全国2009年4月高等教育自学考试
英美文学选读试题
课程代码：00604
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I. Multiple Choice(40 points in all, 1 for each)
    Select from the four choices of each item the one that best answers the question or completes the statement and write the corresponding letter on the answer sheet.
 1. In Renaissance, the European humanist thinkers and scholars made attempts to do the following EXCEPT ______.
A. getting rid of those old feudalist ideas
B. getting control of the parliament and government
C. introducing new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie
 D. recovering the purity of the early church, from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church
2. The Petrarchan sonnet was first introduced into England by ______.
A. Surrey  B. Wyatt
C. Sidney  D. Shakespeare
 3. As the best of Shakespeare's final romances,______ is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life and society in his late years.
 A. The Tempest  B. The Winter's Tale
 C. Cymbeline  D. The Rape of Lucrece
 4. John Milton's greatest poetical work ______ is the only generally acknowledged epic in English literarure since Beowulf.
A. Areopagitica B. Paradise Lost
C. Lycidas D. Samson Agonistes
 5. The British bourgeois or middle class believed in the following notions EXCEPT ______.
A. self - esteem  B. self - reliance
C. self - restraint  D. hard work
6. “Graveyard School”writers are the following sentimentalists EXCEPT ______.
A. James Thomson  B. William Collins
C. William Cowper  D. Thomas Jackson
 7. The best model of satire in the whole English literary history is Jonathan Swift's ______.
A. A Modest Proposal  B. A Tale of a Tub
C. Gulliver's Travels  D. The Battle of the Books
 8. As a representative of the Enlightenment,______ was one of the first to introduce rationalism to England.
A. John Bunyan  B. Daniel Defoe
C. Alexander Pope  D. Jonathan Swift
 9. For his contribution to the establishment of the form of the modern novel,______ has been regarded by some as “Father of the English Novel”.
A. Daniel Defoe  B. Henry Fielding
C. Jonathan Swift  D. Samuel Richardson
10. Which of the following descriptions of Gothic Novels is NOT correct?
A. It predominated in the early eighteenth century.
B. It was one phase of the Romantic movement.
C. Its principal elements are violence, horror and the supernatural.
D. Works like The Mysteries of Udolpho and Frankenstein are typical Gothic romance.
11. “Byronic hero”is a figure of the following traits EXCEPT ______.
A.being proud  B. being of humble origin
C.being rebellious  D. being mysterious
 12. Robert Browning created ______ by adopting the novelistic presentation of characters.
A. the verse novel  B. the blank verse
C. the heroic couplet  D. the dramatic poetry
 13. Charles Dickens' novel ______ is famous for its vivid descriptions of the workhouse and life of the underworld in the nineteenth- century London.
 A. The Pickwick Paper  B. Oliver Twist
 C. David Copperfield  D. Nicholas Nickleby
 14. Charlotte Bronte's works are all about the struggle of an individual consciousness towards ______, about some lonely and neglected young women with a fierce longing for love, understanding and a full, happy life.
 A. self - reliance  B. self - realization
 C. self - esteem  D. self - consciousness
 15. The symbolic meaning of “Book” in Robert Browning's long poem The Ring and the Book is ______.
A. the common sense  B. the hard truth
C. the comprehensive knowledge  D. the dead truth
 16. Thomas Hardy's pessimistic view of life predominated most of his later works and earns him a reputation as a ______ writer.
A. realistic  B. naturalistic
C. romantic  D. stylistic
 17. After the First World War, there appeared the following literary trends of modernism EXCEPT ______.
A. expressionism  B. surrealism
C. stream of consciousness  D. black humour
 18. The masterpieces of critical realism in the early 20th century are the three trilogies of ______.
A. Galsworthy's Forsyte novels  B. Hardy' s Wessex novels
C. Greene's Catholic novels  D. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness novels
 19. In the mid - 1950s and early 1960s, there appeared “______” who demonstrated a particular disillusion over the depressing situation in Britain and launched a bitter protest. against the outmoded social and political values in their society.
A. The Beat Generation  B. The Lost Generation
C. The Angry Young Men  D. Black Mountain Poets
20.The following are English stream-of-consciousness novels EXCEPT ______.
A.Pilgrimage  B. Ulysses
C.Mrs.Dalloway  D. A Passage to Inida

