英美文学选读历年主观题及答案

细心整理英美文学选读历年客观题1.“Let it not be supposed by the enemies ofthe system,that during the period of his solitary incarceration, Oliver was denied the benefit of exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious consolation.”What do you think Charles Dickens intends to say in the above ironic statement taken from Oliver Twist? The sentence is a typical example of irony. What Dickens intends to say is just the opposite of the sentences literal meaning. For the “benefit” of exercise, Oliver whipped every morning in a stone yard; for the “pleasure” of society, he was carried away every other day to the dinning hall and 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 prayer time and listened to the boys prayer to be guarded against his sins and vices. The ironic statement is, in fact, a bitter denunciation and fierce attack at the brutal, 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 ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity, and thus, literary expressions should be of proportion, unity, harmony and grace.Alexander Popes “An Essay on Criticism” advocated grace, wit (usually though satire / humor), and simplicity in language (and the poem itself is a demonstration of those ideals, too), Henry Fieldings Tom Jones helped establish the form of novel; Grays Elegy Written in Country Churchyard displays elegance in style, unified structure, serious tone and moral instructions. Romanticists tended to see the individual as the very center of all experience, including art, and thus, literary work should be “spontaneous overflow of strong feelings”, and no matter how fragmentary those experiences are (Wordsworths I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud or The Solitary Reaper or Coleridges Keble Khan), the value of the work lied in the accuracy of presenting those unique feelings and particular attitudes. In a word, Neoclassicism emphasized rationality and form but Romanticism attached great importance to the individuals mind.3. English Romanticism is generally said to have begun in 1798 with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridges Lyrical 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 preface, Wordsworth defines poetry and poets. Wordsworths poems in this book differ in marked way from his early poetry: simplicity of the language, sympathy for the poor, and expressions of inward states of mind.4. In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen explored three kinds of motivations of marriage the middle-class people had in the second half of the 18th century. Try to make a brief discussion about them with specific examples from the novel. Make comments on Austens attitude towards these motivations. Motivation one: to pursue material wealth and social position through marriage. Wickham, Miss Bingley and Charlotte Lucas are examples of this kind.Motivation two: to seek sensual pleasure and beauty. Lydia and Mr. Bennet are examples of this kind.Motivation three: to search for true love and also take personal merits and financial positions into consideration. Elizabeth Bennet is a typical example of this kind.Austen celebrated the third kind of motivation of marriage while criticizing the first two motivations.5“ My boy! said the old gentleman, leaning over the desk. Oliver started at the sound. He might be excused for doing so, for the words were kindly said, and strange sounds frighten one. He trembled violently, and burst into tears.”from Charles Dickens Oliver TwistExplain why Oliver Twist started first, then trembled violently and burst into tears when the words were “kindly” said. The boy started at the words because kind words were not expected; it must be the first time in all his life that the boy Oliver Twist had ever “kindly” greeted, strange words may predict another suffering.6. Discuss the way symbolism is used in Melvilles Moby-Dick. To Ahab, the whale is either an evil creature itself or the agent of an evil force that controls the universe, or perhaps both. The chase of the white whale symbolizes Ahabs pursuit of truth and fighting against the evil force.To Ishmael, the whale is an astonishing force, an immense power, which defies rational explanation due to a sense of mystery it carries. It also represents the tremendous organic vitality of the universe.To the reader, the whale can be viewed as a symbol of the physical limits that life 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 of allegory. What is the implied meaning an allegory is usually concerned with? Bunyans Pilgrims Progress and Spensers The Faerie Queene It usually concerned with moral, religious, political, symbolic or mythical ideas.8. Take Mark Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as an example to illustrate the statement that Mark Twain was a unique writer in American literature. Mark Twain shaped the worlds view of America and made the extensive combination of American folk humor and serious literature.The novel has become a great contribution to the legacy of American literature.The novel is written in a language that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by his contemporary writers such as Emerson, Poe and Melville. It is simple, direct, lucid and faith to the colloquial speech. This style of colloquialism is best described as vernacular.He successfully used local color and historical settings to illustrate and shed light on the contemporary society. Thats why he is known as a local colorist.Mark Twains humor is remarkable, too. Most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc. some of them are typical of tall tales. And a great deal of his humor is characterized by puns, straight-faced exaggeration, repetition, and anti-climax. He uses his humor to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.9. How do you philosophically define Transcendentalism? Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the sense”. Emerson once proclaimed in a speech, “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual 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 turn of the century, Hardy is often regarded as the transitional writer. In him we see the influence from both the past and the modern. As some people put it, he is intellectually advanced and emotionally traditional. In his Wessex novels, there is a nostalgic touch in his description of the simple and beautiful though primitive rural life, which was gradually declining and disappearing as England marched into an industrial country. And with those traditional characters he is always sympathetic. On the other hand, the immense impact of scientific discoveries and modern philosophic thoughts upon the man is quite obvious, too. He read Darwins The Origin Species and accepted the idea of “survival of the fittest”. He was also influenced by Spensers The First Principle, which led him to the belief that mans fate is predeterminedly tragic, driven by a combined force of “nature”, both inside and outside.11. Hemingway Code heroes It refers to some protagonists in Hemingways works. In the general situation of Hemingways novels, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos and man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. Those who survive in the process of seeking to master the code with the honesty, the discipline, and the restraint are Hemingway code heroes.12“In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair, by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel.”from Theodore Dreisers Sister CarrieWhat idea can you draw from the “rocking-chair”? The “rocking-chair” is a symbol standing for fate. It is like a cradle that makes one feel peaceful. It is also like a tide that ever goes on with life, the destiny of which is uncertain. At the end of novel, Carrie sits in the rocking-chair, which implies that her future is still uncertain and hard to foresee.13. The theme of Hawthornes “The Scarlet Letter”The Scarlet Letter tells a simple but very moving story in which four people living in a Puritan Community are involved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different way. Hawthorne does not intend to tell a love story nor a story of sin, but focuses his attention on the moral, emotional, psychological effects or consequences of the sin on the people in general and those main characters in particular, so as to show us the tension between society and individual. 14It is said that B. Shaws play, Mrs. Warrens Profession, has a strong realistic theme, which fully reflects the dramatists Fabianist idea. Try to summarize this theme briefly. As one of the influential members of the Fabian Society, Shaw regarded the establishment of socialism by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership as the final goal. As a realist dramatist, he took the modern issues as his subject; most of his plays are concerned with political, economic, moral or religious problems Mrs. Warrens Profession is a play about the economic oppression of woman.15. William Faulkner, a Nobel Priza winner, has an important position in American literature. Name two of his Major novels. Do you know anything aboutYoknapatawpha County? What is unique of Faulkners fiction, historically and geographically? The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Go Down, Moses, Absalom, Absalom! Yoknapatawpha County is an imaginary place based on Faulkners own hometown, a place that he took for the setting of 15 of his 19 novels and many short stories. This small region in American South becomes in Faulkners fiction an allegory or a parable of the Old South. His literary representation of the Old South; and his theme of the deterioration, loss and moral decay of the Old South when it was falling apart.16. Mark Twain presented the 19th century America in his own unique way. Discuss Twains art of fiction: the setting, the language, and the characters, etc., based on his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain uses Mississippi valley as his fictional kingdom, writing about the landscape and people, the customs and the dialects of one particular region, and is therefore known as a local colorist. He creates life-like characters, especially the unconventional Huckleberry Finn, who runs away from civilization and stands opposite to conventional village morality. He uses a simple, direct vernacular language, totally different from any previous language. It is the kind of colloquial belonging to the lower class, the living local American English. He has created a special humor to satirize the decayed convention. 17What is the most famous theme in Henry Jamess fiction? And what is his favourite approach in characterization，which makes him different from Mark Twain and WD.Howells as a realist? Give two titles of his first period works in which this theme and this approach are employed.(1)Henry Jamess most famous theme is the international theme.(2) Psychological approach.(3)Daisy Miller, The Portrait of A Lady, The American.18. Discuss the way symbolism is used in Faulkners story “A Rose for Emily.” Rose, as a symbol standing for love, may refer to the love between Emily and the Northerner, yet used rather ironically, in the way it is associated with decay and death in the story. Rose could also stand for the pity, sympathy, or the lament “we” show for Emily The pity and lament goes not to Emily but all those who imprisoned in the past and fail to adapt to the change.19. Whitman is one of the representative poets in America. He employed brand-new means in his poetry. What are the features of his poetry? His poetic style is marked by the use of the poetic “I” He adopted “free verse”, that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. The images in his poems are unconventional He uses oral English His vocabulary is amazing Parallelism and phonetic recurrence are used at the beginning of the lines20.Whitman has made radical changes in the form of poetry by choosing free verse as his medium of expression. What are the characteristics of Whitmans free