美国文学试题库部分

一、记住下面词条（单选题和填空题）

1.A scientist with lots of inventions and a famous experiment (kite, electricity, thunderstorm). Franklindid a lot of famous experiments and invented many things such as volunteer fire departments, effective street lighting, bifocal glasses, efficient heating devices, lightning-rod(避雷针) and so on

2.Typical literary forms of romanticism include ballad, lyrics, sentimental comedy, novels, gothic romance, sonnet, and critical essays.

3.Reached its peak with the appearance of the major authors of the 19th century such as Edgar Allen Poe, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in poetry, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in fiction.

4. James Fenimore Cooper developed three kinds of novels. The first kind is about the revolutionary past such as The Spy. The second kind is the sea novels such as the Pilot. The third kind is about the American frontier.

5.Nathanial Hawthorne’s works belong to dark romanticism, cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity. Many of his works are inspired by Puritan New England combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism.

6.“The American Scholar” has been called America’s Declaration of In tellectual Independence because he called on American writers to write about America in an American way instead of imitating things foreign.

7.Thoreau has faith in the inner virtue and inward, spiritual grace of man; Thoreau was critical of modern civilization; Man should live a simple life; and he believed in the regeneration改过自新of man. Walden exhibits Thoreau’s trust in the future and his belief in a new generation of men.

8.Though his most famous novel is criticized for being racist, Mark Twain never expected nor intended the controversy that arose with the publication of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain was not racist, but depicted life in his times.

9.Naturalistic writers write detailed descriptions of the lives of the lower class. They are interested in finding out how men and women are overwhelmed by the forces of environment and by the forces of heredity.

10.In Sister Carrie, Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and impotence(无能为力) of men.

11.Matin Eden tells how the protagonist changes from a toiler to a best-selling author. When he fails to resolve the inner conflict between his desire for marriage and his resistance to compromise in a class-oppressed society, he finally drowns himself. London once told Upton Sinclair that he wrote this novel as “an attack on individualism.”

12.The Lost Generation is a term applied to the disillusioned intellectuals of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values, but could replace them only by despair or a cynical hedonism享乐主义.

13.Stream of Consciousness is a literary technique in which a character's thoughts are presented in the confusing, jumbled, and inconsequential manner of real life without