elf as the spokesman of revolt. The major ones are: The Book of Urizen(1794),The Book of Los(1795).The Four Zoas (1796-1807) & Milton (1804-1920). 4.领会 Characteristics of Blake's poems
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 \Nature of my work is visionary or imaginative.\
From childhood, Blake had a strongly visual mind; whatever he imagined, he also saw. As an imaginative poet, he presents his view in visual images instead of abstract terms.
Blake writes his poems in plain & direct language. His poems often carry the lyric beauty with immense compression of meaning. He distrusts the abstractness & tends to embody his views with visual images. Symbolism in wide range is also a distinctive feature of his poetry.
5. 应用 Select Readings:
1) The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Innocence)
Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy & innocent world, though not without its evils & sufferings. In this volume, Blake, with his eager quest for new poetics forms & techniques, broke completely with the traditions of the 18th century. He experimented in meter & rhymes & introduced bold metrical innovations which could not be found in the poetry of his contemporaries.
In the 18th century, small boys sometimes no more than 4 or 5 years old, were employed to climb up the narrow chimney flues & clean them, collecting the soot in bags. Such boys, sometimes sold to the master sweepers by their parents were miserably treated by their master & often suffered disease & physical deformity.
This poem, in fact, is a protest against the harm that society does to its children by exploiting them for labor of this kind, The poem was written in the child's-eye point of view, & the dramatic irony (what the speaker says in the poem is different from what the poet means) arises from the poet's knowing more or seeing more than the child does.
2) The Chimney Sweeper (from songs of Experience)
Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war & repression with a melancholy tone, The benighted England becomes the world of dark wood & of the weeping prophet. The poem selected here reveals the true nature of religion which helps bring misery to the poor children. The poem also reveals the relation between are economic circumstance, i.e. the exploitation of child labor & an ideological circumstance, i.e. the role played by religion in making people compliant to exploitation.
3) The Tyger
The Tyger, included in Songs of Experience, is one of Blake's best-known poe
ms. It seemingly praises the great power of tiger, but what the tiger symbolizes remains disputable: the power of man? Or the revolutionary force? Or the evil? Or as it is usually interpreted, the Almighty Maker who created both the meek & gentle lamb & the terrible & awesome tiger? The poem is highly symbolic with a touch of mysticism & it is open to various interpretations. The poem contains six quatrains in rhyming couplets & its language is terse & forceful with an anvil rhythm.
II. William Wordsworth 1.一般识记：His life & career
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born at Cockermouth, Cambarland, in the family of an attorney. He received education at St. John's College, Cambridge. He developed a keen love of nature as a youth. Another important influence on his life was the French Revolution. In 1798 Wordsworth & Coleridge collaborated on a book of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Colerdge & William Wordsworth are known as the \Poets.\In 1842, Wordsworth received a government pension & in the following year he succeeded Southey as Poet Laureate. Wordsworth died at Rydal Mount, April 23, 1850. As a great Romantic poet, Wordsworth had a long poetic career. His Lyrical Ballads, written together with Coleridge, is generally regarded as the symbol of the beginning of the Romantic period in England. The Prelude is ranked by many critics as his greatest work. In 1807 Poems in Two Volumes was published. The Excursion was published in 1814.
2. 识记：His poetic outlook
Wordsworth is regarded as a \worshipper of nature.\He can penetrate to the heart of things & give the reader the very life of nature. \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. To Wordsworth, nature embodies, human beings in their diverse circumstances. It is nature that gives him \& knowledge full of peace.\
Common life is Wordsworth's only subject of literary interest. The joys & sorrows of the common people are his themes. His sympathy always goes to the suffering poor.
Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. Its beginning finally turns out to be its end. Wordsworth's deliberate simplicity & refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure & profound poetry which no other poets has ever equaled. Poetry, he believes originates from \recollected in tranquility.\Rejecting the contemporary emphasis on form & intellectual approach that drained poetic writing of strong emotion, he maintains that the scenes & events of everyday life & the speech of ordinary people are the raw material of which poetry can & should be made.
3. 领会His poetical works 1) Lyrics
Lyrical Ballads differs in marked ways from his early poetry, notably the uncompromising simplicity of much of the language, the strong sympathy not merely with the poor in general but with particular, dramatized examples of them, & the fusion of natural description with expressions of inward states of mind. The poems Wordsworth added to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads are among the best of his achievements.
\Abbey\remains a profoundly original & imaginative achievement; the valley of the Wye itself, the quiet center of the returning wanderer's thoughts is described with a detail that conveys a sense of natural order at once vivid & eternal. Beyond the pleasures of the picturesque with their emphasis on the eye & the external aspects of nature, however, lies a deeper moral awareness, a sense of completeness in multiplicity. But the poem progresses beyond such moral reflections. As he is aware of his own sublime communion with all things, nature becomes an inspiring force of rapture, a power that reveals the workings of the soul. To Wordsworth, nature acts as a substitute for imaginative & intellectual engagement with the development of embodied human beings in their diverse circumstances. It's nature that gives him \& knowledge full of peace.\
2) The Prelude
Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past. To him, life is a cyclical journey. Its beginning finally turns out to be its end. His philosophy of life is presented in his masterpiece The Prelude. It opens with a literal journey whose goal is to return to the vale of Grasmere. The journey goes through the poet's personal history, carrying the metaphorical meaning of his interior journey & questing for his lost early self & the proper spiritual home. The poem charts this growth from infancy to manhood. We are shown the development of human consciousness under the sway of an imagination united to the grandeur go nature. Later books of The Prelude describe Wordsworth's experiences in France, his republicanism, his affair with Annette Vallon, his \dread\during the Terror & his continuing support of the ideals underlying the Revolution. The concluding description of the ascent of Snowdon becomes a symbol of the poet's climb to the height of his inspired powers & to that state of vision in which, dedicating himself to humanity, he becomes one of the \Prophets of Nature.\
4.领会 Characteristics of Wordsworth Poems & His Achievements.
William Wordsworth is the leading figure of the English romantic poetry, the focal poetic voice of the period. His is a voice of searchingly comprehensive humanity & one that inspires his audience to see the world freshly, sympathetically & naturally. The most important contribution he has made is that he has not only started the modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self, but also changed the course of English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language & by advocating a return to nature.
5. 应用：Selected Readings
1) I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1)
Wordsworth is regarded as a \of nature.\He can penetrate to the heart of things & give the reader the very life of nature. \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. Wordsworth wrote this beautiful poem of nature after he came across a long belt of gold daffodils tossing & reeling & dancing along the waterside. There is a vivid picture of the daffodils here, mixed with the poet's philosophical & somewhat mystical thoughts. The poem consists of four 6-lined stanzas of iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of ababcc in each stanza. The last stanza describes the poet's recollection in tranquility from which this poem arose. The poet thinks that it is a bliss to recollect the beauty of nature in his mind while he is in solitude
2) Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (1)
This sonnet, written on the roof of a coach as Wordsworth was on his way to France, was published in Poems in Two Volumes, 1807. The poem presents the speaker's view of London in the early morning. The speaker is not only profoundly touched by its beauty & tranquility of the morning, but even surprised to realize that London is part of Nature just as much as is his own beloved Lake Country.
Wordsworth is regarded as a \worshipper of nature.\Even in this poem, though he is looking at London, he is thinking of home where the sun steeps in his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill.\
The poem is written after the pattern of the Italian sonnet. The octave recreates the experience of London at morning, and the sestet enlarges on his reaction to the scene. The rhyme scheme of the poem is abbaabba, cdcdcd.
3) She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways (1)
This is one of the \poems,\written in 1799. The \Poems\describe with rare elusive beauty of simple lyricism & haunting rhythm a young country girl living a simple life in a remote village far from the civilized world. They are verses of love & loss which hold within their delicate simplicity a meditation on time & death which rises to universal stature.
4) The Solitary Reaper (1)
Wordsworth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. The joys & sorrows of the common people are his themes.
\Solitary Reaper\is an example of his literary views. It describes vividly a young peasant girl working alone in the fields & singing as she works. The plot of the little incident is told straightforwardly in stanzas 1, 3, & 4. Stanza 2, with its comparison of the girl's song to the cuckoo & the nightingale cannot be dismissed as vaguely ornamental comparisons. They are much more than that, & the impression of the girl's singing on the traveler is heightened through these comparisons.
This poem is an iambic verse. Most of the lines in the poem are octosyllabics. The rhyme-scheme for each stanza is ababccdd.
III Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1一般识记 His Life & Literary Career
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), poet & critic, was born in Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, the son of a clergy man. He received education at Cambridge but left without a degree. Inspired by the radical thinkers with their idealism, Coleridge joined Robert Southey in a utopian plan of establishing an ideal democratic community in America, named \In the spring of 1797, Coleridge met & began his long friendship with William Wordsworth. The following year, they published a joint volume of poetry, Lyrical Ballads, which become a landmark in English poetry. Coleridge's poem, \The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,\was included in the volume. The years 1797 &1798 were among the most fruitful of Coleridge's life. In addition to \The Ancient Mariner,\he wrote \Kubla Khan,\began writing \Christabel,\& composed \Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,\\at Midnight,\& \The Nightingale\which are considered to be his best \poems.
In 1798, he traveled with the Wordsworths to Germany. In 1810, Coleridge quarreled seriously with Wordsworth. Although they reconciled with each other later on, their friendship had never reached its former intimacy. In 1813, his tragic drama Remorse received popular welcome. In 1816, he wrote his major prose work, Biographia Literaria (1817), a series of autobiographical notes & dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. 2.识记 His Literary Outlook & Philosophy
Philosophically & critically, Coleridge opposed the limitedly rationalistic trends of the 18th-century thought. He courageously stemmed the tide of the prevailing doctrines derived from Hume & Hartley, advocating a more spiritual & religious interpretation of life, based on what he had learnt from Kant & Schelling. He believed that art is the only permanent revelation of the nature of reality. A poet should realize the vague intimations derived from his unconsciousness without sacrificing the vitality of the inspiration.
