专八人文知识英美文学复习材料专业八级备考英美文学知识纲要注：黄色部分为往年已考过的内容。
英国文学Old and Medieval English literature (5th-15th century) 10661. Beowulf oldest English epic2. medieval romance Arthurian romances, knight3. Geoffrey Chaucer The Canterbury T ales in heroic couplet4. popular ballads Robin Hood stories and the ballad meterThe English Renaissance—Humanism, drama (16th century)1. Edmund Spenser Faerie Queene in the Spenserian stanza, allegorical romance2.Christopher Marlowe The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Tamburlaine the Great3.William Shakespearea)Major tragedies: Hamlet; Othello; King Lear; Macbethb)Major comedies: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Merchant of V enice; As YouLike It; The Twelfth Night; Romeo and Julietc)Sonnet 184.Francis Bacon Essays“Of Studies” some quotes from the essay5.King James’s or The Authorized Bible (1604)The 17th Century—Turbulent and gloomy1.John Donne and Metaphysical Poetry “The Flea”, “Valediction: ForbiddingMourning”2.John Milton: Paradise Lost rebellious spirit, Miltonic style, blank verse3.John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress allegory, satire, Vanity FairThe 18th Century—Age of Reason and common sense1.Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders2.Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, “A Modest Proposal”3.Neoclassicism and Alexander Pope4.Samuel Johnson Letter to the Right Honourable The Earl of Chesterfield5.Henry Fielding The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling6.Robert Burns: “A Red, Red Rose”“Auld Lang Syne”7.William Blake: Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, “The Tyger”The Age of Romanticism—Poetry, individualism, nature, emotion (1798-1832)1.William Wordsworth: “The Preface to Lyrical Ballads” as declaration of Romanticism,nature poet “The Solitary Reaper”, “Tintern Abbey”, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” or“Daffodils” , “Composed upon Westerminster Bridge”2.Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan3.George Gorgon Byron: the Byronic hero; Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan4.Percy Bysshe Shelley: Queen Mab, Prometheus Unbound, “Ode to the West Wind”5.John Keats：“Ode to a Nightingale”, “To Autumn”, “Ode on an Grecian Urn”, truth isbeauty, beauty is truth6.Walter Scott: historical romance, Ivanhoe7.Jane Austen: realistic writing about family life, Pride andPrejudice, Emma, Sense andSensibilityThe Victorian Age (1832-1901) 19th century1.general features: utilitarianism, middle class urban literature, conservative morality2.Charles Dickens: Dombey and Son, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Great Expectations,Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities, Bleak House, Little Dorrit3.William Thackeray: Vanity Fair4.The Bronte sisters: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte; Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte5.George Eliot: Silas Marner, The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch6.Thomas Hardy: the Wessex novels; Tess of the D’urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, TheReturn of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, naturalist ideas7.Alfred Tennyson: poet8.Robert Browning: poet, drama tic monologue, “My Last Duchess”9.George Bernard Shaw: dramatist, 1925 Nobel Prize winnerThe Twentieth Century1.The features of modernism: alienation and loneliness2.T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Waste Land 1948 Nobel Prizewinner3.James Joyce: Ulysses, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Irish, Dublin, stream ofconsciousness4.Virginia Woolf: Mrs. Dalloway5. D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers(Oedipus Complex), Lady Chatterley’s Lover6.W. B. Yeats: Irish poet, modernism 1923 Nobel Prize winner7.Angry Young Men (1950s): Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim8.The Theatre of the Absurd: Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot9.Women writers: Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark10.Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook, 2007 Nobel Prize winner11.contemporary writers: Martin Amis, Ian McEvan, Julia Barnes, A. S. Byatt, MargaretDrabble, Anita Brookner, V. S, Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Larkin(poet), Seamus Heaney (poet), Harold Pinter (dramatist)12.V. S. Naipaul: Indian-British novelist, 2001 Nobel Prize winner13.Seamus Heaney: Irish Poet 1995 Nobel Prize winner美国文学Colonial Period (1607-1800) –Rise of the American Dream1.Puritanism, Enlightenment, Independence War2.Jonathan Edwards3.Benjamin Franklin:Poor Ric hard’s Almanac, AutobiographyRomanticism (1800-1865) –Prime of the American Dream1.Washington Irving: “Rip Van Winkle”, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”2.James Fenimore Cooper: Leather stocking Tales, American Westward movement3.New England Transcendentalism: Oversoul4.Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nature”(The Bible forTranscendentalism), “The AmericanScholar” (intellectual independence), prose5.Henry David Thoreau: Walden, prose6.