2. 外语
  3. "During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heav

"During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heav

admin2012-03-21  55
问题     "During the whole of a dull, dark and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher." Thus Edgar Allan Poe opened his story of "The Fall of the House of Usher" in 1839. In this beautifully crafted sentence he captured so much that is essential to the horror story: darkness, ominous solitude, foreboding calm, apprehension and uncertainty, and a deep feeling of melancholy that could soon turn to fear.
    Many kinds of fiction are self-explanatory: mysteries, Westerns, love stories, spy thrillers, and science fiction define themselves by the terms used to name them. The horror story is less easily defined, perhaps because other types of fiction so often use the trappings of terror to enhance their plots. Charles Dickens used the vehicle of an old-fashioned ghost story to tell "A Christmas Carol" but that book is not a horror story. Nor does a Grimm brothers fairy tale such as "Hansel and Gretel" with its child devouring witch, belong to the genre.
    The nature of the horror story is best indicated by the title of the 1980s television series Tales from the Dark side. Hunan beings have always acknowledged that there is evil in the world and a dark side to human nature that cannot be explained except perhaps in religious terms. This evil may be imagined as having an almost unlimited power to inspire anxiety, fear, dread, and terror in addition to doing actual physical and mental harm.
    In the tale of horror quite ordinary people are confronted by something unknown and fearful, which can be neither understood nor explained in reasonable terms. It is the emphasis on the unreasonable that lies at the heart of horror stories.
    This kind of literature arose in the 18th century at the start of a movement called Romanticism. The movement was a reaction against a rational, orderly world in which humanity was basically good and everything could be explained scientifically. The literary type that inspired the horror story is Gothic fiction, tales of evil, often set in sinister medieval surroundings. This original kind of horror fiction has persisted to the present.
Horror stories derive from_____.
选项 A、The Fall of the House of Usher
B、mysteries
C、Gothic fiction and tales of evil
D、the 1980s television series
答案C
解析 细节题。A项只是文章在开头引用的一本恐怖故事的书名，并非这类故事的起源。mysteries出现在文中第二段首句。第二段主要是指出恐怖故事踉其他类型的文学形式的不同之处，而mysteries就是这些其他类型中的一种，更不可能是恐怖故事的起源。the 1980s television series出现在第三段的第一句，这句是说恐怖故事的性质在20世纪80年代的电视剧的名称里得到最佳的体现，并不是说这些电视就是恐怖故事的起源。文章最后一段的“The literary type that inspire d the horror story is Gothic fiction，tales of evil，often set in sinister medievalsurroundings”里，就指出了本题的答案：激发和产生恐怖故事的文学类型就是Gothic fiction and tales of evil。
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