Chapter I The Renaissance Period

I. Edmund Spenser
 The Faerie Queene:
　1) It is a long, allegorical poem. In the poem, Spenser dramatized political, religious, & moral themes by personifying them, or making them characters.
　2)Plot: The story, which is set against a background of Arthur & medieval legend, deals with the adventures of six knights of the court of the fairy queen named Gloriana, who represents Queen Elizabeth Ⅰ of English.
　   The faerie Queene was originally planned as a 12-book poem. But only 6 books were completed. The poem is particularly admired for the melodic beauty of its language & for its rich content of philosophical & mythological material presented in the form ofvivid narratives.

II. Christopher Marlowe
Dr. Faustus
　The selection of ActⅠfrom Dr. Faustus is mainly about Faustus is showing his great ambition, that is, if he had many souls, he would give them all to the Devil so that he could control the world. In portraying Faustus, Marlowe praises his soaring aspiration for knowledge while warning against the sin of pride since Faustus's downfall was caused by his despair in God & trust in Devil.

Ⅲ. William Shakespeare
1) Sonnet 18
　　Theme: a profound meditation on the destructive power of time & the eternal beauty brought forth by poetry to the one he loves.
　　Imagery: a summer's day-youth
　　　　　　 the eye of heaven-the sun
2) The Merchant of Venice
　　Theme: To praise the friendship between Antonio & Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit & loyalty, & to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew.
3) Hamlet
　　This is one part of Hamlet's most famous monologue. Hamlet, facing the dilemma of action & mind, is hesitating whether he should revenge for his father, which may bring him death, or he should suffer & hide his hatred for his uncle in his deep heart, which may secure his life.

IV. Francis Bacon
Of Studies
　　Of Studies is the most popular of Bacon's 58 essays. It analyzes what studies chiefly serve for, the different ways adopted by different people to pursue studies, & how studies exert influence over human character. Forceful & persuasive, compact & precise, Of Studies reveals to us Bacon's mature attitude towards learning. Bacon's language is neat, priest, & weighty. It is some what affected, like the water in the reservoir, restricted & confined.

V. John Donne
Selected Readings
　　1) Death Be Not Proud, one of Donne's Holy Sonnets, is an almost Startling put-down of poor death. Staunchly Christian in its pare expectation of the resurrection, Donne's poem personifies death as an adversary swollen with false pride & unworthy of being called "mighty & dreadful." Donne gives various reasons in accusing death of being little more than a slave bossed about by fate, chance, kings & desperate men-a craven thing that keeps bad company, such as poison, was & sickness. Finally, Donne taunts death with a paradox: "death, thou shalt die."
　　The sonnet is written in the strict Petrarchan pattern. It reveals the poet's belief in life after death: death is eternal.
　　2) The Sun Rising
　　The persona apostrophizes the sun as " unruly" because the sun enters the lovers' secret room without their approval. The speaker criticizes the sun pays too much attention to such things as sex & that he should not be behaving so tediously as to stick to his rule & enter without thinking twice into such a place as lovers dwell.

Ⅵ. John Milton
Analyze Satan, the hero in John Milton's Paradise Lost.
　　Milton's Paradise Lost is a long epic of which the theme is the "Fall of Man" with its prime cause-Satan. In Heaven, Satan led a rebellion against God. Defeated, he & his angels were cast into Hell, However, Satan refused to accept his failure, vowing that "all was not lost" & that he would seek revenge for his down fall. In order to achieve his ambition, Satan managed to tempt Adam & Eve, the first human beings created by God, to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge against God's instruction. Satan is the real hero of the poem. Like a conquered & banished giant, he remains obeyed & admired by those who follow him down to hell. He is firmer than the rest of the fallen angels. It is he, who, passing through the guarded gates of hell & boundless chaos, amid so many dangers, & overcoming so many obstacles, makes man revolt against God. Though defeated, he prevails, since he was won from God the third part of his angels, & almost all the sons of Adam. Though wounded, he triumphs, for the thunder which overwhelmed him left heart still unvanquished.

Chapter II The Neoclassical Period

I． John Bunyan
　"The Vanity Fair", an excerpt from Part I of The Pilgrim's Progress.
　(1) Theme: The Pilgrim's Progress is the most successful religious allegory in the English language. Its purpose is to urge people to comply with Christian doctrines & seek salvation through constant struggles with their own weakness & all kinds of social evils. It is not only about something spiritual but also beats much relevance to the time. Its predominant metaphor-life as a journey-is simple & familiar.
(2) "Vanity Fair" is the most famous part of The Pilgrim's Progress. It tells how Christian & his friend Faithful come to Vanity Fair on their way to heaven," a fair where in should be sold all sorts of vanity & that it should last all the year long: therefore at this fair all such merchandise sold, as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures & delights of all sorts as harlots, wives, hu***ands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones & what not." As they refuse to buy anything but truth, they are beaten & put in a cage & then taken out & led in chains up & down the fair. They are sentenced to death-to be put to the most cruel death that can be invented." Vanity Fair" is a satirical picture of English society, law & religion in Bunyan's day.

II. Alexander pope
An Excerpt from Part 2 of An Essay on Criticism.
　An Essay on Criticism is a didactic poem written in heroic couplets. It consists of 744 lines &is divided into three parts. It sums up the art of poetry as up held & practiced by the ancients like Aristotle, Horace, Boileau, etc. & the eighteenth century European classicists.
　　In Part 2, Pope advises the critics not to stress too much the artificial use of conceit or the external beauty of language but to pay special attention to True wit which is best set in a plain style.

III. Daniel Defoe
An Excerpt from chapter IV of Robinson Crouse.
　　Robinson Crouse, an adventure story very much in the spirit of the time, is universally considered his masterpiece. In the novel, Defoe traces the growth of Robinson from a simple youth into a mature & hardened man, tempered by numerous trials in his eventful life. The realistic presentation of the successful struggle of Robinson single-handedly against the hostile nature proves the best part of the novel. Robinson is here a real hero: a typical eighteenth-century English middle-class man with a great capacity for work, inexhaustible energy, courage, patience & persistence in overcoming obstacles, in struggling against the hostile natural environment. He is the very prototype of the empire builder, the pioneer colonist. In describing Robinson's life on the island, Defoe glorifies human labor &the puritan fortitude, which save Robinson from despair & are a source of pride &happiness .He toils for the sake of subsistence, & get his reward.

