美国文学汇总题库(选择题网上合集)规范文本

1. For Melville, as well as for the reader and _________, the narrator, Moby Dick is still a mystery, an ultimate mystery of the universe.

A. Ahab

B. Ishmael

C. Stubb

D. Starbuck

2. Naturalism is evolved from re alism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more_____________.

A. rational

B. humorous

C. optimistic

D. pessimistic

3. Dreiser’s Trilogy of Desire includes th ree novels. They are The Financier, The Titan and_____ .

A. The Genius

B. The Tycoon

C. The Stoic

D. The Giant

4. The impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the nineteenth-century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to yet another school of realism: American___________ .

A. local colorism

B. vernacularism

C. modernism

D. naturalism

5. Robert Frost combined traditional verse forms -the sonnet, rhyming couplets, blank verse -with a clear American local speech rhythm, the speech of _______farmers with its idiosyncratic diction and syntax.

A. Southern

B. Western

C. New Hampshire

D. New England

6. As an autobiographical play, O’Neill’s ___________(1956) has gained its status as

a world classic and simultaneously marks the climax of his literary career and the coming of age of American drama.

A. The Iceman Cometh

B. Long Day’s Journey Into Night

C. The Hairy Ape

D. Desire Under the Elms

7. Apart from the dislocation of time and the modern stream-of-consciousness, the other narrative techniques Faulkner used to construct his stories include_________, symbolism and mythological and biblical allusions.

A. impressionism

B. expressionism

C. multiple points of view

D. first person point of view

8. Stylistically, Henry James’ fiction is characterized by____________.

A. short, clear sentences

B. abundance of local images

C. ordinary American speech

D. highly refined language

9. One of the characteristics that have made Mark Twain a major literary figure in the 19th century America is his use of____________ .

A. vernacular

B. interior monologue

C. point of view

D. photographic description

10. It is on his____________ that Washington Irving’s fame mainly rested.

A. childhood recollections

B. sketches about his European tours

C. early poetry

D. tales about America

11. At the middle of 19th century, America witnessed a cultural flowering which is called “____________________”.

A. the English Renaissance

B. the Second Renaissance

C. the American Renaissance

D. the Salem Renaissance

12. As a philosophical and literary movement, the main issues involved in the debate of Transcendentalism are generally concerning ____________________.

A. nature, man and the universe

B. the relationship between man and woman

C. the development of Romanticism in American literature

D. the cold, rigid rationalism of Unitarianism

13. About the novel The Scarlet Letter, which of the following statements is NOT right?

A. It’s very hard to say that it is a love story or a story of sin.

B. It’s a highly symbolic story and the author is a master of symbolism.

C. It’s mainly about the moral, emotional and psychological effects of the sin

upon the main characters and the people in general.

D. In it the letter A takes the same symbolic meaning throughout the novel.

14. The great sea adventure story Moby-Dick is usually considered____________.

A. a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe.

B. an adventurous exploration into man’s relationship with nature

C. a simple whaling tale or sea adventure

D. a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the artistic truth and beauty

15. In his poems, Walt Whitman is innovative in the terms of the form of his poetry, which is called “____________________.”

A. free verse

B. blank verse

C. alliteration

D. end rhyming

16. After the Civil War America was transformed from ______ to _________.

A. an agrarian community …an industrialized and commercialized society

B. an agrarian community …a society of freedom and equality

C. a poor and backward society …an industrialized and commercialized society

D. an industrialized and commercialized society …a highly developed society

17. Which of the following is said of the American naturalism?

A. They preferred to have their own region and people at the forefront of the stories.

B. Their characteristic setting is usually an isolated town.

C. Humans should be united because they had to adapt themselves to changing harsh

environment.

D. Their characters were conceived more or less complex combinations of inherited

attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.

18. Which of the following is not right about Mark Twain’s style of language?

A. His sentence structures are long, ungrammatical and difficult to read.

B. His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in effect.

C. His humor is remarkable and characterized by puns, straight-faced exaggeration，

repetition and anti-climax.

D. His style of language had exerted rather deep influence on the contemporary writers.

19. The impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school of realism: American ______.

A. Romanticism

B. Transcendentalism

C. Realism

D. Naturalism

20. Which of the following is not written by Henry James?

A. The Portrait of A Lady and The Europeans.

B. The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors.

C. What Maisie Knows and The Bostonians.

D.The Genius and The Gilded Age.

21. More than five hundred poems Dickinson wrote are about nature, in which her

general Skepticism about the relationship between ______ is well-expressed.

