自考英美文学选读-作家特色与作品分析

作家及其创作思想/写作特点/语言风格/文学成就 选读作品及作品分析/人物性格 William Shakespeare (09A) 1. He holds that literature should be a combiNATion of beauty, kindness and truth, and should reflect nature and reality. He also states that the beauty in literary works can last For ever. 2. His major characters are neither merely individual Ones nor type ones; they are individuals representing certain types. By applying a psycho-analytical approach, he succeeds in exploring the characters’ inner mind. The soliloquies in his plays fully reveal the characters’ inner conflict. 3. He seldom invents his own plots, but borrows them from some old plays or storybooks, or from ancient Greek and Roman sources. He would shorten the time and intensify the story. There are usually several threads running through the play, thus providing the story with suspense and apprehension. 4. Irony is a good means of dramatic presentation. It makes the characters who are ignorant of the truth do certain ridiculous things. Disguise is also an important device to create dramatic irony, usually with woman disguised as man. 5. He can write skillfully in different poetic forms, such as the sonnet, the blank verse, and the rhymed couplet. His vocabulary is amazing; he is known to have used 16000 different words in his works. His coinage of new words and distortion of the meaning of the old ones also create striking effects. 6. He is above all writers in the past and in the present time. His influence on later writers is immeasurable. Sonnet 18 (06,08,11S) Sonnet 18 is one of the most beautiful sonnets written by Shakespeare, in which he has a profound meditation on the destructive power of time and the eternal beauty brought forth by poetry to the one he loves. A nice summer’s day is usually transient, but the beauty in poetry can last for ever. Thus Shakespeare has a faith in the permanence of poetry. The Merchant of Venice (03Q) The theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew. Hamlet (01S) 1. Hamlet is a melancholic scholar-prince, and faces the dilemma between action and mind. 2. Urged to seek revenge for his father’s murder, he has none of the single-minded blood lust. It is not because he is incapable of action, but because he is so indecisive that action, when it finally comes, seems almost like defeat, diminishing rather than adding to the stature of the hero. 3. Trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing and plotting, and apparently bearing the intolerable burden of the duty to revenge his father’s death, hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and action. 4. His life is one of constant role-playing, examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility, for he is too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger. John Milton 1. In his life, Milton shows himself a real revolutionary, a master poet and a great prose writer. 2. As a Christian humanist, he fought for freedom in all aspects, While his achievements in literature make him tower over all the other English writers of his time and exert a great influence over later ones. Paradise Lost (10Q) 1. The theme is the “Fall of Man”, i.e. man’s disobedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause – Satan. 2. Milton intends to expose the ways of Satan and to “justify the ways of God to men”. At the center of the conflict between human love and spiritual duty lies Milton’s fundamental concern with freedom and choice, i.e. the freedom to obey God’s prohibition on eating the apple and the choice of disobedience made by love. He tries to convince us that an all-knowing God was just in allowing Adam and Eve to be tempted and to choose sin and its inevitable punishment. Daniel Defoe 1. As a member of the middle class, Defoe spoke for and to the members of his class. In most of his works, he gave his praise to the hard-working, sturdy middle class and showed his sympathy for the downtrodden, unfortunate poor. 2. Defoe was a very good story-teller. He had a gift for organizing minute details in such a vivid way that his stories could be both credible and extremely fascinating. His sentence are sometimes short, crisp and plain, and sometimes long and rambling, which leave an impression of casual narration. His language is smooth, easy, colloquial and mostly vernacular. There is nothing artificial in his language: it is common English at its best. Robinson Crusoe (12S)(01=08A) 1. Robinson is a real hero: a typical 18th-century English middle-class man, with a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage, patience and persistence in overcoming obstacles, in struggling against the hostile natural environment. 2. He is the very prototype of the empire builder, the pioneer colonist. 3. In describing Robinson’s life on the island, Defoe glorifies human labor and the Puritan fortitude, which save Robinson from despair and are a source of pride and happiness. He toils for the sake of subsistence, and the fruits of his labor are his own. Jonathan Swift 1. A Tale of Tub and The Battle of the Books established his name as a satirist. 2. His understanding of human nature is profound. In his opinion, human nature is seriously and permanently flawed. To better human life, enlightenment is needed, but to redress it is very hard. 3. Swift is a master satirist. His satire is usually masked by an outward gravity and an apparent earnestness which renders his satire all the more powerful. His “A Modest Proposal” is generally taken as a perfect model. 4. Swift is one of the greatest masters of English prose. He defined a good style as “proper words in proper places”. Clear, simple, concrete diction, uncomplicated sentence structure, economy and conciseness of language mark all his writings. Gulliver’s Travels 1. Gulliver’s Travels contains four parts, each telling about Gulliver’s experiences in Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Flying Island, and Houyhnhnm. 2. The book is one of the most effective criticisms and satires of all aspects in the then English and European life. Its social significance is great and its exploration into human nature profound. 3. In part 1, Gulliver gives an account of some aspects of Lilliputian life and obviously implies the similar ridiculous practices or tricks of the English government. The description of the competitions in games held before royal members hints that the success of those government officials lies not in their being any wiser or better but in their being nimbler in games. Henry Fielding 1. Fielding has been regarded as “Father of the English Novel”. 