2017 年浙江温州大学英美文学考研真题 Part I Literary Identification (Read the following 10 excerpts, and identify the names of the works and their authors. 3 points for each excerpt, and 30 points in all.) 1.“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” 2.“The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind, / If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” 3.“When in April the sweet showers fall / And pierce through the drought of March to the root, / And all the veins are bathed in liquor of such power / As brings about the engendering of the flower, / When also Zephyrus with his sweet breath / Exhales an air in every grove and heath / Upon the tender shoots, and the young sun / His half-course in the sign of the Ram has run, / And the small fowl are making melody / That sleep away the night with open eye…” 4.“For oft, when on my couch I lie / In vacant or in pensive mood, / They flash upon that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude; / And then my heart with pleasure fills, / And dances with the daffodils.” 5.“North Richmond street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two stories stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” 6.“It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it was already nada y pues nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.” 7.“IN Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree: / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea. / So twice five miles of fertile ground / With walls and towers were girdled round: / And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills / Where blossom’d many an incense-bearing tree; / And here were forests ancient as the hills, / Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.” 8.“April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with spring rain. / Winter kept us warm, covering / Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers…” 9.“Simon Wheeler backed me into a corner and blockaded me there with his chair—and then sat down and reeled off the monotonous narrative which follows this paragraph. He never smiled, he never frowned, he never changed his voice from the quiet, gently-flowing key to which he turned the initial sentence, he never betrayed the slightest suspicion of enthusiasm—but all through the interminable narrative there 

ran a vein of impressive earnestness and sincerity, which showed me plainly that so far from his imagining that there was anything ridiculous or funny about his story, he regarded it as a really important matter, and admired its two heroes as men of transcendent genius in finesse. To me, the spectacle of a man drifting serenely along through such a queer yarn without ever smiling was exquisitely absurd. As I said before, I asked him to tell me what he knew of Rev. Leonidas W. Smily, and he replied as follows. I let him go on in his own way, and never interrupted him once…” 10.“Gatsby believed in that green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…And one fine morning-- / So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Part II Literary and Critical Terms (Choose FIVE terms, and explain each of them in English in about 80 words. 6 points for each, and 30 points in all.) 1. criticism 2. elegy 3. free verse 4. humanism 5. Realism 6. novel 7. point of view 8. Renaissance 9. Transcendentalism 10. tragedy Part III Literary Analysis (Read the following 6 excerpts, and answer the questions following each excerpt according to the requirement. 10 points for each excerpt, and 60 points in all.) 1. Read the following excerpt and answer the questions followed Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed; But thy eternal summer shall not fade, Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest, Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest; So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Q1. What is the metrical scheme of the poem? 

Q2. According the poem, what is ephemeral? What is eternal? Q3. How is the poem structured? Q4. What is theme of the poem? 2. Read the following excerpt and answer the questions followed “And now I speak of thanking God, I desire with all humility to acknowledge that I owe the mentioned happiness of my past life to His kind providence, which lead me to the means I used and gave them success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised toward me, in continuing that happiness, or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done: the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless to us even our afflictions…Thus I went up Market Street as far as Fourth Street, passing the door of Mr. Read, my future wife’s father, when she, standing at the door, saw me, and thought I made—as I certainly did—a most awkward, ridiculous appearance.” Q1. Who is “I” in the excerpt? Q2. What kind of attitude toward life is expressed here? Q3. What is American dream? 3.Read the following excerpt and answer the questions followed Break, break, break, On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me. O, well for the fisherman's boy, That he shouts with his sister at play! O, well for the sailor lad, That he sings in his boat on the bay! And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand, And the sound of a voice that is still! Break, break, break At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! But the tender grace of a day that is dead Will never come back to me. Q1. Why does the poet describe the stones as “cold” and “gray”? Q2. What effect do the joyful scenes in the second stanza bring to the whole poem? 4. Read the following excerpt and answer the questions followed In a Station of the Metro The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough Q1. Why does the poet call the faces of pedestrians “apparition”? Q2. What images do you find in the poem? Q3. What do “petals” and “bough” stand for? Q4. Which poetic techniques does the poem employ? 

5. Read the following excerpt and answer the questions followed I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize never more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him: I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events. You are constrained to accept his standard. Ordinarily, every body in society reminds us of somewhat else, or of some other person. Character, reality, reminds you of nothing else; it takes place of the whole creation. The man must be so much that he must make all circumstances indifferent—put all means into the shade. This all great men are and do. Every true man is a cause, a country, and an age; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully to accomplish his thought;—and posterity seem to follow his steps as a procession. A man Cæsar is born, and for ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius that he is confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; as, the Reformation, of Luther; Quakerism, of Fox; Methodism, of Wesley; Abolition, of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called “the height of Rome;” and all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons. Q1. Where is the excerpt taken and who is the author? Q2. According to the excerpt, what is individualism? Q3. What is the author’s attitude towards history? 6. Read the following excerpt and answer the questions followed Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep. But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. 

Q1. Who is the author of the poem? Q2. What does “he” in line 9 refer to? Q3. What does the “lovely, deep and deep” “woods” probably symbolize? Q4. What philosophy of life is expressed in the poem? Part IV Literary Commentary (Write your commentary in English in no less than 600 words. 30 points in all.) “Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” (Aristotle, Poetics). Do you agree or not? Illustrate your points with examples from your reading of English and American literature.