Ⅰ学习目的和要求
通过本章的学习，了解20世纪批判现实主义文学和现代主义文学产生的历史、文化背景。认识该时期文学创作的基本特征、基本主张，及其对现当代英国文学乃至文化的影响；了解该时期重要作家的文学创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画、语言风格、思想意义等；同时结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。
Ⅱ本章重点及难点
1． 英国现代文学的特征
2． 主要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画和语言风格
3． 名词解释：现代主义
4． 应用：选读作品的主题结构、艺术特色、人物刻画和语言风格，如
（1）叶芝和艾略特诗歌（所选作品）的主题、意象分析
（2）小说《儿子与情人》的主题和主要人物的性格分析
（3）意识流小说的主要特色分析
（4）萧伯纳戏剧的特点与社会意义分析
Ⅲ.考核知识点和考核要求
（一）现代时期概述
1．识记：
A. 20世纪英国社会的政治、经济、文化背景
B．英国20世纪批判现实主义文学
C．现代主义文学的兴起与衰落
2．领会：
A. 现代主义文学创作的基本主张
B．英国现代主义文学思潮
（1）诗歌
（2）小说
（3）戏剧
3．应用：
A．名词解释：现代主义
B．英国现代主义文学的特点
C．现代主义文学对当代文学的影响
（二）现代时期的主要作家
A.萧伯纳
1．一般：萧伯纳的生平与文学生涯。
2．识记：
A．萧伯纳的政治改革思想和文学创作主张
B．萧伯纳的戏剧创作
（1）早期主要作品：《鳏夫的房产》、《华伦夫人的职业》、《康蒂坦》、《凯撒和克莉奥佩特拉》
（2）中期作品：《人与超人》、《巴巴拉少校》、《皮格马利翁》
（3）晚期作品：《伤心之家》、《回到麦修色拉》、《圣女贞德》、《苹果车》
3．领会：
A．萧伯纳戏剧的特点与社会意义
B．萧伯纳的戏剧对20世纪英国文学的影响
4．应用：
A．《华伦夫人的职业》的故事梗概、情节结构、人物塑造、语言风格、思想意义
B．选读：所选作品的主要内容、人物塑造、语言特点、艺术手法等
B．约翰·高尔斯华绥
1．一般识记：高尔斯华绥的生平与文学生涯
2．识记： 高尔斯华绥的文学创作
（1）戏剧：《银盒》、《正义》、《斗争》
（2）小说：《福赛特世家》（《有产业的人》、《骑虎》、《出租》）、《现代喜剧》
3．领会：
A．高尔斯华绥的创作思想
B．高尔斯华绥批判现实主义小说的主要特点及社会意义
4．应用：
选读：所选作品的主要内容、人物性格。语言特点、叙述手法等
C、威廉·勃特勒·叶芝
1．一般：叶芝的生平及文学生涯
2．识记：叶芝诗歌的代表作品
（1）早期诗歌：《茵尼斯弗利岛》、《梦见仙境的人》、《玫瑰》
（2）中期诗歌：《新的纪元》、《1916年的复活节》
（3）晚期诗歌：《驶向拜占廷》、《丽达及天鹅》、《在学童们中间》
3．领会：
A．叶芝的诗歌创作思想
B．叶芝诗歌的特点及思想意义
C．叶芝诗歌的艺术成就
D．叶芝的诗歌对当代英国文学的影响
E．叶芝的戏剧创作
4．应用：选读：、所选作品的主题思想、语言风格、艺术特色等
D、T．S．艾略特
1．一般识记：艾略特的生平及创作生涯
2．识记： 艾略特的主要诗歌作品
（1）《普鲁弗洛克的情歌》
（2）《荒原》
（3）《灰星期三》
（4）《四个四重奏》
3．领会：
A．艾略特的文学理论与文艺批评观
B．艾略特诗歌的艺术特色及社会意义
C．艾略特的戏剧
D. 文略特的艺术成就
E．艾略特的文学创作及文艺批评思想对现当代英国文学的影响
4．应用：
A．《荒原》主题、结构、神话、象征、语言特色及社会意义
B．选读：所选作品的主题结构、思想内容、语言特点、艺术手法等
E．戴维·赫伯特·劳伦斯
1．一般识记：劳伦斯的生平及文学生涯
2．识记： 劳伦斯的主要小说
（1）《儿子与情人》
（2）《虹》
（3）《恋爱中的女人》
3．领会：
A． 劳伦斯的创作思想
B． 劳伦斯小说的主要艺术特色及社会意义 ．
C． 劳伦斯的小说对现当代英国文学的影响
4．应用：
A．《儿子与情人》的故事梗概、情节结构、人物塑造、语言风格、思想意义
B．选读：所选作品的主要内容、人物性格、语言特点、艺术手法等
F．詹姆斯·乔伊斯
1．一般识记：乔伊斯的生平与创作生涯
2．识记：乔伊斯的主要作品简介
（1）《都柏林人》
（2）《青年艺术家的肖像》
（3）《尤利西斯》
3．领会：
A． 乔伊斯的文学创作主张与美学思想
B． 乔伊斯小说的主要艺术特色及思想意义
C．乔伊斯的艺术成就
D．乔伊斯的作品对现当代世界文学的影响
4．应用：
A． 意识流小说的主要特色分析
B． 选读：所选作品的主题思想、人物塑造、语言特色、艺术手法等
Chapter 5 The Modern Period
一．识记：
1. The social, ideological background of the modern English literature:
(1) The influences of the two World Wars on English literature:
Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism. The First World War and the Second World War had greatly influenced the English literature. The catastrophic First World War tremendously weakened the British Empire and brought about great sufferings to its people as well. Its appalling shock severely destroyed people's faith in the Victorian values; The postwar economic dislocation and spiritual disillusion produced a profound impact upon the British people, who came to see the prevalent wretchedness in capitalism.
The Second World War marked the last stage of the disintegration of the British Empire. Britain suffered heavy losses in the war: thousands of people were killed; the economy was ruined; and almost all its former colonies were lost. People were in economic, cultural, and belief crisises.
(2) Ideologically, the rise of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited modern writers to make new explorations on human natures and human relationships. (a) In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put forward the theory of scientific socialism, which not only provided a guiding principle for the working people, but also inspired them to make dauntless fights for their own emancipation. (b) Darwin's theory of evolution exerted a strong influence upon the people, causing many to lose their religious faith. The social Darwinism, under the cover of "survival of the fittest," vehemently advocated colonialism or jingoism. (c) Einstein's theory of relativity provided entirely new ideas for the concepts of time and space. (d) Freud's analytical psychology drastically altered our conception of human nature. (e) Arthur Schopenhauer, a pessimistic philosopher started a rebellion against rationalism, stressing the importance of will and intuition. (f) Having inherited the basic principles from Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche went further against rationalism by advocating the doctrines of power and superman and by completely rejecting the Christian morality. (g) Based on the major ideas of his predecessors, Henry Bergson established his irrational philosophy which put the emphasis on creation, intuition, irrationality and unconsciousness. All these irrationalist philosophers exerted immense influence upon the major modernist writers in Britain.
