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英美文学选读The Modern Period (近代时期一)

(2009-12-11 14:02:04)
标签:

杂谈

分类: 英语语言文学

The Modern Period (近代时期)

本章概述

一. 20世纪批判现实主义文学和现代主义文学产生的历史、文化背景;
二.该时期文学创作的基本特征、基本主张;
三、对现当代英国文学的影响;
四、主要作家作品。


文学史分析

一、The cultural Background

1、In the mid-19th century , Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put forward the theory of scientific socialism .

2.Darwin's theory of evolution exerted a strong influence up on the people . The social Darwinism , advocated colonialism or jingoism .

3.Einstein's theory of relativity provided entirely new ideas for the concepts of time and space .

4.Freud's analytical psychology drastically altered our conception of human nature .

5.In philosophy , Arthur Schopenhauer , stared a rebellion against rationalism .Stressing the importance of will and intuition , Friedrich Nietzsche went further against rationalism ,Henry Bergson established his irrational philosophy .


二. The rising of modernism :

1. The movement of modernism :

A. The source :
Modernism rose out of Skepticism and disillusion of capitalism .

B.The forms :
The French symbolism heralded modernism . After the First World War ,all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared :expression_r_rism , surrealism ,futurism ,Dadaism ,imagism and stream of consciousness .

C. The process
Modernism was somewhat curbed in the 1930s. But after the Second World War , a variety of modernism ,or post-modernism ,like existentialist literature,theater of the absurd , new novels and black humor , rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that "the world was asurd ,and the human life was an agony ."


2.The theoretical Base :

A.The theory :
Modernism takes the irrtional philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base .

B.The themes :
The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted ,alienated and ill relationships between man and nature , man and society , man and man ,and man and himself .

C.The features :
The modernist writers concentrate more on the private , the subjective ,the inner being of an individual , the psychic time .


三. The literary forms :

1.The poetries :

A. The 20th century has witnessed a great achievement in English poetry .Hardy expressed his strong sympathies for the suffering poor and his bitter disgusts at the social evils in his poetry as in his novels .

B.The early poems of Pound and Eliot and Yeats's matured poetry marked the rise of "modern poetry"

C.The 1930s witnessed great economic depressions ,mass unemployment ,and the rise of the Nazis ,most of the young intellects started to turn to the left .

D.With the coming of the 1950s ,there was a return of realistic poetry again .

2. The novels :

A. The realistic novels :

a.The realistic novels in the early 20th century were the continuation of the Victorian tradition. the outstanding realistic novelists of this period were John Galsworthy ,H.G.Wells and Arnold Bennett.

b.Realism was ,to a certain textent ,eclipsed by the rapid rise of modernism in the 1920s.The realistic novels of this period wre more or less touched by a pessimistic mood, preoccupied with the theme of man's loneliness .Another important aspect of realistic novels in this period is the fact that there rose a few working-class writers .Among this group ,Gibbon was the most outstanding .His trilogy .Sunset Song , Cloud How ,and Grey Granite present the social changes .

C.In the mid-1950s and early 1960s ,there appeared a group of young novlists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working -class background .who were known as "The Angry Young Men." Amis was the first to star the attack on middle-class privileges and power in his novel Lucky Jim.


B.The modernist novels :

a. The first three decades of this century were golden years of the modernist novel . The theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis played a particularly important role .

b. Writers like Dorothy Richardson,James Joyce and Virgina Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human consciousness .James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness novelist ,in Ulysses ,Bloom ,becomes teh symbol of everyman in the post-World-War-I Europe . Forster's masterpiece , A Passage to India, is a novel of decidedly symbolist asirations ,Lawrence is regarded as revolutionary as Joyce in novel writing .In his best novels like The Rainbow and Women in Love ,Lawrence made a bold psychological exploration of various human relationships ,especially those between men and women .