3.识记 His Major Works
(1)\Rime of the Ancient Mariner,\told an adventurous story of a sailor. By neglecting the law of hospitality, the mariner cruelly shot an albatross which flew to the ship through thick fog. Then disaster fell onto the ship. The breeze died down; the ship stopped; the hot tropical sun shone all day long. The other sailors died of thirst one after another, while the mariner alone was alive, being tortured all the time with thirst & the horror of death. Only when the mariner finally repented & blessed for the water snake did the spell break & the ship was then able to go back home. The story moves on through a world of wond
Chapter I The Renaissance Period
一、学习目的和要求
通过本章学习，了解文艺复兴运动和人文主义思潮产生的历史，文化背景，认识该时期文学创作的基本特征和基本主张，及其对同时代及后世英国文学乃至文化的影响；了解该时期重要作家的文学生涯，创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物刻画，语言风格，思想意义等；同时结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。 二、考核要求
(一) 文艺复兴时期概述
1. 识记：（1）文艺复兴时期的界定 （2）历史文化背景
2. 领会: （1）文艺复兴运动的意义与影响 （2）文艺复兴时期的文学特点
（3）人文主义的主张及对文学的影响
3. 应用：文艺复兴，人文主义及玄学诗等名词的解释 Brief Introduction to the Renaissance Period
I. 应用
Definitions of the Literary Terms:
1. The Renaissance: The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th & 17th centuries. It first started in Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture & literature. From Italy the movement went to embrace the rest of Europe. The Renaissance, which means \or \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. 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, & to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. 2. Humanism: Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It sprang from the endeavor to restore a medieval reverence for the ancient authors and is frequently taken as the beginning of the Renaissance on its conscious, intellectual side, for the Greek and Roman civilization was based on such a conception that man is the measure of all things. Through the new learning, humanists not only saw the arts of splendor and enlightenment, but the human values represented in the works. Renaissance humanists found in the classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfections, and that th
e world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy. Thus, 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. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the English humanists.
3. Spenserian stanza:
Spenserian stanza 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.
4. Metaphysical poetry: The term \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 in drawn from the actual life. The form is frequently that of an argument with the poet's beloved, with God, or with himself.
5. The Renaissance her A Renaissance hero refers to one created by Christopher Marlowe in his drama. Such a hero is always individualistic and full of ambition, facing bravely the challenge from both gods and men. He embodies Marlowe's humanistic ides of human dignity and capacity. Different from the tragic hero in medieval plays, who seeks the way to heaven through salvation and god's will, he is against conventional morality and contrives to obtain heaven on earth through his own efforts. With the endless aspiration for power, knowledge, and glory, the hero interprets the true Renaissance spirit. Both Tamburlaine and Faustus are typical in possessing such a spirit.
（二） 该时期的重要作家
1.一般识记：重要作家的文学生涯 2.识记：重要作品及主要内容
3.领会：重要作家的创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，艺术手法，社会意义等。
4.应用：（1）莎士比亚和邓恩诗歌的主题，意象
（2）喜剧《威尼斯商人》的主题和主要人物性格分析 （3）哈姆雷特的性格分析
（4）史诗《失乐园》的结构，人物性格，语言特点等的分析
I. Edmund Spenser
1. 一般识记
Brief Introduction to the Author English poet，born in London, England, about 1552,and died in London, Jan 13, 1599.
2. 识记His Major Works
Spenser's most important work & masterpiece is The Faerie Queene, a great poem of its age. A complex moral, religious, & political allegory, it is also an epic that exalts Queen Elizabeth Ⅰ& the English nation. According to Spenser's own explanation, his principal intention is to present through a \poem\the example of a perfect gentleman: \fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous & gentle discipline.\Its principal hero is the Arthur of medieval legend. The six books of the poem illustrate the nature of particular virtues, such as, temperance & justice. Other major works of Spenser are The Shepheardes Calender(1579), a poem consisting of 12 eclogues-corresponding to the 12 months of the year; Epithalamion (1595), a poem expressing the deep personal feelings occasioned by the poets second marriage; Amoretti (1595), a series of sonnets.
3. 领会His Influence
1) 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
2) In his writing, Spenser drew on the conventions & thought of Classical, medieval, & Renaissance literature. However, he added to his fusion of these diverse elements much that was original, & his works inspired many later English poets. He created a new stanza, called the Spenserian stanza, which is well suited to narrative verse. His skills in writing melodious English verse & his combination of emotion, erudition, & spiritual vision have won him the admiration of generations of English poets. It is his idealism, his love of beauty, &his exquisite melody that make him known as \poets' poet.\
4. 应用
The Faerie Queene:
1) It is a long, allegorical poem. In the poem, Spenser dramatized political, religious, & moral themes by personifying them, or making them characters.
2)Plot: The story, which is set against a background of Arthur & medieval legend, deals with the adventures of six knights of the court of the fairy queen named Gloriana, who represents Queen Elizabeth Ⅰ of English.
The faerie Queen was left unfinished at Spenser's death. It was originally planned as a 12-book poem. But only 6 books were completed. The poem is parti
cularly admired for the melodic beauty of its language & for its rich content of philosophical & mythological material presented in the form of vivid narratives.
II. Christopher Marlowe
1. 一般识记
Brief Introduction
English dramatist & poet,born in Canterbury, England, Feb, 6,1567, died in Deptford, England, May 30, 1593. Marlowe was the first great English Dramatist. He brought to the English stage a new concept of tragedy, one in which the drama centers around the struggles of a man overwhelmed by his passions & ambitions.
2. 识记
His Major Works
His most famous tragedies are Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine & Edward Ⅱ. In his plays, Marlowe used blank verse, which he molded into a superb instrument for expressing intense emotions. After his development of blank verse it became the standard medium for English dramatic & epic poetry. His non-dramatic poetry includes Hero & Leander, \Passionate shepherd to His love,\& a verse translation of Ovid's Amores.
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (about 1589), generally considered his best play, was based on a real Dr. Faustus, who was later associated with a medieval legend of a man selling 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.
The Jew of Malta (about 1589) illustrates Marlowe's outstanding portrayal of character. Its hero, Barabas the Jew, served as the model for Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. In about 1592. Marlowe wrote one of the first successful English historical dramas, Edward Ⅱ。 It is his most dramatically mature play & exhibits his mastery of characterization, stage craft & rhetoric. Tamburlaine is a play about an ambitious & pitiless Tartar conqueror in the fourteenth century who rose from a shepherd to an overpowering King. By depicting a great hero with high ambition & sheer brutal force in conquering one enemy after another, Marlowe voiced the supreme desire of the man of the Renaissance for infinite power & authority.
3. 领会His Achievements & Influence
Achievements: Marlowe's greatest achievement lies in that he perfected the blank verse & made it the principal medium of English drama.
His second achievement is his creation of the Renaissance hero for English drama.
The theme of his works is the praise of the Renaissance spirit.
His influence: A man of wide learning, Marlowe was one of the extra ordinary poets & playwrights of his time. \mighty line,\as Ben Jonson called his blank verse, was one of the most important contributions to the art of English literature.
4. 应用Dr. Faustus
The selection of ActⅠfrom Dr. Faustus is mainly about Faustus is showing his great ambition, that is, if he had many souls, he would give them all to the Devil so that he could control the world. In portraying Faustus, a more introspective & philosophical figure than Tamburlaine, Marlowe praises his soaring aspiration for knowledge while warning against the sin of pride since Faustus's downfall was caused by his despair in God & trust in Devil.
Ⅲ. William Shakespeare 1. 一般识记Brief Introduction
William Shakespeare was the greatest writer of plays who ever lived. His friend & fellow playwright Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare was \of an age but for all time.\The 18th-century English essayist Samuel Johnson described his work as \mirror of life.\The 19th-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke of \Shakespeare.\The 20th-century English dramatist George Bernard Shaw stressed his \power over language.\
2. 识记His Life & Career
The exact date of Shakespeare's birth is not known, but his baptism was recorded on April 26, 1564, in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon. Since it was customary to baptize infants within two or three days of birth, April 23 is regarded as a reasonable birth date. It is also the date on which he died in 1616. Generally, his dramatic career is divided into 4 periods. The First Period (1590-1594)-five historical plays & four comedies: Henry Ⅵ, part Ⅰ (1590) Henry Ⅵ, part Ⅱ (1590) Henry Ⅵ, part Ⅲ (1591) Richard Ⅲ (1592)
Titus Andronicus (1593)
The Comedy of Errors (1592)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594) The Taming of the Shrew (1593) Love's Labor's Lost (1594)
The Second Period (1595-1600)-five historical plays, six comedies & two tragedies:
Richard Ⅱ (1595)
1. 一般识记：His life
Thomas Gray (1716-1771), son of a London exchange broker, was born in Cornhill, London on Dec. 26, 1716. He was first educated at Eton. In 1734 he went to Cambridge University & left it in 1738 without taking a degree. In 1768 he was made professor of History & Modern Languages at Cambridge. He died at Cambridge, England, on July 30, 1771.
2. 识记: His major works
In contrast to those professional writers, Gray's literary output was small. His masterpiece, \Written in a Country Churchyard\was published in 1751. The poem once & for all established his fame as the leader of the sentimental poetry of the day, especially \Graveyard School.\His poems, as a whole, are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or meditation on life, past & present.
In addition to his elegiac masterpiece, Gray is known for his odes, including \de on the Spring\\on a Distant Prospect of Eton College\\Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat\(1748), \to Adversity\& two translations from old Norse: The Descent of Odin(1761) & The Fatal Sisters(1761).
