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Summary 4 of English Literature
?
Chapter Six
The Modern Period
?
Background
Information:
In
the
second
half
of
the
19th
century
and
the
early
decades
of
the
20th
century, both natural
and social sciences in Europe had enormously
advanced.
The two world wars
destroyed people’s faith in the
Victorian values and gave
rise to all
kinds of philosophical ideas in Western Europe.
Modernism rose out of
skepticism and disillusion of capitalism. It began
with
the French Symbolism in the late
19th century. Towards the 1920s, different
literary
trends
of
modernism
converged
into
a
mighty
torrent
of
modernist
movement. Major
figures associated with this movement were Kafka,
Picasso,
Pound, Eliot, Joyce and
Virginia Woolf.
After
the
Second
World
War,
a
variety
of
modernism,
or
post-modernism
,
like existentialist literature, theater
of the absurd, new novels and black humor,
rose with the spur of the
existentialist idea that “the world was absurd,
and the
human life was an agony.
Modernism
takes
the irrational philosophy
and
the 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
nature,
man
and
society,
man and man, and man and himself.
Modernism
, is in many
respects, a reaction against realism.
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Drama
in the
Modern Period
?
The
most
celebrated
dramatists
in
the
last
decade
of
the
19th
century
were
Oscar
Wilde
(
The
Importance
of
Being
Earnest
)
and
George
Bernard
Shaw,
who
pioneered the modern drama.
?
Shaw is
considered to be the best-known English dramatist
since Shakespeare,
whose
works
are
examples
of
the
play
inspired
by
social
criticism.
His
representative
works
are
Widower’
s
Houses
《鳏夫之家》
,
Mrs.
Warren’
s
Profession
《华伦夫人的职业》
and
Heartbreak
House
《伤心之屋》
.
Poetry
in The Modern Period
?
The 20th
century witnessed a great achievement in English
poetry. The early
poems
of
Ezra
Pound
and
T.S.
Eliot
and
Yeats
’
matured
poetry
marked
the
rise of “modern poetry
,”
which was, in some sense, a revolution against the
conventional ideas and forms of the
Victorian poetry.
William Butler Yeats
威廉
·
巴特勒
·
叶芝
(1865~1939)
?
Irish
poet and dramatist, the central poet of
modern literature
?
His fame rests
chiefly with his shorter poems and lyrics. T.S.
Eliot considered
him to be the greatest
English-speaking poet of his age.
?
The three major
concerns of his life
—
art,
Irish nationalism and occult studies
1
—
are all
central to his poetry and drama.
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Representative
poems:
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The Lake Isle of Innisfree
“
茵尼斯
弗利岛
”
?
Sailing to Byzantium
“
驶向拜
占庭
”
?
Leda and the Swan
：
“
丽达与天鹅
”
Irish National Theater
Movement
?
With their
joint efforts, the Irish playwrights like W.B.
Yeats, Lady Gregory,
and
J.M.
Synge
brought
about
the
Irish
National
Theater
Movement
in
the
early
20th
century,
thus
starting
an
Irish
dramatic
revival
.
Yeats
was
the
leader of
this movement. To write about Ireland for an Irish
audience and to
recreate
a
specifically
Irish
literature---these
were
the
aims
that
Yeats
was
fighting for as a poet and a
playwright.
Summary of
“The Lake Isle of
Innisfree”
:
The twelve-line
poem is divided into three quatrains with a rhyme
pattern abab cdcd
efef.
It
is
an
example of
Yeats
’
s
earlier
lyric poems.
The short poem
explores the
speaker's
longing for the peace and tranquility of Innisfree
while residing in an urban
setting. It
is typically a pastoral poem.
Yeats
used
sounds
found
in
nature
(bees,
crickets,
and
water
lapping)
to
make
Innisfree appear to be
peaceful and tranquil. There is a pause in the
middle of the first
three lines of
every stanza; Yeats does this to slow the reader
down, so that they can
feel the calm
that his lines are expressing. Alliteration is
also used in this poem (cabin,
clay;
glimmer,
glow).
He
described
where
the
peace
comes
from
through
several
visual and aural images,
like
“
the veils of the
morning
”
,
“
purple
glow
”
and
“
the
cricket
sings.
”
He can
escape the noise of the city and be lulled by the
sounds by the shore.
and
having
bee
hives,
by
enjoying
the
glow
of
noon,
the
sounds
of
birds'
wings,
and, of course, the bees. He can even build a
cabin and stay on the island much
as
Thoreau, the American Transcendentalist, lived on
Walden Pond.
T.
S.
Eliot
艾略特
(1888~1965)
?
one
of the most important modernist poets, verse
dramatists and prose writers
?
Eliot’s
m
ost
important
single
poem
The
Waste
Land
has
been
hailed
as
a
landmark and a model of
the 20th-century English poetry. It is often
regarded
as
being
primarily
a
reflection
of
the
20th-
century
people’s
disillusionment
and frustration in a sterile and futile
society.
?
Representative works:
?
Murder in the
Cathedral
《教堂里的谋杀案》
?
Tradition and
Individual Talent
《传统与个人天才》
?
Prufrock and
Other
Observations
《普鲁弗洛克与其它情况》
?
The Waste
Land
《荒原》
2