VI. Jonathan Swift
An Excerpt from Chapter III, Part I of Gulliver's Travels.
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift's best fictional work, contains four parts, each about one particular voyage during which Gulliver has extraordinary adventures on some remote island after he has met with shipwreck or piracy or some other misfortune. As a whole the book is one of the most effective & devastating criticisms & satires of all aspects in the then English &  & European life - socially, politically, religiously, philosophically, scientifically, & morally. Its social significance is great & its exploration into human nature profound.
　　Gulliver's Travels is also an artistic masterpiece. Here we find its author at his best as a master of prose. In structure, the four parts make an organic whole, with each contrived upon an independent structure, & yet complementing the others & contributing to the central concern of study of human nature & life. It leads the reader to a basic question: What on earth is a human being?

V. Henry Fielding
An Excerpt from chapter VIII, Book Four of Tom Jones.
Tom Jones, generally considered Fielding's masterpiece, brings its author the name of the "Pose Homer." The panoramic view it provides of the 18th century English country & city life with different places & about 40 characters is unsurpassed. The language is one of clarity & suppleness. And last of all, the plot construction is excellent. Its 18 books of epic form are divided into 3 sections, 6 books each, clearly marked out by the change of scenes: in the country, on the high way & in London. By this, Fielding has indeed achieved his goal of writing a "comic epic in prose."

VI. Samuel Johnson
To the Right Honorable the Earl of chesterfield
　　The letter is written in a refined & very polite language, with a bitter undertone of defiance & anger.  It expresses explicitly the author's assertion of his independence, signifying the opening of a new era in the development of literature.

VII. Richard Brinsley Sheridan
An Excerpt from Act 4, Scene III of The School for Scandal
1) Brief Introductions
　　The School for Scandal is mainly a story about 2 brothers, the hypocritical Joseph Surface & the good-natured, imprudent, spendthrift Charles Surface.
2) Theme
　　The School for Scandal is one of the great classics in English drama. It is a sharp satire on the moral degeneracy of the aristocratic-bourgeois society in the 18th-century England, on the vicious scandal mongering among the idle rich, on the reckless life of extravagance & love intrigues in the high society & above all, on the immorality & hypocrisy behind the mask of honorable living & high-sounding moral principles. And in terms of theatrical art, it shows the playwright at his best. No wonder, the play has been regarded as the best comedy since Shakespeare.

VIII. Thomas Gray
"Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"
　　1) Theme: It is a meditation on human mortality, the tragic dignity it gives to all mankind, & the stability & serenity of rustic life. The Elegy lies in Gray's perfect expression of what all men feel about life & death. In this poem, Gray reflects on death, the sorrows of life & the mysteries of human life with a touch of his personal melancholy. The poet compares the ordinary people with the great ones, wondering what the commons could have achieved if they had had the chance. Here he reveals his sympathy for the poor & the unknown, but mocks the great ones who despise the poor .
　 　2)Language
　　The poem abounds in images & arouses sentiment in the bosom of every reader. Though the use of artificial poetic diction & distorted word order make understanding of the poem somewhat difficult, the artistic polish-the sure control of language, imagery, rhythm, & his subtle moderation of style & tone-gives the poem a unique charm of its own. The poem has been ranked among the best of the 18th century English poetry.

Chapter III The Romantic Period

I. William Blake
 1) The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Innocence)
　Songs of Innocence is a lovely volume of poems, presenting a happy & innocent world, though not without its evils & sufferings. In this volume, Blake, with his eager quest for new poetics forms & techniques, broke completely with the traditions of the 18th century. He experimented in meter & rhymes & introduced bold metrical innovations.
　In the 18th century, small boys sometimes no more than 4 or 5 years old, were employed to climb up the narrow chimney flues & clean them, collecting the soot in bags. Such boys, sometimes sold to the master sweepers by their parents were miserably treated by their master & often suffered disease & physical deformity.
This poem, in fact, is a protest against the harm that society does to its children by exploiting them for labor of this kind, The poem was written in the child's-eye point of view, & the dramatic irony arises from the poet's knowing more or seeing more than the child does.
 2) The Chimney Sweeper (from Songs of Experience)
　Songs of Experience paints a different world, a world of misery, poverty, disease, war & repression with a melancholy tone, The benighted England becomes the world of dark wood & of the weeping prophet. The poem selected here reveals the true nature of religion which helps bring misery to the poor children. The poem also reveals the role played by religion in making people compliant to exploitation.
3) The Tyger(Songs of Experience)
　The Tyger is one of Blake's best-known poems. It seemingly praises the great power of tiger, but what the tiger symbolizes remains disputable: the power of man? Or the revolutionary force? Or the evil? Or as it is usually interpreted, the Almighty Maker who created both the meek & gentle lamb & the terrible & awesome tiger? The poem is highly symbolic with a touch of mysticism & it is open to various interpretations. The poem contains six quatrains in rhyming couplets & its language is terse & forceful with an anvil rhythm.