2. Of all the 18th-century novelists he was the first to write specifically a “comic epic in prose”, the first to give the modern novel its structure and style. 3. Fielding adopted “the third-person narration”, in which the author becomes the “all-knowing God”, so he is able to present not only their external behaviors but also the internal activities of their minds. 4. In form, he tries to retain the epical form of the classical works but at the same time keeps faithful to his realistic presentation of common life. The ordinary and usually ridiculous life of the common people is his major concern. 5. Fielding’s language is easy, unlaboured and familiar, but extremely vivid and vigorous. His sentences are always distinguished by logic and rhythm. His works are also noted for lively, dramatic dialogues and other theatrical devices. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling 1. Tom Jones is a masterpiece on the subject of human nature. 2. Tom is a national hero, a young fellow with virtues and yet not without fault – honest, kind-hearted, high-spirited, loyal, and brave, but impulsive, wanting carefulness and full of animal spirits. In a way, the young man stands for a wayfaring Everyman, who is expelled from the paradise and has to go through hard experience to gain a knowledge of himself and finally to approach perfectness. 3. Tom Jones brings its author the name of the “Prose Homer”. The panorama of the 18th-century English country and city life with scores of different places and about 40 characters is superb. Its 18 books of epic form are divided into 3 sections, 6 books each, clearly marked out by the change of scenes: in the country, on the highway and in London. By this, Fielding has indeed achieved his goal of writing a “comic epic in prose”. William Blake 1. Literarily Blake was the first important Romantic poet, despising the rule of reason, opposing the classical tradition of the 18th century, and treasuring the individual’s imagination. 2. Blake declares that “I know that This World is a World of IMAGINATION & Vision ”, and that “The nature of my work is visionary or imaginative”. 3. Blake writes his poems in plain and direct language. His poems often carry the lyric beauty with immense compression of meaning. He distrusts the abstractness and tends to embody his views with visual images. Symbolism in wide range is also a distinctive feature of his poetry. The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Innocence), The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Experience) (10Q,12Q), The Tyger (11S) 1. Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy and innocent world. Songs of Experience paints a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a melancholy tone. The two books hold the similar subject-matter, but the tone, emphasis and conclusion differ. 2. “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence finds a counterpart of the same title in Songs of Experience. The former indicates the conditions which make religion a consolation, a prospect of “illusory happiness”; the later reveals the true nature of religion which helps bring misery to the poor children. They are good examples to reveal the relation between an economic circumstance and an ideological circumstance, i.e. the relation between the exploitation of child labor and the role played by religion in making people compliant to exploitation. William Wordsworth 1. Wordsworth’s theory of poetry is calling for simple themes drawn from humble life expressed in the language of ordinary people. Wordsworth defines the poet as a “man speaking to men”, and poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which originates in emotion recollected in tranquillity”. 2. Wordsworth’s deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and profound poetry which no other poets has ever equaled. 3. He held that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people were the raw material which poetry could and should be made of. 4. The most important contribution he had made is that he has not only started the modern poetry, but also paved the way for English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a return to nature. I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (07S) Wordsworth wrote this beautiful poem of nature after he came across a long belt of gold daffodils tossing and reeling and dancing along the waterside. Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (04S) The date of this experience was not Sept.3, but July 31, 1802; its occasion was a trip to France. The sonnet describes a vivid picture of a beautiful morning in London. It follows strictly the Italian form, with a clear division between the octave and the sestet; the rhyme scheme is abbaabba, cdcdcd. She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways (03S) This is one of the “Lucy poems”, written in 1799. The Solitary Reaper It is an iambic verse. Most of the lines in the poem are octosyllabics. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is ababccdd. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1. Shelley is one of the leading Romantic poets, an intense and original lyrical poet in the English language. 2. He has a reputation as a difficult poet: learned, imagistically complex, full of classical and mythological allusions. 3. His style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figures of speech which describe vividly what we see and feel, or express what passionately moves us. A Song: Men of England (09,10S) This poem was written in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre. It is not only a war cry calling upon all working people of England to rise up against their political oppressors, but also an address to point out to them the intolerable injustice of economic exploitation. Ode to the West Wind (01S) Shelley praised the powerful west wind and expressed his eagerness to enjoy the boundless freedom from the reality. He gathered in this poem a wealth of symbolism, employed a structural art and his powers of metrical orchestration at their mightiest. Jane Austen 1. As a realistic writer, Jane Austen considers it her duty to criticize life seriously, and to expose the follies and illusions of mankind. And in style, she is a neoclassicism advocator, upholding those traditional ideas of order, reason, proportion and gracefulness in novel writing. 