So, after the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared: symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, cubism, futurism, Dadaism, imagism and stream of consciousness. Towards the 1920s, these trends converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement, which swept across the whole Europe and America. After the Second World War, a variety of modernism, or post-modernism, like existentialist literature, theater of the absurd, new novels and black humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that "the world was absurd, and the human life was an agony."
2. The development of English poetry in the 20th century:
The 20th century has witnessed a great achievement in English poetry. In the early years of this century, Thomas Hardy and the war poets of the younger generation were important realistic poets. Hardy expressed his strong sympathies for the suffering poor and his bitter disgusts at the social evils in his poetry as in his novels. The soldiers-poets of World War I revealed the appalling brutality of the war in a most realistic way. The early poems of Pound and Eliot and Yeats's matured poetry marked the rise of "modern poetry," which was, in some sense, a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian poetry. The modernist poets fought against the romantic fuzziness and self-indulged emotionalism, advocating new ideas in poetry- writing such as to use the language of common speech, to create new rhythms as the expression of a new mood, to allow absolute freedom in choosing subjects, and to use hard, clear and precise images in poems.
The 1930s witnessed great economic depressions, mass unemployment, and the rise of the Nazis. Facing such a severe situation, most of the young intellects started to turn to the left. And therefore the period was known as "the red thirties." A group of young poets during this period expressed in their poetry a radical political enthusiasm and a strong protest against fascism. With the coming of the 1950s, there was a return of realistic poetry again. By advocating reason, moral discipline, and traditional forms, a new generation of poets started "The Movement," which explicitly rejected the modernist influence. There was no significant poetic movement in the 1960s. A multiplicity of choices opened to both the poet and the reader. Poets gradually moved into more individual styles.
3. Realism in the 20th century English literature:
The realistic novels in the early 20th century were the continuation of the Victorian tradition, yet its exposing and criticizing power against capitalist evils had been somewhat weakened both in width and depth. The outstanding realistic novelists of this period were John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, and Arnold Eennett. The three trilogies of Galsworthy's Forsyte novels are masterpieces of critical realism in the early 20th century, which revealed the corrupted capitalist world. In his novels of social satire, H. G. Wells made realistic studies of the aspirations and frustrations of the "Little Man;" whereas Bennett presented a vivid picture of the English life in the industrial Midlands in his best novels.
Realism was, to a certain extent, eclipsed by the rapid rise of modernism in the 1920s. But with the strong swing of leftism in the 1930s, novelists began to turn their attention to the urgent social problems. They also enriched the traditional ways of creation by adopting some of the modernist techniques. However, the realistic novels of this period were more or less touched by a pessimistic mood, preoccupied with the theme of man's loneliness, and shaped in different forms: social satires by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell comic satires on the English upper class by Evelyn Waugh; and Catholic novels by Graham Greene. Another important group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working-class background in the mid-1950s and early 1960s known as "The Angry Young Man." They demonstrated a particular disillusion over the depressing situation in Britain and launched a bitter protest against the outmoded social and political values in their society. Kingsley Amis, John Wain, John Braine and Alan Sillitoe were the major novelists in this group. They portrayed unadorned working-class life in their novels with great freshness and vigor of the working-class language. Amis was the first to start the attack on middle-class privileges and power in his novel Lucky Jim (1954). The term "The Angry Young Man" came to be widely
Having been merged and interpenetrated with modernism in the past several decades, the realistic novel of the 1960s and 1970s appeared in a new face with a richer, more vigorous and more diversified style.
二．领会:
1.Modern English poetry:
It is, in some sense, a revolution against the conventional ideas and forms of the Victorian poetry. The modernist poets fought against the romantic fuzziness and self-indulged emotionalism, advocating new ideas in poetry- writing such as to use the language of common speech, to create new rhythms as the expression of a new mood, to allow absolute freedom in choosing subjects, and to use hard, clear and precise images in poems.
2. Modern English novels:
The first three decades of 20th century were golden years of the modernist novel. In stimulating the technical innovations of novel creation, the theory of the Freudian and Jungian psycho-analysis played a particularly important role. With the notion that multiple levels of consciousness existed simultaneously in the human mind, that one's present was the sum of his past, present and future, and that the whole truth about human beings existed in the unique, isolated, and private world of each individual, writers like Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf concentrated all their efforts on digging into the human consciousness. They had created unprecedented stream-of-consciousness novels such as Pilgrimage by Richardson, Ulysses (1922) by Joyce, and Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Woolf. One of the remarkable features of their writings was their continuous experimentation on new and sophisticated techniques in novel writing, which made tremendous impacts on the creation of both realistic and modernist novels in this century.
James Joyce is the most outstanding stream-of-consciousness novelist; in Ulysses, his encyclopedia-like masterpiece, Joyce presents a fantastic picture of the disjointed, illogical, illusory, and mental- emotional life of Leopold Bloom, who becomes the symbol of everyman in the post-World-War-ⅠEurope.
In the works of E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence, old traditions are still there, but their subject matter about human relationships and their symbolic or psychological presentations of the novel are entirely modern. Forster's masterpiece, A Passage to India (1924), is a novel of decidedly symbolist aspirations, in which the author set up, within a realistic story, a fable of moral significance that implies a highly mystical, symbolic view of life, death, human relationship, and the relationship of man with the infinite universe. D. H. Lawrence is regarded as revolutionary as Joyce in novel writing; but unlike Joyce, he was not concerned with technical innovations; his interest lay in the tracing of the psychological development of his characters and in his energetic criticism of the dehumanizing effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature. He believed that life impulse was the primacy of man's instinct, and that any conscious repression of such an impulse would cause distortion or perversion of the individual's personality. In his best novels like The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920), Lawrence made a bold psychological exploration of various human relationships, especially those between men and women, with a great frankness Lawrence claimed that the alienation of the human relationships and the perversion of human nature in the modern society were caused by the desires for power and money, by the shams and frauds of middle-class life, and, above all, by the whole capitalist mechanical civilization, which turned men into inhuman machines.
After the Second World War, modernism had another upsurge with the rise of existentialism which was reflected mainly in drama.
3. The development of 20th century English drama:
The most celebrated dramatists in the last decade of the 19th century were Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, who, in a sense, pioneered the modern drama, though they did not make so many innovations in techniques and forms as modernist poets or novelists. Wilde expressed a satirical and bitter attitude towards the upper-class people by revealing their corruption, their snobbery, and their hypocrisy in his plays, especially in his masterpiece, The Importance-of Being Earnest (1895). Shaw is is considered to be the best-known English dramatist since Shakespeare whose works are examples of the plays inspired by social criticism. John Galsworthy carried on this tradition of social criticism in his plays. By dramatizing social and ethical problems, Galsworthy made considerable achievements in his plays such as The Silver Box (1906) and Strife (1910), in which Galsworthy presents not only realistic pictures of social injustice, but also the workers' heroic struggles against their employers.
W. B. Yeats, a prominent poet of the 20th century, was the leader of the Irish National Theater Movement. He was a verse playwright who desired to restore lyrical drama to popularity. With the heroic portrayal of spiritual truth as his main concern, Yeats wrote a number of verse plays, introducing Irish myths and folk legends; but the plot in his plays was seldom very dramatic.