II. William Wordsworth
 1) I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1)
　Wordsworth is regarded as a "worshipper of nature." He can penetrate to the heart of things & give the reader the very life of nature. "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is perhaps the most anthologized poem in English literature, & one that takes us to the core of Wordsworth's poetic beliefs. Wordsworth wrote this beautiful poem of nature after he came across a long belt of gold daffodils tossing & reeling & dancing along the waterside. There is a vivid picture of the daffodils here, mixed with the poet's philosophical & somewhat mystical thoughts.
　　The poem consists of four 6-lined stanzas of iambic tetrameter The last stanza describes the poet's recollection in tranquility from which this poem arose. The poet thinks that it is a bliss to recollect the beauty of nature in his mind .
2) Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 (1)
　This sonnet, written on the roof of a coach as Wordsworth was on his way to France, was published in Poems in Two Volumes, 1807. The poem presents the speaker's view of London in the early morning. The speaker is not only profoundly touched by its beauty & tranquility of the morning, but even surprised to realize that London is part of Nature just as much as is his own beloved Lake Country.
　Wordsworth is regarded as a " worshipper of nature." Even in this poem, though he is looking at London, he is thinking of home where the sun steeps in his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill."
The poem is written after the pattern of the Italian sonnet.
3) She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways (1)
　This is one of the "Lucy poems," written in 1799. The "Lucy Poems" describe with rare elusive beauty of simple lyricism & haunting rhythm a young country girl living a simple life in a remote village far from the civilized world. They are verses of love & loss which hold within their delicate simplicity a meditation on time & death.
 4) The Solitary Reaper (1)
　Wordsworth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest. The joys & sorrows of the common people are his themes.
　"The Solitary Reaper" is an example of his literary views. It describes vividly a young peasant girl working alone in the fields & singing as she works. The plot of the little incident is told straightforwardly in stanzas 1, 3, & 4. Stanza 2, with its comparison of the girl's song to the cuckoo & the nightingale cannot be dismissed as vaguely ornamental comparisons. They are much more than that, & the impression of the girl's singing on the traveler is heightened through these comparisons.
This poem is an iambic verse. Most of the lines in the poem are octosyllabics.
III Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"Kubla Khan" is one of the best-known poems written by Coloridge. It is a vision, a fragment painting, a gorgeous Oriental picture. Though the poet calls this poem a fragment, there is a wholeness in the poem & it is highly symbolic. The places symbolize conflicting forces --Xanadu, which represents a beautifully cultivated & ordered product of the rational will, is opposed to Alph's wild & savage chasm which represents an irrationally mysterious creative energy or inspiration. The speaker realizes that the opposites can be reconciled through the creative imagination. "Ancestral voices prophesying war" confirms that the conflict is always present; the "pleasure-dome," the product of human imaginative vision is the device (poetry) which will reconcile the opposites; & "a damsel with a dulcimer" is anything which releases the poetic vision.
　　Either ways, however, the descrīption of Xanadu, the pleasure dome, the chasm the sacred river Alph bursts out of, along with the speaker's reaction to this revision of them is exotic & vivid. This poem can be a source of pleasure of verbal music or of freely associated & impressive images.  The rhymes are also arranged haphazardly to accommodate the idea.

IV　George Gordon Byron
1) Song for the Luddites(1)
　　The poem  shows his sympathy & support for the workers in their struggle against the capitalist oppression & exploitation. It is composed of three 5-lined stanzas, all of which are strong & vigorous masculine rhymes.
　 2) The Isles of Greece (from Don Juan, III)
　　Don Juan, the masterpiece of Byron, is a long satirical poem. Its hero Juan is an aristocratic libertine, amiable & charming to ladies. Byron puts into Don Juan his rich knowledge of his world & his wisdom. It presents brilliant pictures of life in its various stages of love, joy, suffering, hatred & fear. The unifying principle in Don Juan is the basic ironic theme of appearance & reality, i.e. what things seem to be & what they actually are.  In the early 19th century, Greece was under the rule of Turk. By contrasting the freedom of ancient Greece & the present enslavement, the poet appealed to people to struggle for liberty.

V. Percy Bysshe Shelley
 1) A Song: Men of England (1)
　　This poem is unquestionably one of Shelley's greatest political lyrics. It is not only a war cry calling upon all working people of England to rise up against their political oppressors, but also an address to point out to them the intolerable injustice of economic exploitation. In the poem Shelley pictured the capitalist society as divided into two hostile classes: the parasitic class ("drones") & the working class ("bees").
　　The song contains eight quatrains; generally each line contains 4 accented syllables. The last two stanzas of the poem are ironically addressed to those workers who submit passively to capitalist exploitation. They serve as a warning to the working people, that if the latter should give up their struggle they would be digging graves for themselves with their own hands compared to the preceding stanzas, these lines appear weak & ineffectual.
 2) Ode to the West Wind
　　The poem Ode to the West Wind was the best known of Shelley's shorter poems. In the poem the poet describes vividly the activities of the West Wind on the earth, in the sky & on the sea, & then expresses his envy for the boundless freedom of the West Wind & his wish to be free like the wind & scatter his words among mankind. He gathered in this poem a wealth of symbolism, employed a structural art & his powers of metrical orchestration at their mightiest. The autumn wind, burying the dead year, preparing for a new Spring, becomes an image of Shelley himself, as he would want to be, in its freedom, its destructive-constructive power, its universality, "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" calls the Shelley that could not bear being fettered to the humdrum realities of everyday! The whole poem has a logic of feeling, a progression that leads to the triumphant, hopeful & convincing conclusion: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"Shelley's ode is an invocation to a primitive deity, a plea to exalt him in its fury & to trumpet the radical prophecy of hope & rebirth.

VI. John Keats
"Ode on a Grecian Urn"
　The Grecian Urn that the poem depicts is a piece of ancient Greek pottery with a pastoral scene overwrought upon it. The urn represents a piece of artifact, & it has endured a long history, yet remains untarnished, & the pastoral scene on it can still be seen clearly.
　On the surface, this ode is about the Grecian Urn, but we can fairly say it is a commentary on nature & art, for art has the power to preserve intense human experiences, so that they may go on being enjoyed by men from generation to generation. Pleasure in life cannot be protected from change, while artifact can remain intact.
　The Ode consists of 5 stanzas, the first four stanzas describing a pastoral scene on the urn, & the last epitomizing the relation of the timeless ideal world in art to the woeful actual world.

　VII Jane Austen
An Excerpt From Chapter I of Pride & Prejudice
　 1) Structure, characterization & language style
　　The structure of the novel is exquisitely deft, the characterization in the highest degree memorable, while the irony has a radiant shrewdness unmatched elsewhere. At the heart of the novelist's exploration of the marriage, property & intrigue lies the exhilarating suspense of the relationship between Elizabeth Bennet & Darcy, & Jane Austen's delicate probing of the values of the gentry. The moments of high comedy in the novel are always related to deeper issues. Elizabeth's rejection of the odious Mr. Collins suggests her independence & self-esteem, but when Collins is accepted by her friend Charlotte Lucas, we see the reality of marriage as a necessary step if a woman is to a void the wretchedness of aging spinsterhood. Conversely, in the elopement of Lydia & Wickham, we are shown the dangers of feckless relationships unsupported by money. The comic characters in Pride & Prejudice are: Mr. & Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Collins & that monstrous snob Lady Catherine de Burgh.
　 应用 Characteristics of Jane Austen's novels
　 1) Austen's novels describe a narrow range of society & events: a quiet, prosperous, middle class circle in provincial surroundings, which she knew well from her own experience2) Her subject matter is also limited, for most of her novels deal with the subject of getting married, which was in fact the central problem for the young leisure-class lady of that age, who had no other choice in her life but to find a good hu***and.3) Austen's interest was in human nature; in her depiction of human nature, instead of being fascinated by great waves of elevated emotion, by passion or heroic experience, she focused on the trivial & petty details of everyday living, which became very interesting through her truthful & lively descrīption.4) Austen's novels are brightened by their witty conversation & omnipresent humor. Her language shines with an exquisite touch of lively gracefulness, elegant & refined, but never showy.

