中西文明选读（英文版）第四章Literature.pptVIP

4.3.6 English Literature of the Victorian Era Great Expectations Great Expectations, many readers’ favorite Dickens novel, is immensely popular for its self-portrait of the author and for the warmth, feeling, and reality that it imparts to what is essential in human experience. Because of the deep impressions his own childhood made on him, Dickens is a novelist of childhood. He presents children, especially Pip, with sympathy and understanding, creating a sensitive orphan boy with whom every reader can identify. Tess of the d’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles presents complex pictures of both the importance of social class in nineteenth-century England and the difficulty of defining class in any simple way. Certainly the Durbeyfields are a powerful emblem of the way in which class is no longer evaluated in Victorian times as it would have been in the Middle Ages—that is, by blood alone, with no attention paid to fortune or worldly success. Indubitably the Durbeyfields have purity of blood, yet for the parson and nearly everyone else in the novel, this fact amounts to nothing more than a piece of genealogical trivia. 4.3.7 English Literature of the 20th Century From around 1910 the Modernist movement began to influence British literature. Modern period of English literature was marked by a new style, format, mis-en-scene, concept and the relative features of the subjects in question. Modernism stretched the definition of the novel with books like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando breaking the bounds of the traditional narrative. The modern poets include Yeats, Auden, T.S. Eliot, Franz Kafka amongst the many notable poets and authors. 4.3.7 English Literature of the 20th Century Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion derives its name from the famous story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Pygmalion, disgusted by the loose and shameful lives of the women of his era, decides to live alone and unmarried. With won