Since her own era, Christina Rossetti’s devout Christianity has often been seen as a characteristic setting her apart fro

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问题               Since her own era, Christina Rossetti’s devout Christianity has often been
       seen as a characteristic setting her apart from the other avowedly non-Christian
       members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle. In designating their movement a form of
Line    "aesthetic mysticism", one established critic, Alice Law described the place
(5)     Pre-Raphaelitism holds in the development of Victorian artistic culture as a
       movement away from a predominantly religious and moralizing function toward
       a culture of aestheticism—precisely what Rossetti’s work has long been thought
       to reject. The Pre-Raphaelites’ attention to picturesque detail, the medievalist
       atmosphere and settings, the pervasive melancholy of their works, and their
(10)    awareness of their art’s primarily Christian literary and pictorial origins—all
       these have been traditionally downplayed in their similarity to the
       characteristics of Christina Rossetti’s poetry.
             This belief persists, despite the distinctly religious "atmosphere" of much
       of the work produced by both generations of Pre-Raphaelites: its employment of
(15)    biblical images and typology; of religious figural language; and, more especially
       and pervasively, of medievalist backgrounds and settings that were seen by
       their early audiences to have clearly devotional, if not dangerously "Romanist",
       associations. When discussing Pre-Raphaelitism as an historical movement, we
       must remember that the first brotherhood was inspired largely by a sacramental
(20)    aesthetic that tended to alienate Victorian society, which generally abhorred the
       notion of sacrifice. It is true that Rossetti’s traditional solution to the Romantic
       and Victorian literary problem of alienation from nature and the more
       characteristically Victorian problem of despair at life’s meaninglessness, was
       fundamentally Christian. But with few exceptions, Rossetti relied on the
(25)    colloquial and angst-ridden language of both generations of Pre-Raphaelites.
       Even Swinburne, the Pre-Raphaelite whose anti-orthodoxy and iconoclasm seem
       to conflict most profoundly with Rossetti’s values, enthusiastically hailed her.
             That most Victorians themselves perceived Christina Rossetti as
       unequivocally Pre-Raphaelite in her poetic affinities is clear, for throughout her
(30)    poetry and much of her prose Christina Rossetti demonstrated true and deep
       affinities with Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic values, in both innovative and traditional
       ways. We must not forget her "pictorial" modes of representation, the medieval
       atmosphere and settings that appear repeatedly in her poems, her appreciation
       of the world’s physical beauty and its expression in lush images, the intensity of
(35)    her poems, which seems inseparable from their "sincerity", and not least her
       preoccupation with love. To a greater extent than figures more peripheral to
       the Pre-Raphaelite circle, Christina Rossetti produced works that appear to be
       dominated by the same aesthetic consciousness and literary values that make
       Pre-Raphaelitism the central movement which unintentionally spawned the
(40)    aestheticism of the 1880s and 1890s. Pre-Raphaelitism, in fact, influenced
       aesthetic thought in a way that made the movement central to the transition
       from the sentimental moral idealism of the Victorian mainstream to the
       variously nihilistic, skeptical, and ironic value systems that dominate modern
       poetry.
It can be inferred from the examples given in the passage that medievalist backgrounds were problematic for Victorians for which of the following reasons?

选项 A、They symbolized a reliance on irony that was typical not only of Pre-Raphaelite work but many other controversial movements.
B、They concealed an uncomfortable infatuation with the notion of sacrifice.
C、They avoided the sentimentality that was most revered and palatable at the time.
D、They indicated an affinity for pictorial modes of representation that ultimately contributed to Rossetti’s popularity.
E、They presented a challenge to the average Victorian’s reluctance to modernize and become nihilistic.

答案B

解析
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