3. 领会His style
A conscientious artist of the first rate, Gray wrote slowly & carefully, painstakingly seeking perfection of form & phrase. His poems are characterized by an exquisite sense of form. His style is sophisticated & allusive. His poems are often marked with the trait of a highly artificial diction & a distorted word order. 4. 应用：Selected Reading
\Written in a Country Churchyard\
1) Theme: It is a meditation on human mortality, the tragic dignity it gives to all mankind, & the stability & serenity of rustic life. The Elegy lies in Gray's perfect expression of what all men feel about life & death. In this poem, Gray reflects on death, the sorrows of life & the mysteries of human life with a touch of his personal melancholy. The poet compares the ordinary people with the great ones, wondering what the commons could have achieved if they had had the chance. Here he reveals his sympathy for the poor & the unknown, but mocks the great ones who despise the poor & bring havoc on them. 2)Language
The poem abounds in images & arouses sentiment in the bosom of every reader. Though the use of artificial poetic diction & distorted word order make understanding of the poem somewhat difficult, the artistic polish-the sure control of language, imagery, rhythm, & his subtle moderation of style & tone-gives the poem a unique charm of its own. The poem has been ranked among the best of the 18th century English poetry.
Chapter III The Romantic Period
一 本章的学习目的和要求
通过本章的学习，了解浪漫主义文学的产生的历史，文化背景，认识该时期文学创作的基本特征，基本主张，及其对时代及后世英国文学用至文化的影响； 了解该时期重要作家的文学生涯，创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物刻画，语言风格，思想意义等； 同时结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。 二 本章考核知识点及考核要求
（一） 考核知识点 1 浪漫主义时期概述
1） 浪漫主义时期英国社会的政治，经济，文化背景 2） 浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张 3） 英国浪漫主义文学的特色
4） 浪漫主义文学对同时代及后世英国文学的影响
2 浪漫主义时期主要作家的文学创作思想及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，艺术手法及社会意义等。 威廉·布莱克；威廉·华兹华斯；塞·特·科勒律治；乔治·戈登·拜伦；珀·比·雪莱；约翰·济兹；简·奥斯汀 （二） 考核要求 1 浪漫主义时期概述
1）识记：a.浪漫主义时期的界定 b.历史文化背景
2) 领会：a.浪漫主义思潮的意义与影响。
b.浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张及对后世文学的影响。、 3) 应用：a.名词解释：浪漫主义 b.浪漫主义时期文学特点的分析 2 该时期的重要作家
1） 识记：浪漫主义时期的重要作家，代表作品及其主要内容。
2） 领会：重要作家的创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，社会意义等。
3） 应用：a.浪漫派诗歌（所选作品）的主题，意象分析 b.小说《傲慢与偏见》的主题和主要人物的性格分析。
一 概述
1. 一般识记
English Romanticism
English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to hav
e 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.
2. 识记 Historical & Cultural background
During this period, England had experienced profound economic & social change. The biggest social change in English history was the transfer of large masses of the population from the countryside to the towns. As a result of the Enclosures & the agricultural mechanization, the peasants were driven of their land; some emigrated to the colonies; some sank to the level of farm laborers & many others drifted to the industrial towns where there was a growing demand for labor. But the new industrial towns were no better than jungles, where the law was \survival of the fittest.\The cruel economic exploitation caused large-scale workers' disturbances in England.
3 领会
（1） Influences of the Romantic Movement
Romanticism constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit. In essence it designates a literary & philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life & all experience. It also places the individual at the center of art, making literature most valuable as an expression of this or her unique feelings & particular attitudes & valuing its accuracy in portraying the individual's experiences.
(2) The Romantic views about literature
a. The Romantic period is an age of poetry. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley & Keats are the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. b. The Romantic period is also a great age of prose. The two major novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen & Walter Scott.
c. Besides poetry & prose, there are quite a number of writers who have fried their hand at poetic dramas in this period.
4 应用
(1) Literary Terms
a. 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 i
ndividual's mind. Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer. b. 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.
(2) Characteristics of Romantic literature in English history.
The Romantic period is an age of poetry Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley & Keats are the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. Wordsworth & Coleridge were the major representatives of this movement. They explored new theories & innovated new techniques in poetry writing. They saw poetry as a healing energy: 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. Wordsworth is the closest to nature. To escape from a world that had became excessively rational, as well as excessively materialistic & ugly, the Romantics would turn to other times & places, where the qualities they valued could be convincingly depicted. Romantics also tend to be nationalistic, defending the great poets & dramatists of their own national heritage against the advocates of classical rules who tended to glorify Rome & rational Italian & French neoclassical art as superior to the native traditions. To the Romantics, poetry should be free from all rules. They would turn to the humble people & their everyday life for subjects, Romantic writers are always seeking for the Absolute, the Ideal through the transcendence of the actual. They have also made bold experiments in poetic language, versification & design, & constructed a variety of forms on original principles of structure & style.
二 该时期的重要作家 I. William Blake
1.一般识记： His life
English poet, artist, & philosopher, born in London England, Nov 28, 1757, and died in London, Aug 12,1827. Blake made distinguished contributions to both Literature & art. He ranks with great poets in the English language & may be considered the earliest of the major English Romantic poets. His poems range f
rom lyrics of childlike simplicity to mystical or prophetic works of great complexity. As an artist he is best known for his engravings, which are among the masterpieces of graphic art.
2. 识记 His political, religious & literary views
Blake never tried to fit into the world; he was a rebel innocently & completely all his life. He was politically of the permanent left & mixed a good deal with the radicals like Thomas Paine& William Godwin. Like Shelley, Blake strongly criticized the capitalists' cruel exploitation, saying that the \satanic mills left men unemployed, killed children & forced prostitution.\Meanwhile he cherished great expectations & enthusiasm for the French Revolution, & regarded it as a necessary stage leading to the millennium predicted by the biblical prophets. Literarily Blake was the first important Romantic poet, showing contempt for the rule of reason, opposing the classical tradition of the 18th century & treasuring the individual's imagination.
3. 领会 His poems (1) Early works
The Songs of Innocence (1809) is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy & innocent world, though not without its evils & sufferings. For instance, \Holy Thursday\with its vision of charity children lit \with a radiance all their own\reminds us terribly of a world of loss & institutional cruelty. The wretched child described in \The Chimney Sweeper,\orphaned, exploited, yet touched by visionary rapture, evokes unbearable poignancy when he finally puts his trust in the order of the universe as he knows it. His Songs of Experience (1794) paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war & repression with a melancholy tone. The benighted England becomes the world of the dark wood & of the weeping prophet. The orphans of \Holy Thursday\are now \with cold & usurious hand.\The little chimneysweeper sings \of woe\while his parents go to church & praise \& his Priest & King\very instruments of their repression. In \the city is no longer a paradise, but becomes the seat of poverty & despair, of man alienated from his true self. Blake's Marriageof Heaven & Hell (1790) marks his entry into maturity. The poem was composed during the climax of the French Revolution & it plays the double role both as a satire & a revolutionary prophecy. In this poem, Blake explores the relationship of the contraries. Attraction & repulsion, reason & energy, love & hate, are necessary to human existence. Life is a continual conflict of give & take, a pairing of opposites, of good & evil, of innocence & experience, of body & soul. \contraries,\Blake states, \is no progression.\The \age,\to Blake, means the reconciliation of the contraries, not the subordination of the one to the other.
(2) Later works
In his later period, Blake wrote quite a few prophetic books, which reveal him as the prophet of universal political & spiritual freedom and show the poet hims
mportance & strength of the English middle class, Among the pioneers were Daniel Defoe ,Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Tobias Creorge Smollott, & Oliver Goldsmith.
2. 领会Characteristics of Neoclassical Literature
According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek & Roman writers (Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, etc,)& those of the contemporary French ones. Neoclassicists had some fixed laws &rules for almost every genre of literature, prose should be precise, direct, smooth & flexible. Poetry should be lyrical, epical, didactic, satiric or dramatic, & each class should be guided by its own principles. 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.
二.该时期的重要作家
1，一般识记：重要作家的创作生涯 2，识记：重要作品及主要内容
3，领会：重要作家的创作思想，艺术特色其代表作的主题结构，人物刻画，语言风格，艺术特色，社会意义等。
4，应用：（1）《天路历程》中\名利场\的寓义。 （2）蒲伯的文学（诗歌）批评观及其诗歌特色。 （3）〈〈格列佛游记〉〉的社会讽刺。 （4）菲尔丁的\散文体史诗\。 （5）格雷诗歌的主题与意象。
I． John Bunyan
1. 一般识记His life
English author & preacher, born in Elstow, England, probably Nov.28, 1628,and died in London, England, Aug, 31, 1688.
2. 识记His major works
John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress (1678) is the outstanding 17th-century English religious literature. For more than 200 years this book was second in popularity only to the Bible. Bunyan did not attempt to portray the political confusion & social upheaval of 17th-century England. His concern was rather the study of man's spiritual life.
Bunyan chiefly wrote four prose works - Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), The Life & Death of Mr. Badman (1680), The Holy War (1682) & The Pilgrim's Progress, part II (1684).
3. 领会Characteristics of his works
Bunyan's style was modeled after that of the English Bible. With his concrete &living language & carefully observed & vividly presented details, he made it possible for the reader of the least education to share the pleasure of reading his novel & to relive the experience of his characters.
4. 应用Selected Reading
\Vanity Fair\an excerpt from Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress.
(1) Theme: The Pilgrim's Progress is the most successful religious allegory in the English language. Its purpose is to urge people to comply with Christian doctrines & seek salvation through constant struggles with their own weakness & all kinds of social evils. It is not only about something spiritual but also beats much relevance to the time. Its predominant metaphor-life as a journey-is simple & familiar.
(2) \Fair\is the most famous part of The Pilgrim's Progress. It tells how Christian & his friend Faithful come to Vanity Fair on their way to heaven,\a fair where in should be sold all sorts of vanity & that it should last all the year long: therefore at this fair all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures & delights of all sorts as harlots, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones & what not.\As they refuse to buy anything but truth, they are beaten & put in a cage & then taken out & led in chains up & down the fair. They are sentenced to death-to be put to the most cruel death that can be invented.\Vanity Fair\is a satirical picture of English society, law & religion in Bunyan's day.
