美国文学史（常耀信）超详细笔记（考研专用）American Literature Survey

American Puritanism: It is the practices and beliefs of American Puritans. Like their English brothers, they are idealists. They accept the doctrines and practice of the original sin, predestination, and total depravity, and the limited atonement from God‘s grace. But due to the struggle for living, they become more and more practical. American Puritanism is more a part of national atmosphere than a set of tenets.

Diction (措辞):A writer?s choice and use of words in speech or writing, particularly for clarity, effectiveness, and precision.

Style(风格):An author?s characteristic way of writing ,determined by the choice of words, the arrangement of words in sentences, and the relationship of sentences to one and another. Influence of Puritanism:

(1). A group of good qualities – hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety (serious and thoughtful) influenced American literature. (2). It led to the everlasting myth. All literature is based on a myth – Garden of Eden.

(3). Symbolism: the American puritan‘s metaphorical mode of perception was chiefly instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctly American.

(4). With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple and direct; the rhetoric is plain and honest, not without a touch of nobility often traceable to the direct influence of the Bible. Overview of the literature

1. Types of writing: diaries, histories, journals, letters, travel books, autobiographies/biographies, sermons 2. Writers of colonial period: (1). Anne Bradstreet (2). Edward Taylor (3). Roger Williams (4). John Woolman (5). Philip Freneau

Jonathan Edwards (1703 –1758) was a Christian preacher and was the last great voice to renounce the Calvinist stance in ―the Great Awaking‖. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Chapter 1 Colonial Period

Freedom of the Will

The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended The Nature of True Virtue

Benjamin Franklin (1705 –1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Autobiography: The form of literary autobiography is a person‘s account of his or her own life. An autobiography is generally written in narrative form and includes some introspection. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Poor Richard's Almanack (sometimes Almanac) was a yearly almanac published by Benjamin Franklin, who adopted the pseudonym of“Poor Richard” or“Richard Saunders” for this purpose.

It contains the calendar, weather, poems, sayings and astronomical and astrological information that a typical almanac of the period would contain. Franklin also included the occasional mathematical exercise, and the Almanack from 1750 features an early example of demographics. It is chiefly remembered, however, for being a repository of Franklin's aphorisms and proverbs, many of which live on in American English. These maxims typically counsel thrift and courtesy, with a dash of cynicism.

The Autobiography Franklin's account of his life is divided into four parts, reflecting the different periods at which he wrote them.

3. Contribution:

(1). He helped found the Pennsylvania Hospital and the American Philosophical Society.

(2). He was called ―the new Prometheus who had stolen fire (electricity in this case) from heaven‖.

(3). Everything seems to meet in this one man – ―Jack of all trades‖. Herman Melville thus described him ―master of each and mastered by none‖.

Thomas Paine (1737 –1809) was an American political activist, author, political theorist and revolutionary. As the author of two highly influential pamphlets at the start of the American Revolution, he inspired the Patriots in 1776 to declare independence from Britain. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Common Sense (1776) the pamphlet became an immediate success.

The American Crisis (1776) In late 1776 Paine published The American Crisis pamphlet series, to inspire the Americans in their battles against the British army. To inspire his soldiers, General George Washington had The American Crisis, first Crisis pamphlet, read aloud to them. It begins: 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. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.

Rights of Man

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The Age of Reason

American Romanticism：The American Romanticism spanned the first half of the 19th century. The rising American ideals of equality and democracy, the industrialization and the Westward Expansion made its literary expression and expansion possible and inevitable after the nation‘s political independence. Yet American Romanticism shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in individualism, intuitive perception and a presumption that the natural world is the source of goodness while the society was the source of corruption. Romantic values were prominent in the works of Washington Irving, James Cooper, Nathanial Hawthorne and Herman Melville.

Compare American Romanticism with the Romanticism of Britain. :

1) The two Romanticism both stress the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature; 2) They all pay attention to psychic states of the characters; 3) They all exalt the individual and common man.

