文学史名词解释

Old English: the language of Anglo and Saxon people during 5and 11th century

Epic: A long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes. In a grand ceremonious style .The hero, usually protected by or even descended from gods, performs superhuman exploits in battle or in marvelous voyages, often saving or founding a nation.

Romance:the most popular literary form in the Middle Ages in Europe; A tale (in verse or prose) that deals with knightly adventures or other heroic deeds or supernatural or amorous subjects, and usually emphasizes the chivalric love.

Ballad:A folk song or orally transmitted poem telling in a direct and dramatic manner some popular story usually derived form a tragic incident in local history or legend.Ballad are normally composed in quatrains with alternating four-stress and three- stress lines ,the second and fourth lines rhyming.

Couplet(双行体)a pair of rhyming verse lines of the same length. Chauser established the use of couplet in his Canterbury Tales, using rhymed iambic pentameters later known as heroic couplet

The Renaissance refers to the period between the 14th and 17th centuries.The rebirth of literature, art, and learning that progressively transformed

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European culture from the mid-14 century in Italy to the mid-17 century in England, strongly influenced by the rediscovery of classical Greek and Latin literature. The Renaissance is commonly held to mark the close of the middle Ages, and the beginning of the modern western world. The term

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normally refer to the combined intellectual and artistic transformation of the 15 16 centuries, including the emergency of humanism, protestant individualism, Copernican astronomy, and the discovery of America

Humanism:it stands for devotion to human values represent in classical literature.it is the keynote or the dominate ideology during the Renaissance Sonnet：A lyric of fourteen lines usually in iambic pentameter. 1. Shakespearean sonnet: Also called English sonnet or Elizabethan Sonnet. It is structured of 3 quatrains and a final couplet with the rhyme scheme: abab cdcd efef gg2. Petrarchan Sonnet: Also called Italian sonnet. It contains an octave with the rhyme pattern abba abba and a sestet of various rhyme Patterns such as cdecde or cdcdcd.

3. Spenserian sonnet: comprising 3 quatrains and a couplet in iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee

Ode is a dignified and elaborately structured lyric poem of some length, praising and glorifying an individual, commemorating an event or describing nature intellectually rather than emotionally.

Elegy Formal lyric poem lamenting the death of a friend or a public figure, or reflecting seriously on a solemn subject.

Pastoral: a highly conventional mode of writing that celebrates the innocent life of shepherds or shepherdesses in poems, plays, and prose romance. Tragedies were concerned with the harshness and apparent injustice of life. They involved the trials and eventful death of a hero who was an important person and whose death led to the downfall of others.a. the central characters are always people of importance, like kings, queens, prince, general, nobles.b. a tragic hero often a flawed good man; often the hero’s fall from happiness was due to a weakness in his character, by some great error in his part.c. supernatural beings are often involved in the conflict of human beings, like gods, spirits, witches, ghosts.d. sadness is mixed with horror, murder, treachery, and blood-shedding.

Catharsis or Cathartic effect of tragedies: Tragedies give an outlet for such emotions as greed, hatred, lust, fear and pity. The audience feel relieved or purged when they leave the theatre.

Comedy deals with ordinary people in everyday situations, it deals with ordinary people in a humble style, usually beginning with misfortune and ending with joy. The purpose of comedy is chiefly to entertain people, but some have moral and corrective purposes, to ridicule and satirize human weaknesses.

Comedy of humor according to the comedy of humor, each of characters in the play has some dominating passion or peculiar quality such as jealousy,greedy and comedy of humor mainly satires these humours demonstrated the characters in the play. Ben Jonson has been chefly known for his comedy of humors Soliloquy is the act of talking to oneself, whether silently or aloud. In drama it denotes the convention by which a character, alone on the stage, utters his or her thoughts aloud. Playwrights have used this device as a convenient way to convey information about a character’s motives and state of mind, or for purpose of exposition, and sometimes in order to guide the judgments and responses of the audience.

Allegory: is a fictional narrative or artistic expression that conveys a symbolic meaning parallel to but distinct from and more important than the literary meaning.

Dramatic irony involves the reader (or audience) knowing something about what's happening in the plot, about which the character(s) have no knowledge. Dramatic irony can be used in comedies and tragedies, and it works to engage the reader, as one is drawn into what is happening. The audience may sympathize with the character, who does not know the true situation. Or, the reader may see the character as blind or ignorant (as with Oedipus). The clues may be rather obvious, but the character may be unwilling to recognize the truth.

