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内容简介
这本全英文版《美国学生文学简史》,由耶鲁大学英语文学教授Henry Beers为英美学生编写,是一部英美文学简史教程,分为上下两部分,包括英国文学史和美国文学史,共17篇章。对于准备出国留学或英语专业学习者来讲,英美文学史是一门必须了解和学习的课程。
全书配套英文朗读MP3文件免费下载,在帮助读者学习英美文学史的同时,更好地训练英语阅读水平,带领读者步入优美的英语文学世界。这本英文原版读本,不仅能让国内学生依托教材,全面系统地训练英语,同时,通过书中的故事与文学作品,感受英美历史文化,培养良好的阅读兴趣与品味。本书也适合成人英语学习者提高英语阅读水平使用,让众多国内读者在了解西方文学的同时,感受英语语言的魅力。
In so brief a history of so rich a literature, the problem is how to get room enough to give, not an adequate impression-that is impossiblebut any impression at all of the subject. To do this I have crowded out everything but belles-lettres. Books in philosophy, history, science, etc., however important in the history of English thought, receive the merest incidental mention, or even no mention at all. Again, I have omitted the literature of the Anglo-Saxon period, which is written in a language nearly as hard for a modern Englishman to read as German is, or Dutch. Caedmon and Cynewulf are no more a part of English literature than Vergil and Horace are of Italian. I have also left out the vernacular literature of the Scotch before the time of Burns. Up to the
date of the union Scotland was a separate kingdom, and its literature had a development independent of the English, though parallel with it.
In dividing the history into periods, I have followed, with some modifications, the divisions made by Mr. Stopford Brooke in his excellent little Primer of English Literature. A short reading course is appended to each chapter.
目录
PART I Outline Sketch of English Literature
CHAPTER 1
FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER
CHAPTER 2
FROM CHAUCER TO SPENSER
CHAPTER 3
THE AGE OF SHAKSPERE
CHAPTER 4
THE AGE OF MILTON
CHAPTER 5
FROM THE RESTORATION TO
THE DEATH OF POPE
CHAPTER 6
FROM THE DEATH
OF POPE TO THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
CHAPTER 7
FROM THE FRENCH REVOLUTION TO
THE DEATH OF SCOTT
CHAPTER 8
FROM THE DEATH
OF SCOTT TO THE PRESENT TIME
CHAPTER 9
THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS
LITERATURE IN GREAT BRITAIN
PART II Outline Sketch of American Literature
CHAPTER 10
THE COLONIAL PERIOD
CHAPTER 11
THE REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD
CHAPTER 12
THE ERA OF NATIONAL EXPANSION
CHAPTER 13
THE CONCORD WRITERS
CHAPTER 14
THE CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS
CHAPTER 15
LITERATURE IN THE CITIES
CHAPTER 16
LITERATURE SINCE 1861
CHAPTER 17
THEOLOGICAL AND
RELIGIOUS LITERATURE IN AMERICA
精彩书摘
CHAPTER 1
FROM THE CONQUEST TO CHAUCER
1066~1400.
