英美文学复习资料

Literature RevisionI. Filling1. After his death, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow became the only American tobe honored with a bust in the Poet‟s Corner of Westminster Abbey.2.American writers of the first postwar era self-consiciously acknowledged thatthey were a “Lost Generation”,devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization .3.In the novel The Old Man and the Sea , Hemingway portaryed an oldfisherman named Santiago ,who shows triumphant even in defeat.4.Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.5. Phlilip Freneau has been called the “Father of AmericaPoetry.6.As T.S Eliot declared, he followed strictly the advice of hisclose frien d Ezra Pound in cutting and concentrating TheWaste Land.7.Pracitical yet idealistic ,hard-working and emormously successful,Fraklin reached his ealy life in his famous Autobiography.8.Edgar Allan Poe can somewhat be called “the Father ofthe American detective story.II.Works and AuthorsProseOf Plymounth Plantation: William BradfordAutobiography: Benjamin FranklinCommon Sense: Thomas PaineThe Sketch Book: Washington IrvingCivil Disobedience: Henry David ThoreauThe House of the Seven Gabies: Nathaniel HawthorneUncle Tom‟s Cabin : Harriet Beecher StoweDaisy Miller: Henry JamesThe Call of the Wild: Jack LondonSister Carrie: Theodore DreiserThe Great Gatsby: F.Scott.FitzgeraldThe Sound and the Furry: William FaulknerA Farewell to Arms: Ernest HemingwayThe Grapes of Wrath: John SteinbeckPoetryThanatopsis: William Cullen BryantThe people,yes: Carl SandburgHarmonium: Wallace StevensThe Waste Land: T.S.EliotIII. Literary Terms:Poetry/Prose1. Free verseFree verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conventional rules of meter.1）Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19th century. 2）Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead thee rhythms of natural speech .3).Walt Whitman‟s Leaves of Grass is perhaps the most notable example.2. American Romanticism1).It is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature that stretches from the end of the eighteenth century through the the outbreak of the Civil War.2).Being a period of the great flowering of America literature.it is aslo called the “the American Renaissance”.3).American romantic works emphasize the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature.The strong tendency to eulogize the individual and the common man was typical of this period.Most importanly ,the writings of American Romanticism are typically American Works concentrate on unique characteristics of the American land,such as Cooper‟s Leatherstocking Tales and Hawthorne‟s The Scarlet Letter.4)New England Transcendentalism is the summit of American Romanticism.The New England poets,such as Longfellow and Bryant are most famous.3. American Realism1.) In American literature,the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to anend .It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism.2.)Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange tward a faithful renderingof the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived .3.)Realists looked for truth in everyday truths and concerned with social andpsychological problems,revealing the frustrations of characters in an environment of sordidness and depravity4.) They aslo express the concern for common place and the low ,and it offer an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.5. Realist literature finds the drama and tension beneath the ordinary surface of life.These are three masters as William Dean Howells ,Henry James and Mark Twain.VI.Questions and Answers1. Please interpret Rober Frost‟s The Road Not Taken1) This poem is written on classic five-line stanzas,with the rhyme scheme a-b-a-a-b and conversational rhythmn.The poem seems to be about the poet. Walking in the woods in autumn,choosing which road he should follow on his walk. In reality,it concerns the important decisions which one must make in life,when one must give up once desirable thing in order to possess another.Then,whatever the outcome,one must accept the consequences of one‟s choice for it is not possible to go back and have another chance to choose differently.The poet seems to be giving a suggestion to the reader “Make good choice of your life>”2).In the poem,the poet hesitates for a long time,wondering which road to take,because they are both pretty.In the end ,he follows the one which seems to have fewer travelers on it. Symbolically he chose to follow an unusual,solitary life. Perhaps he was speaking of his choice to become a poet rather than some commoner profession. But he always remembers the road which he might have taken,and which would have give him a different kind of life.2. Whitman is one of the representative poets in America. He employs brand-new means in his poetry.What are the features of his poetry?1).His poetice style is marked by the use of poetic “I”2)He adopted “free verse”,poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.3).The images in his poems are unconventional.4).He has a strong tendency to use oral English.5).His vocabulary is amazing,powerful colourful,rarely used words of foreign origins,some even wrong.6).Parallelism and phonetic recurrence are used at the beginning of the lines.7).The sentences in his poems always use catalogue technique ling list of names,long list of names,long poem lines.3. Mark Twain presented the 19th century America in his own unique way. Discuss Twain…s art of fiction: the setting, the language, and the characters,etc; based on his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.1). The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel in which Twain shows a panorama of pre-war America and contrasts innocence with experience,nature with culture,and wilderness with civilization,thus exposing hypocrisies,dishonesties and pervasive cruelties.2) Setting :In the novel Mark Twain recreates a small-town world of America and presents the local color.3).Language:He uses simple,direct language faithful to the colloquial speech,the vernacular language of the local people.4).Character(s.): The author recreats two rebels and fugitives running away from innocent boy who refuses to accept the conventional village morality.5).Theme: The novel employs a humorous style of narration and is aslo highly symbolic with the central symbol.The novel is a criticism of social injustice,hypocrisy,conservativeness and narrow-mindedness of the American small town society.In short, the novel is not only a child‟s adventure story,but aslo Twain‟s masterpiece which has shaped the world‟s view of America and proved a milestone in American literature.4. What are the characteristics of America naturalism? Please discuss the above question in relation to the basic principles1).The most familiar in American naturalism is the theme of human,especially as explanation o f sexual desire.2).Artistically naturalistic writings are usually unpolished in language,lacking in academic skills and awkward in structure.3).Philosophically, the naturalists believe that the real and true is always partially hidden from the eyes of the individual or beyond his control.4).The author‟s tone in writing becomes less serious and loss aympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic.5. The Great Gatsby is a masterpiece in American literature. Who is the author? What is the main concept of the work?Is there any realtionship between The Great Gatsby and the American Dream?1).The Great Gatsby is written by F.S.Fitzgerald .The novel evokes a haunting mood of glamorous,wild time that seemingly will never come again.2).Besides ,the loss of an ideal and the disillusitonment that comes with the failure are represented fully in the personal tragedy of a yong man whose “incorruptible dream” is “smashed into pieces by the relentless reality”.3).The protagonist Gatsby is a mythical figure whose intensity of dream stands for a state of mind that embodies America itself.Gatsby is the last of the romantic heroes, whose energy and sense of commitment take him in search of his personal grail,Gastby‟s failure symbolizes to a great extent the end of the American Dream.6. Make a brief comment on Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.1.Hester is passionated but also strong—she endures years of shame andscorn .She equals both her husband and her lover in her intelligence and thoughtfulness .Her alienation puts her in the position to make acute observations about her community ,particularly about its treatment of women.2.Hester was a strong-willed and impetuous young woman---She remembersher parents as loving guides who frequently had to restrain her incautious behavior.The fact that she has an affair aslo suggests that she once had a passionate nature.3.Hester is portrayed as an intelligent,capable,but not necessarilyextraordinary woman .It is the extraordinary circumstances shaping her that make her such an important figure.。