

注：黄色部分为往年已考过的内容。

英国文学

Old and Medieval English literature (5th-15th century) 1066

1. Beowulf oldest English epic

2. medieval romance Arthurian romances, knight

3. Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury Tales in heroic couplet

4. popular ballads Robin Hood stories and the ballad meter

The English Renaissance—Humanism, drama (16th century)

1. Edmund Spenser Faerie Queene in the Spenserian stanza, allegorical romance

2.Christopher Marlowe The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great

3.William Shakespeare

a)Major tragedies: Hamlet; Othello; King Lear; Macbeth

b)Major comedies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Merchant of V enice; As You

Like It; The Twelfth Night; Romeo and Juliet

c)Sonnet 18

4.Francis Bacon Essays“Of Studies” some quotes from the essay

5.King James’s or The Authorized Bible (1604)

The 17th Century—Turbulent and gloomy

1.John Donne and Metaphysical Poetry “The Flea”, “Valediction: Forbidding

Mourning”

2.John Milton: Paradise Lost rebellious spirit, Miltonic style, blank verse

3.John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress allegory, satire, Vanity Fair

The 18th Century—Age of Reason and common sense

1.Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders

2.Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal”

3.Neoclassicism and Alexander Pope

4.Samuel Johnson Letter to the Right Honourable The Earl of Chesterfield

5.Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling

6.Robert Burns: “A Red, Red Rose”“Auld Lang Syne”

7.William Blake: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, “The Tyger”

The Age of Romanticism—Poetry, individualism, nature, emotion (1798-1832)

1.William Wordsworth: “The Preface to Lyrical Ballads” as declaration of Romanticism,

nature poet “The Solitary Reaper”, “Tintern Abbey”, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” or

“Daffodils” , “Composed upon Westerminster Bridge”

2.Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan

3.George Gorgon Byron: the Byronic hero; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan

4.Percy Bysshe Shelley: Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, “Ode to the West Wind”

5.John Keats：“Ode to a Nightingale”, “To Autumn”, “Ode on an Grecian Urn”, truth is

beauty, beauty is truth

6.Walter Scott: historical romance, Ivanhoe

7.Jane Austen: realistic writing about family life, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and

Sensibility

The Victorian Age (1832-1901) 19th century

1.general features: utilitarianism, middle class urban literature, conservative morality

2.Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations,

Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Little Dorrit

3.William Thackeray: Vanity Fair

4.The Bronte sisters: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

5.George Eliot: Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch

6.Thomas Hardy: the Wessex novels; Tess of the D’urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The

Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, naturalist ideas

7.Alfred Tennyson: poet

8.Robert Browning: poet, dramatic monologue, “My Last Duchess”

9.George Bernard Shaw: dramatist, 1925 Nobel Prize winner

The Twentieth Century

1.The features of modernism: alienation and loneliness

2.T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Waste Land 1948 Nobel Prize

winner

3.James Joyce: Ulysses, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Irish, Dublin, stream of

consciousness

4.Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway

5. D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers(Oedipus Complex), Lady Chatterley’s Lover

6.W. B. Yeats: Irish poet, modernism 1923 Nobel Prize winner

7.Angry Young Men (1950s): Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

8.The Theatre of the Absurd: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

9.Women writers: Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark

10.Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook, 2007 Nobel Prize winner

11.contemporary writers: Martin Amis, Ian McEvan, Julia Barnes, A. S. Byatt, Margaret

Drabble, Anita Brookner, V. S, Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Larkin

(poet), Seamus Heaney (poet), Harold Pinter (dramatist)

12.V. S. Naipaul: Indian-British novelist, 2001 Nobel Prize winner

13.Seamus Heaney: Irish Poet 1995 Nobel Prize winner

美国文学

Colonial Period (1607-1800) –Rise of the American Dream

1.Puritanism, Enlightenment, Independence War

2.Jonathan Edwards

3.Benjamin Franklin:Poor Richard’s Almanac, Autobiography

Romanticism (1800-1865) –Prime of the American Dream

1.Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle”, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

2.James Fenimore Cooper: Leather stocking Tales, American Westward movement

3.New England Transcendentalism: Oversoul

4.Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nature”(The Bible for Transcendentalism), “The American