英国文学史名词解释

Enlightenment 启蒙运动

With the advent of the 18th century, in England, as in other European countries, there sprang into life a public movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment on the whole, was an expression of struggle of the then progressive class of bourgeois against feudalism. The egogo inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. The attempted to place all branches of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the actual deeds and requirements of the people.

Byronic hero 拜伦式英雄

The creation of the Byronic hero is G.G.Byron’s chief contribution to English poetry. Such a hero is a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. Passionate and powerful, he is to right all the wrongs in a corrupt society, religious and moral. Thus this figure is a rebellious individual against outworn social system and conventions. Because Byron’s poetry is one of experiences on the whole, such a hero is more or less a surrogate of himself. He appears first in “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimmage”, and then further developed in later works such as the “Oriented Tales,” and “Don Huan”.

Heroic Couplets 英雄双韵体

It is a pair of rhymed lines of iambic pentameter. The form was introduced into English by Chaucer and widely used subsequently. This form was employed in the “heroic” poem and plays of the seventeenth century, and in translations of the heroic poems of antiquity, such as “Odyssey by Gorge Chapman. Hence it is widely known as the heroic couplet.

Allegory 寓言

A tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities. An allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.

Neoclassicism 新古典主义

The tendency the Enlightenment Movement brought about in reviving the interest in old classical works, is known as neoclassicism. On the one hand, neoclassicists took classical works as their models; on the other, they kept to order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy. They also had specific rules for almost every genre of literature. For example, in drama, they held that plays should be written in the Heroic Couplets, and that , as far as their content is concerned, they should stick to the unities of time, space and action.