2. Her main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships. Because of this, her novels have a universal significance. 3. Stories of love and marriage provided the major themes in all her novels, in which female characters are always playing an active part. 4. As a novelist Jane Austen writes within a very narrow sphere. All her works are concerning three or four landed gentry families with their daily routine life. Austen can portray the characters and their recurring situations with absolute accuracy and sureness, which makes her unequaled. 5. She presents the quiet, day-to-day country life of the upper-middle-class English. Because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of human behavior, Jane Austen has brought the English novel to its maturity, and she has been regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists. Pride and Prejudice (03A)(12Q) 1. Pride and Prejudice, originally drafted as “First Impressions”, is the most delightful and the most popular of Jane Austen’s works. The title tells of a major concern of the novel: pride and prejudice. If to from good relationships is our main task in life, we must first have good judgement. 2. In dealing with the five Bennet sisters and their search for suitable husbands, it mainly tells of the love story between a rich, proud young man Darcy and the beautiful and intelligent Elizabeth Bennet. In the end false pride is humbled and prejudice dissolved. 3. At the heart of the novelist’s exploration of the marriage, property and intrigue lies the exhilarating suspense of the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy, and Jane Austen’s delicate probing of the values of the gentry.     Charles Dickens 1. As one of the greatest critical realistic writers of the Victorian Age, Charles Dickens considers it his duty to expose and criticize in his works all the poverty, injustice, hypocrisy and corruptness he sees all around him. 2. In his works, Dickens criticizes all aspects of the 19th-century England, particularly London. A combination of optimism about people and realism about the society is obvious in his early works. His later works show a highly conscious modern artist. The settings are more complicated; the stories are better structured. Most novels of this period present a sharp criticism of the more complicated and yet most fundamental social institutions and morals of the Victorian England. The early optimism could no more be found. 3. Charles Dickens is a master story-teller. With his first sentence, he engages the reader’s attention and holds it to the end. The settings of his stories have an extraordinary vividness, a result of years’ intimacy and rich imagination. His language could, in a way, be compared with Shakespeare’s for his large vocabulary and use of vernacular. His humor and wit seem inexhaustible. Character-portrayal is the most outstanding feature of his works. His best-depicted characters are those innocent, virtuous, persecuted, helpless child characters such as Oliver Twist. Dickens also employs exaggeration in his works. And his works are also characterized by a mixture of humor and pathos. He is a humorist and is also noted for his picture of pathos. Oliver Twist (01Q,05Q,08Q) 1. The novel is famous for its vivid descriptions of the workhouse and life of the underworld in the 19th-century London. The author’s intimate knowledge of people of the lowest order and of the city itself apparently comes from his journalistic years. Here the novel also presents Oliver Twist as Dickens’s first child hero and Fagin the first grotesque figure. 2. This section, Chapter III of the novel, is a detailed account of how he is punished for that “impious and profane offence of asking for more” and how he is to be sold, at three pound ten, to Mr. Gamfield, the notorious Chimney-sweeper. Though we can afford a smile now and then, we feel more the pitiable state of the orphan boy and the cruelty and hypocrisy of the workhouse board. Charlotte Bronte 1. Charlotte Bronte’s works are all about the struggle of an individual consciousness towards self-realization, and about some lonely and neglected young women with a fierce longing for love, understanding and a full, happy life. 2. Besides, she is a writer of realism combined with romanticism. On one hand, she presents a vivid realistic picture of the English society by exposing the cruelty, hypocrisy and other evils of the upper classes, and by showing the misery and suffering of the poor. On the other hand, she is able to recreate life in a very romantic way by writing from an individual point of view, by creating characters who are possessed of strong feelings, fiery passions and some extraordinary personalities, and by using some elements of horror, mystery and prophesy. 3. The vivid narration, the perfect characterization, especially the unexpectable description of the heroines, and the most truthful presentation of the social life of the time – all these render her works a never dying popularity. Jane Eyre (08S)(09Q)(07=11A) 1. Being one of the most popular and important novels of the Victorian age, Jane Eyre is noted for its sharp criticism of the existing society, e.g. the religious hypocrisy of charity institutions and the false social convention as concerning love and marriage. It is an intense moral fable. Jane Eyre, like Mr. Rochester, has to undergo a series of physical and moral tests to grow up and achieve her final happiness. The success of the novel is also due to its introduction the first governess heroine to the English novel. 2. Jane Eyre, an orphan child with a fiery spirit and a longing to love and be loved, a poor, plain, little governess who dares to love her master, a man superior to her in many ways, and even is brave enough to declare her love to him, cuts a completely new woman image. She represents those middle-class working women who are struggling for recognition of their rights and equality as a human being. Thomas Hardy (10A,12A) 1. Living at the turn of the century, Hardy is often regarded as a transitional writer. In him we see the influence from both the past and the modern, i.e. he is intellectually advanced and emotionally traditional. In his Wessex novels, there is an apparent nostalgic touch in his description of the simple and beautiful though primitive rural life, and with those traditional characters he is always sympathetic. On the other hand, the immense impact of scientific discoveries and modern philosophic thoughts upon the man is quite obvious, too. 2. In his works, man is shown inevitably bound by his own inherent nature and hereditary traits which prompt him to pursue happiness or success and set him in conflict with the environment. The outside nature is shown as some mysterious supernatural force, very powerful but half-blind to the individual’s will, hope, passion or suffering. It likes to play practical jokes upon human beings by producing a series of mistimed actions and unfortunate coincidences. Man proves impotent before Fate, however he tries, and he seldom escapes his ordained destiny. 