英美文学复习材料
Jeffery Chaucer
•Father/founder of English Poetry
•Major works:
•The Romaunt of the Rose 《玫瑰传奇》
•The Parliament of Fowls《百鸟议会》
•Troilus and Criseyde 《特鲁伊罗斯和克里塞德》
•The Legend of Good Women《好女人传》
•The Canterbury Tales 《坎特伯雷故事集》
The Canterbury Tales
•The story of a group of thirty people who travel as pilgrims to Canterbury.
•A rich, tapestry (织锦) of medieval social life combining elements of all classes, from
nobles to workers, from priests and nuns to drunkards and thieves.
•London dialect
•The General Prologue consists of character sketches of each member of the group that is
going to Canterbury.
The Canterbury Tales
•Some of the characters
•The Knight :the first story teller
•The Prioress 女修道院副院长
•The Merchant
•The Wife of Bath 巴斯妇: the first female figure in British literature
•Poor Priest
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
•Renaissance
•Meaning: rebirth or revival
•Time: began in the 14th century, end in the 17th century.
•Place: began in Italy, later spread to France, Spain and England.
•A keen interest in the Greek and Latin culture; the art and science of ancient Greece and
Rome were being born again after long years of neglect.
•Essence: humanism
William Shakespeare
•Works
•37 plays
•2 long narrative poems
•154 sonnets
William Shakespeare
•Drama:
•Tragedies- Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet
•Comedies- As You Like It, The Merchants of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,The Taming of the Shrew,Twelfth Night
• Histories- Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Henry VIII, Richard III,
•Romances/tragicomedies: Cymbeline, The Tempest
Romeo and Juliet
•Characters: The Montagues / The Capulets
•Plot
•Theme
•Act II, Scene II
•The balcony scene
•One of the romantic peaks of the play.
•In this scene, Romeo has employed three comparisons to express his admiration for Juliet: the sun, twinkling stars, a bright angel.
William Shakespeare :Sonnet
•A sonnet is a lyric invariably of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter五音步抑扬格 , restricted to a definite rhyme scheme韵律 .
•Three types of sonnet
1) Petrarchan sonnet (彼特拉克体/意大利十四行诗 )
2) Spenserian Sonnet（斯宾塞体十四行诗）
3) Shakespearian Sonnet（莎士比亚/英国体十四行诗
Shakespearian Sonnet
•3 quatrains + a couplet
•abab cdcd efef gg
•Sonnet 18
•―Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?‖
•Theme: A nice summer day is usually transient, but the beauty in poetry can last forever. Thus Shakespeare expresses his faith in the permanence of poetry, of art and love.
•Sonnet 29
•Theme: The power of love can overcome all the difficulties and obstacles in one’s lifetime.
Romanticism
•Begins with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and ends with the death of Sir Walter Scott(1832).
•Pre-romantic poets: William Blake, Robert Burns
•Active romantic poets: George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats
•Passive romantic poets / Lake Poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey.
Robert Burns
•Farmer poet/national poet of Scotland
•Write in Scottish dialect
•Themes of poetry are life of the common Scotch, love, friendship, ect.
•―A Red, Red Rose
•―Auld Lang Syne‖: friendship, parting-song
William Wordsworth
•Poet Laureate 桂冠诗人
•Collaborate with Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads: a declaration of romanticism
•Define Poetry as ―the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which originates in
emotion recollected in tranquility‖.
•A worshipper of nature
•― I Wandered Lonely as Cloud‖: four six-line stanzas; iambic tetrameter; rhyme scheme:
ababcc; theme: the harmony between things in nature and the harmony between nature
and the poet himself/ Nature' s beauty uplifts the human spirit.
•―Composed Upon Westminster Bridge‖: a Petrarchan sonnet; abbaabba cdcdcd ;describing London in an early morning; figures of speech: simile, metaphor,
personification
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
•one of the leading romantic poets
•loved people and hated the oppressors and exploiters
•His wife: Mary Shelley Frankenstein 《弗兰肯斯坦》
•Major works:
•The Necessity of Atheism 《无神论的必要性》
•Queen Mab 《仙后麦布》
•Prometheus Unbound 《解放了的普罗米修斯》
•Ode to the West Wind 《西风颂》
•Ode to a Skylark 《云雀颂》
•A Defence of Poetry 《诗辩》
•The Masque of Anarchy 《暴政的行列》
Ode to the West Wind
•Ode: a long lyric poem that is serious in subject, elevated in style, and elaborate in its
structure. It is written to praise and glorify somebody or to eulogize something.
•Form: 1. Every stanza is a sonnet; five stanzas of iambic pentameter.
•2. Every stanza consists of 4 terza rima（三行诗隔句押韵法 ） + couplet.
•Structure: stanza 1-3: activities of the west wind on the earth, in the sky and on the sea.
Stanza 4-5: the poet’s wish to be free like the wind.
Ode to the West Wind
•Theme: 1. Revolutionary spirit; 2. Wish to destroy the old and build up a new world.
•The art of language:
•1. The use of alliteration, capitalization, end rhyme, ect.
•2. many figures of speech: simile /metaphor / personificiton / allusion / symbol
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
•The first important English woman novelist
•Writing style:
•Theme: mostly about love and marriage
•Language: simple, humorous, witty, ironic
•Plot: straightforward, little action
•Characters: like real living persons
•Dialogues: true to life
•She called her work ―a fine engraving made upon a little piece of ivory only two inches
square‖ (―两寸牙雕‖)
•A very narrow literary field
•But within her own field, she is unrivaled: vivid portrait of her major characters and
realistic and colorful pictures of the life and manners of the upper middle class in rural
England of her time
Jane Austen
•Major works:
•Northanger Abbey《诺桑觉寺》 (1818)
•Sense and Sensibility 《理智与情感》(1811)
•Pride and Prejudice 《傲慢与偏见》(1813)
•Mansfield Park《曼斯菲尔德庄园》(1814)
•Emma 《艾玛》 (1816)
•Persuasion 《劝导》(1818)
Pride and Prejudice
•―It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune
must be in want of a wife.‖
•Main characters/plot/theme
•Dialogues
•Character analysis: Mr. and Mrs. Bennet; Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy; Jane and Mr.
Bingley
•Pride/prejudice
Charles Dickens (1812 –1870)
•Victorian novelist
•Representative writer of critical realism
•critical realism:
•1. Objectivity :truly reflected the life of the Capitalist Society
•2. Criticalness: deeply exposed and criticized Feudal aristocracy and the capitalists;
advocated humanism & pursue the truth
•3. Typicality :Use typical characters in a certain environment.
