英美文学选读

英美文学选读 1.课程性质与学习目的 英美文学选读课是全国高等教育自学考试英语语言文学专业本科段的必修课程，是为培养和 检验自学应考者英美文学的基本理论知识和理解、鉴赏英美文学原著的能力而设置的一门专 业理论课程。 设置本课程旨在使英语自学者对英美两国文学形成与发展的全貌有一个大概的了解；并通过 阅读具有代 表 关于同志近三年现实表现材料材料类招标技术评分表图表与交易pdf视力表打印pdf用图表说话 pdf 性的英美文学作品，理解作品的 内容 财务内部控制制度的内容财务内部控制制度的内容人员招聘与配置的内容项目成本控制的内容消防安全演练内容 ，学会 分析 定性数据统计分析pdf销售业绩分析模板建筑结构震害分析销售进度分析表京东商城竞争战略分析 作品的艺术特色并努力掌握正 确评价文学作品的 标准 excel标准偏差excel标准偏差函数exl标准差函数国标检验抽样标准表免费下载红头文件格式标准下载 和方法。由于本课程以作家作品为重点，因此考生需仔细阅读原作。 通过阅读，努力提高语言水平，增强对英美文学原著的理解，特别是对作品中表现的社会生 活和人物思想感情的理解，提高他们阅读文学作品的能力和鉴赏水平。 2.课程内容与考核目标 本课程的考试要求为全日制普通高等学校英语语言文学专业《英美文学选读》课程 本科的结业水平。课程的内容和考核目标是根据本课程的性质、学习目的以及自学考试的特 点编制而成的。本课程由英国文学和美国文学两部分组成。主要内容包括英美文学发展史及 代表作家的简要介绍和作品选读。文学史部分从英美两国历史、语言、文化发展的角度，简 要介绍英美两国文学各个历史断代的主要历史背景，文学文化思潮，文学流派，社会政治、 经济、文化等对文学发展的影响，主要作家的文学生涯、创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品 的主 题 快递公司问题件快递公司问题件货款处理关于圆的周长面积重点题型关于解方程组的题及答案关于南海问题 结构、人物刻画、语言风格、思想意义等；选读部分主要节选了英美文学史上各个时 期重要作家的代表作品，包括诗歌、戏剧、小说、散文等，详见全国高等教育自学考试指导 委员会编写的指定用书《英美文学选读》（张伯香主编，外语教学与研究出版社１９９９年 １２月第２版）。根据本课程考试的大纲，凡要求“识记”的内容，所涉及的知识和理论都 与考核点直接相关，考生应熟知其概念和有关知识，理解其原理，并能在语言环境中予以辨 认。凡要求“领会”的内容，必须做到掌握有关知识和理论。凡要求“应用”的内容，必须 做到在掌握有关知识和理论的基础上使之转换为能力，即能用有关知识和理论来分析解决英 美文学中的相关问题，并指导作品的阅读。凡要求“一般识记”的内容，所涉及的知识和理 论，一般不直接作为考核时命题的内容，但由于这些内容对于其他相关知识和理论以及作品 阅读能力的考核有直接或间接的影响，因此要求考生在自学过程对这些内容也要有所了解。 英美文学选读 第1章 (英国文学)文艺复兴时期 第1节 Edmund Spenser 第2节 Christopher Marlowe 第3节 William Shakespeare 第4节 Francis Bacon 第5节 John Donne 第6节 John Milton 第2章 新古典主义时期 第1节 John Bunyan 第2节 Alexander Pope 第3节 Daniel Defoe 第4节 Jonathan Swift 第5节 Henry Fielding 第6节 Samuel Johnson 第3章 浪漫主义时期 第1节 William Blake 第2节 William Wordsworth 第3节 Samuel Taylor Coleridge 第4节 George Gordon Byron 第5节 Percy Bysshe Shelley 第6节 John Keats 第7节 Jane Austen 第4章 维多利亚时期 第1节 Charles Dickens 第2节 The Bronte Sisters 第3节 Alfred Tennyson 第4节 Robert Browning 第5节 George Eliot 第6节 Thomas Hardy 第5章 现代时期 第1节 George Bernard Shaw 第2节 John Galsworthy 第3节 William Butler Yeats 第4节 T. S. Eliot 第5节 D. H. Lawrence 第6节 James Joyce 第6章 (美国文学)浪漫主义时期 第1节 Washington Irving 第2节 Ralph Waldo Emerson 第3节 Nathaniel Hawthorne 第4节 Walt Whitman 第5节 Herman Melville 第7章 现实主义时期 第1节 Mark Twain 第2节 Henry James 第3节 Emily Dickinson 第4节 Theodore Dreiser 第8章 现代时期 第1节 Ezra Pound 第2节 Robert Lee Frost 第3节 Eugene O'Neill 第4节 F. Scott Fitzgerald 第5节 Ernest Hemingway 第6节 William Faulkner (英国文学)文艺复兴时期 本章简介 <> The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. It first started in Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture and literature. From Italy the movement went to embrace the rest of Europe. The Renaissance, which 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. The Renaissance, therefore, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that exssed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. The Renaissance was slow in reaching England not only because of England's separation from the Continent but also because of its domestic unrest. The century and a half following the death of Chaucer is the most volcanic period of English history. The war-like nobles seized the power of England and turned it into self-destruction. The Wars of Roses are examples to show how the energy of England was violently destroying itself. The frightful reign of Richard III marked the end of civil wars, making possible a new growth of English national feelings under the popular Tudors. But it was not until the reign of Henry VIII (from 1509 to 1547) that the Renaissance really began to show its effect in England. With Henry VIII's encouragement, the Oxford reformers, scholars and humanists introduced classical literature to England. Education, based upon the classics and the Bible, was revitalized, and literature, already much read during the 15th century, became even more popular. Thus began the English Renaissance, which was perhaps England's Golden Age, especially in literature. Among the literary giants were Shakespeare, Spenser, Johnson, Sidney, Marlowe, Bacon and Donne. The English Renaissance had no sharp break with the past. Attitudes and feelings which had been characteristic of the 14th and 15th centuries persisted well down into the era of Humanism and Reformation. Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It sprang from the endeavor to restore a medieval reverence for the antique authors and is frequently taken as the beginning of the Renaissance on its conscious, intellectual side, for the Greek and Roman civilization was based on such a conception that man is the measure of all things. Through the new learning, humanists not only saw the arts of splendor and enlightenment, but the human values resented in the works. In the medieval society, people as individuals were largely subordinated to the feudalist rule without any freedom and independence; and in medieval theology, people's relationships to the world about them were largely reduced to a problem of adapting to or avoiding the circumstances of earthly life in an effort to pare their souls for a future life. But Renaissance humanists found in the classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfection, and that the world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy. Thus, by emphasizing the dignity of human beings and the importance of the sent life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of this life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders. Humanism began to take hold in England when the Dutch scholar Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) came to teach the classical learning, first at Oxford and then at Cambridge. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best resentatives of the English humanists. The long reign of Henry VIII was marked not only by a steady increase in the national power at home and abroad but also by the entrance of the religious reformation from the Continent. It was Martin Luther (1483-1546), a German Protestant, who initiated the Reformation. Luther believed that every true Christian was his own priest and was en学习指导d to intert the Bible for himself. Encouraged by Luther's aching, reformers from northern Europe vitalized the Protestant movement, which was seen as a means to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption and superstition of the Middle Ages. The colorful and dramatic ritual of the Catholic Church was simplified. Indulgences, pilgrimages, and other practices were condemned. In the early stage of the continental Reformation, Henry VIII was regarded as a faithful son of the Catholic Church and named "Defender of the Faith" by the Pope. Only his need for a legitimate male heir, and hence a new wife, led him to cut ties with Rome. But the common English people had long been dissatisfied with the corruption of the church and inspired by the reformers' ideas from the Continent. So they welcomed and sup-ported Henry's decision of breaking away from Rome. When Henry VIII declared himself through the approval of the Parliament as the Sume Head of the Church of England in 1534, the Reformation in England was in its full swing. One of the major results was the fact that the Bible in English was placed in every church and services were held in English instead of Latin so that people could understand. In the brief reign of Edward VI, Henry's son, the reform of the church's doctrine and teaching was carried out. But after Mary ascended the throne, there was a violent swing to Catholicism. However, by the middle of Elizabeth's reign, Protestantism had been firmly established, with a certain extent of compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. The religious reformation was actually a reflection of the class struggle waged by the new rising bourgeoisie against the feudal class and its ideology. Strong national feeling in the time of the Tudors gave a great incentive to the cultural development in England. English schools and universities were established in place of the old monasteries. With classical culture and the Italian humanistic ideas coming into England, the English Renaissance began flourishing. And one of the men who made a great contribution in this respect was William Caxton, for he was the first person who introduced printing into England. In his lifetime, Caxton printed about one hundred books in English, including Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1483) and Malory's Morte Darthur (1485). Thus, for the first time in history it was possible for a book or an idea to reach the whole nation in a speedy way. With the introduction of printing, an age of translation came into being. And lots and lots of continental literary works both ancient and modern were translated and printed in English. For instance, Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans was translated by North, Ovid's etamorphoses by Golding, Homer's The Iliad by Chapman, and Montaigne's Essays by Florio. As a result, the introduction of printing led to a commercial market for literature and provided numerous books for the English people to read, thus making everything ready for the appearance of the great Elizabethan writers. The first period of the English Renaissance was one of imitation and assimilation. Academies after the Italian type were founded. And Petrarch was regarded as the fountainhead of literature by the English writers. For it was Petrarch and his successors who established the language of love and sharply distinguished the love poetry of the Renaissance from its counterparts in the ancient world. Wyatt and Surrey began engraving the forms and graces of Italian poetry upon the native stock. While the former introduced the Petrarchan sonnet into England, the latter brought in blank verse, i.e. the unrhymed iambic pentameter line. Sidney followed with the sestina and terza rima and with various experiments in classic meters. And Marlowe gave new vigor to the blank verse with his "mighty lines. "From Wyatt and Surrey onwards the goals of humanistic poetry are: skillful handling of conventions, force of language, and, above all, the development of a rhetorical plan in which meter, rhyme, scheme, imagery and argument should all be combined to frame the emotional theme and throw it into high relief. Poetry was to be a concentrated exercise of the mind, of craftsmanship, and of learning. Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender showed how the pastoral convention could be adopted to a variety of subjects, moral or heroic, and how the rules of decorum, or fitness of style to subject, could be applied through variations in the diction and metrical scheme. In "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love," Marlowe spoke with a voice so innocent that it would be very difficult for us to connect it with the voice in his tragedies. In the early stage of the Renaissance, poetry and poetic drama were the most outstanding literary forms and they were carried on especially by Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. But the poetry written by John Donne, George Herbert and others like them (who were later labeled as the metaphysical poets by Dryden and Johnson) resented a sharp break from the poetry by their decessors and most of their contemporaries. The Elizabethan drama, in its totality, is the real mainstream of the English Renaissance. It could be dated back to the Middle Ages. Interludes and morality plays thriving in the medieval period continued to be popular down to Shakespeare's time. But the development of the drama into a sophisticated art form required another influence- the Greek and Roman classics. Lively, vivid native English material was put into the regular form of the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence. Tragedies were in the style of Seneca. The fusion of classical form with English content brought about the possibility of a mature and artistic drama. The most famous dramatists in the Renaissance England are Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson, who wrote plays with such universal qualities of greatness. By imitating the romances of Italy and Spain, embracing the mysteries of German legend, and combining the fictions of poetic fancy with the facts of daily life, they made a vivid depiction of the sharp conflicts between feudalism and the rising bourgeoisie in a transitional period. And with humors of the moment, abstractions of philosophical speculation, and intense vitality, this extraordinary drama, with Shakespeare as the master, left a monument of the Renaissance unrivaled for pure creative power by any other product of that epoch. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the first important English essayist, is best known for his essays which greatly influenced the development of this literary form. He was also the founder of modern science in England. His writings paved the way for the use of scientific method. Thus, he is undoubtedly one of the resentatives of the English Renaissance. 