英国文学作品赏析.doc

英国文学作品赏析
The features of Charles Dickens
1. His critical realism: While sticking to the principle of faithful representation of the 18th-century realist novel, he carried the duty to the criticism of the society and the defense of the mass.
2. He is a master storyteller. With his first sentence, he engages the reader’s attention and holds it to the end.
3. What he writes is mainly the middle and lower-middle class life in London.
4. He is a master of language with a large vocabulary and an adeptness with the vernacular.
5. He is a great humorist as well as a great painter of pathos. He always mingles the two to make his fictional world realistic.
6. His characters are not only true to life but also large than life. There are both individual characters and type characters.
II. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
1. Theme: The novel sharply criticizes the religious hypocrisy of charity institutions like Lowood School, where girls are trained to be humble slaves. It rebukes the social discrimination and false convention about love and marriage. Besides, the novel is a moral fable. It tells us that people have to go through all kinds of physical or moral tests to obtain their final happiness.
2. The character analysis of Jane Eyre: Jane Eyre is an orphan child with a fiery spirit and a longing to love and be loved. She is poor and plain, but she dares to love her master, a man superior to her in many ways, as a little governess. She is brave enough to declare to the man her love for him. She cuts a completely new women image. She represents those middle-class working women who are struggling for recognition of their basic rights and equality as a human being.
III. Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Height
1. The novel is an extraordinary moving love story: the passion between Heathcliff and Catherine is the most intense, beautiful, and the most horrible passions ever found among human beings.
2. It is also a work of critical realism. Heathcliff is abused, rejected and distorted by the society only because he is a poor orphan of obscure parents. He suffers all kinds of inhuman treatment after the death of his benefactor. He loves Catherine dearly but forced to be separated from her. So, Heathcliff’s cruel revenge upon his enemies is justified in a way.
3. The author makes clear that it is wrong to discriminate on the basis of social status, and it is cruel and destructive to break genuine, natural human passions. Although Catherine and Edgar’s marriage is ideal in the eyes of the whole neighborhood, her love for Heathcliff is hard and everlasting.
I. The features of Shaw’s plays:
1. Problem plays: He took the modern social issues as his subject with the aim of directing social reforms. Most of his plays are concerned with political, economic, or religious problems.
2. In his characterization, he makes the tricks of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another. His characters are the representatives of ideas, which shift and alter during the play.
3. The strong sense of comedy in his play are achieved through his witty dialogues, sharp satires, and vivid portrayal of characters.
II. The theme of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s profession
1. The play is not only moral, but also has a strong realistic theme. The guilt for prostitution lies more upon the social system than immoral woman. He shows all human sufferings are consequences of the economic exploitation.
2. The play is a spiritual triumph for Vivie who experiences a journey from illusion to reality. At first, she is ignorant of the evil, and through a series of temptations, she understands the capitalist world better.

D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers
1. Theme: Sociologically, it is a novel about modern civilization, the “sickness of a whole civilization”. Psychologically, it is a case study of the Oedipus complex theory, for it deals with a son who loves the mother too dearly and hates the father too despisingly. The psychic conflict (between dark self and white self) in human relationships is the central theme of the novel.
2. The character analysis of Paul Morel:
He is a light, quick, slender boy. From his childhood, he is especially sensitive, artistic and imaginative, and he becomes extraordinarily dependent on his mother. When he gets older, his distorted relationship with his mother prevents him from loving girls as fully as he feels he should. Besides, Paul is also an artist, and a likeable young man adored by many girls.
The features of stream of consciousness
1. The unspoken thoughts and feelings of their characters are described without resorting to objective description or conventional dialogue.
2. The flux of a character’s thoughts, impressions, emotions are often shown without logical sequence or syntax.

Wordsworth’ poem

William Wordsworth was one of the greatest poets of the ages, who excelled in vivid descriptions of nature and the joy that could be derived from the beauties of nature. For much of his life he lived in the Lake District, near Grasmere Lake in "Dove Cottage".
He established his reputation as a poet of great lyricism with his "Poems in Two Volumes" published in 1807; these included his famous "Daffodils" and "Ode: On the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood". In 1843 he was appointed Poet Laureate.
Features of his writings
1. Chaacteristic of features of Romantic poetry;
2. Nature and ordinary people are normally the subjects of his poems;
3. Melodic in rythem;
4. Full of passion;
5. Lyricism in wording.

