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英国文学名词解释大全(整理版)

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名词解释

1. Epic (史诗)（appeared in the the Anglo-Saxon Period ）

It is a narrative of heroic action, often with a principal hero, usually mythical in its content, grand in its style,

offering inspiration and ennoblement within a particular culture or national tradition.

A long narrative poem telling about the deeds of great hero and reflecting the values of the society from which it

originated.

Epic is an extended narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, like Homer’s Iliad & Odyssey. It usually celebrates

the feats of one or more legendary or traditional heroes. The action is simple, but full of magnificence.

Today, some long narrative works, like novels that reveal an age & its people, are also called epic.

E.g. Beowulf （ the pagan（异教徒），secular(非宗教的) poetry） Iliad 《伊利亚特》，Odyssey《奥德赛》

Paradise Lost 《失乐园》，The Divine Comedy《神曲》

2. Romance （传奇）(Anglo-Norman feudal England)

• Romance is any imaginative literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with heroic adventures and

battles between good characters and villains or monsters.

• Originally, the term referred to a medieval (中世纪) tale dealing with the love and adventures of kings, queens,

knights, and ladies, and including supernatural happenings.

Form: long composition, in verse, in prose

Content: description of life and adventures of a noble hero

Character: a knight, a man of noble birth, skilled in the use of weapons; often described as riding forth to seek

adventures, taking part in tournaments(骑士比武), or fighting for his lord in battles; devoted to the church and the king

• Romance lacks general resemblance to truth or reality.

• It exaggerates the vices of human nature and idealizes the virtues.

• It contains perilous (dangerous) adventures more or less remote from ordinary life.

• It lays emphasis on supreme devotion to a fair lady.

①The Romance Cycles/Groups/Divisions

Three Groups

 matters of Britain Adventures of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table （亚瑟王和他的圆桌骑士）

 matters of France Emperor Charlemagne and his peers

 matters of Rome Alexander the Great and the attacks of Troy

Le Morte D’Arthur （亚瑟王之死）

②Class Nature (阶级性) of the Romance

Loyalty to king and lord was the theme of the romances, as loyalty was the corner-stone（the most important part基石）of feudal morality.

The romances were composed not for the common but for the noble, of the noble, and by the poets patronized（supported 庇护,保护） by the noble.

3. Alliteration（押头韵）: a repeated initial(开头的) consonant(协调,一致) to

successive(连续的) words.

e.g. 1.To his kin the kindest, keenest for praise.

2.Sing a song of southern singer

4. Understatement（低调陈述）（for ironical humor）

not troublesome: very welcome

need not praise: a right to condemn

5. Chronicle《编年史》（a monument of Old English prose） 6. Ballads （民谣）（The most important department of English folk literature ）

①Definition:

A ballad is a narrative poem that tells a story, and is usually meant to be sung or recited in musical form.

An important stream of the Medieval folk literature

②Features of English Ballads

1. The ballads are in various English and Scottish dialects.

2. They were created collectively and revised when handed down from mouth to mouth.

3. They are mainly the literature of the peasants, and give an outlook of the English common people in feudal society.

③Stylistic （风格上） Features of the Ballads

1. Composed in couplets （相连并押韵的两行诗,对句） or in quatrains （四行诗） known as the ballad stanza （民谣诗节 ）, rhyming abab or abcb, with the first and third lines carrying 4 accented syllables （重读音节） and the second

and fourth carrying 3.

2. Simple, plain language or dialect （方言，土语） of the common people with colloquial （口语的，会话的）, vivid

and, sometimes, idiomatic （符合当地语言习惯的） expressions

3. Telling a good story with a vivid presentation around the central plot.

4. Using a high proportion of dialogue with a romantic or tragic dimension （方面） to achieve dramatic effect.

④Subjects of English Ballads

1. struggle of young lovers

2. conflict between love and wealth

3. cruelty of jealousy

4. criticism of the civil war

5. matters of class struggle

7. Heroic couplet （英雄双韵体）（introduced by Geoffrey Chaucer）

Definition: the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter; a verse form in epic poetry, with lines of ten syllables and five

stresses, in rhyming pairs.

英雄诗体/英雄双韵体：用于史诗或叙事诗，每行十个音节，五个音部，每两行押韵。

8. couplet（两行诗，对句）: Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme.A heroic couplet is an iambic

pentameter couplet. During the Restoration period and the 18th C. it was a popular verse form.

9. iambic pentameter: A poetic line consisting of five Verse feet (penta- is from a Greek word meaning “five”),

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英国文学名词解释

英国文学名词解释

Allegory is a tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract

ideas or moral qualities. Thus, an allegory is a story with two meaning, a literal meaning and a

symbolic meaning.

Bildungsroman: a novel that traces the initiation, development, and education of a young

person. Examples are Dickens’s David Copperfield and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man.

Byronic hero is a character-type found in Byron’s narrative Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He is a

boldly defiant but bitterly self-tormenting outcast, proudly contemptuous of social norms but

suffering for some unnamed sin. Emily Bronte’s Heath cliff is a later example.

Conceit: a kind of metaphor that makes a comparison between two startlingly different things. A

conceit usually provides the framework for an entire poem. An especially unusual and intellectual

英国文学史名词解释

英国文学史名词解释

1. Ballad(民谣)

A ballad originally is a song intended as an accompaniment to a dance or a popular song. In the

relatively recent sense, now most widely used, a ballad is a single, spirited poem in short stanzas, in

which some popular story is graphically narrated. The ingredients of ballads usually include a refrain,

stock descriptive phrases, and simple, terse dialogue.

2. Alliteration(头韵)

It refers to a repeated initial consonant to successive words and it is the most striking feature in its

poetic form. In alliterative verse, certain accented words in a line begin with the same consonant sound.

There are generally 4 accents in a line, three of which show alliteration, and it is the initial sound of

the third accented syllable that normally determiners the alliteration. In old English verse, alliteration

英国文学史名词解释 2

英国文学史名词解释 2

1、Epic :An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject

containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form. Nonetheless, epics have been

written down at last since Homer. Epics have nine characteristics: opens in media res;

vast setting covering many nations, the world or the universe; begins with an

invocation to a muse; starts with a statement of the theme; the use of epithets;

includes long lists; features long and formal speeches; shows divine intervention on human affairs; “star” heroes that embody the values of the civilization. Beowulf, the

only organic whole poem of the old English period, is an epic of well over 3000 lines.

2、Blank verse: Blank verse was first introduced by the Earl of Surrey in his

英国文学主要名词解释

英国文学主要名词解释

1. Enlightenment:

a. The Enlightenment was a progressive intellectual movement throughout western Europe in

the 18th century.进步的智力运动

b. The Enlightenment on the whole, was an expression of struggle of the then progressive class

of bourgeois against feudalism. The social inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other

survivals of feudalism. They attempted to place all branches of science at the service of

mankind by connecting them with the actual deeds and requirements of the people.

总体上，启蒙主义是当时的资产阶级对封建主义，社会的不平等、死寂、偏见和其他的封建残余的一种反对。通过将科学的各个分支与人民的日常生活和需要联系起来，启蒙主义者们努力将他们变成为人民大众服务的工具

c. English enlighteners differed in some way from those of France “cleared the minds of men for

the coming revolution,” the English enlighteners set no revolutionary aims before them. They

strove to bring it to an end by clearing away the feudal ideas with the bourgeois ideology.