新古典主义时期 本章简介 <> What we now call the neoclassical period is the one in English literature 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. The English society of the neoclassical period was a turbulent one. Of the great political and social events there were the Restoration of King Charles II in 1660, the Great Plague of 1665 which took 70,000 lives in London alone, the Great London Fire which destroyed a large part of the city, leaving two-thirds of the population homeless, the Glorious Revolution in which King James Il was replaced by his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch husband William, Duke of Orange, in 1689, and so on. There was constant strife between the monarch and the parliament, between the two big parties -- the Tories and the Whigs -- over the control of the parliament and government, between opposing religious sects such as the Roman Catholicism, the Anglican Church and the Dissenters, between the ruling class and the laboring poor, etc. In short, it was an age full of conflicts and divergence of values. The eighteenth century saw the fast development of England as a nation. Abroad, a vast expansion of British colonies in North America, India, the West Indies, and a continuous increase of colonial wealth and trade provided England with a market for which the small-scale hand production methods of the home industry were hardly adequate. This created not only a steady demand for British goods but also standardized goods. And at home in the country, Acts of Enclosure were putting more land into fewer privileged rich landowners and forcing thousands of small farmers and tenants off land to become wage earners in industrial towns. This coming together of free labor from the home and free capital gathered or plundered from the colonies was the essence of the Industrial Revolution. So, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, England had become the first powerful capitalist country in the world. It had become the work-shop of the world, her manufactured goods flooding foreign markets far and near. Along with the fast economic development, the British bourgeois or middle class also grew rapidly. It was the major force of the Revolution and was mainly composed of city people: traders, merchants, manufacturers, and other adventurers such as slave traders and colonists. As the Industrial Revolution went on, more and more people joined the rank of this class. Marx once pointed out that the bourgeois class of the eighteenth-century England was a revolutionary class then and quite different from the feudal aristocratic class. They were people who had known poverty and hardship, and most of them had obtained their sent social status through hard work. They believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work. To work, to economize and to accumulate wealth constituted the whole meaning of their life. This aspect of social life is best found in the realistic novels of the century. The eighteenth-century England is also known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment Movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept through the whole Western Europe at the time. The movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. They held that rationality or reason should be the only, the final cause of any human thought and activities. They called for a reference to order, reason and rules. They believed that when reason served as the yardstick for the measurement of all human activities and relations, every superstition, injustice and opssion was to yield place to "eternal truth," "eternal justice" and "natural equality." The belief provided theory for the French Revolution of 1789 and the American War of Independence in 1776. At the same time, the enlighteners advocated universal education. They believed that human beings were limited, dualistic, imperfect, and yet capable of rationality and perfection through education. If the masses were well educated, they thought, there would be great chance for a democratic and equal human society. As a matter of fact, literature at the time, heavily didactic and moralizing, became a very popular means of public education. Famous among the great enlighteners in England were those great writers like John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Joseph Addison and Sir Richard Steele, the two pioneers of familiar essays, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Henry Fielding and Samuel Johnson. In the field of literature, the Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism. According to the neoclassicists, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers (Homer, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, etc.) and those of the contemporary French ones. They believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity. This belief led them to seek proportion, unity, harmony and grace in literary exssions, in an effort to delight, instruct and correct human beings, primarily as social animals. Thus a polite, urbane, witty, and intellectual art developed. Neoclassicists had some fixed laws and rules for almost every genre of literature. Prose should be cise, direct, smooth and flexible. Poetry should be lyrical, epical, didactic, satiric or dramatic, and each class should be guided by its own principles. Drama should be written in the Heroic Couplets (iambic pentameter rhymed in two lines); the three unities of time, space and action should be strictly observed; regularity in construction should be adhered to, and type characters rather than individuals should be resented. In the last few decades of the 18th century, however, the neoclassical emphasis upon reason, intellect, wit and form was rebelled against or challenged by the sentimentalists, and was, in due time, gradually replaced by Romanticism. But it had a lasting wholesome influence upon English literature. The poetic techniques and certain classical graces such as order, good form, unified structure, clarity and conciseness of language developed in this period have become a permanent heritage. The neoclassical period witnessed the flourish of English poetry in the classical style from Restoration to about the second half of the century, climaxing with John Dryden, Alexander Pope and the last standard-bearer of the school, Samuel Johnson. Much attention was given to the wit, form and art of poetry. Mock epic, romance, satire and epigram were popular forms adopted by poets of the time. Besides the elegant poetic structure and diction, the neoclassical poetry was also noted for its seriousness and earnestness in tone and constant didacticism. The mid-century was, however, dominated by a newly rising literary form -- the modern English novel, which, contrary to the traditional romance of aristocrats, gives a realistic sentation of life of the common English people. This -- the most significant phenomenon in the history of the development of English literature in the eighteenth century -- is a natural product of the Industrial Revolution and a symbol of the growing importance and strength of the English middle class. Among the pioneers were Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Tobias George Smollett, and Oliver Goldsmith. And from the middle part to the end of the century there was also an apparent shift of interest from the classic literary tradition to originality and imagination, from society to individual, and from the didactic to the confessional, inspirational and prophetic. Gothic novels -- mostly stories of mystery and horror which take place in some haunted or dilapidated Middle Age castles -- were turned out profusely by both male and female writers; works such as The Castle of Otranto (1765) by Horace Walpole, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797) by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, The Champion of Virtue, a Gothic Story (1777) by Clara Reeve, and The Monk (1796) by M.G. Lewis became very popular. Eulogizing or lamenting lyrics by nature poets like James Thomson, William Collins, and William Cowper, and by such sentimentalists as the "Graveyard School" were widely read. The romantic poems of the Scottish peasant poet, Robert Burnsand William Blake also joined in, paving the way for the flourish of Romanticism early the century. In the theatrical world, Richard Brinsley Sheridan was the leading figure among a host of playwrights. And of the witty and satiric prose, those written by Jonathan Swift are especially worth studying, his A Modest Proposal being generally regarded as the best model of satire, not only of the period but also in the whole English literary history. 浪漫主义时期 本章简介 <> The movement which we call Romanticism is something not so easy to define, especially concerning its characteristics or dates. For it is a broad movement that affected the whole of Europe (and America). However, English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to have begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott's death and the passage of the first Reform Bill in the Parliament. However, these dates are arbitrary and, to some extent, conventional, for a new current of literature, in fact, had started long before the publication of the Lyrical Ballads. In the works of the sentimental writers, we note a new interest in literatures and legends other than those of Greece and' Rome. It was in effect a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason which vailed from the days of Pope to those of Johnson. And some of the great imaginative writings in English literature sprang from the confrontation of radicals and conservatives at the close of the 18th century, as the history in England started to move with a new urgency. This urgency was provoked by two important revolutions: the French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English Industrial Revolution which happened more slowly, but with astonishing consequences. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a French philosopher, was one of the leading thinkers in the second half of the 18th century. In 1762 he published two books that electrified Europe -- Du Contrat Social and Emile, in which he explored new ideas about Nature, Society and Education. These ideas of Rousseau's provided necessary guiding principles for the French Revolution, for they inspired an implacable resentment against the tyrannical rule in France and an immense hope for the future. In 1789 there broke out the epoch-making French Revolution. The news of the Revolution, especially the Declaration of Rights of Man and the storming of Bastille, aroused great sympathy and enthusiasm in the English liberals and radicals. Patriotic clubs and societies multiplied in England, all claiming Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Then, in October, 1790, Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke's pamphlet was designed as a crusade against the sad of such radical innovations and the overthrow of the established privileges he saw enshrined in the church, the hereditary power of the monarchy and the greater landed families. By pouring scorn on the feverish violence of rebellion and prophesying mob-rule and military dictatorship in France, Burke raised the most authoritative voice in Britain in denouncing the Revolution. Burke's Reflections provoked many replies from the radical writers who argued for the rights of the people to fight against tyranny and to overthrow any government of opssion; but none was so effective as Thomas Paine's Declaration of Rights of Man (1791-1792). Paine knew what he was talking about: he had been in France during the Revolution, and demonstrated conclusively that by 1789 France was so enmeshed in opssion and misery that nothing short of revolution could set her free. William Godwin, who exerted a great influence on Wordsworth, Shelley and other poets, wrote passionately against the injustices of the economic system and the opssion of the poor in his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Fighting against Burke's conservative ideas was also William Cobbet whom Marx once extolled as "an instinctive defender of the masses of the people against the encroachment of the bourgeoisie." If law and government appeared to some contemporaries as one system of injustice, conventional gender roles were another, for women had long been regarded as inferior to men. After the Declaration of Rights of Man was released, Mary Wollstonecraft urged the equal rights for women in her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), thus setting out the earliest exposition of feminism based on a comhensive system of ethics. But later when Jacobeans took over power in France and started to push a policy of violent terror at home and aggressive expansion abroad, most of the English sympathizers dropped their support. And the English government even waged wars against France till the fall of Napoleon in 1815. During this period, England itself had experienced profound economic and social changes. The primarily agricultural society had been replaced by a modern industrialized one. The biggest social change in English history was the transfer of large masses of the population from the countryside to the towns. The prosperous peasant farmers had long been considered the solid base of English society; but by the 19th century they had largely disappeared. As a result of the Enclosures and the agricultural mechanization, the peasants were driven out of their land: some emigrated to the colonies; some sank to the level of farm laborers; and many others drifted to the industrial towns where there was a growing demand for labor. But the new industrial towns were no better than jungles, where the law was "the survival of the fittest." The workers were herded into factories arid overcrowded streets, and reduced to the level of commodities, valued only according to the fluctuating demand for their labor. Women and children were treated no differently in this respect from the men. With the British Industrial Revolution coming into its full swing, the capitalist class came to dominate not only the means of production, but also trade and world market. Though England had increased its wealth by several times, it was only the rich who owned this wealth; the majority of the people were still poor, or even poorer. After the Napoleonic War, the English