王佐良《欧洲文化入门》课后习题详解(现实主义)【圣才出品】

第9章现实主义

Questions for Revision:

1. When and in what country did the realist movement arise?

Key: The Realist movement arose in the 50s of the 19th century and had its origin in France.

2. What is the chief difference between Romanticism and Realism?

Key: (1) In art and literature realism came as a protest against the falseness and sentimentality which realists thought they saw in romantic fiction

(2) If romanticism allows full play to the imagination and stresses love of beauty and interest in the past, the central issues of life for realists tend to be ethical or issues of conduct

(3) And their democratic attitude tended to make them value the individual very highly and to regard characterization as the centre of the novel.

(4) In this sense, realism means more than a literary method; it defines a particular kind of subject matter—the surface details, the commonplace actions and the tragedies of the ordinary people constitute the chief matter if realist movement.

(5) Its language was simple, clear, and direct, while the tone was often comic, frequently satiric.

3. What were the conditions in Western Europe in the l 840s?

Key: In 1848 there was revolution throughout Europe. And once again the revolution started in France and was followed by a series of revolution in other parts of Europe.

4. Who were the important French and English realist novelists? Name a few of their works.

Key: (1) The important France writers and some of their works:

Stendhal: The Red and the Black

Balzac: Le Pere Goriot, La Cousine Bette, The Human Comedy

Flaubert: Madame Bovary

Zola: Les Rougen-Macquarts

Maupassant: The Necklace, The Piece of String

(2) English realist novelists and some of their works:

Dickens: Hard Times, Black House, David Copperfield

George Eliot: The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch

Thackeray: Vanity Fair

Hardy: Jude the Obscure, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crown, The Return of the Native

George Bernard Shaw: Heartbreak House, The Doctor’s Dilemma, Major Barbara

5. Who has been called “the French Dickens”, and who “the English Balzac”? Why?

Key: Charles Dickens has been called “the English Balzac” and Balzac has been called “the French Dickens”.

Both are realist writers, both depict many walks of life in their novels and touches on most fields of knowledge.

6. Explain “A novel is a mirror walking along the road.”

Key: This is Stendhal’s words. It tells that the realists wanted a truthful representation in their works of Contemporary life and manners. They thought of their method as observational and objective.

7. Can you account for the great achievement of Russian literature in the nineteenth century?

Key: It was no until the eighteenth century, when Peter the Great carried through the reforms that Russians really came into contact with the literature of Western Europe. Between 1700 and 1815 Russia absorbed what she could of the classical Renaissance, classicism, neo-classicism, etc. after 1815 modern Russian literature began at once with an enormous power and full of vigor. Gogol was born in 1821 and Tolstoy, in 1828. Besides them was a host of other writers. At one step, literature in Russia raised itself from nothingness to the centre of Russian life. The

beginnings of modern Russian literature are to be traced to the Napoleonic wars. Napoleon had tried to invade Moscow. The army was defeated not by the Russian army but by the unfavorable conditions: cold and hunger. Later the Russian participated in the battle of Waterloo and many intelligent young Russians spent enough time in France to become acquainted with the ideas of democracy. They became “dangerous men” when they returned to Russia, where anyone who should say anything against the government was punished by severe sentences to labor in Siberia. Therefore the political and philosophical aspirations of the Russian people expressed themselves in the form of literature, and literature became the voice of the people.

8. Who among all the Russian writers has exerted the greatest influence on the European novelists of the twentieth century?

Key: Dostoyevsky.

9. What is the book for which Whitman is famous throughout the world?

Key: Leaves of Grass.

10. Who is regarded as the father of American literature? What did Hemingway say

about him?

Key: Mark Twain was regarded as the father of American literature. Hemingway thought highly of him, as he put it, “All modern literature comes from one book by

Mark Twain, called Huckleberry Finn…”