Main Points for English Literature
一、Old English : 450-1066
Beowulf
二、Medieval English : 1066 - middle 14th century
Geoffrey Chaucer - the father of English poetry
The Canterbury Tales first time to use heroic couplets
三、The Renaissance - rebirth or revival
Humanism - the essence of the Renaissance, the dignity of humanbeing & the importanceof the present life
1.Edmund Spenser - the poets’poet
The Shepherd’s Calendar ; The Faerie Queene
2.Christopher Marlowe - University Wits, the pioneer of English drama
Blank verse, hyperbole夸张
The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus: the human passion for knowledge, power and happiness
The Passionate Shepherd to His Love: pastoral life
3.William Shakespeare - above all writers in the past and in the present time
Four tragedies - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear & Macbeth
Sonnet 18: eternal or immortal beauty
The Merchant of Venice :to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, to expose the insatiable greed and brutality.
Hamlet: hesitate between fact and fiction, language and action, too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger. To be, or not to be - to live on in this world or to die; to suffer or to take action. Soliloquy or monologue - fully reveal the inner conflict of the characters
4.Francis Bacon - brevity, compactness & powerfulness, his essays is an important landmark in the development of English rose.Inductive method is in place of deductive method.
Of Studies : uses and benefits of study - studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Studies perfect nature, and are perfected by experience. Different ways adopted by different people to pursue studies - studies and experience are complementary to each other. The correct attitude to reading books - to weigh and consider. How studies exert influence over human character - reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.
5.John Donne
Metaphysical poetry - break away from love poetry, a seemingly unfocused diversity of experiences and attitudes, and a free range of feelings and moods.Donne frequently applies conceits and syllogistic forms.
The Sun Rising: the busy sun is always ready to interfere with other things and everywhere
Death, Be Not Proud: whatever you are, you can not escape from death. When you are living, you are always in the shadow of death. Death only lasts a moment, our life after death is eternal. The more pleasure the death gives people, not only the pleasure of the rest & the sleep, because “whom the gods love die young”. Though death is usually considered powerful, it actually provides a rest for a man’s body and a birth for his soul.
6.John Milton
Paradise Lost: the only generally acknowledged epic in English literature since Beowulf. The conflict is between human love and spiritual duty. In heaven, Satan led a rebellion against God with his unconquerable will.
Paradise Regained
Samson Agonistes: the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English.
四、Neoclassicism - a revival of interest in the old classical works, order, logic, restrained emotion & accuracy
Enlightenment - a progressive intellectual movement, reason (rationality), equality & science
Gothic novel - mystery, horror & castles
1.John Bunyan
The Vanity Fair from The Pilgrim’s Progress：a religious allegory, pursue the truth
2.Alexander Pope
An Essay on Criticism：a poem written in heroic couplets, criticize the present poem lack of true taste & call on people to turn to the old Greek and Roman writers for guidance, “true wit”is best set in a plain (simple & clear) style.
3.Daniel Defoe - the first writer study of the lower-class people
Robinson Crusoe： praise the human labor and the Puritan fortitude.
4.Jonathan Swift - a master satirist. In his opinion, human nature is seriously and permanently flawed.
A Modest Proposal
Gulliver’s Travels, four parts - Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Flying Island & Houyhnhnm
5.Henry Fielding - Father of English novel,Prose Homer,Comic epic in prose
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
6.Samuel Johnson - first combine an English dictionary, last neoclassicist enlightener
A Dictionary of the English Language
To the Right Honorable the Earl of Chesterfield
7.Richard Brinsley Sheridan - the only important English dramatist of the 18th century
The Rivalsand The School for Scandalare regarded as important links between the masterpieces of Shakespeare and those of Bernard Shaw.
8.Thomas Gray-- The Graveyard School
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
五、The romantic period --began with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads
Romantic - emotion over reason, spontaneous emotion, a change from the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit, poetry should be free from all rules, imagination, nature, commonplace
1.William Blake –engraver
The Chimney Sweeperfrom Songs of Innocencea happy and innocence world from children’s eye
The Chimney Sweeperfrom Songs of Experiencea world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a melancholy tone from men eyes Childhood, paradoxes, a pairing of opposites
The Tyger
2.William Wordsworth - the leading figure of the English romantic poetry, simple, spontaneous, worshiper of nature “Lake Poets” - William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge & Robert Southey. He defines the poet as a “man speaking to men”, and poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, which originates in “emotion recollected in tranquility”.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud the poet is very cheerful with recalling the beautiful sights. In the poem on the beauty of nature, the reader is presented a vivid picture of lively and lovely daffodils and poet’s philosophical ideas and mystical thoughts.
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 the sonnet describes a vivid picture of a beautiful morning in London, silent, bright, glittering, smokeless & mildly. It is so touching a sight that the poet expressed his religion piety for nature.
