Chapter One English Literature in the Anglo - Saxon Period
Section One The Historical and Cultural Context
Section Two The Literary Tradition and the Innovation
Section Three The Poetry
Section Four The Prose
Chapter Two English Literature in the Medieval Period
Section Two The Literary Tradition and the Innovation
Section Three The Poetry
Section Four The Prose
Section Five The Drama
Chapter Three English Literature in the Renaissance
Section One The Historical and Cultural Context
Section Two The Literary Tradition and the Innovation
Section Three The Poetry
Section Four The Prose
Section Five The Drama
Chapter Four English Literature m the Seventeenth Century
Section One The Historical and Cultural Context
Section Two The Literary Tradition and the Innovation
Section Three The Metaphysical Poets and the Cavalier Poets
Section Four John Milton
Section Five John Bunyan
Section Six The Restoration Drama
Section Seven John Dryden
Chapter Five English Literature in the Eighteenth Century
Section One The Historical and Cultural Context
Section Two The Literary Tradition and the Innovation
Section Three The Poetry
Section Four Essays
Section Five The Fiction
Section Six The Drama
Chapter Six English Literature in the Romantic Age
Section One The Historical and Cultural
Context
Section Two The Literary Tradition and the Innovation
Section Three The Poetry
Section Four The Novel
Section Five The Prose
Section Six The Drama
Chapter Seven English Literature in the Victorian Age
Section One The Historical and Cultural Context
Section Two The Literary Tradition and the Innovation
Section Three The Victorian Poetry
Section Four The Coming of Age of the Novel of Critical
Realism
Section Five Several Minor Novelists
Section Six Several Female Novelists
Section Seven The Victorian Prose
Chapter Eight English Literature in the First Half of the
Twentieth Century
Section One The Historical and Cultural Context
Section Two The Literary Tradition and the Innovation
Section Four The Continuity of the Realistic Novels in the First
Two Decades
Section Five The Precursors of the Modernist Novels
Section Six The Summit of the Modernist Novels
Section Seven The Novels of Social Satire
Section Eight The Short Fiction
Section Nine The Irish Dramatic Revival
Chapter Nine English Literature in the Second Half of the
Twentieth Century
Section One The Historical and Cultural Context
Section Two The Literary Tradition and the Innovation
Section Three The Poetry
Section FourThe Nove
Section Five The Drama
后记
內容試閱:
The Christian faith is considered to be established around the
arrival of Augustine in 597 ; however, it was not until the second
half of the ninth century when King Alfred was in reign that
English prose had been used on any large scale. Compared with
poetry at the time, Old English prose employed relatively a more
stable word order and a less flexible syntactical structure.
Bede, King Alfred, Elfric, and Wulf stan were the best-known
Old English prose writers of Anglo-Saxon England.
1.The Venerable Bede ( ca.673-735)
The Venerable Bede is the first major literary figure of
England''s literary tradition. He spent almost all his life at
Wearmouth-Jarrow, but his teaching and treatises spread throughout
western Christen dom. There was Bede and also the "Age of
Bede".
Today, Bede is preenunently known for the great work of his
last years, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731 ,
in Latin) . Following mainly chronological order,
Bede traced in five books the political history of Britain
and the development of Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons,
starting with Julius Caesar''s attempt to invade in 60 BC and ending
at the date of the book''s composition. It remains as the most
leamed and polished of all Latin works written in Anglo-Saxon
England. The most familiar passages from the work are the
story of Gregory the Great and the English boys for sale in the
Roman slave market (11, 1) , the conversion of Northumbria, with
the pagan nobleman''s comparison of human life to the flight of a
sparrow through a warm and lighted banquet-hall on a dark winter''s
night ( n, 13) , and the story of Caedmon''s miraculous gift of song
(IV, 24).
For Bede, the very identity of England as one united nation
was bound up with the Christian faith of its people. In Chapter 24
of Book IV, Bede recounts how Caedmon, a cowherd at Whitby Abbey,
was inspired by an angel to sing about the Creation. This account
has become one of the touchstones of Old English literature and it
has come to seem a natural place to begin almost any study of Old
English poetic
style or literary history.
The West-Saxon translation of Bede''s History was often
associated with King Alfred himself. But scholars now agree
that all five manuscripts of the Old English Bede descended from a
Mercian, rather than an Early West-Saxon, archetype. It is likely
that Alfred''s reforms have directly inspired the origi-nal
translation.
Bede''s History in many ways set standards for subsequent
Anglo-Latin and Old English prose in terms of content, approach,
and use of sources. Much of the early material in the
AngLo-Saxon Chron,i-cle was indebted to Bede, and it is Bede who
fathered the idea of Englishness, a concept that King Al-fred the
Great later arguably stressed.
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