115 年 國立臺灣大學外文學系碩士班《英國文學史》

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages,
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.
Bifil that in that seson on a day,
In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay,
Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage
To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,
At nyght were come into that hostelrye
Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye
Of sondry folk, by áventure y-falle
In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,
That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream-ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so
well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of
their daughters.

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
For Thine is the Kingdom

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round;
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

Below is a selection from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own that discusses the life and work of Aphra Behn. Write an essay in which you develop an argument about how we should understand Woolf's conception of literary history here.

...with Mrs Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their
folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to
town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the streets. Mrs Behn was a middle-class woman with all the plebeian
virtues of humour, vitality and courage; a woman forced by the death of her husband and some unfortunate adventures
of her own to make her living by her wits. She had to work on equal terms with men. She made, by working very hard,
enough to live on. The importance of that fact outweighs anything that she actually wrote, even the splendid 'A
Thousand Martyrs I have made', or 'Love in Fantastic Triumph sat', for here begins the freedom of the mind, or rather
the possibility that in the course of time the mind will be free to write what it likes. For now that Aphra Behn had done
it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen. Of course
the answer for many years to come was, Yes, by living the life of Aphra Behn! Death would be better! and the door was
slammed faster than ever...

...Aphra Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and
so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind, but was of practical importance. A
husband might die, or some disaster overtake the family. Hundreds of women began as the eighteenth century drew on
to add to their pin money, or to come to the rescue of their families by making translations or writing the innumerable
bad novels which have ceased to be recorded even in text-books, but are to be picked up in the fourpenny boxes in the
Charing Cross Road. The extreme activity of mind which showed itself in the later eighteenth century among women-
the talking, and the meeting, the writing of essays on Shakespeare, the translating of the classics was founded on the
solid fact that women could make money by writing. Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for. It might still be
well to sneer at 'blue stockings with an itch for scribbling', but it could not be denied that they could put money in their
purses. Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I
should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses.
The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride And Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering
Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not merely
the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. Without those
forerunners, Jane Austen and the Brontës and George Eliot could no more have written than Shakespeare could have
written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways
and tamed the natural savagery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome
of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is
behind the single voice. Jane Austen should have laid a wreath upon the grave of Fanny Burney, and George Eliot
done homage to the robust shade of Eliza Carter-the valiant old woman who tied a bell to her bedstead in order that
she might wake early and learn Greek. All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn,
which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right
to speak their minds. It is she-shady and amorous as she was who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you
to-night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.

Write a proposal for a research project in English literature that you would like to undertake. You may focus on any literary work(s) that interests you.