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更新时间：2004.4.19 21：00

1.Geoffrey Chaucer.

Chaucer, Geoffrey (1343-1400), one of the greatest English poets, whose masterpiece, The Canterbury Tales, was one of the most important influences on the development of English literature. His life is known primarily through records pertaining to his career as a courtier and civil servant under the English kings Edward III and Richard II.

Chaucer is an English poet best loved after Shakespeare for his wisdom, humor, and humanity. He greatly increased the prestige of English as a literary language and extended the range of its poetic vocabulary and meters. He was the first English poet to use the seven-line stanza in iambic pentameter known as rhyme royal and the couplet later called heroic.

Poetic Style:

Chaucer’s poetry is plainly narrative .Everything is based on reality .Chaucer’s language ,now called Middle English ,is vivid and exact .He is a master of word –pictures. His verse is among the smoothest in English .Hardly a single word will offer difficulties to a man of sufficient reading in modern English .Repetition with variation is redundant.

2.William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare, William (1564-1616), English playwright and poet, recognized in much of the world as the greatest of all dramatists. Shakespeare is one of the founder of realism in world literature. He is against religious persecution and racial discrimination, against social inequality and the corrupting influence of gold and money. His literature is a combination of beauty, kindness and truth, and reflects nature and reality. He can write skillfully in different poetic forms, like the sonnet, the blank verse, and the rhymed couplet. He has an amazing wealth of vocabulary and idiom. In his romantic comedies, Shakespeare takes an optimistic attitude toward love and youth.

Merits:
　　1) The realistic attitude in literary creation :Shakespeare makes comment on dramatic performance . Its purpose, he maintains , is “to hold , as it were , the mirror top to nature ; to show virtue her own feature ,scorn her own image ,and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure
　　2) The complexities and implications of the real life : give a world of full – blood people . No two figures are identified .
　　3) The expert in poetic forms : Shakespeare was skilled in many poetic forms : the song , the sonnet ,the couplet ,and the dramatic blank verse . He was especially at home with the blank verse .
　　4) Shakespeare is a great master of the English language . He commanded a vocabulary larger than any other English writer .He used about 16,000 words . Shakespeare and the Authorized version of the English Bible are the two great treasuries of the English language .
　　5) Shakespeare has been universally acknowledged to be the summit of English Renaissance ,and one of the greatest writers the world over.

Freed of many of the conventions and rules of modern English, Shakespeare could shape vocabulary and syntax to the demands of style. It gave his language an extraordinary plasticity, which enabled him to create the large number of unique and memorable characters he has left us. Shakespeare made each character singular by a distinctive and characteristic set of speech habits.

Key Words: blank verse, sonnet, the rhymed couplet

3.John Donne

Donne, John (1572-1631), English poet, prose writer, and clergyman, considered the greatest of the metaphysical poets and one of the greatest writers of love poetry.

Donne's poetry involves a certain kind of argument, sometimes in rigid syllogistic form. In his poetry, Donne frequently applies conceits, i.e. extended metaphors involving dramatic contrasts.

Donne's poems are characterized by mysticism in content and fantasticality in form. In all of his poems there is a mystery. They are uneven, startling and fantastic. He threw style and all literary standards to the winds.

The poetry of Donne is characterized by complex imagery and irregularity of form. He frequently employed the conceit, an elaborate metaphor making striking syntheses of apparently unrelated objects or ideas. His intellectuality, introspection, and use of colloquial diction, seemingly unpoetic but always uniquely precise in meaning and connotation, make his poetry boldly divergent from the smooth, elegant verse of his day. The content of his love poetry, often both cynical and sensuous, represents a reaction against the sentimental Elizabethan sonnet.

Literary Features
1) Original, witty, erudite, and often obscure, Donne's style is characterized by a brilliant use of paradox, hyperbole, and imagery.

2) All of Donne's verse--his love sonnets and his religious and philosophical poems.