The term “metaphysical” indicates a common poetic style, use of figurative language, and way of organizing the meditative process or the poetic argument. This term is now applied to a group of 17th century poets who, whether or not directly influenced by Done, employ similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in secular poetry( Cleveland, Marvell, Cowley) and in religious poetry(Herbert, Vaughan, Crashaw, and Traherne). The term was coined by John Dryden (1693): \"He affects the metaphysics Metaphysical Conceit

In general, the metaphysical conceit will use some sort of shocking or unusual comparison as the basis for the metaphor. When it works, a metaphysical conceit has a startling appropriateness that makes us look at something in an entirely new way. Draws upon a wide range of knowledge, mainly using highly intellectual analogies; its comparisons are elaborately rationalized

Heroic drama: A kind of tragedy or tragicomedy that came into vogue with the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. Influenced by French classical tragedy and its dramatic unities (time, place, action), it aimed at epic (heroic) grandeur, usually by means of bombast, exotic settings and lavish scenery. The noble hero would typically be caught in a conflict between love and patriotic duty, leading to emotional scenes presented in a manner close to opera. The leading English exponent of heroic drama was John Dryden: hid the conquest of Granada (1670-1) and Aureng-Zebe (1675) were both written in heroic couplets. the Enlightenment movement

A general term applied to the movement of the intellectual liberation that developed in Western Europe from the late 17th century to the late 18th century( the age of reason)。 Neo-classicism:

the literary principle according to which the writing and criticism of poetry and drama were to be guided by rules and precedents derived from the best ancient Greek and Roman authors. In a more general sense, in contrast with Romanticism, the term has also been used to describe the characteristic world-view or value system of the age of reason, denoting a preference for rationality, clarity, restraint, order and decorum, and for general truths rather than particular insights. The central assumption of neo-classicism was that the ancient authors had already attained perfection; the modern author's chief task was to imitate them. Accordingly, the approved genes of classical literature ---epic, tragedy, comedy, elegy, ode, epistle, eclogue, epigram, fable, and satire--- were adopted as the favored forms in this period.

Mock- epic, a poem using the lofty style and the conventions of epic poetry to describe trivial or undignified series of events: thus a kind of satire that mocks the subject by treating it in an inappropriately grandiose manner, usually at some length. The outstanding example is Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock\"

Novel is a highly stylized prose account of fictional reality in the form of story with profundity for the purpose of changing the readers’ mind by the aid of the reader’s active involvement while providing entertainment and superior truth of life.

Sentimentalism: is a literal movement in the middle of the 18th century in England which concentrates on the distressed of the poor unfortunate and virtuous people and demonstrates that effusive emotion was evidence of kindness and goodness. It reveals grief, pains and tears. It came into being as a result of a better discontent on the part of certain enlighteners in social reality.

Elegy The term was usually used in classical times for love poetry written with a specific meter, and in the Renaissance it kept this sense with

some variation. However, since the 17th century it has come to mean a formal poem of lament and consolation concerning a particular person's death, or reflection on death in general. Milton's \"Lycia’s\" (1638) is an example of the pastoral elegy, in which the speaker and the person mourned are shepherds. A less formal and lengthy form of elegy is the dirge, which is usually sung.

The Graveyard School refers to a group of C18 poets whose writings frequently touched on themes of death, mortality, religion, and melancholy. Often elegiac in tone (and title) their poems make frequent use of funereal or gloomy imagery; they were often very Christian writers who used the imagery of night, death, and gloom in spiritual contemplations of human mortality and our relation to the divine.

Picaresque novel a humor novel in which the plot consist of a young knave’s adventures and escapades narrated in comic or satiric scenes. It is usually in nature and realistic in its presentation of the all around aspects of society,eg, Defoe’s Robinson Cruse

Gothic novel emphasizes the grotesque, mysterious and desolate .this novel is filled with scenes of terror and gloom in the medical setting. Burns stanza or Burns Meter

A six-line﹡ stanza rhyming aaabbb, the first three lines and the fifth having four ﹡stresses, and the fourth and sixth having two stresses. Ottawa rima

A form of verse ﹡stanza consisting of eight lines rhyming abababcc, usually employed for ﹡narrative verse but sometimes used in ﹡lyric poems. Rhyme royal

A ﹡stanza form consisting of seven 5-stress lines (iambic pentameters)rhyming ababbcc, first used by Chaucer and thus also known as the Chaucerian stanza.

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Romanticism，it is the modern term applied to the profound shift in western attitude to art and human creativity that dominated much of 19 century. Its chief emphasis was on freedom or individual self-expression, sincerity, spontaneity.

Lake poets,wordsworth,Coleridge and Southey have often been mentioned as the lake poets, because they lived in the lake district in the northwest part of England.the three traversed the same path in politics and in poetry, beginning as radicals and closing as conservatives.