美国文学考试范围

D. developing their science and technology

2. The Puritan dominating values were ___A__.

A. hard work B. thrift C. piety D. sobriety 3. ____D___ usually was regarded as the first American writer. A. William Bradford B. Anne Bradstreet C. Emily Dickinson D. Captain John Smith 4. Which writer is not a poet? D

A. William Cullen Bryant B. Anne Bradstreet C. Edward Taylor D. Thomas Hooker 5. The common thread throughout American literature has been the emphasis on the __C___. A. Revolutionism B. Reason C. Individualism D. Rationalism

6. Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan poet. Her poems made such a stir in England that she became known as the “__B___” who appeared in America.

A. 9th Muse B. 10th Muse C. Best Muse D. 1st Muse

7. The ship “___C____” carried about 100 Pilgrims and took 66 days to beat it way across the Atlantic. In December of 1620, it put the Pilgrims ashore at Plymouth, Massachusetts. A. Sunflower B. Armada C. Mayflower D. Pequod

8. American literature, the 18th century was the age of the Enlightenment. ___B___ was the dominant spirit.

A. Humanism B. Rationalism C. Revolution D. Evolution 9. Which statement about Benjamin Franklin is not true? D A. He instructed his countrymen as a printer. B. He was a scientist

C. He was a master of diplomacy. D. He was a Puritan

10. Which is not connected with Thomas Paine? D

A. Common sense B. The American Crisis C. Pennsylvania Magazine D. The Autobiography

11. Who was considered as the “Poet of American Revolution”? A

A. Michael Wigglesworth B. Edward Taylor C. Anne Bradstreet D. Philip Freneau 12. According to Hawthorne, the scarlet letter “A” which originally stood for “___A__” finally obtained the meaning of “able” or “angel” through Hester’s efforts.

A. adultery B. arrogance C. accomplishment D. agony

13. The Romantic writers would focus on all the following issues except the ____B____ in the American literature history.

A. individual feelings B. idea of survival of the fittest C. strong imagination D. return to nature

14. Henry David Thoreau’s work, ____A____ has always been regarded as a masterpiece of the New England Transcendentalism.

A. Walden B. The Pioneers C. Nature D. Song of Myself

15. The literary characters of the American type in early 19th century are generally characterized

by all the following features except that they ____B_____.

A. speak local dialects B. are polite and elegant gentlemen

C. are simple and crude farmers D. are noble savages (red and white) untainted by society

16. The Transcendentalists believe that, first, nature is ennobling, and second, the individual is ___C__.

A. insignificant B. vicious by nature C. divine D. forward-looking 17. In Hawthorne’s novels and short stories, intellectuals usually appear as ____C___. A. commentators B. observers C. villains D. Saviors

18. For Melville, as well as for the reader and __A___, the narrator, Moby Dick is still a mystery, an ultimate mystery of the universe.

A. Ahab B. Ishmael C. Stubb D. Starbuck

19. ___B___ exerts the single most important influence on literary naturalism, of which Theodore Dreiser and Jack London are among the best representative writers. A. Freud B. Darwin C. W. D. Howells D. Emerson

20. In American literature, escaping from the society and returning to nature is a common subject, the following titles are all related, in one way or another, to the subject except ___B____. A. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn B. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie

C. Copper’s Leather Stocking Tales D. Thoreau’s Walden

21. Walt Whitman was a pioneering figure of American poetry. His innovation first of all lies in his use of ___C__, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.

A. blank verse B. heroic couplet C. free verse D. iambic pentameter

22. Most of the poems in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass sing of the “en-mass” and the ___C____ as well.

A. nature B. self-reliance C. self D. life

23. We can perhaps summarize that Walt Whitman’s poems are characterized by all the following features except that they are __B___.

A. conversational and crude B. lyrical and well-structured C. simple and rather crude D. free-flowing

24. Emily Dickinson wrote many short poems on various aspects of life. Which of the following is not a usual subject of her poetic expression? D A. religion and immortality B. life and death C. love and marriage D. war and peace

25. Mark Twain, one of the greatest 19th century American writers, is well known for his ____C____.

A. international theme B. waste-land imagery C. local color D. symbolism

26. As a naturalist writer, Theodore Dreiser was greatly influenced by ____B_____. A. Nathaniel Hawthorne B. Charles Darwin

C. Henry James D. Ralph Waldo Emerson

27. Dreiser’s “Trilogy of Desire”, includes three novels. They are The Financier, The Titan and ____C____.

A. The Genius B. The Tycoon C. The Stoic D. The Giant

28. Stylistically, Henry James’ fiction is characterized by ___D_____. A. Short, clear sentence B. abundance of local images C. ordinary American speech D. highly refined language

29. American writers of the first postwar era who were devoid of faith and alienated from civilization were commonly called ___D____.

A. son of liberty B. fatherless children C. The Beat Generation D. The Lost Generation

30. Of the following American poets in the 20th century, the one who has the best knowledge of Chinese culture is ____C_____.

