英國(guó)文學(xué)簡(jiǎn)史englishliterature

1、English LiteratureI INTRODUCTIONEnglish Literature, literature produced in England, from the introduction of Old English by the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century to the present. The works of those Irish and Scottish author

2、s who are closely identified with English life and letters are also considered part of English literature.II OLD ENGLISH, OR ANGLO-SAXON, ERAThis period extends from about 450 to 1066, the year of the Norman-French conqu

3、est of England. The Germanic tribes from Europe who overran England in the 5th century, after the Roman withdrawal, brought with them the Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, language, which is the basis of Modern English (see E

4、nglish Language). They brought also a specific poetic tradition, the formal character of which remained surprisingly constant until the termination of their rule by the Norman-French invaders six centuries later.A Poetry

5、Much of Old English poetry was probably intended to be chanted, with harp accompaniment, by the Anglo-Saxon scop, or bard. Often bold and strong, but also mournful and elegiac in spirit, this poetry emphasizes the sorrow

6、 and ultimate futility of life and the helplessness of humans before the power of fate. Almost all this poetry is composed without rhyme, in a characteristic line, or verse, of four stressed syllables alternating with an

7、 indeterminate number of unstressed ones (see Versification). This line strikes strangely on ears habituated to the usual modern pattern, in which the rhythmical unit, or foot, theoretically consists of a constant number

8、 (either one or two) of unaccented syllables that always precede or follow any stressed syllable. Another unfamiliar but equally striking feature in the formal character of Old English poetry is structural alliteration,

9、or the use of syllables beginning with similar sounds in two or three of the stresses in each line.All these qualities of form and spirit are exemplified in the epic poem Beowulf, written sometime between the 8th century

10、 and the late 10th century. Beginning and ending with the funeral of a great king, and composed against a background of impending disaster, it describes the exploits of a Scandinavian cultural hero, Beowulf, in destroyin

11、g the monster Grendel, Grendel's mother, and a fire-breathing dragon. In these sequences Beowulf is shown not only as a glorious hero but as a savior of the people. The Old Germanic virtue of mutual loyalty between l

12、eader and followers is evoked effectively and touchingly in the aged Beowulf's sacrifice of his life and in the reproaches heaped on the retainers who desert him in this climactic battle. The extraordinary artistry w

13、ith which fragments of other heroic tales are incorporated to illumine the main action, and with which the whole plot is reduced to symmetry, has only recently been fully recognized.Another feature of Beowulf is the weak

14、ening of the sense of the ultimate power of arbitrary fate. The injection of the Christian idea of dependence on a just God is evident. That feature is typical of other Old English literature, for almost all of what surv

15、ives was preserved by monastic copyists. Most of it was actually composed by religious writers after the early conversion of the people from their faith in the older Germanic divinities.Sacred legend and story were reduc

16、ed to verse in poems resembling Beowulf in form. At first such verse was rendered in the somewhat simple, stark style of the poems of Caedmon, a humble man of the late 7th century who was described by the historian and t

17、heologian Saint Bede the Venerable as having received the gift of song from God. Later the same type of subject matter was A second and shorter alliterative vision poem, The Pearl, written in northwest England in about 1

18、370, is similarly doctrinal, but its tone is ecstatic, and it is far more deliberately artistic. Apparently an elegy for the death of a small girl (although widely varying religious allegorical interpretations have been

19、suggested for it), the poem describes the exalted state of childlike innocence in heaven and the need for all souls to become as children to enter the pearly gates of the New Jerusalem. The work ends with an impressive v

20、ision of heaven, from which the dreamer awakes. In general, poetry and prose expressing a mystical longing for, and union with, the deity is a common feature of the late Middle Ages, particularly in northern England.B Ta

21、les of Chivalry and AdventureA third alliterative poem, supposedly by the same anonymous author who wrote The Pearl, is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late 1300s), a romance, or tale, of knightly adventure and love, of

22、 the general medieval type introduced by the French. Most English romances were drawn, as this one apparently was, from French sources. Most of these sources are concerned with the knights of King Arthur (see Arthurian L

23、egend) and seem to go back in turn to Celtic tales of great antiquity. In Sir Gawain, against a background of chivalric gallantry, the tale is told of the knight's resistance to the blandishments of another man's

24、 beautiful wife.C ChaucerTwo other important, nonalliterative verse romances form part of the work of Geoffrey Chaucer. These are the psychologically penetrating Troilus and Criseyde (1385?), a tale of the fatal course o

25、f a noble love, laid in Homeric Troy and based on Il filostrato, a romance by the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio; and The Knight's Tale (1382?; later included in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), also

26、based on Boccaccio. Immersed in court life and charged with various governmental duties that carried him as far as Italy, Chaucer yet found time to translate French and Latin works, to write under French influence severa

27、l secular vision poems of a semiallegorical nature (The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls) and, above all, to compose The Canterbury Tales (probably after 1387). This latter work consists of

28、 24 stories or parts of stories (mostly in verse in almost all the medieval genres) recounted by Chaucer through the mouths and in the several manners of a group of pilgrims bound for Canterbury Cathedral, who were repre

29、sentative of most of the classes of medieval England. Characterized by an extraordinary sense of life and fertility of invention, these narratives range from The Knight's Tale to sometimes indelicate but remarkable t

30、ales of low life, and they concern a host of subjects: religious innocence, married chastity, villainous hypocrisy, female volubility—all illumined by great humor. With extraordinary artistry the stories are made to char

31、acterize their tellers.D Arthurian LegendsIn the 15th century a number of poets were obviously influenced by Chaucer but, in general, medieval literary themes and styles were exhausted during this period. Sir Thomas Malo

32、ry stands out for his great work, Le morte d'Arthur (The Death of Arthur, 1469-1470), which carried on the tradition of Arthurian romance, from French sources, in English prose of remarkable vividness and vitality. H

33、e loosely tied together stories of various knights of the Round Table, but most memorably of Arthur himself, of Galahad, and of the guilty love of Lancelot and Arthur's queen, Guinevere. Despite the great variety of

34、incident and the complications of plot in his work, the dominant theme is the need to sacrifice individual desire for the sake of national unity and religious salvation, the latter of which is envisioned in terms of the