II. Alexander pope
1. 一般识记His life & career
English poet & satirist, born in London, England, May 21, 1688, died in Twickenham, England May 30, 1744.
Pope is one of the fore-most satirists in world literature as well as a great poet. He wrote witty & polished verses ridiculing the behavior of his day. Pope's mock-heroic poem The Rape of the Lock is one of the finest examples of English comic verse. He made his name as a great poet with the publication of An Essay on Criticism in 1711. His Dunciad is a scathing attack on dullness & pedantry in literature. He also composed verse essays on philosophy, literature, & criticism. In An Essay on Man, he brilliantly expressed the philosophical trends & concepts of his age.
2. 识记Pope's literally outlook
As a representative of the Enlightenment, Pope was one of the first to introduce rationalism to England. He was the greatest poet of his time. He strongly ad
vocated 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. 识记His major works 1). The Rape of the Lock
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. 2) An Essay on Criticism
His first important work, An Essay on Criticism was a long didactic poem in heroic couplets. In this work, he reflected the neo-classical spirit of the times by advocating good taste, common sense & the adherence to classical rules in writing & criticism. The whole poem is written in a plain style, hardly containing any imagery or eloquence &therefore makes easy reading. 3） The Dunciad
Generally considered Pope's best satiric work, The Dunciad goes deep in meaning & works at many levels. Its satire is directed at Dullness in general, & in the course of it all the literary men of the age. Poets mainly who had made Pope's enemies, are held up to ridicule. But the poem is not confined to personal attack.
Dullness as reflected in the corruptness of government, social morals, education & even religion, is expertly exposed & satirized.
4. 领会His language style
Pope's works are still enjoyed for their sparkling wit, good sense & charm of expression. After Shakespeare, he is the most widely quoted poet in English literature. He worked painstakingly on his poems, developed a satiric, concise, smooth, graceful &well-balanced style.
5. 应用Selected Readings
An Excerpt from Part 2 of An Essay on Criticism.
An Essay on Criticism is a didactic poem written in heroic couplets. It consists of 744 lines &is divided into three parts. It sums up the art of poetry as up held & practiced by the ancients like Aristotle, Horace, Boileau, etc. & the eighteenth century European classicists.
In Part 2, Pope advises the critics not to stress too much the artificial use of conceit or the external beauty of language but to pay special attention to True wit which is best set in a plain style.
III. Daniel Defoe
1. 一般识记His life
English novelist & journalist, born in London, England, 1660, and died in London, Apr. 26,1731.
Like Pope, he never went to university, but he received a good education in one of the best Dissenting academies. He started as a small merchant & all his life his business underwent many ups & downs & yet he was never beaten. Defoe also had a zest for politics. He wrote quite a number of pamphlets on the current political issues.
2. 识记His social outlook
As a member of the middle class, Defoe spoke for & to the members of his class & his novels enjoyed great popularity among the less cultivated readers. In most of his works, he gave his praise to the hard-working, sturdy middle class & showed his sympathy for the downtrodden, unfortunate poor.
3. 识记His major works
Defoe is generally considered the first great realistic novelist in English fiction. He based his stories on current events & materials, such as the maps & logs of actual sea voyages, personal memoirs& historical or eyewitness reports.
Perhaps his most popular novel is Robinson Crusoe (1719), an adventure story based partly on the actual experience of a man who had been trapped on a deserted island. A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), sometimes considered his best work, has such a colorful & detailed account of the London plague of 1664 & 1665 that it seems to have been written by an observer on the scene. Defoe's third masterpiece, Moll Flanders (1722), is a lively novel tracing the adventures of a female rogue. Told in the form of \the narrative includes vivid descriptions of the courts, prisons, & other social institutions of Defoe's era.
4. 领会Characteristics of his works
Defoe was a very good story-teller. He had a gift for organizing minute details in such a vivid way that his stories could be both credible& fascinating. His sentences are sometimes short, crisp & plain, & sometimes long & rambling, which leave on the reader on impression of casual narration. His language is smooth, easy, colloquial & mostly vernacular. There is nothing artificial in his language: it is common English at its best.
5. 应用Selected Reading
An Excerpt from chapter IV of Robinson Crouse.
Robinson Crouse, an adventure story very much in the spirit of the time, is universally considered his masterpiece. In the novel, Defoe traces the growth of Robinson from a na?ve & simple youth into a mature & hardened man, tempere
d by numerous trials in his eventful life. The realistic presentation of the successful struggle of Robinson single-handedly against the hostile nature proves the best part of the novel. Robinson is here a real her a typical eighteenth-century English middle-class man with a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage, patience & persistence in overcoming obstacles, in struggling against the hostile natural environment. He is the very prototype of the empire builder, the pioneer colonist. In describing Robinson's life on the island, Defoe glorifies human labor &the puritan fortitude, which save Robinson from despair & are a source of pride &happiness .He toils for the sake of subsistence, & get his reward.
VI. Jonathan Swift
1. 一般识记His life
English author, born in Dublin, Ireland, Nov. 30, 1667, and died in Dublin, Oct. 19, 1745.
Swift is generally considered the greatest prose satirist in English literature. Through fables, allegories, & pamphlets he savagely exposed the vices &follies of mankind &championed common sense. 2. 识记Swift's humanist view
Swift was a man of great moral integrity & social charm. A man with bitter life experience, he had a deep hatred for all the rich oppressors & a deep sympathy for all the poor & oppressed. His understanding of human nature is profound. In his opinion, human nature is seriously & permanently flawed. To better human life, enlightenment is needed, but to redress it is very hard. So, in his writings, although he intends not to condemn but to reform & improve human nature &human institutions. There is often an Under-or over tone of helplessness & indignation.
3 领会His style
Swift is a master satirist. His satire is usually masked by an out word gravity &an apparent earnestness which renders his satire all the more powerful.
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 \oper words in proper places.\Clear, simple, concrete diction, uncomplicated sentence structure, economy & conciseness of language mark all his writings-essays, poems & novels.
4. 应用Selected reading
An Excerpt from Chapter III, Part I of Gulliver's Travels.
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift's best fictional work, contains four parts, each about one particular voyage during which Gulliver has extraordinary adventures on some remote island after he has met with shipwreck or piracy or some other misfortune. As a whole the book is one of the most effective & devastating criticisms & satires of all aspects in the then English & satires of all aspects in
the then English & European life - socially, politically, religiously, philosophically, scientifically, & morally. Its social significance is great & its exploration into human nature profound.
Gulliver's Travels is also an artistic masterpiece. Here we find its author at his best as a master of prose. In structure, the four parts make an organic whole, with each contrived upon an independent structure, & yet complementing the others & contributing to the central concern of study of human nature & life. The first two parts are generally considered smallness in Part I words just as effectively as the exaggerated largeness in Part 2. The similarities between human beings & the Lilliputians & the contrast between the Brobdingnagians & human beings both bear reference to the possibilities of human state. Part 3 furthers the criticism of the western civilization & deals with different malpractices & false illusions about science, philosophy, history & false illusions about science, philosophy, history & even immortality. The lost part, where comparison is made through both similarities &differences, leads the reader to a basic question: What on earth is a human being?
V. Henry Fielding
１. 一般识记：His life & career
English author, born in Sharpham Park, England, April. 22. 1707, and died in Lisbon, Portugal, Oct. & 1754.
During his career as a dramatist, Fielding had attempted a considerable number of forms of plays. Witty comedies of manners or intrigues in the Restoration tradition, farce or ballad operas with political implication, & burlesques & satires that been heavily upon the status quo of England. Of all his plays, the best known are The coffee-House Politician ((1730), The Tragedy of Tragedies (1730), Pasquin (1736) & The Historical Register for the Year 1736(1737).
Fielding started to write novels when he was preparing himself for the Bar. In 1742 appeared his first novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews & of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams, Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, which was first intended as a burlesque of the dubious morality & false sentimentality of Richardson's Pamela. The next year came The History of Jonathan Wild the Great, a satiric biography that harks back to Fielding's early plays. The novel was followed by The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) & The History of Amelia (1751). The former is a masterpiece on the subject of human nature & the latter the story of the unfortunate life of an idealized woman, a maudlin picture of the social life at the time.
2. 识记: His major works 1) Joseph Andrews
In this novel, Joseph supposedly the young handsome & chaste brother of Richardson's virtuous heroine Pamela, is tempted by his amorous mistress, suppose
dly aunt of Pamela's husband, Mr. B. Here, instead of being rewarded for his virtue, Joseph is turned out of doors by his mistress. But the burlesque ends here; the book quickly turns into a great novel of the open road, a \epic in prose\whose subject is \true ridiculous\in human nature, as exposed in all its variety as Joseph & the amiable quixotic parson journey homeward through the heart of England. The dominating qualities of the novel are its excellent character-portrayal, timely entrances & exits, robustness of tone &hilarious, hearty humor.
2) The History of Jonathan Wild the Great
It's a satiric biography that harks back to Fielding's early plays. 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. The ironical praises for the very qualities of the unscrupulous self-aggrandizement of wild point out the way the Prime Minister had achieved his \atness.\The Great Man, properly considered, is no letter than a great gangster.
3. 领会：His achievement in English novel
Fielding has been regarded by some as \of the English Novel,\for his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel. Of all the eighteenth-century novelists he was the first to set out, both in theory & practice, to write specifically a \epic in prose,\the first to give the modern novel its structure & style. Before him, the relating of a story in a novel was either in the epistolary form (a series of letters), as in Richardson's Pamela, or the picaresque form (adventurous wanderings) through the mouth of the principal character, as in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, but Fielding adopted \the third-person narration,\in which the author becomes the \God.\He \the thought\of all his characters, so he is able-to present not only their external behaviors but also the internal workings of their minds. In planning his stories, he tries to retain the grand epical form of the classical works but at the same time keeps faithful to his realistic presentation of common life as it is.
