英国文学史名词解释大全

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 Blank verse is unrhymed poetry, typically in iambic pentameter, and, as such, the dominant verse form of English dramatic and narrative poetry since the mid-16th century. Blank verse was adopted by Italian Renaissance writers from classical sources; it became the standard form of dramatists. Christopher Marlow used blank verse for dramatic verse; and English playwright William Shakespeare transformed blank verse into a supple instrument, uniquely capable of conveying speech rhythms and emotional overtones. According to the English poet John Milton, only unrhymed verse could give English the dignity of a classical language.

The miracle play had as its subject either a story from the bible, or else the life and martyrdom of a saint. In the usage of some historians, however, “miracle play” denotes only dramas based on saints’ lives, and term “mystery play”.

The term “metaphysical poetry” is commonly used to name the work of the 17th –century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. Metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry. In general, metaphysical poetry has the following features: 1) The diction is simple and echoes the words and cadences of common speech; 2) The imagery is drawn from the actual life; 3) The form is frequently that of an argument with the poet’s beloved, with God, or with himself. Metaphysical poetry has gained new recognition because of their seriousness of art, their spirit of revolt, and their realism, and it has greatly influenced the modernist poetry of the 20th century.毕业论文网 www.unjs.com 论文网

 Soliloquy is a speech, often of some length, in which a character, alone on the stage, expresses his thoughts and feelings. In classical drama the soliloquy is rare, but the playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean period used it extensively and with great skill. The soliloquy’s advantages are inestimable because it enables a dramatist to convey directly to audience important information about a particular character: his state of mind and heart, his most intimate thoughts and feelings, his motives and intentions.

Gothic Novel

Gothic novel or romances, which enjoyed much popularity in England in the last decades of the 18th century, are novels of terror that employ medieval background and contain gloomy sentiment, superstitious horror and much supernaturalism. They have been so named because “Gothic” architecture dating from the middle ages is invariably the setting for the elements of horror in them. According to these writers evil forces reign in the world, and it is useless to struggle against one’s fate. The mysterious element plays an enormous role in the Gothic novel; it is so replete (full) with bloodcurdling scenes and unnatural feelings that it is justly called an “a novel of horrors”

Modernism is a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in literature of the early 20th century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dada, and Surrealism, along with the innovations of the unaffiliated writers. Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. It is 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 can often be labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry or anti-drama.

Stream-of-consciousness is one of the modern literary techniques, which is used to depict the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events, rather than the events themselves. It adopts the psycho-analytic approach in literary creation to explore the existence of subconscious and unconscious elements in the mind more thoroughly and see more clearly how men are thrown into existence. As opposed to usages of conventional plot structure, description, and characterization，the action is presented in terms of images and attitudes within the mind of one or more figures, often to get at the psychi

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