文学术语汇编

文学术语汇编(考研用)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.

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.

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.

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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.

文学术语汇编3

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.

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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.

文学术语汇编5

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.

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.

第23个应该是blank verse但系统总说含有不允许的关键字，所以一直发不上来，很郁闷，我把目前编好的一起发到公开邮箱去，大家到那里下载。

文学术语汇编6

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.)

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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.

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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.