英国文学史复习题之名词解释

（0091）《英国文学史》复习思考题答案

I. Write out the authors’ names of the following works. (20)

1 William Shakespeare《Romeo and Juliet》 2 Henry Fielding《Tom Jones》

3 Charlotte Bronte《Jane Eyre》 4 Daniel Defoe《Robinson Crusoe》

5 Robert Burns《A Red Red, Rose》 6 Oscar Wilde《The Importance of Being Earnest》

7 George Bernard Shaw 《Mrs. Warren’s Profession》8 Virginia Woolf《To the Lighthouse》

9 Lord Byron《Don Juan》 10 John Keats《Ode to the Nightingale》

11 William Shakespeare 《Macbeth》 12 Jonathan Swift《Gulliver’s Travels》

13 William Thackery《Vanity Fair 》 14 Emily Bronte《Wuthering Heights》

15 Charles Dickens 《A Tale of Two Cities》 16 Thomas Hardy《Tess of the D’Urberviles》

17 James Joyce《Ulysses》 18 George Eliot《Silas Marner》

19 Lord Byron《Don Juan》 20 Percy Shelley《Ode to the West Wind》

II. Define the following literary terms. (20)

1、Iambic pentameter is a meter in poetry, consisting of an unrhymed line with five iambs or

feet (hence pentameter), felt by many to be the most powerful of all metrical forms in English

poetry. Shakespeare excelled in the use of iambic pentameter (as in his famous Sonnet XVIII,

beginning "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”

2、Heroic couplet: a rhyming couplet in iambic pentameter. It is also called riding rhyme,

rhymed 5-beat lines, or rhymed decasyllables. It is one of the most popular metrical forms in

English poetry. Though its origin is uncertain, heroic couplet is generally assumed to be

introduced by Chaucer. Characteristics exhibited by heroic couplet include epigrammatic

expression, balanced sentences, parallel construction, concise diction, use of antithesis, and medial

pause. Two types of heroic couplets can be distinguished: closed heroic couplet and open heroic

couplet. The former is a complete sentence with a full stop at the end of the second rhyme. The

latter is one in which a sentence extends from one couplet to another.

3、Courtly love: an idealized love in some medieval literature and chivalric society. It has its

origin in the works of Plato, in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, and in Andreas Capellanus’s De Arte

Honeste Amandi. It owes its development to the medieval devotion to the Virgin Mary. Courtly

love celebrates the beauty, virtues and ennobling power of women. It adds to the rise of women’s position and offers a philosophical and religious interpretation of love and its function. Apart from

noble passions and persistent pursuit, courtly love aims at the moral perfection of the lover. Love

is essentially treated as a motivating power, directing the lover toward moral progress and spiritual

development. Other elements of courtly love are humility and courtesy on the part of the lover,

adultery between the man and his beloved mistress, and a great respect for the lady. Courtly love

was popular first in France among the troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries. In England, those

who wrote in this tradition were Chaucer, Sidney, Spenser and Shakespeare. Examples are

Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and the sonnets written by Shakespeare and Spenser.

4、Literature of the Absurd: a term associated with modern literature, criticism, and

philosophy. It is applied to describe the meaninglessness of human existence in a world that is

alien and incomprehensible. Deprived of their old beliefs and cut off from their past, human

beings are in a state of complete isolation and confusion. Literature of the absurd has

Existentialism as its philosophical background and is most fruitful in drama and novel. The idea

that man and his existence are absurd is best illustrated in the works of Camus, Beckett, Ionesco,

Adamov, Albee, Heller, Pynchon, and Vonnegut.

5、Ballad: a narrative poem in short stanzas about heroic or tragic deeds; or a song that tells a

romantic or sentimental story. There are mainly two kinds of ballads: the folk ballad and the

literary ballad. The folk or popular ballad is without authorship and is of oral tradition. It might be

composed by an individual or a community. It is intended to be sung or recited before the public.

Ballads of oral tradition are not written down until many years later. And its language is simple

and even unliterary. Folk ballad belongs to the Middle Ages. The literary or art ballad is with

known authorship and has a definite moral purpose. Ballads of this type are usually imitations of

medieval popular ballads. They are written down at the start. Many Romantic poets of the 19th

century wrote literary ballads. Both folk and literary ballads share the following similarities: (a)

simple and familiar language; (b) having adventure, love or war as the subject matter; (c) telling

story through dialogue; (d) little description; (e) strong supernatural elements; (f) frequent use of

repetition and parallelism; (g) having rhyme, assonance and the like; (h) impersonal narrator; (I)

lyrical, romantic, sentimental or tragic qualities; and (j) the ballad writer getting his inspiration

from folklore, local or national history. In England, many ballads are about the border conflicts

between English and Scottish people, or about the legends of Robin Hood and his merry men.