A. Setting: in the novel, Mark twain recreates a small-town world of America and presents the
local color.
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 conventional 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 Defoe’s novel Robinson 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 growing 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 present 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 demand 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 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 movement 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 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 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 of American naturalism.
A. The impact of Darwin's 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 implications 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 theorist Emile Zola's 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 poverty
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 gothic 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
reader's emotion.
C. With its descriptions of the dark, irrational 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 Faulkner’s novels, historically and geographically? A. Most of Faulkner's 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 Faulkner's childhood 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 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 consciousness of the whole Southern society.
Discuss Hemingway’s 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 of this \"iceberg\" analogy is Hemingway's 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, without conventionally emotive language, and with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs. Seemingly simple and natural, Hemingway's 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 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 various 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 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 people, 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 that 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 John Milton write this poem?
A. The theme is the \"Fall of Man,\" i.e. man's 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 hell. 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 Satan’s character, which was the important spirit of the rising middle class.
Robinson Crusoe is universally considered as Daniel Defoe’s masterpiece. What is the significance of the novel?
As a sequel to Tom Sawyer, .Huckleberry Finn marks the climax of Twain's 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 all, 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.\" Speaking 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 raft's journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom. 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 and ends with him deciding not to let it happen again at the hands of Aunt Sally. The climax arises with Huck's 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 who help slaves escape. Huck's 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?
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