文学理论英文专业术语LiteraryTerms

文学理论英文专业术语LiteraryTerms

1. Literature of the absurd: (荒诞派文学) The term is applied

to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in

common the sense that the human condition is essentially

absurd, and that this condition can be adequately represented

only in works of literature that are themselves absurd. The current

movement emerged in France after the Second World War, as a

rebellion against essential beliefs and values of traditional culture

and traditional literature. They hold the belief that a human being

is an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe and the

human life in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning is both

anguish and absurd.

2. Theater of the absurd: (荒诞派戏剧) belongs to literature of

the absurd. Two representatives of this school are Eugene

Ionesco, French author of The Bald Soprano (1949) (此作品中文译名<秃头歌女>), and Samuel Beckett, Irish author of Waiting for

Godot (1954) (此作品是荒诞派戏剧代表作<等待戈多>). They

project the irrationalism, helplessness and absurdity of life in

dramatic forms that reject realistic settings, logical reasoning, or

a coherently evolving plot.

3. Black comedy or black humor: (黑幽默) it mostly

employed to describe baleful, naïve, or inept characters in a

fantastic or nightmarish modern world playing out their roles in

what Ionesco called a “tragic farce”, in which the events are

often simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd. Joseph

Heller’s Catch-22 (美国著名作家约瑟夫海勒<二十二条军规>) can

be taken as an example of the employment of this technique.

4. Aestheticism or the Aesthetic Movement（唯美主义）: it

began to prevail in Europe at the middle of the 19th century. The

theory of “art for art’s sake” was first put forward by some

French artists. They declared that art should serve no religious,

moral or social purpose. The two most important representatives

of aestheticists in English literature are Walt Pater and Oscar

Wilde.

5. Allegory（寓言）: a tale in verse or prose in which

characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral

qualities, such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. An

allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a

symbolic meaning.

6. Fable（寓言）: is a short narrative, in prose or verse, that

exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human

behavior. Most common is the beast fable, in which animals talk

and act like the human types they represent. The fables in

Western cultures derive mainly from the stories attributed to

Aesop, a Greek slave of the sixth century B. C.

7. Parable（寓言）: is a very short narrative about human

beings presented so as to stress analogy with a general lesson

that the narrator is trying to bring home to his audience. For

example, the Bible contains lots of parables employed by Jesus

Christ to make his flock understand his preach.

(注意以上三个词在汉语中都翻译成语言，但是内涵并不相同，不要搞混)

8. Alliteration（头韵）: the repetition of the initial consonant

sounds. In Old English alliterative meter, alliteration is the

principal organizing device of the verse line, such as in Beowulf.

9. Consonance is the repetition of a sequence of two or more

consonants but with a change in the intervening vowel, such as

“live and love”.

10. Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowel,

especially in stressed syllables, in a sequence of nearby words,

such as “child of silence”.

11. Allusion （典故）is a reference without explicit

identification, to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or

to another literary work or passage. Most literary allusions are

intended to be recognized by the generally educated readers of

the author’s time, but some are aimed at a special group.

12. Ambiguity（复义性）: Since William Empson（燕卜荪）

published Seven Types of Ambiguity（《复义七型》）, the term

has been widely used in criticism to identify a deliberate poetic

device: the use of a single word or expression to signify two or

more distinct references, or to express two or more diverse

attitudes or feeling.

13. Antihero（反英雄）：the chief character in a modern

novel or play whose character is totally different from the

traditional heroes. Instead of manifesting largeness, dignity,

power, or heroism, the antihero is petty, passive, ineffectual or

dishonest. For example, the heroine of Defoe’s Moll Flanders is

a thief and a prostitute.

14. Antithesis（对照）：(a figure of speech) An antithesis is

often expressed in a balanced sentence, that is, a sentence in

which identical or similar syntactic structure is used to express

contrasting ideas. For example, “Marriage has many pains, but

celibacy（独身生活）has no pleasures.” by Samuel Johnson

obviously employs antithesis.