American Romanticism revealed unique characteristics: (difference)

<1> American authors describe their native land, especially the spirit of the pioneering into the west, the desire for an escape from society and a return to nature;

<2> American writers use local dialect in language;

<3> Puritanism has great influence over American Romantics; <4> Calvinism of original sin is obvious in their works;

<5> The important setting in American Romanticism are: ① the early puritan settlement; ② the confrontation with the Indians; ③ the frontiersmen‘s life; ④ the wild west; ⑤ imagination. Section 1 Early Romantic Period

Washington Irving (1783 –1859) was called ―Father of the American short stories‖ and ―the American Goldsmith‖. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Chapter 2 American Romanticism

A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty

The Sketch Book Irving won a measure of international fame on both side of the Atlantic .The book contains familiar essays like

\Rip Van Winkle‖ and \The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.‖

Plot of Rip Van Winkle: Rip, an indolent good-natured Dutch-American, lives with his shrewish wife in a village on the Hudson during the years before the Revolution. One day while hunting in the Catskills with his dog Wolf, he meets a dwarflike stranger dressed in the ancient Dutch fashion. He helps him to carry a keg, and with him joins a party silently playing a game of ninepins. After drinking of the liquor they provide, Rip falls into a sleep which lasts 20 years, during which the Revolutionary War takes place. He awakes as an old man and returns to his home village that has greatly altered. Upon entering the village, he is greeted by his old dog, which dies of the excitement and then learns that his wife has long been dead. Rip is almost forgotten but he goes to live with his daughter, now the mother of a family, and is soon befriended with his generosity and cheerfulness.

Theme of Rip Van Winkle: Irving's taste was essentia1ly conservative and always exa1ted a disappearing past. This socia1 conservatism and literary preference for the past is revea1ed, to some extent, in his famous story \tale remembered mostly for Rip's 20-year s1eep, set against the background of the inevitably changing America. Rip went to sleep before the War of Independence and woke up after it. The change that had occurred in the 20 years he slept was to him not always for the better. The revolution upset the natural order of things. In the story Irving ski1lfu1ly presents to us paralleled juxtapositions of two totally different worlds before and after Rip's 20 years' s1eep. By moving Rip back and forth from a noisy world with his wife on the farm to a wild but peaceful natural world in the mountains, and from a pre-Revolution village to a George Washington era, lrving describes Rip's response and reaction in a dramatic way, so that we see clearly both the narrator and Irving agree on the preferabi1ity of the past to the present, and the prefer ability of a dream-like world to the real one. Irving never seemed to accept a modern democratic America.

“Time grew worse and worse with Rip Van Winkle as years of matrimony rolled on: a tart temper mellows with age, and a sharp tongue is the only edge tool that grows keener by constant use. For a long while he used to perpetual club of the sages, philosophers, and other idle personages of the village.” - With his wife‘s dominance at home, the situation became harder and harder for Rip Van Winkle. His wife‘s temper became worse and she scolded him for more often. He had to stay in the club with idle people. Rip Van Winkle was the hero in Irving‘s works. He was a good-natured man, a henpecked (惧内的，妻管严的) husband.

The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada

The Alhambra The Alhambra is usually regarded as Irving's \flavor of Spanish culture.

2. Literary ideas:

(1). Most of Irving's subject matters are borrowed heavily from European sources, which are chiefly Germanic. (He was absorbed in German Literature and got ideas from German legends for two of his famous stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.)

(2). Irving's relationship with the Old World in terms of his literary imagination can hardly be ignored considering his success both abroad and at home. (Most of the thirty-three essays in The Sketch Book were written in England, filled with English scenes and quotations from English authors and faithful to British orthography. Washington Irving brought to the new nation what its peop1e desired most in a man of 1etters the respect of the Old World. ) 3. Irving’s unique contribution to American literature:

(1). He was the first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame.

(2). Although greatly influenced by European literature, Irving gave his works distinctive American flavor. (\

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\These two stories easily trigger off American imagination with their focus on American subjects, American landscape. It is not the sketches about the Old World but the tales about America that made Washington Irving a household word and his fame enduring. ) (3). He was father of American short stories. And later in the hands of Hawthorne and Melville the short story attained a degree of perfection.

4. Style – beautiful:

(1). Musical language – We hear rather than read, for there is musicality in almost every line of his prose.