4. 领会：Characteristics of his language
His language is easy, unlabored & familiar, but extremely vivid & vigorous. His sentences are always distinguished by logic & rhythm, & his structure carefully planned towards an inevitable ending. His works are also noted for lively, dramatic dialogues & other theatrical devices such as suspense, coincidence & unexpectedness.
5.应用：Selected Reading
An Excerpt from chapter VIII, Book Four of Tom Jones.
Tom Jones, generally considered Fielding's masterpiece, brings its author the name of the \Homer.\The panoramic view it provides of the 18th century English country & city life with different places & about 40 characters is unsurp
assed. The language is one of clarity & suppleness. And last of all, the plot construction is excellent. Its 18 books of epic form are divided into 3 sections, 6 books each, clearly marked out by the change of scenes: in the country, on the high way & in London. By this, Fielding has indeed achieved his goal of writing a \epic in prose.\
VI. Samuel Johnson
1. 一般识记：His life & literary career
Samuel Johnson, English writer, critic, & lexicographer, born in Richfield, England, Sept. 18.1709, and died in London. England, Dec, 13,1784.
Samuel Johnson, commonly called Dr. Johnson, was one of the greatest figures of 18th-century English literature. He was an energetic & versatile writer. He had a hand in all the different branches of literary activities. He was a poet, dramatist, prose romancer, biographer, essayist, critic, lexicographer & publicist. 2. 识记：His major works
His major works include poems: \& \vanity of Human Wishes\a romance: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759); a tragedy: Irene (1749); several hundred essays which appeared in the two periodicals under his editorship-The Rambler & The Idler; & literary criticism as found in the preface to his edition of Shakespeare & in his comments on 52 poet in Lives of the Poets (1779-1781). As a lexicographer, Johnson distinguished himself as the author of the first English dictionary by an Englishman-A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), a gigantic task which Johnson undertook single-handedly & finished in over seven years.
3. 领会：His neoclassical literary outlook &style
Samuel Johnson was the last great neoclassicist enlightener in the late 18th century. He was very much concerned with the theme of the vanity bear this theme. He tried to warn men against this folly & hoped to care then of it through his writings. In literary creation & criticism, be was rather conservative, openly showing his dislike for some newly rising form of literature &his appreciation for those writings which carried a lot of moralizing & his appreciation for those writings which carried a lot of moralizing & philosophizing. He held that a writer must adhere to universal truth & experience, i.e. Nature; he must please, but he must also instruct; he must not offend against religion or promote immorality; & he must let himself be guided by old principles. Like Pope, he was particularly fond of moralizing & didacticism.
Samuel Johnson's language is characteristically general, often Latinate & polysyllabic. His sentences are long & well structured with parallel words & phrases. However, no matter how complex his sentences are, his idea is always clearly
expressed; & though he tends to use \words,\they are always accurately used Reading his works gives the reader the impression that he is talking with a very learned man.
4. 领会：His contribution to English language-A Dictionary of the English Language
In 1746, a group of booksellers commissioned Johnson to prepare a dictionary. Published in 1755, A dictionary of the English Language was the first real attempt at a systematic & interestingly written survey of English usage & the first dictionary to quote from poets & other writers to illustrate definitions. On the whole, the work showed great scholarship, although it contained humor & reflected a number of Johnson's prejudices.
5. 应用：Selected Reading
To the Right Honorable the Earl of chesterfield
The letter is written in a refined & very polite language, with a bitter undertone of defiance & anger. The seemingly peaceful retrospection, reasoning & questioning express, to the best satiric effect, the author's strong indignation at the lord's fame-fishing & his firm resolution not to be reconciled to the hypocritical lord. It expresses explicitly the author's assertion of his independence, signifying the opening of a new era in the development of literature.
VII. Richard Brinsley Sheridan
1. 一般识记: His dramatic career
Richard B. Sheridan, British dramatist & statesman, born in Dublin, Ireland, Oct. 30, 1751, and died in London, England, July 7, 1816.
Sheridan is ranked among the important comic playwrights of the English drama. His masterpiece. The School for Scandal (1777) is considered one of the finest English comedies of manners. A satire on gossip, hypocrisy, & the corrupting influence of fashionable city life, it is also admired for its ingenious plot construction & witty dissection of character. Sheridan's other outstanding comedy. The Rivals (1775), is famous for the character Mrs. Malaprop, whose misuse of words has made her one of the great comic creation of the English theater. Both plays, in their attack on false sentimentalism & moralizing, represent a rebirth of the type of polished, sophisticated comedy written during the Restoration(1660-1700)
2识记The theme of his plays
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.
3领会: His writing techniques
Sheridan's greatness also lies in his theatrical art. He seems to have inherited from his parents a natural ability &inborn knowledge about the theatre. His plays are the product of a dramatic genius as well as of a well-versed theatrical man. Though his dramatic techniques are largely conventional. They are exploited to the best advantage. His plots are well organized, his characters, either major or miner. Are all sharply drawn, & his manipulation of such devices as disguise, mistaken identity & dramatic irony is masterly. Witty dialogues & neat &decent language also make a characteristic of his plays.
4领会：His major works
His plays, especially The Rivals & The School for scandal, are generally regarded as important links between the masterpieces of Shakespeare & those of Bernard Shaw, & as true classics in English comedy. In The Rivals, a comedy of manners, he is satirizing the traditional practice of the parents to arrange marriages for their children without considering the latter's opinion. The school for Scandal is a sharp satire on the moral degeneracy of the aristocratic-bourgeois society in the 18th century England, on the vicious scandal-mongering among the idle rich, on the reckless life of extravagance & love intrigues in the high society, and above all, on the immorality & hypocrisy behind the mask of honorable living & high-sounding moral principles.
Besides The Rivals & The School for Scandal, Sheridan's other works include: St. Patrick's Day, or the Scheming Lieutenant (1775), a two act farce; The Duenna(1775), a comic opera; The Critic(1779), a burlesque & a satire on sentimental drama; & Pizarro (1799), a tragedy adapted from a German play. 5应用：Select reading
An Excerpt from Act 4, Scene III of The School for Scandal
1) Brief Introductions
The School for Scandal is mainly a story about 2 brothers, the hypocritical Joseph Surface & the good-natured, imprudent, spendthrift Charles Surface. 2) Theme
The School for Scandal is one of the great classics in English drama. It is a sharp satire on the moral degeneracy of the aristocratic-bourgeois society in the 18th-century England, on the vicious scandal mongering among the idle rich, on the reckless life of extravagance & love intrigues in the high society & above all, on the immorality & hypocrisy behind the mask of honorable living & high-sounding moral principles. And in terms of theatrical art, it shows the playwright at his best. No wonder, the play has been regarded as the best comedy since Shakespeare.
VIII. Thomas Gray
er, from mysterious preface to inevitable close. Each incident stands out clear & vivid; each corresponding change in the soul of the mariner is registered. The whole experience is an ordeal of oppressive weariness.
(2) \Khan\was composed in a dream after Coleridge took the opium. The poet was reading about Kubla Khan when he fell asleep. The images of the river, of the magnificent palace & other marvelous scenes deposited in his unconsciousness were expressed into about two or three hundred lines. But when he was writing them down, a stranger interrupted him & the vision was never recaptured. Only 54 lines survived.
(3) %uses a freer version of the ballad form to create an atmosphere of the Gothic horror at once delicate & sinister. The tale is an old one of a serpent disguised as a beautiful lady to victimize an innocent maiden. The standard trappings of Gothic horror----the remote castle & the wood, the virgin Christabel in peril & the subtly wicked Geraldine ---- dramatize a confrontation with evil through disturbing suggestions of the sexual, supernatural & fantastic elements of dream. The moaning of the owl & the crowing of the cock, together with the response of the dog to the regular strokes of the clock, produced the effect of mystery & horror in the dead night. Opposed to the nightmarish are images of religious grace & the spring of love that had gushed from the poet's heart. It has been said that the thing attempted in \is the most difficult in the whole field of romance, & nothing could come nearer the mark. The miraculous element, which lies on the face of \The Ancient Marines,\is here driven beneath the surface.
(4) Biographia Literaria, his major prose work is a series of autobiographical notes & dissertations on many subjects, including some brilliantly perceptive literary criticism. The sections in which he expresses his views on the nature of poetry & discusses the works of Wordsworth are especially notable.
4.领会 Characteristics of His Poems
Coleridge was esteemed by some of his contemporaries & is generally recognized today as a lyrical poet & literary critic of the first rank. His poetic themes range from the supernatural to the domestic. His treatises, lectures, & compelling conversational powers made him one of the most influential English literary critics & philosophers of the 19th century.
5.领会:His Achievements
His actual achievement as a poet can be divided into two remarkably diverse groups: the demonic & the conversational. The demonic group includes his three masterpieces: \Rime of the Ancient Mariner,\\& \Khan.\ Mysticism & demonism with strong imagination are the distinctive features of this group. Generally, the conversational group speaks more directly of an allied theme: the desire to go home, not to the past, but to \an improved infancy.\ Each of these poems bears a kind of purgatorial atonement, in which Coleridg
e must fail or suffer so that someone he loves may succeed or experience joy. Coleridge is one of the first critics to give close critical attention to language, maintaining that the aim of poetry is to give pleasure \the medium of beauty.\In analyzing Shakespeare, Coleridge emphasizes the philosophic implication, reading more into the subject than the text & going deeper into the inner reality than only caring for the outer form.
