专八人文知识文学部分

 测试要求：能初步具备英语文学知识。

 考点：重要作家、作品、流派、文学类型、年份  分值：3分

Quiz

1. George Bernard Shaw was a(n)__

A. playwright B. poet C. novelist D. essayist

2. John Galsworthy was most famous for___.

A. Heart of Darkness B. Ulysses

C. The Forsyte Saga D. A Passage to India

3. The novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was written by___.

A. Henry James B. O. Henry

C. Harriet Beecher Stower D. Mark Twain 4. Which of the following was written by Thoreau?

A. Nature B. Walden C. The Scarlet Letter D. The Fall of the House of Usher

5. The book that gives a fairly accurate picture of southern plantation life is __.

A. An American Tragedy B. The Call of the Wild C. Uncle Tom’s Cabin D. A Hazard of New Fortunes 6. Which of the following is NOT the Noble Prize winner?

A. Ernest Hemingway B. Eugene O’Neil C. William Faulkner D. F. Scott Fitzgerald

7. What flourished in Elizabethan age more than any other form of literature?

A. Novel B. Drama C. Essay D. Poetry 8. Which of the following is the novel by Jane Austen?

A. Frankenstein B. Sense and Sensibility C. Kuba Khan D. Don Juan

9. Which is William Thackeray’s masterpiece?

A. The Virginians B. Vanity Fair

C. The Book of Snobs D. The News Comes

10. Which of the following writers was NOT associated with modernism?

A. D.H. Lawrence B. E. M. Forster C. Charles Dickens D. Virginia Woolf (1—5： A C D B C 6-10: D B B B C)

Basic Literary Genre

    

Poem drama Essay Fiction Short story

Poem

A. Narrative:  Romance

Romance: It is a literary genre popular in the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century),

dealing, in verse or prose, with legendary, supernatural, or amorous(恋爱的） subjects and characters. The tern was applied to tales specifically concerned with knights, chivalry, and courtly love. Popular subjects for romances included the Macedonian King Alexander the Great, King Arthur of Britain and the Knights of the Round Table. Later prose and verse narrative, particularly those in the 19th-century romantic tradition, are also referred to as romances; set in distant or mythological places and times, like most romances they stress adventure and supernatural elements.

 Ballads（民歌，歌谣）:three eight-line stanzas with a concluding stanza of four liens called an envoy(结

尾）

 Epic: (Homer,荷马）Iliad ,Odyssey，Beowulf

Epic: It is, originally, an oral long narrative poem, majestic both in theme and style. Epics deal with legendary or historical events of national or universal significance, involving action of broad sweep and grandeur. Most epics deal with the exploits of a single individual, thereby giving unity to the composition. Typically, an epic includes several features: the introduction of supernatural forces that shape the action; conflict in the form of battles or other physical combat; the stylistic conventions such as an invocation (祈祷）to the Muse, a formal statement of the theme, long Lists of the protagonists involved, and set speeches couched in elevated language. Epic poems are not merely entertaining stories of legendary or historical heroes; they summarize and express the nature or ideals of an entire nation at a significant or crucial period of its history. The characteristics of the hero of an epic are national rather than individual. At other times epic may synthesize the ideals of a great religious or cultural movement. The Divine Comedy by the Italian poet Dante expresses the faith of medieval Christianity. The Faerie Queene by the English poet Edmund Spenser represents the spirit of the Renaissance in England and like Paradise Lost by John Milton, represents the ideals of Christian humanism.

B. Lyric:  Sonnet,

Sonnet: It is a lyric poem of 14 lines with a formal rhyme scheme, expressing different

aspects of a single thought, mood, or feeling, sometimes resolved or summed up in the last lines of the poem.