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: poet, “A Psalm of Life”7.Edgar Allan Poe: poet and short story writer, “The Raven”, The Fall of the House ofUsher, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter8.Walt Whitman: free verse, Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself”, “O Captain! MyCaptain!”, national poet of America, social and national topics, strongly influenced byEmerson9.Emily Dickinson: poet, regional and inner world, topics on religion, death, love, nature10.Nathaniel Hawthorn: novelist, dark side of human beings, The Scarlet Letter, “YoungGoodman Brown”, “The Minister’s Black Veil”11.Herman Melville: novelist, sea life, Moby DickRealism and Naturalism (1865-1918)—Questioning the American Dream1.William Dean Howells: middle class, The Rise of Silas Lapman2.Mark Twain: Samuel Clemens, lower class, local colorism, The Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn/T om Sawyer, The Gilded Age3.Henry James: rich class, international theme, psychological descriptions, The Portrait ofa Lady, The Ambassadors, The American, Daisy Miller4.Stephen Crane: pioneer writing in the naturalistic tradition, Maggie: A Girl of theStreets, The Red Badge of Courage5.Frank Norris: McTeague, the first full-bodied naturalistic American novel, a case studyof the inevitable effect of environment and heredity on human lives6.Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, The Financier, An American Tragedy7.Jack London: The Call of the Wild, Martin Eden8.O Henry: short story writer, the American Maupassant, surprise endings, “The Gift ofthe Magi”, “The Cop and the An them”Modernism (1918-1945)—Disillusionment of the American Dream1.Imagist poetry: imagism, direct treatment of the thing, use as few words as possible2.Ezra Pound: “In a Station of the Metro”, The Cantos3.T. S. Eliot: referring to the British part4.Wallace Stevens: “Anecdote of the Jar”, “The Idea of Order at Key West”5.William Carlos Williams: “The Red Wheelbarrow”6.Robert Frost: New England poet, “The Road Not Taken”, “Mending Wall”, “AfterApple-picking”7.Modernist Novels: the Lost Generation8. F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, the Jazz age9.Ernest Hemingway: the Lost Generation, Hemingway hero, iceberg theory, The Sun AlsoRises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea, 1954Nobel Prize winner10.William Faulkner: the Southern Renaissance/myth, Yoknapatawpha, The Sound and theFury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, stream of consciousness1949 Nobel Prize winner11.Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio; describing the grotesque12.Sinclair Lewis: Main Street, sociological writer, first American Nobel Prize winner,(1930)13.Willa Cather: female writer, writing about the Old West in traditional way, My Antonio14.John Dos Passos: 1930s, Depression, U.S.A.15.John Steinbeck: 1930s, Depression, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, The Pearl1962 Nobel Prize winner16.Drama: A renaissance of drama in 1920s—Eugene O’Neill, The theatre of theDepression in 1930s17.Eugene O’Neill: American dram began in 1916 when O’Neil’s first play Bound East forCardiff was produced, The Hairy Ape, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey intoNightPost-War American Literature—Multi-faceted1.The Beat Generation in 1950s: Howl by Allen Ginsberg (poet), On the Road by JackKerouac (novelist)2.Black Humor: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller3.Post-war Realism: Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger4.Jewish literature: Herzog by Saul Bellow5.African-American literature: Richard Wright, Native Son; Ralph Ellison, The InvisibleMan; Toni Morrison, Beloved6.Post-war drama: Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie,A Streetcar Named Desire;Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman7.Theatre of the Absurd: George Albee, Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?Literary Terms:1. Alliteration: repetition of the same sound or sounds at the beginning of two or more wordsthat are next to or close to each other.2. Iambic pentameter: poetic meters of five iambs or feet. Iambic means the stress is on thesecond syllable.3. Heroic couplet: a pair of rhyming iambic pentameter lines.4. Blank verse: unrhymed poetic lines in iambic pentameters.5. Sonnet: a lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linkedby an intricate rhyme scheme. Italian or Petrarchan sonnet is composed of an octave and a sestet (rhyming abbaabba cdecde). Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrains and a couplet (rhyming abab cdcd efef gg).6. Assonance: repetition of related vowel sounds7. Ode: a long lyric poem that is serious in subject and treatment, elevated in style and elaboratein its stanzaic structure.8. Spenserian stanza: a nine-line stanza of eight lines in iambic pentameter plus an iambichexameter. The rhyme scheme is abab bcbc c.9. Romance: a tale in verse, embodying the life and adventures of knights.10. Ballad: a narrative poem that tells a story.11. Ballad meter: a quatrain in alternate four- and three-stress lines; usually only the second andfourth lines rhyme.12. Allegory: a story or description in which the characters and events symbolize some deeperunderlying meaning, and serve to spread moral teaching.13. American Puritanism: Puritanism is a Protestant movement which spread its influence intothe New England colonies in 17th century. The American Puritans believed that the Church should be restored to the “purity” of the Church as established by Christ himself. