Questions 29-39
The economic depression in the late-nineteenth-century United States contributed
significantly to a growing movement in literature toward realism and naturalism. After the
1870' s, a number of important authors began to reject the romanticism that had prevailed
Line immediately following the Civil War of 1861-1865 and turned instead to realism.
(5) Determined to portray life as it was, with fidelity to real life and accurate representation
without idealization, they studied local dialects, wrote stories which focused on life in
specific regions of the country, and emphasized the "true" relationships between people. In
doing so, they reflected broader trends in the society, such as industrialization,
evolutionary theory which emphasized the effect of the environment on humans, and the
(10) influence of science.
Realists such as Joel Chandler Harris and Ellen Glasgow depicted life in the South;
Hamlin Garland described life on the Great Plains; and Sarah One Jewett wrote about
everyday life in rural New England. Another realist, Bret Harte, achieved fame with stories
that portrayed local life in the California mining camps.
(15) Samuel Clemens, who adopted the pen name Mark Twain, became the country's most
outstanding realist author, observing life around him with a humorous and skeptical eye. In
his stories and novels, Twain drew on his own experiences and used dialect and common
speech instead of literary language, touching off a major change in American prose style.
Other writers became impatient even with realism. Pushing evolutionary theory to its
(20) limits, they wrote of a world in which a cruel and merciless environment determined
human fate. These writers, called naturalists, often focused on economic hardship,
studying people struggling with poverty, and other aspects of urban and industrial life.
Naturalists brought to their writing a passion for direct and honest experience.
Theodore Dreiser, the foremost naturalist writer, in novels such as Sister Carrie, grimly
(25) portrayed a dark world in which human beings were tossed about by forces beyond their
understanding or control. Dreiser thought that writers should tell the truth about human
affairs, not fabricate romance, and Sister Carrie, he said, was "not intended as a piece of
literary craftsmanship, but was a picture of conditions."
【題組】39. Which of the following statements
about Theodore Dreiser is supported by
the passage?
(A) He mainly wrote about historical
subjects such as the Civil War.
(B) His novels often contained elements
of humor.
(C) He viewed himself more as a social
commentator than as a literary artist.
(D) He believed writers should
emphasize the positive aspects of
life.
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