A. man and man

B. men and women

C. man and nature

D. men and God

22. Which of the following is right about Emily Dickinson’s poems about nature?

A. In them, she expressed her general affirmation about the relationship between

man and nature.

B. Some of them showed her disbelief that there existed a mythical bond

between man and nature.

C. Her poems reflected her feeling that nature is restorative to human beings.

D. Many of them showed her feeling of nature’s inscrutability and indifference to

the life and interests of human beings.

23. As a great innovator in American literature, Walt Whitman wrote his poetry in an

unconventional style which is now called free verse, that is _________.

A. lyrical poetry with chanting refrains

B. poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme

C. poetry without rhymes at the end of the lines but with a fixed beat

D. poetry in an irregular metric form and expressing noble feelings

24. In the first part of the 20th century，apart from Darwinism, there were two thinkers

-______，whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period.

A. the German Karl Marx and the Austrian Sigmund Freud

B. the German Karl Marx and the American Sigmund Freud

C. the Swiss Carl Jung and the American William James

D. the Austrian Karl Marx and the German Sigmund Freud

25. Which of the following can be said about Eugene O’Neill plays?

A. Most of his plays are concerned about the root, the truth of human desires and

human frustrations.

B. His tragic view of life is reflected in many of his works.

C. His plays are concerned about the relationship between man and nature as

well as man and woman.

D. Both A and B.

26. Most of O’Neill’s plays are concerned about the following except______.

A. success and failure in man’s literary career

B. life and death, illusion and disillusion, dream and reality

C. alienation and communication, self and society, desire and frustration

D. the basic issues of human existence and predicament

27. Which of the following can be said about a typical modern literary work?

A. It is a record of sequence and coherence of the history and the world.

B. It is a juxtaposition of the past and present, of the history and the memory.

C. It is a book of integrity drawn from diverse areas of experience.

D. Its perspective is shifted from the internal to the external, from the private to the public.

28. As to the great American poet Ezra Pound, which of the following is not right?

A. His language is usually oblique yet marvelously compressed and his poetry is

dense with personal, literary, and historical allusions.

B. His artistic talents are on full display in the history of the Imagist Movement.

C. From his analysis of the Chinese ideogram Pound learned to anchor his poetic

language in concrete, perceptual reality, and to organize images into larger

patterns through juxtaposition.

D.For he was politically controversial and notorious for what he did in the

wartime, his literary achievement and influence are somewhat reduced.

29. In his poetry, Robert Frost made the colloquial ______ speech into a poetic expression.

A. England

B. New England

C. Plymouth

D. Boston

30. Which of the following statements is right about Robert Frost’s poetry?

A. He combined traditional verse forms with the difficult and highly ornamental language.

B. He combined traditional verse forms with the pastoral language of the Southern area.

C. He combined traditional verse forms with a simple spoken language-the speech of

New England farmers.

D. He combined traditional verse forms with the experimental.

31. Which of the following statements can be said about the works of Scott Fitzgerald,

a spokesman of the “Roaring 20s”?

A. Many of them portrayed the hollowness of the American worship of riches and the

unending American dream of fulfillment.

B. They are symbolic of the psychological journey of the modern man and his

helplessness in the modern world.

C. They show the primitive struggle of individuals in the context of irresistible natural forces.

D. They penetrate into the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.

32. Which of the following is not written by Ernest Hemingway, one of the best-known American authors of the 20th century?

A. The Sun Also Rises.

B. The Old Man and the Sea.

C. Mosses From the Old Manse.

D. The Green Hills of Africa.

33. Which of the following statements is right about the novel A Farewell to Arms?

A. The author favored the idea of nature as an expression of either god’s design

or his beneficence.

B. The author attempted to write the epitaph to a decade and to the whole

generation in the 1930s.

C.The author emphasizes his belief that man is trapped both physically and

mentally and suggests that man is doomed to be entrapped.

D. It tells a story about the tragic love affair of a wounded American soldier with

an Italian nurse.

34. Which of the following is depicted as the mythical county in William Faulkner’s novels?

A. Cambridge.

B. Oxford.

C. Mississippi.

D. Yoknapatawpha.

35. To Faulkner, the primary duty of a writer was to explore and represent the infinite possibilities inherent in human life. Therefore a writer should ______.

A. observe with no judgment whatsoever.

B. reduce authorial intrusion to the lowest minimum.

C. observe at a great distance and sometimes participate in the events.

D. both A and B.

36. Which of the following is right about American fiction from 1945 onwards?

A. A group of new writers who survived the war wrote about their ideals within

the artistic field.

B. There appeared a significant group of Jewish-American writers whose works

were set against the Jewish experience and tradition.