3) The devotional poems and sermons

Key Words: epigram, metaphysical poetry

4.John Milton

Milton, John (1608-1674), English poet, whose rich, dense verse was a powerful influence on succeeding English poets, and whose prose was devoted to the defense of civil and religious liberty. Milton is often considered the greatest English poet after Shakespeare.

John Milton 's work is marked by cosmic themes and lofty religious idealism; it reveals an astonishing breadth of learning and command of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew classics. His blank verse is of remarkable variety and richness, so skillfully modulated and flexible that it has been compared to organ tones.

Milton has noble thought and splendid imagery. He is a great stylist. His poetry has a grand style. That is because he made a life-long study of classical and Biblical literature. His poetry is noted for sublimity of thought and majesty of expression. Milton is a great master of blank verse. He is the glorious pioneer to introduce blank verse into non-dramatic poetry. He has used it as the main tool in his masterpiece Paradise Lost. His blank verse is rich in every poetic quality and never monotonous.

Feature: Inheritance from traditional writings
1) Influence from France, Switzerland and Italy;

2) The blank verse inherited from Shakespeare;

3) Influenced and inspired by Greek and Roman epics by Homer and Virgil;

4) The Bible as source material and the themes of tragedy and redemption in the Old Testament mini-epic

Contribution:

1) His richly textured and passionate verse;

2) Milton 's use of blank verse and his treatment of the Sublime.

5.Daniel Defoe

Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731), English novelist and journalist, whose work reflects his diverse experiences in many countries and in many walks of life. Besides being a brilliant journalist, novelist, and social thinker, Defoe was a prolific author, producing more than 500 books, pamphlets, and tracts.

Defoe was a very good story-teller. He had a gift for organizing minute details in such a vivid way that his stories could be both credible and fascination. His sentences are sometimes short, crisp and plain, and sometimes long and rambling, which leave on the reader an impression of casual narration. His language is smooth easy, colloquial and mostly vernacular. There is nothing artificial in his language; it is common English at its best.

Style: English Realistic Novel, realistic narration, sympathetic, realistic, narrative
The eighteenth century was the golden age of the English novel. The novel of this period spoke the truth about life with an uncompromising courage. The novel is the most important gift of bourgeois ,or capitalist, civilization to the world's imaginative culture.

Defoe's "Robinson's Crusoe" was one of the forerunners of the English realistic novel. It creates the imagine of an enterprising Englishman, typical of English bourgeoisie of the 18th century .Defoe's novels were first published anonymously, which led the reader to believe that these were genuine and authentic stories .This impression was heightened by the circumstantial detail and verisimilitude of the narrative.

The principal problem of the Enlightenment-influence of society on man's nature-stands in the centre of all these novels .The writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment held that man is good and noble by nature but many succumb to an evil environment. So Defoe in his novel.

6.Oliver Goldsmith

Goldsmith's work alternately praises, satirizes, and sentimentalizes a pioneer settlement there. The title poem of Goldsmith's work contrasts two kinds of river in two kinds of diction—one lyrical and gentle, the other rugged and winding—to suggest the difficulties inherent in capturing the new landscape of “overwhelming beauty” through the imported conventions of British poetry.

Goldsmith shows his compassion for the poor and the afflicted .His novel appeals to human sentiment as a means of achieving happiness and social justice. That is why he is acknowledged to be one of the representatives of English sentimentalism.

Goldsmith belonged to the neoclassical tradition in the main and he showed passive resistance to social evil and had a false idealization of the patriarchal society.

His first work of importance made satirical comment upon the social reality of England.
His contribution is to form sentimentalism .His mind belonged to stream of consciousness.

7.William Wordsworth

Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), English poet, one of the most accomplished and influential of England's romantic poets, whose theories and style created a new tradition in poetry.

