英美文选复习资料

1、精品1.“Let it not be supposed by the enemies of the system, that during the periodof his solitary incarceration, Oliver was denied the benefit of exercise, the pleasureof society, or the advantages of religious consolation.”What do you think CharlesDickens intends to say in the above ironic statement

2、taken from Oliver Twist?The sentence is a typical example of irony. What Dickens intends to say is justthe opposite of the sentence s literal meaning.For the“benefit”of exercise, Oliver whipped every morning in a stone yard; forthe “pleasure ”of society, he was carried away every other day to the di

3、nning halland flogged as a public warning and example to the boys; as for the“advantages”of the religious consolation, he kicked out into apartment every evening at prayertime and listened to the boy s prayer to be guarded against his sins and vices.The ironic statement is, in fact, a bitter denunci

4、ation and fierce attack at thebrutal, inhuman treatment of the poor orphan by the workhouse authority.2. How is Romanticism different from Neoclassicism? Provide brief evidence from the literary works you know best? Neoclassicists upheld that the artistic idealsshould be order, logic, restrained emo

5、tion and accuracy, and that literature shouldbe judged in terms of its service to humanity, and thus, literary expressions shouldbe of proportion, unity, harmony and grace.Alexander Pope s“An Essay onCriticism”advocated grace, wit (usually though satire / humor), and simplicity inlanguage (and the p

6、oem itself is a demonstration of those ideals, too), HenryFielding s Tom Jones helped establish the form of novel; Gray s Elegy Written in感谢下载载精品Country Churchyard displays elegance in style, unified structure, serious tone andmoral instructions.Romanticists tended to see the individual as the very

7、center of all experience,including art, and thus, literary work should be“spontaneous overflow of strongfeelings”,and no matter how fragmentary those experiences are (Wordsworth s IWandered Lonely as a Cloud or The Solitary Reaper or Coleridge s Keble Khan), thevalue of the work lied in the accuracy

8、 of presenting those unique feelings andparticular attitudes.In a word, Neoclassicism emphasized rationality and form but Romanticismattached great importance to the individual s mind.3. English Romanticism is generally said to have begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge s Ly

9、rical Ballads. Why is Lyrical Ballads considered the milestone to mark the beginning of English Romanticism? In this book, Wordsworth and Coleridge explored new theories and innovated new techniques in poetry wring. The preface to the Lyrical Ballads acts as a manifesto for the new school. In the pr

10、eface, Wordsworth defines poetry and poets.Wordsworth s poems in this book differ in marked way from his early poetry:simplicity of the language, sympathy for the poor, and expressions of inward statesof mind.4. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen explored three kinds of motivations of marriage the

11、middle-class people had in the second half of the 18th century. Try to感谢下载载精品make a brief discussion about them with specific examples from the novel. Makecomments on Austen s attitude towards these motivations.Motivation one: to pursue material wealth and social position throughmarriage. Wickham, M

12、iss Bingley and Charlotte Lucas are examples of this kind.Motivation two: to seek sensual pleasure and beauty. Lydia and Mr. Bennet areexamples of this kind.Motivation three: to search for true love and also take personal merits andfinancial positions into consideration. Elizabeth Bennet is a typica

13、l example of thiskind.Austen celebrated the third kind of motivation of marriage while criticizing thefirst two motivations.5“My boy! said the old gentleman, leaning over the desk. Oliver started at thesound. He might be excused for doing so, for the words were kindly said, andstrange sounds frighte

14、n one. He trembled violently, and burst into tears.”（ fromCharles Dickens Oliver Twist）Explain why Oliver Twist started first, then trembled violently and burst intotears when the words were“kindly ”said. The boy started at the words because kindwords were not expected; it must be the first time in

15、all his life that the boy OliverTwist had ever“kindly ”greeted, strange words may predict another suffering.6. Discuss the way symbolism is used in Melville s Moby-Dick.感谢下载载精品To Ahab, the whale is either an evil creature itself or the agent of an evil forcethat controls the universe, or perhaps bot

16、h. The chase of the white whalesymbolizes Ahab s pursuit of truth and fighting against the evil force.To Ishmael, the whale is an astonishing force, an immense power, which defiesrational explanation due to a sense of mystery it carries. It also represents thetremendous organic vitality of the unive

17、rse.To the reader, the whale can be viewed as a symbol of the physical limits thatlife imposes upon man. It may also be regarded as a symbol of nature.7. As a rule, an allegory is a story in verse or prose with a double meaning: a surface meaning, and an implied meaning. List two works as examples o

18、f allegory. What is the implied meaning an allegory is usually concerned with?Bunyan s Pilgrim s Progress and Spenser s The Faerie QueeneIt usually concerned with moral, religious, political, symbolic or mythical ideas.8. Take Mark Twain s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an example to illustra

19、te the statement that Mark Twain was a unique writer in American literature.Mark Twain shaped the world s view of America and made the extensivecombination of American folk humor and serious literature.The novel has become a great contribution to the legacy of American literature.The novel is writte

20、n in a language that is totally different from the rhetoricallanguage used by his contemporary writers such as Emerson, Poe and Melville. It is感谢下载载精品simple, direct, lucid and faith to the colloquial speech. This style of colloquialism isbest described as vernacular.He successfully used local color

21、and historical settings to illustrate and shedlight on the contemporary society. That s why he is known as a local colorist.Mark Twain s humor is remarkable, too. Most of his works tend to be funny,containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc. some of them aretypical of tall ta

22、les. And a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns,straight-faced exaggeration, repetition, and anti-climax. He uses his humor tocriticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.9. How do you philosophically define Transcendentalism?Transcendentalism has been defined phil

23、osophically as“the recognition in manof the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcendingthe reach of the sense”.Emerson once proclaimed in a speech,“Nothing is at lastsacred but the integrity of your own mind”.Other concepts that accompaniedTranscendentalism include

24、the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that theindividual is divine and, therefore, self-reliant.10. 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?Living at the tur

25、n of the century, Hardy is often regarded as the transitionalwriter. In him we see the influence from both the past and the modern. As some感谢下载载精品people put it, he is intellectually advanced and emotionally traditional. In hisWessex novels, there is a nostalgic touch in his description of the simple

26、 andbeautiful though primitive rural life, which was gradually declining anddisappearing as England marched into an industrial country. And with thosetraditional characters he is always sympathetic.On the other hand, the immense impact of scientific discoveries and modernphilosophic thoughts upon the man is quite obvious, too. He read Darwin s TheOrigin Species and accepted the idea of“survival of the fittest”.He was alsoinfluenced by Spenser s The First Principle, which led him to the belief that man sfate is predeterminedly tragic, driven by a combine