Charles Dickens
•Major works:
•《匹克威克外传》（The Pickwick Papers）
•《雾都孤儿》（Oliver Twist）
•《老古玩店》（The Old Curiosity Shop）
•《美国纪行》（American Notes）
•《圣诞颂歌》（A Christmas Carol）
•《董贝父子》（Dombey and Son）
•《大卫·科波菲尔》（David Copperfield）
•《荒凉山庄》（Bleak House）
•《艰难时世》（Hard Times）
•《双城记》（A Tale of Two Cities）
•《我们共同的朋友》（Our Mutual Friend）
A Tale of Two Cities
•Two cities: Paris and London
•Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution
•Three groups of people:
•The feudal aristocrat： Marquis（侯爵） Evremond 封建贵族
•The revolutionary masses： Ms Defarge 革命群众
•Ideal persons: Doctor Manette; Lucy Manette; Charles Darney; Sydney Carton 理想化
人物
A Tale of Two Cities
•It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, i
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way。--in short,
the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted
on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
•parallelism
Oliver Twist
•vivid descriptions of the workhouse and life of the underworld in the nineteenth-century
London.
•―Please, sir, I want some more‖
Bronte sisters
•Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
•Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
•Anne Bronte: Agnes Grey The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall
Jane Eyre
•The first important governess novel in the English literary history
•Plot: five stages
•Childhood at Gateshead
•Education at the Lowood School
•As a governess at Thornfield
•With the Rivers family at Moor House
•Her reunion with and marriage to Rochester at Ferndean
Jane Eyre
•A ground-breaking(开拓性的) novel:
•it is noted for its sharp criticism of the existing society.
•it is an intense moral fable.
•its introduction to the English novel the first governess heroine.
•The characteristic of Jane Eyre：small, plain, quick wit, honesty, frankness, loving heart, the spirit of independence and self-dignity
Wuthering Heights
•Characters: Wuthering Heights vs Thrushcross Grange
•Plot:
•Theme: love, class, revenge
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
•English poet and playwright
•Master of dramatic monologues
•One of the foremost Victorian poets
•major works
•My Last Duchess 《我已故的公爵夫人》
•Home-Thoughts, from Abroad 《海外乡思》
•The Ring and the Book 《环与书》
•Meeting at Night 《夜会》
•Parting at Morning《晨别》
My Last Duchess
•Summary: In this poem, Browning creates a character of chilling coldness and cruelty. The speaker is a Duke who is conducting negotiations for a bride, a new Duchess. He is talking with the representative of potential father-in-law. Almost casually, he shows them the picture of the ―last‖ Duchess whom he had killed because he could not dominate her. •Characters: Speaker (or narrator): the Duke
proud, possessive, selfish, cruel, jealous
Duchess: the late wife of the Duke.
gentle, kind, beautiful, noble-minded
Emissary (使者) of the Count (the listener)
:the emissary has no speaking role; he simply listens, but we can clearly feels his presence.
My Last Duchess
•Dramatic monologue: a type of poem in which a character, at some specific and critical moment, addresses an identifiable but silent audience, thereby unintentionally revealing his or her essential temperament and personality.
Elizabeth Barret Browning
•Wife of Robert Browning
•Sonnets from the Portuguese 《葡萄牙十四行诗集》
•Sonnets from the Portuguese:14 ―If thou must love me, let it be for naught / Except for love's sake only.‖
•Sonnets from the Portuguese:43 ―How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.‖ Petrarchian sonnet: abba abba cdcdcd
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
•the Wessex Novels/ ―Novels of Character and Environment‖:
•Under the Greenwood Tree《绿荫下》(1872),
•Far from the Madding Crowd 《远离尘嚣》(1874),
•The Return of the Native 《还乡记》(1878),
•The Mayor of Casterbridge《卡斯特桥市长》 (1886),
•Tess of the D‘Urbervilles 《德伯家的苔丝》(1891)
•Jude the Obscure《无名的裘德》 (1896).
Thomas Hardy
•Thomas Hardy’s pessimistic view of life predominated most of his later works and earns him a reputation as a naturalistic (自然主义的) writer.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
•Tess Durbeyfield:
•Angel Clare
•Alec d'Urbervilles
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
•Tess was a pure woman:
•a. Pure here not refers to the physical meaning but the spiritual one. Throughout the novel, Tess was loyal to her true feelings. She remained her loyalty to Angel. Alec only claimed her body. She was spiritually with Angel all the time.
•b. She is responsible and does her best for the family.
•c. She is honest.
•d. She could face her tragedy with great dignity.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
•Why do we say Tess’s tragedy is a personal as well as a social one?
•Tess’s fate is personal:
•She happens to be so beautiful, so pure, so innocent, and so poor, and she happens to get involved with two men who, though apparent rivals, actually joint their forces in bringing about her destruction.
•Both Alec and Angel violated and made fun of Tess. Tess was physically injured by Alec d'Urbervilles, and mentally was affected by Angel Clare.
•Alec and Angel by different way made Tess’ tragedy from bad to worse.
•Her fate is a social one: It can be the fate of any country girl like her. It can be the fate of all the peasants who are driven out of their land and home and forced to seek somewhere else for sustenance.
•What is the theme of Hardy’s Wessex novels?
•The setting is the agricultural region of the southern countries of England. •He truthfully depicts the impoverishment and decay of small farmers.
•These laborers are mercilessly exploited by the rich landowners.
•He thinks that mankind is subjected to the rule of some hostile and mysterious fate.
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
•Father of American literature.
•the father of American short stories.
•the first American writer to gain international game.
•His writing marks the beginning of Romanticism in American literature
Washington Irving
•Major works
•A History of New York 《纽约外史》
•The Sketch Book 《见闻札记》including:
•―The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow‖
《睡谷的传说》
•―Rip Van Winkle‖《瑞普·凡·温克尔》
Rip Van Winkle
•The story of Rip Van Winkle begins about five or six years before the American Revolution and ends twenty years later.
•The action takes place in a village in British colonial New York, near the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains.
•The character of Rip Van Winkle: A simple, good-natured man; An obedient, henpecked (惧内的) husband; A great favorite among neighbors and children; who loathes（厌恶） 'profitable labor'.
