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, the summit of Shakespeare’s 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 wide variety of subjects. They have won popularity for their precision, clearness, brevity and force. Of Studies is the most popular of Bacon’s 58 essays. Forceful and persuasive, compact and precise, Of Studies reveals to us Bacon’s mature attitude towards learning.
埃德蒙·斯宾塞Edmund Spencer(1552-1599)
Spencer was recognized as the “Poet’s 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 present 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 masterpiece Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, the world is seen from a child’s 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 beauty 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 the “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 of Transcendentalism, which said that God’s nature was in every person and thing. Emerson’s 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 that 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 society.
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 world’s view of America and made an extensive combination of American folk humor and serious literature. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Twain’s 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 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 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 D’Urbervilles is Hardy’s most well known novel, which portraits the tragic lot of a poor country girl ruined 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 naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards.
斯蒂芬·克莱恩Stephen Crane（1871～1900）
Crane was a pioneer writing in the naturalistic tradition and also a pioneer in the field of modern poetry. Crane’s fictional world is a naturalistic one in which man is deprived of free will and expects no help from any quarter whatever. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets relates the story of a good woman’s downfall and destruction in a slum environment.
现代主义
T．S．爱略特T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
T. S. Eliot was a leader of the modernist movement in English poetry and a great innovator 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 people’s disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society.
D. H.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 detailed description of the human relationships shows the influence of Freud’s 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 psychic 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 playwright, 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 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 influential 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 Lieutenant’s 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.
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