3. Though Naturalism seems to have played an important part in Hardy’s works, there is also bitter and sharp criticism and even open challenge of Victorian institutions, conventions and morals. The conflicts between the traditional and the modern, between the old rural value and the new utilitarianism, between the old, false social moral and the natural human passion, etc. are all closely set in a realistic background true to the very time and the very place. Tess of the D’Urbervilles 1. Tess is a beautiful, innocent peasant girl but with spirit of rebellious. The poverty of the family forces her to claim kinship with the sham but rich d’Urbervilless. Alec, the young master of the d’Urbervilles, a dandy, seduces Tess and impregnates her. Tess finally kills him and flees with Angel but is caught by the police and hanged. 2. Tess is actually a victim of her society. Hardy created the heroine Tess just to criticize the society in his time. Hardy’s works are known as “novels of the character and environment.” Tess is a tragic person simply because she is not accepted by the society in which agriculture is threatened by the forces of invading capitalism. So in a way, we say, Tess’ fate is decided by her society. George Bernard Shaw 1. Being a drama critic, Shaw attacks directly on the Neo-Romantic tradition and the fashionable drawing-room drama. He was strongly against the credo of “art for art’s sake”, and held that art should serve social purpose by reflecting human life, exposing social contradictions and educating the common people. 2. Structurally and thematically, Shaw followed the great traditions of realism. He took the modern social issues as his subjects with the aim of directing social reforms. Most of his plays are concerned with political, economic, or moral problems, and can be termed as problem plays. And his plays have only one passion, i.e. indignation. 3. One feature of Shaw’s characterization is that he often shows up one character vividly at the expense of another. Another feature is that Shaw’s characters are the representatives of his own ideas, for Mr. Shaw is primarily interested in doctrines. 4. Much of Shavian drama is constructed around the inversion of a conventional theatrical situation. The inversion is an integral part of an interpretation of life. 5. Shaw’s plays have plots, but they do not work by plots. It is the vitality of the talk that takes primacy over mere story. Action is reduced to a minimum, while what maintain the interest of the audience are the dialogue and the interplay of minds of the characters. The forward motion consists not in the unrolling of plot, but in the operation of the spirit of the discourse. Mrs. Warren’s Profession (12S)(04=08=11Q) 1. Mrs. Warren’s Profession is a play about the economic oppression of women. 2. The play exposes that guilt for prostitution lies more upon the social system than the immoral women. 3. In the play, Shaw shows clearly that all human sufferings are consequences of the cruel economic exploitation, which is pursued shamelessly by the so-called respectable members of the society through the lowest and the dirtiest means. T. S. Eliot 1. Most of his early poems are about a state of mind. There is little “action” in a physical sense; the action is totally psychological. The poems are dominated by the dark horror of an earthly hell. 2. The Waste Land, Eliot's most important single poem, has been regarded as a landmark and a model of the 20th-century English poetry. The poem not only presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in the modern Western world, but also reflects the prevalent mood of disillusionment and despair of a whole post-war generation. The Waste Land is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modem civilization in which human life has lost its meaning and purpose. The poem has developed a whole set of historical, cultural and religious themes; but it is often regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century people's disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society. 3. He was one of the important verse dramatists in the first half of the 20th century. All his plays have something to do with Christian themes. Eliot's major achievement in play writing has been the creation of a verse drama in the 20th century to express the ideas and actions of modern society with new accents of the contemporary speech. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (02,09,10S) 1. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is Eliot's most striking early achievement. It presents the meditation of an aging young man over the business of proposing marriage. 2. The poem is in a form of dramatic monologue, suggesting an ironic contrast between a pretended "love song" and a confession of the speaker's incapability of facing up to love and life in a sterile upper-class world. 3. Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, is neurotic, self-important, illogical and incapable of action. He is a kind of tragic figure caught in a sense of defeated idealism and tortured by unsatisfied desires. 4. The setting of the poem resembles the "polite society" of Pope's “The Rape of the Lock," in which a tea party is a significant event and a game of cards is the only way to stave off boredom. 5. Style: The poem is intensely anti-romantic with visual images of hard, gritty objects and evasive hellish atmosphere. D. H. Lawrence 1. Lawrence is one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century. 2. The major characteristics of his novel are that he combined social criticism with psychological exploration in his novel writing. He was not concerned with technical innovations; his interest lays in the tracing of psychological development of his character and in his energetic criticism of the dehumanizing effect of the capitalist industrialization on human nature. 