英国文学作品选读小说家.ppt

1、英国文学选读要点（4）,- 小说家及其作品解读,1. Daniel Defoe (1661-1731) Significance 1) a pioneer novelist of England; 2) one of the forerunners of the English realistic novel; 3) Along with Samuel Richardson, Defoe is considered the founder of the English novel.,Robinson Crusoe (上p.190) The themes mans struggles again

2、st nature Glorification of the bourgeois men who has the courage and will to face hardship and determination to improve his livelihood Glorification of labor The style Realistic style,Symbol The great wooden cross The great wooden cross that Crusoe makes to mark time is a symbol of his journey towar

3、ds rebirth. The symbol casts a new, somewhat romantic light on the adventure, for it gives hope and foreshadows success for Robinson Crusoe The Capital letters on the cross The large size and capital letters show us how important this cross is to Crusoe as a timekeeping device and thus also as a way

4、 of relating himself to the larger social world where dates and calendars still matter. Its a memorial to Crusoe himself, underscoring how completely he has become the center of his own life.,Character Analysis Robinson Crusoe Robinson Crusoe is one of the protagonists drawn most successfully in Eng

5、lish novels. Through the characterization of Robinson Crusoe, Defoe depicts him as a hero struggling against nature, and human fate with his indomitable will and hand, and eulogizes creative labor, physical and mental, an allusion to glorification of the bourgeois creativity when it was a rising and

6、 more energetic class in the initial stage of its historical development. From an individual laborer to a master and colonizer, Crusoe seems to have gone through various stages of human civilization, creating a visual picture to manifest how mans history has developed from the primitive to the feuda

7、l, and then to the capitalistic one in the eighteenth century.,2. Jane Austen(1775-1817) Significance 1) a woman novelist of the 18th century 2) the only important female author in the 18-19th century 3) the first writer who examines womens position and their problems in the society 4) She presented

8、 the quiet, day-to-day country life of the middle -upper -class English.,Pride and Prejudice (下p.118) 1) Pride and Prejudice is the most popular of Jane Austens novels. 2) Pride and Prejudice is originally drafted as First Impressions. 3) In this novel, the author explores the relationship between g

9、reat love and realistic benefits. 4) In this novel, Darcy stands for Pride and Elizabeth represents Prejudice. In the end, pride is humbled and prejudice dissolved.,Theme Marriage is important to individuals and society. Analysis of the Novel It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man

10、 in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. This is the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice and stands as one of the most famous first lines in literature because of its masterful irony, its humorous tone, and its foreshadowing of the entire novel. It offers a miniature sketch of

11、the entire plot that the pursuit of “single men in possession of a good fortune” by various female characters. The second half of the sentence, however, reveals that the universal truth is nothing more than a social truth, which ironically is not a truth at all, but a misrepresentation of social fac

12、ts. In fact, a woman who has no means of outside support in the 19th century is greatly in need of a wealthy husband.,Mrs. Bennet She is a stupid, vulgar, silly, and noisy woman.She is a single-minded woman with the desire to see her daughters married and seems to care for nothing else in the world.

13、Austen uses her continually to highlight the necessity of marriage for young women. Elizabeth Bennet The second daughter in the Bennet family, and the most intelligent and quick-witted, Elizabeth is the protagonist of Pride and Prejudice and one of the most well-known female characters in English li

14、terature. She is lovely, clever, and, in a novel defined by dialogue, she converses as brilliantly as anyone.Her beauty, honesty, virtue, and lively wit enable her to rise above the nonsense and bad behavior that pervade her class-bound and often spiteful society. She pursues her true love bravely.

15、She is also courageous, fearless and frank. On the whole, Elizabeth is a typical image of the good, attractive lady in the 19th century.,3. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) Significance 1) The last important novelist of the Victorian age. 2) naturalist also critical realist writer 3) Hardy started as a poet

16、 and ended as a poet 4) both hardy s poems and novels are transition from realism to modernism.,naturalism 1) Darwins idea of survival of the fittest” 2) Naturalism is essentially a literary expression of determinism. Associated with bleak, realistic depictions of lower-class life, determinism denie

17、s religion as a motivating force in the world and instead perceives the universe as a machine. 3) Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers had also imagined the world as a machine, but as a perfect one, invented by God and tending toward progress and human betterment. Naturalists imagined society,

18、instead, as a blind machine, godless and out of control. 4) Man is born with tragic, inevitably bound by his own hereditary traits.Man proves powerless before fate however he tries, he seldom escapes his doomed destiny,Tess of the DUrbervilles (下p.315) Literary Views 1) Thomas Hardy believes that ma

19、ns fate is predeterminedly tragic, driven by a combined force of “nature”, both inside and outside. 2) Most of his novels have a tragic ending. And the characters tragedies result from some mysterious force in nature in the form of fate and chance. This shows Hardys pessimism and sympathy for human

20、miseries.,Writing Features 1) The tragic sense is the keynote of Hardys novels, and he is a nostalgic author. 2) Hardys novels always set in Wessex, the fictional primitive and crude region, which is threatened by the invading capitalism, expressing the conflict between the traditional and the moder

21、n, the old and the modern. 3) In his Wessex novels, he vividly and truthfully described the tragic lives of the tenants in the last decade of the 19th century. 4) Mans fate is tragic with born, driven by the force of the nature of outside and inside, and man is bound by his inherent nature and hered

22、itary traits which prompt him to go and search for happiness or success, and set him in conflict with the environment, which is influenced greatly by Darwins theory “survival of the fittest”.,5) Man proves to be incompetent/impotent before Fate, and he seldom escapes his destiny. The pessimistic vie

23、w of life predominates most works of Hardy, which earns him the name of a naturalistic writer. 6) Hardy is noted for he rustic dialect and a poetic flavor, so he is also called local-colorist. 7) Tess of the DUrbervilles is one of the most representative of him as both a naturalistic and a critical

24、realist writer.,Symbolic Meanings of the historic site of Stonehenge a collection of giant stones arranged in a circular form, dating from 2,800 to 1,500 B.C. The purposes for the monuments were to serve as an astrological calendar and a ceremonial place for religious or tribal worship. Angel recogn

25、izes that Tess is “lying on an altar”like a sacrifice to the ancient pagans who used to practice there. In a modern sense, Tess is sacrificed to the laws and morals of the nineteenth century.,Understanding “Justice” was done 1) In this sense, there is great irony in Hardys reference to the Greek tra

26、gedian Aeschylus. 2) Tess is like Prometheus in that she seems to have been a “toy” of the gods of morality and religion in Victorian England, and she had to be sacrificed for the good of mankind. 3) All of Tess life is the result of either an accident, fate, or the intervention of the gods. Fate ha

27、s intervened in Tess world and shaped the course of her life. 4) In any case, Hardy hints that Tesss life may have a mythical and tragic importance like that of Prometheus.,An analysis of Tess 1) Tess is able to bear great burdens placed upon her at a young age. She is between the ages of 16 and 23 when we read her tale. This ability to undergo so much at such a young age builds her character so that we see her as a powerful force in the novel. 2) In part, Tess represents the changing role of the agricultural workers in England in the late nineteenth century. There is aristocra