《英国文学选读》复习资料.docxVIP

British Literature Review Geoffrey Chaucer *Geoffrey Chaucer (/tjoissr/; c. 1343 - 25 October 1400), known as the Father of English literature, is widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages and was the first poet to be buried in Poets Corner of Westminster Abbey. While he achieved fame dun ng his lifetime as an author, philosopher, alchemist and astronomer, composing a scientific treatise on the astrolabe for his ten year-old son Lewis, Chaucer also maintained an active career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Among his many works, which in elude The Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Lege nd of Good Wome n and Troilus and Criseyde, he is best known today for The Can terbury Tales? Chaucer is a crucial figure in developing the legitimacy of the vernacular, Middle English, at a time when the dominant literary Ianguages in England were French and Latin. * Narrative, Lyric, and Drama are the three general literary forms into which writing, especially poetry, has traditi on ally bee n grouped ? A n arrative tells a story or a tale; drama is prese nted on a stage, where actors embody characters; lyric has been loosely defined as any :short poem other than narrative and drama, where poets express their state of mind. *Heroic couplet: A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry; it refers to poems constructed from a sequenee of rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pen ta meter. Use of the heroic couplet was pion eered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Lege nd of Good Wome n and the Can terbury Tales., and was perfected by John Dry de n in the Restorati on Age. Modernity: a rebel to the medieval John Bunyan *John Bunyan (/bAnjan/; baptised 28 November 1628 一 31 August 1688) was an English writer and preacher best remembered as the author of the religious allegory The Pilgrims Progress. In addition to The Pilgrims Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them ex