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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 sy