3.The drama :

A.The pioneer dramatists :

a.The most celebrated dramatists in the last decade of the 19th century were Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw ,who ,in a sense, pioneered the modern drama .

b.Wilde expressed a satirical and bitter attitude towards the upper-class people ,in his masterpiece ,The Importance of Being Earnest . Shaw is considered to be the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare .Galsworthy made considerable achievements in his plays . The Silver Box and Strife .

B. The Irish National Theater Movement :

a . With their joint efforts, the Irish playwrights brought about the Irish National Theater Movement in the early 20th century .

b.Yeats was a verse playwright who desired to restore lyrical drama to popularity . By adopting the vivid figurative language of the Irish peasantry ,Synge brought vigor , ironic humor , and dramatic pathos to the Irish stage . His most popular play is the comedy ,The playboy of the Western World . O'Casey presented an urban drama of Dublin slum life to the Irish audience in plays like Juno and the Paycock , and The plough and the Stars .

C. The revival of poetic drama :

a. The 1930s witnessed a revival of poetic drama in England .T.S. Eliot regarded drama as the best medium of poettry . Murder in the Cathedral , remains the most popular of his verse plays .

b. Fry gained considerable successes in poetic drama . The Lady's Not For Burning attracted delighted audience .

D. The English dramatic revolution :

a. The English dramatic revolution came in the 1950s .This revolution developed in two directions the working-class drama and the Theater of Absurd .

b. John Osborne was the man who stared the first change in drama by presenting his play Look Back in Anger Osborne brought vitality to the English theater and became known as teh first "Angry Young Man ." The most original playwright of the Theater of Absurd is Samuel Beckett.His first play , Waiting for Godot ,is regraded as the most famous and influential play of the Theater of Absurd .

主要作家作品

A. 乔治.伯纳德.萧伯纳 B. 约翰.高尔斯华绥 C. 威廉.勃特勒.叶芝
D. T.S.艾略特 E. 戴维.赫伯特.劳伦斯 F. 詹姆斯.乔伊斯

A. 乔治.伯纳德.萧伯纳

一. The literary creation :

1.The early period

A. The works "

a.Shaw began his literary career by writing novels the best know is Cashel Byron's Profession .

b.Shaw directed his attacks on the Neo-Romantic tradition and the fashionable drawing-room drama .In a collection Our Theaters in the Nineties .

c. His first play is Widower's Houses . Shaw's play ,Candida ,was produced and since then ,Shaw's position as the leading playwright of his time was established .

d.Widowers' House and Mrs. Warren's Profession can be regarded as the typical representatives of Shaw's early plays .


B.The theme :

His early plays were mainly concerned with social problems and directed towards the criticism of the contemporary social ,economic ,moral and religious evils.

2.The middle period :

A. The miscellaneous subjects :
There are history plays ,the idea of "Life Force " and other subjects .

B. The works :

a.The history plays includ Caesar and Cleopatra and St.Joan
b. Shaw also produced several plays , exploring his idea of "Life Force ". The typical examples of this group are Man and Superman and Back to Methuselah .
c.Shaw wrote plays on miscellaneous subjects : The Apple Cart is about Politics ;John Bull 's other Island is about racial problems ; Pygmalion is about culture and art .

3.The later period :

A. The features :
In the 1930s, Shaw continued his dramatic career and wrote several plays ,but his satire became weaker and less effectual .

B.The works :
Too True to Be Good is better play of the later period .

二. The artistic features :

1.The problem plays :

As a realistic dramatist ,he took the modern social issues as his subjects they can be termed as problem plays .

2.The character-portrayal:
Shaw's characterization is that he makes the trick of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another . Another feature is that Shaw's Characters are the representatives of ideas ,points of view .

3.The inversion of the situation :
Much of Shavian drama is constructed around the inversion of a conventional theatrical situation. The inversion is an integral part of an interpretation of life .Inversion is also used in character portrayal to achieve comic effects .

4. The vitality of the talk
It is the vitality of the talk that takes primacy over mere story . Action is reduced to minimum ,while the dialogue and the imterplay of the minds of the characters maintain the interest of the audience .

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