•Language: humorous
•Theme: the nostalgia for the unrecoverable past
The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow
•The story takes place in about 1790, in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. The main character is Ichabod Crane; he is a lean, lanky, and extremely superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut. He and Brom Van Brunt, a native of Sleepy Hollow, both fall in love with Katrina Van Tassel. Katrina is the daughter and sole child of a weathy farmer, Baltus Van Tassel. At first, Crane seems to win her heart, so he is invited to attend a party at the Van Tassel home. And on his way back home, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, who is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper（赫赛骑兵） who had his head shot off during some nameless battle of the American Revolutionary War. Then Crane mysteriously disappears from town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Van Brunt. Although the nature of the Headless Horseman is left open to interpretation, the story implies that the Horseman was really Brom in disguise.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
•novelist, poet, critic
••Major works:
•Poems: The Raven To Helen
•Short stories:
•The Murders in the Rue Morgue 《毛格街血案》
•The Fall of the House of Usher 《厄舍古屋的倒塌》
•The Tell-Tale Heart 《泄密的心》
•Black Cat 《黑猫》
•The Masque of the Red Death 《红色死亡的化妆舞会》
Poe’s Theories for the Short Story:
a. The short story should be so brief as to
be read at one sitting.
b. The first sentence ought to help to
bring out the ―single effect‖ of the story.
c. No word should be used which does not
contribute to the work.
d. A tale should reveal some logical truth,
and should end with the last sentence,
leaving a sense of finality with the reader.
Poe’s poetic theory
a. The poem should be so brief as to
be read at one sitting.
b. The purpose of poetry lay in the creation of beauty and intensity of emotion rather than teaching of morality. →a forerunner of pure poetry
c. The most efficient form of beauty which is able to undulate reader’s soul had to be the death, especially the death of a beautiful woman. so the key tone of Poe's poetry was melancholy and depressed.
d. Poet should combine music with poetry so as to provoke readers with a sense of beauty.
The Raven corresponds in every aspect with Poe's aesthetic standard for poetry.
•With the 108 lines, it is readable at one sitting;
•It took the lament over the death of a beautiful woman as its theme;
•It is pervaded with a sense of melancholy;
•The exquisite rhyme and rhythm were widely used.
Questions
•1. Why a raven, not a parrot?
because of the melancholy tone, and the symbolism of ravens as birds of ill-omen, he found the raven more suitable for the mood in the poem (Poe, 1850).
Questions
•2. Why did the raven perch on the goddess of wisdom?
•Contrasted color
•Lead the narrator to believe that the raven spoke from wisdom.
•To signify the scholarship of the narrator.
Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864) •Great American Romantic Novelist •Pioneering psychological novelist •Combined the American romanticism with puritan moralism
•using symbolism
•Dark romanticism 黑色浪漫主义
•In almost every book he wrote, he discussed sin and evil.
Major Works
Novels
The Scarlet Letter (1850)《红字》
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)《七个尖角阁的房子》
The Blithedale Romance (1852) 《福谷传奇》
The Marble Faun (1860) 《玉石雕像》
Short Story Collections
Twice-Told Tales (1837) 《故事重述》
Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)《古屋青苔》
Selected Short Stories
Young Goodman Brown (1835) 《年轻小伙子布朗》
The Minister’s Black Veil (1836)《牧师的黑面纱》
The Birth-Mark (1843) 《胎记》
The Scarlet Letter
•setting (time) : Middle of the seventeenth century
•setting (place) : Boston, Massachusetts
•protagonist : Hester Prynne
•major conflicts : Hester vs her community; Chillingworth vs Dimmesdale; Dimmesdale’s inner conflict；Puritanism vs humanism
The Scarlet Letter
•Hester Prynne
•Arthur Dimmesdale
•Roger Chillingworth
Symbolism
•The symbolic meaning of the letter A: adultery→able→angel
•The symbolic meaning of names: 1.Chillingworth is cold and inhuman
. 2. ―Prynne‖ rhymes with ―sin,‖
3. ―Dimmesdale‖ suggests ―dimness‖—weakness, indeterminacy
4. Pearl: the treasure to her mother; Comes out of an ugly shell but is beautiful; Comes out of an torturing process
The symbolic meaning of prison and rosebush:
Symbolic meaning of prison
•the harshness of the Puritan society
•the symbol for puritanical severity of law and the rigorous enforcement of law and the impossibility to break free of it
•the authority of the regime
Symbolic meaning of rosebush
•Passion- the passionate wilderness in the form of Hester Prynne; an aspect of nature that should be admired and not judged
•Promise-good occurrences do emerge from bad situations
What makes SL a Masterpiece?
•Its writing skills, a good narration
•An encyclopedia of 17th century of America
•The universal themes
•The everlasting, philosophical and paradoxical issues discussed in the novel.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
•An eventless life
•Remain single all her life
•1,800 poems altogether, but only 7 were published while she was alive
•Themes: death and immortality; nature; love; truth, beauty, etc.
Emily Dickinson
•Poems:
•I’m Nobody!
•Because I could not stop for death
•I heard a fly buzz-when I died
•Hope
•I died for beauty
•A Long Narrow Fellow in the Grass
•Over the Fence
Style
•A: Her poems have no titles, hence the first line of each poem is always quoted as the title of each poem.
•B: particular stress pattern: dash―— ‖
•C: Capital letters as a means of emphasis;
•D: Language: brief, direct, and plain;
•E: Poem: short, always on original images or symbols
•F: Short poetic lines, condensed by using intense metaphors and by extensive use of ellipsis.
Robert Frost (1874 -1963)
•The most popular 20th Century American Poet
•A four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Robert Frost
•Major poems:
•Mending Wall 《补墙》
•After Apple-Picking 《摘苹果之后》
•Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 《雪夜林边小驻》
•The Road Not Taken 《未选择的路》
•Fire and Ice 《火与冰》
Major Features of Frost’s Poems
•He was an essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England。 •His adopts traditional verse forms, plain language and everyday speech to explore the complexity of human existence through treating seemingly trivial subjects.
•The themes of his work include landscape and people of New England, loneliness and poverty of farmers; beauty, terror and tragedy. The subjects come from daily life of ordinary people.
•
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Metaphors:
•Promises – Our own promises or duties that we must fulfill.
