2009年4月全国英美文学选读试卷及答案

全国2009年4月高等教育自学考试

英美文学选读试题

课程代码：00604

请将答案填在答题纸相应的位置上(全部题目用英文作答)

I. Multiple Choice(40 points in all, 1 for each)

Select from the four choices of each item the one that best answers the question or completes the statement and write the corresponding letter on the answer sheet.

1. In Renaissance, the European humanist thinkers and scholars made

attempts to do the following EXCEPT ______.

A. getting rid of those old feudalist ideas

B. getting control of the parliament and government

C. introducing new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie

D. recovering the purity of the early church, from the corruption of the

Roman Catholic Church

2. The Petrarchan sonnet was first introduced into England by ______.

A. Surrey

B. Wyatt

C. Sidney

D. Shakespeare

3. 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.

A. The Tempest

B. The Winter's Tale

C. Cymbeline

D. The Rape of Lucrece

4. John Milton's greatest poetical work ______ is the only generally

acknowledged epic in English literarure since Beowulf.

A.Areopagitica

B. Paradise Lost

C. Lycidas

D. Samson Agonistes

5. The British bourgeois or middle class believed in the following notions

EXCEPT ______.

A. self - esteem

B. self - reliance

C. self - restraint

D. hard work

6. “Graveyard School”writers are the following sentimentalists EXCEPT ______.

A. James Thomson

B. William Collins

C. William Cowper

D. Thomas Jackson

7. The best model of satire in the whole English literary history is Jonathan

Swift's ______.

A. A Modest Proposal

B. A Tale of a Tub

C. Gulliver's Travels

D. The Battle of the Books

8. As a representative of the Enlightenment,______ was one of the first

to introduce rationalism to England.

A. John Bunyan

B. Daniel Defoe

C. Alexander Pope

D. Jonathan Swift

9. For his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern

novel,______ has been regarded by some as “Father of the English Novel”.

A. Daniel Defoe

B. Henry Fielding

C. Jonathan Swift

D. Samuel Richardson

10. Which of the following descriptions of Gothic Novels is NOT correct?

A. It predominated in the early eighteenth century.

B. It was one phase of the Romantic movement.

C. Its principal elements are violence, horror and the supernatural.

D. Works like The Mysteries of Udolpho and Frankenstein are typical Gothic romance.

11. “Byronic hero”is a figure of the following traits EXCEPT ______.

A.being proud

B. being of humble origin

C.being rebellious

D. being mysterious

12. Robert Browning created ______ by adopting the novelistic presentation

of characters.

A. the verse novel

B. the blank verse

C. the heroic couplet

D. the dramatic poetry

13. Charles Dickens' novel ______ is famous for its vivid descriptions of

the workhouse and life of the underworld in the nineteenth- century London.

A. The Pickwick Paper

B. Oliver Twist

C. David Copperfield

D. Nicholas Nickleby

14. Charlotte Bronte's works are all about the struggle of an individual

consciousness towards ______, about some lonely and neglected young women with a fierce longing for love, understanding and a full, happy life.

A. self - reliance

B. self - realization

C. self - esteem

D. self - consciousness

15. The symbolic meaning of “Book” in Robert Browning's long poem The

Ring and the Book is ______.

A. the common sense

B. the hard truth

C. the comprehensive knowledge

D. the dead truth

16. Thomas Hardy's pessimistic view of life predominated most of his later

works and earns him a reputation as a ______ writer.

A. realistic

B. naturalistic

C. romantic

D. stylistic

17. After the First World War, there appeared the following literary trends

of modernism EXCEPT ______.

A. expressionism

B. surrealism

C. stream of consciousness

D. black humour

18. The masterpieces of critical realism in the early 20th century are the

three trilogies of ______.

A. Galsworthy's Forsyte novels

B. Hardy' s Wessex novels

C. Greene's Catholic novels

D. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness novels

19. In the mid - 1950s and early 1960s, there appeared “______” who

demonstrated a particular disillusion over the depressing situation in Britain and launched a bitter protest. against the outmoded social and political values in their society.

A. The Beat Generation

B. The Lost Generation

C. The Angry Young Men

D. Black Mountain Poets

20.The following are English stream-of-consciousness novels EXCEPT ______.

A.Pilgrimage

B. Ulysses

C.Mrs.Dalloway

D. A Passage to Inida

21. The leader of the Irish National Theater Movement in the early 20th century

was ______.

A. W.

B.Yeats B. Lady Gregory

C. J.M.Synge

D. John Galworthy

22. T.S.Eliot's most popular verse play is ______.

A. Murder in the Cathedral

B. The Cocktail Party

C. The Family Reunion

D. The Waste Land

23. The American writer ______ was awarded the Nobel Prize for the anti-racist In-

truder in the Dust in 1950.

