英美文学试题

2011年7月试题

1.All of Charles Dickens’ works, with the exception of _________, present a criticism of the more complicated and yet most fundamental social institutions and morals of the Victorian England.

A. Bleak House

B. Hard Times

C. Great Expectations

D. A Tale of Two Cities

2. From ____________ on, the tragic sense becomes the keynote of Thomas Hardy’s novels, the conflict between the traditional and the moden is brought to the center of the stage.

A. The Return of the Native

B. The Mayor of Casterbridge

C. Tess of the D’Urbervilles

D. Jude the Obscure

3. George Bernard Shaw’s play ____________ shows his almost nihilistic bitterness on the subjects of the cruelty and madness of World War I and the aimlessness and disillusion of the young.

A. Getting Married

B. Too True to Be Good

C. Widowers’ Houses

D. The Apple Cart

4. It was only after the publication of ____________ that D.H. Lawrence was recognized as a prominent novelist.

A. The Trespasser

B. The White Peacock

C. Sons and Lovers

D. The Rainbow

5. T. S. Eliot’s poem ____________ is heavily indebted to James Joyce in terms of the stream - of -consciousness technique, also a prelude to The Waste Land.

A. “Prufrock”

B. “Gerontion”

C. The Hollow Men

D. Lyrical Ballads

6. Charlotte Brontё’s ____________ is noted for its sharp criticism of the existing society,

e. g. the religious hypocrisy of charity institutions.

A. The Professor

B. Wuthering Heights

C. Villette

D. Jane Eyre

7. Shelley’s greatest achievement is his four - act poetic drama ____________ , which is an ex- ultant work in praise of humankind’s potential.

A. Adonais

B. Queen Mab

C. Prometheus Unbound

D. Kubla Khan

8. Among the Romantic poets _________ is regarded as a “worshipper of nature”.

A. William Blake

B. William Wordsworth

C. George Gordon Byron

D. John Keats

9. The most perfect example of the verse drama after Greek style in English is John Milton’s ____________.

A. Paradise Lost

B. Paradise Regained

C. Samson Agonistes

D. Areopagitica

10. The major theme of Jane Austen’s novels is____________.

A. love and money

B. money and social status

C. social status and marriage

D. love and marriage

11. T. S. Eliot’s most important single poem ____________ has been hailed as a landmark and a model of the 20th-century English poetry.

A. The Hollow Men

B. The Waste Land

C. Murder in the Cathedral

D. Ash Wednesday

12. According to the subjects, William Wordsworth’s short poems can be classified into two groups, poems about____________.

A. nature and human life

B. happiness and childhood

C. symbolism and imagination

D. nature and commonlife

13. Among the following writers ____________ is considered to be the best -known English dramatist since Shakespeare.

A. Oscar Wilde

B. John Galsworthy

C. W. B. Yeats

D. George Bernard Shaw

14. William Blake’s ____________ composed during the climax of the French Revolution plays the double role both as a satire and a revolutionary prophecy.

A. The Book of Urizen

B. The Book of Los

C. Poetical Sketches

D. Marriage of Heaven and Hell

15. Charles Dickens’ works are characterized by a mingling of ____________ and pathos.

A. metaphor

B. passion

C. satire

D. humor

16. Daniel Defoe describes ____________ as a typical English middle -class man of the eigh- teenth century, the very prototype of the empire builder, the pioneer colonist.

A. Robinson Crusoe

B. Moll Flanders

C. Gulliver

D. Tom Jones

17. In Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels, there is an apparent ____________ touch in his description of the simple and beautiful though primitive rural life.

A. nostalgic

B. tragic

C. romantic

D. ironic

18. Of all the eighteenth - century novelists ____________ was the first to set out, both in the-ory and practice, to write specially a “comic epic in prose”, the first to give the modern novel its structure and style.

A. Thomas Gray

B. Richard Brinsley Sheridan

C. Jonathan Swift

D. Henry Fielding

19. Shakespeare’s authentic non-dramatic poetry consists of two long narrative poems: Venus and Adonis and____________.

A. Julius Caesar

B. The Winter’s Tale

C. The Rape of Lucrece

D. The Two gentlemen of Verona

20. John Milton’s ____________ is probably his most memorable prose work, which is a great plea for freedom of the press.

