English Literature

Geoffrey Chaucer: the Father of English Poetry

the Founder of English Realism

the Master of modern English language

The pioneer of the English Renaissance

Beowulf: National epic of the Anglo-Saxons

The story of Beowulf is a folk legend which reflects the feature of the tribal

world.

John Milton: Blank verse 双韵体、革命诗人

John Donne: peculiar conceits奇喻 metaphysical school形而上学派

John Bunyan: The pilgrim’s progress 天路历程

Daniel Defoe: Father of English novels 英国现代小说之父

Jonathan Swift: Father of English stylistics

Henry Fielding: The founder of English realistic novel 小说艺术之父

Alexander Pope: 英语诗歌艺术之父

Robert Burns: The poet of peasants 农民作家

Lyrical Ballads: The beginning of romantic revival

Walter Scott: The father of historical novel 历史小说之父

Old English Literature(mid 5th-mid 11th)

Background: Roman conquest A.D 78

Anglo-Saxon settled in English

Old English

From tribal to feudalism

Medieval English Literature (1066-14th末）

Background: Norman conquest in 1066

French and Latin prevail

Division into class

conflicts

Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales

--the rising the bourgeoisie of Britain

--praise man’s energy, intellect, wit and love of life

--satirize the evil of and degeneration of the noble and

corruption of the church

--French rhymed stanza: heroic couplet<英雄双韵体>

两行一韵:a-a-b-b-c-c-d-d-e-e-f-f-g-g

--create the famous terza rima 三行诗 run on line跳行

--show a true life picture, the first smooth English

--the foreshadow of the coming the English Renaissance

Troilus and Criseyde 1383 <8000lines>

William Langland: Piers the Plowman

The English Renaissance(14th-17th)

Background: politically--Henry VIII--Tudor dynasty

--break with Rome

--new religious dogma protestantism

--Queen Mary--反新教，互相妥协

Economically--the closure movement <生产与土地需求，农民被剥削>

--Commercial expansion

--exploration and travel

--colony

Culturally--Renaissance

Military--with Spain

William Caxton: the first English printer

< translate Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde>

Thomas More: Utopia

William Shakespeare:----Comedy: A mid summer Night’s Dream

The Merchant of Venice

As you like it

Twelfth Night

----Tragedy: Hamlet、Othello、King Lear、Macbeth

<早期>Romeo and Juliet

Main features: realistic writing

Imitation and adaptation

Language master

Diversified writing skills and methods:song, sonnet, couplet, blank verse

Sonnets 十四行诗 a-b-a-b-c-d-c-d-e-f-e-f-g-g

^-^-^-^-^- five feet

One foot 一个重音和一个或一个以上的非重音

Iambic Pentameter抑扬格

Edmund Spenser: The Shepherd Calendar

The Faerie Queene

Achievement: the Spenserian stanza

9-line stanza--a b a b b c b c c

Iambic pentameter五步格, iambic hexameter六步格

Christopher Marlowe: Tamburlaine、The Jews of Malta、Doctor Faustus

Ben Jonson(the successor of Shakespeare)---comedy: Every man in His Humour

Volpone

Bartholomew Fair

Fox

The Alchemist

---tragedy: Sejanus

Catiline

Francis Bacon: Advancement of Learning

New instrument

The essays “knowledge is power”

Translational period

John Milton: Paradise Lost

Paradise Regained

Samson Agonistes

John Donne: Songs and Sonnets

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s progress

18th English Literature (end of 17th-18th <1789>)

Background: The Glorious Revolution in 1688 ended in a compromise between the

aristocracy and bourgeois.

English became constitutional monarchy and power passed from the

King to the Parliament and the cabinet minister.

The Industrial Revolution

The Enlightenment marked the beginning of an intellectual movement

in Europe. An expression struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism.

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels

Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews

Jonathan Wild

Tome Jones

Samuel Richardson: Pamela

Alexander Pope: An Essay on Man

Sentimentalism and Pre-romanticism

Sentimental novel: The vicar of Wakefield

Sentimental poetry: Elegy written in a country churchyard

Features: 1. emphasize too much emotion rather than reason

2. optimistic attitude toward the goodness of humanity

Pre-romanticism representatives

William Blake: Songs of Innocence

Songs of Experience

Robert burns: My love is like a Red Red rose

Style: emphasis on natural sentiment and individual originality, showing revolutionary passion against classical tradition, followed by Shelley.

19th En Historical Background:

Background: Industrial Revolution

French revolution, Independence of The United States

Scholars and writers are dissatisfactory with the development of

bourgeois, against the reason of enlightenment. Philosophers in Europe

and America are active emotion ,imagination, independence,

individuality and intuition of humankind prevail.

Romantic Movement

William Wordsworth: Written in March

Wordsworth、Samuel T(aylor) Coleridge------Lyrical Ballads

Percy Shelley: Ode to the West Wind

Queen Mab

The revolt of Islam

George Byron: Don Juan

“She walks in Beauty”

John Keats: When I have fears

Ode to a nightmare

Ode to a Grecian Urn

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”

Jane Austin: Sense and sensibility

Pride and prejudice

Mansfield Park

Emma

Northanger Abbey

Persuasion

Walter Scott: Waverley

Ivanhoe

Rob Roy

Features: vivifying the past, closely pay attention to the fates of individuals, All kinds of people are described, both romantic imagination and realistic investigation, conservative in politics

Realistic movement (Victorian Period 1836)

Historical Backgrounds: Critical realism, Victorian literature, Chartist literature