A. Ernest Hemingway

B. Gertrude Stein

C. William Faulkner

D.T.S. Eliot

24. Hemingway's second big success is ______ , which wrote the epitaph to

a decade and to the whole generation in the 1920s, in order to tell

us a story about the tragic love affair of a wounded American soldier with a British nurse.

A. For Whom the Bell Tolls

B. A Farewell to Arms

C. The Sun Also Rises

D. The Old Man and the Sea

25. With the publication of ______ , Dreiser was launching himself upon

a long career that would ultimately make him one of the most significant

American writers of the school later known as literary naturalism.

A. Sister Carrie

B. The Titan

C. The Genius

D. The Stoic

26. Henry James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th -century

“stream -of-consciousness”novels and the founder of ______.

A. neoclassicism

B. psychological realism

C. psychoanalytical criticism

D. surrealism

27. In 1849, Herman Melville published ______ ,a semi-autobiographical

novel, con- cerning the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors.

A. Omoo

B. Mardi

C. Redburn

D. Typee

28. As a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,______ marks the climax of Mark

Twain's literary activity.

A. The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin n

B. Life on the Mississippi

C. The Gilded Age

D. Roughing It

29. Realism was a reaction against ______ or a move away from the bias

towards romance and self- creating fictions, and paved the way to Modernism.

A. Romanticism

B. Rationalism

C. Post-modernism

D. Cynicism

30. When World War II broke out,______ began working for the Italian

government, engaged in some radio broadcasts of anti- Semitism and pro- Fascism.

A. Ezra Pound

B.T.S. Eliot

C. Henry James

D. Robert Frost

31. In 1915 ______ became a naturalized British citizen, largely in protest

against America's failure to join England in the First World War.

A. Henry James

B.T.S.Eliot

C. W.

D.Howells D. Ezra Pound

32. What Whitman prefers for his new subject and new poetic feelings is “______ ,”

that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.

A. blank verse

B. free rhythm

C. balanced structure

D. free verse

33. The American woman poet ______ wanted to live simply as a complete

independent being, and so she did, as a spinster.

A. Emily Shaw

B. Anna Dickinson

C. Emily Dickinson

D. Anne Bret

34. The Birthmark drives home symbolically ______ point that evil is a man's

birthmark, something he was born with.

A. Whitman's

B. Melville's

C. Hawthorne's

D. Emerson's

35. The Financier ,The Titan and The Stoic written by ______ are called his

“Trilogy of Desire”.

A. Henry James

B. Theodore Dreiser

C. Mark Twain

D. Herman Melville

36. Disregarding grammar and punctuation,______ always used “i”instead

of “I” in his poems to show his protest against self-importance.

A. Wallace Stevens

B. Ezra Pound

C. Robert Frost

D.

E.E.Cummings

37. Though Robert Frost is generally considered a regional poet whose

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.

A. the west

B. the south

C. New England

D. Alaska

38. Most critics have agreed that Fitzgerald is both an insider and an

outsider of ______ with a double vision.

A. the Gilded Age

B. the Rational Age

C. the Jazz Age

D. the Magic Age

39. In the American Romantic writings,______ came to function almost as

a dramatic character that symbolized moral law.

A. fire

B. water

C. trees

D. wilderness

40. The desire for an escape from society and a return to ______ became

a permanent

convention of the American literature.

A. the family life

B. nature

C. the ancient time

D. fantasy of love

II. Reading Comprehension (16 points in all, 4 for each)

Read the quoted parts carefully and answer the questions in English. Write your

answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

41. Wherefore feed and clothe and save

From the cradle to the grave

Those ungrateful drones who would

Drain your sweat- nay, drink your blood?

Questions:

A. Identify the poet and the title of the poem from which the stanza is taken.

B. What figure of speech is used in Line 2?

C. Whom does “drones” refer to?

Answer:

A: The Men of England by Percy Bysshe Shelley

B. Metaphor (不确定答案)

C.Drones: the male of the honey-bees that do not work, referring here to the parasitic class in human society.

42. The following quotation is from one of the poems by T. S. Eliot:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous,

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

Questions:

A. Identify the title of the poem from which the quoted part is taken.

B. Who's the speaker of the quoted lines?

C. What does the first line show about the speaker?

Answer:

A. The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.

B. Prufrock.

C. (待补充)

43．There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

Questions:

A. Identify the poet.

B.From which poem and which collection of the poet are these lines taken?

C.What does the poet describe in the poem?