A. Paradise Lost

B. Paradise regained

C. Areopagitica

D. Lycidas

21.D. H. Lawrence’s novels ____________ are generally regarded as his masterpieces.

A. The Rainbow; Women in Love

B. The Rainbow; Sons and Lovers

C. Sons and Lovers; Lady Chatterley’s Lover

D. Women in Love; Lady Chatterley’s Lover

22. The best representatives of the English humanists are Thomas More, Christopher Mar-lowe and____________.

A. William Shakespeare

B. John Milton

C. Henry Fielding

D. Jonathan Swift

23. Mark Twain’s particular concern about the local character of a region came about as “local colorism,” a unique variation of American literary____________.

A. romanticism

B. nationalism

C. modernism

D. realism

24. As a poet with a strong sense of mission, Walt Whitman devoted all his life to the creation of the “single” poem,____________.

A. Drum Taps

B. North of Boston

C. A Boy’s Will

D. Leaves of Grass

25. William Faulkner creates his own mythical kingdom that mirrors not only the decline of the ____________ society of America but also the spiritual wasteland of the whole American society.

A. Eastern

B. Western

C. Southern

D. Northern

26. In his final years, Herman Melville turned again to prose fiction and wrote what is probably his second famous work, ____________ , which was published after his death.

A. Billy Budd

B. Redburn

C. Moby - Dick

D. Typee

27. The Sun Also Rise casts light on a whole generation after ____________ and the effects of the war by way of a vivid portrait of “the Lost Generation. ”

A. the Spanish Civil War

B. the American- Mexican War

C. WWI 流落在法国的一群美国年轻人。他们在第一次世界大战后，迷失了前进的方向，战争给他们造成了生理上和心理上的巨大伤害，他们非常空虚、苦恼和忧郁。他们想有所作为，但战争使他们精神迷惘，尔虞我诈的社会又使他们非常反感，他们只能在沉沦中度日，美国作家斯坦因由此称他们为“迷惘的一代”。

D. WWII

28. Herman Melville went to the South Seas on a whaling ship in 1841, where he gained the first -hand information about whaling that he used later in____________.

A. Typee

B. Redburn

C. Moby - Dick

D. Omoo

29. According to ____________ , the life - death cycle, the spring and winter of the earth, the birth and death of the animals is reality.

A. Theodore Dreiser

B. William Faulkner

C. Henry James

D. F·Scott Fitzgerald

30. “Though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity. ” This is an outlook towards life that ____________ had been trying to illustrate in his works.

A. F·Scott Fitzgerald

B. Ernest Hemingway

C. Theodore Dreiser

D. William Faulkner

31. More than five hundred poems ____________ wrote are about nature, in which his (her) general skepticism about the relationship between man and nature is well -expressed.

A. Robert Frost

B. Emily Dickinson

C. Ezra Pound

D. Walt Whitman

32. In 1954, the Nobel Prize for literature was granted to ____________ , one of the greatest of American writers.

A. Ernest Hemingway

B. Robert Frost

C. Henry James

D. Theodore Dreiser

33. North of Boston is described by Robert Frost as “a book of poople,” which shows a brilliant insight into ____________ character and the background that formed it.

A. Eastern

B. Western

C. Southern

D. New England

34. Walt Whitman is radically innovative in terms of the form of his poetry. What he prefers for his new poetic feelings is “ ____________ ”.

A. standardized rhyming

B. regular rhyming

C. free verse

D. strict verse

35. Henry James’fame generally rests upon his novels and stories with the____________ theme.

A. international

B. local

C. colonial

D. post-modern

36. The Financier, The Titan and The Stoic by Theodore Dreiser are called his “Trilogy of _________. ”

A. Hatred

B. Death

C. Desire

D. Fate

37. In 1920, F·Scott Fitzgerald’s first novel ____________ was published, which was, to some extent, his own story.

A. This Side of Paradise

B. Tales of the Jazz Age

C. All the Sad Young Men

D. Taps at Reveille

38. In 1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne published Twice - Told Tales, a collection of ____________ which attracted critical attention.

