考研英国文学部分

考研英国文学部分 Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen (1775-1817): a quiet sunny little woman, alomost unmindful of the great world, was enlivening her father?s parsonage and writing about the clergy, the old maids, the short-sighted mothers, the marriageable daughters, and other people that figure in village life. Her main themes are love and marriage. , Elizabeth & Mr. Darcy ,The novel depicts four marriages: Jane & Mr. Bingley Lydia & Wickham elope Charlotte & Mr. Collins The first two marriages are based on true love. The third on attractive appearance, and is not happy. The fourth is pragmatic, out of the consideration of age and other factors. The main characters: Elizabeth, Mr. Darcy, Jane, Mr. Bingley, other three daughters of the Bennets, Mr. and Mrs Bennet, Wickham, Collins, Charlotte ,Main Themes: ,Pride: In the novel, pride prevents the characters from seeing the truth of a situation and from achieving happiness in life. Pride is one of the main barriers that creates an obstacle to Elizabeth and Darcy's marriage. Darcy's pride in his position in society leads him initially to scorn anyone outside of his own social circle. Elizabeth?s pride in her quick wit barricades herself against seeing Darcy clearly. ,Prejudice: Initially, Elizabeth has prejudice against Darcy, and having been brought up in a rich and aristocratic family, Darcy must overcome his prejudice against the lower class. ,Class: Considerations of class are omnipresent in the novel. The novel does not call for equality of all social classes, yet it does criticize an over-emphasis on class. Darcy's inordinate pride is based on his extreme class-consciousness. Yet eventually he sees that factors other than wealth determine who truly belongs in the aris?tocracy. Realism The terms can be used to refer to 1) a movement in the writing of novels during the nineteenth century that included Balzac in France, Charles Dickens in England and William Dean Howells in America; 2) a recurrent mode, in various ears and literary forms, of representing human life and experience in literature. The difference between realism and romanticism: realism is often opposed to romanticism. Realism represents life as it really is; it evokes the sense of the readers that its characters might in fact exist and that such things might well happen, while romanticism presents life as we would have it be. Romanticism is more picturesque, fantastic, adventurous, or heroic than reality. The historical background of critical realism •The Industrial Revolution in Britain •The Victorian Age •The Chartist Movements Critical Realism •The features The thoughts firstly appeared in France in the 1830s and spread to Europe and America. It describes, analyses and discloses and criticizes the reality. “批判地再现当时存在的社会制度和社会关系，解剖性地暴露、撕毁一切的假面具，故称之为 批判现实主义。” (1) reflects the reality objectively, concretely and genuinely. (2) discloses and criticizes the reality strongly. (3) creates the typical characters under the typical circumstances. They were more or less influenced by the Chartist Movements. The British critical realist writers were sympathetic with the miseries of the poor laboring masses and cried out loud against social injustice, so they were humanists. But they didn?t approve the use of violence to right the social wrongs, so it?s impossible for them to find out the real way to innovate the society. 2. The achievements of the critical realists They achieved greatly in the art of writing. The period was regarded as the third pinnacle in the European history of literature after Greek mythology and Elizabethan drama. 3. The representatives of critical realists Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and George Eliot. 1.The first period (1836-1841) Oliver Twist (1838) 2. The second period (1842-1850) David Copperfield (1850) . During his visit to America, Dickens is deeply impressed by the rule of dollars and the enormously corrupting influence of wealth and power there. Vulgar selfishness prevails everywhere and conceals the fine qualities of people. Dickens? naïve optimism about capitalist society is thus profoundly shaken. 3.The Third Period (1851-1870) Hard Times (1854), A Tale of Two Cities (1859) , Great Expectations (1861) His novels of this period are much “darker” in content than their predecessors. Up to this time Dickens maintains some hope of reform under capitalism but beginning from Bleak House there is “underlying tone of bitterness” which shows the novelist?s loss of hope for English bourgeois society. Oliver Twist Good characters: Oliver Twist, Mr. Brownlow, the Maylies, Nancy Evil characters: Monks, Fagin, people working in the workhouse It criticizes the Poor Law and the workhouse system. Themes of Oliver Twist In a personal level, its theme is the struggle of an individual for his survival in the harsh world. In a broader level, it criticizes the society of the day, the cruelty of the bourgeoisie and the miserable life of the weak and the poor. Great Expectations ,The main characters Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, Magwitch, Joe Appreciate Oliver Twist Charles Dickens is very humorous, sarcastic and ironic. He believes that life is made up of both joy and sorrow. Most of his works are a mixture of humor and pathos. His popularity mainly lies in his ability to give readers bright merriment and dark gloom at the same time, and mingle tears and laughter as in real life. •“Bow to the board,” said Bumble. Oliver brushed away two or three tears that were lingering in his eyes, and seeing no board but the table, fortunately bowed to that.