◆Chapter 1 The Renaissance PeriodTime: Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries.The Renaissance （文艺复兴）: The Renaissance is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. Humanism (人文主义): Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. “Man is the measure of all things.” Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the English humanists.Mainstream of Literary Forms: In the early stage of the Renaissance, poetry and poetic dram a were the most outstanding literary forms and they were carried on especially by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. The Elizabethan dram a, in its totality, is the real mainstream of the English Renaissance.◆Chapter 2 The Neoclassical PeriodTime: Between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798.Social Events: Glorious Revolution （光荣革命）; British colonies (Abroad); Acts of Enclosure （圈地运动）(At home); The Enlightenment Movement （启蒙运动）.The Enlightenment Movement: The 18th century England is known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment Movement was a progressive intellectual movement which purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. They held that rationality or reason should be the only, the final cause of any hum an thought and activities. They called for a reference to order, reason and rules. They believed that when reason served as the yardstick for the measurement of all hum an activities and relations, every superstition, injustice and oppression was to yield place to “eternal truth,” “eternal justice” and “natural equality”. Great writers like John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, the two pioneers of familiar essays, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Henry Fielding and Samuel Johnson.Neoclassicism: In the field of literature, the Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism. According to the neoclassicists, all forms of litera ture were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers. They believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic res trained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to hum anity. This belief led them to seek proportion, unity, harmony and grace in literary expression, in an effort to delight, instruct and correct human beings, primarily as social animals. Thus a polite, urbane, witty, and intellectual art developed.Neoclassicists had some fixed laws and rules for almost every genre of literature. Prose should be precise, direct, smooth and flexible. Poetry should be lyrical, epical, didactic, satiric or dram atic; Drama should be written in the Heroic Couplets (英雄双韵体诗).In the last few decades of the 18th century, the neoclassical emphasis upon reason, intellect, wit and form was rebelled against or challenged by the sentimentalists, and was gradually replaced by Rom anticism.Novel: The mid-century was predominated by a newly rising literary form---the modern English novel. Gothic novels---mostly stories of mystery and horror which take place in some haunted or dilapidated Middle Age castles.◆Chapter 3 The Romantic Period(反新古典主义)Time: From 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads to 1832 with Sir Walter Scott’s death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliam ent.Social Events: French Revolution; English Industrial Revolution.Romantic Movement: The Romantics saw man essentially as an individual in the solitary state and emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind. Thus we can say that Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from attenti on to the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit. In essence, it designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and all experience.Major Figures: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly and Keats.Theme: Imagination and NatureMajor Literary Forms: Poetry (best), prose, novel (Jane Austen and Walter Scott). Drama is less successful.◆Chapter 4 The Victorian PeriodTime: Queen Victoria who ruled over England from 1836 to 1901. The period has bee n generally regarded as one of the most glorious in the English history.Social Events: Reform Bill （改革法案）；Chartist Movem ent (宪章运动)；Theme: Common sense and moral propriety, which were ignored by the Romanticists, again became the predominant preoccupation in literary works.Theory of “art for art’s sake”: Oscar Wilde and Walter PaterUtilitarianism(功利主义): Utilitarianism was widely accepted and practiced. Almost everything was put to the test by the criterion of utility, that is, the extent to which it could promote the material happiness. Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and many other socially conscious writers severely criticized the Utilitarian creed, especially its depreciation of cultural values and its cold indifference towards human feelings and imagination.Major Literary Forms:1. Novel (best): In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging expression of progressive thought. While sticking to the principle of faithful representation of the 18th century realist novel, they carried their duty forward to the criticism of the society and the defense of the m ass. They were all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry with the inhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as represented by the money-worship and Utilitarianism, and the widespread misery, poverty and injustice.2. Prose: Many of the prose writers joined forces with the critical realist novelists in exposing and criticizing the social reality, a nd som e became very influential in the ideological field.3. Poetry: The poetry of this period was mainly characterized by experime nts with new styles and new ways of expression. “psycho-analytical” element.◆Chapter 5 The Modern PeriodTime: 1850-1910Social Events: First World War; Sun-never-set Empire collapsedNew Theories:1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: they put forward the theory of scientific socialism.2. Darwinism: Darwin’s theory of evolution exerted a strong influence upon the people, causing many to lose their religious faith. The social Darwinism, under the cover of “survival of the fittest,” vehemently advocated colon ialism or jingoism.3. Einstein: Einstein’s theory of relativity provided entirely new ideas for the concepts of time and space.4. Freud: Freud’s analytical psychology drastically altered our conception of hum an nature.5. Arthur Schopenhauer: a pessimistic (悲观主义) philosopher, started a rebellion against rationalism（唯理主义）, stressing the importance of will and intuition.6. Friedrich Nietzsche: he went further against rationalism by advocating the doctrines of power and superman and by completely rejecting the Christian morality.7. Henry Bergson: He established his irrational philosophy, which put the emphasis on creation intuition, irrationality and unconsciousness. The irrationalist philosophers exerted immense influence upon the major modernist writers in Britain. Modernist Movement: 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. