刘意青《简明英国文学史》课后习题详解(18世纪英国文学 古典主义时期)【圣才出品】

第8章古典主义时期
1.What are the essential features of Neoclassicism in the18th-century England? Key:(1)Glorious Revolution happened at the end of17th Century.With the firmly established political power of the middle class,capitalism flourished rapidly in England,especially after1769in which year James Watt(1736-1819)invented the steam engine.(2)To match the rapid development of economy,there emerged in Britain a number of great thinkers of social sciences.(3)London and many other cities soon became big metropolises and a working class was also being formed during the process.(4)People of the18th-century England attached great importance to Reason and joined in the great Enlightenment Movement.
(5)However,when science and reason were promoted,religion felt threatened.
the major Neoclassic representative writers of this period and introduce their major achievements.
Key:The Age of Classicism,or rather of Neoclassicism,in English Literary History refers to the literary trend in the first half of the18th century.The new literature reached its peak with strong concentration and vigour,of which Alexander Pope was its central figure.Besides Pope,Swift was also its outstanding representative. The two writers are great masters of satire and poetry in heroic couplet,which are the most prominent achievements of English Neoclassicism.
Pope’s major achievements lie in his representative works such as The Rape
of the Lock,On Literary Criticism,The Dunciad,An Essay on Man and Translations of Homer,etc.
Jonathan Swift’s major works include The Battle of the Books(1704),A Tale of a Tub(1704),Bickerstaff Almanac(1708),Gulliver’s Travels(1726),The Drapier’s Letters(1726)and A Modest Proposal(1729),etc.
ment on Pope’s literary contributions.
Key:When Pope died in1744the Neoclassicism as a literary trend to represent the Enlightenment Movement in England had ebbed toward its end.But,as a great satirist and master of language and an ingenious poet who had brought the heroic couplet to its perfection,Alexander Pope has acquired an immortal place in the history of English literature.
4.Analyse Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Key:Gulliver’s Travels is the work that has made Swift known all over the world, which is not a real novel in the modern sense,but rather a satirical allegory that tells improbable and fantastic events with the purpose of criticising his contemporary reality.The novel consists of Lemuel Gulliver’s four travels, arranged in4books.Gulliver was a physician,but could not earn enough money in London to support his family.Therefore,he found a doctor’s position on a ship to sail overseas.The first two travels,that is Gulliver’s adventures in Lilliput, the country of tiny men and Brobdingnag,the country of the giants,are the most
widely-read parts of the book,and they are often adapted into reading material or cartoons for children and young readers.The third and fourth adventures are more philosophical and demanding and,as a result,they are less known to the general reading public,but are dearly liked by serious and mature readers.
Gulliver’s Lilliput experience is aimed at criticising the English government and exposing the political and religious problems of England.In Book II,he introduces England proudly to the king of Brobdingnag,boasting about its law system,and the wars fought in the English history,and recommends weapons of all kinds to be very effective reigning tools to the Brobdingnag king,who is surprised by the cruelty and meanness of races like Gulliver’s.In both Books I and II,Swift displays to the full his rich imagination,by playing with the smallness of the Lilliputians and the giant figures of the Brobdingnag people against Gulliver and achieves many fantastically humourous and satirical effects.
In the third and fourth books,Gulliver experiences even more unbelievable adventures.In the third one,that is Gulliver’s adventure in the country of the Flying Island,Swift fulfills the task set to him by the Scriblerus Club to expose and ridicule false learning,and he did so to a burlesque degree.For instance,people on the Flying Island do not know how to live a good and normal life.They are solely interested in mathematics and music.In consequence,they wear ill-fitting clothes decorated with music notes and geometry shapes.On land below,the scientists in the Academy of Lagado,a colony of the Flying Island,are all engaged in the most impossible experiments,such as to extract sunshine from cucumbers,
to restore food from human excrement,and to build houses from top to the bottom.Through such bitter attacks on modern science Swift intended to ridicule all the false learning of his time.But,here we must notice that as a staunch Christian of the Church of England,Swift was also worried about the encroaching of science into the spiritual scope of human beings.He was trying at the same time to give warnings to those who are overly enthusiastic about the omnipotence of science at the expense of human love and humanistic spirit.In this book,he also criticises early imperialist ventures of England.
The fourth book has been generally regarded as the most shocking of the four,because in it Swift describes men as so low and depraved that they are made to serve the horses.His last adventure brings Gulliver to the country of horses,or of the Houyhnhnms,and here he sees an animal of human shape called yahoo.The yahoos are filthy beasts of strong passion with hair covering a human body.Their masters are horses with good manners,clean living habits and absolute reason.They live in wood houses and eat hay,fruits,and vegetables.In contrast to the horse masters,yahoos are chained in a dirty yard when they are not doing any work of the beasts of burden.They eat rotten meat,dead mice and frog,sleep wallowing in the mud and often fall to fighting each other over the most trivial things.What is more,the yahoos are all fond of colored stones,which, if found by a yahoo,will be hidden like treasures,and yahoos all the time fight each other over the possession of them.Here,Swift is referring to those European imperialists who go overseas to plunder wealth of other countries.The
gray horse that Gulliver stays with points out the similarities of his guest to his yahoos,but because Gulliver is dressed,the horse master finally believes him to be different.Here,Swift makes Gulliver number to the horse master all the wars, cheatings,the dissipation of the life of the rich and the dire poverty of the poor, and tell all other sorts of ill maneuvers of the Europeans to the horse master.He boasts of his fellow human beings’crimes of plunder and killing,which shocks the horses to the extreme.By portraying human beings as depraved and disgusting yahoos and setting them against the noble horses that are guided by reason,Swift is launching the most severe attack on humanity and the European reality.But on the other hand,he is also criticising absolute reason represented by the cool-headed horses,who never have problems caused by love or passion.
In the fourth book,Swift’s attack is,first of all,aimed at his fellow men who have fallen so low that Swift wants to use yahoos to shock them into realising their depravity.Because of this,for a long time,he is criticised as a misanthropist who hates human race to the point of eulogising the horses as their betters. However,on the other hand,by presenting Gulliver’s crazy worship of reason in the form of the horse in the most burlesque way,Swift is also criticising absolute reason.What he advocates is,man of Christian faith and benevolence.Such people can guide their own behaviour with Christian morals,and be free from selfish desires and passion on the one hand,but on the other hand they are by no means as cold and indifferent as absolute reason advocates.
two important newspapers of the period and tell what you know about them.
Key:The Tatler(1709-1711)and The Spectator(1711-1712)were two important newspapers of the period.
At first,it was Steele who started The Tatler,coming out three issues a week to carry the domestic and foreign news,poetry and drama,and there were some special columns like“From My Own Apartment”,to which Swift made frequent contributions.Pretending to be a Mr.Isaac Bickerstaff whose comments on restoration plays were sharp literary criticism.There was also a main persona Mr. Tatler who discussed all kinds of social,political and literary topics with his readers.It was a newspaper very much in the satirical style of Swift and focused on the didactic aim of educating the populace.Due to Steele’s lack of subtlety, The Tatler on the whole was short of literary flavor and sometimes offended people,and thus its popularity gradually dwindled.In January1711,The Tatler had to terminate its publication.
Two months later with Addison joining Steele The Spectator was born.It was a daily newspaper with only one essay per issue,all of which were almost totally written by Addison and Steele themselves,and Addison,rather than Steele, influenced both its style and the content.The main character Mr.Spectator discussed,for instance,what he had seen when traveling on the Continent, commenting on issues of a broad scale.Many of the articles were of an enlightening nature and thus met with the eager popular demand for knowledge。