Chapter 4 The Victorian Period
I.              Charles Dickens
An Excerpt from Chapter III of Oliver Twist
　　The novel is famous for its vivid descrīptions of the workhouse & life of the underworld in the 19th-century London. The author's intimate knowledge of people of the lowest order & of the city itself apparently comes from his journalistic years. Here the novel also presents Oliver Twist as Dickens's first child hero & Fagin the first grotesque figure.

 II. The Bronte Sisters
Excerpt One: from Chapter XXIII of Jane Eyre by charlotte Bronte
The work is one of the most popular & important novels of the Victorian age. It is noted for its sharp criticism of the existing society, e.g. the religious hypocrisy of charity institutions, the social discrimination & the false social convention as concerning love & marriage. At the same time, it is an intense moral fable. Jane, like Mr. Rochester, has to undergo a series of physical & moral tests to grow up & achieve her final happiness. The success of the novel is also due to its introduction to the English novel the first governess heroine.
Jane Eyre's character:
　　Jane Eyre, an orphan child with a fiery spirit & a longing to love & be loved, a poor, plain, little governess who dares to love her master,  & even is brave enough to declare to the man her love for him, cuts a completely new woman image. In this novel Charlotte characterizes Jane Eyre as a naive, kind-hearted, noble-minded woman who pursues a genuine kind of love. Jane Eyre represents those middle-class workingwomen who are struggling for recognition of their basic rights & equality as a human being. The vivid descrīption of her intense feelings & her thought & inner conflicts brings her to the heart of the audience.
Excerpt Two: from Chapter XV of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The theme of the novel
　　The novel is a riddle which means different things to different people. From the social point of view, it is a story about a poor man abused, betrayed & distorted by his social betters because he is a poor nobody. As a love story, this is one of the most moving: the passion between Heathcliff & Catherine proves the most intense, the most beautiful & at the same time the most horrible passion ever to be found possible in human beings.
　3) The structure of the novel
　　The novel has a unique structure: the story is told through independent narrators unidentical with the author, whose personality is therefore completely absent from the book. The story is told mainly by Nelly, Catherine's old nurse, to Mr. Lockwood, a temporary tenant . The latter too gives an account of what he sees at Wuthering Heights. And part of the story is told through Isabella's letters to Nelly. While the central interest is maintained, the sequence of its development is constantly disordered by flashbacks. This makes the story all the more enticing & genuine.

 III. Alfred Tennyson
(1) Break, Break, Break (1)
　　This short lyric is written in memory of Tennyson's best friend, Arthur Hallam, whose death has a lifelong influence on the poet. Here, the poet's own feelings of sadness are contrasted with the carefree, innocent joys of the children & the unfeeling movement of the ship & the sea waves. The beauty of the lyric is to be found in the musical language & in the association of sound & images with feelings & emotions.
　(2) Crossing the Bar (1)
　　This poem was written in the later years of Tennyson's life. Although not the last poem written by Tennyson in his long creative career, this poem appears, at his request, as the final poem in all collections of his works. The scene is sketched with a few strokes: sunset & the evening star, the twilight and the evening bell, & then the dark. The ship is ready to go out of the harbor. It will cross the bar & reach the vast open sea for the long voyage that it is to make. The allegory of the poem is clear. Tennyson is in the evening of life, & the "clear call" of death will come soon. But when he has crossed the border between life & death to go on that voyage beyond the bound of Time & Place, he hopes then to see his "Pilot," God, face to face. From the moving imagery & the pleasant sound of the poem, we can feel his fearlessness towards death, his faith in God & an afterlife.
　(3) Ulysses(1)
　　In Greek mythology, Ulysses is the king of the Ithaca Island. He is the hero in many literary classics.  In this poem, Ulysses is now three years back in his homeland, reunited with his wife Penelope & his son Telemachus, & resumes his rule over the land. But he will not endure the peaceful commonplace everyday life. Old as he is, he persuades his old followers to go with him & to sail again to pursue a new world & new knowledge. Written in the form of dramatic monologue, the poem not only expresses, through the mouth of the heroic Ulysses, Tennyson's own determination & courage to brave the struggle of life but also reflects the restlessness & aspiration of the age.

IV. Robert Browning
1) My Last Duchess (1)
　　"My Last Duchess" is Browning's best-known dramatic monologue. The poem takes its sources from the life of Alfonso II, duke of Ferrara of the 16th-century Italy, whose young wife died suspiciously after three years of marriage. Not long after her death, the duke managed to arrange a marriage with the niece of another noble man. This dramatic monologue is the duke's speech addressed to the agent who comes to negotiate the marriage. In his talk about his "last duchess," the duke reveals himself as a self-conceited, cruel & tyrannical man. The poem is written in heroic couplets, but with no regular metrical system.
　　2) Meeting at Night (1)
　　 Browning made them separate poems in a late edition of his work. The speaker in both is a man. In this poem, the man, a lover, describes the whereabouts of their meeting place. The journey to love is dominated by moon, shadows, softness, & sexual imagery.
3) Parting at Morning (1)
　　Here in the descrīption of sunrise, the poet unconsciously expresses his helplessness in having to face up his duty as a man. The journey back is from the nighttime woman's world of love to the daytime world of reality.

V. George Eliot
An Excerpt from Chapter XXVIII of Middlemarch
　　Middlemarch, a study of provincial life, has been known as one of the most mature works in English literary history. The book provides a panoramic view of life in a small English town, Middlemarch, &its surrounding countryside in the mid-nineteenth century. It is mainly centered on the lives of Dorotea Brooke & Tertius Lydgate, both of whom are shown have great potentials & ambitions, but both fail in achieving their goals owing to the social environment as well as their own vulnerabilities.
The excerpt below begins from Drothea & Casoubon's return from their honeymoon in Rome, where Mr. Casaubon buries himself in the library, ignoring the bride & leaving her very much alone. This is but the first taste of bitterness & disappointment for the youthful & hopeful Dorothea. Now back at home, she finds herself shut up in the cold, lifeless Lowick Manor & begins to see the impossibility of hope.

