文秋芳编
Active reading (1)
Danger! Books may change your life
Culture points
Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) is the pen-name of Charles Dodgson. He was a priest, a mathematician whotaught at Oxford University, a photographer, humorist and writer of children‘s literature. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was immediately successful, a masterpiece which revolutionized children‘s literature, giving coherence and logic through wit and humour to unlikely or impossible episodes in which imaginary creatures embody recognizable human characteristics. He is also known for Through the Looking Glass and
what Alice found there (1871) and nonsense poems, such as The Hunting of the Snark (1876).
William Cowper (1731–1800): a notable English poet, writer of hymns and letter-writer. He wrote gentle, pious, direct poems about everyday rural life and scenes of the countryside which have been seen as forerunners of the Romantic movement: Coleridge called Cowper ―the best modern poet‖. He translated Homer‘s Greek epics. The Odyssey and The Iliad into English. Another example of his verses which have become common sayings is ―God moves in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform…‖
John Steinbeck (1902–1968): American novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is a well-known, long tragic novel about an American family of farmers who are driven off their land in Oklahoma by soil erosion in the famous ―dust bowl‖ era. They flee to California to
what they hope will be a better life. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a film in 1940. Other well-known novels include Of Mice and Men (1937), Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952) and an account of a personal rediscovery of America, Travels with Charlie (1962).
John Irving (1942– ): American novelist and screenwriter who taught English at college and was a wrestling coach. The Fourth Hand (2001) is a comic-satirical novel about a TV journalist, Wallington, whose hand is seen by millions of viewers to be bitten off by a circus lion. A surgeon gives him a hand transplant (a third hand) but the wife of the dead donor wants to visit her husband‘s hand and have a child by Wallington, who feels where his original hand used to be (the fourth hand).
Audrey Niffenegger (1963– ): American college professor who teaches writing to visual artists and shows students how to make books by hand. Her first novel, The Time Traveller’s Wife (2003) –
filmed in 2009 – is a science fiction and romance bestseller about a man who travels uncontrollably in time to his own history and visits his wife in her childhood, youth and old age. His wife needs to cope with his absences and dangerous life while he travels. The story is a metaphor for distance and miscommunication in failed relationships.
Paul Torday (1946– ): a British businessman who worked for a company that repaired ship‘s engines for many years. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2007) was his first novel. It is a political satire and
comedy about a dull civil servant who becomes involved in a plan to populate the desert with Scottish salmon. Politicians manage the media to ―spin‖ this as a plan they support in order to divert attention from problems in the Middle East. There are themes of cynicism and belief, and East-West culture clashes.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008): a Russian writer who was imprisoned in Soviet labour camps in 1945; after eight years, he was exiled to Kazakhstan and not freed until 1956, when he became a teacher. In 1970 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature but not receive it until 1974. He went