3. He was one of the first novelists to introduce themes of psychology into his works. To him, human sexuality was a symbol of Life Force. He believed that the healthy way of an individual’s psychological development lay in the primacy of his life impulse, i.e. the sexual impulse. And the frank discussion of sex in his novel is the chief reason why Lawrence had been accused of pornographic writing. 4. His artistic tendency is mainly realism, which combines dramatic scenes with an authoritative commentary. 5. His language is with the working-class simplicity and directness. In presenting the psychological aspects of his characters, Lawrence makes use of poetic imagination and symbolism in his writing. Sons and Lovers 1. Sons and Lovers is Lawrence’s autobiographical novel, and it vividly presents the class conflict between the strong-willed, intelligent and ambitious middle-class family daughter and a warm, vigorous and sensuous coal miner. 2. Paul depends heavily on his mother's love and help to make sense of the world around him; but in order to become an independent man and a true artist he has to make his own decisions about his life and work, and has to struggle to become free from his mother's influence. However, Paul is proved to be incapable of escaping the overpowering emotional bond imposed by his mother's love, so he fails to achieve a fulfilling relationship with either girl. Finally, his mother has died and he is left alone, in despair. There is no one now to love him or to help him. But the book ends with Paul's rejection of despair and his determination to face the unknown future. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1. His "black" vision of life and human beings refers to his concern with human sin and evil. According to Hawthorne, "There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity." One source of evil that Hawthorne is concerned most is over-reaching intellect, which usually refers to someone, who is too proud, too sure of himself. Hawthorne’s intellectuals are usually villains. Hawthorne's view of man and human history originates, to a great extent, in Puritanism. He believed that “the wrong doing of one generation lives into the successive ones”. This sensibility led to his understanding of evil being at the very core of human life. 2. As a man of literary craftsmanship, Hawthorne is extraordinary. The structure and the form of his writings are always carefully worked out to cater for the thematic concern. With his special interest in the psychological aspect of human beings, there isn’t much action, or physical movement going on in his works and he is good at exploring the complexity of human psychology. So his drama is full of mental activities. Hawthorne is also a great allegorist and almost every story can be read allegorically. Hawthorne is a master of symbolism, which he took from the Puritan tradition and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form. The symbol serves as a weapon to attack and penetrate reality. The symbol can be found everywhere in his writing. Ambiguity is another outstanding characteristic of Hawthorne's art. Young Goodman Brown (01,05S)(11Q)(04=08A) 1. Goodman Brown, a Puritan who lives in the village of Salem, leaves his wife Faith who pleads him not to go, to attend a witches' Sabbath in the woods where he astonishingly finds lots of prominent people of the village and the church. When he is about to be confirmed into the group, he finds his wife Faith is also there beside him. He immediately cries out" look up to Heaven and resist the wicked one," only to find he is alone in the forest. He returns to his home, but since then lives a dismal and gloomy life because he is never able to believe in goodness or piety again. 2. "Young Goodman Brown" is one of Hawthorne's most profound tales. In the manner of its concern with guilt and evil, it exemplifies what Melville called the "power of blackness" in Hawthorne's work. Its hero, a naive young man who accepts both society in general and his fellow men as individuals worth his regard, is confronted with the vision of human evil in one terrible night, and becomes thereafter distrustful and doubtful. Allegorically, he becomes an Everyman named Brown, a "young" man, who will be aged in one night by an adventure that makes everyone in this world a fallen idol. However, Hawthorne poses the question of Good and Evil in man but withholds his answer, and he does not permit himself to determine whether the events of the night are real or merely a dream. Walt Whitman (05Q,06Q) 1. Whitman believed that poetry could play a vital part in the process of creating a new nation. Hence, the abundance of themes in his poetry voices freshness. In celebrating the self, Whitman gives emphasis to the physical dimension of the self and openly and joyously celebrates sexuality. 2. Whitman's poetic style is marked by the use of the poetic "I". Speaking in the voice of "I," Whitman becomes all those people in his poems, and yet still remains "Walt Whitman", to express the aspirations of himself and that of all Americans. By makeing use of a triangular relationship: the poet, the subject in the poem, and "you" the reader, Whitman invites us to participate in the process of sympathetic identification. 3. He adopted “free verse”, that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. A looser and more open-ended syntactical structure is frequently favored. By means of "free verse," Whitman is conversational and casual, in the fluid and unstructured style of talking. However, there is still a strong sense of the poems being rhythmical. Parallelism and phonetic recurrence at the beginning of the lines also contribute to the musicality of his poems. 