The 1930s witnessed a revival of poetic drama in England. One of the early experimenters was T. S. Eliot who regarded drama as the best medium of poetry. Eliot wrote several verse plays and made a considerable success. Murder in the Cathedral (1935), with its purely dramatic power, remains the most popular of his verse plays, in spite of its primarily religious purpose. After Eliot, Christopher Fry gained considerable successes in poetic drama. His exuberant though poetically commonplace verse drama. The Lady's Not For Burning (1948), attracted delighted audience.
The English dramatic revolution, which came in the 1950s under various European and American influences, developed in two directions: the working-class drama and the Theater of Absurd.
The working-class drama was started by a group of young writers from the lower-middle class, or working class, who presented a new type of plays which expressed a mood of restlessness, anger and frustration, a spirit of rebelliousness, and a strong emotional protest against the existing social institutions. John Osborne's play, Look Back in Anger (1956), in a fresh, unadorned working-class language, angrily, violently and unrelentingly condemned the contemporary social evils. With an entirely new sense of reality, Osborne brought vitality to the English theater and became known as the first "Angry Young Man."
The most original playwright of the Theater of Absurd is Samuel Beckett, who wrote about human beings living a meaningless life in an alien, decaying world. His first play Waiting for Godot (1955) is regarded as the most famous and influential play of the Theater of Absurd.
三．应用:
1. What is Modernism?
Modernism was a complex and diverse international movement in all creative arts, originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided the greatest renaissance of the 20th century. After the First World War, all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared: symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, cubism, futurism, Dadaism, imagism and stream of consciousness. Towards the 1920s, these trends converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement, which swept across the whole Europe and America. It has also been called "the tradition of the new"-a conscious rejection of established rules, traditions and conventions, and "the dehumanization of art"-pushing into the background traditional notions of the individual and society. The major figures that were associated with Modernism were Kafka, Picasso, Pound, Webern, Eliot, Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Modernism was somewhat curbed in the 1930s. But after the Second World War, a variety of modernism, or post-modernism, like existentialist literature, theater of the absurd, new novels and black humor, rose with the spur of the existentialist idea that "the world was absurd, and the human life was an agony."
Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. By advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, Modernism casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama.
2. The basic philosophy or characteristics of Modernism in literature:
Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. One characteristic of English Modernism is "the dehumanization of art". The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. Therefore, they pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual.
Modernism is, in many aspects, a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism; it excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world, which is the only creative source of realism; by advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, it casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama.
I. George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
一． 一般识记：His life and writing:
Bernard Shaw, a brilliant dramatist, was born in Dublin, Ireland, of English parentage. He once worked in a landagent's office where he had much contact with the poor people in Dublin and came to know their miserable life. This experience surely enriched his understanding of the society and the sufferings of the people. In 1876 Shaw gave up his job and went to London, where he devoted much of his time to self-education by wide reading. Shaw came under the influence of Henry George and William Morris and took an interest in socialist theories. He started to attend all kinds of public meetings and to read Karl Marx in the British Museum. In 1884 Shaw joined the Fabian Society and became one of its most influential members.
二． 识记
1. Shaw's reform ideas:
He regarded the establishment of socialism by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership as the final goal. But on how to achieve it, he differed greatly from the Marxists. He was against the means of violent revolution or armed struggle in achieving the goal of socialism; he also had a distrust of the uneducated working class in fighting against capitalists. This reformist view of his caused him a painful, often conscious, inner conflict between his sincere desire for the new world and his inability to break out of the snobbish intellectual isolation throughout his life and work.
2. His major works:
Shaw wrote five novels in all the best of which is Cashel Byron's Profession (1886), which is about a world-famous prize fighter marrying a priggishly refined lady of property. His criticism is entitled Our Theaters in the Nineties (1931). In his long dramatic career, Shaw wrote more than 50 plays of a variety of subjects:
(1) His early plays were mainly concerned with social problems and directed towards the criticism of the contemporary social, economic, moral and religious evils. Widowers' House is a grotesquely realistic exposure of slum landlordism; Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play about the economic oppression of women.
(2) Shaw wrote quite a few history plays, in which he kept an eye on the contemporary society. The important plays of this group are Caesar and Cleopatra (1898) and St. Joan (1923).
(3) Shaw also produced several plays, exploring his idea of " Life Force," the power that would create superior beings to be equal to God and to solve all the social, moral, and metaphysical problems of human society. The typical examples of this group are Man and Superman (1904) and Back to Methuselah (1921).
(4) Besides, Shaw wrote plays on miscellaneous subjects: for instance. The Apple Cart (1929) is about politics; John Bull's Other Island (1904) is about racial problems; Pygmalion (1912) is about culture and art; Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1910) and Fanny's First Play (1911) are about the problem of family and marriage; and The Doctor's Dilemma (1906) is about the ignorance, incompetence, arrogance and bigotry of the medical profession. Too True to Be Good (1932) is a better play of the later period, with the author's almost nihilistic bitterness on the subjects of the cruelty and madness of World War I and the aimlessness and disillusion of the young.
三． 领会
1. Shaw's literary ideas:
Shaw held that art should serve social purposes by reflecting human life, revealing social contradictions and educating the common people. Being a drama critic, Shaw directed his attacks on the Neo-Romantic tradition and the fashionable drawing-room drama. His criticism was witty, biting, and often brilliant. Shaw was strongly against the credo of "art for art's sake" held by those decadent aesthetic artists. In his critical essays, he vehemently condemned the "well made" but cheap, hollow plays which filled the English theater of the late 19th century to meet the low taste of the middle class.
2. The main characteristics of Bernard Shaw's plays:
(1) Structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. As a realistic dramatist, he took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim of directing social reforms. Most of his plays, termed as problem plays, are concerned with political, economic, moral, or religious problems. And his plays have only one passion, i.e. indignation against oppression and exploitation, against hypocrisy and lying, against prostitution and slavery, against poverty, dirt and disorder.
(2) One feature of Shaw's characterization is that he makes the trick of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another. Usually he would take an unconventional character, a person with the gift of insight and freedom, and impinge it upon a group of conventional social animals, so as to reveal at every turn stock notions, prejudices and dishonesties. Another feature is that Shaw's characters are the representatives of ideas, points of view, that shift and alter during the play, for Mr. Shaw is primarily interested in doctrines.
(3) Much of Shavian drama is constructed around the inversion of a conventional theatrical situation. The inversion, a device found in Shaw from beginning to end, is an integral part of an interpretation of life. Inversion is also used in character portrayal to achieve comic effects.
(4) Shaw's plays have plots, but they do not work by plots. The plot is usually the disregarded backbone to one long, unbroken conversation. It is the vitality of the talk that takes primacy over mere story. Action is reduced to a minimum, while the dialogue and the interplay of the minds of the characters maintain the interest of the audience. The forward motion consists not in the unrolling of plot but in the operation of the spirit of discourse.
