2010年7月自考英美文学选读试题

PART ONE (40 POINTS)

Ⅰ. Multiple Choice(40 points in all, 1 for each)

Select from the four choices of each item the one that best answers the question or completes the statement. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

1. T. S. Eliot’s ______ is a poem of dramatic monologue and a prelude to The Waste Land, helping to point up the continuity of Eliot’s thinking.

A. “Prufrock”

B. “Gerontion”

C. The Hollow Men

D. Four Quartets

2. Defoe’s group of four novels are the first literary works devoted to the study of problems of the lower-class people. They are the following EXCEPT ______.

A. Captain Singleton

B. Moll Flanders

C. Roxana

D. Robinson Crusoe

3. Charles Dickens’ novel, ______, is famous for its vivid descriptions of the work-house and life of the underworld in the nineteenth-century London.

A. The Pickwick Paper

B. Oliver Twist

C. David Copperfield

D. Nicholas Nickleby

4. D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel is ______.

A. The Rainbow

B. Women in Love

C. Sons and Lovers

D. Lady Chatterley’s Lover

5. Jonathan Swift’s greatest satiric work is ______.

A. A Tale of a Tub

B. The Battle of the Books

C. Gulliver’s Travels

D. A Modest Proposal

6. Dickens’best- depicted characters are the following. EXCEPT ______.

A. innocent, virtuous, persecuted and helpless child characters

B. horrible and grotesque characters

C. broadly humorous or comical characters

D. simple, innocent and faithful women characters

7. George Bernard Shaw’s ______ explored his idea of “Life Force”, the power that would create superior beings to be equal to God and to solve all the social, moral, and metaphysical problems of human society.

A. Man and Superman

B. The Apple Cart

C. Pygmalion

D. Too True to Be Good

8. For his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel, ______ has been regarded as “Father of the English Novel”.

A. Daniel Defoe

B. Jonathan Swift

C. Henry Fielding

D. Oliver Goldsmith

9. Charlotte Bronte’s autobiograghical work ______ largely based on her experience in Brussels.

A. The Professor

B. Shirley

C. Villette

D. Jane Eyre

10. D. H. Lawrence’s artistic tendency is mainly ______ , which combines dramatic scenes with an authoritative commentary.

A. romanticism

B. realism

C. naturalism

D. modernism

11. In ______ opinion, human nature is seriously and premanently flawed. To better human life, enlightenment is needed, but to redress it is very hard.

A. Daniel Defoe’s

B. Charles Dickens’

C. Jonathan Swift’s

D. Henry Fielding’s

12. The major theme of Jane Austen’s novels is ______ toward which she holds on a practical idealism.

A. love and money

B. marriage and money

C. love and family

D. love and marriage

13. Hardy’s ______ is a fierce attack on the hypocritical morality of the bourgeois society and the capitalist invasion into the country and destruction of the English peasantry towards the end of the century.

A. Tess of the D’Urbervilles B. The Mayor of Caste Bridge

C. The Return of the Native D. Jude the Obscure

14. Henry Fielding adopted “______” to relate a story in his novel in which the author becomes the “all- knowing God”.

A. the first- person narration

B. the epistolary form

C. the picaresque form

D. the third -person narration

15. In ______ , Shelley created a Platonic symbol of the spirit of man, a force of beauty and regeneration.

A. “To a Skylark”

B. “The Cloud”

C. “Ode to Liberty”

D. Adonais

16. The success of ______ is also due to its introduction to the English novel the first governess heroine.

A. The Professor

B. Jane Eyre

C. Wuthering Heights

D. Far from the Madding Crowd

17. John Milton’s ______ is the only generally acknowledged epic in English literature since Beowulf.

A. Paradise Lost

B. Paradise Regained

C. Samson Agonistes

D. Areopagitica

18. Wordsworth’s ______ is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature.

A. “To a Skylark”

B. “I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud”

C. “An Evening Walk”

D. “My Heart Leaps Up”

19. As the best of Shakespeare’s final romances, ______ is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life and society in his late years.

A. The Tempest

B. The Winter’s Tale

C. Cymbeline

D. The Rape of Lucrece

20. The major representatives of the poetic revolution in English Romantic period were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and ______.

A. William Blake

B. William Wordsworth

C. John Keats

D. Percy Bysshe Shelley

21. Samson Agonistes by ______ is the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English.

A. John Milton

B. William Blake

C. Henry Fielding

D. William Wordsworth

22. The declaration that “I know that This World is a World of IMAGINATION & Vision,” and that “The Nature of my work is visionary or imaginative” belongs to ______.

A. William Blake

B. William Wordsworth

C. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

D. George Gordon Byron

23. Two people could be “twain yet one” : their paths could be different, and yet they could achieve a kind of transcendent contact, ______ believed.

A. Walt Whitman

B. Ezra Pound

C. Washington Irving

D. Nathaniel Hawthorne

24. Most literary critics think that Fitzgerald is both an insider and an outsider of ______ with a double vision.

A. the Jazz Age

B. the Age of Reason and Revolution

C. the Babybooming Age

D. the Post- Modern Age

25. The Nobel Prize Committee highly praised ______ for “his powerful styleforming mastery of the art” of creating modern fiction.

A. T. S. Eliot

B. Ernest Hemingway

C. William Faulkner

D. Mark Twain

26. The attitude towards life that ______ had been trying to demonstrate in his works is known as “grace under pressure”.

