I wish I am good enough to match U

《英美文学史》考前複習

一、            作家作品

英国文学史

Early and Medieval Period  

Geoffrey Chaucer  The Canterbury Tales

The Period of English Renaissance  

Edmund Spenser   The Faerie Queene

Francis Bacon    Essays, “The Advancement of Learning”, “New Instrument”

William Shakespeare    Four Great Tragedies= Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth

Four Great Comedies= A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night

The Period of English Bourgeois Revolution

John Bunyan   The Pilgrim’s Progress

John Miltion    Paradise Lost

The 18^th Century

Alexander Pope   Essay on Criticism, The Rape of the Lock, Essay on Man

Jonathan Swift   Gulliver’s Travels, “ A Modest Proposal”

Daniel Defoe   Robinson Crusoe

Samuel Richardson    Pamela, Clarissa

Henry Fielding   Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews

The Romantic Period

William Wordsworth    Lyrical Ballads

Samuel Taylor Coleridge    “The Rime of Ancient Mariner”, “Kubla Khan”

Lord Byron   Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Percy Bysshe Shelley   Prometheus Unbound, Queen Mab, The Revolt of Islam, “Ode to the West Wind”

John Keats   Endymion, Lamia, Hyperion, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

The 19^th Century

William Makepeace Thackeray     Vanity Fair

Charles Dickens    Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities

Jane Austen   Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility

Charlotte Bronte   Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte    Wuthering Heights

George Eliot    The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner

Thomas Hardy  Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge

The Modern Period

T. S. Eliot    The Wasteland

D. H. Lawrence    Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, The Rainbow, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

James Joyce    Ulysses

Virginia Woolf    To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway

美国文学史

The Colonial Period

Benjamin Franklin  Poor Richard’s Almanac, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

The Romantic Period

Washington Irving    Rip Van Winkle, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Henry David Thoreau    Walden

Nathaniel Hawthorne    The Scarlet Letter, House with Seven Gabbles

Herman Melville    Moby Dick

Walt Whitman    Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself

The Realistic Period

William Dean Howells   The Rise of Silas Lapham

Henry James    A Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller

Mark Twain    The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Stephen Crane    The Red Badge of Courage

Frank Norris  McTeague

Theodore Dreiser   Sister Carrire, An American Tragedy

F. Scott Fitzgerald    The Great Gatsby

Ernest Hemingway    A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Old Man and the Sea

William Faulkner    The Sound and the Fury

American Drama

Eugene O’Neill    Long Day’s Journey Into the Night, The Hairy Ape, Emperor Jones

Arthur Miller    Death of a Salesman

二、            事实判断

10.  Samuel Richardson is a famous epistolary novelist while Sir Walter Scott invented the historical novel.

11.  Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is sometimes regarded as the first psycho-analytical novel in the English literary history.

12.  Henry James was an important realistic writer. His works are called literature of “psychological realism.”

13.  The beginning of the English Romantic Period was marked by the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and its end was marked by Scott’s death in 1832.

14.  Ezra Pound was the leader of Imagist poets. He emphasized the economy of words in writing poetry.

15.  William Shakespeare used blank verse in the writing of his plays.

16.  The novel in its modern sense rose in England in the 18^th century. It reflects the ordinary life of the ordinary people in reality.

17.  Classic poets believed that they should follow certain fixed rules when writing literature.

18.  Alexander Pope was a representative classic poet who paid great attention to the rules of writing poetry.

19.  In the 19^th century, the Critical Realist School was formed in England. Important writers belonging to this school include Dickens and Thackeray.

20.  Nathaniel Hawthorne was an important American writer in the Romantic Period. He called his works romances.

21.  Ernest Hemingway was the leader of the “lost generation” writers.

22.  Mark Twain’s works are generally marked by their “local colour.” He preferred to represent social life through portraits of local places which he knew best.

23.  Fitzgerald is famous for his detailed descriptions in his masterpiece The Great Gatsby.

24.  T. S. Eliot was a modern poet. His representative work, The Wasteland, represents the spiritual emptiness of the human world.

