华中师范大学网络教育学院《英美文学史》测试题答案1. Write the names of the authors of the following literary works.1. Samuel Richardson2. Henry Fielding3. Richard Brinsley Sheridan4. Samuel Johnson5.Thomas Gray6.William Blake7.Robert Burns8.William Wordsworth9.Samuel Taylor Coleridge10.Robert Southey11.Walter Scott12.William Makepeace Thackeray13.Charlotte Bronte14.Emily Bronte15.George Eliot16.Robert Louis Stevenson17.Oscar Wilde18.John Galsworthy19.Thomas Hardy20.Bernard Shaw21.William Butler Yeats22.David Herbert Lawrence23.Virginia Woolf24.Charles Dickens25.Percy Shelley26.Christopher Marlow27.Jonathan Swift28.Jane Austen29.Henry Fielding30.Thomas Hardy31.William Shakespeare32.George Gordon Byron33.Samuel Taylor Coleridge34.r Edmund Spenser35.Alexander Pope36.Richard Brinsley Sheridan37.George Eliot38.James Joyce39.Poesy John Drydenurence Sterne41.Percy Shelley42)Thomas Jefferson43) Fenimore Cooper44) Washington Irving45) Emerson46) Henry David Thoreau47) Nathaniel Hawthorne48)Herman Melville49)Edgar Allan Poe50) Walt Whitman51)Walt Whitman52)Emily Dickinson53) Robert Frost54) Edgar Allan Poe55) Harriet Beecher Stowe56) William Dean Howells57) Henry James58) Mark Twain59) O. Henry60) Jack London61) Stephen Crane62) Frank Norris63) Theodore Dreiser64) Ezra Pound65) Ezra Pound66) Wallace Stevens67) Carl Sandburg68)T. S. Eliot69) John Steinbeck70) Fitzgerald71) William Faulkner72) Ernest Hemingway73) Eugene O’Neill74) Arthur Miller75) William Faulkner76) T. S. Eliot77) Longfellow78) John Steinbeck79) Mark Twain80)John Doss Passos2. Choose the right answer. 1Answer: D2Answer: B3 Answer: D4. Answer: C6. Answer: B7. Answer: D8. Answer: B9. Answer: B10. Answer: A11. Answer: C12. Answer: C13. Answer: B14. Answer: B15. Answer: B16. Answer: B17. Answer: C18. Answer: B19. Answer: D20. Answer: C21. Answer: B22. Answer: C23. Answer: B24. Answer: B25. Answer: A26. Answer: D27. Answer: A28. Answer: D29. Answer: A30. Answer: B31. Answer: C32. Answer: D33. Answer: B34. Answer: C35. Answer: D36. Answer: C37. Answer: D38. Answer: B39. Answer: A40. Answer: B41. Answer: A42. Answer: A43. Answer: B44. Answer: C45. Answer: B46. Answer: D47. Answer: C48. Answer: A50. Answer: A51. Answer: B52. Answer: A53. Answer: D54. Answer: A55. Answer: D56. Answer: D57Answer: D58. Answer: A59. Answer: A60. Answer: A61. Answer: D62. Answer: C63. Answer: A64. Answer: B65. Answer: A66. Answer: A67. Answer: B68. Answer: C69. Answer: B70. Answer: A71. Answer: D72. Answer: B73. answer: D74. Answer: A75. Answer: B76. Answer: A77. Answer: D78. Answer: D79. Answer: C80 Answer: A3. Answer the following questions briefly.1)What is Chaucer's contribution to English language?Chaucer's language is vivid and exact. His verse is smooth. His words are easy to understand. He introduced from France the rhymed stanzas of various types, especially the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter which was later called the "heroic couplet." Though drawing influence from French, Italian and Latin models, he is the first important poet to write in the current English language. Chaucer did much in making the dialect of London the foundation for modern English language.2)What was the English Renaissance?The English Renaissance was an intellectual movement or rebirth of letters. There were two striking features. The first was the revived interest in classical literature. People were thirsty for works of Greek and Latin. Another feature washumanism. People began to see themselves as important beings, not only living for God and a future world. Interest in beauty and achievement rose. This was the outlook of the new bourgeois class. They believed in their strength. They expected the promising world opening to them. They believed that they could make the world according to their desires.3)What are the themes of "Robinson Crusoe"?1) The novel sings high praises of self-reliance. It demonstrates that man can remake the world with his own power. He can rely on himself in difficult situations.2) This novel is also an exhibition of man's capacity. Man has boundless energy. Together with his persistence and strong will power, he can do anything that may seem impossible previously.3) This novel also glorifies human labor. It is labor that saves Robinson Crusoe from despair, and labor is also a source of pride and happiness.In short, Robinson Crusoe is representative of the English bourgeoisie at the early stage of its development.4) This novel also touches upon the theme of colonization. Crusoe makes Friday his servant, and he himself master of the island and Friday. This plot is in accordance with the exploitation of the English bourgeois class out of Britain.4)Summarize Shelley's significance in the English literature.Shelley is one of the leading Romantic poets, an intense and original lyrical poet in the English language. Like Blake, he has a reputation as a difficult poet: erudite, imagistically complex, full of classical and mythological allusions. His style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figures of speech which describe vividly what we see and feel, or express what passionately moves us.5) What are the periods of Shakespeare’s dramatic composition? And what are their respective features?Three periods: 1. Period of historical plays and comedies. This period is characterized by happiness and optimism. This period can be further put into two phases: the phase of apprenticeship and the phase of maturation. 2. Period of tragedies. This period is characterized by gloom. 