6. 应用Selected Reading Kubla Khan (1)
\Khan\is one of the best-known poems written by Coloridge. It is a vision, a fragment painting, a gorgeous Oriental picture. When the poem was published in 1816, Coleridge prefaced it explaining that the poem came to him in 1797, as he lay asleep at the moment when he was reading a story from Maco polo in an old travel book named Purcha's Pilgrimage. Though the poet calls this poem a fragment, there is a wholeness in the poem & it is highly symbolic. The places symbolize conflicting forces --Xanadu, which represents a beautifully cultivated & ordered product of the rational will, is opposed to Alph's wild & savage chasm which represents an irrationally mysterious creative energy or inspiration. The speaker realizes that the opposites can be reconciled through the creative imagination. \voices prophesying war\confirms that the conflict is always present; the \the product of human imaginative vision is the device (poetry) which will reconcile the opposites; & \damsel with a dulcimer\is anything which releases the poetic vision.
Either ways, however, the description of Xanadu, the pleasure dome, the chasm the sacred river Alph bursts out of, along with the speaker's reaction to this revision of them is exotic & vivid. This poem can be a source of pleasure of verbal music or of freely associated & impressive images. Notice how the meter of the poem supports its shifting ideas: lines 1 through 11 are orderly Iambic tetrameter broken only in line 5; lines 12 through 30 are iambic pentameter which is poly-rhythmic in its diversity; lines 31 through 34 are in a lilting iambic tetrameter shifting to a couplet of iambic pentameter in lines 35 & 36. The poem ends with tetrameter iambic occasionally interrupted by trochaic. The rhymes are also arranged haphazardly to accommodate the idea.
IVGeorge Gordon Byron
1. 一般识记 His Life
English poet, born George Gordon Byron, in London, England, Jan. 22, 1788, and died in Missolonghi, Greece, April 19, 1824.
Lord Byron was perhaps the most fascinating & influential literary personality of the Romantic age. An eloquent poet, handsome nobleman, & political rebel, he was one of the most popular & notorious figures of the 19th century.
He was educated first at Harrow & then Cambridge. In 1807, a volume of Byron's poems, Hours of Idleness, was published. A very harsh review of this work
in the Edinburgh Review prompted a satirical reply from Byron in heroic couplets, entitled English Bards & Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which Byron lashed not only his reviewers, but also the conservative schools of contemporary poetry, showing his lasting contempt for what he considered the commonplace & vulgarity of the \Lake Poets.\
In 1811, Byron took his seat in the House of Lords, & made vehement speeches, attacking the reactionary policy of the English government, & showing his great sympathy for the oppressed poor. At the news of the Greek revolt against the Turks, Byron not only gave the insurgent Greeks financial help but plunged himself into the struggle for the national independence of that country. In July 1823, Byron joined the Greek insurgents at Missolonghi. The Greeks made him commander in chief of their forces in January 1824. Because of several months' hard work under bad weather, Byron fell ill & died. The whole Greek nation mourned over his death.
2. 识记 His Literary Career
In 1807, a volume of Byron's poems, Hours of idleness, was published. In 1809, he wrote a satirical reply to a harsh review in the Edinburgh Review in heroic couplets, entitled English Bards & Scotch Reviewers. The publication in 1812 of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a poem narrating his travels between 1809 & 1811 in Europe, brought Byron fame. In the following two years. He had written a number of long verse-tales, generally known as the Oriented Tales, with similar kind of heroes. In 1816, he wrote the third canto of Childe Harold & the narrative poem The Prisoner of Chillon. From 1816 to 1819, he produced, among other works, the verse drama Manfred (1817), the first two cantos of Don Juan (1818-1819), & the fourth & final canto of Childe Harold (1818). In 1821, Byron wrote the verse drama Cain & the narrative poem The Island. He published, in 1822, one of the greatest political satires, The Vision of Judgment, with its main attack on Southey, the Tory Poet Laureate. Don Juan, a mock epic in 16 cantos, was finished in 1823.
3. 识记His Major works
(1) Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
The poem is about a gloomy, passionate young wanderer who escaped from the society he disliked & traveled around the continent, questing for freedom. It teems with all kinds of recognizable features of Romantic poetry --- the medieval, the outcast figure, love of nature, hatred of tyranny, preoccupation with the remote & savage, & so on. It also contains many vivid & exotic descriptive passages on mountains, rivers & seas. With his strong passion for liberty & his intense hatred for all tyrants, Byron shows his sympathy for the oppressed Portuguese under French occupation; he gives his strong support to the Spanish people fighting for their national independences; he laments over the fallen Greece, expressing his ardent wish that the suppressed Greek people should win their freedom; he glorifies the French Revolution & condemns the despotic Napoleon period; & he appeals for the liberty of the oppressed nations while exalting the
great fighters for freedom in history. 2) Don Juan
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. In the conventional sense, Juan is immoral, yet Byron takes this poem as the most moral. He invests in Juan the moral positives like courage, generosity & frankness, which, according to Byron are virtues neglected by the modern society. In addition, though Don Juan is the central figure & all the threads of the story are woven around him, he & his adventures only provide the framework: the poet's true intention is, by making use of Juan's adventures, to present a panoramic view of different types of society.
4. 领会Characteristics of Byron's Poems
Byron's poetry, though much criticized by some critics on moral grounds, was immensely popular at home, & also abroad, where it exerted great influence on the Romantic Movement. This popularity it owed to the author's persistent attacks on \political, religious, & moral,\to the novelty of his oriental scenery, to the romantic character of the Byronic hero, & to the easy, fluent, & natural beauty of his verse. Byron's diction, though unequal & frequently faulty, has on the whole a freedom, copiousness & vigor. His descriptions are simple & fresh, & often bring vivid objects before the reader. Byron's poetry is like the oratory which hurries the hearers without applause. The glowing imagination of the poet rises & sinks with the tones of his enthusiasm, roughing into argument, or softening into the melody feeling & sentiments. Byron employed the Ottva Rima (Octave Stanza) from Italians mock-heroic poetry. It was perfected in Don Juan in which the convention flows with ease & naturalness, as Colonel Stanhope described \stream sometimes smooth, sometimes rapid & sometimes rushing down in cataracts-a mixture of philosophy & slang-of everything.\
5 领会 Byronic Hero
As a leading Romanticist, Byron's chief contribution is his creation of the \Byronic hero,\a proud & mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With 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. The conflict is usually one of rebellious individuals against outworn social systems & convention. Such a hero appears first in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, & then further developed in later works such as Oriented Tales, Manfred, & Don Juan in different guises. The figure is, to some extent, modeled on the life & personality of Byron himself, & makes Byron famous both at home and abroad.
6 领会 His influence
For a long time, there existed two controversial opinions on Byron. He was regarded in England as the perverted man, the satanic poet; while on the Contine
nt, he was hailed as the champion of liberty, poet of the people. Byron's poetry has great influence on the literature of the whole world. Across Europe, patriots & painters & musicians are all inspired by him. Poets & novelists are profoundly influenced by his works. Actually Byron has enriched European poetry with an abundance of ideas, images, artistic forms & innovations. He stands with Shakespeare & Scott among the British writers who exert the greatest influence over the mainland of Europe.
7 应用 Selected Readings 1) Song for the Luddites(1)
Luddites named after Ned Ludd, a late 18th-century workers' leader, were craftsmen who deliberately smashed machinery in the industrial centers of the East-Midlands, Lancashire & Yorkshire, because they believed that machinery was a cause of their unemployment. On February 27, 1812, Byron in the House of Lords made his famous parliamentary speech, showing his sympathy for the Luddites & indignation at the Frame-breakers Bill(《破坏织机者法案》) which would induce capital punishment to the destroyers of machines.
The poem selected here was written in March 1817. It shows his sympathy & support for the workers in their struggle against the capitalist oppression & exploitation. It is composed of three 5-lined stanzas, each with a rhyme scheme of abaab, all of which are strong & vigorous masculine rhymes. The general metrical movement is anapestic trimeter & dimeter with line 3 in iambic dimeter.. 2) The Isles of Greece (from Don Juan, III)
Don Juan, the masterpiece of Byron, is a long satirical poem. Its hero Juan is an aristocratic libertine, amiable & charming to ladies. Byron puts into Don Juan his rich knowledge of his world & his wisdom. It presents brilliant pictures of life in its various stages of love, joy, suffering, hatred & fear. The unifying principle in Don Juan is the basic ironic theme of appearance & reality, i.e. what things seem to be & what they actually are. The selected section, \Isles of Greece,\is taken from Canto III, which is sung by a Greek singer at the wedding of Don Juan & Haidee, the pure & beautiful daughter of a pirate. In the early 19th century, Greece was under the rule of Turk. By contrasting the freedom of ancient Greece & the present enslavement, the poet appealed to people to struggle for liberty.
V. Percy Bysshe Shelley
1. 一般识记 His Life
Shelley (1792-1822) was born into a wealthy family at Sussex. Though gentle by nature, his rebellious qualities were cultivated in his early years. At 18, Shelley entered Oxford University, where he had written & circulated a pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism (1811), repudiating the existence of God. This event resulted in his expulsion from the university & being disinherited by his headstron
g father. Early in 1818, Shelley & his wife Mary left England for Italy. During the Remaining four years of his life, Shelley traveled & lived in various Italian cities. Shelley was drowned in 1822 in storm near La Spezia, at the age of 30. 2. 识记 His Literary Outlook
Shelley grew up with violent revolutionary ideas under the influence of the free thinkers like Hume & Godwin, so 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. He realized that the evil was also in man's mind. So he predicted that only trough gradual & suitable reforms of the existing institutions could benevolence be universally established & none of the evils would survive in this \society\where people could live together happily, freely & peacefully.