15. Archaism（拟古）：the literary use of words and

expressions that have become obsolete in the common speech

of an era. For example, the translators of the King James Version

of Bible gave weight and dignity to their prose by employing

archaism.

16. Atmosphere（氛围）: the prevailing mood or feeling of a

literary work. Atmosphere is often developed, at least in part,

through descriptions of setting. Such descriptions help to create

an emotional climate to establish the reader’s expectations and

attitudes.

17. Ballad（民谣）：it is a song, transmitted orally, which tells

a story. It originated and was communicated orally among

illiterate or only partly literate people. It exists in many variant

forms. The most common stanza form, called ballad stanza is a

quatrain in alternate four- and three-stress lines; usually only the

second and fourth lines rhyme. Although many traditional

ballads probably originated in the late Middle Age, they were not

collected and printed until the eighteenth century.

18. Climax：as a rhetorical device it means an ascending

sequence of importance. As a literary term, it can also refer to the

point of greatest intensity, interest, or suspense in a story’s

turning point. The action leading to the climax and the

simultaneous increase of tension in the plot are known as the

rising action. All action after the climax is referred to as the falling

action, or resolution. The term crisis is sometimes used

interchangeably with climax.

19. Anticlimax（突降）：it denotes a writer’s deliberate

drop from the serious and elevated to the trivial and lowly, in

order to achieve a comic or satiric effect. It is a rhetorical device

in English.

20. Beat Generation（垮掉一代）：it refers to a loose-knit

group of poets and novelists, writing in the second half of the

1950s and early 1960s, who shared a set of social attitudes –

antiestablishment, antipolitical, anti-intellectual, opposed to the

prevailing cultural, literary, and moral values, and in favor of

unfettered self-realization and self-expression. Representatives of

the group include Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William

Burroughs. And most famous literary creations produced by this

group should be Allen Ginsberg’s long poem Howl and Jack

Kerouac’s On the Road.

21. Biography（传记）：a detailed account of a person’s life

written by another person, such as Samuel Johnson’s Lives of

the English Poets and James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson.

22. Autobiography（自传）：a person’s account of his or

her own life, such as Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.

23. Blank verse（无韵诗）：it consists of lines of iambic

pentameter which are unrhymed. Of all English metrical forms it

is closest to the natural rhythms of English speech, and at the

same time flexible and adaptive to diverse levels of discourse; as

a result it has been more frequently and variously used than any

other type of versification. Soon after blank verse was introduced

by the Earl of Surrey in his translation of Virgil’s works, it

became the standard meter for Elizabethan and later poetic

dramas and some poets also employed this form to write their

long poems such as John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

24. A parody（模仿）imitates the serious manner and

characteristic features of a particular literary work, or the

distinctive style of a particular author, or the typical stylistic and

other features of a serious literary genre, and deflates the original

by applying the imitation to a lowly or comically inappropriate

subject.

25. Celtic Revival also known as the Irish Literary Renaissance

（爱尔兰文艺复兴）identifies the remarkably creative period in

Irish literature from about 1880 to the death of William Butler

Yeats in 1939. The aim of Yeats and other early leaders of the

movement was to create a distinctively national literature by

going back to Irish history, legend, and folklore, as well as to

native literary models. The major writers of this movement

include William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, John Millington

Synge and Sean O’Casey and so on.

26. Characters（人物）are the persons represented in a

dramatic or narrative work, who are interpreted by the reader as

being endowed with particular moral, intellectual, and emotional

qualities by inferences from the dialogues, actions and

motivations. E. M. Forster divides characters into two types: flat

character, which is presented without much individualizing detail;

and round character, which is complex in temperament and

motivation and is represented with subtle particularity.

