英国文学史及作品选读习题集(3)

Ⅰ. Essay questions.

1. Give supporting reasons for the statement: Samson in Samson Agonistes is John Milton the author himself.

2. Analyze the character of Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Ⅱ. Define the following terms.

1. Elegy 9. Pastoral 2. Pamphlet 10. Diction

3. Assonance 11. Epithalamion

4. Stanza 12. Dream vision (Dream allegory) 5. Folktale 13. Metaphysical poetry 6. Hyperbole 14. Fable 7. Prose poems 15. Parable

8. Conceit 16. Masques (Masks) Ⅲ. Fill in the blanks.

1. One school of poetry prevailing in the 17th century is that of __________, who were sided with the King against the Parliament and Puritans.

2. Though as __________, the characters in The Pilgrim’s Progress impress the readers like real persons. The places in it are English scenes, and the conversations which enliven his narratives vividly repeat the language of the writer’s time.

3. The poems of John Donne belong to two categories: the _________, and the later________.

4. John Donne is the founder of the school of __________. His works are characterized by mysticism in content and fantasticality in form.

5. Because of the success of Paradise Lost, John Milton produced in 1671 another epic, _________.

6. John Milton’s Paradise Lost opens with the description of a meeting among the fallen angels, and ends with the departure of _______and ________from the Garden of Eden.

7. George Herbert, “the saint of the Metaphysical school,” sometimes resorts to tricks of typographical layout to express his religious piety, as shown by “_________”: “A broken Altar, Lord, thy servant rears…”

8. The most distinguished literary figure of the Restoration Period was John Dryden, poet, ________, and playwright.

9. Paradise Lost is a long epic. The stories are taken from __________.

10. The Pilgrim’s Progress tells of the spiritual pilgrimage of Christian, who flies form City of Destruction, and finally comes to the Delectable Mountains and the __________.

11. Sir Thomas Browne and Jeremy Taylor have been thought to be two representative_________ prose writers in English literature for their elaborate and magnificent style.

Ⅳ. Choose the best answer.

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1. John Dryden’s tragedy All for Love deals with the same story as ________’s Antonym and Cleopatra.

A. William Shakespeare B. John Milton C. Christopher Marlowe D. John Bunyan

2. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of _________.

A. Love and Hate B. Good and Evil

C. Faith and Betrayal D. Scene and Sensibility 3. ________ is shown in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. A. Utopianism B. Idealism C. Realism D. Puritanism

4. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan is often said to be concerned with the search for ________.

A. Material wealth B. spiritual salvation C. Universal truth D. self-fulfillment

5. “To wage by force or guile eternal war, Irreconcilable to our grad Foe.” (John Milton, Paradise Lost) By what means were Satan and his followers to wage this war against God?

A. By planting a tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. B. By turning into poisonous snakes to threaten man’s life. C. By removing God from His throne.

D. By corrupting man and woman created by God.

6. By making the truth-seeking pilgrims suffer at the hands of the people of Vanity Fair, John Bunyan intends to show the prevalent political and religious _______of his time.

A. Persecution B. improvement C. prosperity D. disillusionment 7. “Areopagitica” is John Milton’s best-known______. A. Prose B. epic C. novel D. drama

8. ______ is one of the most remarkable passages in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.

A. Holy Living B. Holy Dying C. Vanity Fair D. Lycidas 9. The only love poem of John Milton is “__________”.

A. Lycidas B. On His Deceased Wife C. On Marriage D. Areopagitica

10. Metaphysical poets and Cavalier poets share a similar awareness of _________in their poetry.

A. Mortality B. sensuality C. destiny D. joy Ⅴ. Short-answer questions.

1. Analyze the relation between John Milton’s works and the English Revolutions. 2. What are the contributions of John Dryden to the English neoclassical school of

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literature?

3. List no less than five characters in The Pilgrim’s Progress. 4. Illustrate with an example that John Milton is a great stylist. Ⅵ. Answer the questions according to the following passage. Passage 1

Judge: thou runagate, heretic, and traitor, hast thou heard what these honest gentlemen

have witnessed against thee?

Faithful: May I speak a few words in my own defense?

Judge: Sirrah, sirrah! Thou deservest to live no longer but to be slain immediately

upon the place: yet, that all men may see our gentleness towards thee, let us hear what thou, vile runagate, hast to say. Questions:

1. Which work is the passage quoted from? 2. Who is the author of the work?

3. Summarize the story of the passage.

Passage 2

“…Knowledge forbidden?

Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord Envy them that? Can do they only stand By ignorance, is that their happy state,

The proof of their obedience and their faith?… Hence I will excite their minds

With more desire to know, and to reject Envious commands, invented with design

To keep them low whose knowledge might exalt Equal with gods… Questions:

4. Which epic are these two stanzas quoted from? 5. Who is the author of the epic? 6. Who is the image, “I”?

7. What is the possible theme of the epic?

Keys

Ⅰ. Essay questions.

1. (1) Samson Agonistes is a poetical drama modeled on the Greek tragedies. It deals

with the story of Samson from the “Book of Judges” in the Old Testament. Samson is an athlete of the Israelites. He stands as the champion fighting for the freedom of his country. But he is betrayed by his wife Dalilah and blinded by his enemies the Philistines. Led into the temple to make them sport, he wreaks his vengeance upon his enemies by pulling down the temple them and upon himself in a common ruin.

(2) There is much in common between Samson and John Milton. Like Samson, Milton had also been embittered by an unwise marriage, persecuted by his

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enemies, and suffered from blindness. And yet he was unconquerable.

(3) Samson’s miserable blind servitude among his enemies, his agonizing longing for sight and freedom, and the last terrible triumph all strongly suggest Milton’s passionate longing that he too could bring destruction down upon the enemy at the cost of his own life. There fore, Samson in the drama is Milton himself in life.

2. (1) In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Satan, like a conquered and banished giant,

remains obeyed and admired by those who follow him down to hell. He is firmer than the rest of angels. It is he who, passing the guarded gates obstacle, makes man revolt against God.

(2) Satan is the spirit of questioning the authority of God. When he gets to the Garden of Eden, he believes in no reason why Adam and Even should not taste the fruit of tree of Knowledge.

(3) Though defeated, Satan prevails, since he has won from God a third part of his angels, and almost all the son of Adam. Though wounded, he triumphs, for the thunder which hits upon his head leaves his heart invincible. Though feebler in force, he remains superior in nobility, since he prefers independence to happy servility, and welcomes his defeat and his torments as a glory, a liberty, and a joy. In conclusion, the finest thing in Paradise Lost is the description of hell. And Satan is the real hero of the poem. Ⅱ. Define the following terms.

1. Elegy: In Greek and Roman times, the term elegy was used to refer to any poem composed in elegiac meter. Since the 17th century, elegy has typically been used to refer to reflective poems that lament the loss of something or someone, or loss or death more generally, although in Elizabethan times it was also use to refer to certain love poems. Elegies written in English frequently take the form of the pastoral elegy.

2. Pamphlet: Originally a pamphlet was a sort of treatise or tract. It then came to mean a short work written on a topical subject on which an author feels strongly. Many outstanding writers have used the pamphlet to express vigorous political or religious views.

3. Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowels-especially in stressed syllables-in a sequence of nearby words.

4. Stanza: A stanza is a grouping of the verse lines in a poem, often set off by a space in the printed text. Usually the stanzas of a given poem are marked by a recurrent pattern of rhyme and are also uniform in the number and length of the component lines.

5. Folktale: Folktale, strictly defined, is a short narrative in prose of unknown authorship which has been transmitted orally; many of these tales eventually achieve written form. The term, however, is often extended to include stories invented by a known author which have been picked up and repeatedly narrated by word of mouth as well as in written form.

6. Hyperbole: It is bold overstatement, or the extravagant exaggeration of fact or possibility.

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7. Prose poems: Prose poems are densely compact, pronouncedly rhythmic, and highly sonorous compositions which are written as a continuous sequence of sentences without line break.

8. Conceit: From the Italian concetto (meaning idea or concept), it refers to an unusually far-fetched or elaborate metaphor or simile presenting a surprisingly apt parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or feeling. Poetic conceits are prominent in Elizabethan love sonnets and metaphysical poetry. Conceits often employ the devices of hyperbole, paradox and oxymoron.

9. Pastoral: the originator of the pastoral was the Greek poet Theocritus, who in the third century B.C. wrote poems representing the life of Sicilian shepherds. (Pastor is Latin for “shepherd.”) It is a deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban poet’s nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other rural folk in an idealized natural setting.

10. Diction: The term diction signifies the types of words, phrases, and sentence structures, and sometimes also of figurative language, that constitute any work of literature. A writer’s diction can be analyzed under a great variety of categories, such as the degree to which the vocabulary and phrasing is abstract or concrete, Latin or Anglo-Saxon in origin, colloquial of formal, technical or common.