(2). Avoiding moralizing – We seldom learn a mora1 lesson because he wants us amused and relaxed. So we often find ourselves lost in a world that is permeated with a dreaming quality.

(3). Enveloping stories in an atmosphere – The Gothic elements and the supernatural atmosphere are manipulated in such a way that the reader is so eager to know what is happening in a seemingly exotic place.

(4). Vivid and true characters – Yet Irving never forgets to associate a certain place with the inward movement of a person and to charge his sentences with emotion so as to create a true and vivid character. He is worth the honor of being \American Goldsmith\

James Fennimore Cooper (1789 –1851)

1. Life: 2. Works:

Precaution (1820, his first novel, imitating Austen‘s Pride and Prejudice) The Spy (his second novel and great success)

Leatherstocking Tales (his masterpiece, a series of five novels) is a legendary presentation of frontier life that fosters the individualism and love of nature. （The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer）

3. Point of view: The theme of wilderness vs. civilization, freedom vs. law, order vs. change, aristocrat vs. democrat, natural rights vs. legal rights

4. Literary achievements: He created a myth about the formative period of the American nation. If the history of the United States is, in a sense, the process of the American settlers exploring and pushing the American frontier westward, then Cooper‘s Leatherstocking Tales approximates the American national experience of adventure. He turned the west and frontier as a useable past and he helped to introduce western tradition to American literature. Section 2 Summit of Romanticism – American Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism: is a very important theory in philosophy and literature of American Romanticism. It spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism. It placed the emphasis upon the spirit, regarding it as the most important thing in the universe. And it also stressed the importance of individual, seeing nature as symbolic of the spirit of God. Its doctrine found their greatest literary advocates in Ralph Emerson and Henry Thoreau. Its main ideas are:

1) Man has the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or the ability of getting knowledge transcending the senses; 2) Nature is ennobling and individual is divine, therefore, man should be self-reliant.

3) Man is divine/holy and perfectible and man can trust himself to decide what is right and act accordingly; (but to Hawthorne and Melville man is a sinner);

4) Universe is over-soul -a symbol of the spirit, or God, there is an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal \

5) The important authors are: Emerson (The American Scholar) and Thoreau. 6) \festo for the club.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 –1882) is the chief spokesman of New England Transcendentalism, which is unanimously agreed to be the summit of the Romantic period in the history of American literature. 1. Life:

2. Works: Emerson is generally known as an essayist.

Nature The Publication of Nature established Emerson as the most eloquent spokesman of New England Transcendentalism. In the essay Emerson clearly expresses the main principles of his transcendental pursuit and his love for nature. Emerson develops his concept of ―over-soul‖. He wanted to tell us: Nature can purify our quality and let us get comfort. Last but not the least; it affirms the divinity of the human beings.

“Standing on the bare ground, ----my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -----all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all.”

Emerson's view on nature: Emerson's nature is emblematic of the spiritual world, alive with God's overwhelming presence; hence, it exercises a healthy and restorative inf1uence on human mind. \inf1uence and you'1l become spiritually who1e again.\ By employing nature as a big symbol of the Spirit, or God, or the over-soul, Emerson has brought the Puritan 1egacy of symbolism to its perfection.

Essays (1841) included many of his famous essays, which convey the best of his philosophical discussions and transcendental pursuits, such as The American Scholar (which was hailed by Oliver Wendell Holmeasas: ―Our Intellectual Declaration of Independence‖.) Self Reliance, The Over Soul.

Essays: Second Series (1844) demonstrated even more thorough1y than the first that Emerson's intellect had sharpened in the years since Nature.

The Poet is a reflection upon the aesthetic problems in terms of the present state of literature in America. Experience is a discussion about the conflict between idealism and ordinary 1ife. 3. Style:

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(1). Emerson's essays often have a casual style, for most of them were derived from his journals or lectures.

(2). They are usually characterized by a series of short, declarative sentences, which are not quite logically connected but will flower out into statements of truth and thoughts.

(3). Emerson's philosophical discussion is sometimes difficult to understand but he uses comparisons and metaphors to make the general idea of his work clearly expressed.