4. One of the most often-used methods in Whitman's poems is to make colors and images fleet past the mind's eye of the reader. Another characteristic in Whitman's language is his strong tendency to use oral English. Whitman's vocabulary is amazing. He would use powerful, colorful, as well as rarely-used words, words of foreign origin and sometimes even wrong words. There Was a Child Went Forth (01,09S) This poem describes the growth of a child who learned about the world around him and improved himself accordingly. In the poem Whitman's own early experience may well be identified with the childhood of a young, growing America. Cavalry Crossing a Ford This poem reminds its readers of a picture of a scene of the American Civil War. All the movements described in this picture are frozen. And while sounds are depicted, it's more likely that they come out of the watcher's imagination, rather than from the picture itself. Song of Myself (00,08,11,12S) In this poem Whitman sets forth two principal beliefs: the theory of universality, which is illustrated by lengthy catalogues of people and things, and the belief in the singularity and equality of all beings in value. Herman Melville 1. Melville’s writings can be well divided into two groups, each with something in common according to the thematic concern and imaginative focus. 2. His early works were sea adventures. Moby-Dick proves to be the best. In the early ones, Melville is more enthusiastic about setting out on a quest for the meaning of the universe. 3. while in the late works, Melville becomes more reconciled with the world of man, in which, he admits, one must live by the rules. 4. Like Hawthorne, Melville is a master of allegory and symbolism. Moby-Dick (02Q)(03A,06A) 1. Moby-dick is regarded as the first American prose epic. It is a whaling tale or sea adventure, dealing with Ahab, a man with an overwhelming obsession to kill the whale which has crippled him, on board his ship Pequod in the chase of the big whale. The dramatic description of the hazards of whaling makes the book a very exciting sea narrative and builds a literary monument to an era of whaling industry in the 19th century. But Moby-Dick is not merely a whaling tale or sea adventure. It turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man's deep reality and psychology. 2. Different people on board the ship stand for different ideas and different social groups; the Pequod is the microcosm of human society and the voyage becomes a search for truth. The white whale, Moby Dick, symbolizes nature for Melville. For the character Ahab, however, the whale represents only evil. Moby Dick is like a wall, hiding some unknown, mysterious things behind. For the author, as well as for the reader and Ishmael, the narrator, Moby Dick is still a mystery, an ultimate mystery of the universe, inscrutable and ambivalent, and the voyage of the mind will forever remain a search of the truth, not a discovery of the truth.ut one must live by the rules. s.ligent and ambitious middle-class family daughter and a warm, vigorous and sensuous coal mine Mark Twain (06Q,10Q)(01=09A) 1. Twain is known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. 2. Another fact that made Twain unique is his magic power with language, his use of vernacular. His words are colloquial, concrete and direct, and his sentence structures are simple, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken language. 3. Mark Twain's humor is remarkable, too. His humor is characterized by puns, exaggeration, repetition, and anti-climax, let alone tricks of travesty and invective. However, his humor is not only of witty remarks mocking at small things or of farcical elements making people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (00A,02A,05A) 1. The novel begins with a description of how Widow Douglas attempts to civilize Huck and ends with him deciding not to let it happen again at the hands of Aunt Sally. The climax arises with Huck's inner struggle on the Mississippi. Huck's final decision amounts to a vindication of what Mark Twain called “the damned human race”. 2. The novel is best known for Twain's wonderful characterization of Huck, a typical American Boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”, and remarkable for the raft’s journey down the Mississippi river, which Twain used both realistically and symbolically to shape his book into an organic whole. Through the eyes of Huck, the innocent and reluctant rebel, we see the pre Civil War American society fully exposed and at the same time we are deeply impressed by Mark Twain's thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization. Henry James (03=07Q)(10A) 1. James's novels are mainly about the international theme. They are always set against a large international background, usually between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cultures with two different groups of people representing two different value systems. 2. James's literary criticism is an indispensable part of his contribution to literature. It is both concerned with form and devoted to human values. He advocates that an artist should be able to “feel” the life, to understand human nature, and then to record them in his own art form. 3. James’s realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner life of human beings than with outer human actions. This emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousness proves to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and has great influence on the coming generations. That is why James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th century "stream-of-consciousness" novels and the founder of psychological realism. 4. One of James's literary techniques innovated to cater for this psychological emphasis is his narrative “point of view”. James avoids the authoritative commentary as much as possible and makes his characters reveal themselves. This narrative method proves to be successful in bringing out his themes. 5. As to his language, James is not so easy to understand. He is often highly refined and insightful. With a large vocabulary, he is always accurate in word selection, trying to find the best expression for his literary imagination.Therefore Henry James is not only one of the most important realists of the period before the First World War, but also the most expert stylist of his time. Daisy Miller (11Q) 1. Daisy Miller, a typical young American girl who goes to Europe and affronts her destiny. The unsophisticated girl is cruelly wronged because of the confrontation between the two value systems. 2. With the publication of Daisy Miller, Henry James’s reputation was firmly established and Daisy Miller has ever since become the American Girl in Europe, an outstanding cultural type who embodies the spirit of the New World. However, innocence, the keynote of her character, turns out to be an admiring but a dangerous quality and her defiance of social taboos in the Old World finally brings her to a disaster in the clash between two different cultures. Emily Dickinson 1. Dickinson’s poems are usually based on her own experiences, her sorrows and joys. But within her little lyrics Dickinson addresses those issues that concern the whole human beings, which include religion, death, immortality, love, and nature. 