A. poems

B. short stories

C. essays

D. plays

39. William Faulkner set most of his works in the American ____________ , with his emphasis on the ________subjects and consciousness.

A. North... Northern

B. East... Eastern

C. West... Western

D. South... Southern

40. The House of the Seven Gables was based on the tradition of a curse pronounced on ____________’s family when his great - grandfather was a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials.

A. Nathaniel Hawthorne

B. Washington Irving

C. Ezra Pound

D. Walt Whitman

PART TWO (60 POINTS)

II. Reading Comprehension (16 points in all, 4 for each)

Read the quoted parts carefully and answer the questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

41. “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. ”

Questions:

A. Who’s the poet of the quoted stanza, and what’s the title of the poem?

B. What does the word “this” in the last line refer to?

C. What idea do the quoted lines express?

42. “Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendor, valley, rock or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep !

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!”

( From Wordsworth’s sonnet Composed upon Westminster Bridge)

Questions:

A. What does this sonnet describe?

B. What does the phrase “mighty heart” refer to?

C. The sonnet follows strictly the Italian form. What is the feature of the Italian form of sonnet?

43. “ 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. ”

Questions:

A. Who’s the poet of the quoted stanza, and what’s the title of the poem?

B. What does the word “sleep” mean?

C. What idea do the four lines express?

44. “ I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass. ”

( From Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself)

Questions:

A. Who does “myself ” refer to?

B. How do you understand the line “I loafe and invite my soul” ?

C. What does “a spear of summer grass” symbolize?

III. Questions and Answers (24 points in all, 6 for each)

Give a brief answer to each of the following questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

45. What’s the theme of the poem Paradise Lost? What’s the author’s intention to create it and the implication that the poem expresses?

46. The Waste Land is T. S. Eliot’s most important single poem. What’s the theme of the poem?

47. In American literature, Emily Dickinson’s poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way. What are the features of Dickinson’s poems?

48. What’s the theme of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby?

IV. Topic Discussion(20 points in all, 10 for each)

Write no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

49. Discuss Charles Dickens’art of fiction: the setting, the character- portrayal, the language, etc. , based on his novel Oliver Twist.

50. Summarize Ernest Hemingway’s artistic features.

2010年7月试题

1. T. S. Eliot’s ______ is a poem of dramatic monologue and a prelude to The Waste Land, helping to point up the continuity of Eliot’s thinking.

A. “Prufrock”

B. “Gerontion”

C. The Hollow Men

D. Four Quartets

2. Defoe’s group of four novels are the first literary works devoted to the study of problems of the lower-class people. They are the following EXCEPT ______.

A. Captain Singleton

B. Moll Flanders

C. Roxana

D. Robinson Crusoe

3. Charles Dickens’ novel, ______, is famous for its vivid descriptions of the work-house and life of the underworld in the nineteenth-century London.

A. The Pickwick Paper

B. Oliver Twist

C. David Copperfield

D. Nicholas Nickleby

4. D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel is ______.

A. The Rainbow

B. Women in Love

C. Sons and Lovers

D. Lady Chatterley’s Lover

5. Jonathan Swift’s greatest satiric work is ______.

A. A Tale of a Tub

B. The Battle of the Books

C. Gulliver’s Travels

D. A Modest Proposal

6. Dickens’best- depicted characters are the following. EXCEPT ______.

A. innocent, virtuous, persecuted and helpless child characters

B. horrible and grotesque characters

C. broadly humorous or comical characters

D. simple, innocent and faithful women characters

7. George Bernard Shaw’s ______ explored his idea of “Life Force”, the power that would create superior beings to be equal to God and to solve all the social, moral, and metaphysical problems of human society.

A. Man and Superman

B. The Apple Cart

C. Pygmalion

D. Too True to Be Good

8. For his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel, ______ has been regarded as “Father of the English Novel”.

A. Daniel Defoe

B. Jonathan Swift

C. Henry Fielding

D. Oliver Goldsmith

9. Charlotte Bronte’s autobiograghical work ______ largely based on her experience in Brussels.

A. The Professor

B. Shirley

C. Villette

D. Jane Eyre

10. D. H. Lawrence’s artistic tendency is mainly ______ , which combines dramatic scenes with an authoritative commentary.