C. Black fiction began to attract critical attention during the 1950s.

D. American fiction in the 1950s and 1960s proves to be a harvest which derived

from its predecessors.

37. Which of the following is not a work of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s?

A. The House of the Seven Gables.

B. The Blithedale Romance.

C. The Marble Faun.

D.White Jacket.

38. In Hawthorne’s novels and short stories, intellectuals usually appear as ______________.

A. commentators

B. observers

C. villains

D. saviors

39. Besides sketches, tales and essays, Washington Irving also published a book on ______, which is also considered an important part of his creative writing.

A. poetic theory

B. French art

C. history of New York

D. life of George Washington

40. In Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, there are detailed descriptions of big parties. The purpose of such descriptions is so show _______.

A. emptiness of life

B. the corruption of the upper class

C. contrast of the rich and the poor

D. the happy days of the Jazz Age

41. In American literature, escaping from the society and returning to nature is a common subject. The following titles are all related, in one way or another, to the subject except _________.

A. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

B. Dreiser’s Si ster Carrie

C. Copper’s Leather-Stocking Tales

D. Thoreau’s Walden

42. Which of the following novels can be regarded as typically belonging to the

school of literary modernism?

A. The Sound and the Fury

B. Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

C. Daisy Miller.

D. The Gilded Age.

43. Emily Dickinson wrote many short poems on various aspects of life. Which of the following is not a usual subject of her poetic expression?

A. Religion.

B. Life and death.

C. Love and marriage.

D. War and peace.

44. In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson made a speech entitled _______ at Harvard, which was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "Our intellectual Declaration of Independence."

A. "Nature"

B. "Self-Reliance"

C. "Divinity School Address"

D. "The American Scholar"

45. Which of the following statements about writers in 1920s is true?

A. Mark Twain published his last and most important novel.

B. F. Scott Fitzgerald received the Nobel Prize.

C. Freudian psychology influenced many modern writers.

D. Most writers were politically radical.

46. In American literature the first important writer who earned an international fame

on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean is_______________.

A. Washington Irving

B. Ralph Waldo Emerson

C. Nathaniel Hawthorne

D. Walt Whitman

47. The American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne is known for his“black vision．”The

Term “black vision” refers to______________.

A. Hawthorne's observation that every man faces a black Wall

B. Hawthorne's belief that all men are by nature evil

C. that Hawthorne employed a dream vision to tell his story

D. that Puritans of Hawthorne's time usually wore black clothes

48. Theodore Dreiser was once criticized for his____________ in Style，but as a true artist his strength just lies in that his style is very serious and well calculated to achieve the thematic ends he sought.

A. crudeness

B. elegance

C. conciseness

D. subtlety

49. Almost all Faulkner’s heroes turned out to be tragic because_____________.

A. all enjoyed living in the declining American South

B. none of them was conditioned by the civilization and Social institutions

C. most of them were prisoners of the past

D. none were successful in their attempt to explain the inexplicable

50. Yank, the protagonist of Eugene O’Neill’s play The Hairy Ape,talked to the gorilla and set it free because____.

A. he was mad，mistaking a beast for a human

B. he was told by the white young lady that he was like a beast and he wanted to

see how closely he resembled the gorilla

C. he was caged with the gorilla after he insulted an aristocratic stroller

D. he could feel the kinship only with the beast

51. In__________, Robert Frost compares life to a journey, and he is doubtful whether he will regret his choice or not when he is old, because the choice has made all the difference.

A. “After Apple-Picking”

B. “The Road NOt Taken”

C. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

D. “Fire and Ice”

52. Though Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were romantic poets in theme and technique, they differ from each other in a variety of ways. For one thing, whereas Whitman likes to keep his eye on human Society at large, Dickinson often addresses such issues as_______, immortality, religion, love and nature.

A. progress

B. freedom

C. beauty

D. death

53. The Romantic writers would focus on all the following issues EXCEPT the_______

in the American literary history．

A. individual feeling

B. survival of the fittest

C. strong imagination

D. return to nature

54. Generally speaking，all those writers with a naturalistic approach to human reality

tend to be_____________.

A. transcendentalists

B. optimists

C. pessimists

D. idealists

55. With Howells, James, and Mark Twain active on the literary scene, ______became

the major trend in American literature in the seventies and eighties of the 19th century．

A. Sentimentalism

B. Romanticism

C. Realism

D. Naturalism

56. American writers after World War I self-consciously acknowledged that they were(a)

“_______,” devoid of faith and alienated from the Western civilization．

A. Lost Generation

B. Beat Generation

C. Sons of Liberty

D. Angry Young Men

57. Hester Prynne, Dimmesdale, Chillingworth and Pearl are most likely Characters in_______.

A. The House of the Seven Gables

B. The Scarlet Letter

C. The Portrait of a Lady

D. The pioneers

58. In his realistic fiction, Henry James's primary concern is to present the_________.

A. inner life of human beings

B. American Civil War and its effects

C. life on the Mississippi River

D. Calvinistic view of original Sin

59. Which of the following statements about E. Grierson, the protagonist in Faulkner's

Story “A Rose for Emily,” is NOT true?