2. Her poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no titles, hence are always quoted by their first lines. In her poetry there is a particular stress pattern, in which dashes are used as a musical device to create rhythm and capital letters as a means of emphasis. Her poems are usually short, rarely more than twenty lines, and many of them are centered on a single image or symbol and focused on one subject matter. 3. She frequently uses personae to render the tone more familiar to the reader, and personification to vivify some abstract ideas. 4. The form of her poetry is familiar and sometimes irregular. However, her poetic style is noted for its brevity, directness and plainness. Dickinson's poetry, despite its simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness. This is my letter to the World (10S) The poem expresses Dickinson's anxiety about her communication with the outside world. I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – (04,09S) This poem is a description of the moment of death. I like to see it lap the Miles This poem is an interesting study of how Dickinson makes the train part of nature by animalizing it. Because I could not stop for Death – (03,05,12S) In this poem Dickinson personifies death and immortality so as to make her message strongly felt. Theodore Dreiser 1. The effect of Darwinist idea of "survival of the fittest" on Dreiser was shattering. It is not surprising to find in Dreiser's fiction a world of jungle, where "kill or to be killed" was the law. Dreiser's naturalism was expressed in almost every book he wrote. 2. With the publication of Sister Carrie, Dreiser was launching himself upon a long career that would ultimately make him one of the most significant American writers of the school later known as literary naturalism. As a genre, naturalism emphasized that heredity and environment were important deterministic forces to those who were presented in special circumstances. Like all naturalists he was restrained from finding a solution to the social problems that appeared in his novels and accordingly almost all his works have tragic endings. 3. For lack of concision, his writings appear more inclusive and less selective, and the readers are sometimes burdened with massive detailed descriptions of characters and events. Though the time sequence is clear and the plot straightforward, he has been always accused of being awkward in sentence structure, inept and occasionally wrong in word selection and meaning, and mixed and disorganized in voice and tone. However, he broke away from the genteel tradition of literature and dramatized the life in a very realistic way. There is no comment, no judgment but facts of life in the stories. His style is not polished but very serious and well accorded with the thematic pursuit. Sister Carrie (01Q,04=08Q,09Q) 1. In Sister Carrie Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by describing the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards. From Sister Carrie on, Dreiser set himself to project the American values for thorough materialism. 2. Though received not favorably and attacked as immoral by the public in its time, Sister Carrie best embodies Dreiser's naturalistic belief that while men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, instinct, and chance, a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate wordlessly and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose for their existence. Carrie, as one of such, senses that she is merely a cipher in an uncaring world yet seeks to grasp the mysteries of life and thereby satisfies her desires for social status and material comfort. Robert Lee Frost (12A) 1. Unlike his contemporaries in the early 20th century, he did not break up with the poetic tradition nor made any experiment on form. Instead, he learned from the tradition, especially the familiar conventions of nature poetry and of classical pastoral poetry, and made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression. Many of his poems are fragrant with natural quality. Images and metaphors in his poems are drawn from the simple country life and the pastoral landscape. Most of Frost's poems are simple in the way that they are dramatic monologues or dialogues, they are short and direct on the informational level, and they have simple diction. However, profound ideas are delivered under the disguise of the plain language and the simple form, for what Frost did is to take symbols from the limited human world and the pastoral landscape to refer to the great world beyond the rustic scene. These thematic concerns include the terror and tragedy in nature, as well as its beauty, and the loneliness and poverty of the isolated human being. But first and foremost Frost is concerned with his love of life and his belief in a serenity that only came from working usefully, while he practiced himself throughout his life. 2. By using simple spoken language and conversational rhythms, Frost achieved an effortless grace in his style. He combined traditional verse forms – the sonnet, rhyming couplets, blank verse – with a clear American local speech rhythm, the speech of New England farmers with its especial diction and syntax. In verse form he was assorted; he wrote in both the metrical forms and the free verse, and sometimes he wrote in a form that borrows freely from the merits of both, in a form that might be called semi-free or semi-conventional. After Apple-picking This poem is so vivid a memory of experience on the farm in which the end of labor leaves the speaker with a sense of completion and fulfillment yet finds him blocked from success by winter's approach and physical weariness. The Road Not Taken (02,06S) In this meditative poem, the speaker tells us how the course of his life was determined when he came upon two roads that diverged in a wood. Forced to choose, he "took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (08S) This is a deceptively simple poem in which the speaker literally stops his horse in the winter twilight to observe the beauty of the forest scene, and then is moved to continue his journey. F. Scott Fitzgerald 1. Most critics have agreed that Fitzgerald is both an insider and an outsider of the Jazz Age with a double vision. Fitzgerald's fictional world is the best embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz Age, in which he shows a particular interest in the upper-class society, especially the upper-class young people. Fitzgerald’s fictions deal with the bankruptcy of the American Dream, which is highlighted by the disillusionment of the protagonists' personal dreams due to the clashes between their romantic vision of life and the relentless reality. 