VI. Thomas Hardy
An Excerpt from Chapter XIX of Tess of the D'Urbervilles
　　This novel is one of the best & most popular work by Hardy. It is a fierce attack on the hypocritical morality of the bourgeois society & the capitalist invasion into the country & destruction of the English peasantry towards the end of the century. Tess, as a pure woman brought up with the traditional idea of womanly virtues, is abused & destroyed by both Alec & Angel, agents of the destructive force of the society. And the misery, the poverty & the heartfelt pain she suffers & her final tragedy give rise to a most bitter cry of protest & denunciation of the society. Of course, naturalistic tendency is also strong in the novel. In a way, Tess seems to be led to her final destruction step by step by Fate. Coincidence adds on "wrong" to another until she is caught up in a dead-end. As Hardy says at the end of the novel: "Justice was done, & the President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess."

Chapter ５　The Modern Period

I. George Bernard Shaw
The outline and social significance of Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession:
　　(1) The outline: Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play about the economic oppression of women. Mrs. Warren's profession is keeping brothels. Sir George Crofts, an old aristocrat, is her partner in this business. Vivie, Mrs. Warren's daughter, is educated in a very moral atmosphere at a boarding school. Upon graduation, she returns home and by accident discovers the source of her mother's income. Her conversations with Mrs. Warren and Sir George Crofts reveal the unscrupulousness of these members of the ruling class. It must be noted, however, that while protesting strongly against bourgeois exploitation and the immorality of the English ruling classes, Shaw points out no corrective. His heroine Vivie simply leaves her mother and, living independently, tries to earn her bread by honest work. Like Shaw, she is under the delusion that piecemeal, pretty and gradual reform will eventually do away with the evils of capitalism.
　　(2) The social significance: The play tells an outrageous truth: in a moribund capitalist society, even prostitution can be made a means of exploitation by an ex-prostitution Mrs. Warren, and a sound investment by a respectable aristocrat Sir George Crofts. Here he exposes and satirizes the entire capitalist system, shows his infinite sympathy for the exploited, and therefore sharply and daringly touches on the most fundamental being of the capitalist system.

Ⅱ.John Galsworthy (1867-1933)
An Excerpt from Chapter l3 of The Man of Property
　　1. The outline of the story: The Man of Property is the first novel of the Forsyte trilogies which tell the ups and downs of the Forsyte family from 1886 to 1926.Soames Forsyte, a typical Forsyte, represents the essence of the principle that the accumulation of wealth is the sole aim of life, for he considers everything in terms of one's property. Irene, his young and beautiful wife, on the contrary, loves art and cherishes noble ideals of life. But Soames never pay any attention to her thoughts and feeling; he takes her merely as part of his own property. Thus, Irene is not happy about her marriage. In order to please his wife, Soames asks Bosinney, a young architect, to build a country house for them. Like Irene, Bosinney is also interested in art and not in practical things in life. During the designing and building of the house, the two come to enjoy a great deal of each other's company and finally fall in love with each other. Rumors arise and Soames wants his revenge. He sues Bosinney at the court for spending more money than stipulated. The conflict of the triangle ends tragically with Bosinney's death in a car accident and Irene's leaving Soames for good.
　　2. The theme of this novel: It is that of the predominant possessive instinct of the Forsytes and its effects upon the personal relationships of the family with the underlying assumption that human relationships of the contemporary English society are merely an extension of property relationships.
　　The harsh satire on this inhuman sense of property is brought out very effectively in the early chapters of the novel. But in the later part of the novel, the harsh tone gradually changes into a more tolerant one, and finally it becomes a distinctly sentimental one, thus weakening the effect of the novel.

Ⅲ.William Butler Yeats
1. The Lake Isle of Innisfree
　 Tired of the life of his day, Yeats sought to escape into an ideal "fairyland" where he could live calmly as a hermit and enjoy the beauty of nature. The poem consists of three quatrains of iambic pentameter. Innisfree is an inlet in the lake in Irish legends. Here the author is referring to a place for hermitage. Around a "fairyland" background, the poem is c1osely woven, easy, subtle and musical; the c1arity and control of the imagery give the poem a haunting quality.
2. Down by the Salley Gardens
　　The theme of the poem is very simple: a boy has fallen in love with a beautiful girl who is carefree and advises the boy not to be so serious about love and life. But he does not agree with her and suffers a lot.

Ⅳ.T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
The literary significance of The Waste Land:
　　(1) The theme: The Waste Land, Eliot's most important single poem, has been hailed as a landmark and a model of the 20th-century English poetry, comparable to Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads. With bold technical innovations in versification and style, the poem not only presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation in the modern Western world, but also reflects the prevalent mood of disillusionment and despair of a whole post-war generation.
　　(3) The poem's social significance: The Waste Land is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modem civilization in which human life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose. The poem has developed a whole set of historical, cultural and religious themes; but it is often regarded as being primarily a reflection of the 20th-century people's disillusionment and frustration in a sterile and futile society. The horror and menace, the anguish and dereliction, and the futility and sterility expressed in his poetry had been afflicting all sensitive members of the postwar generation.
　　2．The characteristics of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock":
　　"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is Eliot's most striking early achievement. It presents the meditation of an aging young man over the business of proposing marriage. The poem is in a form of dramatic monologue, suggesting an ironic contrast between a pretended "love song" and a confession of the speaker's incapability of facing up to love and to life in a sterile upper-class world. Prufrock, the protagonist of the poem, is neurotic, self-important, illogical and incapable of action. He is a kind of tragic figure caught in a sense of defeated idealism and tortured by unsatisfied desires. The setting of the poem resembles the "polite society" of Pope's " The Rape of the Lock," in which a tea party is a significant event and a game of cards is the only way to stave off boredom. The poem is intensely anti-romantic with visual images of hard, gritty objects and evasive hellish atmosphere.

V. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
Sons and Lovers
　　(1) The brief outline of Lawrence's Sons and Lover: Sons and Lovers is largely an autobiographical novel told by means of straight-forward narrative and vivid episodes in chronological sequence. The story starts with the marriage of Paul's parents. Mrs. Morel, daughter of a middle-class family, is "a woman of character and refinement", a strong-willed, intelligent and ambitious woman who is fascinated by a warm, vigorous and sensuous coal miner, Walter Morel, and married beneath her own class. After an initial stage of happiness in their marriage, the class difference between them starts to estrange them from each other. The disillusion in her hu***and makes her lavish all the affections upon her sons. She determines that her sons should never become miners; they will be educated to realize her ideals of success, happiness and social esteem. Thus, the sons gradually come under the strong influence of the mother in affections, aspirations and mental habits, and see their father with their mother's eyes, despising their father whose personality degenerates step by step as he feels his exclusion. Later Mrs. Morel stands in the way of her second son Paul's love affairs first with Miriam, a farmer's daughter, and then with Clara, a married woman who lives separated from her hu***and. In the near-end of the story, Mrs. Morel suffers from a terminal disease. Paul casts off his mistress and attends to his dying mother. It is only after his mother's death that he feels free. Resisting the urge to follow his mother into darkness, he walks towards life.
　　(2) The characterization of Paul in Sons and Lovers: In the second part of the novel, the closeness between Paul, the hero of the story, and his mother develops after the death of his elder brother, William, and his own illness. Paul's psychological development is traced with great subtlety, especially his emotional conflicts in the course of his early love affairs with Miriam and Clara. Paul depends heavily on his mother's love and help to make sense of the world around him; but in order to become an independent man and a true artist he has to make his own decisions about his life and work, and has to struggle to become free from his mother's influence. However, Paul is proved to be incapable of escaping the overpowering emotional bond imposed by his mother's love, so he fails to achieve a fulfilling relationship with either girl. Finally, his mother has died and he is left alone, in despair. There is no one now to love him or to help him. But the book ends with Paul's rejection of despair and his determination to face the unknown future.

Ⅵ. James Joyce (1882-1941)
The theme of "Araby":  This tale of the frustrated quest for beauty in the midst of drabness is both meticulously realistic in its handling of details of Dublin life and the Dublin scene and highly symbolic in that almost every image and incident suggests some particular aspect of the theme. Joyce was drawing on his own childhood recollections, and the uncle in the story is a reminiscence of Joyce's father. But in all the stories in Dubliners dealing with childhood, the child lives not with his parents but with an uncle and aunt - a symbol of that isolation and lack of proper relation between "consubstantial"parents and children which is a major theme in Joyce's work.

 Chapter l The Romantic Period　

Ⅰ. Washington Irving(1783-l859)4.应用：选读《瑞普·凡·温可尔》的主题及其艺术特色
What are the theme and the artistic features of "Rip Van Winkle"?
(1) The theme:
　　Irving's taste was essentia1ly conservative and always exa1ted a disappearing past. This socia1 conservatism and literary preference for the past is revea1ed, to some extent, in his famous story "Rip Van Winkle."
(2) The artistic features:
"Rip Van Winkle" is not only well-known for Rip's 20-year sleep but also considered a model of perfect English in American Literature and in the English language as well. He has a clear, easy style.
(a) We hear rather than read, for there is musicality in almost every line of his prose.(b) We seldom learn a mora1 lesson because he wants us amused and relaxed. (c)The Gothic elements and the supernatural atmosphere are manipulated in such a way that we could become so engaged and involved in what is happening in a seemingly exotic place.(d)Yet Irving never forgets to associate a certain place with the inward movement of a person and to charge his sentences with emotion so as to create a true and vivid character.

II. Ralph Waldo Emerson
应用：《论自然》节选：爱默生的基本哲 学思想及自然观
Selected Reading:
　　An Excerpt from Nature
　　Question : What is Emerson's view on nature?
Emerson's nature is emblematic 象征of the spiritual world, alive with God's overwhelming无法抵抗的 presence; hence, it exercises a healthy and restorative苏醒的 inf1uence on human mind. "Go back to nature, sink yourse1f back into its inf1uence and you'1l become spiritually who1e again." The essay Nature discusses the love of nature, the uses of nature, the idealist philosophy in relation to nature, In the essay Emerson clearly expresses the main principles of his Transcendentalist pursuit and his love for nature.In the selection Emerson's famous metaphor暗喻 of "a transparent eyeball" is employed to illustrate his philosophical discussion.

III. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-l864)
　　Young Goodman Brown
　　1.The story:
        Goodman Brown, a Puritan who lives in the village of Salem, leaves his wife Faith who pleads him not to go, to attend a witches' Sabbath in the woods. A satanic figure leads the credulous protagonist to a witches' Sabbath. There, he astonishingly finds lots of prominent people of the village and the church. When he is about to be confirmed into the group, he finds his wife Faith is also there beside him. He immediately cries out" look up to Heaven and resist the wicked one," only to find he is alone in the forest. He returns to his home, but since then lives a dismal and gloomy life because he is never able to believe in goodness or piety again.
2.The theme, allegory, symbolism and language features of the selected reading
　　(1)allegorical theme: "Young Goodman Brown" is one of Hawthorne's most profound tales. The story illustrates Hawthorne's allegorical theme of human evil. In "Young Goodman Brown," he sets out to prove that everyone possesses some evil secret. "Evil is the nature of mankind."
　　(2)allegory:Hawthorne is a great allegorist and almost every story can be read allegorically, as is the case in "Young Goodman Brown." A1legory is used to ho1d fast against the crushing blows of reality. Its hero, a naive young man who accepts both society in general and his fellow men as individuals worth his regard, is confronted with the vision of human evil in one terrible night, and becomes thereafter distrustful and doubtful. Allegorically, our protagonist, becomes an Everyman named Brown, a "young man" who will be aged in one night by an adventure that makes everyone in this world a fallen idol.
　　(3)ambivalence of Hawthorne's art :The story is manipulated in such a way that we as readers feel that Hawthorne poses the question of Good and Evil in man but withholds his answer, and he does not permit himself to determine whether the events of the night are real or a mere  dream.

IV.　Walt Whitman
Selected Readings:
　　1. There Was a Child Went Forth
　　This poem describes the growth of a child who learned about the world around him and improved himself accordingly. In the poem Whitman's own early experience may well be identified with the childhood of a young, growing America.He shows concern for the whole hard-working people and the growing life of cities.
The poem describes the influence of environment on the child,
2. Cavalry Crossing a Ford
　　This poem which reminds its readers of a picture, or a photo, of a scene of the American Civil War. All the movements described in this picture are frozen.  it's more likely that they come out of the watcher's imagination, rather than from the picture itself.Whitman expressed much mourning for the sufferings of the young lives in the battlefield and showed a determination to carry on the fighting  until the final victory.Whitman uses colors and images.
3. Song of Myself
　　The two principal beliefs embodied in this poem:In this poem Whitman sets forth two principal beliefs: the theory of universality, , and the belief in the singularity and equality of all beings in value.