• Miles - experience we must travel through before death
•Sleep – death
•Rhyme scheme: aaba bbcb ccdc dddd
The Road not Taken
•Five-line stanza with the rhyme scheme: abaab
•Two roads refer to the choices or important decisions which one must make in life. •The poet chooses to follow an unusual, solitary life, perhaps he was speaking of his choice to be a poet rather than some common profession.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) •The Jazz Age / The roaring 20’s
•The American Dream
•The lost generation
Major works
•This Side of Paradise
•The Beautiful and the Damned
•Tales of the Jazz Age
•The Great Gatsby
•Tender is the Night
•The Last Tycoon
The Great Gatsby
•Characters: Gatsby; Daisy; Nick; Tom; Myrtle; George
•Plot
•Theme:
•The discrepancy (矛盾) between Gatsby's dream vision and reality
•Gatsby's quest for the American Dream
•class conflict
•The cultural rift between East and West
Origins of the American Dream:
•European explorers and the Puritans—Doctrine of Election and Predestination
•The Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
•American Revolutionary War—promise of land ownership and investment
•Industrial Revolution—possibility of anyone achieving wealth & the nouveau riche •Individualism and self-reliance
•Westward expansion and the Gold Rush
•Immigration
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
•Related literary terms:
•Local colorism (乡土文学): as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s, it is defined as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native. In literature, regionalism or local color refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific feature—including characters, dialects, customs, history, and landscape—of a particular region.
•Mark Twain employed an unpretentious style of colloquialism in his novels which is best described as ―vernacular‖.
Mark Twain
•The Gilded Age (镀金时代): the term was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. In American history, the Gilded Age refers to substantial growth in population in the United States and extravagant displays of wealth and excess of America’s upper-class during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction era, in the late 19th century.
Mark Twain
•The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
•The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn
•The Prince and the Pauper
•The Cop and the Anthem
•Running for Governor
•The £1,000,000 Bank-Note
•The Innocents Abroad
•The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
•The Gilded Age
•Life on the Mississippi
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
•The leader of a new movement in poetry which he called the Imagist movement. •Imagism (意象派)：it was an early 20th century movement in Anglo-American poetry
that favored the use of concrete language, modern subject matter, figures of speech, metrical freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. It derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language.
In a Station of the Metro
•The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
•Petals on a wet, black bough.
•It is considered as one of the leading poems of the Imagist tradition.
•It contains only 14 words, further typifies Imagism’s focus on economy of language, precision of imagery and experimenting with non-traditional verse forms.
•1913年的某天，诗人从巴黎的协约车站走出潮湿幽暗的地铁。他在忽明忽暗的熙攘的人群里，看到了几个美丽的面孔，几个女人和儿童的美丽的面孔。这一场景给他留下极为深刻的印象。他开始搜肠刮肚，几经努力，曾写成130余行的诗，终因不如意而销毁。一年之后，他才写下了两行充满内在活力的日本俳句式的诗。 •在这首诗中，诗人运用的意象是―阴湿的树枝上面的几片花瓣‖。 他用阴湿的树枝比喻潮湿阴暗的地铁，用鲜艳的花瓣形容人的美丽脸庞。
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
•In 1954, he was awarded the Noble Prize for literature.
•Deeply depressed and tormented by failing artistic and physical power, he committed suicide on July2, 1961.
•He is the spokesman for the Lost Generation.
Major works
•The Sun Also Rises (1926) 《太阳照常升起》
•A Farewell to Arms (1929)《永别了，武器》
•For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)《丧钟为谁而鸣》
•The Old Man and the Sea (1952)《老人与海》（Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize）
Ernest Hemingway
•Hemingway’s hero is usually isolated, and fights a good fight. There is a particular term for his character, ―the code hero/man‖(硬汉形象)。
•He thinks a writer should write little, so that readers can understand much more. This is called Iceberg Principle (冰山原则).
The Old Man and the Sea
•―Life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually.‖
•人生不过是一场注定失败的战斗。但人们可以主导这场战斗，化损失为尊严。人的肉体可以被毁灭，但精神永不败。
The Old Man and the Sea
•At the end of the story, is the old man defeated? Why or why not?
•First, he was defeated outwardly because the shark ate up the Marlin and only the skeleton was left. So it was a failure for Santiago in material. But spiritually, he was not defeated, because he never gave up. Because of his endurance, determination, confidence, bravery, knowledgeable skills, he earns the respect, achieves the natural self, and confirms his heroic personalities. All in all, it was a victory for Santiago in his inner world.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
•One of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States.
•He sets many of his works in Yoknapatawpha County (based on his hometown)
•He makes frequent use of ―stream of consciousness‖ in his writing.
•He won the 1950 Noble Prize for Literature.
•He won Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Fable in 1955 and The Rivers in 1963.
•He won the U.S. National Book Award twice for Collected Stories in 1951 and A Fable in 1955.
Major works
•The Sound and the Fury《喧哗与骚动》
•As I Lay Dying 《我弥留之际》
•Light in August《八月之光》
•Absalom, Absalom！《押沙龙，押沙龙！》
•Go Down, Moses《去吧，摩西》
•A Rose for Emily《献给艾米丽的玫瑰》
Figures of speech
•Simile 明喻 Metaphor 暗喻 Personification 拟人 Hyperbole 夸张 •Repetition 重复 Parallelism 排比 Allusion 典故
Terms of poetry
•1. stanza 诗节 2. meter 格律 3. foot 音步 4. pentameter 五音步
5. iamb 抑扬格 6. iambic pentameter 抑扬格五音步 7. rhyme 韵
•8. Rhyme Scheme 韵律
Meter
•Refers to the arranged pattern composed by stressed syllable and unstressed syllable. One unit, or combination of a stressed and unstressed syllable is called a foot (音步).
Kinds of Meter
(1)monometer (one foot ) (2)diameter (two feet)
(3)trimeter (three feet) (4)tetrameter (four feet)
(5)pentameter(five feet) (6)hexameter (six feet)
(7)heptameter(seven feet) (8)octameter (8 feet)
•iambic pentameter (五音步抑扬格)
•iambic tetrameter (四音步抑扬格)
Kinds of Stanza
•(1) couplet (两行押韵的诗体)
•(2) tercet (三行押韵的诗体)
•(terza rima:隔行押韵的三行诗体,如:Ode to the West Wind)
•(3) quatrain (四个诗行组成的诗体)
•(4)ottava rima (八行诗体)
•(5)Spenserian stanza(九行诗体)
•(6)sonnet (十四行诗)(又叫商籁体)
Heroic couplet 英雄双韵体
•Two successive rhyming lines of iambic pentameter.
•It was common practice to string long sequences of heroic couplets together in a patten of aa, bb, cc, dd, ee, ff, and so on.
Rhyme scheme a b a b
•Definition: pattern or sequence in which rhyme occurs
Alliteration 头韵
•Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sound in several words close together in a sentence or in a line.
• —Writing Essays About Literature
•头韵是指一组词，一句话或一行诗中重复出现开头音相同的单词。 •E.g. safe and sound pride and prejudice
英美文学复习材料
Jeffery Chaucer
•Father/founder of English Poetry
•Major works:
•The Romaunt of the Rose 《玫瑰传奇》
•The Parliament of Fowls《百鸟议会》
•Troilus and Criseyde 《特鲁伊罗斯和克里塞德》
•The Legend of Good Women《好女人传》
•The Canterbury Tales 《坎特伯雷故事集》
The Canterbury Tales
•The story of a group of thirty people who travel as pilgrims to Canterbury.