3. Period of romances or tragic-comedies. This period is characterized by reconciliation.6) What are the principles of classicists? Tell three representative classicists in the English literature and their representative works.1) The classicists modeled themselves on Greek and Latin authors, and tried to control literary creation by some fixed laws and rules drawn from Greek and Latin works. Rimed couplet instead of blank verse, the three unities of time, place and action, regularity in construction, and the presentation of types rather than individuals—these were some of the standards the classicists required of drama. Poetry, following the ancient divisions, should be lyric, epic, didactic, satiric or dramatic, and each class should be guided by some peculiar principles. Prose should be precise, direct and flexible. The English classicists followed these standards in thei r writing. 2) Addison and Steele, “The Tatler,” and “The Spectator.” Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism,” and “The Rape of the Lock.”7)Summarize Eliot's influence briefly.The novels of George Eliot mark the beginning of a new stage in the development of English critical realism following that of Dickens and Thackeray. In one respect her work had an advantage over her predecessors. Her characters were not grotesque types, but real, common men and women, whose psychology Eliot revealed very skillfully to the reader. But in other respects her work marks a retrogression. She shifted the center of gravity in the novel from the social problems to the problems of religion and morality. Though aware of the evils of bourgeois society, she did not attack the social system. She believed in the sentimental "religion of humanity", and cherished the illusion that humanity and love could do away with the evils of capitalism.8)Why is Hamlet a representative of humanism?Hamlet is a humanist, a man who is free from medieval prejudices and superstition. He has an unbounded love for the world instead of the heaven. Such love for nature and man is characteristic of the humanists of the Renaissance. Hamlet is also a man of strong moral standards. He loves good and hates evil. He treats everybody as equal. This democratic tendency is based on his humanist thought. His intellectual genius is outstanding. He is a close observer of men and manners. He easily sees through people, so he is always unmasking the world. His image reflects the versatility of the men of the Renaissance.9) What are the characteristics of the American writings in the Romantic Period?Most of the American writings in the Romantic Period share the following characteristics: 1) there was a new emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature, which include a liking for the picturesque, the exotic, the sensuous, the sensational, and the supernatural. 2) The Americans also placed an increasing emphasis upon the free expression of emotions and displayed an increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters. Heroes and heroines exhibited extremes of sensitivity and excitement. 3) The strong tendency to exalt the individual and the common man was almost a national religion in American. 4) The more colorful aspects of the past are used in the literary works. 5) American Romanticism is derivative and typically American.10) How does “Rip Van Winkle” reveal Washington Irving’s conservative attitude?1) Washington Irving was a conservative and always exalted a disappearing past, which is obvious in “Rip Van Winkle”. Rip went to sleep before the War of Independence and woke up after it. The change that had occurred in the twenty years he slept was to him not always for the better. Instead of feeling happy about the country finally independent from the yoke of British colonial rule, Rip was pleased with his new life chiefly because “he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony”.2) The story might be taken as an illustratio n of Irving’s argument that change—and revolution—upset the natural order of things, and of the fact that Irving preferred the past to the present, a dreamlike world to the real one, and never seemed to accept a modern democratic America.11) What is Hawth orne’s writing style?1) As a man of literary craftsmanship, Hawthorne is extraordinary in that the structure and the form of his writing are always carefully worked out to cater of the thematic concern. 2) With his special interest in the psychological aspect of human beings, he is good at exploring the complexity of human psychology. 3) Hawthorne is a great allegorist and almost every story can be read allegorically. 4) Hawthorne is a master of symbolism, which he took from the Puritan tradition and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form.12) Comment on the language of Whitman’s poems1) Contrary to the rhetoric of traditional poetry, Whitman’s language is relatively simple and even rather crude. 2) An often-used method in Whitman’s poem s if to make colors and images fleet past the mind’s eye of the reader. 3) Another characteristic in Whitman’s language is his strong tendency to use oral English.13) What is Dreiser’s writing style?Dreiser’s contribution to the American literary hist ory is great.1) He broke away from the genteel tradition of literature and dramatized the life in a very realistic way. His style is not polished but very serious and well calculated to achieve the thematic ends he sought. 2) However, his writings appear more inclusive and less selective, and the readers are sometimes burdened with massive detailed descriptions of characters and events. 3) He has been accused of being awkward in sentence structure, inept and occasionally flatly wrong in word selection and meaning, and mixed and disorganized in voice and tone.14) What is the Imagist Movement?1) Flourished from 1909 to 1917 and involved quite a number of British and American writers and poets, Imagist Movement is a movement that advanced modernism in arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism, especially Tennyson’s worldliness and high-flown language in poetry.2) The Imagist Movement15) What is the basic concern of The Hairy Ape?1)Sister Carrie The play concerns the problem of modern man’s identity. 