The Norman conquest of England, in the 11th century, made a break in the natural growth of the English language and literature. The old English or Anglo-Saxon had been a purely Germanic speech, with a complicated grammar and a full set of inflections. For three hundred years following the battle of Hastings this native tongue was driven from the king's court and the courts of law, from parliament, school, and university. During all this time there were two languages spoken in England. Norman French was the birth-tongue of the upper classes and English of the lower. When the latter finally got the better in the struggle, and became, about the middle of the 14th century, the national speech of all England, it was no longer the English of King Alfred. It was a new language, a grammarless tongue, almost wholly stripped of its inflections. It had lost a half of its old words, and had filled their places with French equivalents. The Norman lawyers had introduced legal terms; the ladies and courtiers, words of dress and courtesy. The knight had imported the vocabulary of war and of the chase. The master-builders of the Norman castles and cathedrals contributed technical expressions proper to the architect and the mason. The art of cooking was French. The naming of the living animals, ox, swine, sheep, deer, was left to the Saxon churl who had the herding of them, while the dressed meats, beef, pork, mutton, venison, received their baptism from the tabletalk of his Norman master. The four orders of begging friars, and especially the Franciscans or Gray Friars, introduced into England in 1224, became intermediaries between the high and the low. They went about preaching to the poor, and in their sermons they intermingled French with English. In their hands, too, was almost all the science of the day; their medicine, botany, and astronomy displaced the old nomenclature of leechdom, wort-cunning, and star-craft. And, finally, the translators of French poems often found it easier to transfer a foreign word bodily than to seek out a native synonym, particularly when the former supplied them with a rhyme. But the innovation reached even to the commonest words in every-day use, so that voice drove out steven, poor drove out earm, and color, use, and place made good their footing beside hue, wont, and stead. A great part of the English words that were left were so changed in spelling and pronunciation as to be practically new. Chaucer stands, in date, midway between King Alfred and Alfred Tennyson, but his English differs vastly more from the former's than from the latter's. To Chaucer Anglo- Saxon was as much a dead language as it is to us.
The classical Anglo-Saxon, moreover, had been the Wessex dialect, spoken and written at Alfred's capital, Winchester. When the French had displaced this as the language of culture, there was no longer a "king's English" or any literary standard. The sources of modern standard English are to be found in the East Midland, spoken in Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge, and neighboring shires. Here the old Anglian had been corrupted by the Danish settlers, and rapidly threw off its inflections when it became a spoken and no longer a written language, after the Conquest. The West Saxon, clinging more tenaciously to ancient forms, sunk into the position of a local dialect; while the East Midland, spreading to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, became the literary English in which Chaucer wrote.
The Normans brought in also new intellectual influences and new forms of literature. They were a cosmopolitan people, and they connected England with the continent. Lanfranc and Anselm, the first two Norman archbishops of Canterbury, were learned and splendid prelates of a type quite unknown to the Anglo-Saxons. They introduced the scholastic philosophy taught at the University of Paris, and the reformed discipline of the Norman abbeys. They bound the English Church more closely to Rome, and officered it with Normans. English bishops were deprived of their sees for illiteracy, and French
abbots were set over monasteries of Saxon monks. Down to the middle of the 14th century the learned literature of England was mostly in Latin, and the polite literature in French. English did not at any time altogether cease to be a written language, but the extant remains of the period from 1066 to 1200 are few and, with one exception, unimportant. After 1200 English came more and more into written use, but mainly in translations, paraphrases, and imitations of French works. The native genius was at school, and followed awkwardly the copy set by its master.
The Anglo-Saxon poetry, for example, had been rhythmical and alliterative. It was commonly written in lines containing four rhythmical accents and with three of the accented syllables alliterating.
R_este hine th?r_úm-heort; r_éced hlifade
G_eáp and g_óld-f?h, g?st inne sw?f.
Rested him then the great-hearted; the hall towered
Roomy and gold-bright, the guest slept within.
This rude energetic verse the Saxon sc?p had sung to his harp or glee-beam, dwelling on the emphatic syllables, passing swiftly over the others which were of undetermined number and position in the line. It was now displaced by the smooth metrical verse with rhymed endings, which the French introduced and which our modern poets use, a verse fitted to be recited rather than sung. The old English alliterative verse continued, indeed, in occasional use to the 16th century. But it was linked to a forgotten literature and an obsolete dialect, and was doomed to give way. Chaucer lent his great authority to the more modern verse system, and his own literary models and inspirers were all foreign, French or Italian. Literature in England began to be once more English and truly national in the hands of Chaucer and his contemporaries, but it was the literature of a nation cut off from its own past by three centuries of foreign rule.
The most noteworthy English document of the 11th and 12th centuries was the continuation of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle. Copies of these annals, differing somewhat among themselves, had been kept at the monasteries in Winchester, Abingdon, Worcester, and els
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