•A rich, tapestry (织锦) of medieval social life combining elements of all classes, from
nobles to workers, from priests and nuns to drunkards and thieves.
•London dialect
•The General Prologue consists of character sketches of each member of the group that is
going to Canterbury.
The Canterbury Tales
•Some of the characters
•The Knight :the first story teller
•The Prioress 女修道院副院长
•The Merchant
•The Wife of Bath 巴斯妇: the first female figure in British literature
•Poor Priest
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
•Renaissance
•Meaning: rebirth or revival
•Time: began in the 14th century, end in the 17th century.
•Place: began in Italy, later spread to France, Spain and England.
•A keen interest in the Greek and Latin culture; the art and science of ancient Greece and
Rome were being born again after long years of neglect.
•Essence: humanism
William Shakespeare
•Works
•37 plays
•2 long narrative poems
•154 sonnets
William Shakespeare
•Drama:
•Tragedies- Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet
•Comedies- As You Like It, The Merchants of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream,The Taming of the Shrew,Twelfth Night
• Histories- Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Henry VIII, Richard III,
•Romances/tragicomedies: Cymbeline, The Tempest
Romeo and Juliet
•Characters: The Montagues / The Capulets
•Plot
•Theme
•Act II, Scene II
•The balcony scene
•One of the romantic peaks of the play.
•In this scene, Romeo has employed three comparisons to express his admiration for Juliet: the sun, twinkling stars, a bright angel.
William Shakespeare :Sonnet
•A sonnet is a lyric invariably of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter五音步抑扬格 , restricted to a definite rhyme scheme韵律 .
•Three types of sonnet
1) Petrarchan sonnet (彼特拉克体/意大利十四行诗 )
2) Spenserian Sonnet（斯宾塞体十四行诗）
3) Shakespearian Sonnet（莎士比亚/英国体十四行诗
Shakespearian Sonnet
•3 quatrains + a couplet
•abab cdcd efef gg
•Sonnet 18
•―Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?‖
•Theme: A nice summer day is usually transient, but the beauty in poetry can last forever. Thus Shakespeare expresses his faith in the permanence of poetry, of art and love.
•Sonnet 29
•Theme: The power of love can overcome all the difficulties and obstacles in one’s lifetime.
Romanticism
•Begins with the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1798) and ends with the death of Sir Walter Scott(1832).
•Pre-romantic poets: William Blake, Robert Burns
•Active romantic poets: George Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats
•Passive romantic poets / Lake Poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey.
Robert Burns
•Farmer poet/national poet of Scotland
•Write in Scottish dialect
•Themes of poetry are life of the common Scotch, love, friendship, ect.
•―A Red, Red Rose
•―Auld Lang Syne‖: friendship, parting-song
William Wordsworth
•Poet Laureate 桂冠诗人
•Collaborate with Coleridge on Lyrical Ballads: a declaration of romanticism
•Define Poetry as ―the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which originates in
emotion recollected in tranquility‖.
•A worshipper of nature
•― I Wandered Lonely as Cloud‖: four six-line stanzas; iambic tetrameter; rhyme scheme:
ababcc; theme: the harmony between things in nature and the harmony between nature
and the poet himself/ Nature' s beauty uplifts the human spirit.
•―Composed Upon Westminster Bridge‖: a Petrarchan sonnet; abbaabba cdcdcd ;describing London in an early morning; figures of speech: simile, metaphor,
personification
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
•one of the leading romantic poets
•loved people and hated the oppressors and exploiters
•His wife: Mary Shelley Frankenstein 《弗兰肯斯坦》
•Major works:
•The Necessity of Atheism 《无神论的必要性》
•Queen Mab 《仙后麦布》
•Prometheus Unbound 《解放了的普罗米修斯》
•Ode to the West Wind 《西风颂》
•Ode to a Skylark 《云雀颂》
•A Defence of Poetry 《诗辩》
•The Masque of Anarchy 《暴政的行列》
Ode to the West Wind
•Ode: a long lyric poem that is serious in subject, elevated in style, and elaborate in its
structure. It is written to praise and glorify somebody or to eulogize something.
•Form: 1. Every stanza is a sonnet; five stanzas of iambic pentameter.
•2. Every stanza consists of 4 terza rima（三行诗隔句押韵法 ） + couplet.
•Structure: stanza 1-3: activities of the west wind on the earth, in the sky and on the sea.
Stanza 4-5: the poet’s wish to be free like the wind.
Ode to the West Wind
•Theme: 1. Revolutionary spirit; 2. Wish to destroy the old and build up a new world.
•The art of language:
•1. The use of alliteration, capitalization, end rhyme, ect.
•2. many figures of speech: simile /metaphor / personificiton / allusion / symbol
Jane Austen (1775-1817)
•The first important English woman novelist
•Writing style:
•Theme: mostly about love and marriage
•Language: simple, humorous, witty, ironic
•Plot: straightforward, little action
•Characters: like real living persons
•Dialogues: true to life
•She called her work ―a fine engraving made upon a little piece of ivory only two inches
square‖ (―两寸牙雕‖)
•A very narrow literary field
•But within her own field, she is unrivaled: vivid portrait of her major characters and
realistic and colorful pictures of the life and manners of the upper middle class in rural
England of her time
Jane Austen
•Major works:
•Northanger Abbey《诺桑觉寺》 (1818)
•Sense and Sensibility 《理智与情感》(1811)
•Pride and Prejudice 《傲慢与偏见》(1813)
•Mansfield Park《曼斯菲尔德庄园》(1814)
•Emma 《艾玛》 (1816)
•Persuasion 《劝导》(1818)
Pride and Prejudice
•―It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune
must be in want of a wife.‖
•Main characters/plot/theme
•Dialogues
•Character analysis: Mr. and Mrs. Bennet; Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy; Jane and Mr.
Bingley
•Pride/prejudice
Charles Dickens (1812 –1870)
•Victorian novelist
•Representative writer of critical realism
•critical realism:
•1. Objectivity :truly reflected the life of the Capitalist Society
•2. Criticalness: deeply exposed and criticized Feudal aristocracy and the capitalists;
advocated humanism & pursue the truth
•3. Typicality :Use typical characters in a certain environment.