2) Yank’s sense of belonging nowhere, hence homelessness and rootless, is typical of the mood of isolation and alienation in the early twentieth century in the United States and the whole world as well.16) What is the theme of The Old Man and the Sea?1) A short novel by Hemingway which brought him the Nobel Prize, The Old Man and the Sea is about an old Cuban fisherman Santiago and his losing battle with a giant marlin. 2) In a tragic sense, it is a representation of life and as a struggle against unconquerable natural forces in which only a partial victory is possible. Nevertheless, there is a feeling of great respect for the struggle of mankind.17) Sea adventures are Melville’s favorite subject; "Moby-Dick" is a great novel in the theme, which is also noted for its symbolism, please analyze it in detail.1) About the sea adventure: it symbols the voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe; a spirit exploration into man’s deep re ality and psychology;2) About the boat; it symbols the society, and the crew symbol all kinds of peoplewith different social and ethnic ideas;3) About the white whale: To the author, it symbols nature, it is a complex, unfathomable and beautiful; To the captain Ahab, it is evilness, is a wall. So he will lead all his crew to cut through the wall to dig out all the unknown, mysterious things behind it. To the narrator, Ishmael, it is a mystery.18) Why Modernism is different from Realism?In many aspects, Modernism acts against Realism; 1) Modernism rejects rationalism, while Realism stresses it; 2) Modernism includes internal, subjective, psychological world, while Realism stresses external, objective, and material world;3) Modernism advocates new forms and new techniques, and it casts away all the traditional elements such as: story, character, etc. while Realism stresses it. 4) Modernism works are called anti-novel, anti-poetry, anti-drama etc.4. Answer the following questions in detail.1)What are the general features of Shakespeare's plays?1. Realism & Humanism. Shakespeare is regarded as one of the founders of realism in world literature. His theory of drama is "to hold, as it were, the mirror to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure." This is in agreement with Engels' definition of realism: "Realism implies the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances."Humanism is also keynote of Shakespeare's drama. Many of his characters are representatives of Shakespeare's humanistic thoughts. The women characters are such examples. Women in Shakespeare's plays are usually braver and more capable than men characters. They are no longer restrained by the feudal fetters. Falstaff, in "Henry IV," also shows Shakespeare's humanistic belief. Falstaff is fat, old, ugly, gross and guilty of many sins. He is boastful and greedy. He takes bribes. These are included in The Seven Deadly Sins. However, Shakespeare didn't create him as a bad example. On the contrary, his characterization of Falstaff is comic, not criticizing. In fact, it is said that this character was so amusing that Queen Elizabeth asked Shakespeare to write another play imply devoting to Falstaff. From the creation of Falstaff, we can see that Shakespeare is free from the religious constraints. This is an important feature of humanism.Shakespeare's histories also demonstrate hi belief in unity of the country and an ideal king, for example, "Henry IV" and "Henry V." This is also what the English people was expecting after many years' war in the Middle Ages.2. Shakespeare used a lot of adoptions. He borrowed his source materials from a variety of sources: Greek legends, Roman history, Italian stories and English historical records. However, he was always able to put a new meaning on the old stories, thus reflecting the reality of England of his time.3. Shakespeare is a master of drama. He broke the classical rules of three unities, thus caused English drama to flourish.4. Shakespeare is skillful in many poetic forms. He is especially good at sonnets and blank verse.5. Shakespeare is a master of the English language. He used about 16,000 words.Many of his coined words have remained in the English language. Shakespeare and the King James Bible are the two great treasuries of the English language.2)Summarize Byron's chief contribution and significance in the Englishliterature.As a leading Romanticist, Byron's chief contribution is his creation of the "Byronic hero," a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With immense superiority in his passions and powers, this Byronic hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society, and would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies. The conflict is usually one of rebellious individuals against outworn social systems and conventions. The image of this hero is to some extent modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself, and makes Byron famous both at home and abroad. Byron's poetry was immensely popular at home and also abroad, where it exerted great influence on the Romantic movement. This popularity owes to the author's persistent attacks on "cant political, religious, and moral," to the novelty of his oriental scenery, to the romantic character of the Byronic hero, and to the easy, fluent and natural beauty of his verse. Byron's diction on the whole has a freedom, copiousness and vigor. His descriptions