27. Chivalric Romance (or medieval romance) （骑士传奇或中世纪传奇）is a type of narrative that developed in twelfth-century

France, spread to the literatures of other countries. Its standard

plot is that of a quest undertaken by a single knight in order to

gain a lady’s favor; frequently its central interest is courtly love,

together with tournaments fought and dragons and monsters

slain. It stresses the chivalric ideals of courage, loyalty, honor,

mercifulness to an opponent, and elaborate manners.

28. Comedy:（喜剧）in general, a literary work that ends

happily with a healthy, amicable armistice between the

protagonist and society.

29. Farce （闹剧）is a type of comedy designed to provoke

the audience to simple and hearty laughter. To do so it commonly

employs highly exaggerated types of characters and puts them

into improbable and ludicrous situations.

30. Confessional poetry（自白派诗歌） designates a type of

narrative and lyric verse, given impetus by Robert Lowell’s Life

Studies, which deals with the facts and intimate mental and

physical experiences of the poet’s own life. Confessional poetry

was written in rebellion against the demand for impersonality by

T. S. Elliot and the New Criticism. The representative writers of

confessional school include Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and

Sylvia Plath and so on.

31. Critical Realism:（批判现实主义）The critical realism of the

19th century flourished in the fouties and in the beginning of

fifties. The realists first and foremost set themselves the task of

criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and

delineated the crying contradictions of bourgeois reality. But

they did not find a way to eradicate social evils. Representative

writers of this trend include Charles Dickens and William

Makepeace Thackeray and so on.

32. Drama: （戏剧）The form of composition designed for

performance in the theater, in which actors take the roles of the

characters, perform the indicated action, and utter the written

dialogue. (The common alternative name for a dramatic

composition is a play.)

33. Dramatic Monologue:（戏剧独白）a monologue is a

lengthy speech by a single person. Dramatic monologue does

not designate a component in a play, but a type of lyric poem

that was perfected by Robert Browning. By using dramatic

monologue, a single person, who is patently not the poet, utters

the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific

situation at a critical moment. For example, Robert Browning’s

famous poem “My Last Duchess” was written in dramatic

monologue.

34. Elegy（哀歌或挽歌）：a poem of mourning, usually over

the death of an individual. An elegy is a type of lyric poem, usually

formal in language and structure, and solemn or even

melancholy in tone.

35. Enlightenment（启蒙运动）：The name applied to an

intellectual movement which developed in Western Europe

during the seventeenth century and reached its height in the

eighteenth. The common element was a trust in human reason

as adequate to solve the crucial problems and to establish the

essential norms in life, together with the belief that the

application of reason was rapidly dissipating the remaining

feudal traditions. It influenced lots of famous English writers

especially those neoclassic writers, such as Alexander Pope.

36. Epic（史诗）：it is a long verse narrative on a serious

subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a

heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate

of a tribe, a nation, or the human race.

37. Epiphany:（顿悟）In the early draft of A Portrait of the

Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce employed this term to signify

a sudden sense of radiance and revelation that one may feel

while perceiving a commonplace object. “Epiphany” now has

become the standard term for the description, frequent in

modern poetry and prose fiction, of the sudden flare into

revelation of an ordinary object or scene.

38. Epithet: as a term in criticism, epithet denotes an

adjective or adjectival phrase used to define a distinctive quality

of a person or thing. This method was widely employed in ancient

epics. For example, in Homer’s epic, the epithet like “the wine-dark sea” can be found everywhere.

39. Essay:（散文）any short composition in prose that

undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view, persuade

us to accept a thesis on any subject, or simply entertain. The

essay can be divided as the formal essay and the informal essay

(familiar essay).

40. Euphemism（委婉语）: An inoffensive expression used in

place of a blunt one that is felt to be disagreeable or

embarrassing, such as “pass away” instead of “die”

41. Expressionism（表现主义）：a German movement in

literature and the other arts which was at its height between 1910

and 1925 – that is, in the period just before, during, and after

WWⅠ. The expressionist artist or writer undertakes to express a

personal vision – usually a troubled or tensely emotional vision –

of human life and human society. This is done by exaggerating

and distorting. We recognize its effects, direct or indirect, on the

writing and staging of such plays as Arthur Miller’s Death of a

Salesman as well as on the theater of the absurd.

