文学复习(名词解释)

Romances are tales of adventure in which knights, or distressed ladies, experienced various tests and had their wishes eventually fulfilled. The reasons for their adventures could be love, religious faith, or the mere desire for excitement.

Ballad is a story told in song, usually in 4-line stanzas, with the second and fourth lines rhymed. When it was sung by ballad-singers, the audience sang the refrain that usually followed each stanza.

Heroic couplet is a verse form in epic poetry, with lines of ten syllables and five stresses, in rhyming pairs, firstly used by the 14th-century poet Geoffrey Chaucer.

Spenserian stanza: For The Faerie Queene, Spenser originated a nine-line verse stanza, now known as the Spenserian stanza: the first eight lines are iambic pentameter, and the ninth, iambic hexameter; the rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc.

University wits : (1)University wits refer to a group of scholars during the Elizabethan Age who graduated from either Oxford or Cambridge. They came to London with the ambition to become professional writers. Some of them later became famous poets and playwrights. They were called “university wits.” (2) Tomas Greene, Tomas Kyd, John Lily and Christopher Marlowe were among them. (3) They paved the way, to some degree, for the coming Shakespeare.

Sonnet :a poem consists of 14 lines with formal rhyme scheme, expressing different aspects of a single thought , mood, or feeling, sometimes summed up in the last lines of the poem. The two major forms are the Petrarchan or Italian, and the Shakespearean or Elizabethan. 1) abababab, followed by two, or three, other rhymes in the remaining six lines, with a pause in the thought after the octave. 2) ababcdcdefefgg. The final rhymed couplet makes an effective, unifying climax to the whole.

Blank verse : unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. It is a very flexible English verse form which can attain rhetorical grandeur while echoing the natural rhythms of speech.

Soliloquy: a dramatic speech delivered by one character speaking aloud while under the impression of being alone. The soliloquist thus reveals his or her inner thoughts and feelings to the audience, either in supposed self-communion or in a consciously direct address

Allegory: a narrative in which the characters and the setting stand for abstract qualities and ideas. The writer of an allegory is not simply trying to make the characters and their actions realistic, but to make them representative of ideas or truths.

Metaphysical School: They are a school of poets at the beginning of the 17th century, with John Donne as the founder. Their works are generally characterized by mysticism and obscurity in content and fantasticality and conceit in form. Known for their excessive use of philosophy and deliberate show-off of their cleverness and learning, they have great influence on the 20th century poets esp. on the imagists like T. S. Eliot and Yeats.

Neoclassicism: The classicists modeled themselves on Greek and Latin authors, writing for the rising bourgeoisie to tidy up the capitalist social order.The neoclassicists have their artistic ideas: order, logic, symmetry, restraint, accuracy, good taste, good sense, decorum(礼节)and so on.

Satire: the literary art of ridiculing a folly or vice in order to expose or correct it. It is a particular use of humor for moral purposes. It seeks to use laughter, not just to remind us of our common, often ridiculous humanity, but rather to expose

those moral excesses.

Sentimentalism: The enlighteners fought against the survivals of feudalism, but some of them vaguely found the bourgeois progress brought with its ruin to the people, and they also found the power of reason to be insufficient in dealing with the social injustice which was held strong, and therefore they appealed to sentiments, or senses as a means of achieving happiness and social justice.

Romanticism: It refers to the literary and artistic movement of the late 18th century and early 19th century. Romanticism rejected the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment ,which stressed logic and reason. Instead, the Romantics emphasized emotion and passion. They asserted the unique nature of the individual, the value of spontaneity over “artifice and convention”, the rejection of civilized corruption, and a desire to return to nature.

Ode: a complex and often lengthy lyric poem, written in a formal style on some serious subjects. It aims at glorifying an individual, commemorating an event, or describing nature.

Historical novel: a literary genre characterized by the attempt to fuse strong dramatic plot lines and credible human psychology, within a setting constituted from specific historical detail (typically based upon diligent research into actual events, locations, and characters, as well as cultural customs, costume, and speech).

Critical Realism: It is one of the literary genres that flourished mainly in the 19th century. It reveals the corrupting influence of the rule of cash upon human nature. The English critical realist not only gave a satirical portrayal of the bourgeoisie and the ruling class, but also showed a 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.

Dramatic monologue: (1)It is 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. (2) Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess is a typical example in which the duke, speaking to a non-speaking to a non-responding audience, reveals not only the reasons for his disapproval of the behavior of his former duchess, but some tyrannical and merciless aspects of his own personality as well.