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. Modernism is a reactio n against realism. It rejects rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism. As a result, the works created by the mode rnist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama.Major Figures: Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Webern, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf.Major Literary Forms:1. Modern Poetry: The early poem s of Pound and Eliot and Yeats’s matured poetry marked the rise of “modern poetry”, which was a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian poetry. The mo dernist poets fought against the romantic fuzziness and self-indulged emotionalism, advocating new ideas in poetry-writing such as to use the language of common speech, to create new rhythms as the expression of a new mood, to allow absolute freedom in cho osing subjects, and to use hard, clear and precise images in poems.2. Realistic Novel: The realistic novels in the early 20th century were the continuation of the Victorian tradition, yet its exposing and criticizing power against capitalist evils had been somewhat weakened both in width and depth. Another important aspect of realistic novels in this period is the fact that there rose a few working class writers, who gave a direct portrayal of the working-people’s poverty and sufferings, by singing highly of the heroic struggles against capitalism waged by the working class.3. Modernist Novel: In stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation, the theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis played a particularly important role. Writers like Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the hum an consciousness. They had created unprecedentedstream-of-consciousness novels such as Pilgrimage by Richardson, Ulysses by Joyce.4. Drama: Oscar Wi lde and G.B. Shaw, who, in a sense, pioneered the modern drama, though they didn’t make so many innovations in techniques and forms as modernist poets or novelists.American Part◆Chapter 1 The Romantic PeriodTime: From the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s “The sketch Book” and ended with Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance”.Features: In the most of the American writings in the period there was:1. A new emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature, which included a liking for the picturesque, theexotic, the sensuous, the sensational, and the supernatural.2. The American also placed an increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions and displayed an increasing attention tothe psychic states of their characters/3. A great interest in external nature in their respective works.American Romanticism is, in a certain way, derivative.Although foreign influences were strong, the great works that demonstrate what American Rom antic writings were are typically American.1. The American national experience of “pioneering into the west”.2. With the growth of American national consciousness, American character types speaking local dialects speared in poetry andfiction with increasing frequency.3. The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values. One of themanifestations in the fact that American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counterparts.4. A preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of original sin and the mystery of evil.New England Transcendentalism: Transcendental ism has been defined philosophically as “the recognition is man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses. This Transcendentalist group includes two of the most significant writers America has produced so far, Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.◆Chapter 2 The Realistic PeriodTime: The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the literary history of the US. Realism: Realism was a reaction against Rom anticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating fictions, and paved the way to Modernism. After the Civil War, the Americans began to be tired of the sentimental feelings of Romanticism.A new generation cam e up with a new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism, people’s attention was now directed to the interesting featur es of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, and to the open portrayal of class struggle.、“The Gilded Age”: People becam e dubious about the human nature and the benevolence of God, which the Transcendentalists cared most. Gone was the frontier and the spirit of the frontiersman, which is the spirit of freedom and human connection, and gone was a place to escape for the American Dream. In place of all this is what Mark Twain referred to as “The Gilded Age.”Major Figures: The three dominant figures of the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Together they brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the landscape and social surfaces, brought to perfection the vernacular style, and explored and exploited the literary possibilities of the interior life. Though the three prominent writers wrote more or less at the sam e time, they differed in their understanding of the “truth”. While Mark Twain and Howells seemed to have paid more attention to the “life” of the Americans, Henry James had apparently laid a greater emphasison the “inner world” of man. Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived, while Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories. This particular concern about the local character of a region cam e about as “local colorism”, a unique variation of American literary realism.American Naturalism (悲观决定论): The impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on American men of letters gave rise to yet another school of realism: American naturalism. The American naturalists accepted the more negative implications of the Darwinism theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.Chapter 3 The Modern PeriodTime: The 20th centurySocial events: 2 World Wars; The Great Economic Depression in 1930s; Ku Klux KlanSpiritual WastelandThe Expatriate Movement: There was a spiritual crisis in this period, but a full blossoming of literary writings. The most recognizable literary movement that gave rise to the 20th century American literature, or we may say, the second American Renaissance, is the expatriate movement. Writers were basically expatriates who left America and formed a community of writers and artists in Paris, involved with other European novelists and poets in their experimentation on new modes of thought and expression. These writers were later named by a American writer, Gertrude Stein, also an expatriate, “The Lost Generation”. Major Figures in Literature: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Earnest Hemingway, and William Faulkner are considered to be the masters in the field of American fiction. The leading playwright of the modern period in American literature, if not the most successful in all his experiments, is E ugene O’Neil.Features:Modern American writings are notable for what they omit---the explanations, interpretations, connections, and summaries. If realistic fiction achieved its effects by accumulation and saturation, modern fiction preferred suggestiveness. Modern American writers in general emphasize the concrete sensory images or details as the direct conveyer of experience. Traditional fiction featured an authoritative narrator in telling a story, while modern fiction tended to employ the first person narration or limit the reader to the “central consciousness” or one character’s point of view。