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement. 14. American Romanticism: American Romanticism is the literary movement stretching from theend of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It was in essence the expression of “a real new experience” and contained “an alien quality”. There was American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. The features can be found in the major works by Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.15. Transcendentalism: Transcendentalism is a literary and philosophical movement, associatedwith Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcended the empirical and scientific and was knowablethrough intuition.16. American Realism: First, American realist authors described life truthfully. Second, they putthe typical characters under typical circumstances. Third, they were objective rather than idealized, in a close observation and investigation life. Finally, realistic works were concerned with social and psychological problems. The famous realistic works include Henry James’s The Ambassadors and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.17. Local Colorism: As a literary trend, local colorism made its presence felt in the late 1860s toearly 70s. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local characters of their regions. The representative works of local colorism include Bret Hart’s “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and H. B. Stowe’s Oldtown Folks.18. American Naturalism: American naturalism is a literary tendency that prevailed in 1890s.Under the influence of social Darwinism and inspired by French naturalism, American naturalists wrote about the helplessness of man in a cold, amoral world, and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of environment and heredity. The features of naturalism can be found in the major works by Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.19. Lost Generation: The Lost Generation refers to the group of American writers who came ofage during World War I and established their reputations in the 1920s. The writers considered themselves “lost” because their inherited values could not operate in the postwar world. The term is commonly applied to Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others.20.Image(in Pound’s poetry): An image is defined by Pound as that which presents anintellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas”“endowed with energy”.21. Stanza: Stanza is a recurrent grouping of two or more lines or more lines of a poem in termsof length, metrical form, and rhyme-scheme.22. Code Hero: Code hero is the Hemingwayan hero, an average man of decidedly masculinetastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words.23. Southern Literature: Southern Literature is defined as American literature about the SouthernUnited States or by writers from this region. The Southern literature meets its renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s, and the famous Southern writers include Ellen Glasgow and William Faulkner.24. “Anti-hero”(as in William Faulkner’s works): A central character in a work of literature wholacks traditional heroic qualities such as courage, physical prowess, and fortitude. Anti-heroestypically distrust conventional values and are unable to commit themselves to any ideals.Anti-heroes usually accept, and often celebrate, their positions as social outcasts.25. Allusion: Allusion is a figure of speech that makes brief, often casual reference to a historicalor literary, event, or object.26. Beat Generation: Beat generation is a term applied to agroup of American poets andnovelists of the 1950s and 1960s who were in romantic rebellion against the culture and value systems of America. They expressed their revolt through the literary works of loose structure and slang diction. Among the leading members of the loose group were the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist Jack Kerouac.27. Black Humor: Black humor is a term applied to a large group of American novels beginningin the 1950s, represented by Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. In the novelists’ opinion, their society is full of institutionalized absurdity. Therefore, all of them hold a cynical attitude toward society and the conventional moral values. This despondency is reflected in their novels by the use of exaggeration as a vehicle for satire.28. Satire: Satire is a literary manner which blends a critical attitude with humor and with wit forthe purpose of improving human institutions or humanity. Catch-22, satirizes bureaucracy and the military, and is frequently cited as one of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.29. Motif:Motif is a theme, character type, image, metaphor, or any other verbal element thatrecurs throughout a single work of literature or occurs in a number of different works over a period of time. For example, the disillusionment of “American Drama” is one of the important motifs in Death of a Salesman.30. Theatre of the Absurd: The Theatre of the Absurd is an avant-garde kind of drama in the1950s and 1960s that represents the absurdity of the humancondition by abandoning rational devices and realistic form. Some playwrights in the school are Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee.。