A. romanticism

B. realism

C. naturalism

D. modernism

11. In ______ opinion, human nature is seriously and premanently flawed. To better human life, enlightenment is needed, but to redress it is very hard.

A. Daniel Defoe’s

B. Charles Dickens’

C. Jonathan Swift’s

D. Henry Fielding’s

12. The major theme of Jane Austen’s novels is ______ toward which she holds on a practical idealism.

A. love and money

B. marriage and money

C. love and family

D. love and marriage

13. Hardy’s ______ is a fierce attack on the hypocritical morality of the bourgeois society and the capitalist invasion into the country and destruction of the English peasantry towards the end of the century.

A. Tess of the D’Urbervilles

B. The Mayor of Caste Bridge

C. The Return of the Native

D. Jude the Obscure

14. Henry Fielding adopted “______” to relate a story in his novel in which the author becomes the “all- knowing God”.

A. the first- person narration

B. the epistolary form

C. the picaresque form

D. the third -person narration

15. In ______ , Shelley created a Platonic symbol of the spirit of man, a force of beauty and regeneration.

A. “To a Skylark”

B. “The Cloud”

C. “Ode to Liberty”

D. Adonais

16. The success of ______ is also due to its introduction to the English novel the first

governess heroine.

A. The Professor

B. Jane Eyre

C. Wuthering Heights

D. Far from the Madding Crowd

17. John Milton’s ______ is the only generally acknowledged epic in English literature since Beowulf.

A. Paradise Lost

B. Paradise Regained

C. Samson Agonistes

D. Areopagitica

18. Wordsworth’s ______ is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature.

A. “To a Skylark”

B. “I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud”

C. “An Evening Walk”

D. “My Heart Leaps Up”

19. As the best of Shakespeare’s final romances, ______ is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life and society in his late years.

A. The Tempest

B. The Winter’s Tale

C. Cymbeline

D. The Rape of Lucrece

20. The major representatives of the poetic revolution in English Romantic period were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and ______.

A. William Blake

B. William Wordsworth

C. John Keats

D. Percy Bysshe Shelley 来源:

21. Samson Agonistes by ______ is the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English.

A. John Milton

B. William Blake

C. Henry Fielding

D. William Wordsworth

22. The declaration that “I know that This World is a World of IMAGINATION & Vision,”and that “The Nature of my work is visionary or imaginative” belongs to ______.

A. William Blake

B. William Wordsworth

C. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

D. George Gordon Byron

23. Two people could be “twain yet one” : their paths could be different, and yet they could achieve a kind of transcendent contact, ______ believed.

A. Walt Whitman

B. Ezra Pound

C. Washington Irving

D. Nathaniel Hawthorne

24. Most literary critics think that Fitzgerald is both an insider and an outsider of ______ with a double vision.

A. the Jazz Age

B. the Age of Reason and Revolution

C. the Babybooming Age

D. the Post- Modern Age

25. The Nobel Prize Committee highly praised ______ for “his powerful styleforming mastery of the art” of creating modern fiction.

A. T. S. Eliot

B. Ernest Hemingway

C. William Faulkner

D. Mark Twain

26. The attitude towards life that ______ had been trying to demonstrate in his works is known as “grace under pressure”.

A. William Faulkner

B. Theodore Dreiser

C. Ernest Hemingway

D. F·Scott Fitzgerald

27. In 1841, ______ went to the South Seas on a whaling ship, where he gained the first- hand information about whaling that he used later in Moby -Dick.

A. Herman Melville

B. Nathaniel Hawthorne

C. Robert Lee Frost

D.T.S. Eliot

28. In most of his writings, ______ deliberately broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present, in the way the montage does in a movie.

A. Walt Whitman

B. William Faulkner

C. Ernest Hemingway

D.F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. In 1950, one of the leading American writers ______ was awarded the Nobel Prize for the anti-racist Intruder in the Dust.

A. Robert Frost

B. Theodore Dreiser

C. William Faulkner

D.F. Scott Fitzgerald

30. Walt Whitman ’s ______ is a collection of poems incorporating his emotions and feelings before and during the Civil War when he stood firmly on the side of the North.

