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英国文学复习笔记整理

1 Although Geoffrey Chaucer was essentially a medieval writer, he bore marks of humanism and anticipated a new era of literature to come.

2 Romance, which uses narrative verse or prose to tell stories of Knightly adventures or other heroic deeds, is a popular literary form in the medieval period.

The Renaissance Period

Edmund Spencer / Christopher Marlowe / William Shakespeare Francis Bacon / John Donne / John Milton

1. Renaissance: between 14th and mid-17th century.

2. Renaissance means rebirth or revival is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as: The rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, The new discoveries in geography and astrology,

The religious reformation and the economic expansion. 3. The Renaissance, therefore in essence is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and Scholars made attempt to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in Medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the purity of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.

The religious reformation in the early 16th-century England was a reflection of the class struggles waged by the rising bourgeoisie against the feudal class and its ideology 4. Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance

The essence of humanism is to emphasize human qualities (1) Capable of individual development in the direction of perfection.

(2) They inhabited was theirs not to despise by to question, explore and enjoy.

(3) Tomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representative of the English humanist.

5 Metaphysical poetry: Metaphysical is characterized by passionate thought succession of concentrated image, exercise of elaborate ingenuity and “wit”, John Donne was the famous of the Metaphysical poet. The Metaphysical Poets were men of learning and to show their learning was their endeavor. Edmund Spenser

Masterpiece: The Faerie Queene (allegory)

Christopher Marlowe （University wits）

1 Important plays: Tambulaine, Dr.Faustus, The Jew of Malta

2 Marlowe voiced the supreme desire of the man of the Renaissance of infinite powers and authority (1) Perfected the blank verse.

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(2) Creation of the Renaissance hero to English drama, it embodies Marlowe’s ideal of human dignity and capacity.

3Dr.Faustus: aspiring for knowledge, the play’s dominant moral is human rather than religious, it celebrates the human passion for knowledge, power and happiness, it also reveals man’s frustration in realizing the high aspiration in a hostile moral order and the confinement to time is the cruelest fact of man’s condition.

4 The statement that a man gained the whole world but lost his own soul makes a good summary of the main plot of The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus

William Shakespeare

1. Works: 154 sonnets, 38 plays, 2 long poems Comedy: Merchant of Venice.

2 4 great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth

Each portrays some noble hero, who face the injustice of human fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation; each hero has his weakness of nature.

Hamlet, the melancholic scholar-prince, faces the dilemma between action and mind:

Othello’s inner weakness is made use of by the outside evil force;

old King Lear who is unwilling to totally give up his power makes himself suffer from treachery(背叛) and infidelity(失真)

Macbeth’s lust for power stirs up his ambition and leads him to incessant crime.

3 statements best illustrates the theme of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 :The speaker praises the power of artistic creation. Francis Bacon 1 Masterpiece: Essay; Novum Organum.(新工具)

2 Novum Organum: most impressive display of Beacon’s intellect. The argument is for the use of inductiveness of reason in scientific study.

3 Beacon suggests the inductive reasoning, i.e. proceeding from the particular to the general, in place of the Aristotelian method, the deductive reasoning, i.e. proceeding from the general to the particular. 4 Beacon’s essays are famous for their brevity, compactness and powerfulness.

John Donne

Metaphysical poetry

The most striking feature of Donne’s poetry is precisely its tang of reality, in the sense that it seems to reflect life in a real rather than a poetical world.

Donne frequently applies conceits.

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John Milton

Three major poetical works:

Paradise lost, Paradise Regained, Samson Agonists

The freedom of the will is the key tone of Milton’s creed. Paradise Lost

The epic is the masterpiece of John Milton

The story is drawn from the Old Testament of the Bible, which tells how Satan, after being defeated in his rebel against God, tempts Adam and Eve to eat the apples for the Forbidden Tree, and causes the Fall of Man.

The Neoclassic Period

John Bunyan / Alexander Pope / Daniel Defoe / Jonathan Swift Henry Fielding / Samuel Johnson / Richard Brinsley Sheridan Tomas Gray

1 Between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the publication of lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 2 Enlightenment or the Age of reason

The Enlightenment movement was a progressive intellectual movement, which flourished in France and swept the whole Western Europe at the time

Its propose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlightenment celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. They called for a reference to order, reason and rule, yield place to “eternal truth” “eternal justice” and “natural equality”

They believed that human beings were limited, dualistic and imperfect literature at the time, heavily didactic and moralizing.

They believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work. To work, to economize and to accumulate wealth constitutes the whole meaning of their life. This aspect of social life is best-formed in the realistic novels of the 18th century.

3 In the field of literature, they believed that the artistic should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy. Seek proportion, unity, harmony and grace in literary expression, in an effort to delight, instruct and correct human beings.

4 Neoclassicism. In English literature and, the stylistic trend between the Restoration and the advent of romanticism at the beginning of the 19th century is referred to as Neoclassicism.

5 Heroic: It is a pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The form was introduced into English by Chaucer and widely used subsequently.

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