Main features--the struggling of the proletariat for its rights

--critical ideas occupied great place

--women writers stood on the stage of literature

Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist

Dombey and son

David Copperfield

Bleak House

Hard Times

A tale of two cities

Our Mutual Friends

William Thackeray: Vanity Fair 名利场

Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

George Eliot : Middlemarch

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell: Mary Barton <A Tale of Manchester Life>

End of 19th century

Naturalism---George Gissing: New Grub Street

Neo-romanticism---Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island

Strange case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Aestheticism---Oscar Wilder: The picture of Dorian Gray

Prose writers---Thomas Carlyle: Sartor Resartus

History of French Revolution

Hero-worship

Past and present

---John Ruskin: Modern Painters

Seven Lamps of Architecture

The stones of Venice

Unto this last

Poetry writers---Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam: “Break, Break, Break” 1842

---Robert Browning: Pippa Passes

The Ring and the Book

My last Duchess

20th English Literature

Background--At home: decline of the military and political power of the English

Empire, frequent strikes of the workers. Monopoly capitalism

played a decisive role in economy.

--Abroad: conflicts between Britain and the colonists, conflicts between

the colonists, development of the other countries, the

influence of the World War I, the influence of Russian Oct.

Revolution, preparations of the war by Hitler and Mussolini

and inevitable World War II.

--Cultural Background: the development of the science and technology, “the decline

of the west” caused the skepticism and disillusionment, the

influence of the theory of socialism, the influence of the

theory of evolution, the influence of psychology, the influence

of Oriental culture.

Poetry---W.B. Yeats: 1923 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature

---T.S.Eliot <Thomas Stearns Eliot>: the love song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The waste land

The Hollow men

Ash Wednesday

Four Quarters

1947 he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature

Novel---Joseph Conrad: Almayer’s Folly

---Rudyard Kipling: Kim

The Jungle Book

The second Jungle book

---James Joyce: A portrait of the artist as a young man

Ulysses

Finneganns Wake

---Virginia Woolf: Mrs Dalloway 1925

To the lighthouse 1927

Orlando 1928

A room of one’s own 1929

The waves 1931

The Years 1938

Between the Acts 1941

American Literature

Washington Irving 美国小说之父

Ralph Waldo Emerson--Father of American literature

--dominant spirit of the age

--proponent of “the American newness”

--the leading spokesman for Transcendentalism

Nathaniel Hawthorne--Marginal transcendentalist

Ezra Pound--leader of imagist poetry

Puritan literature

Puritan beliefs--First covenant: God and Adam, “original sin”;

--Second covenant: God and Abraham, “grace”

“original sin”and “grace”are two most important premises in

Puritanism.

--Puritan beliefs helped shape the colonial life.

--Puritanism helped shape the colonial literature.Benjamin

Franklin---the autobiography

American romanticism(1815-1865)

Early romanticism--Washington Irving: Rip Van winkle

The sketch book

The legend of sleepy Hollow

--James Fenimore Cooper: The pioneers

The last of the Mobicans

The Prairie

The pathfinder

The Deerslayer

Transcendentalism--Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature

The American scholar

“history”“self-reliance”“The over-soul”

“the poet”“experience” “women” “Thoreau”

--Henry David Thoreau:Civil Disobedience

Walden

--Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

The House of seven Gables

The Blithedale Romance

The Marble Faun

Late 19th poets--Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass-song of myself (1855-1892)

--Emily Dickinson

Age of Realism

Political and Social Background--1861-1865 Civil War

--Scepticism of Transcendentalism

--Increasing industrialization and mechanization

--admiration for driving ambition and a lust for

money and power

--frontier spirit closed ended the idealized romantic

imagination of the New World

--"Gilded" age coming

--ending of romanticism and Transcendentalism

--Impact of philosophy (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,

Bergson, Freud, James)

Localism--Mark Twain(1843-1910): The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Roughing it

--Henry James(1843-1916): The wings of Dove

The Ambassador

The Golden Bowl

Daisy Miller

The Turn of the screw

--William Dean Howells(1837-1920)

Features:

1. concern for the world of experience, of commonplace and for the familiar and the

low;

2. verisimilitude of detail derived from observation;

3. a reliance on the representative in plot, setting and character;

4. an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience.

5. Local color and regional writings constitudes the early realism in American

literature. Naturalism is a very important variety.

Naturalism--Hamilton Garland: Grumbling Idols

--Stephen Crane: Maggie: A girl of streets

The red badge of courage

--Frank Norris: McTeague

The Octopus

--Jack London: the Call of the Wild

--Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie

Background of naturalism: the influence of European writers as Emile Zola, Thomas

Hardy and George Eliot; the influence of Darwinism,

influence of European and American philosophy; situation

at home.

Modernism of 20th century

Poetry--Ezra Pound: The Cathay 1915

Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

The Cantos (1925-1955)

--Gertrude Stein: Three lives

The making of Americans (1906)

Tender Button (1914)

--T.S.Eliot: The waste land 1922

The love song of J.Alfred Prufrock

--Wallace Stevens: Harmonium 1923

--Amy Lowell

--H.D

--William Carlos William: Defamilarization 断章

--e.e cummings

Fiction--William Faulkner: Soldier Pay 1926

Mosquitoes 1927

The sound and the Fury 1929

As I Lay Dying 1930

Light in August 1932

--Ernest Hemingway: the Sun also Rises

For Whom the Bell Tolls

A Farewell to Arms

The Old Man and the Sea

In 1954, he got the Nobel Prize

--F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

Tender is the Night

英美文学史（作家及作品）