美国文学选择题2014

1. In 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson made a speech entitled _______ at Harvard, which was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmes as "Our intellectual Declaration of Independence."

A. "Nature"

B. "Self-Reliance"

C. "Divinity School Address"

D. "The American Scholar"

2. For Melville, as well as for the reader and _______ , the narrator, Moby Dick is still

a mystery, an ultimate mystery of the universe.

A. Ahab

B. Ishmael

C. Stubb

D. Starbuck

3. Most of the poems in Whitman's Leaves of Grass sing of the "mass" and the _______ as well.

A. nature

B. self-reliance

C. self

D. life

4. Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author's tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more _______ .

A. rational

B. humorous

C. optimistic

D. pessimistic

5. Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire includes three novels. They are The Financier, The Titan and _______ .

A. The Genius

B. The Tycoon

C. The Stoic

D. The Giant

6. The impact of Darwin's evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the nineteenth-century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to yet another school of realism: American ________ .

A. local colorism

B. imagism

C. modernism

D. naturalism

7. It is on his _______ that Washington Irving's fame mainly rested.

A. childhood recollections

B. sketches about his European tours

C. early poetry

D. tales about America

8. Which of the following works concerns most concentrated the Calvinistic view of original sin?

A. The Wasteland.

B. The Scarlet Letter.

C. Leaves of Grass.

D. As I Lay Dying

9. We can perhaps summarize that Walt Whitman’s poems are characterized by all the following features except that they are _______.

A. conversational and crude

B. lyrical and well-structured

C. simple and rather crude

D. free-flowing

10. Who exerts the single most important influence on literary naturalism, of which Theodore Dreiser and Jack London are among the best representative writers?

A. Freud

B. Darwin.

C. W.

D. Howells.

D. Emerson

11. Mark Twain, one of the greatest 19th century American writers, is well known for his ____.

A. international theme

B. waste-land imagery

C. local color

D. symbolism

12. The period before the American Civil War is commonly referred to as _______.

A. the Romantic Period

B. the Realistic Period

C. the Naturalist Period

D. the Modern Period

13. “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough.” This is the shortest poem written by（）.

A. e.e. Cummings C. Ezra Pound

B. T.S. Eliot D. Robert Frost