英国文学史术语
1.The Settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain
The starting date represents the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon invasions, i.e. the invasion/migration of the tribes termed the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from the northern part of modern Germany to the island of Britain. Similarly, the end-date of the mid-eleventh century centers on the Battle of Hastings (14th October, 1066) which saw the defeat of Harold Godwin son, the last Saxon king, at the hands of William the Conqueror thus transferring control of England to the Normans. Yet this simple cut-off date blurs historical reality. Although Saxon resistance to the Normans post-Hastings was ineffectual, their language did survive developing (influenced, of course, by Norman French) into Middle English (the language of Chaucer).
2.The Old English
Old English refers to the language used in English until the Normans invaded England in 1066.during that period, the English language, as a branch of West Germanic language, was an inflected language. It had strong and weak forms of verbs. Its nouns and adjectives had cases and genders. Word order was not very important in the meaning of the sentences. During this period, a number of Latin words came into the vocabulary as the English people were converted to Christianity.
3.Beowulf
Beowulf is an approach to building a supercomputer as a cluster of commodity
off-the-shelf personal computers, interconnected with a local area network technology like Ethernet, and running programs written for parallel processing. The Beowulf idea is said to enable the average university computer science department or small research company to build its own small supercomputer that can operate in the gigaflop (billions of operations per second) range. In addition to possible cost savings, building your own supercomputer is said to be a learning investment and make you less dependent in the future on particular hardware and software vendors. As off-the-shelf technology evolves, a Beowulf can be upgraded to take advantage of it.
The original Beowulf cluster was developed in 1994 at the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (CESDIS), a contractor to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Thomas Sterling and Don Becker built a cluster computer that consisted of 16 Intel DX4 processors connected by channel-bonded 10 Mbps Ethernet. Their success led to the Beowulf Project, which fosters the development of similar commodity off-the-shelf (COTS) clusters. A number have been developed in universities and research groups, ranging from the original 16-processor Beowulf to Avalon, a cluster of 140 Alpha processors built by the Los Alamos National
Laboratory. A more typical smaller cluster might have 16 200-MHz (or faster) Intel
P6 processors connected by Fast Ethernet and a Fast Ethernet switch.
As a way to lower cost and increase vendor independency, Beowulf developers often choose the Linux operating system and use standard message passing protocols between the computers within the cluster. A Beowulf cluster is placed in the taxonomy of parallel computing as somewhere below a massively parallel processor (MPP) and a network of workstations (NOW) that is clustered for the purpose of load balancing.
4.Epic.
EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing) is a 64-bit microprocessor instruction set, jointly defined and designed by Hewlett Packard and Intel, that provides up to 128 general and floating point unit registers and uses speculative loading, predication, and explicit parallelism to accomplish its computing tasks. By comparison, current 32-bit CISC and RISC microprocessor architectures depend on 32-bit registers, branch prediction, memory latency, and implicit parallelism, which are considered a less efficient approach in microarchitecture design.
IA-64 (Intel Architecture-64), Intel's first 64-bit CPU microarchitecture, is based on EPIC. Intel's first implementation, long expected and well-known as Merced (its code name), was christened with the Itanium brand name in October, 1999. It is expected that Itanium-based systems will be compatible with versions of existing and future operating systems including HP-UX, 64-bit Windows, IA-64 Linux, Project Monterey, and Novell Modesto.
5.The Norman Conquest
Reasons for William’s invasion of England after Edward’s death.
It was said that king Edward had promised the English throne to William, but the Witan chose Harold as king. So William led his army to invade England. In October 1066, during the important battle of Hastings, William defeated Harold and killed him. One Christmas Day, William was crowned king of England, thus beginning the Norman Conquest of England
The Norman Conquest and its consequences
The Norman Conquest of 1066 is perhaps the best-known event in English history. William the Conqueror confiscated almost all the land and gave it to his Norman followers. He replaced the weak Saxon rule with a strong Norman government. So the feudal system was completely established in England. Relations with the Continent were opened, and the civilization and commerce were extended. Norman-French culture, language, manners and architecture were introduced. The Church was brought
into closer connection with Rome, and the church courts were separated from the civil courts.
The English is a mixture of nationalities of different origins. The ancestors of many English people were the ancient Angles and Saxons. Some English people are of the Norman-French origin.
6.Geoffrey Chaucer (Main Works)
1340-1400
Writer, official and bureaucrat, the outstanding English poet before William Shakespeare. Geoffrey Chaucer is remembered as the author of Canterbury Tales, which ranks as one of the greatest epic works of world literature. Chaucer made a crucial contribution to English literature in using English at a time when much court poetry was still written in Anglo-Norman or Latin. Although he spent one of two brief periods of disfavor, Chaucer lived the whole of his life close the centers of English power.
7.The Canterbury Tales
代表作：《坎特伯雷故事集》（The Canterbury Tales）其他作品《公爵夫人之书》(Book of the Duchess)、《声誉之宫》(The House of Fame)、《百鸟会议》(The Parliament of Fowles)、《贤妇传说》(The Legend of Good Women)以及《特洛伊罗斯与克丽西达》(Troilus and Criseyde)。
8.Ballad
A ballad is a narrative poem, usually set to music; thus, it often is a story told in a song. Any story form may be told as a ballad, such as historical accounts or fairy tales in verse form. It usually has foreshortened, alternating four stress lines ("ballad meter") and simple repeating rhymes, often with a refrain.
A ballad is a story, distilled to its essence and set to song. The song itself tends to be unpretentious - usually a simple verse form set to a modal melody - but an unpretentious song can still be lovely, as many ballads are. It is probable that simplicity has had much to do with the ballad's continued survival and popularity: Ballads have been passed down through the centuries, changing to suit the tastes of the singers, borrowing from the music of the day, borrowing from each other. Every few decades the ballad seems to undergo a revival, with old books and manuscripts being searched for old ballads and new inspiration. The result is a living musical tradition whose roots can be traced back over half a millenium
9.Ballad Metre
Ballad meter is commonly used in narrative verse, because it tells a story. Ballad stanza or Ballad metre, the usual form of the folk ballad and its literary imitations, consisting of a quatrain in which the first and third lines have four stresses while the second and fourth have three stresses. Usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme. The rhythm is basically iambic.。