四． 应用：Selected Reading: An Excerpt from Act II of Mrs. Warren's Profession:
The outline and social significance of Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession:
(1) The outline: Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play about the economic oppression of women. Mrs. Warren's profession is keeping brothels. Sir George Crofts, an old aristocrat, is her partner in this business. Vivie, Mrs. Warren's daughter, is educated in a very moral atmosphere at a boarding school. Upon graduation, she returns home and by accident discovers the source of her mother's income. Her conversations with Mrs. Warren and Sir George Crofts reveal the unscrupulousness of these members of the ruling class. It must be noted, however, that while protesting strongly against bourgeois exploitation and the immorality of the English ruling classes, Shaw points out no corrective. His heroine Vivie simply leaves her mother and, living independently, tries to earn her bread by honest work. Like Shaw, she is under the delusion that piecemeal, pretty and gradual reform will eventually do away with the evils of capitalism.
(2) The social significance: The play tells an outrageous truth: in a moribund capitalist society, even prostitution can be made a means of exploitation by an ex-prostitution Mrs. Warren, and a sound investment by a respectable aristocrat Sir George Crofts. Here he exposes and satirizes the entire capitalist system, shows his infinite sympathy for the exploited, and therefore sharply and daringly touches on the most fundamental being of the capitalist system.
Ⅱ.John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
一．一般识记 His life:
John Galsworthy was born into an upper-middle class family. He was educated first at Harrow and then at Oxford. After practising the law for a short time, he turned to literature.
二．识记 His major works:
He published his first book, From the Four Winds (a volume of short stories), in 1897 under the pseudonym of John Sinjohn. The experiences of his wife's unhappy life of the first marriage were reflected in The Man of Property (1906), which, together with his first p1ay, The Silver Box (1906), established him as a prominent novelist and playwright in the public mind. After the First Wor1d War he completed The Forsyte Saga, his first trilogy: The Man of Property, In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921). His second Forsyte trilogy, A Modern Comedy, appeared in 1929, and the third, End of the Chapter, posthumous1y in 1934.
三． 领会
1．John Galsworthy basic literary ideas: Galsworthy was essentially a bourgeois liberal, a reformist. Throughout his life, he was preoccupied with the social injustice in his time. He regarded human life as a struggle between the rich and the poor. And his sympathy always went out to the suffering poor. In his works, he criticizes a dull, parasitic and inhuman class of the rich, which is against any kind of change; and showed great sympathy to the oppressed, but rebellious and unyie1ding class of the poor, which is bent on reforming things. He battled for many liberal causes, from women's suffrage to the abo1ition of censorship. He was also a moralist and a critic whose primary aim as a writer was not to create a new society but to criticize the existing one, though his final aim was to keep a balance between the rich and the poor. His works were designed to help improve the status quo; there was no suggestion in them that society shou1d be radical1y and painfully reconstructed if socia1 enemies were to be reconciled and social i11s remedied.
2．The characteristics of Galsworthy's critical realism and its social effect:
Ga1sworthy was a conventional writer, having inherited the fine traditions of the great Victorian nove1ists of the critical realism such as Dickens and Thackeray. He learned from Maupassant for the vigor, economy and clarity of writing, Turgenev for the wisdom and naturalness, and Tostoy for the depth of insight and the breadth of character drawing. Technically, he was more traditional than adventurous, focusing on plot development and character portrayal. With an objective observation and a naturalistic description, Galsworthy had tried his best to make an impartial presentation of the social 1ife in a documentary precision. By emphasizing the critical element in his writing, he daunt1essly laid bare the true features of the good and the evi1 of the bourgeois society. He was also successful in his attempt to present satire and humor in his writing. He wrote in a clear and unpretentious sty1e with a c1ear and straightforward language.
四．应用：Selected Reading:
An Excerpt from Chapter l3 of The Man of Property
1. The outline of the story: The Man of Property is the first novel of the Forsyte trilogies which tell the ups and downs of the Forsyte family from 1886 to 1926. This novel centers itself on the Soames-Irene-Bosinney triangle. Soames Forsyte, a typical Forsyte, represents the essence of the principle that the accumulation of wealth is the sole aim of life, for he considers everything in terms of one's property. Irene, his young and beautiful wife, on the contrary, loves art and cherishes noble ideals of life. But Soames never pay any attention to her thoughts and feeling; he takes her merely as part of his own property. Thus, Irene is not happy about her marriage. In order to please his wife, Soames asks Bosinney, a young architect, to build a country house for them. Like Irene, Bosinney is also interested in art and not in practical things in life. During the designing and building of the house, the two come to enjoy a great deal of each other's company and finally fall in love with each other. Rumors arise and Soames wants his revenge. He sues Bosinney at the court for spending more money than stipulated. The conflict of the triangle ends tragically with Bosinney's death in a car accident and Irene's leaving Soames for good.
2. The theme of this novel: It is that of the predominant possessive instinct of the Forsytes and its effects upon the personal relationships of the family with the underlying assumption that human relationships of the contemporary English society are merely an extension of property relationships.
The harsh satire on this inhuman sense of property is brought out very effectively in the early chapters of the novel. But in the later part of the novel, the harsh tone gradually changes into a more tolerant one, and finally it becomes a distinctly sentimental one, thus weakening the effect of the novel.
Ⅲ.William Butler Yeats (1865-1939 )
一． 一般识记：
W. B. Yeats was born into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family in Dub1in. He was brought up where old Irish way of 1ife and folk1ore were stil1 very strong. With a strong passion for Celtic 1egends, he read Irish poetry and the Gaelic sagas in translation. His youth was spent during the high tide of the Irish Nationalist Movement. He was a moderate nationalist. With the common cultural ideas of reviving the Irish literature, Yeats, Lady Gregory and John Synge organized the Irish National Dramatic Society and opened the Abbey Theater in 1904. Yeats served as its director and wrote more than 20 p1ays for the theater. In 1923, he was awarded NobeI Prize for 1iterature.
二． 识记和领会：
1. Yeats's literary ideas:
Not content with any dogma in any of the established religious institutions, Yeats built up for himself a mystical system of beliefs. In choosing the mystical belief of cyclical history over the modern conception of progress, Yeats owed a great deal to the Italian philosopher Vico, and the German philosopher Nietzsche. He believed that history, and life, followed a circular, spiral pattern consisting of long cycles which repeated themselves over and over on different levels. And symbols 1ike " winding stairs," "spinning tops," "gyres" and "spirals" were part of his elaborate theory of history, which had obviously become the central core of order in his great poems. Yeats later disagreed with the idea of "art for art's sake." He came to see that literature should not be an end in itself but the expression of conviction and the garment of noble emotion. To write about Ire1and for an Irish audience and to recreate a specifically Irish literature -- these were the aims that Yeats was fighting for as a poet and a playwright.
2．The three periods of Yeats's poetic creation and their respective features:
Generally, his poetic career starting in the romantic tradition and finishing as a matured modernist poet can be divided into three periods according to the contents and sty1e of his poetry.
