20世纪英美文学史知识讲稿.pptVIP

He was also a moralist and a critic whose primary aim as a writer was not to create a new society but to criticize the existing one, though his final aim was to keep a balance between the rich and the poor. His works were designed to help improve the status quo（现状）; there was no suggestion in them that society should be radically and painfully reconstructed if social enemies were to be reconciled and social ills remedied. The characteristics of Galsworthy‘s critical realism and its social effect:　　A conventional writer, having inherited the fine traditions of the great Victorian novelists such as Dickens and Thackeray. He learned from Maupassant for the vigor, economy and clarity of writing, Turgenev for the wisdom and naturalness, and Tolstoy for the depth of insight洞察力 and the breadth of character drawing. Technically, he was more traditional than adventurous, focusing on plot development and character portrayal. With an objective observation and a naturalistic description, he had tried his best to make an impartial presentation of the social life in a documentary precision. By emphasizing the critical element in his writing, he dauntlessly laid bare the true features of the good and the evil of the bourgeois society. He was also successful in his attempt to present satire and humor in his writing. He wrote in a clear and unpretentious含蓄 style with a clear and straightforward language. The Man of Property The theme of this novel: 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