英美文学考研 术语翻译(2)

本站小编 福瑞考研网/2016-12-05


31. Critical Realism:(批判现实主义)The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the fouties and in the beginning of fifties. The realists first and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and delineated the crying contradictions of bourgeois reality. But they did not find a way to eradicate social evils. Representative writers of this trend include Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray and so on.
32. Drama: (戏剧)The form of composition designed for performance in the theater, in which actors take the roles of the characters, perform the indicated action, and utter the written dialogue. (The common alternative name for a dramatic composition is a play.)
 
33. Dramatic Monologue:(戏剧独白)a monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person. Dramatic monologue does not designate a component in a play, but a type of lyric poem that was perfected by Robert Browning. By using dramatic monologue, a single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment. For example, Robert Browning’s famous poem “My Last Duchess” was written in dramatic monologue.
34. Elegy(哀歌或挽歌):a poem of mourning, usually over the death of an individual. An elegy is a type of lyric poem, usually formal in language and structure, and solemn or even melancholy in tone.
35. Enlightenment(启蒙运动):The name applied to an intellectual movement which developed in Western Europe during the seventeenth century and reached its height in the eighteenth. The common element was a trust in human reason as adequate to solve the crucial problems and to establish the essential norms in life, together with the belief that the application of reason was rapidly dissipating the remaining feudal traditions. It influenced lots of famous English writers especially those neoclassic writers, such as Alexander Pope.
36. Epic(史诗):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.
37. Epiphany:(顿悟)In the early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce employed this term to signify a sudden sense of radiance and revelation that one may feel while perceiving a commonplace object. “Epiphany” now has become the standard term for the description, frequent in modern poetry and prose fiction, of the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene.
38. Epithet: as a term in criticism, epithet denotes an adjective or adjectival phrase used to define a distinctive quality of a person or thing. This method was widely employed in ancient epics. For example, in Homer’s epic, the epithet like “the wine-dark sea” can be found everywhere.
39. Essay:(散文)any short composition in prose that undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view, persuade us to accept a thesis on any subject, or simply entertain. The essay can be divided as the formal essay and the informal essay (familiar essay).
40. Euphemism(委婉语): An inoffensive expression_r used in place of a blunt one that is felt to be disagreeable or embarrassing, such as “pass away” instead of “die”
41. Expressionism(表现主义):a German movement in literature and the other arts which was at its height between 1910 and 1925 – that is, in the period just before, during, and after WWⅠ. The expression_rist artist or writer undertakes to express a personal vision – usually a troubled or tensely emotional vision – of human life and human society. This is done by exaggerating and distorting. We recognize its effects, direct or indirect, on the writing and staging of such plays as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman as well as on the theater of the absurd.
42. Free verse(自由体诗):Like traditional verse, it is printed in short lines instead of with the continuity of prose, but it differs from such verse by the fact that its rhythmic pattern is not organized into a regular metrical form – that is, into feet, or recurrent units of weak and strong stressed syllables. Most free verse also has irregular line lengths, and either lacks rhyme or else uses it only occasionally. Walt Whitman is a representative who employed this poem form successfully
43. Gothic novel:(哥特式小说)It is a type of prose fiction. The writers of this type of fictions mostly set their stories in the medieval period and in a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle. The typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel villain. This type of fictions made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other supernatural occurrences. The principle aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror and the best of this type opened up to the fiction the realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind. Some famous novelists liked to employ some Gothic elements in their novels, such as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
44. Graveyard poets(墓园派诗歌): A term applied to eighteenth-century poets who wrote meditative poems, usually set in a graveyard, on the theme of human mortality, in moods which range from pensiveness to profound gloom. The vogue resulted in one of the most widely known English poems, Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”.
45. Harlem Renaissance(哈莱姆文艺复兴):a period of remarkable creativity in literature, music, dance, painting, and sculpture by African-Americans, from the end of the First World War in 1917 through the 1920s. As a result of the mass migrations to the urban North in order to escape the legal segregation of the American South, and also in order to take advantage of the jobs opened to African Americans at the beginning of the War, the population of the region of Manhattan known as Harlem became almost exclusively Black, and the vital center of African American culture in America. Distinguished writers who were part of the movement included Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer. The Great Depression of 1929 and the early 1930s brought the period of buoyant Harlem culture – which had been fostered by prosperity in the publishing industry and the art world – effectively to an end.
46. Heroic Couplet(英雄双韵体)refers to lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, cc, and so on. The adjective “heroic” was applied in the later seventeenth century because of the frequent use of such couplets in heroic poems and dramas. This verse form was introduced into English poetry by Geoffrey Chaucer. From the age of John Dryden through that of Samuel Johnson, the heroic couplet was the predominant English measure for all the poetic kinds; some poets, including Alexander Pope, used it almost to the exclusion of other meters.
47. Hyperbole(夸张):this figure of speech called hyperbole is bold overstatement, or the extravagant exaggeration of fact or of possibility. It may be used either for serious or ironic or comic effect.
48. Understatement(轻描淡写):this figure of speech deliberately represents something as very much less in magnitude or importance than it really is, or is ordinarily considered to be. The effect is usually ironic.
49. Imagism(意象派):it was a poetic vogue that flourished in England, and even more vigorously in America, between the years 1912 and 1917. It was planned and exemplified by a group of English and American writers in London, partly under the influence of the poetic theory of T. E. Hulme, as a revolt against the sentimental and mannerish poetry at the turn of the century. The typical Imagist poetry is written in free verse and undertakes to be as precisely and tersely as possible. Meanwhile, the Imagist poetry likes to express the writers’ momentary impression of a visual object or scene and often the impression is rendered by means of metaphor without indicating a relation. Most famous Imagist poem, “In a Station of the Metro”, was written by Ezra Pound. Imagism was too restrictive to endure long as a concerted movement, but it influenced almost all modern poets of Britain and America.
50. Irony(反讽):This term derives from a character in a Greek comedy. In most of the modern critical uses of the term “irony”, there remains the root sense of dissembling or hiding what is actually the case; not, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve rhetorical or artistic effects.
51. Local Colorism(地方色彩)was a literary trend belonging to Realism. It refers to the detailed representation in prose fiction of the setting, dialect, customs, dress and ways of thinking and feeling which are distinctive of a particular region. After the Civil War a number of American writers exploited the literary possibilities of local color in various parts of America. The most famous representative of local colorism should be Mark Twain who took his hometown near the Mississippi as the typical setting of nearly all his novels.
52. Lyric(抒情诗):in the most common use of the term, a lyric is any fairly short poems consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought and feeling.
53. Metaphysical Poets(玄学派诗人):The name is now applied to a group of seventeenth-century poets who, whether or not directly influenced by John Donne, employ similar poetic procedures and imagery, both in secular poetry and in religious poetry. Metaphysical poetry is characterized by irregular meter, colloquial language and original images.

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