(1) As a young man in the last decades of the 19th -century, Yeats began his poetic career in the romantic tradition. The major themes are usually Celtic 1egends, local folkta1es, or stories of the heroic age in Irish history. Many of his early poems have a dreamy quality, expressing melancho1y, passive and self-indulgent feelings. The representative works are "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland". The overall style of his early poetry is very delicate with natural imagery, dream-like atmophere and, musical beauty.
(2) Yeats turned from the traditional poetry to a modernist one during the first two decades of the 20th century. Ideologically, he responded to Nietzsche's works with great excitement; artistically, he came under the influence of French Symbolism and John Donne's metaphysical poetry; and poetically, he accepted the modernist ideas in poetry writing advocated by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Yeats began to write with realistic and concrete themes on a variety of subjects, exploring the profound and complicated human problems, such as life, love, politics, and religion. The early passive and dreamy mood was replaced by anger, disillusion and bitter satire. His style is both simple and rich, colloquial and formal, with a quality of metaphysical wit and symbolic vision, which indicates that Yeats has already been on his way to modernist poetry. The representative poems are "Easter of 1916" and "New Era."
(3) Yeats reached the last stage of his poetic creation when he was over fifty. He felt more bitter and more disillusioned. Yeats came to realize that eternal beauty could only live in the realm of art. His concern has turned to the great subjects of dichotomy, such as, youth and age, love and war, vigor and wisdom, body and soul, and life and art. And this dichotomy has brought constant tensions in his works and revealed the human predicament. In this last period, Yeats has developed a tough, complex and symbolical style. The representative poems are "Sailing to Byzantium," "Leda and the Swan" and "Monuments of Unaging intellect."
3．Yeats as a dramatist and his contribution to modern theater:
He wrote verse plays in most of the cases. He wrote more than 20 plays in a stretch of 48 years. The stories of his early plays all came from the Irish myth or legends. His sucessful plays include The Countess Cathleen (1892), Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) The Land of Heart's Desire (1894), The Shadowy Waters (1900) and Purgatory (1935).
In his later phase of dramatic career, in order to reflect "the deeps of the mind," Yeats began experimenting with techniques such as the use of masks, of ritualized actions, and of symbolic languages together with the combination of music and dance. In a certain way, his experiments anticipated the abstract movement of modern theater. However, even in his plays Yeats has remained a lyrical poet. His plays are enjoyed more for the beauty of their language than for dramatic situations.
三．应用：Selected Readings:
1. The Lake Isle of Innisfree
The poem is written in 1893. Tired of the life of his day, Yeats sought to escape into an ideal "fairyland" where he could live calmly as a hermit and enjoy the beauty of nature. The poem consists of three quatrains of iambic pentameter, with each stanza rhymed abab. Innisfree is an inlet in the lake in Irish legends. Here the author is referring to a place for hermitage.
This poem is just a popular representative of the poems in which Yeats has achieved suggestive patterns of meaning by a careful counterpointing of contrasting ideas or images like human and fairy, natura1 and artificial, domestic and wild, and ephemeral and permanent. Around a "fairyland" background, the poem is c1osely woven, easy, subtle and musical; the c1arity and control of the imagery give the poem a haunting quality.
2. Down by the Salley Gardens
Originally entitled "An Old Song Resung," with Yeats's footnote: "This is an attempt to reconstruct an old song from three lines imperfectly remembered by an old peasant woman in the village of Ballysodare, Sligo, who often sings them to herself."
The theme of the poem is very simple: a boy has fallen in love with a beautiful girl who is carefree and advises the boy not to be so serious about love and life. But he does not agree with her and suffers a lot.
Ⅳ.T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
一．一般识记：
His life and writing: Thomas Steams Eliot was born at St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A. Eliot was first educated at Smith Academy and then at Harvard where he concentrated his energies on studying philosophy and logic. He took interest in Elizabethan literature, the Italian Renaissance and Indian mystical philosophy of Buddhism. He was also attracted by the French symbolist poetry. He worked as the editor of The Egoist and The Criterion, the two most influential literary reviews of 20th century. He won various awards, including the Nobel Prize and the Order of Merit in 1948.
二．识记与领会：
1． Eliot had a long poetic career, which was generally divided into two periods: the early one from 1915 to 1925, and the later one from 1927 onward.
(1) The main features of T.S.Eliot's early poems: In his early period, Eliot produced a fairly large number of poems, which were mainly collected in Poems 1909-25 (1925). His first important poem was "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" (1915). He also published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and his most famous poem The Waste Land (1922). As a young man with bitter disillusionment and with boldness in the handling of language, Eliot had explored in his early poetry various aspects of decay of culture in the modem Western world, expressing a sense of the disintegration of life. Most of his early poems are about a state of mind. There is little "action" in a physical sense; the action is totally psychological. The poems are dominated by the dark horror of an earthly hell. The more important poems of this period are: "Prufrock," "Gerontion," The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men.
(2) In his later period, Eliot produced only two major volumes of poetic works: Ash Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1944). The quest for stability, for order, and for the maintaining of the bourgeois status quo became his primary concern in his later works. The Four Quartets, based on the Christian dogmas of incarnation and resurrection, is concerned with the quest for the immortal element, the stillness within time or history. Man, disillusioned and hopeless in his early poetry, now finds reconciliation in God. Thus, the Four Quartets is characterized by a philosophical and emotional calm quite in contrast to the despair and suffering of the early works. The stream-of-consciousness technique has been largely employed in Eliot's poems.
2．T. S. Eliot's major achievement in drama writing:
He was one of the important verse dramatists in the first half of the 20th century. Besides some fragmentary pieces, Eliot had written in his lifetime five full-length plays: Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Family Reunion (1939), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The-Elder Statesman (1959). All the plays have something to do with Christian themes. His three later plays are also concerned with the subject of spiritual self-discovery but in the form of a sophisticated modern social comedy. Eliot's major achievement in play writing has been the creation of a verse drama in the 20th century to express the ideas and actions of modern society with new accents of the contemporary speech.
3．T. S. Eliot was also an important prose writer. During his literary career, he wrote a large number of essays, articles and book reviews. His essays are mainly concerned with cultural, social, religious, as well as literary issues. It is not inappropriate to say that Eliot, as a critic, may have occupied today a position of distinction and influence equal in importance to his position as a poet.
In his famous essay, "Tradition and Individual Talent," Eliot put great emphasis on the importance of tradition both in creative writing and in criticism. And in presenting his doctrine of impersonality, Eliot argued that a poet's mind should remain "inert" and "neutral" towards his subject matter, keeping a gulf between the man who suffers and the mind which creates.
三．应用Selected Reading:
1．The literary significance of The Waste Land:
(1) The theme: The Waste Land, Eliot's most important single poem, has been hailed as a landmark and a model of the 20th-century English poetry, comparable to Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. With bold technical innovations in versification and style, the poem not only presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in the modern Western world, but also reflects the prevalent mood of disillusionment and despair of a whole post-war generation.