Ⅴ. Herman Melville(1819-1891)
　An Excerpt from Moby-Dick
　　(1) The image形象 of the captain, Ahab: The captain,Ahab is a tragic hero with an overwhelming desire to kill Moby Dick. He transforms himself into an evil in his thirst to destroy evil.2)(a) Moby-Dick is a mixture of fantasy and realism based upon the South Pacific whaling industry; (b) It might be read as an initiation story about Ishmael, the outcast, finding himself in a real world of hard work and danger and an unreal world of speculation and mystery; (c)It is a fabulous dramatization of Ahab's obsessed determination to revenge himself in the pursuit of one particular whale who has previously destroyed his boat and humiliated him by ripping off one of his legs.(d) The deep symbolic theme: Moby-Dick is not merely a whaling tale or sea adventure, but turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man's deep reality and psychology.

Chapter 2  The Realistic Period

I. Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huckleberry Finn, by general agreement, is Twain’s finest book and an outstanding American novel. Its narrator is Huck, a youngster whose carelessly recorded vernacular speech is admirably adapted to detailed and poetic de scrīption of scenes, vivid representations of characters, and narrative renditions that are both broadly comic and subtly inonic.
Huck, son of the village drunkard, is uneducated, superstitious, and sometimes credulous; but he also has a native shrewdness, a cheerfulness that is hard to put down, compassionate tolerance, and an instinctive tendency to reach the right decisions about important matters. He runs away from his persecuting father and, with his companion, the runaway slave Jim, makes a long and frequently interrupted voyage floating down the Mississippi River on a raft. During the journey Huck meets and comes to know members of greatly varied groups, so that the book memorably portrays almost every class living on or along the river. Huck overcomes his initial prejudices and learns to respect and love Jim.
The significance of the novel 
 The book marks the climax of Twain's literary creativity. Hemingway once described the novel the one book from which “all modern American literature comes.”The book is significant in many ways. First of all,the language of the novel is not grand, pompous, but simple, direct, lucid, and faithful to the colloquial speech. This unpretentious style of colloquialism is best described as “vernacular”.Secondly, the great strength of the book also comes from the shape given to it by the course of the raft's journey down the Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their different kinds of freedom.Thirdly, the profound portrait of Huckleberry Finn is another great contribution of the book to the legacy of American literature. The climax arises with Huck's inner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape.
Huck’s final decision -- to fo1low his own good--hearted moral impulse rather than conventional village morality -- amounts to a vindication of what Mark Twain called" the damned human race.With the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows.
3.Selected Reading:
(2) The novel’s theme, characterization of “Huck” and the novel’s social significance:
 Theme: The novel is a vindication of what Mark Twain called “ the damned human race.” That is the theme of man’s inhumanity to man---of human cruelty, hypocrisies, dishonesties, and moral corruptions. Mark Twain’s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a typical American boy whom its creator described as a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience,” and remarkable for the raft’s journey down the Mississippi river, which Twain used both realistically and symbolically to shape his book into an organic whole.
Through the eyes of Huck, the innocent and reluctant rebel, we see the pre-Civil War American society fully exposed and at the same time we are deeply impressed by Mark Twain’s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.

Ⅱ. Henry James
 Daisy Miller
 1.The theme of the novel
Daisy Miller is one of James’s early works that dealt with the international theme, i.e., to set against a large international background, usual1y between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cu1tures with two different groups of peop1e representing two different value systems: American innocence in contact and contrast with European decadence ..
2.Characterization of Daisy Miller:Daisy Miller, a typical young American girl who goes to Europe and affronts her destiny. The unsophisticated girl is cruelly wronged because of the confrontation between the two value systems. Innocence, the keynote of her character, turns out to be an admiring but a dangerous quality and her defiance of social taboos in the Old World finally brings her to a disaster in the clash between two different cultures. In this novel James’s sympathy for Daisy could be easily felt when we think of a tender flower crushed by the harsh winter in Rome.

Ⅲ. Emily Dickinson (1830-l886)
1. (44l ) This is my letter to the World
This poem expresses Dickinson 's anxiety about her communication with the outside world and her vision of the poet’s task and function.
 2. (465) I heard a Fly buzz -- when l died --
This poem is a descrīption of the moment of death. Dickinson’s attitude toward death is that of peaceful acceptance. She looked at death from the point of view of both the living and the dying. She even imagined her own death, the loss of her own body, and the journey of her soul to the unknown. This poem, universally considered one of her masterpieces
 3. (585) I like to see it lap the Miles -
 This poem is an interesting study of how Dickinson makes the train part of nature by animalizing it.
  4. (7l2) Because I could not stop for Death-
  This is one of Dickinson’s most celebrated poems describing death. It possesses many  typical features of her poetry. To her ,death is a release from a lifetime of work and suffering to a lasting peace in heaven. Therefore, she depicts the dark subject of death in a light tone. In this poem Dickinson personifies death and immortality so as to make her message strongly felt and vivify the abstract ideas. On the other hand, she feels uncertain about immortality of death. Many rhetorical devices are used in this poem,such as personification,image and symbolsShe also uses punctuation for musicality and capitalization for emphasis.

Ⅳ.Theodore Dreiser (l87l-1945 )
2. The theme of the book:
Sister Carrie best embodies Dreiser’s naturalistic belief that men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, environment and chance, but a few extraordinary human beings refuse to accept their fate wordlessly and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose for their existence. Carrie senses that she is merely a cipher in an uncaring world yet seeks to grasp the mysteries of life and thereby satisfies her desires for social status and material comfort. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and impotence of men.

Chapter 3 The Modern Period

Ⅰ.Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
1. In a Station of the Metro (1) Theme: This poem is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris subway station .(2) The one image in this poem: The faces in the dim light of the Metro suggest both the impersonality 非人格性and haste 匆忙of city life and the greater transience 虚无of human life itself. The word "apparition" 幻影is a well-chosen one which has a two-fold meaning: Firstly, it means a visible appearance of something real. Secondly, it builds an image of a ghostly幽灵的sight视觉 .
　3) Pound uses the fewest possible words to convey传送 an accurate image, which is the principle of the Imagist poetry. This poem looks to be a modern adoption of the haiku form of Japanese poetry .The poem succeeds largely because of its internal内在的 rhymes.
2. The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
(1) Theme: It is an adaptation from a poem of the Chinese Li Po,which, by means of vivid images and shifting tones, describes the silky shy tenderness of the young wife writing to her absent hu***and the river-merchant.
2The  use of images and allusion: In this poem Pound uses images such as "hair" "grown moss" "falling leaves" to suggest the passing years and growing age. Besides, Pound employs an allusion to "a story of a woman waiting for her hu***and on a hill."
3. A Pact
　　This poem is about Pound's evaluation评估 on Whitman. Pound started to find some agreement between "Whitmanesque" free verse, which he had attacked for its carelessness in composition,and ""Imagist Libre". In the poem Pound affirmed Whitman's contribution in the experiment on the form and content of American poetry and expressed his eagerness to communicate with Whitman.