Charles Dickens
•Major works:
•《匹克威克外传》（The Pickwick Papers）
•《雾都孤儿》（Oliver Twist）
•《老古玩店》（The Old Curiosity Shop）
•《美国纪行》（American Notes）
•《圣诞颂歌》（A Christmas Carol）
•《董贝父子》（Dombey and Son）
•《大卫·科波菲尔》（David Copperfield）
•《荒凉山庄》（Bleak House）
•《艰难时世》（Hard Times）
•《双城记》（A Tale of Two Cities）
•《我们共同的朋友》（Our Mutual Friend）
A Tale of Two Cities
•Two cities: Paris and London
•Set in London and Paris before and during the French Revolution
•Three groups of people:
•The feudal aristocrat： Marquis（侯爵） Evremond 封建贵族
•The revolutionary masses： Ms Defarge 革命群众
•Ideal persons: Doctor Manette; Lucy Manette; Charles Darney; Sydney Carton 理想化
人物
A Tale of Two Cities
•It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, i
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way。--in short,
the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted
on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
•parallelism
Oliver Twist
•vivid descriptions of the workhouse and life of the underworld in the nineteenth-century
London.
•―Please, sir, I want some more‖
Bronte sisters
•Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
•Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
•Anne Bronte: Agnes Grey The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall
Jane Eyre
•The first important governess novel in the English literary history
•Plot: five stages
•Childhood at Gateshead
•Education at the Lowood School
•As a governess at Thornfield
•With the Rivers family at Moor House
•Her reunion with and marriage to Rochester at Ferndean
Jane Eyre
•A ground-breaking(开拓性的) novel:
•it is noted for its sharp criticism of the existing society.
•it is an intense moral fable.
•its introduction to the English novel the first governess heroine.
•The characteristic of Jane Eyre：small, plain, quick wit, honesty, frankness, loving heart, the spirit of independence and self-dignity
Wuthering Heights
•Characters: Wuthering Heights vs Thrushcross Grange
•Plot:
•Theme: love, class, revenge
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
•English poet and playwright
•Master of dramatic monologues
•One of the foremost Victorian poets
•major works
•My Last Duchess 《我已故的公爵夫人》
•Home-Thoughts, from Abroad 《海外乡思》
•The Ring and the Book 《环与书》
•Meeting at Night 《夜会》
•Parting at Morning《晨别》
My Last Duchess
•Summary: In this poem, Browning creates a character of chilling coldness and cruelty. The speaker is a Duke who is conducting negotiations for a bride, a new Duchess. He is talking with the representative of potential father-in-law. Almost casually, he shows them the picture of the ―last‖ Duchess whom he had killed because he could not dominate her. •Characters: Speaker (or narrator): the Duke
proud, possessive, selfish, cruel, jealous
Duchess: the late wife of the Duke.
gentle, kind, beautiful, noble-minded
Emissary (使者) of the Count (the listener)
:the emissary has no speaking role; he simply listens, but we can clearly feels his presence.
My Last Duchess
•Dramatic monologue: a type of poem in which a character, at some specific and critical moment, addresses an identifiable but silent audience, thereby unintentionally revealing his or her essential temperament and personality.
Elizabeth Barret Browning
•Wife of Robert Browning
•Sonnets from the Portuguese 《葡萄牙十四行诗集》
•Sonnets from the Portuguese:14 ―If thou must love me, let it be for naught / Except for love's sake only.‖
•Sonnets from the Portuguese:43 ―How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.‖ Petrarchian sonnet: abba abba cdcdcd
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)
•the Wessex Novels/ ―Novels of Character and Environment‖:
•Under the Greenwood Tree《绿荫下》(1872),
•Far from the Madding Crowd 《远离尘嚣》(1874),
•The Return of the Native 《还乡记》(1878),
•The Mayor of Casterbridge《卡斯特桥市长》 (1886),
•Tess of the D‘Urbervilles 《德伯家的苔丝》(1891)
•Jude the Obscure《无名的裘德》 (1896).
Thomas Hardy
•Thomas Hardy’s pessimistic view of life predominated most of his later works and earns him a reputation as a naturalistic (自然主义的) writer.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
•Tess Durbeyfield:
•Angel Clare
•Alec d'Urbervilles
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
•Tess was a pure woman:
•a. Pure here not refers to the physical meaning but the spiritual one. Throughout the novel, Tess was loyal to her true feelings. She remained her loyalty to Angel. Alec only claimed her body. She was spiritually with Angel all the time.
•b. She is responsible and does her best for the family.
•c. She is honest.
•d. She could face her tragedy with great dignity.
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
•Why do we say Tess’s tragedy is a personal as well as a social one?
•Tess’s fate is personal:
•She happens to be so beautiful, so pure, so innocent, and so poor, and she happens to get involved with two men who, though apparent rivals, actually joint their forces in bringing about her destruction.
•Both Alec and Angel violated and made fun of Tess. Tess was physically injured by Alec d'Urbervilles, and mentally was affected by Angel Clare.
•Alec and Angel by different way made Tess’ tragedy from bad to worse.
•Her fate is a social one: It can be the fate of any country girl like her. It can be the fate of all the peasants who are driven out of their land and home and forced to seek somewhere else for sustenance.
•What is the theme of Hardy’s Wessex novels?
•The setting is the agricultural region of the southern countries of England. •He truthfully depicts the impoverishment and decay of small farmers.
•These laborers are mercilessly exploited by the rich landowners.
•He thinks that mankind is subjected to the rule of some hostile and mysterious fate.
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
•Father of American literature.
•the father of American short stories.
•the first American writer to gain international game.
•His writing marks the beginning of Romanticism in American literature
Washington Irving
•Major works
•A History of New York 《纽约外史》
•The Sketch Book 《见闻札记》including:
•―The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow‖
《睡谷的传说》
•―Rip Van Winkle‖《瑞普·凡·温克尔》
Rip Van Winkle
•The story of Rip Van Winkle begins about five or six years before the American Revolution and ends twenty years later.
•The action takes place in a village in British colonial New York, near the Hudson River and the Catskill Mountains.
•The character of Rip Van Winkle: A simple, good-natured man; An obedient, henpecked (惧内的) husband; A great favorite among neighbors and children; who loathes（厌恶） 'profitable labor'.