42. Free verse（自由体诗）：Like traditional verse, it is

printed in short lines instead of with the continuity of prose, but

it differs from such verse by the fact that its rhythmic pattern is

not organized into a regular metrical form – that is, into feet, or

recurrent units of weak and strong stressed syllables. Most free

verse also has irregular line lengths, and either lacks rhyme or

else uses it only occasionally. Walt Whitman is a representative

who employed this poem form successfully.

43. Gothic novel:（哥特式小说）It is a type of prose fiction.

The writers of this type of fictions mostly set their stories in the

medieval period and in a Catholic country, especially Italy or

Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle. The typical story

focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a

cruel villain. This type of fictions made bountiful use of ghosts,

mysterious disappearances, and other supernatural occurrences.

The principle aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror and

the best of this type opened up to the fiction the realm of the

irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors

that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind. Some

famous novelists liked to employ some Gothic elements in their

novels, such as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

44. Graveyard poets（墓园派诗歌）: A term applied to

eighteenth-century poets who wrote meditative poems, usually

set in a graveyard, on the theme of human mortality, in moods

which range from pensiveness to profound gloom. The vogue

resulted in one of the most widely known English poems, Thomas

Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”.

45. Harlem Renaissance（哈莱姆文艺复兴）：a period of

remarkable creativity in literature, music, dance, painting, and

sculpture by African-Americans, from the end of the First World

War in 1917 through the 1920s. As a result of the mass migrations

to the urban North in order to escape the legal segregation of

the American South, and also in order to take advantage of the

jobs opened to African Americans at the beginning of the War,

the population of the region of Manhattan known as Harlem

became almost exclusively Black, and the vital center of African

American culture in America. Distinguished writers who were part

of the movement included Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer.

The Great Depression of 1929 and the early 1930s brought the

period of buoyant Harlem culture – which had been fostered by

prosperity in the publishing industry and the art world –

effectively to an end.

46. Heroic Couplet（英雄双韵体）refers to lines of iambic

pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on. The

adjective “heroic” was applied in the later seventeenth century

because of the frequent use of such couplets in heroic poems

and dramas. This verse form was introduced into English poetry

by Geoffrey Chaucer. From the age of John Dryden through that

of Samuel Johnson, the heroic couplet was the predominant

English measure for all the poetic kinds; some poets, including

Alexander Pope, used it almost to the exclusion of other meters.

47. Hyperbole（夸张）:this figure of speech called hyperbole

is bold overstatement, or the extravagant exaggeration of fact or

of possibility. It may be used either for serious or ironic or comic

effect.

48. Understatement（轻描淡写）：this figure of speech

deliberately represents something as very much less in

magnitude or importance than it really is, or is ordinarily

considered to be. The effect is usually ironic.

49. Imagism（意象派）：it was a poetic vogue that flourished

in England, and even more vigorously in America, between the

years 1912 and 1917. It was planned and exemplified by a group

of English and American writers in London, partly under the

influence of the poetic theory of T. E. Hulme, as a revolt against

the sentimental and mannerish poetry at the turn of the century.

The typical Imagist poetry is written in free verse and undertakes

to be as precisely and tersely as possible. Meanwhile, the Imagist

poetry likes to express the writers’ momentary impression of a

visual object or scene and often the impression is rendered by

means of metaphor without indicating a relation. Most famous

Imagist poem, “In a Station of the Metro”, was written by Ezra

Pound. Imagism was too restrictive to endure long as a concerted

movement, but it influenced almost all modern poets of Britain

and America.

50. Irony（反讽）：This term derives from a character in a

Greek comedy. In most of the modern critical uses of the term

“irony”, there remains the root sense of dissembling or hiding

what is actually the case; not, however, in order to deceive, but to

achieve rhetorical or artistic effects.