Two main forms of the sonnet are:

The Petrarchan, or Italian (8+6)：octave+sestet

E.g. Elizabeth Browning: Sonnets from the Portuguese

The English, or Shakesperean(4+4+4+2: three quatrains +one couplet

(Robert Browning: Ulysses, written in the form of dramatic monologue)

Spenserian Stanza: In The Faerie Queene, Spenser, a poet in the 16th century, originated a

nine-line verse stanza, now known as the Spenserian stanza: the first eight lines are iambic pentameter(五步抑扬格）, and the ninth, iambic hexameter (六步抑扬格）.  ode（颂诗）

Ode: It is a dignified and elaborately structured lyric poem praising and glorifying an

individual, commemorating an event, or describing nature intellectually rather than emotionally. Odes originally songs performed to the accompaniment of a musical instrument.

Eg.Percy B. Shelly: Ode to the West Wind John Keats: Ode to a Nightgale(夜莺颂） Ode on Melancholy (忧郁颂）， Ode on a Grecian Urn (希腊古瓮颂）  elegy (挽歌）

 Elegy: It is, originally in classical Greek and Roman literature, a poem composed of

couplets. Classical elegies addressed various subjects, including love, lamentation, and politics, and were characterized by their metric form. The best elegy in English is Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, written by Thomas Gray, which treats not just a single death but the human condition as well. The most famous example of the pastoral elegy is Lycidas, by the English poet John Milton.

 Free Verse(不受格律约束的)自由诗体

A type of poetry that deliberately seeks to free itself from the restriction imposed by

traditionally fixed conventions of meter, rhyme, and stanza. Free verse is now often poetry in open forms.

E.g. Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass

 Blank Verse无韵诗，素体诗（不押韵的五音步诗行）

Blank verse is a type of poetry, distinguished by having a regular meter, but no rhyme. In English, the meter most commonly used with blank verse has been iambic pentameter

 Dramatic Irony The reader’s awareness of a discrepancy (difference) between a character’s perception of his or

her own situation or activities, or of their consequences and the true nature of that situation or those consequences. E.g. It is frequently employed in Shakespeare’s many plays such as The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth and so on.

A Brief Survey of British Literature

 I.Old and Medieval English Literature

(5th-14th Century)

 II. The Renaissance Period (14th- mid-17th)  III. The Neoclassical Period

（ mid-17th-18th century）

 IV. The Romantic Period (1798-1832)  V. The Victorian Period (1837-1901)  VI. The Modern Period (late 19th C---)

I. Old and Medieval English Literature (5th-14th Century)

A. The historical background

Since the historical times England where the early inhabitants were Celts has been conquered three times. It was conquered by the Romans, the English, and the Normans. And of the three it was only the English conquest that had lasting effects.

(1) In 43 A.D. the Romans landed in Britain, and ruled England for almost 4 centuries, but the Celts still kept their own language, custom and religion.

(2)When the Roman Empire declined and its troops left England, the tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded the island from Northern Europe around the fifth century. They drove the native Celts away from England into Wales, Scotland, and even into Ireland across the sea. The three tribes gradually settled down and mixed into a whole people called English. (3) In 1066, the Normans conquered England.

B. Important writers and works English Epic: Beowulf

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400): The Canterbury Tales

(The first Realistic writer, father of English poetry, Master of the English language)

II. The Renaissance Period (14th- mid-17th)

 It first started in Florence and Venice of Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture and

architecture. From Italy the movement went to embrace the rest of Europe.

 The word “Renaissance”, which means rebirth or revival, is usually regarded as the result of a new

emphasis upon the newly discovered Greek and Roman classics and the combination or comprise of a newly interpreted Christian tradition and an ardently admired tradition of pagan classical culture. The essence of the Renaissance is Humanism.

 Renaissance, therefore, 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 and introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to lift the restriction in all areas placed by the Roman Catholic church authorities.

