英国文学简史问答题期末考试复习提纲教学教材

1. How much do you know about the English literature in the Romantic Age?

①The Romantic Age in England was like the Elizabethan Age, distinctively an age of poetry. It was regarded as the second great age in English literary history; for poetry is the highest form of literary expression, and seems to have been most in harmony with the noblest powers of the English genius. The glory of the age is in the poetry of Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelly, Keats, Moore, and Southey；

②Women novelists appeared in this age. It was during this period that women assumed for the first time, an important place in English literature. Mrs. Anne Radcliff was one of the most successful writers of the school of exaggerated romance. Jane Austen offered us her charming descriptions of everyday life in her enduring work her masterpiece----Pride and Prejudice;

③The greatest historical novelist Walter Scott also appeared in this period. His historical novels combine a romantic atmosphere with a realistic description of historical background and common people life. Scott marked the transition from romanticism to the period of realism which followed it;

④Romantic prose was represented by Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey and Hume. Lamb was the best essayist, whose familiar essays are very famous.

3.What are the major features of Dickens’ novels?

①Dickens’ novels offer a most complete and realistic picture of the English bourgeois society of his age. His novels tell much of the unhappy experiences of his own childhood. They reflect the protest of the people against capitalist exploitation, and criticize the vices of capitalist society.

② The success of Dickens novels also lies in his character-portrayal. Not only are the major characters in his novels very carefully delineated and given distinctive individual characteristics but also his minor figures create in the readers’ mind strong impressions of their personalities. Some of Dickens’characters are really such “typical characters under typical circumstances”that they become proverbial or are representative of a whole group of similar persons.

③Dickens is a great humorist and satirist. His novels are full of humor and satire

④Dickens is not especially known for the construction of plot in his novels. There is in his novels often more than one minor thread of story beside the major one, and these threads are generally very loosely woven together. He seems to love a complicated and involved plot.

⑤In almost every one of Dickens’ novels there is a happy ending, which points to the author’s optimism which is an admirable thing for a critical realist because that means his still has his hopes after seeing the gloomy world all around him and one hand, and as a petty-bourgeois intellectual, could not overstep the limits of his class on the other hand.

⑥Another feature in Dickens’novels is his adroit use of language. On the whole Dickens has a richness of expressions and generally succeeds in using the right words and phrases at the right moments for the right characters to attain the right effects. 12. What are the characteristics of Dickens’ novels?(同第三题)