Wordsworth is the leading figure of the English romantic poetry. To Wordsworth, nature acts as a substitute for imaginative and intellectual engagement with the development of embodied human beings in their diverse circumstances. It's nature that gives him strength and knowledge full of peace. The joys and sorrows of the common people are his themes. He is a voice of searchingly comprehensive humanity and on that inspires his audience to see the world freshly, sympathetically and naturally. The most important contribution he has made is that he has not only started the modern poetry, the poetry of the growing inner self, but also changed the course of English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a return to nature.

Writing style:

1) Influenced from the spirit of the French Revolution.
2) Theme: broke with tradition, seeking his subjects in the small happenings of country life and the talk of countrymen, children, and doings and feelings of humble people, and emotion from his inner heart.
3) Language: He stuck to emphasizing the purest by simplest words.

Contributions:
1) He is the representative poet of passive Romanticism.
2) He emphasized the liberating aesthetic.

8.Thomas Hardy

Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928), English novelist and poet of the naturalist movement, who powerfully delineated characters, struggling helplessly against their passions and external circumstances.

Hardy is a naturalistic and critical realist writer and is often regarded as a transitional writer. In him we see the influence from both the past and the modern. There is an apparent nostalgic touch in his description of the simple and beautiful though primitive rural life, which was gradually declining and disappearing as England marched into an industrial country. And with those traditional characters he is always sympathetic. Hardy is not an analyst of human life or nature, but a meditative story-teller or romancer.

Literature style: realism, use of irony, verse epic

1)Elemental passion, deep instinct, human will struggling against fatal and ill-comprehended laws.
2)The underlining things is the implanted crookedness of things, the struggle of men against the indifferent force that rules the world and inflicts on him the sufferings and ironies of life and love.
3)Fatalism: mysterious or powerful forces and blind chance guiding the affairs of mankind.
4)Philosophy of pessimism

9.James Joyce

Joyce, James (1882-1941), Irish author, whose writings feature revolutionary innovations in prose techniques. He was one of the foremost literary figures of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for his epic novel Ulysses (1922), which uses stream of consciousness, a literary technique that attempts to portray the natural and sometimes irrational flow of thoughts and sensations in a person’s mind.

Joyce was a pioneer and a model for authors who believed in free written expression. Most of his works feature inventive language, and many of them have been criticized for being too obscure in their references or too blunt in their descriptions of intimate matters, including sexual activity. His writing evolved steadily from adolescent lyrics to precise vignettes to bold combinations of autobiography and satire. Most of his works deal with everyday life in 20th-century Dublin. Joyce once remarked that “the extraordinary is the province of journalists,” and most of his writings concentrate on ordinary people, objects, and places.

Joyce is regarded as the most prominent stream-of-consciousness novelist, concentration on revealing in his novels the psychic being of the characters. Another remarkable feature of Joyce's writings is his style. It is a straightforward one, lucid, logical and leisurely; subtlety, economy and exactness are his standards. But when he tries to render the so-called stream of consciousness, the style changes: incomplete, rapid, broken wording and fragmentary sentences are typical features, which reflect the shifting , flirting, disorderly flow of thoughts in the major characters' mind.

Key words: folklore, stream of consciousness, Irish writer

Literature style:
1)Interior monologue: the stream of consciousness
2)Epiphany

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1.Geoffrey Chaucer
Mediaeval Realism (Narrative Poetry) The Canterbury Tales (The General Prologue)

2.William Shakespeare
Lyric poetry
English playwright and poet whose body of works is considered the greatest in English literature. His plays, include historical works, such as Richard II, comedies, including Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It, and tragedies, such as Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. He also composed 154 sonnets. The earliest collected edition of his plays, the First Folio, contained 36 plays.

