英国文学简史

British Literature

Part One The Middle Ages

Section I The Old English Period ( The Anglo-Saxon Period) ( 449-1066) Beowulf

It is regarded as the national epic of the Anglo-Saxons, which was the most important work of the Old English literature

characters: Beowulf: a hero; Grendel: a monster

Section II The Middle English Period (1066~1485/1500)

I.Romance :

1)Romance is the literature for the upper class(the aristocracy), which was a long composition in verse or prose, describing the life and adventures of a noble hero.

2)The hero is usually the knight, who met the evil giant or monster during his journey of accomplish some missions.

3)Romantic love is an important part of the plot in romance. The knight always has a beautiful beloved.

Works: King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table;

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: It was considered as the best of Arthurian romance. II.Geoffrey Chaucer(1340---1400)

1. He was regarded as "the father of English poetry".

2.Masterpiece: The Canterbury Tales

1) It presented to us a comprehensive realistic picture of the English society of his time.

2) Characters from all walks of life are presented.

3. The legend of good women

He used for the first time in English the heroic couplet.

heroic couplet:the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter

Part Two The English Renaissance

The Elizabethan drama

Enclosure movement(sheep devour man); feudalism—Capitalism; aristocracy—gentry The Renaissance:

1) It refers to the period between the 14th & 17th centuries.

2) It first started in Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture & literature.

3) The Renaissance, which means "rebirth" or "revival," is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the re-discovery of ancient Roman & Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography & astrology, the religious reformation & the economic expansion.

4) The Renaissance, therefore, in essence is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers & 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 is the essence of the Renaissance. (place the affairs of mankind at the center of its concerns)

1)The Greek and Roman civilization was based on such a conception that man is the measure of all things.

2)Human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfections, and that the world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy.

3)By emphasizing the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of this life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders.

I. Edmund Spenser(1552—1586)

1) Masterpiece:The Faerie Queene ( a long poem; p.14-15)

It was originally planned as a 12-book poem. But only 6 books were completed.

2) Main qualities of Spenser's poetry

①a perfect melody

②a rare sense of beauty

③a splendid imagination

④a lofty moral purity & seriousness

⑤a dedicated idealism

3) It is his idealism, his love of beauty, &his exquisite melody that make him known as "the poets' poet."

Spenserian stanza:It was invented by Edmund Spenser. It is a stanza of nine lines, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter & the last line in iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc.

II. Christopher Marlowe(1564-1593)

1) The most gifted of the University Wits.

2) Major Works

①Dr. Faustus: It was generally considered his best play, which was based on the German legend of a magician named Dr. Faustus who sold his soul to the devil. The play's dominant moral is human rather than religious. It celebrates the human passion for knowledge, power & happiness; it also reveals man's frustration in realizing the high aspirations in a hostile moral order. The last scene, in which Faustus confronts his doom, brilliantly renders the fear & agony of a condemned man. (p.22)

②Tamburlaine is a play about an ambitious & pitiless Tartar conqueror in the fourteenth century who rose from a shepherd to an overpowering King.

③poetry: The passionate shepherd to his love.(p.27)

3)Achievements:

①Marlowe's greatest achievement lies in that he perfected the blank verse & made it the principal medium of English drama.

Blank verse: the unrhymed iambic pentameter line. It was brought in english by Surrey.

②His second achievement is his creation of the Renaissance hero for English drama.

(节选：Act Ⅰfrom Dr. Faustus ; The passionate shepherd to his love p.27)

Ⅲ. William Shakespeare (1564—1616, Stratford-on-Avon )

1) 38plays, 154 sonnets(the Italian Petrarchan sonnet was introduced into England by Wyatt), and 2 long poems.

2)Great tragedies: Hamlet , Othello , King Lear, Macbeth . (p.33; p55)

Romantic tragedy: Romeo and Juliet

3)comedies:A Midsummer Night’s Dream; As You Like It ;Twelfth Night; All's well that ends well; The Merchant of Venice (p.32; p.38)

4) The Tempest is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life & society in his late years.

5)Sonnet 18 (p.37)

Theme: a profound meditation on the destructive power of time & the eternal beauty brought forth by poetry to the one he loves.