people suffered severe economic dessions. While the price of food rose rocket high, the workers' wages went sharply down; sixteen hours' labor a day could hardly pay for the daily bread. This cruel economic exploitation caused large-scale workers' disturbances in England; the desperation of the workers exssed itself in the popular outbreaks of machine-breaking known as the Luddite riots. The climax of popular agitation and government brutality came in August 1819 at St. Peter's Field, Manchester, where a huge but orderly group of peaceful protesters were charged by mounted troops who killed nine and wounded hundreds more. This was the notorious "Peterloo Massacre'' which roused indignation even among the upper class. However, the workers' strong demands for reform, for their own political and economic rights did not die down. The industrial bourgeoisie made use of this struggle to fight for its own sumacy in political power against the landed aristocrats. In 1832, the Reform Bill was enacted, which brought the industrial capitalists into power; but the workers who played the major role in the fight got nothing. Consequently, there arose sharp conflicts between capital and labor. The Romantic Movement, whether in England, Germany or France, exssed a more or less negative attitude toward the existing social and political conditions that came with industrialization and the growing importance of the bourgeoisie. The Romantics, who were deeply immersed in the most violent phase of the transition from a decadent feudal to a capitalist economy, saw both the corruption and injustice of the feudal societies and the fundamental inhumanity of the economic, social and political forces of capitalism. They felt that the society denied people their essential human needs. So under the influence of the leading romantic thinkers like Kant and the Post-Kantians, they demonstrated a strong reaction against the dominant modes of thinking of the 18th century writers and philosophers. Where their decessors saw man as a social animal, the Romantics saw him essentially as an individual in the solitary state. Where the Augustans emphasized those features that men have in common, the Romantics emphasized the special qualities of each individual's mind. Thus, we can say that Romanticism actually constitutes a change of direction from attention to the outer world of social civilization to the inner world of the human spirit. In essence it designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and all experience. It also places the individual at the center of art, making literature most valuable as an exssion of his or her unique feelings and particular attitudes, and valuing its accuracy in portraying the individual's experiences. The Romantic period is an age of poetry. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats are the major Romantic poets. They started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. Wordsworth and Coleridge were the major resentatives of this movement. They explored new theories and innovated new techniques in poetry writing. In their separate ways, they saw poetry as a healing energy; they believed that poetry could purify both individual souls and the society. Wordsworth's theory of poetry is calling for simple themes drawn from humble life exssed in the language of ordinary people. The face to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads acts as a manifesto for the new school and sets forth his own critical creed. Wordsworth 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.” Imagination, defined by Coleridge, is the vital faculty that creates new wholes out of disparate elements. It is in solitude, in communion with the natural universe, that man can exercise this most valuable of faculties, the imagination. "This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom..." said Blake. "Where intelligence was fallible, limited, the Imagination was our hope of contact with eternal forces, with the whole spiritual world.“ The Romantics not only extol the faculty of imagination, but also elevate the concepts of spontaneity and inspiration, regarding them as something crucial for true poetry. Nature, for the most influential 18th-century writers, was more something to be seen than something to be known. But for the Romantics it is just the opposite. The natural world comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject matter. Wordsworth is the closest to nature. He conceives of nature as "the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being." In his view, the natural world is the dominant influence in changing people's sensibilities: nature to him is a source of mental cleanliness and spiritual understanding; it is a teacher; it is the stepping stone between Man and God. To escape from, or at any rate to articulate an alternative to, a World that had become excessively rational, as well as excessively materialistic and ugly, the Romantics would turn to other times and places, where the qualities they valued could be convincingly depicted. Wordsworth, Coleridge and-Southey chose to live by the lakeside so as to escape from the "madding crowd," while Byron and Shelley rejected the entire English society by their self-imposed exile. In order to achieve the effect of the individual vision, the medieval or renaissance world were particularly favored, but they might range further afield-to the central Asia fief of Kubla Khan, or to India for the vaguely Hindu tales of Robert Southey. There were too one could allow free play to the supernatural-witches, curses, visions and prophesies- without arousing feelings of incongruity. Romantic also tend to be nationalistic, defending the great poets and dramatists of their own national heritage against the Advocates of classic rules who tended to glorify Rome and rational Italian and French neoclassical art as superior to the native traditions. Poetry has been traditionally regarded as an art governed by Rules; but to the Romantics, poetry should be free from all rules. They would turn to the humble people and the common everyday life for subjects. Employing the commonplace, the natural, and the Simple as their poetic materials, Romantic writers are always seeking for the Absolute, the Ideal through the transcendence of the actual. They have also made bold experiments in poetic language, versification and design, and constructed a variety of forms on original principles of organization and style; examples of such can be found in Blake‟s visionary prophetic poems, in Coleridge's mystic ballad, The Ancient Mariner, in Wordsworth's spiritual autobiography, The Prelude, and in Shelley's symbolic drama, Prometheus Unbound. The Romantic period is also a great age of prose. With education greatly developed for the middle-class people, there was a rapid growth in the reading public and an increasing demand for reading materials. Thus, newspapers, magazines and periodicals run by private enterprises started to flourish in this period. Edinburgh Review (1802), The Quarterly Review (founded 1809), Blackwood‟s Magazine (founded 1817), London Magazine (founded 1820), were among the most famous. They made literary comments on writers with high standards, which paved the way for the development of a new and valuable type of critical writings. Colendge, Hazlitt, Lamb, and De Quincey were the leading figures in this new development. Guided by rich knowledge of literature and a profound human sympathy, they read sympathetically the work of a new author, with the sole idea of finding what he had contributed, or tried to contribute, to the magnificent total of the English literature. They also wrote familiar essays. William Hazlitt (1778-1830) is a great critic on Shakespeare, Elizabethan drama, and English poetry. In literary criticism, his particular concern is to give strict judgments on the target work, to point out and validate the author's achievements. He is also a master of the familiar essays, with a keen observation and a sharp, well-in-formed mind. He has developed an eloquent, courageous and arbitrary prose style. His last book is a four-volume Life of Napoleon, in which he exsses a vehement, but qualified, admiration of Napoleon as a man of heroic will and power in the service of the emancipation of mankind. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) is a lovable essayist. With him, the essay is no longer chiefly a mode of intellectual inquiry and moral address. Rather, the essay becomes a medium for a delightful literary treatment of life's small pleasures and reassurances. The essential characteristic of his essays is a strong clear intelligence, commanding in its centrality, its courage, and its vital irony. Lamb's Essays of Ella (1823) is a good work that leads to a delightful intertation of the life of London. Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) is one of the keenest intellects of the age; yet his wonderful intellect seems always subordinate to his passion for dreaming. The great literary merit of his Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822) lies in his subtle revelation of the potentiality of human dreams. His concern with the psychological effects of literature achieves its most acute literary insight in his essay "On the Knocking at the Gate in “Macbeth." His style, sometimes stately, sometimes headlong, now gorgeous, now musical, shows a harmony between the idea and the exssion. The two major novelists of the Romantic period are Jane Austen and Walter Scott. Austen is of the 18th-century in her moral outlook, and in her prose style, though she is fully aware of the new strains of Romanticism. Her view of life is a totally realistic one.She has no sentimentality, no time for emotional excess. She honors the Augustan virtues of moderation, dignity, disciplined emotion and common sense. The major theme of her novels is love and marriage toward which she holds on a practical idealism -- love should be justified by reason and disciplined by self-control. Although the range of her experience is narrow, she never ventures to step beyond the limits of her personal knowledge. She chooses to stay within the tiny field that she knows best, thinking that "three or four families in a country village are the very thing to work on." Not surprisingly she had in her day a small, select circle of admirers. But in the 20th century, she has become a popular classic and has been admired for her wit, her common-sense, her insight into characters and social relationships. Walter Scott (1771-1832) is the most popular novelist of his day. After establishing himself as a writer of romantic historical narrative poetry, Scott switched to novel writing. Waverley (1814), Old Mortality (1816), The Heart of Midlothian (1818), Rob Roy (1818), and Ivanhoe (1820) are among the most popular ones of his novels. In his depiction of Scotland, England, and the Continent from medieval times to the 18th century, he showed a keen sense of political and traditional forces and of their influence on the individual. Through his pen, Scotland became the romantic country for the whole of Europe: the rugged grandeur of its scenery, its sturdy, independent peasantry, the bloody yet poignant nature of much of its history all added to its appeal. For Scott really established the historical novel as a viable and worthwhile fictional fictional form, by setting the personal dilemmas of his characters against a background of historical events. Although his plots are sometimes hastily constructed and his characters sometimes stilted, these works remain valuable for their compelling atmosphere, occasional epic dignity. and clear understanding of human nature. He is the first major historical novelist, exerting a powerful literary influence both in Britain and on the Continent throughout the 19th century. Gothic novel, a type of romantic' fiction that dominated in the late eighteenth century, was one phase of the Romantic movement. Its principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural, which strongly appeal to the reader's emotion. With its descriptions of the dark, irrational side of human nature, the Gothic form has exerted a great influence over the writers of the Romantic period. Works like The Mysteries of Udolpho(1794) by Ann Radcliffe and Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley are typical Gothic romance. Even poets like Blake, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats tend to use those fantastic, grotesque, savage and mysterious elements of Gothic fiction in their poetic works. Besides poetry and prose, there are quite a number of writers who have tried their hand at poetic dramas in this period. This is partly because the lectures and criticism on Elizabethan drama given by Coleridge and Hazlitt have renewed interest in Shakespeare and led to the rediscovery of his contemporaries. Shelley's Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci (1819), Byron's Manfred (1817), and Coleridge's Remorse (1813) are generally regarded as the best verse plays during this period. However, compared with the brilliant achievement in poetry and prose, drama in the Romantic period is less successful. There might be different reasons to explain this, but the chief one might be that none of these poets really understand the theater. Their plays are seldom if ever amongst the best of the stage plays, and they survive for readers, not for audience. 