英国文学简介第一讲 (201309)

Literary Schools in the West

Schools

Classicism

Time

1200 B. C.

–

146 B. C.

Representatives

Aeschylus,

Sophocles, Euripides

Aristophanes,

Herodotus,

Thucydides,

Homer,

Sappho,

Pindar

Petronius, Virgil,

Ovid,

Caesar, Cicero

Dante (Latin) is the

last of the medieval

and the first of

Renaissance because

he is the first who

wrote both in Latin

and in Italian.

Chaucer

Features

Genres

: plays, epics and lyrics

Subjects

: Gods, Goddesses

Aesthetic

ideals

:

order,

logic,

restrained

emotion, accuracy

Greco- Roman

Culture

146 B. C.

–

476 A. D.

Language

: rhythm, grace, harmony, roportion

Requirement

: the unities of time, place, and

characters

Purpose

: serving humanity, catharsis

Subject

: God, the Trinity

Genres

: hymns, lyrics, epics

At

that

time,

only

Latin

is

used

in

literature

because the bible has only Latin version.

Church

Literature

(Age of Faith)

476 A. D.

–

14

th

C.

Knight

Romance

(Dark Age)

Aesthetics:

freedom

Mid-12

th

C.

–

Mid-13

th

C.

love, individual

Troyes,

Chivalry

: protecting the weak

Sainte-Maure,

fighting for the church

Strassburg (France)

being loyal to his lord

respecting

ladies

of

noble birth

Boccaccio, Petrarch

(Italy),

Spenser,

Marlowe,

Shakespeare,

Jonson,

Bacon,

Milton, Dryden

Cowley

Crashaw

John Donne

George Herbert

Marvell

Henry Vaughan

Aesthetic ideals

: dignity, worldly happiness,

desire

Motif

: man is the measure of all things.

Genres

: plays, poetry, essay

Subjects

: human

Language

: V

ernacular

Language

: simple words, cadence of

common speech

Images

: actual life, extended metaphors

Form

:

argument

with

God

or

with

himself,

dramatic contrast

(metaphysical

conceits)

a

rebellious

spirit

from

the

conventional

fashion

of

the

Elizabethan love poetry

Form

: continuation of Renaissance, modeled

after the classical works

Aesthetics

: order, restrained emotion, logic,

14

th

C.

–

Humanism

(a revival of the

17

th

C.

spirit

of

Gods

and

Goddesses

Metaphysical

Poetry

16

th

C.

–

17

th

C.

Neo-Classicism

(Mid)17

th

C.

–

(the

revival

of

18

th

C.

the

Age of Reason/

Essayists

：

Joseph Addison

Sir Richard Steele

pattern

of

the

Enlightenment

old

classical works )

Greco-Roman

works

Samuel Johnson

Poets

:

Alexander Pope

John Dryden

Novelists

:

John Bunyan

Daniel Defoe

Jonathan Swift

Henry Fielding,

Playwright

:

Richard Brinsley

Sheridan

accuracy

Ideology

: rationality, collective, God

Language

: precision, grace, proportion, unity,

harmony

Subject

: bourgeoisie, aristocrat

Genres

: essays, novels, epigrams

Purpose

: for Newly- Rising Bourgeoisie,

service to humanity

Themes

:

social

and

political

life

of

London,

newly rising class

’

s struggle for money

Tone

: satiric, encouraging

Prose

: precise, direct, smooth

Novels

:

type

character,

adventures,

travels,

comic play

Poetry

:

lyrical,

epical,

didactic,

satiric,

dramatic

Drama

:

Heroic

couplets,

iambic

pentameter,

the three unities of time, space, and action

Aesthetics

: personal emotion

Language

: simple, plain

Subject

s: lower class

Genres

: elegies, travels, letters

Themes

: dark night, death, deserted villages

tomb, grief

Tone

: grief, melancholy

Influence

:

paving

the

way

for

the

Gothic

Novels

Gothic Styles

Horace Walpole

(

The Castle of Otranto

, 1764)

Mathew Gregory Lewis (

The Monk

)

Charles Robert Maturin (

Melmoth the

Wanderer

)

Ann Radcliffe (

The Mysteries of Udolpho

)

Charlotte Bront?

(

Jane Eyre

)

Emily Bront?

(

Wuthering Heights

)

Aesthetic Ideals:

Edmund Burke

―

A Philosophical Enquiry into

the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and

the Beautiful (1757)

‖

He points out that horror and disaster are

unpleasant and ugly in reality, but in literature

Sentimentalism

18

th

C.

Poets

:

Thomas Gray

James Thompson

Edward Young

Novelists

:

William Collins

Samuel Richardson

Laurence Sterne

Oliver Goldsmith

George Smollet

Mackenzie

Poets

:

Blake

Burns

Southey

Wordsworth

Coleridge

Byron

Shelley

Keats

Essayists

:

Hunt

Quincey

Lamb

Hazlitt

Novelists:

(Late) 18

th

C.

–

“青年 男子哪个

(Mid)19

th

C.

不善钟情

,

青年女

Goethe

’

s

The

子

谁人

不怀春

?”

Sorrows

of

Young Werther

Romanticism

Austen

Walter

Scott

（

1771-1832

）

they can give people pleasure by shocking

them with the ensuing tragic effect or thrilling

fear, the effect of which is connected with

sublimity.

Imagination,

―

a sort of creative power

‖

Origin

: the knight romance

Aesthetics ideals

: from the outer world of

social civilization to inner world of the human

spirit, overflow of emotion, importance of the

individual, irrationality, harmony between

man and nature

Political

slogans

:

Liberty,

Equality,

and

Fraternity

Ideology

: Rationalism

The Sun-Never-Set Empire

Darwin

’

s The Origin of Species

―

The survival of the fittest

‖

The Shaking of the religious belief

Utilitarianism

Source

: external, objective, material world

Form

: setting, plot, typical

Character, chronological narration

Themes: public, social, poor people

Purpose

: reflecting the society

disclosing

capitalists

’

cruelty,

fate

of

the

common,

inhuman

social

institutions,

decaying social morality

Aesthetics

: based on Aristotle

’

s and Horace

’

s

Poetic

Theories:

writing,

a

sort

of

mimetikai

technai, imitation of action

―

Art

for art’

s sake

‖

―

fin-de- siè

cle

‖

sentiment

Critical

Realism

sive

ending

comedy

or

tragedy

reason

given,

back-

ground

description

19

th

C.

–

(Beginning)20

th

C.

Poets

:

Afred Tennyson

Robert Browning

Gerald

Manley

Hopkins

Algernon

Charles

Swinburne

Novelists

:

Charles Dickens

William

Makepeace

Thackeray

Thomas

Hardy

George Eliot

Anne Bront?

Charlott?

Bront?

Emily Bront?

Mrs Gaskell

Prose Writers

:

Thomas Carlyle

Thomas

Babington

Macaulay

Matthew Arnold

John

Henry

Newman

John Ruskin

Thomas

Henry

Huxley

Playwright

:

Oscar Wilde