英美文学选读2010年7月真题试题及答案解析（00604）

A Rose for Emily is one of Faulkner’s short stories. Discuss the character of Emily Grierson and how this character is depicted.

What is the most famous theme in Henry James’s fiction? And what is his favourate approach in characterization, which makes him different from Mark Twain and W. D. Howlles as realists? Give two titles of his works of his first period in which this theme and this approach are employed.

“Young Goodman Brown”is one of Hawthorne’s most profound tales.

What is the allegorical meaning of Brown, the protagonist? What does Hawthorne set out to prove in this tale? How does Melville comment on Hawthorne’s manner of concerning with guilt and evil?

Please elaborate Wordsworth’s theory of poetry, taking examples from the poems you have learned to support your ideas.

Thomas Hardy is often regarded as a transitional writer. Some critics believe that he is emotionally traditional and intellectually advanced. How do you understand this idea?

What are the features of George Bernard Shaw’s characterization in his plays?

“ We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess- in the Ring-

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain -

We Passed the Setting Sun- ”

( From Emily Dickinson’s poem Because I could not stop for Death)

Questions:

A.What does the phrase “Fields of Gazing Grain” symbolize?

B.What figure of speech is used in the poem?

C.What are Dickinson’s unique writing features?

“Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers 

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them!

Thou For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers”

(From Shelley’s“ Ode to the West Wind”)

Questions:

A.In what form. is the poem written?

B.What does the quotation“ the sense faints picturing them” mean?

C.What idea does Shelley express in this poem?

(A lot of common objects have been enumerated in the previous lines, and here are the last two lines of the poem. )

“The horizon’s edge, the flying sea - crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud.

These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day. ”

Questions:

A.Who is the author of this poem? What is the title of the poem?

B.What does the child stand for in the poem?

C.How do you understand “ These became part of the child” ?

“The Birthmark” drives home symbolically Hawthorne’s point that ______ is man’s birthmark, something he is born with.

The Blithedale Romance is a novel ______ wrote to reveal his own experiences on the Brook Farm and his own methods as a psychological novelist.

“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?”

Questions:

A.Who is the writer of this work? What’s the title of the work?

B.What does the phrase “to take arms against a sea of troubles ” mean?

C.How do you understand the quotation “To be, or not to be -that is the question”?

The effect of Darwinist idea of “survival of the fittest” was shattering in ______ ’s fictional world of jungle, where “kill or to be killed” was the law.

Like all naturalists, ______ was restrained from finding a solution to the social problems that appeared in his novels and accordingly almost all his works have tragic endings.

Though Robert Frost’s subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in ______, he wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man’s life in his long poetic career.

Melville’s semi- autobiographical novel, ______, concerns the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors.

Closely related to Dickinson’s religious poetry are her poems concerning ______, ranging over the physical as well as the psychological and emotional aspects of death.

In Moby-Dick, for the character Ahab, the white whale represents only ______.

It was his masterpiece The Great Gatsby that made ______ one of the greatest American novelists.

The childhood of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the Mississippi is a record of a vanished way of life in the ______ Mississippi valley.

In most of his writings, ______ deliberately broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present, in the way the montage does in a movie.

In 1950, one of the leading American writers ______ was awarded the Nobel Prize for the anti-racist Intruder in the Dust.

Walt Whitman ’s ______ is a collection of poems incorporating his emotions and feelings before and during the Civil War when he stood firmly on the side of the North.

In 1841, ______ went to the South Seas on a whaling ship, where he gained the first- hand information about whaling that he used later in Moby -Dick.

The Nobel Prize Committee highly praised ______ for “his powerful styleforming mastery of the art” of creating modern fiction.

The attitude towards life that ______ had been trying to demonstrate in his works is known as “grace under pressure”.

Two people could be “twain yet one” : their paths could be different, and yet they could achieve a kind of transcendent contact, ______ believed.

Most literary critics think that Fitzgerald is both an insider and an outsider of ______ with a double vision.

The major representatives of the poetic revolution in English Romantic period were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and ______.

Samson Agonistes by ______ is the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English.

The declaration that “I know that This World is a World of IMAGINATION & Vision,” and that “The Nature of my work is visionary or imaginative” belongs to ______.

Wordsworth’s ______ is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature.

As the best of Shakespeare’s final romances, ______ is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life and society in his late years.

John Milton’s ______ is the only generally acknowledged epic in English literature since Beowulf.

The success of ______ is also due to its introduction to the English novel the first governess heroine.

In ______ , Shelley created a Platonic symbol of the spirit of man, a force of beauty and regeneration.

Henry Fielding adopted “______” to relate a story in his novel in which the author becomes the “all- knowing God”.

Hardy’s ______ is a fierce attack on the hypocritical morality of the bourgeois society and the capitalist invasion into the country and destruction of the English peasantry towards the end of the century.

The major theme of Jane Austen’s novels is ______ toward which she holds on a practical idealism.

In ______ opinion, human nature is seriously and premanently flawed. To better human life, enlightenment is needed, but to redress it is very hard.

D. H. Lawrence’s artistic tendency is mainly ______ , which combines dramatic scenes with an authoritative commentary.

Charlotte Bronte’s autobiograghical work ______ largely based on her experience in Brussels.

For his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel, ______ has been regarded as “Father of the English Novel”.

Dickens’best- depicted characters are the following. EXCEPT ______.

George Bernard Shaw’s ______ explored his idea of “Life Force”, the power that would create superior beings to be equal to God and to solve all the social, moral, and metaphysical problems of human society.

Jonathan Swift’s greatest satiric work is ______.

D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel is ______.

Defoe’s group of four novels are the first literary works devoted to the study of problems of the lower-class people. They are the following EXCEPT ______.

Charles Dickens’ novel, ______, is famous for its vivid descriptions of the work-house and life of the underworld in the nineteenth-century London.

T. S. Eliot’s ______ is a poem of dramatic monologue and a prelude to The Waste Land, helping to point up the continuity of Eliot’s thinking.