美国文学 重点和归纳

The American Character

Practical, Religious, Work Ethic,The American Dream. Freedom and liberty Purity

Faithfulness .optimism. Idealist .Practical and hardworking

Enthusiasm in and call for business investment

Enthusiasm in charity-work

Respect for Education

the puritan beliefs

Colonial American literature

The first American writer Captain John Smith

General features

Types of writing: diaries, histories, letters etc.

Content: serving either God or colonial expansion or both

Form: imitating English literary traditions

Anne Bradstreet

The first American female poet

A Puritan poet, “Tenth Muse”

“Contemplations”《沉思录》

The literature of reason and revolution

Benjamin Franklin

Jack of all trades, Spokesman of Enlightenment ,

Autobiography《自传》 Poor Richard’s Almanac 《穷理查德历书》

Edwards and Franklin made the whole of a true puritan, an America

Thomas Paine

American Crisis

These are the times that try men’s souls: the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. Common Sense 常识

Thomas Jefferson

The Declaration of Independence 1976/7/4

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness,--That to secure their Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed ,--That whenever any Form of government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Rights of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation

on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Philip Freneau father of an poetry

American Romanticism

Washington Irving

father of American literature father of American short story

The sketch Book 见闻札记

Tales of a Traveller(first in installment in America, marked the beginning of American Romanticism)

Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow 睡谷的传说

James Fenimore Cooper

He created a myth about the formative period of the American nation. The American Walter Hollow. The first important American novelist.

The Pilot

The Leatherstocking Tales 皮袜子故事集

the Deers layer 杀鹿者

The last of the Mohicans 最后的莫西干人

Edgar Allen Poe

father of modern short story father of detective story father of psychoanalytic criticism Annabel lee

The fall of the House of Usher

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.

Had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

responsible for bringing Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson = The chief spokesman of New England Transcendentalism 超验主义

He was a descendent of a long line of New England clergymen牧师【pastor】.

The American Scholar Spirit The Divinity School Address Representative Men English Traits

Nature

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and

adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out there preachers of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Thoreau Walden

not only fully demonstrates Emersonian ideas of self-reliance but also develops and tests Thoreau’s own transcendental philosophy.

Walden

a collection of nature essays

a great Transcendentalist work

a book about man, what he is, and what he should be and must be.

full of ideas expressed to persuade his neighbors out of their complacency

Political views: disapproved of slavery , condemn the government’s conduct of the

Mexican War.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter the Blithedale Romance , Mosses from an Old Manse, The Marble Faun

Herman Melvilie

Typee Mody Dick

The three great American authors of the last century who had no contemporary readers and yet became great in this century:

Thoreau

Herman Melville

Emily Dickinson

The literature of realism

1861-1865 the civil war

Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass epic poem Song of myself

Emily Dickinson the greatest woman writer of the age

Harriet Beecher Stowe the author of uncle Tom's cabin.

An American institution and the most famous literary woman in the world

William Dean Howells 浪漫主义第一人

Father of American realism in literature

Editor of the Atlantic Monthly

The first president of American Literature and Arts Association

The Rise of Silas Lapham, 1885 《塞拉斯拉帕姆的发迹》

A Modern Instance, 1882《现代婚姻》

A Hazard of New Fortunes, 1890《新财富的危机》

Henry James

A writer who not only bridged the 19th and 20th centuries but connected America and Europe.

Daisy Miller ,The Portrait of a Lady the American

Mark Twain原名： Samuel Langhorne Clemens 美国真正作家之一

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

O. Henry

Pseudonym of William Sidney Porter

"The Gift of the Magi" "The Cop and the Anthem“ Soapy "A Municipal Report"

Collections：

The Four Million, 1906 Heart of the West, 1910

Naturalism

Jack London

before London, the fictions are all for girl's sake

A Daughter of the Snows

The Call of the Wild (1903) (an all-time best-seller)

The Sea-Wolf (1904) White Fang (1906)

The Iron Heel (1908) Martin Eden (1909)

Theodore Dreiser

The predominant naturalistic novelist from a German-speaking family

Sister Carrie An American Tragedy Janine Gerhardt Trilogy of Desire

The Financier The Titan The Stoic

The Twentieth-Century Literature

Eugene O'Neill

American drama developed into a form of literature

the Desire Under the Elm the Emperor Jones

Anna Christie the Hairy Ape

Tennessee Williams

the Streetcar Named Desire 欲望阶车

Ezra pound The Cantos

Edwin Arlington Robinson

one of the most productive of the new poets

the house on the hill . Richard Cory .Miniver cheery

Robert Frost

“The father of American modern poetry” The national bard

The nation’s unofficial Poet Laureate

North of Boston 《波士顿以北》 Mountain Interval 《山间》

New Hampshire 《新罕普什尔》 West Running Brook 《西流的溪涧》

A Further Range 《又一片牧场》 A Witness Tree 《一棵见证的树》

“The Road Not Taken” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”

“The Wood Pile” “Design” ”Mending Wall “

Ernest Hemingway

The lost generation ,A tough guy

Hemingway hero: A despairing courage Grace under pressure The Sun Also Rises (spokesman of The Lost Generation )

A Farewell to Arms 1928 (a tragic story about war and love) (Hero and heroine: Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley)

For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940 (Spanish civil war)

In Our Time

“No man is an island.”

The Old Man and the Sea

–a quite special novel in all his novels ..theme: the importance of life lies in the process of searching and resistance

The Torrents of the Spring 《春潮》 Winner Take Nothing 《胜者无所得》

Death in the Afternoon 《午后之死》 Green Hills of Africa 《非洲的青山》

To Have and Have Not 《富有与贫穷》 The Fifth Column 《第五纵队》

Across the River and into the Trees 《过河入林》

Francis Scott Fitzgerald

The evaporation of the American Dream

The Jazz Age

The Lost Generation

The Great Gatsby

Joseph Heller

Catch-22 （Absurdist theme & Black Humor）

William Faulkner

Father of American modern novel

a great plot weaver

The greatest writer of fiction that the US has yet produced

Literary Scene in the South

A Rose for Emily The Sound and the Fury 《喧嚣与愤怒》

Go Down, Moses 《去吧，摩西》 Absalom! Absalom! 《押沙龙！押沙龙！》

Sanctuary 《圣殿》 Light in August 《八月之光》

As I Lay Dying《在我弥留之际》

John Steinbeck the Grapes of Wrath

What is Puritanism?

A code of values, a philosophy of life, a point of view, a state of mind, the most enduring influence in American thought and literature, a part of the national atmosphere.

Autobiography

A story that a person writes about his or her own life is called an autobiography. Autobiographies are written in first-person point of view, and biographies, third-person point of view.

Realism

A time of disillusionment and loss of hope- a literary revulsion against the false imagination and sentimentality of Romanticism.

Naturalism：

Naturalist point of view: to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness – everything is determined by environment and heredity.

Imagism

To express the momentary impression through the use of one dominant image.

The Lost Generation（Ernest Hemingway， pound , Fitzgerald ）

was a group of rebellious youth appeared in America after the First World War.

Romanticism

is a complex artistic ,literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Resolution.

American Transcendentalism

As a philosophical and literary movement, American Transcendentalism (also known as “ American Renaissance”) flourshed in New England from the 1830s to the Civil War. It is the high tide of American romanticism and its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalists spoke for the cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society.

① The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. 思想 超灵 宇宙

② The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society. 个体+社会

③ The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was not purely matter. It was alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence. 自然+上帝

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