1. Beowulf is the most impressive long poem (3000 lines) in old English. It is a
heroic Scandinavian epic legend in the English language.
2. The Canterbury Tales, a collection of stories told by a group of pilgrims on their
way to Canterbury, is an important poetic work by Geoffrey Chaucer.
3. Alliteration is the repetition of the same sounds or the same kind of sounds at the
beginning of words or in stress syllables of an English language phrase.
4. Romance, which uses narrative verse or prose to tell stories of knightly
adventures or other heroic deeds, is a popular literary form in the medieval period.
5. The word “Renaissance” means “rebirth”. It meant the reintroduction into
Western Europe of the full cultural heritage of Greece and Rome. The essence of the Renaissance is Humanism. 6. Sonnet(十四行诗) is defined as an expression of human emotion which is
condensed into fourteen lines.
7. Francis Bacon is the first important English essayist and the founder of modern
science in England. 8. John Donne is a representative poet of Metaphysical poetry.（玄学派诗歌） 9. John Milton’s masterpiece Paradise Lost vividly portrays the story of Satan’s
rebellion against God and his tempting of Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge.
10. The Pilgrim’s Progress is the most successful religious allegory in the English
language.
11. Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece is Gulliver’s travel.
12. Daniel Defoe was famous for his novel The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
which is often considered to be the first novel in English literature.
13. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Locke, and Rousseau are the representative thinkers in the
Movement of Enlightenment.
14. The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe written by Daniel Defoe is often considered
to be the first novel in English literature.
15. “Yahoos” from the novel Gulliver’s travel written by Jonathan Swift are
described to be very much similar to human beings in outward appearance and their unworthy actions as well.
16. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey were known
as “Lake Poets” because they lived in the Lake District Northwestern England at the beginning of the 19th century.
17. The Romantic poets includes: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Robert Southey, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, etc.
18. George Gordon Byron’s most import work is Don Juan.
19. Tales of Two Cities is a realistic novel written by Charles Dickens about two cities
of London and Paris with French Revolution as the background.
20. Elegy refers to a poem or song composed especially as a lament (mournful poem)
for a dead person.
21. Thomas Gray is the representative writer of sentimentality in Romantic period. 22. “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good
fortune must be in want of a wife” is the beginning of Pride and Prejudice. 23. Emily Bronte’s first and only novel is Wuthering Heights.
24. In Memoriam, which was written a long period of 17 years, is often regarded as
the most important of Alfred Tennyson’s poems.
25. Charles Dickens is a representative novelist of English critical realism, and he
was the greatest novelist of the Realism in the 19th century in Britain.
26. George Bernard Shaw was the greatest English Playwright after Shakespeare
whose works like Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Heartbreak House and Widower’s Houses won him everlasting reputation.
27. Charles Dickens’ best-depicted characters are those innocent, virtuous, persecuted,
and helpless children characters such as Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Little Dorrit.
28. The novel Oliver Twist is the story about the underworld of London.
29. Utilitarianism means that almost everything was put to the test by the criterion of
utility, that is, the extent to which it could promote the material happiness.
30. Oscar Wilde is the representative figure of Aestheticism in the late nineteenth
century.
31. “The love of art for its own sake” is the statement of Aestheticism.
32. Thomas Paine wrote the famous pamphlet, The Common Sense, before the
American Revolution.
33. Nature written by Emerson has been called “the Bible of American
Transcendentalism”
34. The finest example of Hawthorne’s symbolism is the reaction of Puritan Boston
in The Scarlet Letter
35. The chief spokesman of American Transcendentalism is Ralf Waldo Emerson. 36. Edgar Allan Poe occupies an important position in American literature as a poet
and a short story writer, and he is good at detective novels with gothic elements. 37. Moby Dick is regarded as the first American prose epic. It is a tremendous
chronicle of a whaling voyage in pursuit of a seemingly supernatural white whale. 38. Walt Whitman is an American poet whose great work Leaves of Grass written in
unconventional meter and rhyme, celebrates the self, death as process of life, universal brotherhood, and the greatness of democracy.
39. American writer Harriet Stowe was best-known for the anti-slavery novel Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, which was written in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The novel that “touched off the American Civil War” refers to Uncle Tom’s Cabin
40. Mark Twain was an American writer, journalist and humorist, who won a
world-wide reputation for his stories of the youthful adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He is well-known for his local colorism
41. The novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is written by Ernest Hemingway.
42. The Lost Generation included the young English and American expatriates as
well as men and women caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad.
43. English Romanticism, as a historical phase of literature, is generally said to have
begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott's death.
44. Byronic hero is a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin, carrying on his
shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society, rising single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies.
45. Gothic romance flourished through the early nineteenth century. Authors of such
novels set their stories in the medieval period, often in a gloomy castle, and made plentiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences; their principal aim was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery, cruelty, and a variety of horrors.
46. Transcendentalists believed that the society and its institutions—particularly
organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that people are at their best when truly “self-reliant” and independent. It is only form such individuals that true community could be formed.
47. Realism is the trend, beginning with mid nineteenth-century French literature and
extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors, toward depictions of contemporary life and society as it was, or is. Realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.
48. Naturalism was a literary movement or tendency from the 1880s to 1940s that
used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was a mainly unorganized literary movement that sought to depict believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism.
49. Stream of Consciousness was a literary technique in which a character's thoughts
are presented in the confusing, jumbled, and inconsequential manner of real life without any clarification by the author.
50. During the first decade of the 20th century, Modernism became an international
tendency. The essence of it was a break with the past and frosted self fulfillment.