(p.180) humor •What a noble illustration of the tender laws of this favored country!—they let the paupers go to sleep!(p.181) irony •The members of the board of the workhouse discovered—the poor people like it! It (the workhouse) was a regular place of public entertainment for the poorer classes—a tavern where there was nothing to pay—a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round—a brick and mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work.(p.182) irony •They established the rule, that all poor people should have the alternative of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it (workhouse).(p.182) sarcasm •They made a great many other wise and humane regulations. They kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors? Commons; and, instead of compelling a man to support his family as they had therefore done, took his family away from him, and made him a bachelor! (p.182) irony •The bowls never wanted washing—the boys polished them with their spoons till they shone again; and when they had performed this operation, (which never took very long, the spoons being nearly as large as the bowls) they would sit staring at the copper with such eager eyes as is they could devour the very bricks of which it was composed.(p.183) sarcasm •Let it not be supposed by the enemies of “the system”, that, Oliver was denied the benefit of exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages or religious consolation. (p.184) In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens sharply criticized the abuses and shortcoming of the Poor Law. Chen Jia: The justly famous scene in which Oliver was cruelly beaten up and punished merely because he ventured to ask for an extra portion of the very thin gruel to alleviate his intolerable hunger, is only one of the many details described with masterly skill by the novelist to show the extreme tyranny and brutality and corruption of the oppressors and their agents. So, though only a few chapters are devoted to the description of the workhouse, the effect was great and instantaneous, and the novel has always been and will ever be remembered as a most thorough-going invective against the Poor Law and its workhouse system. The novel is a powerful attack on one of the social evils and on its day of publication it even helped in a minor way actually to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, for it has been said that “Oliver Twist” was responsible to a certain extent for the bettering of conditions in the English workhouse of the author?s day. The analysis of Great Expectations ,Pip: Pip?s two most important traits are his immature, romantic idealism and his innately good conscience. On the one hand, Pip has a deep desire to improve himself and attain any possible advancement, whether educational, moral, or social. Pip?s idealism often leads him to behave badly toward the people who care about him. On the other hand, Pip is at heart a very generous and sympathetic young man. Pip?s main line of development in the novel may be seen as the process of learning to place his innate sense of kindness and conscience above his immature idealism. ,Estella: is the first convincing woman in Dickens? novel. She is a woman who darkly undermines the notion of romantic love and serves as a bitter criticism against the class system in which she is mired. Raised from the age of three by Miss Havisham to torment men and “break their hearts,” Estella wins Pip?s deepest love by practicing deliberate cruelty. Estella is cold, cynical, and manipulative. Though she represents Pip?s first longed-for ideal of life among the upper classes, Estella is actually even lower-born than Pip. Ironically, life among the upper classes does not represent salvation for Estella. she is victimized twice by her adopted class. she is raised by Miss Havisham, who destroys her ability to express emotion and interact normally with the world. In this way, Dickens uses Estella?s life to reinforce the idea that one?s happiness and well-being are not deeply connected to one?s social position. ,Miss Havisham: The mad, vengeful Miss Havisham, a wealthy dowager who lives in a rotting mansion and wears an old wedding dress every day of her life. Miss Havisham?s life is defined by a single tragic event: her jilting by Compeyson on what was to have been their wedding day. From that moment forth, Miss Havisham is determined never to move beyond her heartbreak. She stops all the clocks in Satis House at twenty minutes to nine, the moment when she first learned that Compeyson was gone. With a kind of manic, obsessive cruelty, Miss Havisham adopts Estella and raises her as a weapon to achieve her own revenge on men. Miss Havisham is an example of single-minded vengeance pursued destructively: both Miss Havisham and the people in her life suffer greatly because of her quest for revenge. Miss Havisham is completely unable to see that her actions are hurtful to Pip and Estella. She is redeemed at the end of the novel when she realizes that she has caused Pip?s heart to be broken in the same manner as her own. Theme , Affection, loyalty, and conscience are more important