文学史习题
1. What is the theme of “A red red rose”?
The theme of A Red, Red Rose is the praise of love, the true and everlasting love. Robert Burns is leaving his love and intends to reassure her of his fidelity and love for her in his absence. The poem expresses love, but it does not try to stir up deep feelings of passion, instead, it reminds readers of love, making the speaker's feelings sound more theoretical than real. In the first stanza, the word "Luve" is used twice as a pronoun, describing a particular person that the speaker has in mind. By talking about this person, the poet draws attention to the other person and to how he relates to that person, rather than examining his own emotions. This raises the impression that the love affair might be more for show, for the approval of other people, than for the experience of it.
In "A Red Red Rose" Burns is telling us what the epitome of love is to him. The similes he uses are meant to show us the grandness of love. He compares his love to a rose and to a melody, showing us that love is beautiful and precious. Burns also shows us how love is not fleeting; that if it really is love it will always be there no matter how near or far the two people may be from each other. The vivid images, direct similes, simple expressions, and regular meters and rhyme make this poem popular beyond us later generations.
名词解释：9个
1. Romance （名词解释）Romance: Any imagination literature that is set in an idealized world and that deals with a heroic adventures and battles between good characters and villains or monsters.
Romanticism: A movement that flourished in literature, philosophy, music, and art in Western culture during most of the 19th century, beginnigogom.
2. Ballad（名词解释）Ballad: A story told in verse and usually meant to be sung. In many countries, the folk ballad was one of the earliest forms of literature. Folk ballads have no known authors. They were transmitted orally from generation to generation and were not set down in writing until centuries after they were first sung. The subject matter of folk ballads stems from the everyday life of the common people. Devices commonly used in ballads are the refrain, incremental repetition, and code language. A later form of ballad is the literary ballad, which imitates the style of the folk ballad.
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. Ballad stanza: A type of four-line stanza. The first and third lines have four stressed words or syllables; the second and fourth lines have three stresses. Ballad meter is usually iambic. The number of unstressed syllables in each line may vary. The second and fourth lines rhyme.
3. Heroic couplet (名词解释) 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。
4. Renaissance（名词解释）Renaissance: The term originally indicated a revival of classical (Greek and Roman) arts and sciences after the dark ages of medieval obscurantism。The rise of the bourgeoisie soon showed its influence in the sphere of cultural life.. The result is an intellectual movement known as the Renaissance,or the rebirth of letters.It sprang first in Italy in the 14th century and gradually spread all over Europe.
5. Sonnet（名词解释）Sonnet: A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter. A sonnet generally expresses a single theme or idea。
6.Blank verse（名词解释）Blank verse: Verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter
7. Enlightenment（名词解释）Enlightenment: With the advent of the 18th century, in England, as in other European countries, there sprang into life a public movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment on the whole, was an expression of struggle of the then progressive class of bourgeois against feudalism. The egogo inequality, stagnation, prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. The attempted to place all branches of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the actual deeds and requirements of the people.
8. Classicism（名词解释）Classicism: A movement or tendency in art, literature, or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism emphasizes the traditional and the universal, and places value on reason, clarity, balance, and order. Classicism, with its concern for reason and universal themes, is traditionally opposed to Romanticism, which is concerned with emotions and personal themes.
9. Sentimentalism（名词解释）Sentimentalism: A trend of thought beings at the second half of 18th century during the ago of Enlightenment in England. Sentimentalism came into being as a result of a bitter discontent on the part of certain enlighteners in social reality。The representative was Thomas Gray.
10. Neoclassicism: A revival in the 17th agogo of order, balance, and harmony in literature.
11. Pre-Romanticism: It originated among the conservative groups of men and letters as a reaction against Enlightenment and found its most manifest expression in the “Gothic novel”. The term arising from the fact that the greater part of such romances were devoted to the medieval times.
Renaissance is commonly applied to the movement or period in western civilization, which marks the transition from the medieval to the modern world. It first started in Florence and Venice. Humanism
According to them it was against human nature to sacrifice the happiness of this life for an after life. They argued that man should be given full freedom to enrich their intellectual and emotional life.
In religion, the H thinking was a relation against the narrow mindedness of the Catholic Church; they demanded the information of the church.
In art and literature, instead of singing praise to God, they sang in praise of man and of the pursuit of happiness in this life. H shattered the shackles of spiritual bondage of
a‟s mind by the Roman Catholic Church and opened his eyes to “a brave new world” in front of him