11. Epithalamion: Epithalamion, or in the Latin form epithalamium, is a poem written to celebrate a marriage. The term in Greek means” at the bridal chamber,” since the verses were originally written to be sung outside the bedroom of a newly married couple. The form flourished among the Neo-Latin poets of the Renaissance, who established the model that was followed by writers in the European vernacular languages.

12. Dream vision (Dream allegory): It is a mode of narrative widely employed by medieval poets: the narrator falls asleep, usually in a spring landscape, and dreams the events he goes on to relate; often he is led by a guide, human or animal, and the events which he dreams are at least in part an allegory.

13. Metaphysical poetry: A term that can be applied to any poetry that deals with philosophical or spiritual matters but that is generally limited to works written by a specific group of 17th century poets are linked by style and modes of poetic organization. Common elements include the following: (1) an analytical approach to subject matter; (2) colloquial language ;( 3) rhythmic patterns that are often rough or irregular, and (4) the metaphysical conceit, a figurative device used to capture though and emotion as accurately as possible.

14. Fable: A fable is also called an apologue. It is short narrative, in prose or verse, which exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behavior; usually, at its conclusion, either the narrator or one of the characters states the moral in the form of an epigram.

15. Parable: A parable is a very short narrative about human beings presented so as to stress the tacit analogy, or parallel, with a general thesis or lesson that the narrator is trying to bring home to his audience. The parable was one of Jesus’ favorite devices as a teacher.

16. Masques (or Masks): The masque was inaugurated in Renaissance Italy and

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flourished in England during the reigns of Elizabeth Ⅰ. It was an elaborate form of court entertainment that combined poetic drama, music, song, dance, splendid costuming, and stage spectacle. A plot—often slight, and mainly mythological and allegorical—served to hold together these diverse elements. The speaking characters, who wore masks (hence the title), were often played by amateurs who belonged to courtly society. The play concluded with a dance in which the players doffed their masks and were joined by the audience. Ⅲ. Fill in the blanks.

1. Cavalier poets 2. Allegory

3. Youthful love lyrics, sacred verses 4. Metaphysical poetry 5. Paradise Regained 6. Adam; Eve 7. The Altar 8. Critic

9. The Old Testament 10. Celestial City 11. Baroque

Ⅳ. Choose the best answer.

1. A 2. B 3. B 4. B 5. D 6. A 7. A 8. C 9. B 10. A Ⅴ. Short-answer questions.

1. John Milton defended the English Commonwealth with his pen. His epic Paradise Lost and his pamphlets played an active part in pushing on the revolutionary cause. For example, the image of Satan embodies the political passions of the persecuted Republicans after Restoration.

2. Following the standards of Classicism, John Dryden established the heroic couplet as one of the principal English verse form, clarified the English prose and made it precise, concise and flexible, and raise English literary criticism to a new level. He was the forerunner of the English neoclassical school of literature in the 18th century.

3. Christian, Faithful, Envy, Mr. Badman and Judge Hate-good.

4. John Milton is famous for his grand style, which is the result of his life-long classical and biblical study. It is an art attained by definite and conscientious rhetorical devices. For example, he likes to use Latinisms proper names of resonance and color to create an elevated and dignified effect. Ⅳ. Answer the questions according to the following passages. Passage 1

1. It is quoted form The Pilgrim’s Progress. 2. The author is John Bunyan.

3. The passage is entitled Vanity Fair. Christian and Faithful come to Vanity Fair. As they refuse to buy anything but Truth, they are beaten and put in a cage, and then taken out and led in chains up and down the fair, and at length brought before a

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court. Judge Hate-good summons three witnesses: Envy, Superstition and Pick thank, who testify against him. The case is given to the jury, composed of Mr. Badman, Mr. No-good, Mr. Malice, etc. each gives verdict against Faithful, who is presently condemned. Here Bunyan intends to satirize the estate trials in the reactionary reigns of Charles Ⅱ and James Ⅱ, which are merely forms preliminary to hanging, drawing and quartering.

Passage 2

4. They are quoted from Paradise Lost. 5. It is an epic written by John Milton. 6. “I” in the two stanzas refers to Satan.

7. On appearance, the epic is to justify the ways of God to man, i.e., to advocate submission to the Almighty. But actually the theme of the epic is a revolt against God’s authority because in the poem God is no better than a selfish despot, seated upon a throne with a chorus of angels about him eternally singing his praises. He is cruel and unjust in his struggle against Satan. What Milton actually intends to appraise is Satan, who in the author’s eyes is a real hero. He amid so many dangers makes man revolt against God.

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