英语专业美国文学试题

E x e r c i s e T w o

Ⅰ. Write the names of the authors.(10%)

1. The Prince and the Pauper

2. The Red Badge of Courage

3. “A Clean, Well Lighted Room”

4. Call of the Wild

5. “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

6. “A Station at the Metro”

7. “Fire and Ice”

8. The Autobiography

9. “One’s Self I sing” 10. The Scarlet Letter Ⅱ. Fill in the following blanks . (10%)

1. In the novel , Hemingway described the dignity and courage of the common people during the Spanish Civil War.

2. was a great inventor, diplomat, and founding father of the United States of America.

3. , the earliest well-known American naturalist writer, wrote a novel about the American Civil War.

4. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises , Hemingway became the spokesman for what Gertrude Stein

had called “ ”.

5. ____________________, writing well before the Modern Poetry movements of the 20th century, is often

considered the “father of modern poetry.” Ⅲ. Choose only one answer form the four choices as the most appropriate answer. (15%) of the following statements about The Scarlet Letter is NOT true A It is an early expression of naturalist writing.

B It is full of symbolism.

C It is argues the distinction between “sins of passion” and “sins of principle”

D It is considered a “romance” by its writer because it shows fantastic events and does not limit itself to strict, literal reality.

Twain, one of the greatest 19th century American writers, is well known for his ______. A International theme B Waste-land imagery C Local color D Symbolism

3. _____ was known as the founder of the American short story. A Washington Irving B Mark Twain C Jack London D O. Henry

Pound, Hilda Dolittle and Amy Lowell help found and promote a movement in Modern Poetry known as _______.

A French symbolism

B The Beat Generation

C confessional poetry

D Imagism

Howells, James, and Mark Twain active on the literary scene, __ became the major trend in American literature in the seventies and eighties of the 19th century.

A sentimentalism

B romanticism

C realism

D naturalism

Whitman was a pioneering figure of American poetry. His innovation first of all lies in his use of __ , poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme.

A blank verse

B heroic couple

C free verse

D iambic pentameter

Fitzgeralds lived so extravagantly that they frequently spent more money than F. Scoot Fitzgerald earned for parties, liquor, entertaining their friends and traveling. It was this living style that nicknamed the decade of the 1920s as _______.

A The Jazz Age

B The Gilded Age

C The Roaring Age

D The Beat Age

wrote a series of historical novels set in the American Midwest and was known as “the American Sir Walter Scot.”

A Nathaniel Hawthorne

B Mary Renalt

C Stephan Crane

D James Fenimore Cooper

’s ideal hero, who faced life, fate and death courageously, can be called the __ .

A “lost generation” man

B modern man

C natural man

D true individual

doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in _______and Thoreau.

A Jefferson

B Emerson

C Freneau

D Over-soul

of the following writers influenced the development of French symbolist poetry

A Walt Whitman

B Edgar Allen Poe

C Ezra Pound

D Robert Frost

famous graduation speech turned Transcendentalism into a major intellectual and literary movement

A The American Scholar

B The Divinity School Address

C The Conduct of Life

D Representative Men

her poems were never published in her lifetime and a complete collection of them didn’t appear until the 1950’s, _____ had a major impact on 20th century poetry. A Anne Bradstreet B Gertrude Stein C Emily Dickinson D Amy Lowell

of the following fiction writers wanted to always live an active, masculine life and committed suicide in 1961, when he was too old to do so any more A Mark Twain B Ernest Hemingway C Stephen Crane D Jack London

of the following is NOT a 20th century American poet A Ezra Pound B Amy Lowell C Edgar Allan Poe

IV. Decide whether the statements are true or false. (10%)

1. All his literary life, Hawthorne seemed to be haunted by his sense of sin and evil in life.

2. Transcendentalism, in exalting feeling over reason and individual expression over the restraints of law

and custom, very much reflects the spirit of Romanticism.