3.John Donne, 1572-1631, Metaphysical Poetry

4.JohnMilton, 1608-1674, Paradise Lost: Holy Sonnet

5.Daniel Defoe
Masterpieces: Robinson Crusoe; Moll Flanders
Background: The modern European novel began after the Renaissance. The modern English novel began two centuries later in the 18th century. The rise and growth of the realistic novel is the most prominent achievement of 18th century English literature.
Style: English Realistic Novel, realistic narration, sympathetic, realistic, narrative
The eighteenth century was the golden age of the English novel. The novel of this period spoke the truth about life with an uncompromising courage. The novel is the most important gift of bourgeois ,or capitalist, civilization to the world's imaginative culture.
Defoe's "Robinson's Crusoe" was one of the forerunners of the English realistic novel. It creates the imagine of an enterprising Englishman, typical of English bourgeoisie of the 18th century .Defoe's novels were first published anonymously, which led the reader to believe that these were genuine and authentic stories .This impression was heightened by the circumstantial detail and verisimilitude of the narrative.
The principal problem of the Enlightenment-influence of society on man's nature-stands in the centre of all these novels .The writers and philosophers of the Enlightenment held that man is good and noble by nature but many succumb to an evil environment. So Defoe in his novel.

6.Oliver Goldsmith, the outstanding representative of Sentimentalism School. His mind belonged to stream of consciousness. He was influenced by European and Britain writers: Johnson and Lawrence Stern. He was also influenced by Bible (Old Testament)
Masterpiece: The Vicar of Wakefield ; The Good natured Man
The deserted Village is Goldsmith's best poem.
Goldsmith shows his compassion for the poor and the afflicted .His novel appeals to human sentiment as a means of achieving happiness and social justice. That is why he is acknowledged to be one of the representatives of English sentimentalism.
Goldsmith belonged to the neoclassical tradition in the main and he showed passive resistance to social evil and had a false idealization of the patriarchal society.
His first work of importance made satirical comment upon the social reality of England.
His contribution is to form sentimentalism .His mind belonged to stream of consciousness.
　

8.William Wordsworth,1770-1850, Romanticism in English Poetry

              Lyrical Ballads: Lines Written In Early Spring

11 Thomas Hardy, 1843-1916  Precursor of Modernism Life’s Little Ironies ;The Oxen and Others

16.James Joyce,1882-1941  Stream of Consciousness Araby

　　Milton
　　Milton is a great revolutionary poet of the 17th century. He is also an outstanding political pamphleteer of the Revolution period. He dedicated himself to the revolutionary cause. He made a strong influence on the later English poetry. Every progressive English poet since Milton has drawn inspiration from him.
　　Milton is a great stylist. His poetry has a grand style. That is because he made a life-long study of classical and Biblical literature. His poetry is noted for sublimity of thought and majesty of expression.
　　Milton is a great master of blank verse. He is the glorious pioneer to introduce blank verse into non-dramatic poetry. He has used it as the main tool in his masterpiece Paradise Lost. His blank verse is rich in every poetic quality and never monotonous.

　　John Donne
　　John Donne (1573--1631) is the founder of the Metaphysical school in England at about the beginning of the 17th century. The works of these poets are characterized by mysticism in content and fantasticality in form. In all of his poems there is a mystery. They are uneven, startling and fantastic. He threw style and all literary standards to the winds. His poems are included into two collections, Songs and Sonnets, which consists of his love poems, and Devotion Upon Emergent Occasions, which consists of his sacred verses. Donne's poetry had great influence on the poets of his times and the poets of later times .He is still the object of study for scholars up to this day.

　　Donne (The metaphysical poet)
　　1.Donne's Masterpieces:
　　A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning ;GO and Catch a Falling Star, Hymn to God the Father, and the sonnet to death (Death be not proud)
　　2.Literary Features
　　1) Original, witty, erudite, and often obscure, Donne's style is characterized by a brilliant use of paradox, hyperbole, and imagery 2) All of Donne's verse--his love sonnets and his religious and philosophical poems 3)The devotional poems and sermons
　　3.Donne's influence
　　1) Neglected for 200 years, Donne was rediscovered by 20th-century critics .His work has a profound influence on a number of poets, including W. B Yeats, T. S Eliot 2) The metaphysical poet (coined by Dr. Samuel Johnson in an essay of 1779, revived and popularized by TS Eliot, in an essay of l921)