A. Leaves of Grass

B. “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”

C. “Song of Myself”

D. Drum Taps

31. It was his masterpiece The Great Gatsby that made ______ one of the greatest American novelists.

A. F. Scott Fitzgerald

B. William Faulkner

C. Ernest Hemmingway

D. Gertrude Steinbeck

32. The childhood of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the Mississippi is a record of a vanished way of life in the ______ Mississippi valley.

A. pre - War of Independence

B. post - War of Independence

C. pre - Civil War

D. post - Civil War

33. In Moby-Dick, for the character Ahab, the white whale represents only ______.

A. evil

B. nature

C. society

D. purity

34. Melville’s semi- autobiographical novel, ______, concerns the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors.

A. Moby-Dick

B. Redburn

C. Mardi

D. Typee

35. Closely related to Dickinson’s religious poetry are her poems concerning ______, ranging over the physical as well as the psychological and emotional aspects of death.

A. love and nature

B. death and universe

C. death and immortality

D. family and happiness

36. The effect of Darwinist idea of “survival of the fittest”was shattering in ______ ’s fictional world of jungle, where “kill or to be killed” was the law.

A. Mark Twain

B. Henry James

C. Theodore Dreiser

D. Walt Whitman

37. Though Robert Frost’s subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in ______, he wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man’s life in his long poetic career.

A. the South

B. the West

C. England

D. New England

38. Like all naturalists, ______ was restrained from finding a solution to the social problems that appeared in his novels and accordingly almost all his works have tragic

endings.

A. Theodore Dreiser

B. Henry James

C. Washington Irving

D. Walt Whitman

39. “The Birthmark” drives home symbolically Hawthorne’s point that ______ is man’s birthmark, something he is born with.

A. purity

B. generosity

C. evil

D. love

40. The Blithedale Romance is a novel ______ wrote to reveal his own experiences on the Brook Farm and his own methods as a psychological novelist.

A. Herman Melville

B. Nathaniel Hawthorne

C. Washington Irving

D. Walt Whitman

41.“To be, or not to be —— that is the question;

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?”

Questions:

A. Who is the writer of this work? What’s the title of the work?

B. What does the phrase “to take arms against a sea of troubles ” mean?

C. How do you understand the quotation “T o be, or not to be -that is the question”?

42. “Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers”

(From Shelley’s“ Ode to the West Wind”)

Questions:

A. In what form is the poem written?

B. What does the quotation“ the sense faints picturing them” mean?

C. What idea does Shelley express in this poem?

43. “ We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess- in the Ring-

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain -

We Passed the Setting Sun- ”

( From Emily Dickinson’s poem Because I could not stop for Death)

Questions:

A. What does the phrase “Fields of Gazing Grain” symbolize?

B. What figure of speech is used in the poem?

C. What are Dickinson’s unique writing features?

44. (A lot of common objects have been enumerated in the previous lines, and here are the last two lines of the poem. )

“The horizon’s edge, the flying sea - crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud. These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day. ”

Questions:

A. Who is the author of this poem? What is the title of the poem?

B. What does the child stand for in the poem?

C. How do you understand “ These became part of the child” ?

Ⅲ. Questions and Answers (24 points in all, 6 for each)

Give a brief answer to each of the following questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

45. What are the features of George Bernard Shaw’s characterization in his plays?

46. Thomas Hardy is often regarded as a transitional writer. Some critics believe that he is emotionally traditional and intellectually advanced. How do you understand this idea? 47. What is the most famous theme in Henry James’s fiction? And what is his favourate approach in characterization, which makes him different from Mark Twain and W. D. Howlles as realists? Give two titles of his works of his first period in which this theme and this approach are employed.

48. “Young Goodman Brown”is one of Hawthorne’s most profound tales.

What is the allegorical meaning of Brown, the protagonist? What does Hawthorne set out to prove in this tale? How does Melville comment on Hawthorne’s manner of concerning with guilt and evil?

IV. Topic Discussion(20 points in all, 10 for each)

Write no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

49. Please elaborate Wordsworth’s theory of poetry, taking examples from the poems you have learned to support your ideas.

50. A Rose for Emily is one of Faulkner’s short stories. Discuss the character of Emily Grierson and how this character is depicted.