英国文学选读复习要点.docVIP

A Brief Revision Geoffrey Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer is the “father of English poetry” and one of the greatest narrative poets of England. He was buried in Westminster Abbey. Chaucer’s language, now called Middle English, is vivid and exact. Geoffrey Chaucer is the first great poet who wrote in the English language. Chaucer must be ranked among the most learned and accomplished of English poets. The Canterbury Tales is his masterpiece and one of the monumental works in English literature. The Book of the Duchess was composed by Chaucer probably as a memorial poem for the Duchess of Lancaster, who died of the plague. The Canterbury Tales The Canterbury Tales should be an immense work of 124 stories but only 24 were written. Incomplete as they are, The Canterbury Tales covers practically all the major types of medieval literature. The Canterbury Tales was written in heroic couplet. General tone: happy, easy, lively, humorous. Terms: Rhyme: the repetition of sounds at the ends of words is called rhyme. When words rhyme at the end of lines of poetry it is called end rhyme. Heroic couplet: Iambic pentameter lines rhymed in pairs. It is called heroic because in England, especially in the 18th century, it was much used for heroic (epic) poems. Iambic pentameter is a meter in poetry, consisting of an unrhymed line with five iambs or feet, felt by many to be the most powerful of all metrical forms in English poetry. Renaissance Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17th centuries. The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. It first started in Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture, architecture, and literature. The Renaissance, therefore, in essence, is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the earl