英美文学考前必背

英美文学考前必背题精选

1.What makes Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn more than a child's adventure story? Briefly discuss the question from THREE of the following aspects: the setting, the language, the character（s）, the theme and the style.

[参考答案]

A.Setting: In the novel Mark Twain recreates a small-town world of America and presents the local color.

nguage: He uses simple, direct language faithful to the colloquial speech, the vernacular language of the local people.

C.Character（s）: The author recreates two rebels and fugitives running away from civilization, especially Huckleberry Finn, an innocent boy who refuses to accept the conventional village morality.

D.Theme: The novel is a criticism of social injustice, hypocrisy, conservativeness and

narrow-mindedness of the American small town society.

E.Style: The novel employs a humorous style of narration and is also highly symbolic with the central symbol.

2.A possible theme of James Joyce's short story "Araby" is disillusionment. Briefly discuss the symbolism Joyce employs in presenting this theme.

[参考答案]

A."Short days of winter," "silent" the street of "blind end," "dark muddy lanes" with "feeble lanterns," "dark dripping gardens," and many others foretell the inevitable failure of the boy's

attempt to reach his desire.

B.Mangan's sister, for whom the boy had tender feelings, symbolizes hope/aspiration, but she was symbolically confined（"have a retreat in her convent"）.

C. The journey to the bazaar is a quest for the fulfillment of the aspiration, but the journey was "intolerably" delayed, and when the boy got to the bazaar, half of it was already dark. What's more, the young lady at the door of a stall was "not encouraging," and spoke to the boy "out of sense of duty." When the upper part of the hall was completely dark, the boy's disillusionment was announced. And thus, "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."

3.Ezra Pound is one of the pioneers in modern poetry. What is the poetic school of which he is a chief member?

What is Pound's representative work of many years of poetic creation? What is the title of his frequently quoted one-image poem? Pound has translated some literary works from two great ancient civilizations.

One is Greece. What is the other? How do you understand his famous comment "The image itself is the speech"?

[参考答案]

A.Imagism.

B.The Cantos.

C."In a Station of the Metro"

D.Chian.

E.Pound means that image should not be ornaments only, but should be the focus of poetic expression. By emphasizing the exterior object, Pound hopes to avoid moralizing and achieve