英国文学选读第四版复习资料

Charles Dickens

1.Make a brief introduction to the three main characters.

Dombey, Edith and Carker, are vividly described in the novel Dombey and Son.

The writer is Charles Dickens.

Dombey is a heartless capitalist who thinks of everything in terms of cash, even in his relations with the members of his family. He is proud of his wealth and is devoted to the gods of wealth and power.

Edith is also proud. She is very handsome, very haughty, and very willful. Her pride is quite different from that of Dombey. Her pride is the one weapon of self-defense for a hurt and tormented soul in her struggle against the rule of money. Edith is a tragedy from first to last—a fine spirit that has been allowed no chance of unfettered development under capitalism, and who, in the end, wins only the peace of a voluntary, solitary confinement.

Carker the villain, whole smooth tongue covers alago-like malevolence, stands as a type of social evil, to which the capitalist system lends a cover of virtue, and which it usually rewards with success. Though Carker is killed in an accident, he has done the maximum of mischief during his lifetime. These types of characters are all products of the bourgeois society.

2.Tell the characteristics of Alfred Tennyson’s poetry

----- Dramatic monologue (Robert Browning)

Tennyson has a total mastery of the sounds and rhythms of the English language.

Tennyson has a genius for evoking moods and states of mind in his poems. He is able to create a sense of nostalgia, a wistful longing for the past or for remote experiences. No English poet surpasses Tennyson at linking descriptions of nature or setting to state of mind. Some of his poems deal with the main political, religious and scientific issues of his day. His poems reflect his conservative ideas and idealization of the bourgeois social reality.

https://www.360docs.net/doc/af14189593.html,ment on the characteristics of Modernist Literature.(现代文学)

Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationship between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objectivity. They are mainly concerned with the inner world of an individual therefore, they pay more attention to the psychic time than the Chronological one. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are mixed together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual.

4.Make a brief introduction to William Butler Yeats’s literary career.

生涯为三部分，所以从三部分来写。

During the early ears of William Butler Yeats’s literary career, he wrote romantic poetry under the influence of Edmund Spenser, Shelley and the Pre-Raphaelites. He also made an intensive study of William Blake, whose symbolism and mysticism attracted him. In this period, he mainly created the works: The Wanderings of Oisin. The Wind among the Reeds.

The 1910s was Yeats’ period of transition, during which he departed from the romanticism of his early period and developed into modernism, influenced by the poetry and criticism of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. He also studied the Works of John Donne, the 17th century metaphysical poet. Still moved by the “Troubles in Ireland”, he believed that all history or human experience follows a circular, spiral pattern which repeats itself over and over on different levels. The years 1919-1939 were Yeats’s period of maturity, in which he published many volumes of his representative poems. His meditations(深思) upon the relation between imagination, history and the occult were summed up in the book. In his late works he deals with the rise and full of civilization which eternal beauty in the world of art, with the contrast between youth and old age, with love. He wrote poetry, drama and prose, but his fame rests chiefly on his poetry. He is a celebrated and accomplished poet, using an elaborate system of symbols in his poem.

5.Make a brief comment on Sons and Lovers

Sons and Lovers is a semi-autobiographical novel written by D. H. Lawrence. It is based on Lawrence’s early life in the Midland coal-mining village of Eastwood which is called Bestwood in the novel. The novel tells the story of a coal miner’s family with the third child Paul as the central character. It is the first novel in the history of English literature that has a truly working class background. Paul’s father, Mr. Morel, is a miner who is driven to drunkenness by the bad working conditions. Paul’s mother, Mrs. Morel, is a sensitive and high-minded woman and she is better educated than her husband. Mrs. Morel’s dream is smashed by the surroundings of poverty, heavy labor, illiteracy and her husband’s habit of heavy drinking. So she devotes her entire love to her four children especially for her two eldest sons William and Paul.

After William dies of pneumonia, Mrs. Morel turns her whole attention to Paul.

Meanwhile Paul also devotes his emotions to his mother. When Paul is on intimate terms with Marian, Mrs. Morel is filled with resentment and jealousy lest Miriam should possess Paul’s entire emotions. And in Paul’s heart, there is always a conflict between the two kinds of love—the love for Marian and the love for his mother. Tired of Miriam’s pure spiritual love, Paul is dropped into a difficult position of dissensions and contradictions since pure physical warmth cannot bring about long-term happiness for him. He soon gets tired of Clare and later she returns to her husband. Mrs. Morel’s death is a sort of release to Paul.

But still he refuses to marry Miriam, because he thought marriage is somewhat bondage. The novel ends with Paul’s drifting away on the sea of life.

The novel certainly reflects the problems of Lawrence’s young age. It is taken as a typical example and lively manifestation of Oedipus Complex in fiction, as the result of Lawrence’s long-range study of psychoanalysis theories of Sigmund Freud. But the theme of the novel is usually said to concern the effect of maternal love on the development of a son. The didactic elements in the novel and the looseness in structure are often criticized by some critics.