•Language: humorous
•Theme: the nostalgia for the unrecoverable past
The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow
•The story takes place in about 1790, in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. The main character is Ichabod Crane; he is a lean, lanky, and extremely superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut. He and Brom Van Brunt, a native of Sleepy Hollow, both fall in love with Katrina Van Tassel. Katrina is the daughter and sole child of a weathy farmer, Baltus Van Tassel. At first, Crane seems to win her heart, so he is invited to attend a party at the Van Tassel home. And on his way back home, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman, who is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper（赫赛骑兵） who had his head shot off during some nameless battle of the American Revolutionary War. Then Crane mysteriously disappears from town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Van Brunt. Although the nature of the Headless Horseman is left open to interpretation, the story implies that the Horseman was really Brom in disguise.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
•novelist, poet, critic
••Major works:
•Poems: The Raven To Helen
•Short stories:
•The Murders in the Rue Morgue 《毛格街血案》
•The Fall of the House of Usher 《厄舍古屋的倒塌》
•The Tell-Tale Heart 《泄密的心》
•Black Cat 《黑猫》
•The Masque of the Red Death 《红色死亡的化妆舞会》
Poe’s Theories for the Short Story:
a. The short story should be so brief as to
be read at one sitting.
b. The first sentence ought to help to
bring out the ―single effect‖ of the story.
c. No word should be used which does not
contribute to the work.
d. A tale should reveal some logical truth,
and should end with the last sentence,
leaving a sense of finality with the reader.
Poe’s poetic theory
a. The poem should be so brief as to
be read at one sitting.
b. The purpose of poetry lay in the creation of beauty and intensity of emotion rather than teaching of morality. →a forerunner of pure poetry
c. The most efficient form of beauty which is able to undulate reader’s soul had to be the death, especially the death of a beautiful woman. so the key tone of Poe's poetry was melancholy and depressed.
d. Poet should combine music with poetry so as to provoke readers with a sense of beauty.
The Raven corresponds in every aspect with Poe's aesthetic standard for poetry.
•With the 108 lines, it is readable at one sitting;
•It took the lament over the death of a beautiful woman as its theme;
•It is pervaded with a sense of melancholy;
•The exquisite rhyme and rhythm were widely used.
Questions
•1. Why a raven, not a parrot?
because of the melancholy tone, and the symbolism of ravens as birds of ill-omen, he found the raven more suitable for the mood in the poem (Poe, 1850).
Questions
•2. Why did the raven perch on the goddess of wisdom?
•Contrasted color
•Lead the narrator to believe that the raven spoke from wisdom.
•To signify the scholarship of the narrator.
Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864) •Great American Romantic Novelist •Pioneering psychological novelist •Combined the American romanticism with puritan moralism
•using symbolism
•Dark romanticism 黑色浪漫主义
•In almost every book he wrote, he discussed sin and evil.
Major Works
Novels
The Scarlet Letter (1850)《红字》
The House of the Seven Gables (1851)《七个尖角阁的房子》
The Blithedale Romance (1852) 《福谷传奇》
The Marble Faun (1860) 《玉石雕像》
Short Story Collections
Twice-Told Tales (1837) 《故事重述》
Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)《古屋青苔》
Selected Short Stories
Young Goodman Brown (1835) 《年轻小伙子布朗》
The Minister’s Black Veil (1836)《牧师的黑面纱》
The Birth-Mark (1843) 《胎记》
The Scarlet Letter
•setting (time) : Middle of the seventeenth century
•setting (place) : Boston, Massachusetts
•protagonist : Hester Prynne
•major conflicts : Hester vs her community; Chillingworth vs Dimmesdale; Dimmesdale’s inner conflict；Puritanism vs humanism
The Scarlet Letter
•Hester Prynne
•Arthur Dimmesdale
•Roger Chillingworth
Symbolism
•The symbolic meaning of the letter A: adultery→able→angel
•The symbolic meaning of names: 1.Chillingworth is cold and inhuman
. 2. ―Prynne‖ rhymes with ―sin,‖
3. ―Dimmesdale‖ suggests ―dimness‖—weakness, indeterminacy
4. Pearl: the treasure to her mother; Comes out of an ugly shell but is beautiful; Comes out of an torturing process
The symbolic meaning of prison and rosebush:
Symbolic meaning of prison
•the harshness of the Puritan society
•the symbol for puritanical severity of law and the rigorous enforcement of law and the impossibility to break free of it
•the authority of the regime
Symbolic meaning of rosebush
•Passion- the passionate wilderness in the form of Hester Prynne; an aspect of nature that should be admired and not judged
•Promise-good occurrences do emerge from bad situations
What makes SL a Masterpiece?
•Its writing skills, a good narration
•An encyclopedia of 17th century of America
•The universal themes
•The everlasting, philosophical and paradoxical issues discussed in the novel.
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
•An eventless life
•Remain single all her life
•1,800 poems altogether, but only 7 were published while she was alive
•Themes: death and immortality; nature; love; truth, beauty, etc.
Emily Dickinson
•Poems:
•I’m Nobody!
•Because I could not stop for death
•I heard a fly buzz-when I died
•Hope
•I died for beauty
•A Long Narrow Fellow in the Grass
•Over the Fence
Style
•A: Her poems have no titles, hence the first line of each poem is always quoted as the title of each poem.
•B: particular stress pattern: dash―— ‖
•C: Capital letters as a means of emphasis;
•D: Language: brief, direct, and plain;
•E: Poem: short, always on original images or symbols
•F: Short poetic lines, condensed by using intense metaphors and by extensive use of ellipsis.
Robert Frost (1874 -1963)
•The most popular 20th Century American Poet
•A four-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Robert Frost
•Major poems:
•Mending Wall 《补墙》
•After Apple-Picking 《摘苹果之后》
•Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 《雪夜林边小驻》
•The Road Not Taken 《未选择的路》
•Fire and Ice 《火与冰》
Major Features of Frost’s Poems
•He was an essentially pastoral poet often associated with rural New England。 •His adopts traditional verse forms, plain language and everyday speech to explore the complexity of human existence through treating seemingly trivial subjects.
•The themes of his work include landscape and people of New England, loneliness and poverty of farmers; beauty, terror and tragedy. The subjects come from daily life of ordinary people.
•
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Metaphors:
•Promises – Our own promises or duties that we must fulfill.