维多利亚时期 本章简介 <> Chronologically the Victorian period roughly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria who ruled over England from 1836 to 1901. The period has been generally regarded as one of the most glorious in the English history. The early years of the Victorian England was a time of rapid economic development as well as serious social problems. After the Reform Bill of 1832 passed the political power from the decaying aristocrats into the hands of the middle-class industrial capitalists, the Industrial Revolution soon geared up. Scientific discoveries and technologic inventions from railways to steamships, from spinning looms to printing machines quickly brought amazing changes to the country. For a time England was the "workshop of the world." Large amounts of profit were accumulated both from expanding its foreign trade markets and from exploiting its huge-sized colonies." Towards the mid-century, England had reached its highest point of development as a world power. And yet beneath the great prosperity and richness, there existed widesad poverty and wretchedness among the working class. In the towns and cities where new factories and mines bloomed, population grew at a high rate. Workers and their families crowded in the dirty and insanitary slums. The working conditions under which workers toiled were unimaginably brutal, especially in textile factories and coal mines where women and children were widely employed. The worsening living and working conditions, the mass unemployment and the new Poor Law of 1834 with its workhouse system finally gave rise to the Chartist Movement (1836-1848). The English workers got themselves organized in big cities and brought forth the People's Charter, in which they demanded basic rights and better living and working conditions. They, for three times, made appeals to the government, with hundreds of thousands of people's signatures. The movement swept over most of the cities in the country. Although the movement declined to an end in 1848, it did bring some improvement to the welfare of the working class. This was the first mass movement of the English working class and the early sign of the awakening of the poor, opssed people. During the twenty years, England settled down to a time of prosperity and relative stability. With the Industrial Revolution in full swing, the nation was well ahead of others in development. The middle-class life of the time was characterized by prosperity, respectability and material progress. People as a whole were trying to live up to a National spirit of earnestness, respectability, modesty and domesticity, with the Queen herself as the epitome of such virtues. Common sense and moral propriety, which were ignored by the Romanticists, again became the dominant occupation in literary works. But the last three decades of the century witnessed the decline of the British empire and the decay of the Victorian values. Abroad, Britain still maintained its strong economic and military forces and its colonial territory was still the largest. But its absolute leadership in industry and military force was already facing challenge from Germany. The competition with America also hurt the British monopoly in trade and commerce. At home, the Irish question remained unsolved. The growth of labor force -- the proletariat -- disturbed the balance of the political power, which used to be maintained between the Whigs and the Tories. The Victorian morality which had been the spiritual prop for tile national consolidation, as the century came to its end, began to lose its glamour, and the old moderate, respectable life-style was to be replaced by a more "loose and dissipating" one. This fin-de-siecle sentiment was best reflected works of such aestheticists as Oscar Wilde (1854-4900) and Walter Pater (1839-1894), both notorious advocators of the theory of “art for art's sake.” Ideologically, the Victorians experienced fundamental changes. The rapid development of science and technology, new inventions and discoveries in geology, astronomy, biology and anthropology drastically shook people's religious convictions. The religious collision that started from the early nineteenth century continued and was intensified by the disputes over evolutionary science. Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) shook the theoretical basis of the traditional faith. New scientific discoveries increased people's religious doubts and anxieties. In his long poem In Memoriam, Tennyson recorded his own experience of religious uncertainties before the falling faith in god. On the other hand, Utilitarianism was widely accepted and practised. Almost everything was put to the test: by the criterion of utility, that is, the extent to which it could promote the material happiness. The Bible and the Evangelical Orthodoxy were regarded either as an outmoded superstition or tested by the principle of utility. Church service became a form instead of real devotion. This theory held a special appeal to the middle-class industrialists, whose greed drove them to exploiting workers to the utmost and brought greater suffering and poverty to the working mass. Dickens, Carlyle, Ruskin and many other socially conscious writers severely criticized the Utilitarian creed, especially its deciation of cultural values and its cold indifference towards human feelings and imagination. Victorian literature, as a product of its age, naturally took on its quality of magnitude and diversity. It was many-sided and complex, and reflected both romantically and realistically the great changes that were going on in people's life and thought. Great writers and great works abounded. In this period, the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging exssion of progressive thought. Among the famous novelists of the time were the critical realists like Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Mrs. Gaskell (1810-1865) and Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), etc. While sticking to the principle of faithful resentation of the eighteenth-century realist novel, they carried their duty forward to the criticism of the society and the defence of the mass. Although writing from different points of view and with different techniques, they shared one thing in common, that is, they were all concerned about the fate of the common people. They were angry with the inhuman social institutions, the decaying social morality as resented by the money-worship and Utilitarianism, and tile widesad misery, poverty and injustice. Their truthful picture of people's life and bitter and strong criticism of the society had done much in awakening the public consciousness to the social problems and in the actual improvement of the society. And in the last few decades there were also George Eliot, the pioneering woman who, according to D. H. Lawrence, was the first novelist that "started putting all the actions inside," and Thomas Hardy, that Wessex man who not only continued to expose and criticize all sorts of social iniquities, but finally came to question and attack the Victorian conventions and morals. The Victorian age also produced a host of great prose writers: Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), John Henry Newman (1801-1890), John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), John Ruskin (1819-1900), and Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), to mention a few. Many of them joined forces with the critical realist novelists in exposing and criticizing the social reality, and some became very influential in the ideological field. Historical accounts, religious dissertations, literary criticism, and essays and lectures on various subjects constitute a formidable force of influence upon the whole society. At the same time, they brought English prose to a very high point in both prose art and literary criticism. Among the most influential prose works of the time are Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1833-1834), The French Revolution (1837), Chartisrn (1840), Macaulay's History of England (1849-1861), Ruskin's five-volumed Modern Painters (1843-1860) and Huxley's lecture essays. The poetry of this period was mainly characterized by experiments with new styles and new ways of exssion. Among those famous experimental poets was Robert Browning who created the verse novel by adopting the novelistic sentation of characters. This transferred the thematic interest from mere narration of the story to revelation and study of characters' inner world and brought to the Victorian poetry some psycho-analytical element. Other poets like Alfred Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Edward Fitzgerald (1809-1883), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) and his talented sister Christina (1830-1894), Gerald Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) and Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) all made their respective attempts at poetic innovations and helped open up new ways for the twentieth-century modern poetry. Victorian literature, in general, truthfully resents the reality and spirit of the age. The high-spirited vitality, the down-to-earth earnestness, the good-natured humor and unbounded imagination are all uncedented. In almost every genre it paved the way for the coming century, where its spirits, values and experiments are to witness their bumper harvest. 现代时期 本章简介 <> In the second half of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th century, both natural and social sciences in Europe had enormously advanced. Their rapid development led to great gains in material wealth. But when capitalism came into its monopoly stage, the sharpened contradictions between socialized production and the private ownership caused frequent economic dessions and mass unemployment. The gap between the rich and the poor was further deepened. To crown it all, the catastrophic First World War tremendously weakened the British Empire and brought about great sufferings to its people as well. The postwar economic dislocation and spiritual disillusion produced a profound impact upon the British people, who came to see the valent wretchedness in capitalism. The Second World War marked the last stage of the disintegration of the British Empire. Britain suffered heavy losses in the war: thousands of people were killed; the economy was ruined; and almost all its former colonies were lost. The once sun-never-set Empire finally collapsed. All these radical changes gave rise to all kinds of philosophical ideas in Western Europe. In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put forward the theory of scientific socialism, which not only provided a guiding principle for the working people, but also inspired them to make dauntless 'fights' for their own emancipation. Darwin's theory of evolution exerted a strong influence upon the people, causing many to lose their religious faith. The social Darwinism, under the cover of "survival of the fittest," vehemently advocated colonialism or jingoism. Einstein's theory of relativity provided entirely new ideas for the concepts of time and space. Freud's analytical psychology drastically altered our conception of human nature. Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimistic philosopher, started a rebellion against rationalism, stressing the importance of will and intuition. Having inherited the basic principles from Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche went further against rationalism by advocating the doctrines of power ant] superman and by completely rejecting the Christian morality. Based on the major ideas of his decessors, Henry Bergson established his irrational philosophy, which put the emphasis on creation, intuition, irrationality and unconsciousness. The irrationalist philosophers exerted immense influence upon the major modernist writers in Britain. Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism. The appalling shock of the First World War severely destroyed people's faith in the Victorian values; and the rise of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited writers to make new explorations on human natures and human relationships. The French symbolism, appearing in the late 19th century, heralded modernism. After the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared: exssionism, surrealism, futurism, Dadaism, imagism and stream of consciousness. Towards the 1920s, these trends converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement, which swept across the whole Europe and America. The major figures that were associated with this movement were Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Webern, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Modernism was somewhat curbed in the 1930s. But after the Second World War, a variety of modernism, or post-modernism, like existentialist literature, theater of the absurd, new novels and black humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that "the world was absurd, and the human life was an agony." Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and iii relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more 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. Therefore, they pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one. In their writings, the past, the sent and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual. Modernism is, in many aspects, a reaction against realism, it rejects rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism; it excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world, which is the only creative source of realism; by advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, it casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama. The 20th century has witnessed a great achievement in English poetry. In the early years of this century, Thomas Hardy and the war poets of the younger generation were important realistic poets. Hardy exssed his strong sympathies for the suffering poor and his bitter disgusts at the social evils in his poetry as in his novels. The soldiers-poets of World War I revealed the appalling brutality of the war in a most realistic way. The early poems of Pound and Eliot and Yeats' matured poetry marked the rise of "modern poetry," which was, in some sense, a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian poetry. The modernist poets fought against the romantic fuzziness and self-indulged emotionalism, advocating new ideas in poetry-writing such as to use the language of common speech, to create new rhythms as the exssion of a new mood, to allow absolute freedom in choosing subjects, and to use hard, clear and cise images in poems. The 1930s witnessed great economic dessions, mass unemployment, and the rise of the Nazis. Facing such a severe situation, most of the young intellects started to turn to the left. And therefore the period was known as "the red thirties." A group of young poets during this period exssed in their poetry a radical political enthusiasm and a strong protest against fascism. With the coming of the 1950s, there was a return of realistic poetry again. By advocating reason, moral discipline, and traditional forms, a new generation of poets started "The Movement," which explicitly rejected the modernist influence. There was no significant poetic movement in the 1960s. A multiplicity of choices opened to both the poet and the reader. Poets gradually moved into more individual styles. The realistic novels in the early 20th century were the continuation of the Victorian tradition, yet its exposing and criticizing power against capitalist evils had been somewhat weakened both in width and depth. The outstanding realistic novelists of this period were John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Bennett. The three trilogies of Galsworthy's Forsyte novels are masterpieces of critical realism in the early 20th century, which revealed the corrupted capitalist world. In his novels of social satire, H. G. Wells made realistic studies of the aspirations and frustrations of the "Little Man;“ whereas Bennett sented a vivid picture of the English life in the industrial Midlands in his best novels. Realism was, to a certain extent, eclipsed by the rapid rise of modernism in the 1920s. But with the strong swing of leftism in the 1930s, novelists began to turn their attention to the urgent social problems. They also enriched the traditional ways of creation by adopting some of the modernist techniques. However, the realistic novels of this period were more or less touched by a pessimistic mood, occupied with the theme of man's loneliness, and shaped in different forms: social satires by Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, 1932) and George Orwell (Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949); comic satires on the English upper class by Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust, 1934); and Catholic novels by Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory, 1940) Another important aspect of realistic novels in this period is the fact that there rose a few working class writers, who gave a direct portrayal of the working-people's poverty and sufferings, by singing highly of the heroic struggles against capitalism waged by the working class. Among this group, the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the most outstanding. His trilogy: Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934) sent the social changes and the working-people's life on farms, in towns and cities through the personal experience of Chris Guthrie. In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, there appeared a group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working-class background, who were known as "the Angry Young Men." They demonstrated a particular disillusion over the dessing situation in Britain and launched a bitter protest against the outmoded social and political values in their society. Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and Alan Sillitoe were the major novelists in this group. Amis was the first to start the attack on middle-class privileges and power in his novel Lucky Jim (1954). Both Braine and Sillitoe came from working-class families. They portrayed unadorned working- class life in their novels with great freshness and vigor of the working-class language. Having been merged and interpenetrated with modernism in the past several decades, the realistic novel of the 1960s and 1970s appeared in a new face with a richer, more vigorous and more diversified style. The first three decades of this century were golden years of the modernist novel. In stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation, the theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis played a particularly important role. With the notion that multiple levels of consciousness existed simultaneously in the human mind, that one's sent was the sum of his past, sent and future, and that the whole truth about human beings existed in the unique, isolated, and private world of each individual, writers like Dorothy,Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human consciousness. They had created uncedented stream-of-consciousness novels such as Pilgrimage (1915-1938) by Richardson, Ulysses (1922) by Joyce, and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Woolf. One of the remarkable features of their writings was their continuous experimentation on new and sophisticated techniques in novel writing, which made tremendous impacts on the creation of both realistic and modernist novels in this century. James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness novelist; in Ulysses, his encyclopedia-like masterpiece, Joyce sents fantastic picture of the disjointed, illogical, illusory, and mental-emotional life of Leopold Bloom, who becomes the symbol of everyman in the post-World-War-I Europe. In the works of E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence, old traditions are still there, but their subject matter about human relationships and their symbolic or psychological sentations of the novel are entirely modern: Forster's masterpiece, A Passage to India (1924), is a novel of decidedly symbolist aspirations, in which the author set up, within a realistic story, a fable of moral significance at implies a highly mystical, symbolic view of life, death, human relationship, and the relationship of man with the infinite universe. D.H. Lawrence is regarded as revolutionary as Joyce in novel writing; but unlike Joyce, he was not concerned with technical innovations; his interest lay in the tracing of the psychological development of his characters and in his energetic criticism of the dehumanizing effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature. He believed that life impulse was the primacy of man's instinct, and that my conscious ression of such an impulse would cause distortion or perversion of the individual's personality. In his best novels like The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), Lawrence made a bold psychological exploration of various human relationships, especially those between men and women, with a great frankness. Lawrence claimed that the alienation of the human relationships and the perversion of human nature in the modern society were caused by the desires for power and money, by the shams and frauds of middle-class life, and, above all, by the whole capitalist mechanical civilization, which turned men into inhuman machines. Modernist novels came to a decline in the 1930s, though Joyce and Woolf continued their experiments. After the Second World War, modernism had another upsurge with the rise of existentialism; but it was reflected mainly in drama. The most celebrated dramatists in the last decade of the 19th century were Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, who, in a sense, pioneered the modern drama, though they did not make so many innovations in techniques and forms as modernist poets or novelists. Wilde exssed a satirical and bitter attitude towards the upper-class people by revealing their corruption, their snobbery, and their hypocrisy in his plays, especially in his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Shaw is a more important in drama than Wilde. He is considered to be the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare. His works are examples of the inspired by social criticism. John Galsworthy carried on this tradition of social criticism in his plays. By dramatizing social and problems, Galsworthy made considerable achievements in his The Silver Box (1906) and Strife (1910) are such examples , in which Galsworthy sents not only realistic pictures of social rice, but also the workers heroic struggles against their employers. With their joint efforts, the Irish playwrights like W.B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, and J. M. Synge brought about the Irish National Theater Movement in the early 20th century, thus starting an Irish dramatic revival. Yeats, a prominent poet of this century was the leader of this movement. He was a verse playwright desired to restore lyrical drama to popularity. With the heroic portrayal of spiritual truth as his main concern, Yeats wrote a number of verse plays, introducing Irish myths and folk legends; but the plot in his plays was seldom very dramatic. As a result, none of his plays was among the best of his poetical achievement. J. M. Synge was the most gifted dramatist of the Movement. By adopting the vivid figurative language of the Irish peasantry, Synge brought vigor, ironic humour, and dramatic pathos to the Irish stage. His most popular play is the comedy, The Playboy of the Western (1907). Another original and distinguished artist that the Theater produced was Sean O'Casey, who dealt in his work political and social themes of the Irish Nationalist Movement, and with the suffering of the Irish townspeople. By combining “richness" with "reality," O'Casey sented an urban drama of Dublin slum life to the Irish audience in plays like Juno and the Paycock(1925), and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The 1930s witnessed a revival of poetic drama in England. One of the early experimenters was T. S. Eliot who regarded drama as the best medium of poetry. Eliot wrote several verse plays and made a considerable success. Murder in the Cathedral (1935), with its purely dramatic power, remains the most popular of his verse plays, in spite of its primarily religious purpose. After Eliot, Christopher Fry gained considerable successes in poetic drama. His exuberant though poetically commonplace verse drama, The Lady's Not For Burning (1948), attracted delighted audience. The English dramatic revolution came in the 1950s under various European and American influences. This revolution developed in two directions: the working- class drama and the Theater of Absurd. The working-class drama was started by a group of young writers from the lower-middle class, or working class, who sented a new type of plays which exssed a mood of restlessness, anger and frustration, a spirit of rebelliousness, and a strong emotional protest against the existing social institutions. John Osborne was the man who started the first change in drama by senting his play, Look Back in Anger, in 1956. In a fresh, unadorned working-class language, the play angrily, violently and unrelentingly condemned the contemporary social evils. With an entirely new sense of reality, Osborne brought vitality to the English theater and became known as the first "Angry Young Man." The most original playwright of the Theater of Absurd is Samuel Beckett, who wrote about human beings living a meaningless life in an alien, decaying world. His first play, Waiting for Godot (1955), is regarded as the most famous and influential play of the Theater of Absurd. (美国文学)浪漫主义时期 本章简介 <> The Romantic Period, one of the most important periods in the history of American literature, stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It started with the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called "the American Renaissance.” The development of the American society nurtured "the literature of a great nation." The young Republic, devoid of a heavy burden of the inherited past and history, was flourishing into a politically, economically and culturally independent country. Historically, it was the time of westward expansion. The western boundary had reached to the Pacific by 1860; the number of its states had increased from the original thirteen at the time of its independence to twenty-one by the middle of the 19th century; its total population increased from four million people in 1790 to thirty million in 1860. Economically, the whole nation was experiencing an industrial transformation, which affected the rural as well as the urban life. The use of steam power in industry and agriculture, the erection of factories and textile mills, the demand of a large employment, and the technological inventions and innovations all helped restructure the economic life. In addition, the sudden influx of immigration gave a big push to the already booming industry. Politically, democracy and equality became the ideal of the new nation, and the two party system came into being. Worthy of mention is the literary anti cultural life of the country. With the founding of the