2023年自考英美文学选读作家特色与作品分析.doc

作家及其创作思想/写作特点/语言风格/文学成就
选读作品及作品分析/人物性格
William Shakespeare (09A)

1. He holds that literature should be a combination of beauty, kindness and truth, and should reflect nature and reality. He also states that the beauty in literary works can last for ever.
2. His major characters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones; they are individuals representing certain types. By applying a psycho-analytical approach, he succeeds in exploring the characters’ inner mind. The soliloquies in his plays fully reveal the characters’ inner conflict.
3. He seldom invents his own plots, but borrows them from some old plays or storybooks, or from ancient Greek and Roman sources. He would shorten the time and intensify the story. There are usually several threads running through the play, thus providing the story with suspense and apprehension.
4. Irony is a good means of dramatic presentation. It makes the characters who are ignorant of the truth do certain ridiculous things. Disguise is also an important device to create dramatic irony, usually with woman disguised as man.
5. He can write skillfully in different poetic forms, such as the sonnet, the blank verse, and the rhymed couplet. His vocabulary is amazing; he is known to have used 16000 different words in his works. His coinage of new words and distortion of the meaning of the old ones also create striking effects.
6. He is above all writers in the past and in the present time. His influence on later writers is immeasurable.
Sonnet 18 (06,08,11S)
Sonnet 18 is one of the most beautiful sonnets written by Shakespeare, in which he has a profound meditation on the destructive power of time and the eternal beauty brought forth by poetry to the one he loves. A nice summer’s day is usually transient, but the beauty in poetry can last for ever. Thus Shakespeare has a faith in the permanence of poetry.
The Merchant of Venice (03Q)
The theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew.
Hamlet (01S)
1. Hamlet is a melancholic scholar-prince, and faces the dilemma between action and mind.
2. Urged to seek revenge for his father’s murder, he has none of the single-minded blood lust. It is not because he is incapable of action, but because he is so indecisive that action, when it finally comes, seems almost like defeat, diminishing rather than adding to the stature of the hero.
3. Trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing and plotting, and apparently bearing the intolerable burden of the duty to revenge his father’s death, hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and action.
4. His life is one of constant role-playing, examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility, for he is too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger.
John Milton

1. In his life, Milton shows himself a real revolutionary, a master poet and a great prose writer.
2. As a Christian humanist, he fought for freedom in all aspects, while his achievements in literature make him tower over all the other English writers of his time and exert a great influence over later ones.
Paradise Lost (10Q)
1. The theme is the “Fall of Man”, i.e. man’s disobedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause – Satan.
2. Milton intends to expose the ways of Satan and to “justify the ways of God to men”. At the center of the conflict between human love and spiritual duty lies Milton’s fundamental concern with freedom and choice, i.e. the freedom to obey God’s prohibition on eating the apple and the choice of disobedience made by love. He tries to convince us that an all-knowing God was just in allowing Adam and Eve to be tempted and to choose sin and its inevitable punishment.
Daniel Defoe
1. As a member of the middle class, Defoe spoke for and to the members of his class. In most of his works, he gave his praise to the hard-working, sturdy middle class and showed his sympathy for the downtrodden, unfortunate poor.
2. Defoe was a very good story-teller. He had a gift for organizing minute details in such a vivid way that his stories could be both credible and extremely fascinating. His sentence are sometimes short, crisp and plain, and sometimes long and rambling, which leave an impression of casual narration. His language is smooth, easy, colloquial and mostly vernacular. There is nothing artificial in his language: it is common English at its best.
Robinson Crusoe (12S)(01=08A)
1. Robinson is a real hero: a typical 18th-century English middle-class man, with a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage, patience and persistence in overcoming obstacles, in struggling against the hostile natural environment.
2. He is the very prototype of the empire builder, the pioneer colonist.
3. In describing Robinson’s life on the island, Defoe glorifies human labor and the Puritan fortitude, which save Robinson from despair and are a source of pride and happiness. He toils for the sake of subsistence, and the fruits of his labor are his own.
Jonathan Swift
1. A Tale of Tub and The Battle of the Books established his name as a satirist.
2. His understanding of human nature is profound. In his opinion, human nature is seriously and permanently flawed. To better human life, enlightenment is needed, but to redress it is very hard.
3. Swift is a master satirist. His satire is usually masked by an outward gravity and an apparent earnestness which renders his satire all the more powerful. His “A Modest Proposal” is generally taken as a perfect model.
4. Swift is one of the greatest masters of English prose. He defined a good style as “proper words in proper places”. Clear, simple, concrete diction, uncomplicated sentence structure, economy and conciseness of language mark all his writings.
Gulliver’s Travels
1. Gulliver’s Travels contains four parts, each telling about Gulliver’s experiences in Lilliput, Brobdingnag, Flying Island, and Houyhnhnm.
2. The book is one of the most effective criticisms and satires of all aspects in the then English and European life. Its social significance is great and its exploration into human nature profound.
3. In part 1, Gulliver gives an account of some aspects of Lilliputian life and obviously implies the similar ridiculous practices or tricks of the English government. The description of the competitions in games held before royal members hints that the success of those government officials lies not in their being any wiser or better but in their being nimbler in games.
Henry Fielding
1. Fielding has been regarded as “Father of the English Novel”.
2. Of all the 18th-century novelists he was the first to write specifically a “comic epic in prose”, the first to give the modern novel its structure and style.
3. Fielding adopted “the third-person narration”, in which the author becomes the “all-knowing God”, so he is able to present not only their external behaviors but also the internal activities of their minds.
4. In form, he tries to retain the epical form of the classical works but at the same time keeps faithful to his realistic presentation of common life. The ordinary and usually ridiculous life of the common people is his major concern.
5. Fielding’s language is easy, unlaboured and familiar, but extremely vivid and vigorous. His sentences are always distinguished by logic and rhythm. His works are also noted for lively, dramatic dialogues and other theatrical devices.
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling
1. Tom Jones is a masterpiece on the subject of human nature.
2. Tom is a national hero, a young fellow with virtues and yet not without fault – honest, kind-hearted, high-spirited, loyal, and brave, but impulsive, wanting carefulness and full of animal spirits. In a way, the young man stands for a wayfaring Everyman, who is expelled from the paradise and has to go through hard experience to gain a knowledge of himself and finally to approach perfectness.
3. Tom Jones brings its author the name of the “Prose Homer”. The panorama of the 18th-century English country and city life with scores of different places and about 40 characters is superb. Its 18 books of epic form are divided into 3 sections, 6 books each, clearly marked out by the change of scenes: in the country, on the highway and in London. By this, Fielding has indeed achieved his goal of writing a “comic epic in prose”.
William Blake

