natural speech. Walt Whitman’s leaves of grass is , perhaps, the most notable example.
2 Soliloquy
Soliloquy, in drama, means a moment when a character is alone and speaks his or her thoughts aloud. The line “to be, or not to be, that is the question”, which begins the famous soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
3 Metaphysical poetry
Metaphysical poetry is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. With a rebellious spirit, the Metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry. The diction is simple as compared with that of the Elizabethan or the Neoclassical periods, and echoes the words and cadences of common speech. The imagery is drawn from actual life.
4 Local Colorism
Generally speaking, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions, they worked from personal experience to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the local. Major local colorist is Mark Twain.
5 Point of View
Point of view can be divided by the narrator’s relationship with the character, represented by the grammatical person: the first-person narrative, the third-person narrative, and omniscient narrator.
Ⅲ Answering the following questions
1 How do you know about Renaissance? Give a summery about English literature in the period?
The Renaissance refers to the period between 14th----mid-17th century. It first started in Italy. 2. The Renaissance means rebirth or revival----the discovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture. 3. In essence, The Renaissance is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and scholars tried to get rid of the old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie/middle class, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of Roman Catholic Church. 4. Humanism is the essence of Renaissance -----Man is the measure of all things. The humanism exalted/praised human nature and emphasized the dignity of human beings and the present life. They thought man had the right to enjoy the beauty of life and had the ability to perfect himself and made wonders, which got ready for the appearance of the great Elizabethan writers in Britain. Poetry and drama were the most outstanding literary forms. 5. Shakespeare, Marlowe and Francis Bacon etc. were the remarkable representatives of the English Renaissance.
2. People always say that: \and to the members of his class\do you understand this sentence? Please explain it with the character of him.
1) In most of his works, Defoe gave his praise to the hard-working, sturdy middle class and showed his sympathy for the lower-class people. Robinson Crusoe was such a character. 2) Robison goes out to sea, gets shipwrecked and marooned/landed on a lonely island, struggles to live for 24 years there and finally is saved by a ship and returns to England. During the period Robinson leads a harsh and lonely life and survives by growing corps, taming animals, etc. growing from a naive young man into a hardened man. 3) With a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage and persistence in struggling against nature, Crusoe becomes the prototype / representative of the empire builder, the pioneer colonist.．4) In the novel, Defoe glorified human labor and the puritan fortitude which the middle class praised highly, so he can be regarded as a spokesman of the bourgeois.
3 How do you know the naturalistic idea of Hardy?
The tragic sense is the keynote of Hardy’s novels, and he is a nostalgic author. Hardy’s novels always set in Wessex, the fictional primitive and crude region, which is threatened by the invading capitalism, expressing the conflict between the traditional and the modern, the old and the modern. Man’s fate is tragic with born, driven by the force of the nature of outside and inside, and man is bound by his inherent nature and hereditary traits which prompt him to go and search for happiness or success, and set him in conflict with the environment; we can see he is influenced greatly by Darwin’s theory “survival of the fittest”. Man proves to be incompetent/impotent before Fate, and he seldom escapes his destiny. The pessimistic view of life predominates most works of Hardy, which earns him the name of a naturalistic writer. Hardy is noted for the rustic dialect and a poetic flavor, so he is also called local-colorist.
4 Analyze about \
Answer: \ 1) The poem presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation; 2) It reflects the mood of disillusionment, frustration, and despair of the whole post-war generation; 3) It concerns with the spirit breakup that man has lost his meaning, significance, and purpose of life; 4) The poem derogated/criticized the civilized world for its horror, menace, anguish and futility.
5. Explain the theory of Transcendentalism, then list its important author and works. Answer: Transcendentalism is a very important theory in American Romanticism, its main ideas are: 1) Man has the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or the ability of getting knowledge transcending the senses; 2) Nature is ennobling and individual is divine, therefore, man should be self-reliant. 3) Man is divine/holy and perfectible and man can trust himself to decide what is right and act accordingly; (but to Hawthorne and Melville man is a sinner); 4) Universe is over-soul -a symbol of the spirit, God or the universe, there is an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal \-unity of Nature. 5) The important authors are: Emerson (The American Scholar) and Thoreau. 6) \works, is called the unofficial manifesto for the club.
2009年华北电力大学871语言学及文学考研真题