3. The sound of Whitman’s words casts a magic, romantic spell over readers. His tone is awesome, sad and

melancholy.

4. Ezra Pound was famous not only for his own poetry but also as a translator of Chinese poetry and other

classical Chinese literature.

5. Most of the poems in Leaves of Grass are about the New England countryside.

6. Ezra Pound’s poetry evoked the deeply personal wor ld of a man who withdrew from the world around

him and spent most of his time in his room.

7. In 1954, T. S. Eliot was awarded a Nobel Prize for his “mastery of the art of modern narration.” 8. Hemingway believed that a man could find meaning in life by facing is death with dignity and courage. 9. Thomas Jefferson was famous for powerful, persuasive essays, such as his pamphlet Common Sense ,

which persuaded many people to support the American Revolution.

10. William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy , written in 1789, i s often called “the first American novel”. V. Identify the following fragments and then answer questions. (20%)

Passage One

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:

1.Who is the writer of this poem _______________

2.What is the title of this poem _______________

3.Why does the writer repeat the last line

4.What kind of feeling does this stanza show How does the writer show it in the poem as a whole

5.Why do peop le say that this writer’s poems show traditional form and content combined with modern

theme and feeling

Passage 2

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance, on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness of belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was lady-like, too, after the manner of feminine gentility of those days; characterized by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace, which is now recognized as its indication. Questions:

1.This passage is from , written by .

2.Who is the woman being described What does this description tell about change in culture over a period

of time

American Literature. (20%)

VII. Write about 120 words to comment on Ezra Po und’s contribution to American Poetry of

twenty century. (15%)

答案

I．Write the names of the authors. (1*10=10%)

1.Mark Twain

2.Stephen Crane

3.Ernest Hemingway

4.Jack London

5.Washington Irving

6.Ezra Pound

7.Robert Frost

8.Benjamin Franklin

9.Walt Whitman

10.Nathaniel Hawthorne

II．Fill in the following blanks. (2*5=10%)

1.For Whom the Bell Tolls

2.Benjamin Franklin

3.Stephen Crane

4.the lost generation

5.Walt Whitman

Ⅲ. Choose only one answer form the four choices as the most appropriate answer. (1*15=15%)

V. Identify the following fragments and then answer questions. (20%)

Passage 1

1.The writer of the poem is Robert Frost. (1)

2.The poem is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1)

3.Doing so emphasizes the writer’s “modern” theme of urgency; it also completes the form, which is a

quatrain or four line per verse poem. (2)

4.Discuss loneliness, urgency an d the sense of a “tame” nature that is somehow far from friendly and easy

to control. (4)

5.Discuss the contrast between the traditional use of rhyme and meter, pastoral setting etc. and how Frost

transforms these forms with modern feelings and themes. (4)

Passage 2

1.This part if from the novel The Scarlet Letter, (1分) written by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (1分)

2.The woman is Hester. The answer relates to the writer’s use of historical perspective, and his theory that

the ideal of a “lady” has changed over time, fro m the strong, earthy ideal of the Elizabethan period and

shortly after to a weaker, more ethereal ideal by the time he wrote. (6分)

VI. Write about 150 words to comment on Mark Twain, his style, content, and contributions to American Literature. (20%)

?Pay special attention to his place in realism, his humor, his use of local color and role in regional literature and how he helped to create a genuinely “American” literary language.

VII. Write about 120 words to comment on Ezra Pound’s contribution to American Poetry of twenty century. (15%)

?Ezra Pound is regarded, and rightly, as the father of modern American poetry. Impatient with the fetters of English traditional poetics, he led the experiment in revolutionizing poetry. It was he who first discovered T. S. Eliot and blue-penciled the latter’s famous poem, The Waste Land. It was he who helped William

Butler Yeats, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and William Carlos Williams in their literary careers. And he survived them all, writing continually right up to his d eath. Pound’s contribution to the development of

modern poetry is very great.