3. 识记 His major works
1) Lyrics: \a Skylark\& \to the West Wind\
In \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's \to the West Wind \(1819); here Shelley's rhapsodic & declamatory tendencies find a subject perfectly suited to them. The autumn wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new Spring, becomes an image of Shelley himself, as he would want to be, in its freedom, its destructive-constructive potential, its universality. \fall upon the thorns of Life! I bleed!\calls the Shelley that could not bear being fettered to the humdrum realities of everyday! The whole poem has a logic of feeling, a not easily analyzable progression that leads to the triumphant, hopeful & convincing conclusion: \winter comes, can Spring before behind?\The poem is written in the terza rima form Shelley derived from his reading of Dante. The nervous thrill of Shelley's response to nature however is here transformed through the power of art & imagination into a longing to be united with a force at once physical & prophetic. Here is no conservative reassurance, no comfortable mysticism, but the primal amorality of nature itself, with its mad fury & its pagan ruthlessness. Shelley's ode is an invocation to a primitive deity, a plea to exalt him in its fury & to trumpet the radical prophecy of hope & rebirth. 2) Poetic drama: Prometheus Unbound (1820)
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. Shelley based his drama on Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, in which Prometheus reconciles with the tyrant Zeus. Radical & revolutionary as Shelley, he wrote in the preface: \ truth, I was averse from a catastrophe so feeble as that reconciling the Champion with the oppressor of Mankind.\So he gave a totally different interpretation, transforming the compromise into a liberation. With the strong support of Ear
th, his mother; Asia, his bride & the help from Demogorgon & Hercules, Zeus is driven from the throne; Prometheus is unbound. The play is an exultant work in praise of humankind's potential, & Shelley himself recognized it as \the most perfect of my products.\ 3) Prose: Defence of Poetry
4. 领会 Characteristics of Shelley's Poetry
Shelley is one of the lending Romantic poets, an intense & original lyrical poet in the English language. Like Blake, he has a reputation as a difficult poet: erudite, imagistically complex, full of classical & mythological allusions. His style abounds in personification & metaphor & other figures of speech which describe vividly what we see & feel, or express what passionately moves us.
5. 应用 Selected Readings
1) A Song: Men of England (1)
This poem was written in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre. It is unquestionably one of Shelley's greatest political lyrics. It is not only a war cry calling upon all working people of England to rise up against their political oppressors, but also an address to point out to them the intolerable injustice of economic exploitation. In the poem Shelley pictured the capitalist society as divided into two hostile classes: the parasitic class (\& the working class (\The song contains eight quatrains; generally each line contains 4 accented syllables. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is uniformly aabb. The last two stanzas of the poem are ironically addressed to those workers who submit passively to capitalist exploitation. They serve as a warning to the working people, that if the latter should give up their struggle they would be digging graves for themselves with their own hands compared to the preceding stanzas, these lines appear weak & ineffectual.
2) Ode to the West Wind
The poem Ode to the West Wind was the best known of Shelley's shorter poems. In the poem the poet describes vividly the activities of the West Wind on the earth, in the sky & on the sea, & then expresses his envy for the boundless freedom of the West Wind & his wish to be free like the wind & scatter his words among mankind. He gathered in this poem a wealth of symbolism, employed a structural art & his powers of metrical orchestration at their mightiest. The autumn wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new Spring, becomes an image of Shelley himself, as he would want to be, in its freedom, its destructive-constructive power, its universality, \fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!\calls the Shelley that could not bear being fettered to the humdrum realities of everyday! The whole poem has a logic of feeling, a progression that leads to the triumphant, hopeful & convincing conclusion: \Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?\Here is no reassurance, no mysticism, but the primal amorality of nature itself, with its mad fury & its pagan ruthlessness. Shelley's ode is an
invocation to a primitive deity, a plea to exalt him in its fury & to trumpet the radical prophecy of hope & rebirth.
VI. John Keats
1. 一般识记 His Life & Literary Career
John Keats (1795-1821) was born in London & educated at the Clarke's School. At 15, he left school & was apprenticed to a surgeon, Thomas Hammond. Subsequently from 1815 to 1816, Keats studied medicine at Guy's Hospital in London. But he left this profession very soon. He read much of Spenser, Milton & Homer. It was Spenser who awakened in Keats his dormant poetic gift, & the first verses which he wrote were in imitation of the Elizabethan Poetry. Besides the classical elements, Hunt, the radical journalist & minor poet, was a vital influence on the early Keats, cultivating him with a taste for liberal politics as well as for the fine arts.
Keats's first important poem \first Looking into Chapman's Homer\was published in 1816 in the paper, Examiner, run by Hunt. In 1817, he published his first volume of poems. In 1818, a poem based on the Greek myth of Endymion & the moon goddess, Endymion, was published. From 1818 to 1820, Keats reached the summit of his poetic creation. In July 1820, the third & best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, & Other Poems, was published. Keats died in Rome on February 23,1821.
2. 识记 His Major Poetic Works
The odes are generally regarded as Keats's most important & mature works. Their subject matter, however, is the poet's abiding preoccupation with the imagination as it reaches out to union with the beautiful. In the greatest of these works, he also suggests the undercurrent of disillusion that accompanies such ecstasy, the human suffering which forever questions the visionary transcendence achieved by art.
1)\to a Nightingale\
It expresses the contrast between the happy world of natural loveliness & human world of agony. Here the aching ecstasy roused by the bird's song is felt like a form of spiritual homesickness, a longing to be at one with beauty. The poem first introduces joy & sorrow, song & music. Death & rapture which free him into the world of dream. By combining a tingling anticipation with a lapsing towards dissolution, Keats manages to keep a precarious balance between mirth & despair, rapture & grief. Inspired by the nightingale's song, his thoughts now ascend from the transfigured physical world, through the imagined ecstasy of death, to the timeless present of the nightingale's song. The ultimate imaginative view of \lands forlorn\evaporates in its extremity as the full associations of the word \the poet back from his near-loss of self-hood to the real & human world of sorrow & death. 2) \on an Grecian Urn\
It shows the contrast between the permanence of art & the transience of human passion. The poet has absorbed himself into the timeless beautiful scenery on the antique Grecian Urn: the lovers, musicians & worshippers on the Urn exist simultaneously & for ever in their intensity of joy. They are unaffected by time, stilled in expectation. This is at once the glory & the limitation of the world conjured up by an object of art. The urn celebrates but simplifies intuitions of ecstasy by seeming to deny our painful knowledge of transience & suffering. 3) Endymion
Endymion was a poem based on the Greek myth of Endymion & the moon goddess. In this poem, Keats described his imagination in an enchanted atmosphere-a lovely moon-lit world where human love & ideal beauty were merged into one. Endymion marked a transitional phase in Keats's poetry, though he himself was not satisfied with it. 4) Isabella
In July 1820, the third & best of his volumes of poetry, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Ages, &Other Poems, was published, The three title poems all deal with mythical & legendary themes of ancient, medieval, & Renaissance times. At the heart of these poems lies Keats's concern with how the ideal can be joined with the real, the imagined with the actual & man with woman.
4.领会Characteristics of Keats's Poetry
Keats's poetry is always sensuous, colorful & rich in imagery, which expresses the acuteness of his senses. Sight, sound, scent, taste & feeling are all used to give an entire understanding of an experience. He has the power of entering the feelings of others-either human or animal. With vivid & rich images, he paints poetic pictures full of wonderful color. Keats's poetry, characterized by exact & closely-knit construction, sensual descriptions, & by force in imagination, gives transcendental values to the physical beauty of the world.
5.应用 Selected Reading: \on a Grecian Urn\
The Grecian Urn that the poem depicts is a piece of ancient Greek pottery with a pastoral scene overwrought upon it. The urn represents a piece of artifact, & it has endured a long history, yet remains untarnished, & the pastoral scene on it can still be seen clearly.
On the surface, this ode is about the Grecian Urn, but we can fairly say it is a commentary on nature & art, for art has the power to preserve intense human experiences, so that they may go on being enjoyed by men from generation to generation. Pleasure in life cannot be protected from change, while artifact can remain intact.
The Ode consists of 5 stanzas, the first four stanzas describing a pastoral scene on the urn, & the last epitomizing the relation of the timeless ideal world in art to the woeful actual world.
VII Jane Austen
1. 一般识记Her life & Literary Career
Jane Austen (1775-1817) was born in a country clergyman's family on 16 December 1775, in the parish of Steventon. She was educated at home with her sister. Through a wide reading of books available in her father's library, Jane acquired a thorough knowledge of 18th -century of Dr. Johnson, the poetry of W. Cowper, as well as the novels by Richardson & Fielding. She lived a quiet, retired &, in public terms, uneventful life, though she did move to several places like Bath, Southampton & Chawton. And her closest companion was her elder sister Cassandra, who like her, never married. Austen began as a child to write novels for her family entertainment. Her works were later published anonymously due to the prejudice against women writers then. She died in Winchester. In her lifelong career, Jane Austen wrote altogether six complete novels, which can be divided into two distinct periods. Her first novel, Sense & Sensibility (1811), tells a story about two sisters & their love affairs; Pride & Prejudice (1813), the most popular of he novels, deals with the five Bennet sisters & their search for suitable husbands; & Northanger Abbey (1818) satirizes those popular Gothic romances of the late 18th century, Mansfield Park (1814) presents the antithesis of worldliness & unworldliness; Emma (1815) gives the thought over self-deceptive vanity; & Persuasion (1818) contrasts the true love with the prudential calculations. Several incomplete works were published long after Austen's death. These include The Watsons (1923), Fragment of a Novel (1925), & Plan of a Novel (1926).
2.识记 Her Major Works
Pride & Prejudice, originally drafted as \Impressions\in 1796, is the most delightful of Jane Austen's works. The title tells of a major concern of the novel pride & prejudice. If to form good relationships is our main task in life, we must first have good judgment. Our first impressions, according to Jane Austen, are usually wrong, as is shown here by those of Elizabeth. In the process of judging others, Elizabeth finds out something about herself: her blindness, partiality, prejudice & absurdity. In time she discovered her own shortcomings. On the other hand, Darcy too learns about other people & himself. In the end false pride is humbled & prejudice dissolved.
3. 领会 Her Literary creation & literary achievements
In her lifelong career, Jane Austen wrote altogether 6 complete novels. They are Sense & Sensibility; Pride & Prejudice; Northanger Abbey; Mansfield Park; Emma & Persuasion. 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.
