英语专八人文知识：美国文学简史(八).docVIP

英语专八人文知识：美国文学简史(八) Novels in the 1920s I. F. Scott Fitzgerald 1. life – participant in 1920s 2. works (1) This Side of Paradise (2) Flappers and Philosophers (3) The Beautiful and the Damned (4) The Great Gatsby (5) Tender is the Night (6) All the Sad Young Man (7) The Last Tycoon 3. point of view (1) He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the so-called “American Dream” is false in nature. (2) He had always been critical of the rich and tried to show the integrating effects of money on the emotional make-up of his character. He found that wealth altered people’s characters, making them mean and distrusted. He thinks money brought only tragedy and remorse. (3) His novels follow a pattern: dream – lack of attraction – failure and despair. 4. His ideas of “American Dream” It is false to most young people. Only those who were dishonest could become rich. 5. Style Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose is smooth, sensitive, and completely original in its diction and metaphors. Its simplicity and gracefulness, its skill in manipulating the relation between the general and the specific reveal his consummate artistry. 6. The Great Gatsby Narrative point of view – Nick He is related to everyone in the novel and is calm and detected observer who is never quick to make judgements. Selected omniscient point of view II. Ernest Hemingway 1. life 2. point of view (influenced by experience in war) (1) He felt that WWI had broken America’s culture and traditions, and separated from its roots. He wrote about men and women who were isolated from tradition, frightened, sometimes ridiculous, trying to find their own way. (2) He condemned war as purposeless slaughter, but the attitude changed when he took part in Spanish Civil War when he found that fascism was a cause worth fighting for. (3) He wrote about courage and cowardice in battlefield. He defined courage as “an instinctive movement towards or away from the centre of violence