American Independent Government, the nation felt an urge to have its own literary exssion, to make known its new experience that other nations did not have: the early Puritan settlement, the confrontation with the Indians, the frontiersmen's life, and the wild west. Besides, the nation's literary milieu was ready for the movement characterized with imagination as well. Newspapers, magazines, journals, and book reviews appeared in ever-increasing numbers, and a mature reading public constituted a great market. Thus, with a strong sense of optimism and the mood of "feeling good" of the whole nation, a spectacular outburst of romantic feeling was brought about in the first half of the 19th century. Foreign literary masters, especially the English counterparts exerted a stimulating impact on the writers of the new world. Born of one common cultural heritage, the American writers shared some common features with the English Romanticists. Irving, Cooper, Poe, Freneau and Bryant revolted against the literary forms and ideas of the period of classicism by developing some relatively new forms of fiction or poetry. In most of the American writings in the period there was a new emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature, which included a liking for the picturesque, the exotic, the sensuous, the sensational, and the supernatural. The Americans also placed an increasing emphasis on the free exssion of emotions and displayed an increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters. Heroes and heroines exhibited extremes of sensitivity and excitement. The strong tendency to exalt the individual and the common man was almost a national religion in American writers like Freneau, Bryant, and Cooper showed a great interest in external nature in their respective works. The literary use of the more colorful aspects of the past was also to be found in Freneau's use of the "ruins of empire" theme, in Bryant's fascination by the Mound Builders, in Irving's effort to exploit the legends of the Hudson River region, and in Cooper's long series of historical tales short, American Romanticism is, in a certain way, derivative. Although foreign influences were strong, the great works that demonstrate what American Romantic writings were are typically American. They revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native lands. For example, the American national experience of "pioneering into the west" proved to be a rich source of material for American writers to draw upon. They celebrated America's landscape with its virgin forests, meadows, groves, endless prairies, streams, and vast oceans. The wilderness came to function almost as a dramatic character that symbolized moral law. The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature. Such a desire is particularly evident in Cooper's Leather-Stocking Tales, in Thoreau's Walden and, later, in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With the growth of American national consciousness, American character types speaking local dialects appeared in poetry and fiction with increasing frequency, and literature began to celebrate American farmers, the poor, the unlettered, children, and, especially, the noble savages (red and white) untainted by society. Then the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values. And this Puritan influence over American Romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. One of the manifestations is the fact that American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counter-parts. Besides, a occupation with the Calvinistic view of original sin and the mystery of evil marked the works of Hawthorne, Melville and a host of lesser writers. The most clearly defined Romantic literary movement in this period is New England Transcendentalism. It was started by a group of people who were members of an informal club, i.e. the Transcendental Club in New England in the 1830s. It was from the very beginning a local phenomenon restricted only to those people living in New England, who carried out the movement as a reaction against the cold, rigid rationalism of Unitarianism in Boston. Gradually its influence began to sad all over the country, especially among the intellectual and the literary men of the United States. This Transcendentalist group includes two of the most significant writers America has produced so far, Emerson and his young friend, Henry David Thoreau, whose writing has a strong impact on American literature. The main issues involved in the debate were generally philosophical, concerning nature, man and the universe. Basically, Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as "the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses." Emerson once proclaimed in a speech, "Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind." Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore, self-reliant. There emerged a great host of men of letters during this period, among whom the better-known are poets such as Philip Freneau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, James Russel Lowell, John Greenleaf Whitter, Edgar Ellen Poe, and, especially, Walt Whitman, whose Leaves' of Grass established him as the most popular American poet of the 19th century. The fiction of the American Romantic period is an original and diverse body of work. It ranges from the comic fables of Washington Irving to the Gothic tales of Edgar Allen Poe, from the frontier adventures of James Fenimore Cooper to the narrative quests of Herman Melville, from the psychological romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the social realism of Rebecca Harding Davis. American Romanticists also differed in their understanding of human nature. To the transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau, man is divine in nature and therefore forever perfectible; but to Hawthorne and Melville, everybody is potentially a sinner, and great moral courage is therefore indispensable for the improvement of human nature, as is shown in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. The writers yet to be discussed in this chapter include Irving, Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Melville. 现实主义时期 本章简介 , The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the literary history of the United States, which is actually a movement or tendency that dominated the spirit of American literature, especially American fiction, from the 1850s onwards. Realism was a reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating fictions, and paved the way to Modernism. The American society after the Civil War provided rich soil for the rise and development of Realism. The fifty years between the end of the Civil War to the outbreak of the First World War is one of the periods in the American history characterized with changes, in relation to every aspect of American life, politically, economically, culturally, and religiously. The scale of the change was so vast that it indicated a fundamental redirection in the nature and ideology of the American society. First of all, the Civil War affected both the social and the value system of the country. America had transformed itself from a Jeffersonian agrarian community into an industrialized and commercialized society. Wilderness gave way to civilization. The War also brought some noticeable changes to the American economy. It had stimulated the technological development, and new methods of organization and management were tested to adapt to industrial modernization on a large scale. The first transcontinental railway was completed in 1869; electricity was introduced on a large scale; new means of communication such as the telephone revolutionized many aspects of daily life; various kinds of mineral wealth were discovered and extracted to help improve the national economy. As a result, capital invested in manufacturing industries more than quadrupled; factory employment nearly doubled; industrial output grew at, a geometric rate; and agricultural productivity increased dramatically. The burgeoning economy and industry stepped up urbanization. American cities grew fast, with one half of the American population concentrated in a dozen or so cities by the end of the First World War. However, the changes were not all for the better. The industrialization and the urbanization were accompanied by the incalculable sufferings of the laboring people. In the countryside, increasing numbers of farmers were squeezed off the land to become city job-seekers, causing an oversupply of labor, which kept wages down and allowed the industrialists to maintain working conditions of notorious danger and discomfort for men, women and children. Therefore, polarization of the well-being started to show up, with the poor poorer and the rich richer. The concentration of power and wealth gave birth to buccaneers, tycoons and slums, and ghettos as well. As far as the ideology was concerned, people were on a shaking ground. They became dubious about the human nature and the benevolence of God, which the Transcendentalists cared most. Gone was the frontier and the spirit of the frontiersman, which is the spirit of freedom and human connection, and gone was a place to escape for the American Dream. In place of all this is what Mark Twain referred to as "The Gilded Age." The literary scene after the Civil War proved to be quite different a picture. The harsh realities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting from the dark memories of the Civil War had set the nation against the romance. The Americans began to be tired of the sentimental feelings of Romanticism. A new generation of writers, dissatisfied with the Romantic ideas in the older generation, came up with a new inspiration. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the intertation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective judice, idealism, or romantic color. Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism, people's attention was now directed to the interesting features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, and to the open portrayal of class struggle. So writers who could describe the integrity of human character reacting under various circumstances and authors who could picture the pioneers of the Far West, the new immigrants and the struggles of the working classes began to gain the favor of the reading public. This literary interest in the so-called "reality" of life started a new period in the American literary writings known as the Age of Realism. Their emphasis on the fidelistic reflection of human reality is most clearly exssed by William Dean Howells when he said in Criticism and Fiction (1891) that "I confess I do not care to judge any work of the imagination without first applying this test to it. We must ask ourselves before anything else, Is it true? -- true to the motives, the impulses, the principles that shape the life of actual men and women?" Guided by this principle of adhering to the truthful treatment of life, the realists touched upon various contemporary social and political issues. In their works, instead of writing about the polite, well-dressed, grammatically correct middle-class young people who moved in exotic places and remote times, they introduced industrial workers and farmers, ambitious businessmen and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers as major characters in fiction. They approached the harsh realities and ssures in the post-Civil War society either by a comhensive picture of modern life in its various occupations, class stratifications and manners, or by a psychological exploration of man's subconsciousness. The three dominant figures of the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Together they brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the landscape and social surfaces, brought to perfection the vernacular style, and explored and exploited the literary possibilities of the interior life. They recorded and made permanent the essential life of the eastern third of the continent as it was lived in the last half of 19th century on the vanishing frontier, in the village, the small town, or the turbulent metropolis. They established the literary identity of distinctively American protagonists, specifically the vernacular hero and the "American Girl," the baffled and strained middle-class family, the businessman, the psychologically complicated citizens of a new international culture. Together, in short, they set the example and charted the future course for the subjects, themes, techniques and styles of fiction we still call modern. Though the three prominent writers wrote more or less at the same rime, they differed in their understanding of the "truth.“ While Mark Twain and Howells seemed to have paid more attention to the "life" of the Americans, Henry James had apparently laid a greater emphasis on the "inner world" of man. He came to believe that the literary artist should not simply hold a mirror to the surface of social life in particular times and places. In addition, the writer should use language to probe the deepest reaches of the psychological and moral nature of human beings. He is a realist of the inner life. Though Twain and Howells both shared the same concern in senting the truth of the American society, they had each of them different emphasis. Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived, while Twain ferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories. This particular concern about the local character of a region came about as "local colorism," a unique variation of American literary realism. Mark Twain is not the only one whose works are characterized with local colors. The other local colorists might include Sarah Orne Jewett, Joseph Kirkland and Hamlin Garland. Generally, their writings are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a sent that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience; they recorded the facts of a unique environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the locale. Their materials were necessarily limited and topics disparate, yet they had certain common artistic concerns. The impact of Darwin's evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to yet another school of realism: American naturalism. Darwin, in his The Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871), hypothesized that over the millennia man had evolved from lower forms of life. Humans were special, not because God had created them in His image, but because they had successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and had passed on their survival-making characteristics genetically. The American naturalists accepted the more negative implications of this theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were conceived as more or legs complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces. And consciously or unconsciously the American naturalists followed the French novelist and theorist Emile Zola's call that the literary artist "must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies." They chose their subjects from the lower ranks of society, and portrayed misery and poverty of the "underdogs" who were demonstrably victims of society and nature. And one of the most familiar themes in American naturalism is the theme of human "bestiality," especially as an explanation of sexual desire. For example, Frank Norris, in his McTeague (1899), described the relations of a crude dentist, who is compared to a draft-horse, a dog, a bear, with a superficially refined German-American girl who, awakened by his desires, is drawn into an animalistic affection for her "bear" husband. Theodore Dreiser's forgiving treatment of the career of his heroine in Sister Carrie (1900) also drew heavily upon the naturalistic understanding of sexuality. Artistically naturalistic writings are usually unpolished in language, lacking in academic skills and unwieldy in structure. Philosophically, the naturalists believe that the real and true is always partially hidden from the eyes of the individual, or beyond his control. It is the very shape of a system that determines the basis of his being. Devoid of rationality and caught in a process in which he is but a part, man cannot fully understand, let alone control, the world he lives in; hence, he is left with no freedom of choice. In a word, naturalism is evolved from realism when the author's tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a different philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence. Important writers to be introduced and discussed in this section are Mark Twain, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, and Theodore Dreiser. 现代时期 本章简介 <> The twentieth century began with a strong sense of social breakdown. A series of wars fought on the international scene during the first part of the century were to affect the life of Americans and their literary writings. Among them the two World Wars, especially the First World War (1914 -1918), became the emblem of all wars-in the twentieth century, which means violence, devastation, blood and death. With all these wars the whole world had undergone a dramatic social change, a transformation from order to disorder. And so had the United States. On the one hand, the United States' participation in World War I marked a crucial stage in the nation's evolution to a world power. Since the wars were not fought on the American soil, by the second decade of the twentieth century, the United States had become the most powerful industrialized nation in the world, outstripping Britain and Germany in terms of industrial production. What is more, the technological revolution had brought about great changes in the life of the American people. The telephone ceased to be a curiosity but became a commonplace. The radio, along with other agencies of mass communication, began imposing its own imagery on the nation at large. By far the most powerful technological innovation in America between the wars yeas the automobile, which resulted in a mobility unimaginable to the vious generations. Despite its booming industry and material prosperity, there was a sense of unease and restlessness underneath. Strikes took place in several big cities because of industrial dession and uneven distribution of wealth; the rate of unemployment went up due to the oversupply of goods; farmers were driven off their land owing to the poor harvest of the crops -- all this culminated in the collapse of the Stock Market in 1929, known as the Crash, which marked the beginning of The Great Economic Dession in the 1930s. Besides, political corruptions, organized crimes, the growth of radical labor force, and the terrorist drive of the Ku Klux Klan made an already disorderly world even more turbulent. Along with the changes in the material landscape came the changes in the non-material system of belief and behavior. The First World War had made a big impact on the life of the American people. They became less certain about what might arise in this changing world and more cynical about accepted standards of honesty and morality. The idea of "seize the day" or "enjoy the sent" was pervasive, as opposed to placing all hope in the future. Young people. back from the war, had brief affairs with nurses or prostitutes so that they could get rid of boredom. Also the attitude toward sex had changed. Instead of thinking of sex as something obscene or wrong, people, especially youngsters, gave loose to their sexual desire. Girls wore short skirts, smoked, drank, and went about with men. In a word, there was a decline in moral standard and the first few decades of the twentieth century was best described as a spiritual wasteland. The censor of a great civilization being destroyed or destroying itself, social breakdown, and individual powerlessness and hopelessness became part of the American experience as a result of the First World War, with resulting feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment. Between the mid-19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, there had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences, as well as in the field of art in Europe, which played an indispensable role in bringing about modernism and the modernistic writings in the United States. Apart from Darwinism, which was still a big influence over the writers of this period, the two thinkers whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period were the German Karl Marx and the Austrian Sigmund Freud. Marx was a sociologist who believed that the root cause of all behavior was economic, and that the leading feature of the economic life was the division of society into antagonistic classes based on a relation to the means of production. Freud propounded an idea of human beings themselves as grounded in the "unconscious“ that controlled a great deal of overt behavior, and made the practice of the psychoanalysis which emphasizes the importance of the unconscious or the irrational in the human psyche. Worthy of mention are William James, an American psychologist famous for his theory of "stream of consciousness," and Carl Jung, a Swiss psychiatrist, noted for his "collective unconscious" and "archetypal symbol" as part of modern mythology. Their theories, plus Freud's intertation of dreams, have infused modern American literature and made it possible for most of the writers in the modern period to probe into the inner world of human reality. The implications of modern European arts to modern American writings can also be strongly felt in the American literature between the wars, even thereafter. In painting, both the French Imssionist and the German Exssionist artists avoided the resentation of external reality and depicted the human reality in a rather subjective point of view. This highly personal vision of the world is self-evident in the works by writers such as William Faulkner, Eugene O'Neill, etc. Cubism is the name for another school of modern painting, popular in the early 20th century. Its emphasis on the formal structure of a work of art, especially its emphasis on the multiple-perspective viewpoints, had provided the writers with more than one way to explain the reality and engaged the readers in creating order out of fragmentation as well. Composers like Igor Stravinsky similarly produced music in a "modern" mode, featuring dissonance and discontinuity rather than neat formal structure and appealing total harmonies. There was a spiritual crisis in this period, but a full blossoming of literary writings. The most recognizable literary movement that gave rise to the twentieth century American literature, or we may say, the second American Renaissance, is the expatriate movement. When the First World War broke out, many young men volunteered to take part in "the war to end wars" only to find that modern warfare was not as glorious or heroic as they thought it to be. Disillusioned and disgusted by the frivolous, greedy, and heedless way of life in America, they began to write and they wrote from their own experiences in the war. Among these young writers were the most prominent figures in American literature, especially in modern American literature. They were basically expatriates who left America and formed a community of writers and artists in Paris, involved with other European novelists and poets in their experimentation on new modes of thought and exssion. These writers were later named by an American writer, Gertrude Stein, also an expatriate, "The Lost Generation." Among those greatest figures in "The Lost Generation" or modern American literature are famous poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. Ezra Pound's role as a leading spokesman of the famous Imagist Movement in the history of American literature can never be ignored and his one-image poem best demonstrates his principles of what a new poetry should be. While sharing the same pursuit of imagism, William Carlos Williams rooted his poetic imagination in American native tradition. Robert Frost is always liked by the Americans because the subject and the landscape of his poems are forever New England and his simplicity never fails to reveal some profound truth. E. E. Cummings and Wallace Stevens are also remembered for their contributions to the 20th century American poetry. The former, disregarding grammar and punctuation, always used "i" instead of "I" to refer to himself as a protest against self-importance, while the latter, whose style is more cultivated and refined, focused his attention on man and things in his world. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner are considered to be the masters in the field of American fiction, each of them producing some distinguished literary works in their lifetime. The Jazz Age of the 1920s characterized by frivolity and carelessness is brought vividly to life in The Great Gatsby (1925); Hemingway dramatizes in his novels the sense of loss and despair among the post-war generation who are physically and psychologically scarred; Faulkner creates his own mythical kingdom that mirrors not only the decline of the Southern society but also the spiritual wasteland of the whole American society. Besides, writers like Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and John Steinbeck contributed a great deal to modern American literature in their different treatments of the subjects that concerned the modern man. Anderson explores the motivations and frustrations of his fictional characters in terms of Freud's theory of psychology, particularly in one book Winesburg, Ohio (1919), in which individuals in the small community are depicted as socially alienated and emotionally supssed, unable to love or to be loved. In contrast, Lewis is a sociological writer and his Babbit (1922) sents a documentary picture of the narrow and limited middle-class mind, especially that of the middle-class businessmen. John Steinheck is a resentative of the 1930s, when "novels of social protest" became dominant on the American literary scene. His The Grapes of Wrath (1939) proves to be a symbolic journey of man on the way to finding some truth about life and himself, and a record of the dispossessed and the wretched farmers during the Great Dession as well. The leading playwright of the modern period in American literature, if not the most successful in all his experiments, is Eugene O'Neill. O'Neill is remembered for his tragic view of life and most of his plays are about the root, the truth of human desires and human frustrations. Besides, his plays are experimental with regard to dramatic structure and ways of theatrical production available through technology, which remind us of the stylized realism or German Exssionism. Though the scene of American drama was not so promising as fiction and poetry, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams were yet to acclaim the literary recognition and to hold the central position in American drama until the sent times. What happened immediately after the Second World War in the United States and other parts of the world exerted a tremendous influence on the mentality of Americans. It changed man's