Imagery: a summer's day-youth; the eye of heaven-the sun

IV. Francis Bacon(1561-1626) essayist

Of studies(p.60)

The 17th Century

V. John Donne(1572-1631)

1) Donne is the leading figure of the 17th-century "metaphysical school."

2) Metaphysical poetry: The term "metaphysical poetry" is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. With a rebellious spirit, the metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry. The diction is simple as compared with that of the Elizabethan or the Neoclassic periods, and echoes the words and cadences of common speech. The imagery is drawn from the actual life. The form is frequently that of an argument with the poet's beloved, with God, or with himself.

3) Death Be Not Proud, one of Donne's Holy Sonnets, is an almost Startling put-down of poor death. Staunchly Christian in its pare expectation of the resurrection, Donne's poem personifies death as an adversary swollen with false pride & unworthy of being called "mighty & dreadful." Donne gives various reasons in accusing death of being little more than a slave bossed about by fate, chance, kings & desperate men-a craven thing that keeps bad company, such as poison, was & sickness. Finally, Donne taunts death with a paradox: "death, thou shalt die." The sonnet is written in the strict Petrarchan pattern（abba abba cddc ee）. It reveals the poet's belief in life after death: death is eternal(p.68).

Ⅵ. John Milton(1608-1674)

1) Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost, an epic poem in 12 books, written in blank verse, represents the fullest expression of Milton's genius. The poem vividly portrays the story of Satan's rebellion against God & his tempting of Adam & Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. The theme is the "Fall of Man,". The only generally acknowledged epic in English since Beowulf. (p.73).

2) Samson Agonistes: the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English.

Part three The Neoclassical Period

Background(p.79)

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 flourished in France & swept through the whole Western Europe at the time.

1)The movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance of the 15th & 16th centuries.

2)Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modem philosophical & artistic ideas.

3)The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationality, equality & science.

4) They called for a reference to order, reason & rules & advocated universal education. Famous among the great enlighteners in England were those great writers like John Dryden, Alexander pope & so on.

5)They believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work.

Neoclassicism

1)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.

2)According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek & Roman writers (Homer, Virgil, & so on)& those of the contemporary French ones.

They believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion & accuracy, & that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity. This belief led them to seek proportion, unity, harmony & grace in literary expressions, in an effort to delight, instruct & correct human beings, primarily as social animals.

I. John Bunyan( 1628-1688)

The Pilgrim's Progress （p.85）

II. Alexander pope（1688-1744）

1）Pope is one of the fore-most satirists in world literature as well as a great poet.

2）As a representative of the Enlightenment, Pope was one of the first to introduce rationalism to England. He strongly advocated neoclassicism, emphasizing that literary works should be judged by classical rules of order, reason, logic, restrained emotion, good taste & decorum. According to Pope, almost every genre of literature should have some fixed laws & rules. Prose should be precise, direct, smooth & flexible, Poetry should be lyrical, epical, didactic, satiric or dramatic, & drama should be written in the Heroic Couplets (iambic pentameter rhymed in two lines); the three unities of time, space & action should be strictly observed; regularity in construction should be adhered to, & type characters rather than individuals should be represented.

3）Pope made his name as a great poet with the publication of An Essay on Criticism；The Rape of the Lock （a mock epic): A delightful burlesque of epic poetry, it ridicules the manners of the English nobility. The poem is based on an actual incident in which a young nobleman stole a lock of a lady's hair.

III. Daniel Defoe(1660-1731)

1) Defoe is generally considered the first great realistic novelist in English fiction.

2) Robinson Crusoe(P.98);A Journal of the Plague Year;Moll Flanders;Captain Singleton;Colonel Jack; Roxana . They are the first literary works devoted to the study of the problems of the lower-class people.

3) His language is smooth, easy, colloquial & mostly vernacular. There is nothing artificial in his language: it is common English at its best.

VI. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

1) He is a master satirist.

2) Swift is one of the greatest masters of English prose. He is almost unsurpassed in the writing of simple, direct, precise prose. He defined a good style as "proper words in proper places."

3) A modest proposal was regarded as the best model of satire. Gulliver's Travels (P.107)is his greatest satire work. A tale of a tub and The battles of the books are two powerful satires on corruption in religion and learning.

V . Henry Fielding (1707—1754)

1) "Father of English novel", for his contribution to the establishment of the form and structure of the modern novel.

