Approaches to Literature week11

▲May Forth in history

　▽MayFourth Movement: was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student participants in Beijing on May 4, 1919, protesting against the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles.

　　Hu Shih is widely recognized today as a key contributor to Chinese liberalism and language reform in his advocacy for the use of written vernacular Chinese.

　<c.f >movement in the West: movement in drama

　　Henrik Ibsen(1828-1906), he was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre.

　　Ibsen had completely rewritten the rules of drama with a realism which was to be adopted by Chekhov and others and which we see in the theatre to this day. From Ibsen forward, challenging assumptions and directly speaking about issues has been considered one of the factors that makes a play art rather than entertainment.

▲Sonnet 18-

　　In the sonnet, William Shakespeare compares his beloved to the summer season, and argues that his beloved is better. He also states that his beloved will live on forever through the words of the poem.

　▽Poetic License: it is the right assumed by poets to alter or invert standard syntax or depart from common diction or pronunciation to comply with the metrical or tonal requirements of their writing.

　 ▽Sonnet: is a poetic form which originated in Italy. By the thirteenth century it signified a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. 

→Sonnet 18 is written in the typical Shakespearean sonnet form, having 14 lines of iambic pentameter ending in a rhymed couplet.

▲Figure of speech-It is figurative language in the form of a single word or phrase.

　　It can be a special repetition, arrangement or omission of words with literal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words. There are mainly five figures of speech according to Maggie Tucker: simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification and synecdoche.