than social advancement, wealth, and class. William Makepeace Thackeray(1811-1863) Works: Vanity Fair, 1847 Style: the clever mixture of epigrammatic wit with subtle humor and of sharp sarcasm with innocent understatements Vanity Fair The title: The novel has a subtitle, A Novel without a Hero. Vanity Fair comes from John Bunyan?s The Pilgrim’s Progress. The three possible meanings of the subtitle: 1. hero means a positive character; on the contrary, no hero means no positive characters in the novel; 2. it indicates that the novel is concerned principally not with individual heroes but with the society as a whole; 3. it also possibly means there are only heroines in the novel but no heroes. The main characters : Becky (or Rebecca) Sharp and Amelia Sedley. The two heroines are in striking contrast: Amelia, a woman who submits to her fate, is a good but really tame and sentimental and useless woman, while Becky, who rebels and tries to master her own fate, is tricky but resourceful and practical and capable. Both of them are victims of the society. Themes: In a personal sense, it is about the struggle of a woman for high status by hook or crook. In a broader sense, Thackeray criticizes the whole English society of the early 19th century, when the predominant feature of that society is the struggle for money, by everybody against everybody else among the upper classes. Charlotte Bronte Charlotte Bronte English writer noted for her novel Jane Eyre (1847) Charlotte attended the Clergy Daughter„s School at Cowan Bridge in 1824. She returned home next year because of the harsh conditions. In 1831 she went to school at Roe Head, where she later worked as a teacher. Then, she worked as a governess. All the experiences were reflected in Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre appeared in 1847 and became an immediate success. She considered herself a follower of Thackeray, so she dedicated the book to him. In the past 40 years Charlotte Bronte?s reputation has risen rapidly, and feminist criticism has done much to show that she was speaking up for oppressed women of every age. She died during her pregnancy on March 31, 1855. •In her novels, Charlotte Bronte shows herself a critical realist who attacks the greed, petty tyranny and lack of culture among the upper classes and sympathizes with the sufferings of the workers and of poor people in general. •The chief distinctive feature of her novels is the creation of courageous, upright figures, such as Jane Eyre, who successfully resist oppression and other social evils in the inhumane world. •Jane Eyre is considered by the feminist critics as a woman who is independent and pursues freedom and equality with men and among different classes. Jane Eyre, different from other women in the money-worship society, considers marriage not as a bargain but as a union of kindred souls. Jane Eyre ,Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong!--I have as much soul as you,--and full as much heart! I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;--it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God's feet, equal,--as we are!" ,你以为，因为我穷、低微、不美、矮小，我就没有灵魂没有心了吗？你想错了！——我的灵魂 跟你的一样，我的心也跟你的完全一样。我现在跟你说话，并不是通过习俗、惯例，甚至不是 通过凡人的肉体——而是我的精神在同你的精神说话，就像两个都经过了坟墓，我们站在上帝 的面前，是平等的——因为我们是平等的！” Wuthering Heights ,Main characters: the first generation: Heathcliff, Catherine, Edgar Linton, Isabella Linton, Hindley; the second generation: young Catherine (daughter of Edgar and Catherine), Hareton (son of Hindley), Linton Heathcliff (son of Heathcliff and Isabella) Heathcliff Catherine Edgar Hareton Young Catherine Linton Heathcliff ,Analysis of the main characters: Heathcliff: a powerful, fierce, and often cruel man, Heathcliff?s humiliation and misery prompt him to spend most of the rest of his life seeking revenge on Hindley, his beloved Catherine, and their respective children (Hareton and young Catherine). His whole life centers around Catherine, their love and the revenge for her betrayal. He uses his extraordinary powers of will to acquire both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the estate of Edgar Linton. Heathcliff?s great natural abilities, strength of character, and love for Catherine Earnshaw all enable him to raise himself from humble beginnings to the status of a wealthy gentleman, but his need to revenge himself for Hindley?s abuse and Catherine?s betrayal leads him into a twisted life of cruelty and hatred. Primarily an oppressed, Heathcliff turns into a merciless oppressor. He deserves our sympathy no more. ,Catherine: Catherine is free-spirited, beautiful, spoiled, and often arrogant. She is given to fits of temper, and she is torn between her wild passion for Heathcliff and her social ambition. Catherine loves Heathcliff so intensely that she claims they are the same person. However, her desire for social advancement motivates her to marry Edgar Linton instead. She brings misery to both of the men who love her. Her decision to marry the genteel Edgar Linton drags almost all of the novel?s characters into conflict with Heathcliff. ,Theme: the destructiveness of a love that never changes A rewardless love is closely connected with hatred and revenge. Thomas Hardy ,Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), a writer who depicts the life of Wessex (Dorset). He himself divides his novels into three series: ,1. Romances and Fantasies: A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) ,2. Novels of Ingenuity: Desperate Remedies (1871), The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) ,3. Novels of Character and Environment: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Far from the Madding Crowd (1974), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridege (1886), Tess of the D?Urbervilles(1891) , Jude the Obscure (1895) Tess ,The main characters in Tess: Tess, Angel Clare and Alec Stokes d?Urberville ,Tess: Her weakness is her innocence; she is unschooled “in the ways of the world” and therefore unable to protect herself. Tess chides her mother for not telling her full truth about a less-than-kind world: “Why didn?t you tell me there was danger in men-folk?” ,She is a brave girl , hard-working and sweet-natured and innocent, and yet she is not free from the influence of social conventions and moral standards of the day. ,The economic conditions as well as the legal, moral and religious standards of bourgeois society, for only the utter poverty of Tess? family, the double moral standard for man and woman and the religious concept of sin made it inevitable for her to go to work on the farms and to fall into the traps of Alec and the accusations of Angel Clare until her remorse and her bitterness over her fate led up to the murder. She is a victim of economic oppression and social injustice. Themes ,The social injustice of the Victorian Age: Unfairness dominates the lives of Tess and her family to such an extent that it begins to seem like a general aspect of human existence in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. ,Changing ideas of Social Class in Victorian England: In the Victorian context, cash matters more than lineage. ,Men dominating women The transition from 19th to 20th century ,The different literary groups and their characteristics: 1. the socialist group: William Morris, George Bernard Shaw (influenced by Fabianism which believed in peaceful reformation), Pygmalion (a Cyprus king, Galatea, Aphrodite; Henry Higgins, Eliza Doolittle) They reveal the more progressive views of their time: they not only pictured the miseries of the laboring masses and clamored loudly against social injustice, but they also called on the workers to rise and fight for their rights by the revolutionary path. In their works there was optimism and confidence in the bright future, and there were delineated brand-new types of heroes and heroines fighting for socialism and communism whether in narratives or in lyrics. 2. the second group: those who had a great deal of sympathy for the laboring masses and who uttered strong criticisms on the social evils under capitalism and imperialism and a few major novelists of the tradition of critical realism belonged to this group ie. Thomas Hardy. These writers in their different ways contributed their share of social criticism by writing of revolutionary activities abroad or in an earlier age or by replying to the bad logic of apologists for imperialism. ,3. The third group: includes three different schools: naturalism, neo-romanticism and aestheticism. Naturalism: ie. George Moore: tried to look into the ugly reality and to write about the slums and other unpleasantness but they were satisfied with the narration of details of social misery without a correct understanding of the cause of such misery and were therefore apt to describe the poor miserable people as degenerates. All of them shared their common protest, although a mild one, against the political and social status quo, and all of them were more or less pessimistic and felt rather helpless before the sorry state of things at the close of the 19th century. Naturalism is sometimes claimed to give an even more accurate depiction of life than realism. It is a mode of fiction that was developed by a school of writers in accordance with a particular philosophical thesis. This thesis, a product of post-Darwinian biology in the 19th century, held that a human being exists entirely in the order of nature and does not have a soul nor any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond the natural world; and therefore, that such a being is merely a higher-order animal whose character and behavior are entirely determined by two kinds of forces, heredity and environment. Neo-romanticism: they followed the steps of the great romantic poets of early 19th century, esp. Byron, and indulged in the descriptions of the far away and the long ago, of the mysterious and the fantastic, partly to provide entertainment for the reading public, partly as escape and partly as protest or as both, in their dissatisfaction with the social reality of the day. Aestheticism: the spokesmen of aestheticism were actually ivory tower escapists of “pure art” or “art for art?s sake” ie. Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), Walter Pater To them, art is above morality, above life, above everything, art is to give pleasure and nothing else, and beauty alone reigns supreme. Oscar Wilde: The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art?s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. Those who find ugly meaning in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Book are well written, or badly written. That is all. The fourth group: those who spoke in defense of imperialism and colonialism by propagandizing about the inferiority of the natives in Asia and Africa and the “White Man?s burden” to civilize the half-barbarians. Ie. Rudyard Kipling The 20th century English literature ,Modernism: Formation: It is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the 20th century, but esp. after World War I. The specific features vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but of Western culture in general. Modernism rose out of skepticism and disillusionment of capitalism, which made writers and artists search for new ways to express their understanding of the world and the human nature. Precursors of modernism are thinkers who had questioned the certainties that had supported traditional modes of social organization, religion, and morality, and also traditional ways of conceiving the human self. Beginning: Literary historians locate the beginning of the modernist revolt as far back as the 1890s, but most agree that it came into being after the first World War. The year 1922 alone witnessed the simultaneous appearance of such monuments of modernist innovation as James Joyce?s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot?s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf?s Jacob’s Room, as well as many other experimental works of literature. Schools: including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dada, and Surrealism The characteristics of modernism: Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the idea of psychoanalysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and ,Modernism marks a strong and conscious break with the past, by rejecting the moral, religious and himself. cultural values of the past. ,Modernism emphasizes on the need to move away from the public to the private, from the objective to the subjective. ,Modernism upholds a new view of time by emphasizing the psychic time over the chronological one. It maintains that the past, the present and the future are one and exist at the same time in the consciousness of individual as a continuous flow rather than a series of separate moments. ,Modernism is, in many respects, a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism, which is the theoretical base of realism; it excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world, which is the only creative source of realism; it casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature like story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc. which are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers can often be labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry or anti-drama. •Dubliners is a collection of short stories only interconnected by symbols and moods. It presents instead an epiphany or spiritual awakening. The Dublin portrayed in the short stories is usually grimy and full of cynical and indecent individuals. From this gleam a few thinking individuals who the author seems to side with. They are generally the sensitive or young ones, and the adult world is often seen as foolish, futile and unpleasant. •James Joyce (1882-1941), Irish novelist and poet, whose psychological perceptions and innovative literary techniques make him one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Joyce is best known for his experimental use of language and his exploration of new literary methods. The main strength of his masterpiece Ulysses lies in the depth of character portrayed using the technique of “stream of consciousness”. The writer attempts by the stream of consciousness to reflect all the forces, external and internal, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment. Primarily concerned with a 24-hour period in the life of an Irish Jew, Leopold Bloom, Ulysses applies this technique. •His masterpieces include Dubliners (1914), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses(1922), Finnegans Wake(1939). 20th century literature :Oscar Wilde: Aestheticism Masterpiece: The Picture of Dorian Gray Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray George Bernard Shaw: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren?s Profession, Modernists: D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot :Materpieces of D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915) and Lady Chatterlay?s Lover(1928) Sons and Lovers is about the Oedipus Complex. Main character: Paul Masterpieces of Virginia Woolf: Jacob?s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) Masterpiece of T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land Romantic Poets ,Their poems have strong subjective mood ,They like to depict Nature ,Folk song and legend are the sources of their poems ,Lake poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey , Wordsworth: All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. , The child if father of the Man. ,Positive poets: Byron, Shelley and Keats , Shelley: Beauty is truth, truth beauty. ,Lake poets write about the nature and sing high praise of the nature. They avoid the reality and are afraid of fight. ,Positive poets are enthusiastic and long for freedom and revolution. ,Wordsworth?s masterpieces: Lyrical Ballads, The Solitary Reaper, My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold Coleridge: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Byron: Don Juan, She Walks in Beauty, Childe Harold?s Pilgrimage Shelley: Ode to the West Wind Keats: Ode to a Nightingale