(2) The main ideas of each section: The poem is 433 lines long and is divided into five sections, which are not logically constructed or connected. Section I, "The Burial of the Dead," deals chiefly with the theme of death in life. The inhabitants in the modern Waste Land, who have lost the knowledge of good and evil, live a sterile, meaningless life. In the last passage of the section, Eliot connects the "unreal city" with the city of the dead, and modern London with Dante's Hell, claiming that those who have no faith of religion are actually living dead. To bury the dead is to bury a memory, which brings no hope of growth or renewal. Section II, "A Game of Chess," gives a rather concrete illustration of the sterile situation. A picture of spiritual emptiness is presented with the reproduction of a contemporary pub conversation between two cockney women. The discussion is constantly interrupted by the pub keeper's "HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME." Section III, "The Fire Sermon," expresses a painfully elegiac feeling by juxtaposing the vulgarity and shallowness of the modern with the beauty and simplicity of the past. What was once ritualistic and meaningful is now despairing and empty. In section IV, "Death by Water," the drowned Phoenician Sailor is an emblem of futile worries over profit and loss, youth and age. With the curative and baptismal power of the water images, the drowned Phoenician Sailor also recalls the rebirth of the drowned god of the fertility cults, thus giving an instance of the conquest of death. The title of Section V, "What the Thunder Said," appears to be derived from an Indian myth, in which the supreme Lord of the Creation speaks through the thunder. As the drought breaks and the thunder speaks, various elusive suggestions of hopes are given; but despite the thunder's advice "to give, to sympathize, and to control," which projects the possibility of regeneration, the issue is left uncertain at the end.
(3) The poem's social significance: The Waste Land is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modem civilization in which human life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose. The poem has developed a whole set of historical, cultural and religious themes; but it is often regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century people's disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society. The horror and menace, the anguish and dereliction, and the futility and sterility expressed in his poetry had been afflicting all sensitive members of the postwar generation.
2．The characteristics of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is Eliot's most striking early achievement. It presents the meditation of an aging young man over the business of proposing marriage. The poem is in a form of dramatic monologue, suggesting an ironic contrast between a pretended "love song" and a confession of the speaker's incapability of facing up to love and to life in a sterile upper-class world. Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, is neurotic, self-important, illogical and incapable of action. He is a kind of tragic figure caught in a sense of defeated idealism and tortured by unsatisfied desires. The setting of the poem resembles the "polite society" of Pope's " The Rape of the Lock," in which a tea party is a significant event and a game of cards is the only way to stave off boredom. The poem is intensely anti-romantic with visual images of hard, gritty objects and evasive hellish atmosphere.
V. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
一．一般识记
His life and writing: David Herbert Lawrence was born at a mining village in Nottinghamshire. His father was a coal-miner with little education; but his mother, once a school teacher, was from a somewhat higher class, who came to think that she had married beneath her and desired to have her sons well educated so as to help them escape from the life of coal miners. The conflict between the earthy, coarse, energetic but often drunken father and the refined, strong-willed and up-climbing mother is vividly presented in his autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913).
二．识记
1．Lawrence's major works: During his life-long literary career, he had written more than ten novels, several volumes of short stories and a large number of poems. Lawrence began his novel writing in his early twenties. His first novel, The White Peacock (1911), is a remarkable work of a talented young man, acutely observant of nature and delighting in story. His second novel is The Trespasser (1912), which is about the failure of human contact and the lack of warmth between people, which are to be further explored in his later novels. Lawrence was recognized as a prominent novelist only after Sons and Lovers was published. The Rainbow (1915) and Women in Love (1920) are generally regarded as his masterpieces in which symbolism and complex narrative are employed more richly.
2．The Rainbow
(1) The story: The Rainbow is a story about the three generations of the Brangwen family on the Marsh farm. The first part is about the marriage and life of Tom Brangwen and Lydia Lensky, a Polish widow. They have a deep and loving understanding of each other in spite of the utter foreignness between them. They can also communicate with the mysterious natural world. Their relationship is presented as the model one in the novel. The second part of the novel is about Anna Lensky, Lydia's daughter by her first husband, and Will, Tom's nephew. They have physical passion for each other; but, in Lawrence's words, "their souls remain separate." Their relationship is fraught with conflicts, and their marriage fails to achieve the final fulfillment of the older generation. The last part of the novel deals with Ursula, the eldest daughter of Will and Anna, who carries the story on into the third generation. This part of the novel traces Ursula's life from childhood through adolescence up to adulthood. At the end of the novel; Ursula is left with much experience behind her, but still "uncreated" in face of the unknown future.
(2) The social significance of The Rainbow: In this novel, Lawrence illustrates a terrible social corruption that accompanies the progress of human civilization. In Lawrence's opinion, the mechanical civilization is responsible for the unhealthy development of human personalities, the perversion of love and the failure of human fulfillment in marital relationships. In reading the novel, the reader often feels the threatening shadows of the disintegration and destructiveness of the whole civilized world which loom behind the emotional conflicts and psychological tensions of the characters. As a matter of fact, it is the first time for Lawrence to make a conscious attempt to combine social criticism with psychological exploration in his novel writing.
3．Women in Love:
(1) The story: As its title implies, Women in Love is a novel about two pairs of lovers, around whom a series of episodes are dramatically presented. The two heroines are Ursula Brangwen and her younger sister Gudrun; and the two chief male characters are Gerald Crich, a young coalmine owner, and Rupert Birkin, a school inspector. At the opening of the story, Ursula and Birkin strike an immediate kin ship with each other, while Gudrun is attracted by Gerald's physical energy. The rest of the novel is a working out of the relationships of these four through interrelating events and conflicts of personalities. After a series of ups and downs, Birkin and Ursula have reached a fruitful relationship by maintaining their integrity and independence as individuals and decided to get married in the end. But the passionate love between Gudrun and Gerald experiences a process of tension and deterioration. As both of them have let their "will-power" and "ideals" interfere with their proper relations, their love turns out to be a disastrous tragedy.
(2) The symbolic meanings in this novel: Women in Love is rich in its symbolic meanings. Gerald Crich, an efficient but ruthless coalmine owner, who makes the machine his god and establishes the inhuman mechanical system in his mining kingdom, is a symbolic figure of spiritual death, representing the whole set of bourgeois ethics. Whereas Birkin, a self-portrait of Lawrence, who fights against the cramping pressures of mechanized industrialism and the domination of any kind of dead formulas, is presented as a symbolic figure of human warmth, standing for the spontaneous Life Force. Women in Love is a remarkable novel in which the individual consciousness is subtly revealed and strands of themes are intricately wound up. The structural pattern of the book derives from the contrast between the destinies of the two pairs of lovers and the subordinate masculine relationship between Birkin and Gerald. The two sisters, the two male friends, and the two couples are closely paralleled in ideas, actions and relations so that each is corresponding to and contrasting with the other. Thus, Women in Love is regarded to be a more profoundly ordered novel than any other written by Lawrence.
4．His later novels, which deal more extensively with themes of power, dominance, and leadership; the relationships that men form with one another, are also under exploration. These works include Aaron's Rod (1922), Kangaroo (1923), The Plumed Serpent (1926), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). In Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lawrence has returned to his early subjects and background of Nottinghamshire. By presenting an old romantic story about a dissatisfied aristocratic lady who deserts her half-man, half-machine husband to find love with a man of nature, Lawrence not only condemns the civilized world of mechanism that distorts all natural relationships between men and women, but also advocates a return to nature.