Answer:

A. Walt Whitman

B. There Was a Child Went Forth; Leaves of Grass.

C. This poem describes the growth of a child who learned about the world around him and improved himself accordingly.

44. I heard a Fly buzz- when I died-

The Stillness in the Room

Was like the Stillness in the Air-

Between the Heaves of Storm-

The Eyes around- had wrung them dry-

And Breaths were gathering firm

For that last Onset- when the King

Be witnessed - in the Room-

Questions:

A. Identify the poet.

B. What does “the King” refer to?

C. What moment is the poem trying to describe?

Answer: A. Emily Dickinson

B. the King refers to the God of death.

C. the poem trying to describe the moment of death.

the author even imagined her own death, the loss of her own body, and the journey of her soul to the unknown

III. Questions and Answers (24 points in all, 6 for each)

Give brief answers to each of the following questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

45. List at least two leading neoclassicists in England. What did

Neoclassicists celebrate in literary creation?

A. The Neoclassicism period was an important age with the remarkable authors Pope, Defoe, etc.

B. 1) The Neoclassical period is about 1660-1798, also known as "the Age of Enlightenment" or "the age of Reason".

2)In essence, the Neoclassical Period was a progressive intellectual movement.

3)The Enlighteners believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work;They celebrated reason/rationality, equality and science. They advocated universal education, which could make people rational and prefect, they believed.

4)In literature, The Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of

interest in the ancient Greek and Roman classical works; the works at the time, heavily didactic and moralizing; having fixed laws and rules for every type of the literature; among which prose and the modern English novel predominated the age.

46. Jane Eyre is one of the most popular and important novels of the Victorian

Age. Why is Jane Eyre such a successful novel?

Answer:

A. The story opens with the titular heroine, Jane Eyre, a plain little

orphan.

B.This novel sharply criticize the existing society, e.g. the religious

hypocrisy of charity institutions, the social discrimination Jane experiences and the false social convention as concerning love and marriage.

C. The success of the novel is also due to its introduction to the English

novel the first governess heroine Jane Eyre.

D. It is an intense moral fable at the same time. Jane, like Mr. Rochester,

has to undergo a series of physical and moral tests to grow up and achieve her final happiness.

47. Who are the three dominant figures of the American Age of Realism and

what are the differences in their understanding of the “truth”? Anwer:

A. the three dominant figures of the American Age of Realism are Mark

Twain,Howells,Henry James.

B. 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.

Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived, while Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories.

48. What's Dreiser' s naturalistic belief? Please discuss the question with

Carrie, a character in Sister Carrie as an example.

Answer:

1) Penniless and "full of the illusions of ignorance and youth", Sister Carrie leaves her rural home to seek work in Chicago, she grows from an innocent, pure country girl to be a girl mature in intellect and emotion, and she becomes a star of musical comedies. But in spite of her success in material, she is not happy but lonely and dissatisfied.

2) Sister Carrie best embodies Dreiser’s naturalistic belief that while men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, instinct and chance, a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate wordlessly and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose for their existence IV. Topic Discussion(20 points in all, 10 for each)

Write no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

49. Briefly discuss William Shakespeare's artistic achievements in

characterization, plot construction and language.

Answer: As one of the most remarkable playwrights and poets the worlds has ever known, Shakespeare has effected his influence far beyond the time he lived—the Renaissance period. In this greatest tragedy “ Hamlet”, his skillful handling of plot construction, powerful condemination of the royal corruption as well as his genius application of soliloquy are all displayed perfectly, which not only makes this play the most popular one on the stage, but also creates Shakespeare an everlasting fame in the literary world, going beyond the national boundaries for centuries.

50. Briefly discuss Mark Twain's art of fiction in terms of the setting,the

language, and the characters, etc.,based on his novel The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn.

Answer: 1).Adventures of Huckleberry find proved itself to be the milestone in American literature and thus firmly established Twain’s position in American literature.

2) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn marks the climax of Twain’s literary creativity. The novel is written in a language that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by Emerson, Poe, and Melville. It is simple, direct, lucid, and faithful to the colloquial speech. Speaking in vernacular, a wild and uneducated Huck, running away from civilization for his freedom, is vividly brought to life. Indeed, with his great mastery and effective use of vernacular, Twain has made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country.

3) Mark Twain’s humor is remarkable,too. His humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.

4). The profound portrait of Huckleberry Finn is another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature.

5). Twain, known as a local colorist, preferred to present social life throught portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area,the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. The Mississippi valley and the West became his major theme. Unlike James and Howells, Mark Twain wrote about the lower-class people. He successfully used local color and historical settings to illustrate and shed light on the contemporary society.

或者参考第二个答案：As a true father of American national literature, Twain has impresses the whole world with his milestone work “ Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, which not only gives a record of a vanished life moving millions of people worldwide, but also become a classic for both children and adults owing to its vernacular and remarkable humor.