A. Robert Frost B. Allen Ginsberg C. Ezra Pound D. E. E. Cummings

II. Terms:

1 American Romanticism 浪漫主义

The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a period of the great flowering of American literature.

1. It started with the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book（1819）and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass（1855）;

2. It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense;

3. The writers emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group. They affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and the strange.

4. the writers stressed the element of “Amerianness” in their works;

5. Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called the American Renaissance;

Romanticism as a literary movement came into being in England in the later half of the 18th century. It first made its appearance in England as a renewed interest in medieval literature. William Blake and Robert Burns represented the spirit of what is usually called Pre-Romanticism. With the publication of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads in collaboration with S. T. Coleridge, romanticism began to bloom and found a firm place in history of English literature. In fact, the first half the 19th century recorded the triumph of Romanticism.

2. American Realism

In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience

3. American Naturalism

American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变） that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.

4. free verse

Free verse: It is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech.

5. local colorism

Post-Civil War America was large and diverse(various enough to sense its own local difference. Regional voices had emerged from newly settled territories in the South and to the west of the Appalachan. Local colorism is a unique variation of the American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specified setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence.

6. Gothic novel

Gothic Novel or Gothic Romance is a story of terror and suspense set in a gloomy old castle or monastery. n an extended sense, many novels that do not have a medievalized setting, but which share a comparably sinister, grotesque, or claustrophobic（幽闭恐怖的） atmosphere have been classed as gothic.

7. American Rationalism

rationalism is the view that \"regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge\"or \"any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification\". More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory “in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive\".

8. Transendentalism

As a philosophical and literary movement, American Transcendentalism (also known as “ American Renaissance”) flourished in New England from the 1830s to the Civil War. It is the high tide of American romanticism and its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalists spoke for the cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of Am

erican society. Transcendentalism 超验主义(+ H. D. Thoreau; Nathaniel Hawthorne; ) The major features of Transcendentalism:

① The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. 思想 超灵 宇宙

② The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society. 个体+社会

③ The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was not purely matter. It was alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence. 自然+上帝 //

It stressed the power of intuition, believing that people could learn things both from the outside world by means of the five senses and from the inner world by intuition. It took nature as symbolic of spirit or God. All things in nature were symbols of the spiritual, of God’s presence. It emphasized the significance of the individual and believed that the individual was the most important element in society and that the ideal kind of individual was self-reliant and unselfish. Transcendentalists envisioned religion as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “Oversoul”.

III. Match the writers in column A with the works in column B 1. A B

1) W. Irving d d. A History of New York 2) I. F. Cooper g g. The Spy

3) W. C. Bryant j j. To a Waterfowl 4) E.A. Poe i i. The Raven

5) R. W. Emerson a a. The Divinity School Address 6) Philip Freneau c c. The Indian Burying Ground 7) H. D. Thoreau e e. Civil Disobedience

8) N. Hawthorne f f. Mosses from an old Manse 9) H. Melville b b. Typee 10) H. W. Longfellow h h. Hiawatha

2. A B

1) W. Thomas Paine e e. Common Sense

2) I. F. Cooper h h. The Last of the Mohicans

3) A. D. Bradstreet a a. The 10th Muse Lately Sprung in America 4) N. Hawthorne c c. The House of the Seven Gables 5) R. W. Emerson b b. The American Scholar 6) H. Melville j j. Moby Dick 7) H. W. Longfellow i i. A Psalm of life 8) W. Irving d d. Sketch Book

9) E. A. Poe f f. The Fall of the House of Usher 10) H. D. Thoreau g g. Walden

III. Give brief answers to the following questions

1. Say something about the symbolism in Moby Dick. (1) The ship on the ocean “Pequod”（皮阔德） :

A. The whole world with people of every land sailing across the waters of life in quest of its mystery

B. A microcosm of American society, containing representatives of most social and ethnic groups, and their various reactions to the chase.

2. What is the significance of American Puritanism in American Literature?

----American Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and American literature. American literature is based on a myth, i.e. The Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden.

3. Analyze William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”

It is his most famous nature poem. In the poem Bryant develops a view of death which represents a sharp break from Puritan attitude toward man’s final destiny. To the Puritans, death was seen as a preliminary to an afterlife. Bryant, however, treats death part of nature, the destiny of us all, and the great equalizer.

4. Mark Twain presented the 19th century America in his own unique way. Discuss Mark Twain’s

art of fiction: the setting, the language, and the characters, etc., based on his novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

A. Mark Twain uses the Mississippi Vally as his fictional kingdom, Writing about the landscape and people, the customs and the dialects of one particular region, and is therefore known as a local colorist.

B. he creates life-like characters, especially the conventional Huckleberry Finn, who runs away from civilization and stands opposite to conventional morality.

C. He uses a simple, direct vernacular language, totally different from any previous literary language. It is the kind of colloquial language belonging to the lower class, the living local American English.

D. he has created a special humor to satirize social injustices and the decayed convention.