英美文学题库英美文学期末复习题

I. Choose the one that would best complete the statement below. (30 points, 2 points each) 1. ______ is regarded today as the national epic of the Anglo-Saxons. A. Beowulf B. The Canterbury Tales C. Don Juan D. Paradise Lost

2. John Dryden called ______ the father of English poetry. A. Geoffrey Chaucer B. Edmund Spencer C. John Milton D. John Donne 3. The Merchant of Venice is a ________.

A. tragedy B. comedy C. history play D. tragicomedy 4. Hamlet faces the dilemma between ______. A. action and mind B. dream and reality C. money and power D. hate and love 5. John Milton’s masterpiece is his ______.

A. Paradise Lost B. Paradise Regained C. Samson Agonistes D. Areopagitica

6. Robert Frost is a regional poet in the sense that his poems depict mostly ______. A. the frontier life B. The sea adventures

C. the Puritan community D. New England landscape 7. The novel ________ is not written by Henry James.

A. The Ambassadors B. The Wings of the Dove C. The Bostonians D. The Mysterious Stranger

8. In the 1920s decade, O’Neill established an international reputation with such plays as ______. A. The Emperor Jones B. Anna Christie C. The Hairy Ape D. all of the above

9. Fitzgerald’s fictional world is the best embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz Age, in which he shows a particular interest in ______ society.

A. the middle-class B. the upper-class C. the lower-middle-class D. the working-class

10. 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

11. The following are Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies except __________. A. Hamlet B. Othello C. Twelfth Night D. King Lear

12. __________ is a novella about a young American girl who gets “killed” by the winter in Rome, and it brought Henry James international fame for the first time.

A. The American B. The Europeans

C. Daisy Miller D. The Portrait of A lady 13. John Donne is the leading figure of ________. A. Lake Poets B. Graveyard School C. Satanic Poets D. Metaphysical School

14. In Jane Austen’s novels, life and human nature are exposed __________________. A. at moments of crisis B. during the battles C. in the most trivial incidents of everyday D. through the traveling

15. The following writers were awarded Nobel Prize for literature except ________. A. William Faulkner B. F. Scott Fitzgerald

C. John Steinbeck D. Ernest Hemingway

II. Complete each of the following statements with a proper word or a phrase. (30 points, 2 points each) 16. Edmund Spenser’s masterpiece is _________, a great poem of its age.

17. Marlowe’s greatest achievement lies in that he perfected _________ and made it the principle medium of English drama.

18. As a lexicographer, Samuel Johnson distinguished himself as the author of the first English dictionary by an Englishman: _________, a gigantic task which Johnson undertook single-handedly and finished in over seven years. 19. Pope’s An Essay on Criticism is a didactic poem written in _________.

20. _________ has been regarded by some as “Father of the English Novel” for his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel.

21. Mark Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories. This particular concern about the local character of a region came about as _____________, a unique variation of American literary realism. 22. Pound was the leader of a new movement in Poetry which he called “_________” movement.

23. Dreiser broke away form the genteel tradition of literature and dramatized the life in a very _________ way

24. One of the most familiar themes in American naturalism is the theme of human _________, especially as an explanation of sexual desire.

25. Two major figures of black fiction in America are ________ and Ralph Ellison.

26. Apart from Darwinism, the two thinkers whose ideas had the greatest impact on the Modernism period were the German ________ and the Austrian Sigmund Freud.

27. With the Norman Conquest starts the ________ Period in English Literature. 28. Emily Bronte’s masterpiece is ___________

29. Ulysses gives an account of man’s life during one day in ________

30. In the mid-1950s and early 1960s, there appeared a group of young novelists and playwrights with lower-middle-class or working class background, they demonstrated a particular disillusion over the depressing situation in Britain and launched a bitter protest against the outmoded social and political values in their society. They were known as “_______________”.

III. For each of the quotations listed below please give the name of the author and the title of the literary work from which it is taken and then briefly interpret it. (18 points, 6 points each) 31． “Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

32. His father picked the baby up and slapped it to make it breathe and handed it to the old woman. “See, it’s a boy, Nick,” he said. “How do you like being an internee?”

Nick said, “All right.” He was looking away so as not to see what his father was doing.

33. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;”

IV. Give brief answers to the following questions. (22 points, 11 points each)

34. Why do we say Hawthorne is a master of symbolism? Give at least two examples of symbols from The Scarlet Letter.

35. Why is Thomas Hardy often regarded as a transitional writer?

期末复习题答案

I．1 A 2 A 3 B 4 A 5 A 6.D 7.D 8. D 9. B 10. C 11 C 12 C 13 D 14 C 15 C

II．16. The Faerie Queene 17. the blank verse 18. A Dictionary of the English Language 19. heroic couplets 20. Henry Fielding 21. local colorism 22. Imagist 23. realistic 24. bestiality 25. Richard Wright 26. Karl Marx 27. Medieval 28. Wuthering Heights 29. Dublin 30. The Angry Young Man

III．31. William Shakespeare: Sonnet 18. A nice summer’s day is usually transient, but the beauty in poetry can last forever. 32. This is from “Indian Camp,” one of the fourteen short stories collected under the title of In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway.

Nick watches his father deliver an Indian woman of a baby by Caesarian section. This incident brings the boy into contact with something that is perplexing and unpleasant, and is actually Nick’s initiation into the pain and violence of birth and death.

33．Robert Lee Frost, “The Road not Taken”.

The speaker tells us how the course of his life was determined when he came upon two roads that diverged in a wood.

IV．34. Hawthorne is a master of symbolism, which he took from the Puritan tradition and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form.

The symbol can be found everywhere in his writing, and his masterpiece provides the most conclusive proof. By using Pearl as a thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community. With the scarlet Letter A as the biggest symbol of all, Hawthorne proves himself to be one of the best symbolists. As a key to the whole novel, the letter A takes on different layers of symbolic meanings as the plot develops, but people come up with different interpretations and they do not know which one is definite. The scarlet letter A is ambiguous. And the ambiguity is one of the salient characteristics of Hawthorne’s art.

35. Hardy is regarded as a transitional writer not only because he lived at the turn of the century, but more importantly because there is the influence on him from both.

He accepted the ideas of Darwin, and was influenced by Spencer, both of which were great thinkers of his time. But in his Wessex novels, there is an apparent nostalgic touch of the primitive rural life, which was gradually disappearing as England marched into an industrial country.

So, on the one hand, there is bitter criticism of his towards the social reality in the Victorian age, on the other hand, the belief that man’s fate is predeterminedly tragic colours mysteriously his characters who are always impotent before the half-blind and supernatural force. The conflicts between old and new, between the rural value and the utilitarian commercialism, between social moral and human passion are prints of longings for some better past while living in modern times.