verse? It doesnt have fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme His poetic lines are simple and prose-like, varying in length, which allows him to express his ideas freely He also applies oral English in his free verse to make it an effective way to express freely the feelings of common people.21. Give a brief comment on Whitmans style and language radically innovative in terms of poetic form by using “free verse”, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme the use of poetic “I” representing all those people in his poems as well the poet relatively simple and crude honest and undistorted images of different aspects of America of the day strong tendency to use oral English22. A Rose for Emily is one of Faulkners short stories. Comment on the character of the protagonist, Emily Grierson, and analyze how this character is depicted. Emily is an eccentric spinster who refuses to accept the passage of time, or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it. She is the symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of the past In this story, Faulkner makes best use of the Gothic device in narrative, and deformed personality and abnormality Emily demonstrates in her relationship with her sweetheart is dramatized in such a way that we feel shocked and thrilled as we read along.23. Some of Hemingways heroes are regarded as the Hemingway code heroes. Whatever the differences in experience and age, they all have something in common which Hemingway values. What are the characteristics of the Hemingway code hero? They have seen the cold world and for one cause or another, they boldly and courageously face the reality, whatever the result is, they are ready to live with grace under pressure. Almost all his heroes are “soldiers” either in a narrow or broad sense. They are out there against the nature or the world, or even themselves. But no matter where the battle-ground is and how tragic the ending is, they will never be defeated. Hemingway himself is one of those code heroes, some critics say his protagonists are autobiographical, for they share something that is Hemingway.24“ My faith is gone! cried heGoodman Brown,after one stupefied moment. There is no good on earth; and sin is but a name. Come, devil! For to thee is this world given. ”from Nathaniel Hawthornes “Young Goodman Brown”Make a comment on this passage. Goodman Brown utters this cry when he finds his wife Faith, together with lots of prominent people of the village and the church, attending a witches Sabbath in the woods. His cry shows his great surprise and disillusionment. Thereafter, he becomes distrustful and doubtful. He lives in dismal and gloomy life because he is never able to believe in goodness or piety again. Here the author makes a pun of the word “faith”, Goodman Brown loses not only his faith in religion and life, but also his faith in his wife, for his wifes name is Faith. From this story, we also can see that Hawthorne is a great allegorist and a master of symbolism. The story itself is an allegory and is full of symbols such as the forest, the snake, and pink ribbon.38. The following passage is taken from The Merchant of Venice. Read it carefully and find the dramatic it contains. Use it as an example to illustrate what dramatic irony is. “Bassanio: Antonio, I am married to a wife Which is as dear to me as life itself; But life itself, my wife, and all world, Are not with me esteemd above thy life; I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all Here to this devil, to deliver you. Portia: Your wife would give you little thanks for that, If she were by to hear you make the offer.”When the audience is aware of a discrepancy between a characters perception of his or her own situation and the true nature of that situation, that is dramatic irony.In the given example, Portia, Bassanios newly-married wife, disguised herself as a lawyer to take charge of the case, Portia herself and the audience know all this, but Bassanio is ignorant of it, so when Bassanio offers in front of his disguised wife to sacrifice her in order to deliver Antonia, he makes himself behave in a ridiculous way in the eyes of the audience. Thus an effect of dramatic irony is achieved. 26Daniel Defoes novel Robinson Crusoe was a great success partly because the protagonist was a real middle-class hero. Discuss Crusoe, the protagonist of the novel, as an embodiment of the rising middle-class virtues in the mid-eighteenth century England. A. Social background: the 18th century England witnessed the growing importance of the bourgeois or middle class a. The Industrial Revolution b. The expansion of international markets c. Values/ virtues / moral standard different from those of the feudal aristocratic classcourageous, full of energy, hard working, practical, resourceful, self-reliant, etc. thus d. Literature should give / provide a realist presentation of the life of the common life; it should meet the demand / interest of the middle class people B. Robinson Crusoe embodies the virtue of the middle class people a. Crusoe as an adventurous / courageous man full of energy and courage b. Crusoe as a practical man c. Crusoe as a resourceful / self-reliant man d. Crusoe as a patient / persistent man e. and others27.Retell in a few sentences the story of the last chapter (Ch, 135) “The ChaseThird Day” of Melvilles novel Moby-Dick. Discuss the meaning of the ending of the story. The story of Moby-Dick is simple, telling the battle between Ahab, captain of the whaling ship Pequod and the monstrous white whale Moby-Dick. Ahab is obsessed by his determination to revenge himself upon the fierce, cunning whale, because it has crippled him.After many days of search and pursuit, the white whale finally sighted. Chapter 135 is a description of the third days chase. Three boats have been lowered in chase of the whale, two of them are later destroyed by the whale. Although the whale is harpooned at last, the ship is sunk and all the people in board are dro