英国文学literary terms

英语专业 英美文学考试题

Humanism

Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It emphasizes the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. Humanists voiced their beliefs that man was the center of the universe and man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of the present life, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders.

Neoclassicism

According to neoclassicism, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers. Neoclassicism emphasizes such artistic ideals as order, logic, restrained emotion, accuracy and literature’s service to humanity. Alexander Pope is one of the representatives of neoclassicism.

3. Romanticism

Romanticism gives primary concern to passion, emotion, and natural beauty. It is generally regarded as the thought that designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and all experience. The English Romantic Period is an age of poetry.

4. Critical Realism

English critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and in the early fifties. The critical realists described with much vividness and great artistic skill the chief traits of the English society and criticized the capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint. The greatest English realist of the time was Charles Dickens.

5. Modernism

Modernism is an international movement in literature and arts, especially in literary criticism, which began in the late 19th century and flourished until 1950s. Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private and subjective than on the public and objective, mainly concerned with the inner of an individual. James Joyce, T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf are prominent modernist writers.

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