A glossary of literary term

Chapter 1

This collection was used to do record of a famous books [A glossary of literary terms]

Absurd, literature of the

Pastoral 牧歌

Pathos 悲伤感

• Definition:

  • In Greeks, it meant the passions, or suffering, or deep feeling generally, as distinguished from ethos(a person's overall disposition or character)
  • In modern criticism, pathos is applied in a much limited way to a scene or passage that is designed to evoke the feelings of tenderness, pity, or sympathetic sorrow from the audience.

• In the Victoria era, some prominent writers exploited pathos beyond the endurance of many reader now.

  • The death of Little Nell (Charles Dicken's [The Old Curiosity Shop])
  • The death of Little Eva ([Uncle Tom's Cabin])

• The greatest passages of pathos does not dwell on the details of suffering (并不拘泥于对于痛苦之刻画) but achieve their effect by understatement (含蓄) and suggestion (暗示).

  • The speech of King Lear when he is briefly reunited with Cordelia

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    Pray, do not mock me.
    I am a very foolish fond old man,
    

  • Michael (1800), Ⅱ, 465-66 (from William Wordsworth)

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    Many and Many a day he thither went,
    And never lifted up a single stone
    

• Pathetic Fallacy: invented by John Ruskin in 1856.

  • used to signify any representation of inanimate natural objects that ascribe to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions.
  • For evaluation of this term, A presupposition that "truth" was a primary criterion of art must be set.
  • Based on that the term was derogatory, because such description do not represent the "true appearances of things to us" but "the extraordinary, or false appearances, when we are under the influence of emotion, or contemplative fancy"
  • "However beautiful, but false and morbid"
  • but give inanimate natural objects sensation and emotions is a great work which give person a chance to return nostos(Nature itself), which would induce algia about perishable human life and mankind treasure. Thereafter, Aesthetical enjoyment will outflow. (寄物于哀思，是一件很美的事)

• Sentimentalism: 感伤主义

  • A derogatory term (mostly)

Seven Deadly Sins

• Definition: Pride, Covetousness, Lust, Envy, Gluttony, Anger and Sloth

• Date back from the medieval and later Christian theology

• Why called "Deadly"?

  • The soul of anyone manifesting them are put in peril of eternal perdition.
  • These sins could be expiated only by absolute penitence.

• Pride: The primary sin, which was believed to have motivated the original fall of Satan in heaven.

• Sloth: often confuse people why it's "deadly"

  • it signified not simply laziness, but a torpid and despondent spiritual condition
  • threatened to make a person despair of any chance of achieving divine Grace
  • ="accidie"/"dejection"/"spiritual dryness"/acute depression (in present-day psychiatrists diagnose)

• They were balanced by "seven cardinal virtues"

  • three of them called "theological virtues", because they were stressed in the New Treatment——"Faith, hope, Charity (Love)" 信，望，善（爱）

    And now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three (St. Paul's I Corinthians)

  • the other four, the natural virtues, were derived from the moral philosophy of the ancient Greeks: justice（公正）, prudence（审慎）,temperance（节制），fortitude（坚毅）

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