1、文艺复兴时期威廉莎士比亚 William Shakespeare(1564-1616)As the spokesman of English Renaissance, William Shakespeare is one of the most remarkable playwrights and poets the world has ever known. With his 38 plays, 154 sonnets and 2 long poems, he has established his giant position in world literature. Hamlet, th
2、e summit of Shakespeares art, is the profoundest expression of his humanism and his criticism of contemporary life.弗朗西斯培根 Francis Bacon(1561-1626)As a representative of the Renaissance in England, Bacon was the founder of modern science of England and the first English essayist. His essays cover a w
3、ide variety of subjects. They have won popularity for their precision, clearness, brevity and force. Of Studies is the most popular of Bacons 58 essays. Forceful and persuasive, compact and precise, Of Studies reveals to us Bacons mature attitude towards learning.埃德蒙斯宾塞 Edmund Spencer(1552-1599)Spen
4、cer was recognized as the “Poets poet” by his contemporaries and had great influence on a number of great English poets in the later centuries. His greatest work, The Faerie Queene, was written in Spenserian stanza, which was a popular verse form invented by him. The principle intention is to presen
5、t through a “historical poem” the example of a perfect gentleman.浪漫主义时期威廉布莱克 William Blake(1758-1827)Blake is regarded as a Pre-Romantic or a forerunner of the Romantic poetry of the 19th century, who proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism. In his masterpiec
6、e Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, the world is seen from a childs point of view, but the poems also function as parables of adult experience.威廉华兹华斯 William Wordsworth (1770-1850)William Wordsworth was the leading figure of the English romantic poetry. His poems are mainly about the beaut
7、y of nature and its relationship with all human beings. His best-known work Lyrical Ballads marked the beginning of the Romantic revival in England. Its preface served as the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry. He, together with Coleridge and Southey, has often been mentioned as th
8、e “Lake Poets”.拉尔夫瓦尔多爱默生 Ralph Waldo Emerson（1803-1882 ）Emerson was the chief spokesman of New England Transcendentalism, which is unanimously agreed to be the summit of the romantic period in the history of American literature. He greatly influenced religion and philosophy, especially with his idea
9、 of Transcendentalism, which said that Gods nature was in every person and thing. Emersons essay Nature explains Transcendentalism as the unity of nature.现实主义查尔斯狄更斯 Charles Dickens(1812-1870)Dickens was one of the greatest critical realist writers of the Victorian Age. The greatness of Dickens is th
10、at he had the ability to sustain interest through all kinds of literary devices. He is a great humorist and satirist and his novels are characterized by a mingling of humor and pathos. His masterpiece Great Expectations is a satire upon the society and those people who dream to enter the higher soci
11、ety.马克吐温 Mark Twain(1835-1910)Mark Twain is the leading US humorous writer of the 19th century, who is considered the father of American literature. In his books Twain shaped the worlds view of America and made an extensive combination of American folk humor and serious literature. The Adventures of
12、 Huckleberry Finn is Twains most representative work, describing a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by Huck and Jim.亨利詹姆斯 Henry James(1843-1916)Henry James was the forerunner of the “stream of consciousness” literature. A recurring theme in his fiction is the conflict between the European and
13、 American world views. The Portrait of A Lady is generally considered to be his masterpiece, which incarnates the clash between the Old World and the New in the life journey of an American girl in a European cultural environment.自然主义托马斯哈代 Tomas Hardy(1840-1928)Tomas Hardy was an outstanding novelist
14、 as well as a poet. His best local-colored works, known as “novels of character and environment”, are the most representative of him as both a naturalistic and a critical realist writer. Tess of DUrbervilles is Hardys most well known novel, which portraits the tragic lot of a poor country girl ruine
15、d by the bourgeois society.西奥多德莱塞 Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945)Dreiser was one of the most significant American writers of naturalism. His works are often about poor people with unhappy lives. He was opposed to the idea of the American dream of success. In Sister Carrie Dreiser expressed his naturalis
16、tic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards.斯蒂芬克莱恩 Stephen Crane（18711900）Crane was a pioneer writing in the naturalistic tradition and also a pioneer in the field of modern poetry. Cranes fictional world is a naturalistic one in which man is
17、deprived of free will and expects no help from any quarter whatever. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets relates the story of a good womans downfall and destruction in a slum environment.现代主义TS爱略特 T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)T. S. Eliot was a leader of the modernist movement in English poetry and a great innov
18、ator of verse technique, who was awarded the British Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. His masterpiece The Waste land is a poem which is regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century peoples disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society.D. H.
19、劳伦斯 D. H. Lawrence（1885-1930）D. H. Lawrence was one of the literary giants of the modern period. The major theme of all his writings is human relationships in the modern world where natural harmony has been destroyed by industry and modernization. In the autobiographical novel Sons and Lovers, the d
20、etailed description of the human relationships shows the influence of Freuds theory of psychoanalysis, especially that of the “Oedipus complex.”詹姆斯乔伊斯 James Joyce(1882-1941)James Joyce was regarded as the most prominent stream-of-consciousness novelist, concentrating on revealing in his novels the p
21、sychic being of the characters. His masterpiece Ulysses presents a realistic picture of the modern wasteland, which modern men are searching in vain for harmonious human relationships and spiritual sustenance in a decaying world.后现代主义塞缪尔贝克特 Samuel Beckett(1906-1989)Samuel Beckett was an Irish playwr
22、ight, novelist, poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. His plays are concerned with human suffering and survival, and his characters are struggling with meaninglessness and the world of the Nothing. His famous two-act play Waiting for Godot is regarded as an important and symbolic play of
23、 the futility and nothingness of human life, a pessimistic attitude towards life.约瑟夫海勒 Joseph Heller(1923-1999)Heller was an American satirical novelist and playwright. In his books he used an absurd linguistic surface to reflect the depth of the absurdity of the modern world. He wrote the influenti
24、al novel Catch-22 about American servicemen during World War II. It was this work whose title became the term commonly used to express absurdity in choice.约翰福尔斯 John Fowles(1926- )John Fowles is regarded as one of the greatest postmodernist novelists in literary world. He is a master of layered story-telling, illusionism, and purposefully ambiguous endings. His best-known novels are The French Lieutenants Woman, The Collector, and The Magu. His protagonists must often confront their past, self-delusions and illusions, in order to gain their personal freedom or peace of mind.
