Terms of Literature
1.Literature of the absurd: (荒诞派文学) The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the sense that the human condition is essentially absurd, and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd. The current movement emerged in France after the Second World War, as a rebellion against essential beliefs and values of traditional culture and traditional literature. They hold the belief that a human being is an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe and the human life in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning is both anguish and absurd.
2.Theater of the absurd: (荒诞派戏剧) belongs to literature of the absurd. Two representatives of this school are Eugene Ionesco, French author of The Bald Soprano (1949) (此作品中文译名<秃头歌女>), and Samuel Beckett, Irish author of Waiting for Godot (1954) (此作品是荒诞派戏剧代表作<等待戈多>). They project the irrationalism, helplessness and absurdity of life in dramatic forms that reject realistic settings, logical reasoning, or a coherently evolving plot.
3.Black comedy or black humor: (黑色幽默) it mostly employed to describe baleful, naïve, or inept characters in a fantastic or nightmarish modern world playing out their roles in what Ionesco called a “tragic farce”, in which the events are often simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (美国著名作家约瑟夫海勒<二十二条军规>) can be taken as an example of the employment of this technique.
4. Allegory（寓言）: a tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities, such as John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. An allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. 5. Fable（寓言）: is a short narrative, in prose or verse, that exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behavior. Most common is the beast fable, in which animals talk and act like the human types they represent. The fables in Western cultures derive mainly from the stories attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave of the sixth century 6. Parable（寓言）: is a very short narrative about human beings presented so as to stress analogy with a general lesson that the narrator is trying to bring home to his audience. For example, the Bible contains lots of parables employed by Jesus Christ to make his flock understand his preach.
(注意以上三个词在汉语中都翻译成语言，但是内涵并不相同，不要搞混)
7. Consonance is the repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants but with a change in the intervening vowel, such as “live and love”.
8. Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowel, especially in stressed syllables, in a sequence of nearby words, such as “child of silence”.
9. Allusion （典故）is a reference without explicit identification, to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage. Most literary allusions are intended to be recognized by the generally educated readers of the author’s time, but some are aimed at a special group.
10. Ambiguity（复义性）: Since William Empson（燕卜荪） published Seven Types of Ambiguity（《复义七型》）, the term has been widely used in criticism to identify a deliberate poetic device: the use of a single word or expression to signify two or more distinct references, or to express two or more diverse attitudes or feeling. 11. setting:
the overall setting of a narrative or dramatic work is the general locale , historicl time, and social circumstances in which its action occurs.
In a word, it is background of a story or event, including natural, political, historical etc. 12. plot
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the sequence of events or actions in a short story or narrative poems.
Plot is distinguishable from story, that is, a bare synopsis of the temporal order of what happens. Plot and character are interdependent critical concepts. 13. character:
protagonist: the chief character in a plot, on whom our interest centers, it is also called hero or heroine.
Antagonist: a major character item in literary analysis who is usually a person or a force opposing the protagonist in a way that blocks the forward movement. 14. theme:
the general idea or insight about life that a writer wihses to convey in a literary work. 15. epic:
It is a long narrative poem describing the deeds of a great hero and reflecting the value of the culture from which it originates.
It is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or the human race. 16. Alliteration（头韵）:
the repetition of the initial consonant sounds. In Old English alliterative meter, alliteration is the principal organizing device of the verse line, such as in Beowulf. 17. alliteratioin verse:
a kind of verse in which certain accented words in a line begin with the same consonant. 18. foot:
A division of a line in poetry in which there is usually a strong beat and one or two weaker beats. The four distinguished feet in English:
Iambic: an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable 抑扬格
e.g. the curfew tolls the knell of parting day (Thomas Gray “Elegy written in a country churchyard”) anapestic:two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable 抑抑扬格
e.g. the Assyrian came down lide a wold on the fold (Lord Byron “the destruction of Sennacherib”) trochaic: a stressed followed by an unstressed syllable 扬抑格
e.g. there they are, my fifty men and women (Robert Browing “one word more”) dactylic: a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables扬抑抑格 e.g. Eve, with her basket, was
In the forest of the night (Ralph Hodgson, “Eve”) 19. meter:
the recurrence, in regular units, of a prominent feature in the sequence of speech-sounds of a language. Monometer: one foot Dimeter: two feet Trimester: three feet Tetrameter: four feet Pentameter: five feet
Hexameter: six feet( an Alexandrine is a line of six iambic feet)
Heptameter: seven feet( a fourteener is another term for a line of seven iambic feet, hence, of fourteen syllables; it tends to break into a unit of four feet followed by a unit of three feet) Octameter: eight feet 20. heroic couplet
lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc and so on. 21. blank verse
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a verse consists of lines of iambic pentameter(five-stess iambic verse) which are unrhymed, hence the term “blank”. 22. romance
A type of literature that is popular in the middle ages. In the original sense of the word, it means the native language, as opposed to Latin, and later is means a tale in verse, embodying the life and adventures of knights.
Romance is characteristic of the early feudal age, as ti reflects the spirit of chivalry, that is the quality and ideal of knightly conduct.
The content of romance is usually love, chivalry and religion. It generally concerns knights and involves a large amount of fighting as well as adventures.such as Sir Garwin and the Green Knight
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