【正确答案】正确答案：Victorian novel or Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria(1837— 1901). It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20th century. Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished. They tend to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart. Most Victorian novels end up with a definite denouncement, that is, either the good winning over the wicked, as some of Dickens" novels, or the wretched hero or heroine gaining his or her happiness over a long and difficult time of torture and torment, as in Charlotte Bronte"s Jane Eyre. However, this does not mean that all the Victorian novels end in happy endings but a sure ending. On the other hand, the stories of the 20th century seem to lose their preference for a definite ending. As literature undergoes a series of experimentations, more and more modern writers opt for an open ending with the hero or heroine going away but finding nowhere to settle down. Modernist novelists, such as Woolf and Joyce, whose stories even do not follow a chronological narration. That is to say, since they adopt the stream of consciousness as their major writing technique, the stories carry with them no beginning, no plot, no development and certainly no denouncement in the traditional sense.

【正确答案】正确答案：The Victorian period witnessed the soaring development of England. The growth of the middle class, the development of a very conservative morality, the predominance of the moral aesthetic, the wide currency of utilitarianism, the advent of the theory of evolution and faith in progress and a sense of earnestness, all these produced a yearning for something definite and controllable in the literary expression. So a sure denouncement is doomed to some degree by the demand of the society. However, when Queen Victoria died in 1901 , an era was formally over. The new century began with its own particular set of problems. The crisis of faith, first clearly felt with Darwin"s theory of evolution, Nietzsche"s sentence of the death of God and rejection of Christian morality, and Russell"s advocating the helpless mankind in the universe, were prevalent. Then the British Empire was declining; British imperialism was losing its hold upon the imagination of the people as well as the intellectually thinking segment of the society. Furthermore, the status of the arts and literature was beginning to undergo a process of redefining. The alienation of the artist now became a widely felt impulse among the artistically minded people. Important developments in psychology, anthropology and philosophy were exerting a far-reaching influence on literary creation. All these contributed to the forthcoming artistic and literary experimentation among which a sure ending was abandoned. Instead, an open one was more likely to justify to catch the mood of the whole era.