Important writers and works

 Thomas More( 1478-1535): Utopia 《乌托邦》

 Edmund Spenser (1552-1599): The Faerie Queen 《仙后》;

The Shepherd Calendar 《牧羊人日志》

 Christopher Marlowe (15-1593): Edward II,

Dr. Faustus,

Tamburlaine 《帖木耳大帝》, The Jew of Malta,

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

 William Shakespeare (15-1616): History plays, comedy, tragedy, romantic tragicomedies

The greatest four tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth Comedies: The Comedy of Errors,

Love’s Labour’s Lost, As You like It, Twelfth Night,

The Merchant of Venice,

The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing

 Ben Jonson : The Alchemist 《炼金术士》  Francis Bacon: Essays

 John Donne: (the representative of the metaphysics of the 17th century) The Elegies and Satires  John Milton: Paradise Lost,



Paradise Regain, Samson Agonistes

John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress 《天路历程》

III. The Neoclassical Period（mid-17th-18th century）

The eighteenth-century England is also, better, known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment was a progressive intellectual movement going on throughout Europe at the time. The Enlightenment celebrated reason (rationality), equality, science and human beings’ ability to perfect themselves and their society

Literature of the Period:

 Neoclassical poetry and prose ( the last decades of the 17th to the early decades of the 18th century)  The rise and flourish of modern realistic novel in the middle years of the 18th century

 Gothic novel and the sentimental and pre-romantic poetry and fiction in the last decades of the

18th century.

Important writers and works

 Alexander Pope (1688-1744): An Essay on Criticism;

Odyssey;

The Rape of the Lock

 Daniel Defoe (1660-1731): Robinson Crusoe  Samuel Richardson (16-1761): Pamela

 Henry Fielding (father of the English novel): The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling  Samuel Johnson: A Dictionary of the English Language  Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal

 Gulliver’s Travels: a satire on the 18th-century English society. It includes four parts: Lilliput (小人

国）, Brobdingnag (巨人国）， flying Island of Laputa, Houyhnhnms (horses with reasons)  Thomas Gray: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard 《墓园挽歌》

IV. The Romantic Period (1798-1832)

 English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to have begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott’s death.

 The Romantic period is an age of poetry. In the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which originates in emotion recollected in tranquility.”

Important poets & poems of the period

 Robert Burns(1759-1796) (famous for his poems written in Scots):

My Heart’s in the Highland; A Red, Red Rose

 William Blake (1757-1827): Song of Experience;

Song of Innocence

Lake Poets

 William Wordsworth (1770-1850):Lyrical Ballads,

(worshipper of nature) My Heart Leaps Up,

The Prelude 《序曲》, To the Cuckoo

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge(1772-1834): Kubla Khan《忽必烈汗》;

The Fall of theBastille

 Robert Southey : John of Arc 《圣女贞德》 Byron, Shelley, and Keats

 George Gordon Byron (1788-1824): Cain,

Don Juan,

Oriental Tales《东方叙事诗》

 Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822): Ode to a Skylark 《云雀颂》

Ode to the West Wind,

Prometheus Unbound 《的普罗米修斯》

 John Keats（1795-1821）:Ode on a Grecian Um,

Ode to Autumn Ode to Nightingale

 Mary Shelly: Frankenstein 《科学怪人》 其他:

 Jane Austen ( 1775-1817): Emma,

Mansfield Park, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion

 Sir Walter Scott: historical novels

V. The Victorian Period (1837-1901)

By this time, romanticism gradually gave way to realism, and the novel gradually became the dominant form of literature.  Two Poets:

 Alfred Tennyson: Idylls of the King《国王之歌》

 Robert Browning: famous for his dramatic monologue

The Seraphim and other poems 《天使及其他》, The Ring and the Book 《戒指与书》（his masterpiece)

Important writers and works

 Charles Dickens (1812-1870): A Tale of Two Cities,

David Copperfield, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Hard Times,

The Old Curiosity Shop 《老古玩店》, Bleak House 《荒凉之屋》

 William Thackeray（1811-1863）: Vanity Fair 《名利场》  Thomas Hardy(1840-1928): Far From the Madding Crown

Jude the Obscure 《无名的裘德》

Tess of the D’Urbervilles The Mayor of Casterbridge The Return of the Native

Under the Greenwood Tree 《绿荫下》

 Oscar Wilde (18-1900) (put forward aestheticism : art for art’s sake):

The Picture of Dorain Gray An Ideal Husband

A Woman of No Importance

 Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island Women Writers: Bronte Sisters and George Eliot  Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre Professor

Shirley

 Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights  Anne Bronte: Agnes Grey  George Eliot：Middlemarch,

The Mill on the Floss,

Silas Marner 《职工马南传》

VI. The Modern Period (late 19th C---)

Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the idea 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. (1) Modernism marks a strong and conscious break with the past.