25.  In the writing of his Poor Richard’s Almanac, Benjamin Franklin includes a lot of witty remarks, some of which have become mottos of people’s lives. However, he didn’t invent all these maxims himself, but borrowed a lot from earlier writers’ works.

26.  Emily Dickinson’s poetry is characterized with concise, direct and simple diction and syntax.

27.  Dean Howells was an important representative of American realistic novel. To him, realism is by no means mere photographic pictures of externals but includes a central concern with “motives” and psychological conflicts.

28.  In the writing of his plays, Arther Miller is mostly concerned about the dilemma of modern man in relation to his family and work. Death of a Salesman is a good example.

29.  Faulkner was a daring formal experimentalist. His efforts in experiments are evident in his complicated methods of narration.

30.  Eugene O’Neil was the greatest dramatist in the period of American modern drama. He was the owner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel Prize.

三、            简答题

1) What was “The Norman Conquest”? What was its impact on the English language and literature? (pp. 7-8)

2) What was “The English Conquest”? What was its impact on the English language and literature? (pp. 2-3)

3) What are the periods of Shakespeare’s literary career? What are their respective features? (pp. 66-76)

4) What are the periods of Charles Dickens’ literary career? What are their respective features? (pp. 337-361)

5) How is William Faulkner’s style? (pp. 318-321)

7) Who are active romanticists? Tell their respective features.

8) What were the basic principles of classicists? (pp.149-150)

9) What is the importance of Sir Walter Scott in the history of English literature? What is special about him?

10) What are the basic principles held by naturalist writers? What’s the difference between naturalist literature and realistic literature? (p. 440)

11) What are the important thoughts of New England Transcendentalists? (pp.75-76)

12) What are the basic principles of Imagist poets? Tell at least one representative Imagist poet and his work. (pp. 221)

13) What kind of person is Robinson Crusoe in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe? What’s the significance of this image? (pp. 177-179)

14) What kind of person is Santiago in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea? What’s the significance of this image? (p. 301)

15) What were the two important literary movement and school in the early part of the 18^th century England? And what was their influence on English literature? (pp. 148-150)

四、            论述题

要点：Three periods: 1. Period of historical plays and comedies. This period is characterized by happiness and optimism. This period can be further put into two phases: the phase of apprenticeship and the phase of maturation. Great Comedies. Even tragedies have comic colour.

2. Period of tragedies. This period is characterized by gloom. Great tragedies.

3. Period of romances or tragi-comedies. This period is characterized by reconciliation. The Tempest

要点：The English critical realists of the 19^th century not only gave a satirical portrayal of the bourgeoisie and all the ruling classes, but also showed profound sympathy for the common people. In their best works, the greed and hypocrisy of the upper classes are contrasted with the honesty and good-heartedness of the obscure “simple people” of the lower classes. Here lies the root of the democratic and humanistic character of the critical realism of the 19^th century. But the realists did not find a way to eradicate social evils. They did not realize the necessity of changing the bourgeois society. They were unable to find a good solution to the social contradictions. The chief tendency in their works is not of revolution but rather of reformism. They often start with a powerful exposure of the ugliness of the bourgeois world, merely to close in a much too coincidental happy ending or an impotent compromise. Here we see at once the strength and the weakness of the critical realism. Charles Dickens is a good example to show that the critical realist is a reformer. In many of Dickens’ works, there are good models of kind-hearted people from the bourgeois class. Dickens believed in “fraternity”. He thought that all men were brothers. If the rich people helped the poor, then there would be no poverty in the society. He intended to create good models in his novels to be learned from so that in this way the social problems would be eradicated. And in most of Dickens’ early works, there is always a happy ending achieved in one way or another. Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” clearly shows Dickens’ good intention in writing his critical novels. Mr. Brownlow is a good model for the bourgeois class.

