自考英美文学选读作家特色与作品分析.docx

1、自考英美文学选读作家特色与作品分析自考英美文学选读作家特色与作品分析作家及其创作思想/写作特点/语言风格/文学成就选读作品及作品分析/人物性格William Shakespeare (09A)1. He holds that literature should be a combination of beauty, kindness and truth, and should reflect nature and reality. He also states that the beauty in literary works can last for ever.2. His major ch

2、aracters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones; they are individuals representing certain types. By applying a psycho-analytical approach, he succeeds in exploring the characters inner mind. The soliloquies in his plays fully reveal the characters inner conflict.3. He seldom invents his o

3、wn plots, but borrows them from some old plays or storybooks, or from ancient Greek and Roman sources. He would shorten the time and intensify the story. There are usually several threads running through the play, thus providing the story with suspense and apprehension.4. Irony is a good means of dr

4、amatic presentation. It makes the characters who are ignorant of the truth do certain ridiculous things. Disguise is also an important device to create dramatic irony, usually with woman disguised as man.5. He can write skillfully in different poetic forms, such as the sonnet, the blank verse, and t

5、he rhymed couplet. His vocabulary is amazing; he is known to have used 16000 different words in his works. His coinage of new words and distortion of the meaning of the old ones also create striking effects.6. He is above all writers in the past and in the present time. His influence on later writer

6、s is immeasurable.Sonnet 18 (06,08,11S)Sonnet 18 is one of the most beautiful sonnets written by Shakespeare, in which he has a profound meditation on the destructive power of time and the eternal beauty brought forth by poetry to the one he loves. A nice summers day is usually transient, but the be

7、auty in poetry can last for ever. Thus Shakespeare has a faith in the permanence of poetry.The Merchant of Venice (03Q)The theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit and loyalty, and to expose the insatiable greed

8、and brutality of the Jew.Hamlet (01S)1. Hamlet is a melancholic scholar-prince, and faces the dilemma between action and mind. 2. Urged to seek revenge for his fathers murder, he has none of the single-minded blood lust. It is not because he is incapable of action, but because he is so indecisive th

9、at action, when it finally comes, seems almost like defeat, diminishing rather than adding to the stature of the hero.3. Trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing and plotting, and apparently bearing the intolerable burden of the duty to revenge his fathers death, hamlet is obliged to inhabit

10、a shadow world, to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and action.4. His life is one of constant role-playing, examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility, for he is too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger.John Milton1. In hi

11、s life, Milton shows himself a real revolutionary, a master poet and a great prose writer.2. As a Christian humanist, he fought for freedom in all aspects, while his achievements in literature make him tower over all the other English writers of his time and exert a great influence over later ones.P

12、aradise Lost (10Q)1. The theme is the “Fall of Man”, i.e. mans disobedience and the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause Satan.2. Milton intends to expose the ways of Satan and to “justify the ways of God to men”. At the center of the conflict between human love and spiritual duty lies Miltons fun

13、damental concern with freedom and choice, i.e. the freedom to obey Gods prohibition on eating the apple and the choice of disobedience made by love. He tries to convince us that an all-knowing God was just in allowing Adam and Eve to be tempted and to choose sin and its inevitable punishment.Daniel

14、Defoe1. As a member of the middle class, Defoe spoke for and to the members of his class. In most of his works, he gave his praise to the hard-working, sturdy middle class and showed his sympathy for the downtrodden, unfortunate poor.2. Defoe was a very good story-teller. He had a gift for organizin

15、g minute details in such a vivid way that his stories could be both credible and extremely fascinating. His sentence are sometimes short, crisp and plain, and sometimes long and rambling, which leave an impression of casual narration. His language is smooth, easy, colloquial and mostly vernacular. T

16、here is nothing artificial in his language: it is common English at its best.Robinson Crusoe (12S)(01=08A)1. Robinson is a real hero: a typical 18th-century English middle-class man, with a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage, patience and persistence in overcoming obstacles, in struggling against the hostile natural environment. 2. He is the very prototype of the empire builder, the pioneer colonist.