英国文学选读第四版复习资料

Charles Dickens

1.Make a brief introduction to the three main characters.

Dombey, Edith and Carker, are vividly described in the novel Dombey and Son.

The writer is Charles Dickens.

Dombey is a heartless capitalist who thinks of everything in terms of cash, even in his relations with the members of his family. He is proud of his wealth and is devoted to the gods of wealth and power.

Edith is also proud. She is very handsome, very haughty, and very willful. Her pride is quite different from that of Dombey. Her pride is the one weapon of self-defense for a hurt and tormented soul in her struggle against the rule of money. Edith is a tragedy from first to last—a fine spirit that has been allowed no chance of unfettered development under capitalism, and who, in the end, wins only the peace of a voluntary, solitary confinement.

Carker the villain, whole smooth tongue covers alago-like malevolence, stands as a type of social evil, to which the capitalist system lends a cover of virtue, and which it usually rewards with success. Though Carker is killed in an accident, he has done the maximum of mischief during his lifetime. These types of characters are all products of the bourgeois society.

2.Tell the characteristics of Alfred Tennyson’s poetry

----- Dramatic monologue (Robert Browning)

Tennyson has a total mastery of the sounds and rhythms of the English language.

Tennyson has a genius for evoking moods and states of mind in his poems. He is able to create a sense of nostalgia, a wistful longing for the past or for remote experiences. No English poet surpasses Tennyson at linking descriptions of nature or setting to state of mind. Some of his poems deal with the main political, religious and scientific issues of his day. His poems reflect his conservative ideas and idealization of the bourgeois social reality.

ment on the characteristics of Modernist Literature.(现代文学)

Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationship between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objectivity. They are mainly concerned with the inner world of an individual therefore, they pay more attention to the psychic time than the Chronological one. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are mixed together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual.

4.Make a brief introduction to William Butler Yeats’s literary career.

生涯为三部分，所以从三部分来写。

During the early ears of William Butler Yeats’s literary career, he wrote romantic poetry under the influence of Edmund Spenser, Shelley and the Pre-Raphaelites. He also made an intensive study of William Blake, whose symbolism and mysticism attracted him. In this period, he mainly created the works: The Wanderings of Oisin. The Wind among the Reeds.