要点：1. Dickens’ literary career can be divided into three periods: 1) 1836-1841, characterized by fun, high spirit, and a tendency even to literary boisterous play, alternating sometimes with spells of sentimentalism. Naive optimism is characteristic of the petty-bourgeois humanitarians of his time. His famous works in this period are “The Pickwick Papers,” and “Oliver Twist.” The former is a book with a lot of fun. Although the second begins with miseries, it ends happily. Dickens creates the character of Mr. Brownlow to be learned from by the bourgeois class in the belief that in this way social problems can be eradicated. 2) 1842-1850. In this period, Dickens’ naive optimism about capital society was profoundly shaken. His works in this period are covered with gloom. Novels like “Martin Chuzzlewit,” and “Dombey and Son” severely criticize the social evils of Dickens’ time, especially the money-oriented nature of the bourgeois class. 3) 1851-1870. This period is even darker than the second. Up to this time, Dickens maintained some hope of reform under capitalism, but beginning from “Bleak House” there was an “underlying tone of bitterness” which showed the novelist’s loss of hope for English bourgeois society. “A Tale of Two Cities” is a representative work in this period. In this novel, Dickens vividly and relentlessly exposed the cruel deed of the upper class to the lower class. However, from this novel, we can see that even after his loss of hope, Dickens still held his reformist point of view. He didn’t believe in revolution. He called for reforms on the existing system.

要点：1. Realism and modernism are based on different philosophies, realism on rational philosophy while modernism on irrational philosophy. 2. Realistic literature describes the external, objective world while modernistic literature focuses on the inner, subjective world. Therefore, the former often writes about public life and the latter mainly about private life. 3. Realistic literature often follows the traditional way of chronological narration, but modernistic literature doesn’t. It is a technique often employed to record the psychological activity of the characters in modernistic literature. 4. Realistic literature includes the traditional elements like plot and characterization, but modernistic literature doesn’t. Usually there is no typical plot or characterization in modernistic literature. 5. Realistic works often have a resolution in the end while modernistic literature is often open-ended. 6. Realistic works are generally more optimistic than modernistic literature. There is often a pessimistic tone in the latter.

要点：Romantic literature has the following characteristics: 1) sensibility; 2) primitivism; 3) love of nature; 4) mysticism; 5) individualism; 6) sympathetic interest in the past, especially the medieval; 7) against whatever characterized classicism.

We can easily find examples of romantic writers whose works have the above features. Generally speaking, all romantic writers focus on the sensibility, especially the natural flow of feelings, rather than the outside world. Many romantic writers sing high praises of nature. Wordsworth is a good example. It’s said that his poetry about nature is his best poetry. A strong interest in nature naturally causes some poets to take a liking to primitive life, to idealize rural life and even to show sympathy for animal life. Goldsmith and Cowper are two examples. Mysticism, and even Gothicism, is another feature. Poets like Keats include mysterious stories in their poems. Some other poets like Percy have a strong interest in the medieval literature, while others like Burns find sources from folk songs or ballads. Individualism is an important feature of romantic literature. Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a remarkable poem in high praise of individualism. On the whole, romanticists are against whatever classicists support. They abandon the heroic couplet in favor of blank verse, the sonnet, the spenserian stanza and many experimental verse forms. They drop the conventional poetic diction in favor of fresher language and bolder figures. Typical literary forms of the romantic writers include the lyric, especially the love lyric, the reflective lyric, the nature lyric and the lyric of morbid melancholy and sentimental novel.