(2) Modernism emphasizes on the need to move away from the public to the private, from the objective

to the subjective.

(3) Modernism upholds a new view of time by emphasizing the psychic time over the chronological

one.

(4) Modernism is a reaction against realism. The works can be labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry, or

anti-drama.

Famous Irish Authors

(1) George Bernald Shaw (1856-1950):

He is considered as the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare. Some of his plays can be termed as problem plays. He got Nobel Prize in 1925.

Major Barbara 《芭芭拉少校》 Mrs. Warren’s Profession Widowers’ Houses

Pygmalion 《皮格马力翁》

Man and Superman, Arms and Man The Apple Cart The Devil’s Disciple

(2) William Butler Yeats(1865-1939)(got Noble Prize in 1923): The Land of Heart’s Desire (3) James Joyce (1882-1941): (famous for his “stream of consciousness)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Dubliners Ulysses

Finnegans Wake

Other Important Writers

 Virginia Woolf (1882-1941): Mrs. Dalloway,

To the Lighthouse The Waves 《海浪》

 D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930): Lady Chatterley’s Lovers

Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow,

The White Peacock, Women in Love

 T.S.Eliot (1888-1965) (got Noble Prize in 1948 for his poem Four Quartets. Poet, dramatist &

Critic.): Murder in the Cathedral

The Waste Land On Poetry & Poets The Use of Poetry

 Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

Lord Jim

 E.M.Foster: A Passage to India

A Room with a View

 John Galsworthy: （got Noble Prize in 1932): The Forsyte Saga 《福塞特家史》

A Modern Comedy To Let

Other Noble Prize winners:  Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot (1969)

 Rudyard Kipling: the first English author to be awarded the Noble Prize for literature in 1907.

 W.B. Yeats (1923)

A Brief Survey of American Literature

Outline:

 The Literature around the Independence Revolution (mid-17th-18th Century)  American Romanticism (1810-1865)  American Realism (1865-1910)  American Naturalism

 American Modernism(1912--)  African American Writers  American Drama

I. The Literature around the Independence Revolution (mid-17th-18th Century)  Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790): The Autobiography

Poor Richard’s Almanac

 Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): third president of the U.S. (1801-1809), author of The Declaration

of Independence. (the 2nd president of the U.S. is John Adams)



Philip Freneau: poet of the American Revolution

II. American Romanticism (1810-1865)

American Romanticism was also called American Renaissance. It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, the intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense. They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group. 1. Early Romantic Writers

 Washington Irving (1783-1859): Rip Van Winkle

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow The Sketch Book 《见闻札记》

 James Fenimore Cooper (17-1851): The Last of the Mohicans 《最后的莫希干人》

The Deerslayer 《杀鹿者》 The Prairie 《大草原》

边疆小说：The Pioneers 《拓荒者》 Leatherstocking Tales

2. New England Transcendentalism

In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson published a little book called Nature. “The Universe is composed of Nature and the Soul,” it says. “Spirit is present everywhere.” Nature’s voice pushed American Romanticism into a new phase, the phase of New England Transcendentalism, the summit of American Romanticism.

Transcendentalism (1) philosophical definition: The recognition of man’s obtaining (attaining) knowledge by transcending

the reach of the senses/independent of senses, emphasizing intuition.

(2) A literary movement

a. emphasize spirit, or the Oversoul (超灵）as the most important thing in the universe. b. stress the importance of individual, regarding the individual is divine.

c. offer a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. This in turn added to the

tradition of literary symbolism in American literature.