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
The Solitary Reaper thanks to poet’s rich imagination, the mass of associations, this commonplace happening becomes a striking event, the poet succeeds in making the reader’s share his emotion. The poem also shows the poet’s passionate love of nature.
3.Samuel Taylor Coleridge - supernatural, remote Poet can be divided into two groups - the demonic (supernatural) & the conversational.The demonic group includes 3 masterpieces - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Chrisabel, Kubla Khan
4.George Gordon Byron-“Byronic hero” is a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin, against tyrannical rules or moral principles. Such a hero appears first in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
Song for the Luddites “will die fighting, or live free”the Luddites destroyed the machines in their protest against unemployment. The poet’s great sympathy of the workers in their struggle against the capitalists is clearly shown.
The Isles of Greece from Don Juan (the masterpiece of Byron, a long satirical poem), song by a Greek singer at the wedding of Don Juan and Haidee. “Fill high the bowl with Samian wine”?
5.Percy Bysshe Shelley
Men of England
Ode to the West Wind: terza rima, destructive-constructive potential, hopeful, ’I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’, ’If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’
6.John Keats
four great odes - Ode on Melancholy, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode to Psyche
Ode on a Grecian Urn the contrast between the permanence of art and the transience of human passion, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”, “Beauty is truth, truth is beauty”.
7.Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
六、The Victorian Period: Critical realists
Darwin’s The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man shook the traditional faith, everything is created by God. Utilitarianism was widely accepted and practiced Critical realists were all concerned about the fate of the common people
1.Charles Dickens - one of the greatest critical realist writers of the Victorian Age
Character-portrayal is the most distinguishing feature of his works. A mingling of humor and pathos.
A Tale of Two Cities,Oliver Twist
2.The Bronte Sisters - Charlotte, Emily & AnneEmily, a rather reserved and simple girl, was very much a child of nature.
Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights
3.Alfred Tennyson - invents dramatic monologue, Poet Laureate, a real artist
Break, Break, Break: the death of his best friend, his sadness feeling are contrasted with the carefree, innocent joys of the children and the unfeeling movement of the ship and the sea waves
Crossing the Bar: we can feel his fearlessness towards death, his faith in God and an afterlife. ’Crossing the bar’ means leaving this world and entering the next world
Ulysses: not endure the peaceful commonplace everyday life, old as he is, he persuades his old followers to go with him and to set sail again to pursue a new world and new knowledge, dramatic monologue, ’Myself not least, but honour’d of them all’ means I am not the least important, but honoured by all of them
4.Robert Browning - the most original poet, who improve and mature the dramatic monologue
The Ring and the Book: his masterpiece
My Last Duchess: this dramatic monologue is the duke’s speech addressed to the agent who comes to negotiate the marriage, the duke is a self-conceited, cruel and tyrannical man
Meeting at Night/Parting at Morning
5.George Eliot:As a woman of exceptional intelligence and life experience, she shows a particular concern for the destiny of women
Middlemarch: a sharp contrast is set between the cold, lifeless, dull house and Dorothea who is full of youthful life and vigor
6.Thomas Hardy - both a naturalistic and a critical realist writer. Local-colored, Wessex‘ novels of character and environment’
Tess of the D’Urbervilles: experience is as to intensity, and not as to duration
七、The Twentieth Century: Modernism
The writer concentrated on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual.
1.“The Angry Young Men” with lower-middle-class or working class background. Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and Alan Sillitoe were the major novelists in this group. Osborne, the first “Angry Young Man”
2.James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness novelist;All have the same setting: Ireland, especially Dublin, and the same subject: the Irish people and their life.
“stream of consciousness”: literary approach to the presentation of psychological aspects of characters. Ulysses.
3.William Butler Yeats--poet, the leader of the Irish National Theater Movement.
4.George Bernard shaw-dramatist (leading playwright, considered to be the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare)
早期Widowers’ Houses;Candida; Mrs. Warren’s Profession;Caesar and Cleopatra
中期 Man and Superman
晚期Back to Methuselah;The Apple Cart
5.John Galsworthy: A conventional writer, having inherited the traditions of Victorian novelists of the critical realism.
Play: The Silver Box
Novels: The Forsyte Saga(trilogy:The Man of Property;In Chancery; To Let--The three are masterpieces of critical realism in the early 20th century) ;A Modern Comedy
6.T.S.Eliot: one of the important verse dramatists
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: dramatic monologue, an ironic contrast
The Waste Land: the most famous poem，is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modern civilization in which human life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose.
7.D. H. Lawrence: rich symbolism and complex narrative
Autobiographicalnovel :Sons and Lovers
Masterpieces:The Rainbow; Women in Love
