英语专业考研英美文学重点.doc

英语专业考研英美文学重点
英美文学重点（１）
Old English 450-1066 <Beowulf>
Medieval English 1066 - middle 14th century
Geoffrey Chaucer - the father of English poetry
<The Canterbury Tales> first time to use ’heroic couplet’
The Renaissance - rebirth or revival
Humanism - the essence of the Renaissance, the dignity of human being & the importance of the present life
Edmund Spenser - the poets’ poet <The Faerie Queene>
Christopher Marlowe - University Wits, the pioneer of English drama
Blank verse, hyperbole夸张
<Dr. Faustus> the human passion for knowledge, power and happiness
<The Passionate Shepherd to His Love> pastoral life
William Shakespeare - above all writers in the past and in the present time
Four tragedies - Hamlet, Othello, King Lear & Macbeth
<Sonnet 18> eternal or immortal beauty
<The Merchant of Venice> to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, to expose the insatiable greed and brutality <Hamlet> hesitate between fact and fiction, language and action, too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger To be, or not to be - to live on in this world or to die; to suffer or to take action Soliloquy or monologue - fully reveal the inner conflict of the characters Francis Bacon - brevity, compactness & powerfu