Chapter 4 The Victorian Period
一． 学习目的和要求
通过本章的学习，对19世纪维多利亚时代英国的政治，经济，历史，文化背景，对维多利亚时代的诗歌，散文，小说在创作思想上的进步和创作技巧上的改革，以及对该时代主要作家的生平，观点，创作旨意，艺术品特点及其代表作的主题，结构，语言，人物刻画等都有一个全面的了解。 并通过作品选读加深体会感受，增强对作品的理解和鉴赏能力。
二． 考核要求
（一） 维多利亚时期概述
1． 识记:（1）维多利亚时期的界定 （2）社会政治，经济，文化背景。
2． 领会:（1）维多利亚时期的文学特点 （2）批判现实主义小说对后世文学的影响。
3． 应用：宪章运动，功利主义，批判现实主义，戏剧独自等名词的解释
（二） 该时期的重要作家
1． 一般识记：重要作家的生平与创作生涯 2． 识记: 重要作品及主要内容
3． 领会：重要作家的创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题思想，人物塑造，语言风格，社会意义等。
4． 应用:（1）狄更斯和萨克雷作品的批判现实主义思想及各自的创作手法，艺术特色。
（2）小说《简·爱》，《呼啸山庄》的主题思想与人物塑造。 （3）\我逝去的公爵夫?quot;中的戏剧独白。 （4）乔泊·艾略特和哈代小说中环境，氛围描述与人物内世界的展示。 A. Introduction to the Victorian Period 1. 识记
(1) Definition: the Victorian Period
Chronologically the Victorian period roughly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria who ruled over England from 1836 to 1901. The period has been generally regarded as one of the most glorious in the English history. (2) Political, Economical & Cultural Background
The early years of the Victorian England was a time of rapid economic development as well as serious social problems. After the Reform Bill of 1832 passed the political power from the decaying aristocrats into the hands of the middle-class industrial capitalists, the Industrial Revolution soon geared up. Towards the mid-century, England had reached its highest point of development as a world power. And yet beneath the great prosperity & richness, there existed widespread poverty & wretchedness among the working class. The worsening living &
working conditions, the mass unemployment & the new Poor Law of 1834 with its workhouse system finally gave rise to the Chartist Movement (1836-1848). During the next twenty years, England settled down to a time of prosperity & relative stability. The middle-class life of the time was characterized by prosperity, respectability & material progress.
But the last three decades of the century witnessed the decline of the British Empire & the decay of the Victorian values.
Ideologically, the Victorians experienced fundamental changes. The rapid development of science & technology, new inventions & discoveries in geology, astronomy, biology & anthropology drastically shook people's religious convictions. Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) & The Descent of Man (1871) shook the theoretical basis of the traditional faith. On the other hand, Utilitarianism was widely accepted & practiced. Almost everything was put to the test by the criterion of utility, that is, the extent to which it could promote the material happiness. 2. 领会
(1) Features of the Victorian Literature
Victorian literature, as a product of its age, naturally took on its quality of magnitude & diversity. It was many-sided & complex, & reflected both romantically & realistically the great changes that were going on in people's life & thought. Great writers & great works abounded. (2) Features of Victorian novels
In this period, the novel became the most widely read & the most vital & challenging expression of progressive thought. While sticking to the principle of faithful representation of the 18th-century realist novel, novelists in this period carried their duty forward to the criticism of the society & the defense of the mass. Although writing from different points of view & with different techniques, they shared one thing in common, that is, they were all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry at the inhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as represented by the money-worship & Utilitarianism & the widespread misery, poverty & injustice. Their truthful depiction of people's life & bitter & strong criticism of the society had done much in awakening the public consciousness to the social problems & in the actual improvement of the society.
Victorian literature, in general, truthfully represents the reality & spirit of the age. The high-spirited vitality, the down-to-earth earnestness, the good-natured humor & unbounded imagination are all unprecedented. In almost every genre it paved the way for the coming century, where its spirits, values & experiments are to witness their bumper harvest.
3. 应用 Definitions of several terms 1) The Chartist Movement (1836-1848)
The English workers got themselves organized in big cities & brought forth the People's charter, in which they demanded basic rights & better living & working conditions. They, for three times, made appeals to the government, with hundr
eds of thousands of people's signatures. The movement swept over most of the cities in the country. Although the movement declined to an end in 1848, it did bring some improvement to the welfare of the working class. This was the first mass movement of the English working class & the early sign of the awakening of the poor, oppressed people. 2) 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.
3) Critical Realism
The Victorian Age is an age of realism rather than of romanticism-a 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. 4) 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 \Last Duchess\is one of the best-known dramatic monologues.
B. Victorian Writers I. Charles Dickens
1． 一般识记 His Life & Literary Career
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) was born at Portsmouth. His father, a poor clerk in the Navy Pay office, was put into the Marsalsea Prison for debt when young Charles was only 12 years old. The son had to give up schooling to work in an underground cellar at a shoe-blacking factory - a position he considered most humiliating. We find the bitter experiences of that suffering child reflected in many of Dickens's novels. In 1827, Charles entered a lawyer's office, & two years later he became a Parliamentary reporter for newspapers. From 1833 Dickens began to write occasional sketches of London life, which were later collected & published under the title Sketches by Boz (1836). Soon The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837) appeared in monthly installments. And since then, his life became one of endless hard work. In his later years, he gave himself to public readings of his works, which brought plaudits & comfort but also exhausted him. In 1870, this man of great heart & vitality died of overwork, leaving his last novel unfinished.
2. 识记His Major Works
Upon his death, Dickens left to the world a rich legacy of 15 novels & a number of short stories. They offer a most complete & realistic picture of English society of his age & remain the highest achievement in the 19th-century English novel. In nearly all his novels, behind the gloomy pictures of oppression & poverty, behind the loud humor & buffoonery, is his gentleness, his genial mirth, & his simple faith in mankind.
The following is a list of his novels & other collections in three periods: (1) Period of youthful optimist
Sketches by Boz (1836); The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (1836-1837); Oliver Twist (1837-1838); Nicholas Nickleby (1838-1839); The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-1841); Barnaby Rudge(1841) (2) Period of excitement & irritation
American Notes (1842); Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1845); A Christmas Carol (1843); Dombey & Son (1846-1848); David Copperfield (1849-1850) (3) Period of steadily intensifying pessimism
Bleak House (1852-1853); Hard Times (1854); Little Dorrit (1855-1857); A Tale of Two Cities (1859); Great Expectations (1860-1861); Our Mutual Friend (1864-1865); Edwin Drood (unfinished)(1870)
3. 领会 Distinct Features of His Novels (1) Character Sketches & Exaggeration
In his novels are found about 19 hundred figures, some of whom are really such \typical characters under typical circumstances,\that they become proverbial or representative of a whole group of similar persons.
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.
(2) Broad Humor & Penetrating Satire
Dickens is well known as a humorist as well as a satirist. He sometimes employs humor to enliven a scene or lighten a character by making it (him or her) eccentric, whimsical, or laughable. Sometimes he uses satire to ridicule human follies or vices, with the purpose of laughing them out of existence or bring about reform.
(3) Complicated & Fascinating Plot
Dickens seems to love complicated novel constructions with minor plots beside the major one, or two parallel major plots within one novel. He is also skillful at creating suspense & mystery to make the story fascinating. (4) The Power of Exposure
As the greatest representative of English critical realism, Dickens made his novel the instrument of morality & justice. Each of his novels reveals a specific social problem.
4. 领会 His Literary Creation & Literary Achievements
Charles Dickens is one of the greatest critical realistic writers of the Victorian Age. It is his serious intention to expose & criticize in his works all the poverty, injustice, hypocrisy & corruptness he saw all around him. In his works, Dickens sets a full map & a large-scale criticism of the 19th-century England, particularly London. A combination of optimism about people & realism about society is obvious in these works. His representative works in the early period include Oliver Twist, David Copperfield & so on.
His later works show a highly conscious modern artist. The settings are more complicated; the stories are better structured. Most novels of this period present a sharper criticism of social evils & morals of the Victorian England, for example, Bleak House, Hard Times, Great Expectations & so on. The early optimism could no more be found.
Charles Dickens is a master story-teller. His language could, in a way, be compared with Shakespeare's. His humor & wit seem inexhaustible. Character-portrayal is the most outstanding feature of his works. His characterizations of child (Oliver Twist, etc.), some grotesque people (Fagin, etc.) & some comical people (Mr. Micawber, etc.) are superb. Dickens also employs exaggeration in his works. Dickens's works are also characterized by a mixture of humor & pathos. 5. 应用 Selected Reading
An Excerpt from Chapter III of Oliver Twist
The novel is famous for its vivid descriptions of the workhouse & life of the underworld in the 19th-century London. The author's intimate knowledge of people of the lowest order & of the city itself apparently comes from his journalistic years. Here the novel also presents Oliver Twist as Dickens's first child hero & Fagin the first grotesque figure.
This section, Chapter III of the novel, is a detailed account of how he is punished for that \impious & profane offence of asking for more\& how he is to be sold. At three pound ten, to Mr. Gamfield, the notorious chimneysweeper. Though we can afford a smile now & then, we feel more the pitiable state of the orphan boy & the cruelty & hypocrisy of the workhouse board. II. The Bronte Sisters
1. 一般识记 Their lives & literary Career
Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), Emily Bronte (1818-1848), & their gifted sister Anne Bronte (1820-1849), came from a large family of Irish origin. Their father was a clergyman at Haworth, Yorkshire. When they were young, the Bronte sisters were sent to a school for clergymen's daughters. The oldest two died there due to the poor & unhealthy conditions. This experience inspired the later portrayal of Lowood School in the novel Jane Eyre (1847). After the death of the elder sisters, Charlotte & Emily were brought home to be educated by their father. For some time, they worked in a boarding school & were subsequently governesses in rich families.