A. She has a distorted personality.

B. She is physically deformed and paralyzed.

C. She is the symbol of the old values of the South.

D. She is the victim of the past glory.

60. Which of the following is NOT the virtue that Franklin enumerated in his The Autobiography?

A. Temperance

B. Humanity (Humility)

C. Frugality

D. Immoderation

61. American Romanticism stretches from the end of the ________ century through the outbreak of ______.

A. 18th, the Civil War

B. 18th, the War of Independence

C. 19th, WWI

D. 19th, WWII

62. _________ be lieves that the chief aim of literary creation is beauty, and “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”A. Walt Whitman B. Edgar Allen Poe

C. Anne Bradstreet

D. Ralph Waldo Emerson

63. In Emily Dickinson’s Because I Could Not Stop for Death, ______________.

A. death is personified as a devil

B. death is described as the tragic end of a person’s life

C. death is a stage of life and it leads people to the Heaven of immortality

D. death is described as a beautiful girl who couldn’t find her final destination

64. Which is generally regarded as the manifesto and the Bible of American Transcendentalism?

A. Thoreau’s Walden

B.Emerson’s Nature

C. Poe’s Poetic Principle

D. Thoreau’s Nature

65. Henry David Thoreau’s work, ________, has always been regarded as a

masterpiece of the New England Transcendental Movement.

A. Walden

B. The Pioneers

C. Nature

D. "Song of Myself"

66. ‘Leaves of Grass’ commands great attention because of its uniquely poetic

embodiment of________, which are written in the founding documents of both the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War.

A. the democratic ideals

B. the romantic ideals

C. the self-reliance spirits

D. the religious ideals

67. ________is the author of the work “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.

A. Washington Irving

B. James Joyce

C. Walt Whitman

D. William Butler Yeats

68. After "The Adventure of Tom Sawyer", Twain gives a literary independence to Tom’s buddy Huck in a book called_________, and the book from which "all modern American literature comes".

A. Life on the Mississippi River

B. The Gilded Age

C. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

D. The Sun Also Rises

69. The greatest work written by Theodore Dreiser is__________.

A. Sister Carrie

B. An American Tragedy

C. The Financier

D. The Titan

70. We can perhaps summarize that Walt Whitman’s poems are characterized by all the following features except that they are _______________.

A. conversational and crude

B. lyrical and well-structured

C. simple and rather crude

D. free-flowing

71. Who exerts the single most important influence on literary naturalism, of which Theodore Dreiser and Jack London are among the best representative writers?

A. Freud

B. Darwin.

C. W.

D. Howells. D. Emerson

72. Mark Twain, one of the greatest 19th century American writers, is well known for his ____.

A. international theme

B. waste-land imagery

C. local color

D. symbolism

73. At the beginning of Faulkner’s A Rose For Emily, there is a detailed description of Emily’s old house. The purpose of such description is to imply that the person living in it ____________.

A. is a wealth lady

B. has good taste

C. is a prisoner of the past

D. is a conservative aristocrat

74. Most of Herman Melville’s novels are based on sea voyages and sea adventures. Which of the following is not the case?

A. Typee.

B. Moby-Dick.

C. Omoo.

D. The Confidence-Man

75. In Henry James’ Daisy Miller, the author tries to portray the young woman as an embodiment of _______________.

A. the force of convention

B. the free spirit of the New World

C. the decline of aristocracy

D. the corruption of the newly rich

76. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both ..."

In the above two lines of Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, the poet, by implication, was referring to _______.

A. a travel experience

B. a marriage decision

C. a middle-age crisis

D. one’s course of life

77. The Transcendentalists believe that, first, nature is ennobling, and second, the individual is ____________.

A. insignificant

B. vicious by nature

C. divine

D. forward-looking

78. The Publication of ______established Emerson as the most eloquent spokesman of New England Transcendentalism.

A. Nature

B. Self-Reliance

C. The American Scholar

D. The Over-Soul

79. In Robert Frost’s famous poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", there

are four lines like these: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep,/ And miles to go before I sleep”. The second sleep refers to______.

A. die

B. calm down

C. fall into sleep

D. stop walking