2) Major works:

① Joseph Andrews: a great novel of the open road, a "comic epic in prose", whose subject is "the true ridiculous" in human nature.

②The History of Jonathan Wild the Great: It takes the life of a notorious real-life thief as a theme for demonstrating the petty division between a great rogue & a great politician such as Sir Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister.

③The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (p.122)

VI. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

A Dictionary of the English Language

VII. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)dramatist

1)Morality is the constant theme of Richard B. Sheridan's plays. He is much concerned with the current moral issues & lashes harshly at the social vices of the day.

2) The Rivals & The School for Scandal(p.137)

VIII. Thomas Gray(1716-1771)

1)His masterpiece, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (p.152)

2)"the Graveyard School"

Part Four The Romantic Period

The romanticism began in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth & Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads & to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott's death & the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.

The Romantic Movement

It expressed a more or less negative attitude towards the existing social & political conditions that came with industrialization & the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. The Romantics felt that the existing society denied people their essential human needs, so they demonstrated a strong reaction against the dominant modes of thinking of the 18th-century writers & philosophers. Where their predecessors saw man as a social animal, the Romantics saw him essentially as an individual in the solitary state & emphasized the special qualities of each individual's mind. Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer.

The Gothic novel

It is a type of romantic fiction that predominated in the late 18th century & was one phase of the Romantic movement, its principal elements are violence, horror & the supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader's emotion. With its descriptions of the dark, irrational side of human nature, the Gothic form has exerted a great influence over the writer of the Romantic period. Works like The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) by Ann Radcliffe & Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley are typical Gothic romance.

The romantic literature

The Romantic period is an age of poetry.They believed that poetry could purify both individual souls & the society. The Romantics not only extol the faculty of imagination, but also stress the concept of spontaneity & inspiration, regarding them as something crucial for true poetry. The natural world comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject matter. To the Romantics, poetry should be free from all rules.

I. William Blake(1757-1827)

1) The Songs of Innocence (1809) is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy & innocent world, though not without its evils & sufferings.His Songs of Experience (1794) paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war & repression with a melancholy tone. (p.171)

2) Marriage of Heaven & Hell (1790) marks his entry into maturity.

3)Blake who lived in the blaze of revelation, felt bound to declare that " I know that This world is a world of IMAGINATION & Vision," & that "The Nature of my work is visionary or imaginative."

II. William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

1)Lake poets: Robert Southey, Coleridge.

2)Wordsworth is regarded as a " worshipper of nature". It's nature that gives him "strength & knowledge full of peace".

3) I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature, & one that takes us to the core of Wordsworth's poetic beliefs.（p.179）

4) Poetry, he believes originates from "emotion recollected in tranquility."

III Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

1）The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , told an adventurous story of a sailor. Kubla Khan was composed in a dream after Coleridge took the opium. Christabel uses a freer version of the ballad form to create an atmosphere of the Gothic horror at once delicate & sinister.

2）Coleridge is one of the first critics to give close critical attention to language, maintaining that the aim of poetry is to give pleasure "through the medium of beauty."

IV George Gordon Byron(1788-1824)

1) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is about a gloomy, passionate young wanderer who escaped from the society he disliked & traveled around the continent, questing for freedom. Don Juan is Byron's masterpiece, a great comic epic of the early 19th century. It is a poem based on a traditional Spanish legend of a great lover & seducer of women.

2) Byronic Hero

①a proud & mysterious rebel figure of noble origin.

②With immense superiority in his passions & powers, the Byronic hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in an evil society, & would fight single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion or in moral principles with unconquerable wills & inexhaustible energies.

③The conflict is usually one of rebellious individuals against outworn social systems & convention. ④The figure is, to some extent, modeled on the life & personality of Byron himself, & makes Byron famous both at home and abroad.

V. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

1)Major works

①Lyrics: To a Skylark, Ode to the West Wind

In To a Skylark, the bird, suspended between reality & poetic image, pours forth an exultant song which suggests to the poet both celestial rapture & human limitation. Best of all the well-known lyric pieces is Shelley'sOde to the West Wind (p.211).

②Poetic drama: Prometheus Unbound

Shelley's greatest achievement is his four-act poetic drama, Prometheus Unbound. According to the Greek mythology, Prometheus, the champion of humanity, who has stolen the fire from Heaven, is punished by Zeus to be chained on Mount Caucasus & suffers the vulture's feeding on his liver.