Ⅱ. Robert Lee Frost (l874-l963)
l. After Apple-Picking
　　This poem is so vivid a memory of experience on the farm in which the end of labor leaves the speaker with a sense of completion and fulfilment yet finds him blocked from success by winter's approach and physical weariness. He took up a religious question: can a man's best efforts ever satisfy God?
　　Besides this is a typical lyric poem describing the pastoral landscape in New England. Symbols and images from the pastoral landscape to refer to the great world beyond the rustic scene.
　　The language of this poem is characterized by simple spoken language and conversational rhythms,Frost wrote in a form that might be called semi-free or semi-conventional.
2. The Road Not Taken
　(1) The theme: This poem seems to be about the poet, walking in the woods in autumn, hesitating for a long time and wondering which road he should take since they are both pretty. It concerns the important decisions which one must take in the course of life, when one must give up one desirable thing in order to possess another. Then, whatever the outcome, one must accept the consequences of one's choice for it is not possible to go back and have another chance to choose differently. In the poem, he followed the one which was not frequently travelled by. Symbolically, he chose to follow an unusual, solitary life; perhaps he was speaking of his choice to become a poet rather than some common profession. But he always remembered the road which he might have taken, and which would have given him a different kind of life.
　　(2) Language: This poem is written in classic five-line stanzas,
3. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
　　(1) The theme: This is a  simple poem in which the speaker literally stops his horse in the winter twilight to observe the beauty of the forest scene, and then is moved to continue his journey.
　　(2) This poem suggests deep thought about death and about life. Some critics think that the "village" stands for the human world, "woods" for nature, "horse" for the animal world, and "promises" for obligations义务.Besides, the word "sleep" here means "die" symbolically. The poem represents a moment of relaxation from the burdensome journey of life
　　(3) The last stanza shows a kind of sad, sentimental but also strong and responsible feeling.

Ⅲ. Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953)

An Excerpt from Scene VⅢ of The Hairy Ape
　　1.The theme of the play or the tragic vision in it:
　　The tragic sense of modern man belonging nowhere, being helpless and impotent remained as the common theme of O'Neill's works.The Hairy Ape is a good illustration. The play concerns the problem of modern man's identity. Yank's sense of belonging nowhere, hence homelessness and rootlessness, is the typical  mood of isolation and alienation in the early twentieth century in the United States and the whole world as well.
　　2. The expressionistic techniques in the play: 表现主义和象征主义手法
(1) In this expressinistic play, abstract and symbolic stage sets are used to set off against the emotional inner selves and subjective states of mind.  So the emotional content, the subjective reactions of characters are emphasized, which symbolically represent the despairing reality.
　　(2) O'Neill uses vision to reveal psychological reality.  O'Neill does not record external events as realists do.He brought psychological realism, philosophical depth, and poetic symbolism into American literature.
　　3.Language、语言特色: In this play O'Neill intentionally wrote the lines of Yank in dialect to show his social and economic status as an uneducated coal stoker. Many other examples could be found in this selection, for instance, "dat" for that, "yuh" for you, etc.

IV. F. Scott Fitzgerald
An Excerpt from Chapter IlI of The Great Gat***y
　　(1) The theme of the novel: The Great Gat***ydeals with the bankruptcy of the American Dream, which is high1ighted by the disillusionment of the protagonist's personal dream due to the clashes between his romantic vision of life and the relentless reality. American Dream is a popular belief that people can achieve success, whether it is wealth, fame or love through honest hard working in a new world of liberty, equality, chances and promises.
　　The story of The Great Gat***y is a good illustration. At the beginning of the story, Gat***y, a poor young man from the Midwest, is in love with but rejected by an upper-class woman, Daisy.For him, Daisy is the representation of a kind of idealized happiness.  That is why Daisy Buchanan seems so charming to Gat***y and that is why Gat***y has directed his who1e life to winning back her love. Yet his dream ended up with Daisy's indifference and carelessness.
(2) Chapter Ⅲ of the novel, a vivid descrīption of one of Gat***y's fabulous partiesevokes both the romance and the sadness of the Jazz Age. On the surface, the party is crowded, yet empty of warmth or friendship, Beneath the wealthy people's masks of relaxation and joviality there was only sterility, meaninglessness and futi1ity, and amid the grandeur and extravagance a spiritual waste1and and a hint of decadence and moral decay. Thisjuxtaposition of appearance with realityis easily recognizable in Fitzgerald's novels and stories.

V. Ernest Hemingway (l899-1961)
应用（1）海明威小说的艺术特色："硬汉"形象、"重压下的风 度"、"冰山"原则等
The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. According to Hemingway, good literary writing should be ab1e to make readers feel the emotion of the characters directly and the best way to produce the effect is to set down exact1y every particular kind of feeling without any authoria1 comments. "Less is more."
　　　（2）《在我们的时代里》选篇：主题结构、人物刻画、语言 风格
　　Selected Reading: Indian Camp
　　(1) Theme: Hemingway's concern about violence and death by revealing Nick's feeling of  anxiety and terror over the misery of life and death.
　　(2) Characterization: "Indian Camp" relates the story of young Nick watching his father deliver an Indian woman of a baby by Caesarian section with a jack-knife and without anesthesia to relieve the pain. The cries of the mother and the cruel death of the hu***and brings the boy into contact with something that is unpleasant. And this is actually Nick's initiation into the pain and violence of birth and death.
　　Nick Adams isthe early Hemingway protagonist, introduced to a world of violence, disorder, and death, and learning the hard way about what the world is like. Growing up in violent and dismal surroundings, Nick is psychologically and emotionally wounded and is later alienated from the society. The wound is a symbol and the climax for a process of the development of the character of Hemingway Hero; it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace.
　　(3) Language: Hemingway sought to endow prose with the density of poetry, making each image, each scene and each rendered act serve several purposes.

Ⅵ. William Faulkner (1897-l962)
　A