A. William Faulkner

B. Theodore Dreiser

C. Ernest Hemingway

D. F·Scott Fitzgerald

27. In 1841, ______ went to the South Seas on a whaling ship, where he gained the first- hand information about whaling that he used later in Moby -Dick.

A. Herman Melville

B. Nathaniel Hawthorne

C. Robert Lee Frost

D.T.S. Eliot

28. In most of his writings, ______ deliberately broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the present, in the way the montage does in a movie.

A. Walt Whitman

B. William Faulkner

C. Ernest Hemingway

D.F. Scott Fitzgerald

29. In 1950, one of the leading American writers ______ was awarded the Nobel Prize for the anti-racist Intruder in the Dust.

A. Robert Frost

B. Theodore Dreiser

C. William Faulkner

D.F. Scott Fitzgerald

30. Walt Whitman ’s ______ is a collection of poems incorporating his emotions and feelings before and during the Civil War when he stood firmly on the side of the North.

A. Leaves of Grass

B. “Cavalry Crossing a Ford”

C. “Song of Myself”

D. Drum Taps

31. It was his masterpiece The Great Gatsby that made ______ one of the greatest American novelists.

A. F. Scott Fitzgerald

B. William Faulkner

C. Ernest Hemmingway

D. Gertrude Steinbeck

32. The childhood of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in the Mississippi is a record of a vanished way of life in the ______ Mississippi valley.

A. pre - War of Independence

B. post - War of Independence

C. pre - Civil War

D. post - Civil War

33. In Moby-Dick, for the character Ahab, the white whale represents only ______.

A. evil

B. nature

C. society

D. purity

34. Melville’s semi- autobiographical novel, ______, concerns the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors.

A. Moby-Dick

B. Redburn

C. Mardi

D. Typee

35. Closely related to Dickinson’s religious poetry are her poems concerning ______, ranging over the physical as well as the psychological and emotional aspects of death.

A. love and nature

B. death and universe

C. death and immortality

D. family and happiness

36. The effect of Darwinist idea of “survival of the fittest” was shattering in ______ ’s fictional world of jungle, where “kill or to be killed” was the law.

A. Mark Twain

B. Henry James

C. Theodore Dreiser

D. Walt Whitman

37. Though Robert Frost’s subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in ______, he wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man’s life in his long poetic career.

A. the South

B. the West

C. England

D. New England

38. Like all naturalists, ______ was restrained from finding a solution to the social problems that appeared in his novels and accordingly almost all his works have tragic endings.

A. Theodore Dreiser

B. Henry James

C. Washington Irving

D. Walt Whitman

39. “The Birthmark” drives home symbolically Hawthorne’s point that ______ is man’s birthmark, something he is born with.

A. purity

B. generosity

C. evil

D. love

40. The Blithedale Romance is a novel ______ wrote to reveal his own experiences on the Brook Farm and his own methods as a psychological novelist.

A. Herman Melville

B. Nathaniel Hawthorne

C. Washington Irving

D. Walt Whitman  

PART TWO (60 POINTS)
Ⅱ. Reading Comprehension ( 16 points in all, 4 for each)

Read the quoted parts carefully and answer the questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

41. “To be, or not to be —— that is the question;

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?”

Questions:

A. Who is the writer of this work? What’s the title of the work?

B. What does the phrase “to take arms against a sea of troubles ” mean?

C. How do you understand the quotation “To be, or not to be -that is the question”?

42. “Beside a pumice isle in Baiae’s bay,

And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Quivering within the wave’s intenser day,

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou

For whose path the Atlantic’s level powers”

(From Shelley’s“ Ode to the West Wind”)

Questions:

A. In what form is the poem written?

B. What does the quotation“ the sense faints picturing them” mean?

C. What idea does Shelley express in this poem?

43. “ We passed the School, where Children strove

At Recess- in the Ring-

We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain -

We Passed the Setting Sun- ”

( From Emily Dickinson’s poem Because I could not stop for Death)

Questions:

A. What does the phrase “Fields of Gazing Grain” symbolize?

B. What figure of speech is used in the poem?

C. What are Dickinson’s unique writing features?

44. (A lot of common objects have been enumerated in the previous lines, and here are the last two lines of the poem. )

“The horizon’s edge, the flying sea - crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud.

These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day. ”

Questions:

A. Who is the author of this poem? What is the title of the poem?

B. What does the child stand for in the poem?

C. How do you understand “ These became part of the child” ?

Ⅲ. Questions and Answers (24 points in all, 6 for each)

Give a brief answer to each of the following questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

45. What are the features of George Bernard Shaw’s characterization in his plays?

46. Thomas Hardy is often regarded as a transitional writer. Some critics believe that he is emotionally traditional and intellectually advanced. How do you understand this idea?

47. What is the most famous theme in Henry James’s fiction? And what is his favourate approach in characterization, which makes him different from Mark Twain and W. D. Howlles as realists? Give two titles of his works of his first period in which this theme and this approach are employed.

48. “Young Goodman Brown”is one of Hawthorne’s most profound tales.

What is the allegorical meaning of Brown, the protagonist? What does Hawthorne set out to prove in this tale? How does Melville comment on Hawthorne’s manner of concerning with guilt and evil?

IV. Topic Discussion(20 points in all, 10 for each)

Write no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.

49. Please elaborate Wordsworth’s theory of poetry, taking examples from the poems you have learned to support your ideas.

50. A Rose for Emily is one of Faulkner’s short stories. Discuss the character of Emily Grierson and how this character is depicted.