③A Song: Men of England(p.209)

2)Shelley's poems are full of revolutionary spirit. He held a life-long aversion to cruelty, injustice, authority, institutional religion & the formal shams of respectable society, condemning war, tyranny & exploitation, However, under the influence of Christian humanism, Shelley took interest in social reforms.

VI. John Keats (1795-1821)

The odes are generally regarded as Keats's most important & mature works. Ode to a Nightingale expresses the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness & human world of agony. Ode on an Grecian Urn (P.219)shows the contrast between the permanence of art & the transience of human passion.

VII Jane Austen(1775-1817)

1) Austen's main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships. Because of this, her novels have a universal significance. She is particularly preoccupied with the relationship between men & women in love. Stories of love & marriage provide the major themes in all her novels.

2)In her lifelong career, Jane Austen wrote altogether six complete novels. They are Sense & Sensibility; Pride & Prejudice; Northanger Abbey; Mansfield Park; Emma ; Persuasion.

Pride & Prejudice, originally drafted as First Impressions in 1796, is the most delightful of Jane Austen's works.(P.226)

Part Five The Victorian Period

Victorian novels

The Chartist Movement (1836-1848)

Utilitarianism

Almost everything was put to the test by the criterion of utility, that is, the extent to which it could promote the material happiness. This theory held a special appeal to the middle-class industrialists, whose greed drove them to exploiting workers to the utmost & brought greater suffering & poverty to the working mass.

Critical Realism

The Victorian Age is an age of realism which strives to tell the whole truth showing moral & physical diseases as they are. To be true to life becomes the first requirement for literary writing. As the mirror of truth, literature has come very close to daily life, reflecting its practical problems & interests & is used as a powerful instrument of human progress.

I.Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

1)Major works

①Charles Dickens is one of the greatest critical realistic writers of the Victorian age. He sets out a full map and a large scale criticism of the nineteenth century England, especially London.

②In his early novels, he attacks one or more specific social evils. For example, the dehumanizing workhouse system and the dark, criminal world in Oliver Twist(p.242 Oliver was Dickens's first child hero); the cruel school discipline in Nicholas Nickleby ; the debtor’s prison in David Copperfield ; legal fraud in Pickwick Papers; the corrupts and tragedies brought by money-worship in Dombey and son.

③A tale of two cities(fundamental social institutions), Bleak house(legal system), Little Dorrit(the governmental branches), Hard times(utilitarian principles that rules education system).

2)Distinct Features of His Novels

①Character Sketches & Exaggeration. As a master of characterization, Dickens was skillful in drawing vivid caricatural sketches by exaggerating some peculiarities, & in giving them exactly the actions & words that fit them: that is, right words & right actions for the right person. ②Broad Humor & Penetrating Satire; a mingling of humour and pathos.

③ Complicated & Fascinating Plot; a master story teller.

II. The Bronte Sisters

1)Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)

①Her works are all about the struggle of an individual towards self-realization, about some lonely & neglected young women with a fierce longing for love, & understanding & a full, happy life. ②Her works are famous for the depiction of the life of the middle-class workingwomen, particularly governesses.

③The first novel is The professor; her masterpiece is Jane Eyre (p.257)

2)Emily Bronte (1818-1848)

①Wuthering Heights (P.264)

②193 poems

3)Anne Bronte (1820-1849)

III. Alfred Tennyson(1809-1892)

1) In Memoriam is his greatest work.

2) Ulysses (Dramatic Monologue)

By dramatic monologue, it is meant that a poet chooses a dramatic moment or a crisis, in which his characters are made to talk about their lives, & about their minds & hearts. In " listening" to those one-sided talks, readers can form their own opinions & judgments about the speaker's personality & about what has really happened. Robert Browning brought this poetic form to its maturity & perfection & his "My Last Duchess" is one of the best-known dramatic monologues.

3) Idylls of the King is his most ambitious work which took him over 30 years to complete.

4) Break, Break, Break;Crossing the Bar(p.277)

IV. Robert Browning（1812-1889）

1) The Ring & the Book (the book refers to the hard truth)

2)My Last Duchess:His best-known dramatic monologue.(P.285)

V. George Eliot（1819-1880）Mary Ann Evans

Middlemarch;The mill on the Floss

VI. Thomas Hardy（1840-1928）

1)In his Wessex novels, there is an apparent nostalgic touch in his description of the simple & beautiful though primitive rural life, which was gradually declining & disappearing as England marched into an industrial country.