1. Literarily Blake was the first important Romantic poet, despising the rule of reason, opposing the classical tradition of the 18th century, and treasuring the individual’s imagination.
2. Blake declares that “I know that This World is a World of IMAGINATION & Vision ”, and that “The nature of my work is visionary or imaginative”.
3. Blake writes his poems in plain and direct language. His poems often carry the lyric beauty with immense compression of meaning. He distrusts the abstractness and tends to embody his views with visual images. Symbolism in wide range is also a distinctive feature of his poetry.
The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Innocence), The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Experience) (10Q,12Q), The Tyger (11S)
1. Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy and innocent world. Songs of Experience paints a world of misery, poverty, disease, war and repression with a melancholy tone. The two books hold the similar subject-matter, but the tone, emphasis and conclusion differ.
2. “The Chimney Sweeper” from Songs of Innocence finds a counterpart of the same title in Songs of Experience. The former indicates the conditions which make religion a consolation, a prospect of “illusory happiness”; the later reveals the true nature of religion which helps bring misery to the poor children. They are good examples to reveal the relation between an economic circumstance and an ideological circumstance, i.e. the relation between the exploitation of child labor and the role played by religion in making people compliant to exploitation.
William Wordsworth
1. Wordsworth’s theory of poetry is calling for simple themes drawn from humble life expressed in the language of ordinary people. Wordsworth defines the poet as a “man speaking to men”, and poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, which originates in emotion recollected in tranquillity”.
2. Wordsworth’s deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and profound poetry which no other poets has ever equaled.
3. He held that the scenes and events of everyday life and the speech of ordinary people were the raw material which poetry could and should be made of.
4. The most important contribution he had made is that he has not only started the modern poetry, but also paved the way for English poetry by using ordinary speech of the language and by advocating a return to nature.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (07S)
Wordsworth wrote this beautiful poem of nature after he came across a long belt of gold daffodils tossing and reeling and dancing along the waterside.
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (04S)
The date of this experience was not Sept.3, but July 31, 1802; its occasion was a trip to France. The sonnet describes a vivid picture of a beautiful morning in London. It follows strictly the Italian form, with a clear division between the octave and the sestet; the rhyme scheme is abbaabba, cdcdcd.
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways (03S)
This is one of the “Lucy poems”, written in 1799.
The Solitary Reaper
It is an iambic verse. Most of the lines in the poem are octosyllabics. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is ababccdd.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
1. Shelley is one of the leading Romantic poets, an intense and original lyrical poet in the English language.
2. He has a reputation as a difficult poet: learned, imagistically complex, full of classical and mythological allusions.
3. His style abounds in personification and metaphor and other figures of speech which describe vividly what we see and feel, or express what passionately moves us.
A Song: Men of England (09,10S)
This poem was written in 1819, the year of the Peterloo Massacre. It is not only a war cry calling upon all working people of England to rise up against their political oppressors, but also an address to point out to them the intolerable injustice of economic exploitation.
Ode to the West Wind (01S)
Shelley praised the powerful west wind and expressed his eagerness to enjoy the boundless freedom from the reality. He gathered in this poem a wealth of symbolism, employed a structural art and his powers of metrical orchestration at their mightiest.
Jane Austen

1. As a realistic writer, Jane Austen considers it her duty to criticize life seriously, and to expose the follies and illusions of mankind. And in style, she is a neoclassicism advocator, upholding those traditional ideas of order, reason, proportion and gracefulness in novel writing.
2. Her main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships. Because of this, her novels have a universal significance.
3. Stories of love and marriage provided the major themes in all her novels, in which female characters are always playing an active part.
4. As a novelist Jane Austen writes within a very narrow sphere. All her works are concerning three or four landed gentry families with their daily routine life. Austen can portray the characters and their recurring situations with absolute accuracy and sureness, which makes her unequaled.
5. She presents the quiet, day-to-day country life of the upper-middle-class English. Because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of human behavior, Jane Austen has brought the English novel to its maturity, and she has been regarded as one of the greatest of all novelists.
Pride and Prejudice (03A)(12Q)

1. Pride and Prejudice, originally drafted as “First Impressions”, is the most delightful and the most popular of Jane Austen’s works. The title tells of a major concern of the novel: pride and prejudice. If to from good relationships is our main task in life, we must first have good judgement.
2. In dealing with the five Bennet sisters and their search for suitable husbands, it mainly tells of the love story between a rich, proud young man Darcy and the beautiful and intelligent Elizabeth Bennet. In the end false pride is humbled and prejudice dissolved.
3. At the heart of the novelist’s exploration of the marriage, property and intrigue lies the exhilarating suspense of the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy, and Jane Austen’s delicate probing of the values of the gentry.
Charles Dickens

1. As one of the greatest critical realistic writers of the Victorian Age, Charles Dickens considers it his duty to expose an