美国文学考试资料

Part one:

Answer: 1—60

A,B,D,D,C/ D,A,B,A,D/ A,A,D,D,B/ C,C,B,D,C

D A B D B/ A C B C D/ C D C D A/ B,A,C,A,D

B,C,C,B,A/ D,A,B,D,D/ A,A,D,D,B/ C,C,A,D,C

1

1.Hawthorne’s masterpiece, one of the greatest novels of the world is The Scarlet Letter.

2.Emerson’s first startling book is Nature.

3.Ralph Waldo Emerson is the chief spokesman of this spiritual movement of

Transcendentalism.

4.Washington Irving is worth the honor of being “for his literary craftsmanship for his literary

craftsmanship.

5.The colonial influence over American Romanticism made American Romantic writers more

moralize than their English counter-parts.

6.The impact of Darwin's evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the

19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school of realism: American Naturalism.

7.In the first part of the 20th century, apart from Darwinism, there were two thinkers the

German Karl Marx and the Austrian Sigmund Freud, whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period.

8. In his poetry, Robert Frost made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression.

The theme of returning to nature could be read in Leather-Stocking Tales by Cooper.

10. About the novel The Scarlet Letter, which of the following statements is not true? D

A. It's very hard to say that it is a love story or a story of sin.

B. It's a highly symbolic story and the author is a master of symbolism.

C. It's mainly

about the moral, emotional and psychological effects of the sin upon the main characters and the people in general.

D. In it the letter A takes the same symbolic meaning throughout the novel.

11. Ezra Pound showed great interest in Chinese literature and translated the poetry of Li Bai into English.

12. Eli ot’s first major poem (1917 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock , has been called the first masterpiece of modernism in English.

13. The Fitzgerald lived so extravagantly that they frequently spent more money than Fitzgerald earned for parties, liquor, entertaining their friends and traveling. It was this living style that nicknamed the decade of the 1920s as The Roaring Twenties,The Jazz age andThe Dollar Decade.

14. Hemingway was badly wounded in Italy and sent to a hospital where he fell in love with a nurse. These two persons later became the characters of his novel A Farewell to Arms

15. The Grapes of Wrath tells the Joad family’s life from the time they were evicted from their farm in Oklahoma until their first winter in California.

16. Faulkner wrote about the society in the South by inventing families which represented different social forces: the old decaying upper class; the rising, ambitious, unscrupulous class of the “poor Whites”; and the Negroes who laboured for both of them.

17. In Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, he used a technique called stream of consciousness , in which the whole story was told through the thoughts of four characters.

18. Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury describes the decay and downfall of an old southern aristocratic family, symbolizing the old social order, told from four different points of view.

19. To Faulkner, the primary duty of a writer was to explore and represent the infinite possibilities inherent in human life. Therefore a writer should observe with no judgment whatsoever and reduce authorial intrusion to the lowest minimum.

20. Which of the following is right about American fiction from 1945 onwards?

A group of new writers who survived the war wrote about their ideals within the artistic field.

1. The Beat Generation is a large group including San Francisco writers, the name referred simultaneously_______, through drugs, and alcohol.

• A. to their sense that society was worn out

• B. to their interest in new forms of experience

• C. to the rhythm of jazz

2. In the Depression Age, John Steinbeck is the famous leftist for his sympathetic story about drifting farm laborers and factory workers.

3. The 1940s saw the flourishing of a new contingent of writers, including R. P. Warren, A. Miller, T. Williams, K. A. Porter and E. Welty. All but Miller were from the South

4. The Great God Brown fuses symbolism, poetry, and the affirmation of a pagan idealism to show how materialistic civilization denies the life—giving impulses to and destruction of the genuine art.

5. The realistic schools led by Mark Twain and Henry James differ in their understanding of the truth

6. Eliot’s first major poem (1917) has been called the first masterpiece of modernism in English.

A. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

B. The Waste Land

C. Four Quartets

D. Preludes

7. Which story is William Dean Howells’ masterpiece on the American spirit of the self-made man?

A. A Modern Instance

B. The Luck of Roaring Camp

C. The Rise of Silas Lapham

D. A Woman’s Reason

8. Which of the following is depicted as the mythical county in William Faulkner's

novels?

A. Cambridge.

B. Yoknapatawpha