英国文学部分文学术语.docVIP

英国文学部分文学术语 1. Alliteration(押头韵): (also known as “head rhyme” or “initial rhyme”) means a repetition of the same sound—usually initial consonants of words or of stressed syllables—in any sequence of neighboring words in a line or group. In Old English alliterative verse, alliteration is the principal organizing device of the verse line, such as in Beowulf. 2. Ballad (民谣): Ballad is also known as the folk ballad or traditional ballad, popular ballad. It is a story in poetic form to be sung or recited, usually in 4-line stanzas, with the second and fourth lines rhymed. Ballads were passed down from generation to generation. Robin Hood is a famous ballad singing the goods of Robin Hood. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a 19th century English ballad. 3. Blank verse (无韵诗): Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter. It is a very flexible English verse form which can attain rhetorical grandeur while echoing the natural rhythms of speech and allowing smooth enjambment(跨行连续). Much of the finest verse in English—by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Stevens—has been written in blank verse. 4. Comedy (喜剧): In the most common literary application, a comedy is a fictional work in which the materials are selected and managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us: the characters and their discomfitures engage our pleasurable attention rather than our profound concern, we are made to feel confident that no great disaster will occur, and usually the action turns out happily for the chief characters. 5. Epic (史诗): A long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heroes, in a grand ceremonious style. The hero, usually protected by or even descended from gods, performs superhuman exploits in battle or in marvelous voyages, often saving or founding a nation—as in Virgil’s Aeneid (30-20 BC)—or the human race itself, in Milton’s Paradise Lost. The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is a primary epic. 6. Farce (滑稽戏): A type of comedy designed to pr