文学理论英文专业术语Literary Terms

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: (黑色幽默) 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（地方色彩）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.

55.Postmodernism（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.