《英国文学》辅导纲要
Chapter One
English Literature before Renaissance
主要内容： 1. Beowulf
2. Sir Gawain and the Green Knights 3. William Langland: Piers the Plowman 4. Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales 5. Ballads
6. Sir Thomas Malory: Le Morte d’Arthur 重点掌握：
1. Beowulf is a national epic of England.
2. The one who propose the story-telling in the Canterbury tales is the boss. 3. His visit to Italy played an important part in Chaucer’s writing.
4. Le Mort D’ Arthur deals with the following story except fight against Roman
invasion.
5. Geoffrey Chaucer，the ―father of English poetry‖ and one of the greatest narrative
poets of England, was born in London about 1340.
6. Sir Gawain and Green Knight employs the form of romance.
7. The story of Sir Gawain and Green Knight is the culmination of the Arthurian
romances.
8. Apart from original poems, Chaucer translated various works of French authors;
among them is the famous The Romance of the Rose.
9. Chaucer is called the founder of English realism because he portrays all the
classes of English feudal society except nobles and serfs.
10. The characters in the Canterbury Tales can be divided into the following groups:
rural dwellers, church members, tradesmen.
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11. The followings are Chaucer’s contribution to English literature: Chaucer
introduced from France and Italy the rhymed stanzas of various forms to English poetry; Chaucer is called the father of English poetry and the first poet who wrote in current English language; Chaucer did much in making a language of the people.
12. Generally speaking, Chaucer’s works fall into three main groups corresponding
roughly to the three periods of his adult life: The period of French influence; the period of Italian influence; the period of his maturity.
13. Chaucer died on the 25th of October 1400, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. 14. Chaucer was the first to be buried in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. 15. Piers the Plowman is similar in form to the work written by Langland.
16. Le More D’ Arthur is an important landmark in the development of English prose
for its lucid style.
17. Beowulf was brought by Anglo-Saxon people from the Continent to England. 18. A ballad is written in 4-line stanza with the second and fourth lines rhymes. 19. Most of English ballads were collected in the 18th century.
20. Pardoner in The Canterbury Tales sold the relics of the dead saints to earn money. 21. In the year 1066, the Normans defeated the Anglo-Saxons at the battle of
Hastings.
22. In the 14th century, the two most important writers are Chaucer and Langland. 23. Today Chaucer is acclaimed not only as ―the father of English poetry‖ but also as
―the father of English fiction‖. His masterpiece is The Canterbury Tales. 24. The Canterbury Tales opens with a general Prologue where are told of a company
of pilgrims that gathered at Tabard Inn in Southwark, a suburb of London. 25. Chaucer’s literary career is conventionally divided into three periods: French
period, Italian period and English period.
26. William Langland’s Piers the Plowman is written in the form of a dream vision.
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Chapter Two
English Literature in the Renaissance
主要内容:
1. What is humanism?
2. English Renaissance is a period of poetry and drama 3. Sir Thomas Wyatt 4. Earl of Surrey 5. Sir Philip Sidney
6. Edmund Spenser: The Faerie Queene, The Shepherds’ Calendar 7. Thomas More: Utopia 8. Francis Bacon
9. Christopher Marlowe-- Tamburlaine the Great; The Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus, The Jew of Malta
10. Marlowe's contribution to English drama 11. William Shakespeare
1）要知道莎士比亚的所有主要作品的名字，基本内容，主要人物的性格特征及人物之间的关系，他的戏剧创作的三个阶段的特点。 2）要知道莎士比亚十四行诗的特点，重点诗歌是\12. Ben Jonson: Volpone, To Celia; humor. 重点掌握:
1. The story of Utopia was assumed to tell by the Utopian.
2. The one who first made blank verse the principal instrument of English drama is
Marlowe.
3. The difference of Surrey’s contribution to English poetry from that of Wyatt lies
in that Surrey wrote the first English blank verse.
4. English Renaissance Period was an age of poetry and drama.
5. The Elizabethan literature had a marked unity and the feeling of patriotism and
devotion to the queen.
6. Great popularity was won by John Lyly’s prose romance Euphues which gave rise
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to the term ―euphuism‖, designating an affected style of court speech. 7. The New Instrument, Essays, The New Atlantics are wrote by Francis Bacon. 8. The title ―poet’s poet‖ is given to Spencer. 9. Spencer wrote The Faerie Queene.
10. The theme of Faerie Queene can be expressed by Naturalism, Puritanism and
nationalism.
11. English drama originated from church.
12. Morality play presents the conflict of good and civil with allegorical characters. 13. The writer who is remarkable for the music and images in the poetry is Spenser. 14. The most gifted of the University Wits was Marlowe.
15. The recurrent theme of Marlowe’ s play is the praise of individualism.
16. Dr Faustus sells his soul to the devil because he wants to know more about the
world.
17. Tamburlaine takes its subject matter from Chinese history. 18. Shakespeare was born in April 1564 and died in 1616. 19. Shakespeare is a poet, playwright and an actor.
20. Romeo and Juliet belongs to Shakespeare’s plays of the 2nd period.
21. Romeo is a passionate, extreme, excitable and moody young man, while Juliet is
an innocent girl.
22. ―To be or not to be, that is a question‖ is a line from Hamlet.
23. The third period of Shakespeare’s literature career is one of gloom and depression
combined with masterly workmanship. Measure for Measure, Othello, and All’s Well That Ends Well are produced in this period. 24. Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy.
25. ―Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?‖ is the beginning line of Sonnet 18. 26. ―Humor‖ according to Ben Jonson means temperament.
27. The ―dark comedy‖ refers to those written by Jonson in his third period of
dramatic career.
28. Thomas More wrote his famous prose work Utopia.
29. The 16th century in England was a period of breaking up of feudal relations and
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the establishing of the foundations of capitalism.
30. In 1642, the civil war broke out in England. The royalists were defeated by the
parliament army led by Cromwell. In 1649, Charles I was sentenced to death, and English was declared to be a commonwealth.
31. The Renaissance, which began in the 14th century in Italy, was a great cultural
and ideological movement that swept the whole of Europe. All in all, chief characteristic of the Renaissance literature is the expression of secular values with men instead of God as the center of the universe.
32. Bacon is praised by Marx as ―the progenitor of English Materialism‖.
33. In Elizabethan period, Bacon wrote more than fifty excellent essays, which made
him one of the best essayists in English literature. 34. ―Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May.
And summer’s lease has all too short a date.‖
35. ―When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes‖ is the beginning line of Sonnet
29.
36. ―Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, and often is his gold complexion
dimmed.‖
37. Shakespeare produced 37 plays and 160 sonnets.
38. Portia is beautiful, cultured, courteous, and kind-hearted.
39. Sonnet is a poem of 14 lines Iambic pentameter. It mainly has two types: one is
Petrarchan - two quatrains plus a ―sestet‖ (6 line unit) - often abba abba cdecde. The other is Shakespearean - three quatrains plus a couplet - often abab cdcd efef gg.
40. Oxford Reformers: In the days of Henry VIII (1509-47), there were a group of
scholars called Oxford Reformers, who introduced the classical literature to England and stove to reform education on a humanistic line. One of them founded a school where boys might be taught without being subjected to brutal flogging, which in those days was the lot of all schoolboys. These English humanists were all churchmen themselves, but they sought to permeate their old faith with new thought. The greatest of the English humanists was Thomas More,
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