I. The features of Shaw’s plays:
1. Problem plays: He took the modern social issues as his subject with the aim of directing social reforms. Most of his plays are concerned with political, economic, or religious problems.
2. In his characterization, he makes the tricks of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another. His characters are the representatives of ideas, which shift and alter during the play.
3. The strong sense of comedy in his play are achieved through his witty dialogues, sharp satires, and vivid portrayal of characters.
II. The theme of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s profession
1. The play is not only moral, but also has a strong realistic theme. The guilt for prostitution lies more upon the social system than immoral woman. He shows all human sufferings are consequences of the economic exploitation.
2. The play is a spiritual triumph for Vivie who experiences a journey from illusion to reality. At first, she is ignorant of the evil, and through a series of temptations, she understands the capitalist world better.

The Thackeray’s style

He held the idea that the mission of art was to disclose the regime class, what’s more, he was especially good at rearing the masks wore by the aristocrat and bourgeois. His magnum opus Vanity Fair is a vivid show of an adventuress in the early 19th capital society. The way of narrating stories and cynicism formed an inimitable style.

in Vanity Fair, the author makes the narration in the tone of a story-teller. The tone is friendly and casual because he acts as a character in the Vanity Fair to recount what he knows well, and it is also quite natural to insert some comments into the narration. Thackeray was such a good narrator that the narration was vivid, interesting the full of humor. The dialogues are vivid and match the characters’ identities well.

Vanity Fair reveals the truth of the politics and society of the capitalist world, that is, the ugliness of the society. To depict the reality, as Thackeray said, is necessarily to expose marry unpleasant truths. He felt that the society was full of those faithless, hopeless and merciless men who were either swindlers or fools with much popularity. Novelists should make people laugh by exposing and making fun of them. Therefore, the novel Vanity Fair aims to reveal all the evils without mercy.

Thackeray also pointed out selfless love could turn the coward into brave, the self-conscious into self-confident, the lazy into diligent. He said his aim of writing this gloomy story was to disclose people’s imbecility and awake them by appealing

Thackeray tended to probe into those characters’ minds when he was describing them. His constant acute observation and self analysis enabled him to perceive the moods and emotion of the characters well. He also purposefully portrayed condition that could change a person’s way of life. A good man will not necessarily succeed or do well, while successful men are often regarded as good man in the society. A man will become virtuous once he was money. So what he portrays is not a story of a man, but a panorama of a society

Themes

The world is shown as full of all kinds of vanity, esp. snobbery, duplicity of social-climbers, and the weakness of human nature.
The realistic depiction, the ironic and sarcastic tone and constant comment and criticism of the author make it a masterpiece of social criticism.

Special Features

He criticizes the social moral that makes up the society
His criticism embraces people of all social strata; his social-climbers and snobs and money-grabbers can be found in any class.
He always speaks in an ironical, sarcastic and cynical tone of an on-looker.
He proves a conscious artist. His works are known for their fine language, careful overall planning, mastery of detail, vast scope of view and a faithfulness to the history

Ode to the West Wind" is one of Shelley's best known lyrics. The poet describes vividly the activities of the west wind on the earth, in the sky and on the sea, and then expresses his envy for the boundless freedom of the west wind, and his wish to be free like the wind and
to scatter his words among mankind. The ode is a lyric poem of some length, dealing with a lofty theme in a dignified manner and originally intended to be sung. The English odes are generally of three types: (1) the Pindaric ode, following the pattern originated by the ancient Greek poet Pindar, (2) the Cowley-style ode, named after Abraham Cowley, an English poet of the 17th century, and (3) the Horatian ode, named after the ancient Roman poet Horace. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind" is of the Horatian type, i.e., with stanzas of uniform length and arrangement. Here Shelley employed the "terza rima," an Italian measure first used by Dante in his well-known poem La Divina Commedia. Here we find a variant of the original Italian pattern: five 14-lined stanzas of iambic pentameter, each ofthe stanzas containing four tercets and a closing couplet. The rime scheme is aba, bcb, cdc, ded, ee.