Two Great Transcendentalists  Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882）：

Nature: the manifesto of American transcendentalism

The American Scholar: America’s Declaration of Intellectual Independence Self-Reliance

Divinity School Address The Transcendentalist

 Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): Walden 《瓦尔登湖》

Civil Disobedience

 (Louisa May Alcott : Little Women) 3. Late Romantic Writers

 Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-18): The Scarlet Letter

The Hose of the Seven Gables The Marble Faun

Mosses from an Old Manse 《古屋青苔》

 Herman Melville (1819-11): Moby Dick;

Typee

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849): (father of the American detective stories)

The Fall of the House of Usher; Poems: The Raven; To Helen

4. Famous poets

 Walt Whitman (1819-12): Leaves of Grass

Song of Myself

 Emily Dickinson（1830-1886): I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died

Because I Could Not Stop for Death My Life Closed Twice before its Close I Died for Beauty

III. American Realism (1865-1910) Major features of Realism:

 Straightforward or matter-of-fact matter

 Focus on commonness of the lives of the common people  Objective rather than idealistic view of human nature  Present moral visions

Important writers and works

 Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-16): Uncle Tom’s Cabin

 Mark Twain (1835-1910): local colorist (Hemingway once said, “All great American literature came

from one book called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”)

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Gilded Age

The Prince and the Pauper

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, The Innocence Abroad

 Henry James (1843-1916): He is considered the founder of psychological realism, and focuses on

international themes.

The American

The Portrait of a Lady The Ambassadors The Wings of the Dove Daisy Miller

The Golden Bowl The Bosonians

IV. American Naturalism

 Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945): Sister Carrie

Jennie Gerhardt

An American Tragedy (his greatest work)

 Stephen Crane (1871-1900): The Red Badge of Courage

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets

Short Story Writers 





Henry: the father of American short stories: Cabbages and Kings 《白菜与国王》

Road of Destiny 《命运之路》 The Cop and the Anthem The Gift of the Magi

A Service of Love 《爱的牺牲》

Jack London: The Call of the Wild

The Son of the Wolf The Sea-wolf White Fang Martin Eden

IV. American Modernism (1912--) 1. Modern Poetry

 Ezra Pound (1885-1972): In a Station of the Metro

Pisan Cantos 《比萨诗章》

 Robert Frost (1874-1963): His poetry focused on the landscape and people in New England.

New Hampshire, Mending Wall, After Apple-picking,

The Death of the Hired Man, The Road Not Taken

 T.S. Eliot 2. Modern Fiction

 Ernest Hemingway (19-1961): spokesman of the Lost Generation

A Farewell to Arms For Whom the Bell Tolls The Sun Also Rises (1925) The Old Man and the Sea Death in the Afternoon

 F. Scott Fitzgerald (16-1940): the literary spokesman of the Jazz Age.

The Great Gatsby Tender is the Night Tales of the Jazz Age The Side of Paradise The Last Tycoon

 William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury

Light in August Absalom, Absalom Go Down, Moses

 John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath

The Pearl

 John Dos Passos: U.S.A Trilogy Minor Writers  Sinclair Lewis(1885-1951): the first American writer to get Noble Prize for literature

Main Street

Baddit

 J.D. Salinger: （1919--）: The Catcher in the Rye 《麦田的守望者》  Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997): Howl

 Saul Bellow: (Jewish writer, got Nobel prize in 1976) Seize the Day  Joseph Heller: Catch-22

 Jack Kerouac (1922-1969): On the Road 《在路上》 African American Writers

 (1940s) Richard Wright: Native Son,

Black Boy

 (1950s) Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man

 James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain (19)  Alex Haley: Roots (1976)

 Alice Walker: The Color Purple

 Toni Morrison:( the first African American woman to get Nobel Prize in 1993)

The Bluest Eye, Beloved

Song of Solomon Paradise Jazz

American Drama

 Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953): 美国戏剧之父The greatest American dramatist, and got Pulitzer

Prize for 4 times, and the Nobel Prize in 1936.

Beyond the Horizon 《天边外》 （成名作） Emperor Jones

All the God’s Children Got Wings Desire Under the Elms The Iceman Cometh

 Arthur Miller (1915--): Death of a Salesman Noble Prize Winners  Sinclair Lewis (1930)

 Eugene O’Neill (1936): Beyond the Horizon  T.S. Eliot (1948)

 William Faulkner (1949)  Ernest Hemingway (19)

 John Steinbeck (1963): The Grapes of Wrath  Toni Morrison (1993)