5．The theme of his short stories: Lawrence also uses them to expose the bankruptcy of the mechanical civilization and to find an answer to it. Irony, humour and wit are the characteristic features of many of the stories. St. Mawr, The Daughter of the Vicar, The Horse Dealer's Daughter, The Captain's Doll, The Prussian Officer, and The Virgin and the Gypsy are generally considered to be Lawrence's best known stories.
6．Lawrence is also a proficient poet. He began his poetry writing very early and wrote quite a large number of poems in his whole career. His poems fall roughly into three categories - satirical and comic poems, poems about human relationships and emotions, and poems about nature. Lawrence does not care much about the conventional metrical rules; what he tries to do in poetry is to catch the instant life of the immediate present.
7．Lawrence's three influential plays are known as "the Lawrence trilogy": A Collier's Friday Night (1909), The Daughter-in-Law (1912) and The Widowing of Mrs. Holroyed (1914), have in common the typical working-class environments set in Nottinghamshire. The main conflict is between the ignorant, drunken and brutish father or husband and the weary, frustrated mother or wife who tries to find emotional fulfillment in her children. What the plays focus on is the direct and violent emotions of the main characters in times of crisis in their married life. The plays are presented with a higher degree of objectivity and detachment than the novels by Lawrence.
三．领会
The creative features and the social significance of Lawrence's writing: Lawrence is one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century. The major characteristics of his novel is that he combined social criticism with psychological exploration in his novel writing. He was not concerned with technical innovations; his interest lays in the tracing of psychological development of his character and in his enegetic criticism of the dehumanizing effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature.
(1) The theme: In his writings, Lawrence has expressed a strong reaction against the mechanical civilization. In his opinion, the bourgeois industrialization or civilization, which made its realization at the cost of ravishing the land, started the catastrophic uprooting of man from nature and caused the distortion of personality, the corruption of the will, and the dominance of sterile intellect over the authentic inward passions of man. Under the mechanical control, human beings were turned into inanimated matter, while the inanimated matter should be animated to destroy both man and earth. It is this agonized concern about the dehumanizing effect of mechanical civilization on the sensual tenderness of human nature that haunts Lawrence's writing.
(2) Lawrence's influence to modern and contemporary English literature: He was one of the first novelists to introduce themes of psychology into his works. He made a bold psychological exploration of various human relations, especially those between men and women, with a great frankness. He believed that the healthy way of the individual's psychological development lay in the primacy of the life impulse, or in another term, the sexual impulse. Human sexuality was, to Lawrence, a symbol of Life Force. By presenting the psychological experience of individual human life and of human relationships, Lawrence has opened up a wide new territory to the novel. Lawrence declared that any repression of the sexual impulse based on social, religious, or moral values of the civilized world would cause severe damages to the harmony of human relationships and the psychic health of the individual's personality.
(3) Lawrence's artistic tendency is mainly realism, which combines dramatic scenes with an authoritative commentary. And the realistic feature is most obviously seen in its detailed portraiture. With the working-class simplicity and directness, Lawrence can summon up all the physical attributes associated with the common daily objects.
(4) In presenting the psychological aspects of his characters, Lawrence makes use of poetic imagination and symbolism in his writing. By using sets of natural images as poetic symbols to embody the emotional states of the characters and to illustrate human situations, Lawrence endows the traditional realism with a fresh psychological meaning. Through a combination of traditional realism and the innovating elements of symbolism and poetic imagination, Lawrence has managed to bring out the subtle ebb and flow of his characters' subconscious life.
四．应用：Sons and Lovers
(1) The brief outline of Lawrence's Sons and Lover: Sons and Lovers is largely an autobiographical novel told by means of straight-forward narrative and vivid episodes in chronological sequence. The story starts with the marriage of Paul's parents. Mrs. Morel, daughter of a middle-class family, is "a woman of character and refinement", a strong-willed, intelligent and ambitious woman who is fascinated by a warm, vigorous and sensuous coal miner, Walter Morel, and married beneath her own class. After an initial stage of happiness in their marriage, the class difference between them starts to estrange them from each other. The disillusion in her husband makes her lavish all the affections upon her sons. She determines that her sons should never become miners; they will be educated to realize her ideals of success, happiness and social esteem. Thus, the sons gradually come under the strong influence of the mother in affections, aspirations and mental habits, and see their father with their mother's eyes, despising their father whose personality degenerates step by step as he feels his exclusion. Later Mrs. Morel stands in the way of her second son Paul's love affairs first with Miriam, a farmer's daughter, and then with Clara, a married woman who lives separated from her husband. In the near-end of the story, Mrs. Morel suffers from a terminal disease. Paul casts off his mistress and attends to his dying mother. It is only after his mother's death that he feels free. Resisting the urge to follow his mother into darkness, he walks towards life.
(2) The characterization of Paul in Sons and Lovers: In the second part of the novel, the closeness between Paul, the hero of the story, and his mother develops after the death of his elder brother, William, and his own illness. Paul's psychological development is traced with great subtlety, especially his emotional conflicts in the course of his early love affairs with Miriam and Clara. Paul depends heavily on his mother's love and help to make sense of the world around him; but in order to become an independent man and a true artist he has to make his own decisions about his life and work, and has to struggle to become free from his mother's influence. However, Paul is proved to be incapable of escaping the overpowering emotional bond imposed by his mother's love, so he fails to achieve a fulfilling relationship with either girl. Finally, his mother has died and he is left alone, in despair. There is no one now to love him or to help him. But the book ends with Paul's rejection of despair and his determination to face the unknown future.
Ⅵ. James Joyce (1882-1941)
一．一般识记：His life and writing: James Joyce was born into a Catholic family Dublin, got his education at Catholic schools where he passed through a phase of religious enthusiasm but finally rejected the Catholic Church and started rebellion against the narrowness and bigotry of the bourgeois Philistines in Dublin. Influenced by Ibsen, Joyce finally decided to take the literary mission as his career. After his graduation, Joyce left Ireland to live and work in France, Italy and Switzerland for the rest of his life, for he regarded exile as the only way to preserve his integrity and to enable him to recreate the life in Dublin truthfully, completely and objectively in his writings.
二．识记和领会：His main works: Joyce is not a commercial writer. In his lifetime, he wrote altogether three novels, a collection of short stories, two volumes of poetry, and one play. The novels and short stories are regarded as his great works, all of which have the same setting: Ireland, especially Dublin, and the same subject: the Irish people and their life.
1. The theme of Dubliners: Dubliners (1914), a collection of 15 short stories, is the first important work of Joyce's lifelong preoccupation with Dublin life. The stories have an artistic unity given by Joyce who intended "to write a chapter of the moral history of my country . . . under four of its aspects: childhood, adolescence, maturity and public life." Each story presents an aspect of "dear dirty Dublin," an aspect of the city's paralysis moral, political, or spiritual. Each story is an action, defining a frustration or defeat of the soul. And the whole sequence of the stories represents the entire course of moral deterioration in Dublin, ending in the death of the soul. Dubliners begins by presenting death as an inscrutable fact in a small boy's existence; it ends with a vision in which death is seen. To make the Irish see death and living dead in their life is perhaps the first step, in Joyce's opinion, to evoke the national spirit of the Irish people. The stories are also important as examples of Joyce's theory of epiphany in fiction; each is concerned with a sudden revelation of truth about life inspired by a seemingly trivial incident.
