单选题
"Making money is a dirty game," says the Institute of Economic Affairs. summing up the attitude of British novelists towards business. The IEA. a free market think-tank, has just published a collection of essays (The Representation of Business in English Literature) by five academics chronicling the hostility of the country's men and women of letters to the sordid business of making money. The implication is that Britain's economic performance Is retarded by an anti-industrial culture. Rather than blaming rebellious workers and incompetent managers for Britain's economic worries. then, we can put George Orwell and Martin Amis in the dock instead. From Dickens's Scrooge to Amis's John Self in his 1980s novel Money, novelists have conjured up a rogue's gallery of mean. greedy, amoral money-men that has alienated their impressionable readers from the noble pursuit of capitalism. The argument has been well made before, most famously in 1981 by Martin Wiener. an American academic, in his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit. Lady Thatcher was an admirer of Mr. Wiener's. and she led a crusade to revive the "entrepreneurial culture" which the liberal elite had allegedly trampled underfoot. The present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, sounds as though he agrees with her. At a recent speech to the Confederation of British Industry, he declared that it should be the duty of every teacher in the country to "communicate the virtues of business and enterprise". Certainly, most novelists are hostile to capitalism, but this refrain risks scapegoating writers for failings for which they are not to blame. Britain's culture is no more anti-business than that of other countries. The Romantic Movement. which started as a reaction against the industrial revolution of the 21st century, was born and flourished in Germany, but has not stopped the Germans from being Europe's most successful entreprcneurs and industrialists. Even the Americans are guilty of blackening business's name. SMERSH and SPECTRE went our with the cold war, James Bond now takes on international media magnates rather than Rosa Kleb. His films such as Erin Brockovich have pitched downtrodden, moral heroes against the evil of faceless corporatism. Yet none of this seems to have dented America's lust for free enterprise. The irony is that the novel flourished as an art form only after, and as a result of. the creation of the new commercial classes of Victorian England, just as the modem Hollywood film can exist only in an era of mass consumerism. Perhaps the moral is that capitalist societies consume literature and film to let off steam rather than to change the world.
单选题
In the first paragraph, the author introduces his topic by______.