view of himself and the world as well. First of all, the dropping of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima in Japan shocked the whole world and made possible the destruction of the Western civilization. Then a mutual fear and hostility grew between the Eastern and Western countries with the Cold War, the effect of which could be felt in the form of McCarthyism in the Unites States. Besides, the Korean War and the Vietnam War broadened the gap between the government and the people. The assassination of John F. Kennedy, and of Martin Luther King, spokesman of the American Civil Rights Movement, the resignation of Nixon because of the Water-Gate scandal, etc. intensified the terror and tossed the whole nation again into the grief and despair. The impact of these changes and upheavals on the American society is emotional. People start to question the role of science in human progress and the fear of the misuse of modern science and technology is sading. They no longer believe in God but start to reconsider the nature of man and man's capacity for evil. They begin to think of life as a big joke or an absurdity. The world is even more disintegrating and fragmentary and people are even more estranged and despondent. World War II ended two decades of vigorous literary activity in the United States. Though quite a number of writers were writing at the moment or started to write, there wasn't any great literary work produced that could compete with those in the 1920s. However, some literary writings became noticeable due to their historical and literary significance. The postwar poets, with Robert Lowell in the lead, would typically write about an object or a situation which could exss or classify their own feeling, showing a growing sense of resistance to the existing culture and at the same time an assertion of the self. Hence their poems are confessional. Poets in the 50s and the 60s were grouped under different 学习指导s, and among them the outstanding ones are Gary Snyder, who tends to liberate poetry from the academy and make it popular among the ordinary people, and Allen Ginsberg, whose "Howl" (1956) became the manifesto of the Beat Movement. American fiction from 1945 onwards is a bigger story than poetry and drama. First of all, a group of new writers who survived the war wrote about their traumatic experience within the military machine and on European and Pacific battlefields, among whom we have Norman Mailer and Herman Wouk. Robert Penn Warren and Flannery O'Conner are resentatives of the talented Southern writers, who followed Faulkner's footsteps in portraying the decadence and evil in the Southern society in a Gothic manner. By the 1950s a significant group of Jewish-American writers had appeared and one of them was Saul Bellow. Their work, drawing on the Jewish experience and tradition, examined subtly the dismantling of the self by an intolerable modern history. Black fiction began to attract critical attention during this period too. The two major figures are Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, both of whom captured the wide attention of the white readers by truthfully, openly, and shockingly describing the life of black people as they knew it from their own experience. For the first time in the history of American writings, African-Americans started to question their identity as a group and as an individual. Other important writers who were writing at the time include J. D. Salinger and John Updike. Salinger is considered to be a spokesman for the alienated youth in the post-war era and his The Catcher in the Rye (1951) is regarded as a students' classic. Updike's Rabbit novels examine the middle-class values and portray the troubled relationships in people's private life and their internal decay under the stress of the modern times. American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s proves to be different from its decessors in that the writers started to depart from the conventions of the novel writing and experimented with some new forms. Hence, it is always referred to as "new fiction," with Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, John Bath, and Thomas Pynchon at its forefront. Roughly speaking, these writers shared almost the same belief that human beings are trapped in a meaningless world and that neither God nor man can make sense of the human condition. What's more, this absurdist vision is integrated with an absurd form, which is characterized by comic exaggerations, ironic uses of parodies, multiple realities, often two-dimensional characters, and a combination of fantastic events with realistic sentations. More recently American literature is alive with a diversity of interests. Writers from different ethnic and multicultural backgrounds, including women writers, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Indian Americans, are beginning to make their voices heard and they are writing about American experience and consciousness from quite a fresh outlook, hence bringing vitality to the American literary imagination. In general terms, much serious literature written from 1912 onwards attempted to convey a vision of social breakdown and moral decay and the writer's task was to develop techniques that could resent a break with the past. Thus, the defining formal characteristics of the modernistic works are discontinuity and fragmentation. Compared with earlier writings, especially those of the 19th century, modern American writings are notable for what they omit the explanations, intertations, connections, and summaries. A typical modern work will seem to begin arbitrarily, to advance without explanation, and to end without resolution. The book is no longer a record of sequence and coherence but a juxtaposition of the past and the sent, of the history and the memory, or a book of fragments drawn from diverse areas of experience, including areas viously deemed inappropriate for literature, such as the life of the street or of the mind. There are shifts in perspective, voice, and tone, but the biggest shift is from the external to the internal, from the public to the private, from the chronological to the psychic, from the objective description to the subjective projection. The traditional educated literary voice, conveying truth and culture, has lost its authority to a more detached and ironic tone. However, modern American writers in general emphasize the concrete sensory images or details as the direct conveyer of experience. They rely on the reference or allusions to literary, historical, philosophical, or religious details of the past as a way of reminding readers of the old, lost coherence. Myths from popular and folk cultures are exploited fully to construct stories out of vivid segments. Vignettes of contemporary life, dream imagery and symbolism drawn from the authors„ private repertory of life experiences are aim important. Modernistic techniques and manifestos were initiated by poets first and later entered and transformed fiction in this period as well. Like the poets, prose writers strove for directness, comssion, and vividness and were sparing of words. The average novel became quite a bit shorter than it had been in the 19th century. New significance was given to the short story, which had viously been thought of as a relatively slight artistic form. If realistic fiction achieved its effects by accumulation and saturation, modern fiction ferred suggestiveness. Traditional fiction featured an authoritative narrator in telling a story, while modern fiction tended to employ the first person narration or limit the reader to the “ central consciousness" or one character's point of view. This limitation accorded with the modernistic vision that truth does not exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with reality. As a result, the effect of modern American writings is surprising, unsettling, and shocking; the experience of reading is both difficult and challenging. Important writers to be introduced and discussed in this section are Ezra Pound, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. 章节学习指南 第1章 (英国文学)文艺复兴时期 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1、自学要点 了解文艺复兴运动和人文主义思潮产生的历史、文化背景，认识该时期文学创作的基本 特征和基本主张，及其对同时代及后世英国文学乃至文化的影响；了解该时期重要作家的文 学生涯、创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作的主题结构、人物刻画、语言风格、思想意义等； 结合注释读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。 2、考核要求 (一)文艺复兴时期概述 识记： (1)文艺复兴时期的界定 (2)历史文化背景 领会： (1)文艺复兴运动的意义与影响 (2)文艺复兴时期的文学特点 (3)人文主义的主张及对文学的影响应用：文艺复兴、人文主义及玄学诗等名词的解释 (二)该时期的重要作家 一般识记：重要作家的文学生涯 识记：重要作品及主要内容 领会：重要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构；人物塑造、语言风格、艺 术手法、社会意义等 应用： (1)莎士比亚和邓恩诗歌的主题、意象 (2)喜剧《威尼斯商人》的主题和主要人物的性格分析 (3)《哈姆雷特》的性格分析 (4)史诗《失乐园》的结构、人物性格、语言特点等的分析 章节学习指南 第2章 新古典主义时期 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1、自学要点 通过本章的学习，了解当时席卷欧洲的启蒙运动和新古典主义文学流派产生的历史背景、主 要特征和基本主张，及其对同时代及后世英国文学的影响；了解该时期一些重要作家的创作 生涯、创作思想和艺术特色及其代表作品的结构、主题、人物刻画、语目风格、社会意义等； 同时结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特点，提高理解和欣赏文学作品的能 力。 2、考核要求 （一)新古典主义时期概述 识记： (1)新古典主义时期的界定 (2)政治、经济背景 (3)启蒙运动的意义与影响 领会: (1)启蒙运动的主张与文学的特点 (2)新古典主义时期文学的艺术特色 应用： 启蒙运动、新古典主义、英雄双行诗、英国现实主义小说等名词的解释 （二)该时期的重要作家 一般识记：重要作家的创作生涯 识 记：重要作品及主要内容 领会：重要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作、主题结构、人物刻画、语言风格、艺术 特色、社会意义 应用： (1)《天路历程》中“名利场”的寓意 (2)蒲伯的文学(诗歌)批评观及其诗歌特色 (3)《格列佛游记》的社会讽刺 (4)菲尔丁的“散文体史诗” (5)格雷诗歌的主题与意象 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 章节学习指南 第3章 浪漫主义时期 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1、自学要点 通过本章的学习，了解浪漫主义文学产生的历史、文化背景，认识该时期文学创作的基本特 征、基本主张，及其对同时代及后世英国文学乃至文化的影响；了解该时期重要作家的文学 生涯、创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画、语言风格、思想意义等； 同时结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能 力。 2、考核要求 (一)浪漫主义时期概述 识记： (1)浪漫主义时期的界定 (2)历史文化背景 领会： (1)浪漫主义思潮的意义与影响 (2)浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张及对后世文学的影响 应用： (1)名词解释：浪漫主义 (2)浪漫主义时期文学特点的分析 (二)该时期的重要作家 识记：浪漫主义时期的重要作家、他们的代表作品及其主要内容 领会：重要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物塑造、语言风格、社 会意义等 应用： (1)浪漫派诗歌(所选作品)的主题、意象分析 (2)小说《傲慢与偏见》的主题和主要人物的性格分析 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 章节学习指南 第4章 维多利亚时期 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1、自学要点 通过本章的学习，对19世纪维多利亚时代的英国的政治、经济、历史、文化背景，对维多利亚时代的诗歌、散文、小说在创作思想上的进步和创作技巧上的改革，以及对该时代主要 作家的生平、观点、创作旨意、艺术特点及其代表作的主题、结构、语言、人物刻画等都有 一个全面的了解。并通过作品选读加深体会感受，增强对作品的理解和鉴赏能力。 2、考核要求 (一)维多利亚时期概述 识记： (1)维多利亚时期的界定 (2)社会政治、经济、文化背景 领会： (1)维多利亚时期的文学特点 (2)批判现实主义小说的基本特征 (3)批判现实主义小说对后世文学的影响 应用：宪章运动、功利主义、批判现实主义、戏剧独白等名词的解释 (二)该时期的重要作家 一般识记：重要作家的生平与创作生涯 识记：重要作品及主要内容 领会：重要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题思想、人物塑造、语言风格、社 会意义等 应用： (1)狄更斯和萨克雷作品的批判现实主义思想及各自的创作手法、艺术特征 (2)小说《简爱》、《呼啸山庄》的主题思想与人物塑造 (3)“我逝去的公爵夫人”中的戏剧独白 (4)乔治?艾略特和哈代小说中环境、氛围描述与人物内心世界的展示 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 章节学习指南 第5章 现代时期 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1、自学要点 通过本章的学习，了解20世纪批判现实主义文学和现代主义文学产生的历史、文化背景，认识该时期文学创作的基本特征、基本主张，及其对现当代英国文学乃至文化的影响；了解 该时期重要作家的文学创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画、语言风格、 思想意义等；同时结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏 文学作品的能力。 2、考核要求 (一)现代时期概述 识记： (1)20世纪英国社会的政治、经济、文化背景 (2)两次世界大战对英国的影响 (3)英国20世纪批判现实主义文学 (4)现代主义文学的兴起与衰落 领会： (1)现代主义文学思潮 (2)现代主义文学创作的基本主张 应用： (1)名词解释：现代主义 (2)现代主义文学的特点 (3)现代主义文学对当代文学的影响 （二)现代时期的重要作家 识记：重要作家的文学生涯、文学作品及其主要内容 领会：重要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物塑造、语言风格、社 会意义等 应用： (1)叶芝和艾略特诗歌(所选作品)的主题、意象分析 (2)小说《儿子与情人》的主题和主要人物的性格分析 (3)意识流小说的主要特色分析 (4)萧伯纳戏剧的特点与社会意义分析 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 章节学习指南 第6章 (美国文学)浪漫主义时期 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1、自学要点 通过本章学习，了解19世纪初期至中叶美国文学产生的历史、文化背景，认 识该时期文学 创作的基本特征、基本主张，及其对同时代和后期美国文学的影响；了解该时期主要作家的 文学创作生涯、创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题思想、人物刻画、语言风格等；同 时结合注释，读懂所选作品并了解其思想内容和艺术特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。 2、考核要求 (一)浪漫主义时期概述 识记： (1)浪漫主义时期的界定 (2)历史文化背景 领会：浪漫主义时期美国文学的特点 应用：清教主义、超验主义、象征主义、自由诗等名词的解释 (二)该时期的主要作家 一般识记：主要作家的文学生涯 识记：主要作家的主要作品及内容 领会：主要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画、语言风格、艺 术手法 应用： (1)爱默生的超验主义思想及他的自然观 (2)《小伙子布朗》中的寓言和象征：霍桑的清教思想和他人性本“恶’’的观点 (3)麦尔维尔长篇小说《白鲸》的象征意义 (4)惠特曼《草叶集》的结构、主题、语言特色 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 章节学习指南 第7章 现实主义时期 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1、自学要点 通过本章的学习，了解美国19世纪中期现实主义文学产生的历史、文化背景，认识该时期 文学创作的基本特征、基本主张，及其对同时代和后期美国文学的影响；了解该时期的主要 作家的文学创作生涯、人生观及价值观及其代表作品的主题思想、人物刻画，语言风格；同 时结合注释，读懂所选作品并了解其思想内容和艺术特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。 2、考核要求 (一)现实主义时期概述 识记： (1)现实主义时期的界定 (2)历史文化背景 领会： (1)现实主义时期文学的特点 (2)达尔文主义、法国自然主义作家的主张以及对现实主义时期美国文学的影响 (3)现实主义与自然主义倾向的异同 应用：现实主义、达尔文主义、自然主义、地方色彩主义等名词的解释 (二)该时期的主要作家 一般识记：主要作家的文学生涯 识记：主要作家的作品及其内容 领会：主要作家的创作思想、艺术特色，以及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画、语言风格、 艺术手法、社会意义等 应用： (1)现实主义与自然主义倾向在美国19世纪小说中的反映 (2)哈克的性格分析及其社会意义 (3)《黛西?米勒》的主题和主要人物的性格分析 (4)狄金森诗歌的主题结构及艺术特色 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 章节学习指南 第8章 现代时期 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1、自学要点 通过本章的学习，了解20世纪初期至中叶美国现代文学产生的历史、文化背景，认识该时 期文学创作的基本特征、基本主张，及其对当代美国文学发展的影响；了解该时期主要作家 的文学生涯、创作意图、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画和语言风格等；同时 结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。 2、考核要求 (一)现代时期概述 识记： (1)两次世界大战期间美国文学和战后美国文学的界定 (2)历史文化背景 领会： (1)美国现代文学的特征 (2)欧洲现代艺术、马克思主义、弗洛伊德学说等的意义及对美国现代文学产生的影响 应用：“迷惘的一代”、意象派诗歌、表现主义、意识流等名词的解释 (二)该时期的主要作家 一般识记：主要作家的文学生涯 识记：主要作家的主要作品及主要内容 领会：主要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画、 语言风格、艺术特色、社会意义等 应用： (1)意象派诗歌的艺术特色 (2)弗洛斯特的自然诗 (3)《了不起的盖茨比》的主题意义和主要人物的性格分析 (4)海明威小说的艺术特色 (5)艾米莉的人物性格分析 (6)“荒原”意识在美国20世纪文学中的反映 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------