21. The leader of the Irish National Theater Movement in the early 20th century   
 was ______.
A. W.B.Yeats  B. Lady Gregory
C. J.M.Synge  D. John Galworthy
22. T.S.Eliot's most popular verse play is ______.
A. Murder in the Cathedral  B. The Cocktail Party
C. The Family Reunion  D. The Waste Land
23. The American writer ______ was awarded the Nobel Prize for the anti-racist In-
  truder in the Dust in 1950.
A. Ernest Hemingway  B. Gertrude Stein
C. William Faulkner  D.T.S. Eliot
 24. Hemingway's second big success is ______ , which wrote the epitaph to a decade and to the whole generation in the 1920s, in order to tell us a story about the tragic love affair of a wounded American soldier with a British nurse.
A. For Whom the Bell Tolls  B. A Farewell to Arms
C. The Sun Also Rises  D. The Old Man and the Sea
 25. With the publication of ______ , Dreiser was launching himself upon a long career that would ultimately make him one of the most significant American writers of the school later known as literary naturalism.
A. Sister Carrie  B. The Titan
C. The Genius  D. The Stoic
 26. Henry James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th -century “stream -of-consciousness”novels and the founder of ______.
A. neoclassicism  B. psychological realism
C. psychoanalytical criticism  D. surrealism
 27. In 1849, Herman Melville published ______ ,a semi-autobiographical novel, con- cerning the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors.
A. Omoo  B. Mardi
C. Redburn  D. Typee
 28. As a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,______ marks the climax of Mark Twain's literary activity.
A. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  B. Life on the Mississippi
C. The Gilded Age  D. Roughing It
 29. Realism was a reaction against ______ or a move away from the bias towards romance and self- creating fictions, and paved the way to Modernism.
A. Romanticism  B. Rationalism
C. Post-modernism  D. Cynicism
 30. When World War II broke out,______ began working for the Italian government, engaged in some radio broadcasts of anti- Semitism and pro- Fascism.
A. Ezra Pound  B.T.S. Eliot
C. Henry James  D. Robert Frost
 31. In 1915 ______ became a naturalized British citizen, largely in protest against America's failure to join England in the First World War.
A. Henry James  B.T.S.Eliot
C. W.D.Howells  D. Ezra Pound
32. What Whitman prefers for his new subject and new poetic feelings is “______ ,”
  that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.
A. blank verse  B. free rhythm
C. balanced structure  D. free verse
 33. The American woman poet ______ wanted to live simply as a complete independent being, and so she did, as a spinster.
A. Emily Shaw  B. Anna Dickinson
C. Emily Dickinson  D. Anne Bret
 34. The Birthmark drives home symbolically ______ point that evil is a man's birthmark, something he was born with.
A. Whitman's  B. Melville's
C. Hawthorne's  D. Emerson's
 35. The Financier ,The Titan and The Stoic written by ______ are called his “Trilogy of Desire”.
A. Henry James  B. Theodore Dreiser
C. Mark Twain  D. Herman Melville
 36. Disregarding grammar and punctuation,______ always used “i” instead of “I” in his poems to show his protest against self-importance.
A. Wallace Stevens  B. Ezra Pound
C. Robert Frost  D. E.E.Cummings
 37. Though Robert Frost is generally considered a regional poet whose subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in ______ , he wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man's life in his long poetic career.
A. the west  B. the south
C. New England  D. Alaska
 38. Most critics have agreed that Fitzgerald is both an insider and an outsider of ______ with a double vision.
A. the Gilded Age  B. the Rational Age
C. the Jazz Age  D. the Magic Age
 39. In the American Romantic writings,______ came to function almost as a dramatic character that symbolized moral law.
A. fire  B. water
C. trees  D. wilderness
40. The desire for an escape from society and a return to ______ became a permanent
  convention of the American literature.
A. the family life  B. nature
C. the ancient time  D. fantasy of love
II. Reading Comprehension (16 points in all, 4 for each)
Read the quoted parts carefully and answer the questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.
41. Wherefore feed and clothe and save
  From the cradle to the grave
  Those ungrateful drones who would
  Drain your sweat- nay, drink your blood?
  Questions:
 A. Identify the poet and the title of the poem from which the stanza is taken.
    B. What figure of speech is used in Line 2?
 C. Whom does “drones” refer to?

42. The following quotation is from one of the poems by T. S. Eliot:
  No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
  Am an attendant lord, one that will do
  To swell a progress, start a scene or two
  Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
  Deferential, glad to be of use,
  Politic, cautious, and meticulous,
  Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
  Questions:
  A. Identify the title of the poem from which the quoted part is taken.
    B. Who's the speaker of the quoted lines?
  C. What does the first line show about the speaker?

43．There was a child went forth every day,
  And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became,
  And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
  Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.
    Questions:
  A. Identify the poet.
 B.From which poem and which collection of the poet are these lines taken?
 C.What does the poet describe in the poem?

44. I heard a Fly buzz- when I died-
  The Stillness in the Room
  Was like the Stillness in the Air-
  Between the Heaves of Storm-
  The Eyes around- had wrung them dry-
  And Breaths were gathering firm
  For that last Onset- when the King
  Be witnessed - in the Room-
  Questions:
  A. Identify the poet.
    B. What does “the King” refer to?
  C. What moment is the poem trying to describe?
III. Questions and Answers (24 points in all, 6 for each)
Give brief answers to each of the following questions in English. Write your answers in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.
 45. List at least two leading neoclassicists in England. What did Neoclassicists celebrate in literary creation?
 46. Jane Eyre is one of the most popular and important novels of the Victorian Age. Why is Jane Eyre such a successful novel?
 47. Who are the three dominant figures of the American Age of Realism and what are the differences in their understanding of the “truth”?
 48. What's Dreiser' s naturalistic belief? Please discuss the question with Carrie, a character in Sister Carrie as an example.
IV. Topic Discussion(20 points in all, 10 for each)
  Write no less than 150 words on each of the following topics in English in the corresponding space on the answer sheet.
 49. Briefly discuss William Shakespeare's artistic achievements in characterization, plot construction and language.
 50. Briefly discuss Mark Twain's art of fiction in terms of the setting,the language, and the characters, etc.,based on his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.