2)A naturalistic writer

3)Novels of Character and Environment

Under the Greenwood Tree(the most cheerful and idyllic)；The Return of the Native；The Mayor of Casterbridge; Tess of the D''Urbervilles(p.303)；Jude the Obscure.

4) Far Form the Madding Crowd

Part Six The Modern Period

Background

(1) The influences of the two World Wars on English literature:

Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism. The First World War and the Second World War had greatly influenced the English literature.

(2) Ideologically, the rise of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited modern writers to make new explorations on human natures and human relationships. (a) In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put forward the theory of scientific socialism.(b) Darwin's theory of evolution. (c) Einstein's theory of relativity. (d) Freud's analytical psychology. (e) Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimistic philosopher started a rebellion against rationalism, stressing the importance of will and intuition. (f) Friedrich Nietzsche went further against rationalism by advocating the doctrines of power and superman. (g)Henry Bergson established his irrational philosophy.

(3) After the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared: symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, cubism, futurism, Dadaism, imagism and stream of consciousness.

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. By advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, Modernism casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama.

The Angry Young Man

Another important group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working-class background in the mid-1950s and early 1960s known as "The Angry Young Man". They demonstrated a particular disillusion over the depressing situation in Britain and launched a bitter protest against the outmoded social and political values in their society. Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and Alan Sillitoe were the major novelists in this group. They portrayed unadorned working-class life in their novels with great freshness and vigor of the working-class language.

Stream-of-consciousness

In stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation, the theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis played a particularly important role. With the notion that multiple levels of consciousness existed simultaneously in the human mind, that one's present was the sum of his past, present and future, and that the whole truth about human beings existed in the unique, isolated, and private world of each individual, writers like Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human consciousness. They had created unprecedented stream-of-consciousness novels such as Pilgrimage by Richardson, Ulysses by Joyce, and Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf.

I. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

1)Shaw began his literary career by writing novels.

2)Shaw is considered to be the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare whose works are examples of the plays inspired by social criticism.

3)Major works

①Candida , Shaw's position as the leading playwright of his time was established.

②Widowers' House is a grotesquely realistic exposure of slum landlordism;

③Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play about the economic oppression of women(p.324). ④Too True to Be Good (1932) is a better play of the later period, with the author's almost nihilistic bitterness on the subjects of the cruelty and madness of World War I and the aimlessness and disillusion of the young.

4)Most of his plays, termed as problem plays, are concerned with political, economic, moral, or religious problems.

5)The other important playwright is Oscar Wilde: The importance of being earnest. "The Theatre of Absured ": Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot.

Ⅱ.John Galsworthy (1867-1933)

The Forsyte Saga, his first trilogy: The Man of Property, In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921).

Ⅲ.William Butler Yeats (1865-1939 )

1) In 1923, he was awarded NobeI Prize for 1iterature.

2) He was the leader of the Irish National Theater Movement(Lady Gregory, J.M. Synge).

Ⅳ. T. S. Eliot （1888-1965）

1)He was one of the important verse dramatists in the first half of the 20th century.

2)Major works

①The Hollow Men is the darkest of Eliot's poems.

②The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock(p.362)

③The Waste Land consists of five sections: "The Burial of the Dead","A Game of Chess","The Fire Sermon","Death by Water","What the Thunder Said".It is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modem civilization in which human life has lost its meaning,significance and purpose.

V. D. H. Lawrence （1885-1930）

1)Major works

① His first novel, The White Peacock.

②The Rainbow and Women in Love are generally regarded as his masterpieces in which symbolism and complex narrative are employed more richly.

③Sons and Lovers(p.375)

2)He was one of the first novelists to introduce themes of psychology into his works. He made a bold psychological exploration of various human relations, especially those between men and women, with a great frankness.

Ⅵ. James Joyce （1882-1941）

1) Joyce is regarded as the most prominent stream-of-consciousness novelist, concentrating on revealing in his novels the psychic being of the characters.

2) major works

①Dubliners, a collection of 15 short stories.Araby (p.390)

②A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man

③Ulysses , the masterpiece, which gives an account of man's life during one day.