要点：The English novel didn’t come in one day. In the early time of the history of the English literature, there were already literary works which looked like the novel. For example, Sir Thomas More’s Utopia in the English Renaissance period also tells a story and is written in prose. Then in the 17^th century, the prosperity of prose in English literature in a way prepared in artistic form for the rise of the novel. Moreover, letter writing, which was a popular event at that time, even served as a prelude to the novel in content. In these letters, people, instead of telling romances of heroes, began to focus on the description of their own lives, the common life of the common people. Addison’s The Spectators and Steele’s The Tatler in the eighteenth century moved a step forward towards the novel. The character sketches published in series on the two papers had already taken on the form of creation of characters in the novel. Finally, in the eighteenth century, the novel rises. People don’t agree with each other on who is the first novelist in the English literature. Some think that Defoe and his Robinson Crusoe are the pioneers in the English novel, while others believe that Samuel Richardson should be regarded as the first English novelist, for Robinson Crusoe still lives in the shadow of romances of the hero and Richardson’s Pamela exactly tells the story of the everyday life of common people. The first English novels can be called realistic in the sense that they describe the everyday life of the common people. Another important writer in this period is Henry Fielding who wrote Tom Jones, both of which are representatives of the English realistic novel in the eighteenth century. However, in the middle of that century, there was a new turn in creation of the novel, that is, the tendency to focus on the feelings of characters rather than the outside world. These writers are called sentimentalists such as Laurence Sterne who wrote A Sentimental Journey. In the nineteenth century, however, the English novel experienced an important change. After witnessing the social problems of the society at that time, some writers decided to expose and criticize the social problems in their novels. These writers include Charles Dickens and Thackeray, the former often showing the miserable life of the underworld people and the latter vividly presenting the life of the middle class in England. At the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, realism continued to develop in England. Although it was still realism, writers’ tone of criticizing social problems sharply reduced. Some realistic writers like Thomas Hardy were influenced by naturalism. The famous realistic writer Henry James even changed the definition of “reality”. To him, the psychological reality of a person’s mind was more important than the reality of the outside world. This led to the turn to modernism. Modern novels focus more on the revelation of the minds of characters. Modern novelists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf experimented with many new literary techniques. Stream of unconsciousness was one they employed to record the fragments of thoughts of characters in their novels. D. H. Lawrence was another important modern novelist: although his method was rather traditional, the themes of criticism of industrialization struck the keynote of modernism.

要点：1. The oldest relic of the English poetry was “Beowulf,” the national epic of the English people. It tells a legend of a hero of the Anglo-Saxon ancestors. It is alliterative verses. 2. Chaucer is supposed to be “father of the English poetry” because he brought it an important change. He borrowed the rhymed verses of French to the English poetry and a new type of English poetry came into being, that is, rhymed verses which last till today. Chaucer wrote his famous “The Canterbury Tales” in heroic couplet, a form which was later regarded as classic and dignified. Chaucer’s poetry reflected different levels of the English life of his time; therefore, he is often regarded as “founder of English realism.” 3. Edmund Spenser represented the highest achievement of the English poetry in the time of Renaissance. He created his “Spenserian Stanza” in “The Faerie Queene,” a long poem in praise of England and Queen Elizabeth I. In this period, the form of sonnet was introduced to the English poetry and it flourished with the writing of such famous poets as Shakespeare. 4. In the period of the English Bourgeois Revolution, literature served as weapon to support or oppose the revolution. In this period, John Milton wrote the most famous English poem “Paradise Lost” in the form of blank verse. This epic sang high praises of the revolutionary spirit of the English bourgeoisie and the dignity of man. 5. In the eighteenth century when classicism prevailed, it was held that poetry should follow the classic forms like heroic couplet while blank verse was not a good form for poetry. Famous poets like Pope even wrote their criticism in the form of heroic couplet. Poetry in this period mainly discussed and criticized social norms and were meant to teach the bourgeois class proper manners. 6. If poetry mainly wrote about the outside world in the previous time, in the romantic period, it began to focus on expression of poets’ feelings. In this period, the form of poetry was not as important as spontaneous flow of emotions. Poetry mainly described natural beauty and good hope of poets. Borrowing from ballads and folk songs was another characteristic of Romantic poetry. 7. At the end of the 19^th century, aesthetes wrote poetry not for any other purpose but art. Aesthetes made great efforts in refining the form of poetry and in choosing the best diction. “Art for art’s sake” was their principle. 8. Modern poetry began at turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Symbolism and imagism are two striking features of modern poetry which was supposed to reflect the chaotic inner world of human beings.

要点：1) drama before the English Renaissance: Miracle Play, Morality play, Interlude and classic plays

      2) drama during the English Renaissance represented by William Shakespeare

      3) drama during the Restoration: John Dryden

      4) 18^th century drama: comedies and Richard Sheridan

      5) 20^th century drama: Bernard Shaw and his realistic drama