　　John Milton (1608-1674)(Epic in English)
　　1. Milton's Masterpieces
　　1) Paradise Lost (1667); 2) Paradise Regained ( 1671 ); 3)Samson Agonistes (1671)
　　2. Feature: Inheritance from traditional writings
　　1) Influence from France, Switzerland and Italy; 2) The blank verse inherited from Shakespeare ;3)Influenced and inspired by Greek and Roman epics by Homer and Virgil [Aeneid] ;4)The Bible as source material and the themes of tragedy and redemption in the Old Testament mini-epic
　　3. Contribution to English /World Literature
　　1) John Milton the greatest English poet (excepting Shakespeare); 2) His richly textured and passionate verse; 3) Milton's use of blank verse and his treatment of the Sublime

　　Shakespeare
　　1 Shakespeare is one of the founder of realism in world literature .
　　2 Masterpieces :
　　1)Tragedies: Hamlet . Othello .King Lear Macbeth
　　2)Comedies: The Merchant of Venice Much Ado About Nothing As You Like It Twelfth Night
　　3)Tragicomedies: The Tempest, Troilus and Cressida All’s Well That Ends Well Measure for Measure Romeo and Juliet
　　4) Historical play: Henry IV
　　5) Sonnet Cycle : The Sonnets of Shakespeare
　　3 Merits:
　　1) The realistic attitude in literary creation :Shakespeare makes comment on dramatic performance . Its purpose , he maintains , is “to hold , as it were , the mirror top to nature ; to show virtue her own feature ,scorn her own image ,and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure
　　2) The complexities and implications of the real life : give a world of full – blood people . No two figures are identified .
　　3) The expert in poetic forms : Shakespeare was skilled in many poetic forms : the song , the sonnet ,the couplet ,and the dramatic blank verse . He was especially at home with the blank verse .
　　4) Shakespeare is a great master of the English language . He commanded a vocabulary larger than any other English writer .He used about 16,000 words . Shakespeare and the Authorized version of the English Bible are the two great treasuries of the English language .
　　5) Shakespeare has been universally acknowledged to be the summit of English Renaissance ,and one of the greatest writers the world over.

Wordsworth:
Masterpiece:
1) Lyrical Ballads
2) Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting The Blanks of The Wye During A Tour
Writing style:
1) Influenced from the spirit of the French Revolution.
2)Theme: broke with tradition, seeking his subjects in the small happenings of country life and the talk of countrymen, children, and doings and feelings of humble people, and emotion from his inner heart.
3) Language: He stuck to emphasizing the purest by simplest words.
Contributions:
1) He is the representative poet of passive Romanticism.
2) He emphasized the liberating aesthetic.

Chaucer

1 Geoffrey Chaucer was the founder of English poetry .

2 Masterpiece :

“ The Canterbury Tales “ is Chaucer’s masterpiece and one of the monumental works in English literature .

3 Poetic Style :

Chaucer’s poetry is plainly narrative .Everything is based on reality .Chaucer’s language ,now called Middle English ,is vivid and exact .He is a master of word –pictures. His verse is among the smoothest in English .Hardly a single word will offer difficulties to a man of sufficient reading in modern English .Repetition with variation is redundant .

4 Chaucer’s Continental Inheritance

He had attained good knowledge of Latin ,French and Italian . In the French period ,the author is trying his hand on metre , language and subject .In the Italian period , the poet’s own creativeness shows itself through borrowed themes .In the third or English period , he has his own choice of subject ,his own grasp of character and his own diction and plot . “ The Canterbury Tales” shows the influence of Boccaccio's Decameron”.

5 Contribution

Chaucer’s contribution to English poetry lies chiefly to the fact that he introduced from France the rhymed stanzas of various types, especially the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter (to be called later the “heroic couplet”) to English poetry .He is the first great poet who wrote in current English language . Chaucer did much in making the dialect of London the foundation for modern English speech .