Ⅰ.Multiple ChoiceSelect from the four choices of each item the one that best answers the question or completes the statement. Ⅲ.Questions and AnswersGive a brief answer to each of the following questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.1. What is "neoclassicism"?
With the introduction of the Enlightenment Movement into England, a revival of interest in the old classical works was in full swing. This tendency is known as neoclassicism. According to the neoclassicist, all forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers (Homer, Virgil, Horace. Ovid, etc.) and those of the contemporary French ones. They believed that the artistic ideals should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity.
2. Charles Dickens is a master story-teller. What is Dickens' Oliver Twist famous for?
It is famous for its vivid descriptions of the workhouse and life of the underworld in the 19th century London. The novel also presents Oliver Twist as Dickens' first child hero and Fagin the first grotesque figure.
3. What are the characteristics of the British modernist literature?
One characteristic of British Modernism is "the dehumanization of art". The major themes of the British modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself. The modernist writers are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual The modernist works are also characterized by a conscious rejection of established rules, traditions and conventions.
4. Henry James's literary criticism is an indispensable part of his contribution to literature. What's his outlook in literary criticism?
(1)It is both concerned with form and devoted to human values.
(2)He also advocates the freedom of the artist to write about anything that concerns him, even the disagreeable, the ugly and the commonplace.
(3)The artist should be able to "feel" the life, to understand human nature, and then to record them in his own art form.
Ⅳ.Topic DiscussionWrite no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.1. Generally speaking, Jane Austen was a writer of the 18th century, though she lived mainly in the nineteenth century. Based on her writings, discuss Jane Austen's greatest contribution to English literature.
(1)Jane Austen is one of the most important Romantic novelists in English literature. She creates six influential novels.
(2)Her main literary concern is about human beings in their personal relationships. She makes trivial daily life as important as the concerns about human, belief career and salient social event. This is what makes her important in English literature.
(3)Jane Austen has brought the English novel, as an art form, to its maturity because of her sensitivity to universal patterns of human behavior and her accurate portrayal of human individuals.
(4)She describes the world from a woman's point of view, and depicts a group of authentic and common women.
2. Give a comment on Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken.
The poem is in classic five-line stanza, with the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-a and conventional rhythm. In the poem, the poet hesitates for a long time, wondering which road to take, because they are both pretty. In the end, he follows the one which seems to have fewer travelers on it.
Symbolically, he chose to become a poet rather than some commoner profession. But he always remembers the road he might have taken, and which would have given him a different kind of life.