are simple and fresh, and often bring vivid objects before the reader. The glowing imagination also adds to the charm of his poetry.Byron uses Ottva Rima (Octave Stanza) as the form of his poetry.Byron's poetry has great influence on the literature of the whole world. Across Europe, patriots and painters and musicians are all inspired by him. Poets and novelists are profoundly influenced by his work.3) What are the three periods of Yeats’s literary career? Enumerate some representative works at each period.Yeats' literary career can be divided into three periods. During the early years of his literary career, he wrote romantic poetry under the influence of Spenser, Shelley and the Pre-Raphaelites. He also made an intensive study of William Blake whose symbolism and mysticism attracted him very much. His early poems were full of dreams and fairies. The major themes are usually Celtic legends, local folktales, or stories of the heroic age in Irish history. Many of these poems have a dreamy quality with melancholy, passive and self-indulgent feelings. Famous poems composed in this period include "The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Collections of his early poems are: "Crossways" (1899), "The Rose" (1893), and "The Wind Among the Reeds" (1899). The first two decades of the 20th century were Yeats' period of transition, during which he departed from the romanticism of his early period and developed into modernism, influenced by the poetry and criticism of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He also studied the works of John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet. By finding a new force, a new dimension, and a new reality to his verse, Yeats began to write with realistic and concrete themes on a variety of subjects, exploring the profound and complicated human problems, such as life, love, politics and religion. With the combination of his appreciation of beauty and a sense of tragedy in life, Yeats gave asignificance to the ordinary events of life in his poetry. The new vigor of his verse is reflected in the precise and concrete imagery, the strong passion and the active verb forms. Through vivid images, rich symbols and controlled rhythms, the meaning of his poems was pressed disturbing home. His style is both simple and rich, colloquial and formal, with a quality of metaphysical wit and symbolic vision, which indicates that Yeats has already been on his way to modernist poetry. His famous poems composed in this period include: "No Second Troy," "September 1913," "Easter 1916" and "The Second Coming."The years 1919-1939 were Yeats' final period of maturity, in which he published many volumes of his representative poems, which include "The Wild Swans at Coole" (1919), "The Tower" (1828), "Sailing to Byzantium." In his late works he deals with the rise and fall of civilization, with eternal beauty in the world of art, with contrast between youth and old age, and with love. He created an elaborate system of symbols of his own in his poems.4) What are the characteristics of Romanticism in English literature? Give examples to illustrate them.English Romantic literature has the following characteristics: 1) sensibility; 2) primitivism; 3) love of nature; 4) mysticism; 5) individualism; 6) sympathetic interest in the past, especially the medieval; 7) against whatever characterized classicism.We can easily find examples of romantic writers whose works have the above features. Generally speaking, all romantic writers focus on the sensibility, especially the natural flow of feelings, rather than the outside world. Many romantic writers sing high praises of nature. Wordsworth is a good example. It’s said that his poetry about nature is his best poetry. A strong interest in nature naturally causes some poets to take a liking to primitive life, to idealize rural life and even to show sympathy for animal life. Goldsmith and Cowper are two examples. Mysticism, and even Gothicism, is another feature. Poets like Keats include mysterious stories in their poems. Some other poets like Percy have a strong interest in the medieval literature, while others like Burns find sources from folk songs or ballads. Individualism is an important feature of romantic literature. Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a remarkable poem in high praise of individualism. On the whole, romanticists are against whatever classicists support. They abandon the heroic couplet in favor of blank verse, the sonnet, the Spenserian stanza and many experimental verse forms. They drop the conventional poetic fiction in favor of fresher language and bolder figures. Typical literary forms of the romantic writers include the lyric, especially the love lyric, the reflective lyric, the nature lyric and the lyric of morbid melancholy and sentimental novel.5) Comment on the similarities and differences of the three dominant figures—William Dean Howells, Henry James and Mark Twain of the Realistic period.The three dominant figures of the Realistic period are William Dean Howells, Henry James and Mark Twain.a. Their similarities:Together they brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the landscape and social surfaces,brought to perfection the vernacular style, and explored and exploited the literary possibilities of the interior life. They recorded and made permanent the essential life of the eastern third of the continent as it was lived in the last half of the nineteenth century on the vanishing frontier, in the village, the small town, or the turbulent metropolis. They established the literary identity of distinctively American protagonists, specially the vernacular hero and the “American Girl”, the baffled