51. Local Colorism（地方彩）was a literary trend belonging

to Realism. It refers to the detailed representation in prose fiction

of the setting, dialect, customs, dress and ways of thinking and

feeling which are distinctive of a particular region. After the Civil

War a number of American writers exploited the literary

possibilities of local color in various parts of America. The most

famous representative of local colorism should be Mark Twain

who took his hometown near the Mississippi as the typical

setting of nearly all his novels.

52. Lyric（抒情诗）：in the most common use of the term, a

lyric is any fairly short poems consisting of the utterance by a

single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of

perception, thought and feeling.

53. Metaphysical Poets（玄学派诗人）：The name is now

applied to a group of seventeenth-century poets who, whether

or not directly influenced by John Donne, employ similar poetic

procedures and imagery, both in secular poetry and in religious

poetry. Metaphysical poetry is characterized by irregular meter,

colloquial language and original images.

54. Modernism（现代主义）：The term modernism is widely

used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects,

forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the

early decades of the 20th century, but especially after WWI. The

specific features signified by “modernism” vary with the user,

but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical

break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art,

but of Western culture in general.

dernism（后现代主义）：The term

postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after

WWII. Postmodernism involves not only a continuation,

sometimes carried to an extreme, of the countertraditional

experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break

away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in

their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of

modernist “high art” by recourse to the models of “mass art”.

56. Theme（主题）：The term is usually applied to a general

concept or doctrine, whether implicit or asserted, which an

imaginative work is designed to incorporate and make

persuasive to the reader.

57. Multiple Point of View （多重视角）：It is one of the

literary techniques William Faulkner used, which shows within the

same story how the characters reacted differently to the same

person or the same situation. The use of this technique gave the

story a circular form wherein one event was the center, with

various points of view radiating from it. The multiple points of

view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of

arriving at a true judgment.

58. Ode（颂诗）：An ode is a complex and often lengthy

lyric poem, written in a dignified formal style on some lofty or

serious subject.

59. Magic realism（魔幻现实主义）is a new literary genre

appeared in the 20th century. The writers, who employed magic

realistic techniques, interweave, in an ever-lasting pattern, a

sharply etched realism in representing ordinary events and

descriptive details together with fantastic and dreamlike

elements, as well as with materials derived from myth and fairy

tales. In American literature, some of Toni Morrison’s novels

employed magic realistic elements.

60. Transcendentalism（超验主义）：appeared in 1830s in

US；emphasis on spirit or oversoul and stressing importance of

the individual；regarding nature as symbols of the spirit or God

and emphasis on brotherhood of man；representatives: Ralph

Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

61. Lost Generation（迷惘的一代）：Many prominent

American writers of the decade following the end of WWI,

disillusioned by their war experience and alienated by what they

perceived as the crassness of American culture are often tagged

as Lost Generation. Their representatives are F. Scott Fitzgerald

and Ernest Hemingway.

62. Naturalism（自然主义）：Naturalism was a new and

harsher realism. Naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting

moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and

frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic

classes who were determined by their environment and heredity.

In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes

displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism,

but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists

emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had

no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and

environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and

oblivion in death. In American literature, Theodore Dreiser is a

representative of naturalism.

63. American Puritanism（清教主义）：Puritanism is the

practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally

members of a division of the Protestant Church. They were a

group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious

and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to

purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the

doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and

limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God.

As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence

on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had an

enduring influence on American literature.

64. Flashback（闪回）：interpolating narratives or scenes

which represent events that happened before the time at which

the work opened; for example, it is used in Arthur Miller’s Death

of a Salesman.

65. Plot（情节）：The plot in a dramatic or narrative work is

constituted by its events and actions, as these are rendered and

ordered toward achieving particular artistic and emotional

effects.