2. Fitzgerald is a great stylist in American literature. His style, closely related to his themes, is explicit and chilly. His accurate dialogues, his careful observation of mannerism, styles, models and attitudes provide the reader with a vivid sense of reality. He uses the scenic method in his chapters, each one of which consists of one or more dramatic scenes, sometimes with intervening passages of narration, leaving the tedious process of transition to the readers' imagination. He also skillfully employs the device of having events observed by a "central consciousness'' to his great advantage. The accurate details, the completely original diction and metaphors, the bold impressionistic and colorful quality have all proved his perfect artistry. The Great Gatsby (00,07,10S) 1. A masterpiece in American literature, The Great Gatsby evokes a haunting mood of a glamorous, wild time that seemingly will never come again. 2. Besides, the loss of an ideal and the disillusionment that comes with the failure are exploited fully in the personal tragedy of a young man whose "incorruptible dream" is "smashed into pieces by the relentless reality." 3. Gatsby is a mythical figure whose intensity of dream partakes of a state of mind that embodies America itself; Gatsby is the last of the romantic heroes; Gatsby's failure magnifies to a great extent the end of the American Dream. 4. However, the affirmation of hope and expectation is self-asserted in Fitzgerald's artistic manipulation of the central symbol in the novel, the green light. Ernest Hemingway (05=12Q) 1. He deals with a limited range of characters in quite similar circumstances and measures them against an unvarying code, known as "grace under pressure". Those who survive in the process of seeking to master the code with the honesty, the discipline, and the restraint are Hemingway Code heroes. In the general situation of his novels, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos; man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. However, though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually. 2. Hemingway himself once said, “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.” Typical of this "iceberg" analogy is Hemingway's style. Seemingly simple and natural, Hemingway's style is actually polished and tightly controlled, but highly suggestive and connotative. While rendering vividly the outward physical events and sensations Hemingway conveys the complex emotions of his characters as well. Besides, Hemingway develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms of human speech are so well presented that the characters are full of flesh and blood and the use of short, simple and conventional words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care. Indian Camp (04,11S) 1. “Indian Camp” is taken from In Our Time. The title indicates that the material is contemporary and to some extent, representative of the early twentieth-century experience. A reference to the well-known phrase from the Book of Common Prayer: "Give us peace in our time, O Lord," the title is very ironic because there is no peace at all in the stories. The book, arranged in a chronological order, introduces readers to Nick Adams from his childhood to adolescence and manhood. 2. Nick watches his father deliver an Indian woman of a baby with a jack-knife and without anesthesia. 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. William Faulkner (00Q) 1. Most of Faulkner's works are set in the American South. He has always been regarded as a man with great might of invention and experimentation. He added to the theory of the novel and evolved his own literary strategies. The range of narrative techniques used by Faulkner is remarkable. He would never step between the characters and the reader to explain, but let the characters explain themselves and hinder as little as possible the reader's direct experience of the work of art. The most characteristic way of structuring his stories is to fragment the chronological time. He deliberately broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present. The modern stream-of-consciousness technique was also frequently and skillfully exploited by Faulkner to emphasize the reactions and inner musings of the narrator. And Faulkner used the interior monologue to achieve the most desirable effect of exploring the nature of human consciousness. Moreover, Faulkner was good at presenting multiple points of view, which gave the story a circular form, wherein one event is centered, with various points of view radiating from it, or different people responding to the same story. The other narrative techniques Faulkner used to construct his stories include symbolism and mythological and biblical allusions. 2. Faulkner was a master of his own particular style of writing. His prose is very difficult to read, marked by long sentences, complex syntax, and vague reference pronouns. It is not surprising to find in Faulkner's writings his syntactical structures and verbals paralleled, negatives balanced against positives, compounded adjectives swelling his sentences, complex modifying elements placed after the nouns, etc. In contrast, Faulkner could sound very casual or informal sometimes. He captured the dialects of the Mississippi characters. As to the symbols and imageries, they are mostly drawn from nature. A Rose for Emily (06S)(12Q)(07A) 1. Set in the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha, the story focuses on Emily Grierson, an eccentric spinster who refuses to accept the passage of time, or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it. Simple as it is in plot, the story is pregnant with meaning. 2. As a descendent of the Southern aristocracy, Emily is typical of those in Faulkner's Yoknapatwapha stories who are the symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of the past. 3. In this story, Faulkner makes best use of the Gothic devices in narration.