[教育]英美文學欣賞資料-紅色英勇勛章

1、,,The Red Badge of Courage,Stephen Crane,About the auther,,? Born November , 1871 in Newark, New Jersey.The fourteenth child of Jonathan and Mary Helen Crane.? Published his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the

2、Streets, in 1893.? Achieved international fame with the publication of The Red Badge of Courage in 1895. He was just twenty-three.? Between 1895 and 1898, acted as a reporter and war correspondent for an Ameri

3、can newspaper syndicate. ? Died on June 5, 1900 from tuberculosis at age twenty-eight.,Stephen Crane,Plot summary,The story is set during an unnamed battle of the American Civil War(美國內(nèi)戰(zhàn)）.18-year-old Henry Fleming

4、 joins the Union Army despite discouragement from his mother and becomes a private in the 304th Regiment. During his first battle, Confederate soldiers charge his regiment, but are repelled（擊退）. A few minutes la

5、ter, they regroup and attack again. When Henry sees some other people running and has his own fears that the battle is a lost cause（注定要失?。?so he deserts his battalion.,However, when he gets to the rear of the army, he ov

6、erhears (無意中聽到) a general saying that the army won anyway, and realizes he ran for nothing, and feel ashamed. Then he finds a group of injured men returning from battle. One member of the group, the “Tattered(衣衫襤褸的) Sol

7、dier”, asks Henry where he is wounded, but Henry dodges (躲避) the question. Henry is tired, hungry and has a head wound, so he decides to return to his regiment regardless of his shame. When Henry returns to

8、camp, the other soldiers believe his head injury to be caused by a bullet grazing (子彈擦傷)him in battle.,The next morning Henry goes into battle . They meet a small group of Confederates and in the fight Henry proves to be

9、 one of the best fighters in the regiment. In the final battle, Henry acts as the flag carrier. A line of Confederates is hidden behind a fence beyond a clearing, and are able to shoot Henry's regiment . So, f

10、acing certain death if they stay, and disgrace if they retreat, the officers order a charge. Henry leads the charge. Most of the Confederates at the fence run before the regiment gets there. The overall battle ends, and

11、Henry and his regiment march back to camp.,,,Theme,,,Theme,The basic theme is the animal man in a cold, manipulating world. Crane is looking into man’s primitive emotions and trying to tell the elemental truth about huma

12、n life.,.,Courage,courage—defining it, desiring it, and, ultimately, achieving it—is the most salient element. Firstly, Henry's understanding of courage is traditional and romantic. At the end, he h

13、as a more subtle and complex understanding of courage. It is not simply a function of other people's opinions, but it does incorporate egocentric concerns such as a soldier's regard for his reputation.,,,,Manhood

14、,Henry struggles to preserve his manhood and he thinks that battlefield can earn him the praise of women and the envy of men; he will be a hero, a real man, These early conceptions of manhood are simplistic, romantic, ad

15、olescent fantasies. Jim Conklin and Wilson stand as symbols of a more human kind of manhood. They are self-assured without being braggarts and are ultimately able to own up to their faults and shortcomings.

16、 By the novel's end, Henry makes a bold step in the same direction, learning that the measure of one's manhood lies more in the complex ways in which one negotiates one's mistakes and responsibilities tha

17、n in one's conduct on the battlefield.,,,Self-Preservation,,War in the novel is a plain slaughter-house, there is nothing like valor or heroism on the battlefield, if there is anything, it is fear of death, cowardice

18、, the natural instinct of man to run from danger. An anxious desire for self-preservation influences Henry throughout the novel. His conceits—namely that the good of the army and, by extension, the world, requi

19、res his survival—drive him to behave abominably. Henry realizes that the world is largely indifferent to his life and the questions that preoccupy him. Courage and honor endow a man with a belief in the worth of

20、preserving the lives of others, but the pervasiveness of death on the battlefield compels Henry to question the importance of these qualities. This weighing of values begs consideration of the connection between the surv

21、ival instinct and vanity.,,,Symbols,The Dead Soldier The dead soldier, who represents the insignificance of mortal concerns. Henry encounters the corpse, decaying and covered by ants, at a crucial moment: he has j

22、ust reassured himself that he was right to flee battle and that the welfare of the army depends upon soldiers being wise enough to preserve themselves. Then the dead soldier, whose anonymity strips him of any public r

23、ecognition of courage and glory forces Henry to begin to question himself and the values by which he measures his actions.,,,Style In some ways Crane's style is ornate, with profuse use of color and rampant me

24、taphor in a way which was rare for his time. The blues and grays of the two sides of the American Civil War are often described as natural phenomena, swirling like clouds. Fleming's Regiment "was a broken machin

25、e". In dialogue, however, the style is earthy, written out to sound as close to the vernacular of the day as possible. This realism was later to inform many works but was relatively rare at the time.,,,The end,Than