1、What makes “The adventures of Huckleberry Finn” more than a childs adventure story? Briefly discuss the question from the following aspects: the setting，the language，the character(s)and the style.A. Setting: in the novel, Mark twain recreates a small-town world of America and presents the local colo
2、r.B. Language: He uses simple, direct language faithful to the colloquial speech, the vernacular language of the local people.C. Character(s): The author recreates two rebels and fugitives running away from civilization, especially Huckleberry Finn, an innocent boy who refuses to accept the conventi
3、onal village morality. D. Theme: The novel is a criticism of social injustice, hypocrisy, conservativeness and narrow-mindedness of the American small town society. E. Style: The novel employs a humorous style of narration and is also highly symbolic with the central symbol.Daniel Defoes novel Robin
4、son Crusoe was a great success partly because the protagonist was a real middle-class hero. Discuss Crusoe, the protagonist of the novel, as an embodiment of the rising middle-class virtues in the mid-eighteenth century England.A. Social background: The Eighteenth Century England witnessed the growi
5、ng importance of the middle class. a. Industrial Revolution;b. The expansion of international markets;c. The middle class was a revolutionary class then and quite different from the feudal aristocratic class. They were people who had known poverty and hardship, and most of them had obtained their pr
6、esent social status through hard work. They believed in self-restraint, self-reliance and hard work. To work, to economize and to accumulate wealth constituted the whole meaning of their life.d. Literature should provide a realistic presentation of the life of the common people; it should meet the d
7、emand of the middle class people. B. Robinson Crusoe embodies the virtues of the middle class people.With a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage and persistence in overcoming difficulties, in struggling against nature, Crusoe becomes the prototype of the empire builder, the pioneer
8、 colonist.What are the major points about Enlightenment?A. The 18th-century England is known as the Age of Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment Movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept through the whole Western Europe at the time.B. The m
9、ovement was a furtherance of the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries.C. Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modem philosophical and artistic ideas.D. The enlighteners celebrated reason or rationality, equality and science. They held that rationality or reason should
10、 be the only,the final cause of human thought and activities.They called for a reference to order, reason and rules.They advocated universal education.They believed that human beings were limited, dualistic, imperfect, and yet capable of rationality and perfection through education.E. As a matter of
11、 fact, literature at the time, heavily didactic and moralizing, became a very popular means of public education.F. Alexander Pope, Daniel Defoe, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Henry Fielding and Samuel Johnson were the great enlighteners.Based on “Sister Carrie”,say something about the characteristics o
12、f American naturalism.A. The impact of Darwins evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school of realism: American naturalism.B. The American naturalists accepted the more negative implica
13、tions of this theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.C. The American naturalists followed the French novelist and theo
14、rist Emile Zolas call that the literary artist “must operate with characters, passions, human and social data as the chemist and the physicist work on inert bodies, as the physiologist works on living bodies”.D. They chose their subjects from the lower ranks of society, and portrayed misery and pove
15、rty of the “underdogs“ who were demonstrably victims of society and nature. And one of the most familiar themes in American naturalism is the theme of human “bestiality,“ especially as an explanation of sexual desire.E. “Sister Carrie” is a typical representative of American naturalism.What are goth
16、ic novels?A. Gothic novel, a type of romantic fiction that predominated in the late eighteenth century, was one phase of the Romantic movement.B. Its principal elements are violence, horror, and the supernatural, which strongly appeal to the readers emotion.C. With its descriptions of the dark, irra
17、tional side of human nature, the Gothic form has exerted a great influence over the writers of the Romantic period.D. Works like The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and Frankensteinby Mary Shelley are typical Gothic romance.What is unique of Faulkners novels, historically and geographically?A.
18、 Most of Faulkners works are set in the American South, with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness. Fifteen novels and many of his stories are about people from a small region in Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County, which is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkners chi
19、ldhood memory about the place where he grew up.B. With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom.C. The Yoknapatawpha stories deal, generally, with the historical period from the Civil War up to the 1920s
20、when the First World War broke out, and people of a stratified society: the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the blacks.D. As a result, Yoknapatawpha County has become an allegory of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience and c
21、onsciousness of the whole Southern society.Discuss Hemingways art of fiction: his style, the particular type of hero in his novels and his life attitudes, etc.A. Style: Hemingway himself once said, “ The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. ” Typical o
22、f this “iceberg“ analogy is Hemingways style. According to Hemingway, good literary writing should be able to make readers feel the emotion of the characters directly and the best way to produce the effect is to set down exactly every particular kind of feeling without any authorial comments, withou
23、t conventionally emotive language, and with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs. Seemingly simple and natural, Hemingways style is actually polished and tightly controlled, but highly suggestive and connotative. While rendering vividly the outward physical mastery of the art of modern narration
24、 events and sensations Hemingway expresses the meaning of the story and conveys the complex emotions of his characters with a considerable range and astonishing intensity of feeling.B. Type of hero:“In Our Time” is the first book to present a Hemingway hero-Nick Adams. Victimized by violence in vari
25、ous forms, he becomes the prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could muster, confronts situations which are not of his own choosing yet threaten his destruction. “The sun also rises” casts lights on a whole generation after the First World War and the effects of the
26、 war by way of a vivid portrait of “The Lost Generation,“ a group of young Americans who left their native land and fought in the war and later engaged themselves in writing in a new way about their own experiences. The young expatriates in this novel are a group of wandering, amusing, but aimless p
27、eople, who are caught in the war and removed from the path of ordinary life.C. Life attitudes: Hemingway deals with a limited range of characters in quite similar circumstances and measures them against an unvarying code, known as “grace under pressure,“ which is actually an attitude towards life th
28、at Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works. However, though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually. What is the theme of poem “Paradise lost”, and why did Joh
29、n Milton write this poem?A. The theme is the “Fall of Man,“ i.e. mans disobedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause-Satan. B. Satan is a rebellious figure against God in literature, defe He tempted Adam and Eve, which proved his evilness.ated, he and his rebel angels were cast into hel
30、l. However, Satan refused to accept his failure, swearing that “all was not lost” and that he would revenge for his downfall. The freedom of the will is the keystone of Satans character, which was the important spirit of the rising middle class. Robinson Crusoe is universally considered as Daniel De
31、foes masterpiece. What is the significance of the novel?As a sequel to Tom Sawyer, .Huckleberry Finn marks the climax of Twains literary creativity. Hemingway once described the novel the one book from which “all modern American literature comes.“ And the book is significant in many ways. First of a
32、ll, the novel is written in a language that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by Emerson, Poe, and Melville. It is not grand, pompous, but simple, direct, lucid, and faithful to the colloquial speech. This unpretentious style of colloquialism is best described as “vernacular.“ S
33、peaking in vernacular, a wild and uneducated Huck, running away from civilization for his freedom, is vividly brought to life. The great strength of the book also comes from the shape given to it by the course of the rafts journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of fr
34、eedom. Twain, who knew the river intimately, uses it here both realistically and symbolically.The profound portrait of Huckleberry Finn is another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature. The novel begins with a description of how Widow Douglas attempts to civilize Huck a
35、nd ends with him deciding not to let it happen again at the hands of Aunt Sally. The climax arises with Hucks inner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of the society against those w
36、ho help slaves escape. Hucks final decision to follow his own good-hearted moral impulse rather than conventional village morality amounts to a vindication of what Mark Twain called “the damned human race, damned for its comfortable hypocrisies, its thoroughgoing dishonesties, and its pervasive cruelties. With the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows.Why we say that Fitzgerald is both insider and outsider of the Jazz Age?
