刘意青《简明英国文学史》课后习题详解(20世纪中期英国文学 战后文学)【圣才出品】

第24章战后文学

1.What is Graham Greene’s understanding of sin and sinner?How does this

understanding express itself in his major novels?

Key:In Greene’s understanding,only with a full recognition of our own as well as other people’s evil can we really understand life and God’s grace.Indeed,in many of his novels,Greene seems to be confirming the Christian idea that a morally imperfect man may enjoy a better chance of religious understanding and spiritual depth,since,in a way,the struggles of these tainted souls bear a closer resemblance to the passion of Christ.

For example,in his novel The Power and The Glory,Greene’s Christian understanding of human failings and religious passion are translated into the unconventional image of the priest in this novel.Contrasting to the whiskey priest’s imperfect character was the hagiographical stories that a Mexican mother read to her son.The sentimental perfection of these saints’lives had a negative effect upon the boy,religion-wise,which made him help the Lieutenant in his hunt for the priest.It was the death of the priest,a not so impeccable sacrifice that restored the boy’s faith in God.

pare the three major women novelists of postwar English Literature, Murdoch,Spark,and Lessing.

Key:Owing to her education in philosophy,Murdoch’s novels exhibit an intense

engagement with theoretical and metaphysical thinking.She believed in the revelation that art could bring to oblique truth.In most of her novels,Murdoch demonstrated her repulsion at the kind of“scientific and anti-metaphysical”“dryness”of the age,when popular works took only a shallow and “journalistic”interest in reality

Different from the thickly-woven texts and philosophic depth of Iris Murdoch, Muriel Spark(1918-2006)delights in a combination of light comedy and weird Gothic in composing her stories,most of which are set in female institutions—a girls’school,or a convent.Though seriously engaging with tricky moral issues, Spark never loses her ironic distance from her characters.

Compared to her fellow female writers of the time,Lessing had an extra identity as a political activist.But what distinguishes Lessing most as a writer with acute feminist and political awareness is The Golden Notebook(1962),this novel has been hailed by British and American feminists as a landmark of women’s liberation movement.In this work,Lessing seems to suggest,that the individual self of woman can find its particular but not purely subjective existence.This is in fact a solution to the conflicts between individual identity and the“collective”raised by the author in the Martha Quest sequence.

3.In what ways did John Osborne and the Angry Young Men revolutionise the English stage?

Key:The impact of Look Back in Anger(1956)was mostly due to its content rather