• Miles - experience we must travel through before death
•Sleep – death
•Rhyme scheme: aaba bbcb ccdc dddd
The Road not Taken
•Five-line stanza with the rhyme scheme: abaab
•Two roads refer to the choices or important decisions which one must make in life. •The poet chooses to follow an unusual, solitary life, perhaps he was speaking of his choice to be a poet rather than some common profession.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) •The Jazz Age / The roaring 20’s
•The American Dream
•The lost generation
Major works
•This Side of Paradise
•The Beautiful and the Damned
•Tales of the Jazz Age
•The Great Gatsby
•Tender is the Night
•The Last Tycoon
The Great Gatsby
•Characters: Gatsby; Daisy; Nick; Tom; Myrtle; George
•Plot
•Theme:
•The discrepancy (矛盾) between Gatsby's dream vision and reality
•Gatsby's quest for the American Dream
•class conflict
•The cultural rift between East and West
Origins of the American Dream:
•European explorers and the Puritans—Doctrine of Election and Predestination
•The Declaration of Independence—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
•American Revolutionary War—promise of land ownership and investment
•Industrial Revolution—possibility of anyone achieving wealth & the nouveau riche •Individualism and self-reliance
•Westward expansion and the Gold Rush
•Immigration
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
•Related literary terms:
•Local colorism (乡土文学): as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s, it is defined as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native. In literature, regionalism or local color refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific feature—including characters, dialects, customs, history, and landscape—of a particular region.
•Mark Twain employed an unpretentious style of colloquialism in his novels which is best described as ―vernacular‖.
Mark Twain
•The Gilded Age (镀金时代): the term was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today. In American history, the Gilded Age refers to substantial growth in population in the United States and extravagant displays of wealth and excess of America’s upper-class during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction era, in the late 19th century.
Mark Twain
•The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
•The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn
•The Prince and the Pauper
•The Cop and the Anthem
•Running for Governor
•The £1,000,000 Bank-Note
•The Innocents Abroad
•The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
•The Gilded Age
•Life on the Mississippi
Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
•The leader of a new movement in poetry which he called the Imagist movement. •Imagism (意象派)：it was an early 20th century movement in Anglo-American poetry
that favored the use of concrete language, modern subject matter, figures of speech, metrical freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. It derived its technique from classical Chinese and Japanese poetry, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language.
In a Station of the Metro
•The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
•Petals on a wet, black bough.
•It is considered as one of the leading poems of the Imagist tradition.
•It contains only 14 words, further typifies Imagism’s focus on economy of language, precision of imagery and experimenting with non-traditional verse forms.
•1913年的某天，诗人从巴黎的协约车站走出潮湿幽暗的地铁。他在忽明忽暗的熙攘的人群里，看到了几个美丽的面孔，几个女人和儿童的美丽的面孔。这一场景给他留下极为深刻的印象。他开始搜肠刮肚，几经努力，曾写成130余行的诗，终因不如意而销毁。一年之后，他才写下了两行充满内在活力的日本俳句式的诗。 •在这首诗中，诗人运用的意象是―阴湿的树枝上面的几片花瓣‖。 他用阴湿的树枝比喻潮湿阴暗的地铁，用鲜艳的花瓣形容人的美丽脸庞。
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
•In 1954, he was awarded the Noble Prize for literature.
•Deeply depressed and tormented by failing artistic and physical power, he committed suicide on July2, 1961.
•He is the spokesman for the Lost Generation.
Major works
•The Sun Also Rises (1926) 《太阳照常升起》
•A Farewell to Arms (1929)《永别了，武器》
•For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)《丧钟为谁而鸣》
•The Old Man and the Sea (1952)《老人与海》（Pulitzer Prize, Nobel Prize）
Ernest Hemingway
•Hemingway’s hero is usually isolated, and fights a good fight. There is a particular term for his character, ―the code hero/man‖(硬汉形象)。
•He thinks a writer should write little, so that readers can understand much more. This is called Iceberg Principle (冰山原则).
The Old Man and the Sea
•―Life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually.‖
•人生不过是一场注定失败的战斗。但人们可以主导这场战斗，化损失为尊严。人的肉体可以被毁灭，但精神永不败。
The Old Man and the Sea
•At the end of the story, is the old man defeated? Why or why not?
•First, he was defeated outwardly because the shark ate up the Marlin and only the skeleton was left. So it was a failure for Santiago in material. But spiritually, he was not defeated, because he never gave up. Because of his endurance, determination, confidence, bravery, knowledgeable skills, he earns the respect, achieves the natural self, and confirms his heroic personalities. All in all, it was a victory for Santiago in his inner world.
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
•One of the most important writers of the Southern literature of the United States.
•He sets many of his works in Yoknapatawpha County (based on his hometown)
•He makes frequent use of ―stream of consciousness‖ in his writing.
•He won the 1950 Noble Prize for Literature.
•He won Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Fable in 1955 and The Rivers in 1963.
•He won the U.S. National Book Award twice for Collected Stories in 1951 and A Fable in 1955.
Major works
•The Sound and the Fury《喧哗与骚动》
•As I Lay Dying 《我弥留之际》
•Light in August《八月之光》
•Absalom, Absalom！《押沙龙，押沙龙！》
•Go Down, Moses《去吧，摩西》
•A Rose for Emily《献给艾米丽的玫瑰》
Figures of speech
•Simile 明喻 Metaphor 暗喻 Personification 拟人 Hyperbole 夸张 •Repetition 重复 Parallelism 排比 Allusion 典故
Terms of poetry
•1. stanza 诗节 2. meter 格律 3. foot 音步 4. pentameter 五音步
5. iamb 抑扬格 6. iambic pentameter 抑扬格五音步 7. rhyme 韵
•8. Rhyme Scheme 韵律
Meter
•Refers to the arranged pattern composed by stressed syllable and unstressed syllable. One unit, or combination of a stressed and unstressed syllable is called a foot (音步).
Kinds of Meter
(1)monometer (one foot ) (2)diameter (two feet)
(3)trimeter (three feet) (4)tetrameter (four feet)
(5)pentameter(five feet) (6)hexameter (six feet)
(7)heptameter(seven feet) (8)octameter (8 feet)
•iambic pentameter (五音步抑扬格)
•iambic tetrameter (四音步抑扬格)
Kinds of Stanza
•(1) couplet (两行押韵的诗体)
•(2) tercet (三行押韵的诗体)
•(terza rima:隔行押韵的三行诗体,如:Ode to the West Wind)
•(3) quatrain (四个诗行组成的诗体)
•(4)ottava rima (八行诗体)
•(5)Spenserian stanza(九行诗体)
•(6)sonnet (十四行诗)(又叫商籁体)
Heroic couplet 英雄双韵体
•Two successive rhyming lines of iambic pentameter.
•It was common practice to string long sequences of heroic couplets together in a patten of aa, bb, cc, dd, ee, ff, and so on.
Rhyme scheme a b a b
•Definition: pattern or sequence in which rhyme occurs
Alliteration 头韵
•Alliteration is the repetition of the same consonant sound in several words close together in a sentence or in a line.
• —Writing Essays About Literature
•头韵是指一组词，一句话或一行诗中重复出现开头音相同的单词。 •E.g. safe and sound pride and prejudice