and strained middle-class family, the businessman, and the psychologically complicated citizens of a new international culture. Together, in short, they set the example and charted the future of course for the subjects, themes, techniques and styles of fiction we still call modern.b. Their differencesThough the three prominent writers wrote more or less at the same time, they differed in their understanding of “truth”. While Mark Twain and Howells seemed to have paid more attention to the “life” of the Americans, Henry James had apparently laid a greater emphasis on the “inner world” of man. He came to believe that the literary artist should not simply hold a mirror to the surface of social life in particular times and spaces. In addition, the writers should use language to probe the deepest reaches of the psychological and moral nature of human beings. He is a realist of the inner life. Though Mark Twain and Howells both shared the same concern in presenting the truth of the American society, they had each of them different emphasis. Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived, while Mark Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories. This particular concern about the local character of a region came about as “local colorism”, a unique variation of American literary realism.6) The background of American Modernism1)Social backgroundThe 20th century began with a strong sense of social breakdown. A series of wars fought on the international scene during the first part of the century were to affect the life of Americans and their literary writings. With all these wars the world had undergone a dramatic social change, a transformation from order to disorder. So had the United States. Despite its booming industry and material prosperity, there was a sense of unease and restlessness and underneath.2) Along with the changes in the material landscape came the changes in the non- material system of belief and behavior. The First World War had made a big impact on the life of Americans. In a word, there was a decline in moral standard and the first few decades of the twentieth century was best described as a spiritual wasteland. The First World War brought feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment to the Americans.3) Between the mid-19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, there had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences, as well as in the field of are in Europe, which played an indispensable role in bringing about modernism and the modernistic writings in the United States. The implicationsof modern European arts to modern American writings can also be strongly felt in the American literature between the wars, even thereafter.7) What is Hawthorne’s “black” vision of life and human beings?1) Hawthorne’s liter ary world is very disturbed, tormented and problematical because of his “black” vision of life and human beings. He rejected what he saw as the Transcendentalists’ transparent optimism about the potentialities of human nature. Instead he looked more deeply and perhaps more honestly into life, finding it much suffering and conflict but also finding the redeeming power of love. 2) According to him, “There is evil in every human heart”, and a piece of literary work should “show how we are all wronged and wrong ers, and avenge one another”. So in almost every book he wrote, Hawthorne discusses sin and evil. One source of evil Hawthorne is concerned most is over-reaching intellect, which usually refers to someone who is too proud, too sure of himself. The tension between the head and the heart constitutes one of the dramatic moments when the evil of over-reaching intellect would be fully revealed. 3) Hawthorne’s intellectuals are usually villains, dreadful because they are devoid of warmth and feeling. What’s more, they tend to go beyond and violate the natural order by doing something impossible and reaching the ultimate truth, without a sober mind about their own limitations as human beings. Chillingworth, Dr. Rappaccini in “Rappaccini’s daughter” are but a few specimens of Hawthorne’s chilling, cold-blooded human animals.8) Analyze the theory of Theodore Dreiser’naturalism with example.1) His naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters that were presented in special and detailed circumstances. At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even tragic.2) The characters in his books are often subject to the control of the natural forces, especially those of environment and heredity. For example, th e hero Hurstwood’s tragic death showed the theory.3) The effect of Darwinist idea of "survival of the fittest" was shattering. It is not surprising to find in Dreiser’s fiction a world of jungle, where "kill or to be killed" was the law.4) He criticizes materialistic to the core, living in such a society with such a value system, the human individual is obsessed with a never-ending, yet meaningless search for satisfaction of his/her desires. One of the desires is for money which was a motivating purpose of life in the United States in the late 19th century. For example in his masterpiece "Sister Carrie" he traces the material rise of Carrie Meeber, which indicates the critical attitude of the author.5) Sexual beauty symbolizes the acquisition of some social status of great magnitude.9) Take examples to analyze the style and theme of Mark Twain.Mark Twain is a great literary of America, H. L. Mencken considered him "the true father of our national literature".1) Twain’s works like "Adventure of Huckleberry Finn" and "Life on the Mississippi" shaped the views of America and combined American folk humor and serious literature together;。