2. The main idea of A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man (1916): This is Joyce's first novel. The title of the novel suggests a character study with strong autobiographical elements. The novel can be regarded as a naturalistic account of the hero's bitter experiences and his final artistic and spiritual liberation. The story develops around the life of a middle-class Irish boy, Stephen Dedalus, from his infancy to his departure from Ireland some twenty years later. Stephen has an unhappy boyhood. At school, he is unfairly treated by his schoolmates and his masters. During his adolescence the sensitive boy gradually becomes conscious of the oppressive pressures from the moral, political and spiritual environment. He starts to rebel against the oppressive pressures. But rebellion would only result in frustration. Thus, he turns to seek sensual pleasure as an outlet. Consequently he is tormented with his sense of moral sin and frightened by the terrors of the Last Judgment. To remove the restless agony from his mind, he devotes himself to religion; but finally he is repelled by the chilly church life and rejects the call to the priesthood. At a moment of revelation on the seashore, Stephen suddenly realizes that artistic vocation is his true mission. To fulfill this mission, Stephen decides to leave Ireland, to cast off all those that try to tie him down - "his family, his religion, his country and his fleshly desire."
3. The brief outline, artistic features and social significance of Ulysses:
(1) The brief outline: Broadly speaking, Ulysses gives an account of man's life during one day (16 June, 1904) in Dublin. The three major characters are: Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew, his wife, Marion Tweedy Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The whole novel is divided into 18 episodes in correspondence with the 18 hours of the day. The first three episodes are mainly concerned with Stephen Dedalus: he gets up at 8 o'clock on this specific day; he teaches a history class at a boy's school; and then he walks along the strand to town with random thoughts in mind. The next 14 episodes are largely about Leopold Bloom, who, after breakfast, goes about Dublin on his day's routine activities. In the morning, Bloom takes a Turkish bath, calls in at the National Library, attends the funeral of a friend, and shows up at the newspaper office where he sells advertising. After lunch, Bloom wanders about in the city, meeting people in streets, at pubs and in shops, worrying about his wife, his money, his daughter and his digestion, pursuing persistently his own ruminations over his past, the death of his father and his baby son, but at the same time cocking an alert ear for what is going on around him. Then he roams along a beach at twilight, sitting at a place to watch an unknown girl and having a daydream. In the evening he visits a maternity hospital to inquire about the birth of a friend's baby. During the course of the day, Stephen also wanders aimlessly in the town, propounding his theory on Shakespeare's Hamlet at the National Library, drinking at the students' common room of the hospital, visiting a brothel in the "Nighttown" where he is rescued in a drunken affray by Bloom. Subsequently Bloom invites Stephen back to his home for a late drink. Stephen leaves in the early hours of the morning and Bloom goes to bed. The novel ends with the famous monologue by Molly, who is musing in a half-awake state over her past experiences as a woman.
(2) The artistic features: Ulysses has become a prime example of modernism in literature. It is such an uncommon novel that there arises the question whether it can be termed as a "novel" all; for it seems to lack almost all the essential qualities of the novel in a traditional sense: there is virtually no story, no plot, almost no action, and little characterization in the usual sense. The events of the day seem to be trivial, insignificant, or even banal. But below the surface of the events, the natural flow of mental reflections, the shifting moods and impulses in the characters' inner world are richly presented in an unprecedentedly frank and penetrating way.
(3) The social significance of the novel: In Ulysses, Joyce intends to present a microcosm of the whole human life by providing an instance of how a single event contains all the events of its kind, and how history is recapitulated in the happenings of one day. With complete objectivity and minute details of man's everyday routines and his psychic processes, Joyce illustrates a symbolic picture of all human history, which is simultaneously tragic and comic, heroic and cowardly, magnificent and dreary. Like Eliot's masterpiece, The Waste Land, Joyce's Ulysses presents a realistic picture of the modern wasteland in which modern men are portrayed as vulgar and trivial creatures with splitting personalities, disillusioned ideals, sordid minds and broken families, who are searching in vain for harmonious human relationships and spiritual sustenance in a decaying world.
4. The characteristics of Finnegans Wake: Joyce spent 17 years working on his last important book, Finnegans Wake (1939). In this encyclopedic work, Joyce ambitiously attempted to pack the whole history of mankind into one night's dream. In the dream experience, there is no self-conscious logic, no orderly associations, no established values, no limits of time or space; all the past, present and future are mingled and float freely in the mind. Thus, Finnegans Wake is regarded as the most original experiment ever made in the novel form, and also the most difficult book to read.
5. The literary characteristics of Joyce's writing:
James Joyce is one of the most prominent literary figures of the first half of the 20th century.
(1) Joyce is regarded as the most prominent stream-of-consciousness novelist, concentrating on revealing in his novels the psychic being of the characters. In Joyce's opinion, the artist, who wants to reach the highest stage and to gain the insights necessary for the creation of dramatic art, should rise to the position of a god-like objectivity; he should have the complete conscious control over the creative process and depersonalize his own emotion in the artistic creation. He should appear as an omniscient author and present unspoken materials directly from the psyche of the characters, or make the characters tell their own inner thoughts in monologues.
(2) Another remarkable feature of Joyce's writings is his style. His own style is a straightforward one, lucid, logical and leisurely; subtlety, economy and exactness are his standards. But when he tries to render the so-called stream of consciousness, the style changes: incomplete, rapid, broken wording and fragmentary sentences are the typical features, which reflect the shifting, flirting, disorderly flow of thoughts in the major characters' mind. To create his modern Odyssey -Ulysses, Joyce adopts a kind of mock-heroic style. The essence of the mock-heroic lies in the application of apparently inappropriate styles. He achieves this mainly by elaborating his style into parody, pastiche, symbolic fantasy, and narration by question and answer from an omniscient narrator.
Many critics think that Joyce is a great master of innovation. His radical experimentation ranges from "stream of consciousness" to his fantastic engagements with rhetoric, sentimental romance, historical stylistics, counterpoint and expressionist drama. His mastery of the English language and style is always highly praised.
三.应用：Selected Reading:
"Araby" from Dubliners
The theme of "Araby": It is the third of the fifteen stories in Dubliners. This tale of the frustrated quest for beauty in the midst of drabness is both meticulously realistic in its handling of details of Dublin life and the Dublin scene and highly symbolic in that almost every image and incident suggests some particular aspect of the theme. Joyce was drawing on his own childhood recollections, and the uncle in the story is a reminiscence of Joyce's father. But in all the stories in Dubliners dealing with childhood, the child lives not with his parents but with an uncle and aunt - a symbol of that isolation and lack of proper relation between "consubstantial" (" in the flesh") parents and children which is a major theme in Joyce's work.
