英美文选论述题

1.What makes “The adventures of

Huckleberry Finn” more than a child’s adventure story? Briefly discuss the question from the following aspects: the setting，the language，the character(s)and the style.

A.Setting: in the novel, Mark twain

recreates a small-town world of America and presents the local color.

nguage: He uses simple, direct language

faithful to the colloquial speech, the vernacular language of the local people.

C.Character(s): The author recreates two

rebels and fugitives running away from civilization, especially Huckleberry Finn, an innocent boy who refuses to accept the conventional village morality.

D.Theme: The novel is a criticism of social

injustice, hypocrisy, conservativeness and narrow-mindedness of the American small town society.

E.Style: The novel employs a humorous style

of narration and is also highly symbolic with the central symbol.

8.What is the theme of poem “Paradise

lost”, and why did John Milton write this poem?

A.The theme is the "Fall of Man," i.e. man's

disobedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause-Satan.

B.Satan is a rebellious figure against God

in literature, defe He tempted Adam and Eve, which proved his evilness.ated, he and his rebel angels were cast into hell.

However, Satan refused to accept his failure, swearing that “all was not lost”

and that he would revenge for his downfall. The freedom of the will is the keystone of Satan’s character, which was the important spirit of the rising middle class. 2.Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe

was a great success partly because

the protagonist was

a real middle-class hero. Discuss Crusoe,

the protagonist of the novel, as an

embodiment of

the rising middle-class virtues in the mid-eighteenth century England. A. Social background: The Eighteenth

Century England witnessed the

growing importance of the middle

class.

a. Industrial Revolution;

b. The expansion of international

markets;

c. The middle class was a revolutionary class then and quite different from the feudal aristocratic class. They were people who had known poverty and hardship, and most of them had obtained their present social status through hard work. They believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work. To work, to economize and to accumulate wealth constituted the whole meaning of their life.

d. Literature should provide a realistic presentation of the life of the common people; it should meet the demand of the middle class peopl

e.

B. Robinson Crusoe embodies the virtues

of the middle class people.

With a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage and persistence in overcoming difficulties, in struggling against nature, Crusoe becomes the prototype of the empire builder, the pioneer colonist.