(4). Well-read in the classics of Western European literature, Emerson often employed these literary sources to make and enrich his own points but never let them take the full reins of his discussion.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 –1862)

1. Life: 2. Works:

Walden

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers Civil Disobedience

A Plea for John Brown (an essay)

Section 3 Late Romanticism

Symbolism: It is a literary movement which arose in the last half of the 19th century in France and affected writers of the 20th century, particularly poets. Symbolism is a very powerful literary device which enables the poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word.

Symbol: A symbol is a sign which suggests more than its literal meaning. In other words, a symbol is both literal and figurative. It is a way of telling a story and a way of conveying a meaning. The best symbols are those which are believable in the lives of characters and convincing as they convey a meaning beyond the literal level of the story. If the symbol is obscure and ambiguous, then the very obscurity and the ambiguity may also be part of it.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 –1864)

1. Life:

2. Works: In Hawthorne‘s novels and short stories, intellectuals usually appear as villains. Novels:

The Scarlet Letter always regarded as the best of his works, tells a simple but very moving story in which four people living in a Puritan community are invo1ved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different ways

Plot: The main character of The Scarlet Letter is Hester Prynne, a young married woman who has borne an illegitimate child while living away from her husband in a village in Puritan New England .The husband, Roger Chillingworth, arrives in New England to find his wife pilloried and made to wear the scarlet letter A (meaning adulteress) on her dress as a punishment for her illicit affair and for her refusal to reveal the name of the child's father. Chillingworth becomes obsessed with finding the identity of his wife's former lover. He learns that Hester's lover is a saintly young minister, Arther Dimmesdale and Chillingworth then proceeds to revenge himself by mentally tormenting the guilt-stricken young man. Hester herself is revealed to be a compassioned and splendidly self-reliant heroine who is never truly repentant for the act of adultery committed with the minister; she feels that their act was consecrated by their deep love for each other .In the end Chillingworths morally degraded by his monomaniac pursuit of revenge, and Dimmesdale is broken by his own sense of guilt and publicly confess his adultery before dying in Hester's arm. Only Hester can face the future optimistically, as she plans to ensure the future of her beloved little girl by taking her to Europe.

Theme: This novel, together with some other of Hawthorne's work, assumes the universality of guilt and explores the complexities and ambiguities of man's choices. It is marked by a depth of psychological and moral insight seldom equaled and never surpassed by any American writer.

In this particular nove1, Hawthorne does not intend to tell a love story nor a story of sin, but focuses his attention on the moral, emotional, and psychological effects or consequences of the sin on the people in general and those main characters in particular, so as to show us the tension between society and individuals. ―To Hawthorne, everybody is potentially a sinner, and great moral courage is therefore indispensable for the improvement of human nature, as is shown in the The Scarlet Letter.

Symbol: The scarlet letter \best symbolists. As a key to the whole novel, the letter A takes on different layers of symbolic meanings as the plot develops. At the beginning of the novel Hester was discovered to have committed adultery and was punished to wear a scarlet letter \cloth at her bosom and the letter symbolized her sin-\through her honesty and hard work, it stands for Hester's intelligence and hard work-\evolved to represent the high virtues of Hester-\of the high human virtue. By using Pearl as a thematic symbo1, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community.

The House of the Seven Gables was based on the tradition of a curse pronounced on the author's family when his great-grandfather was a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials;

The Blithedale Romance (1852) is a novel he wrote to reveal his own experiences on the Brook Farm and his own methods as a psychological novelist.

The Marble Faun is a romance set in Italy, concerned about the dark aberrations of the human spirit. Short story collections:

Twice-told Tales

Mosses from an Old Manse

3. Style – typical romantic writer

(1). The structure and the form of his writings are always carefully worked out to cater for the thematic concern.

(2). With his specia1 interest in the psychologica1 aspect of human beings, he is good at exploring the complexity of human

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psychology. So his drama is full of mental activities.

(3). Hawthorne is a master of symbolism, which he took from the Puritan tradition and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form. The symbol serves as a weapon to attack and penetrate reality. The symbo1 can be found everywhere in his writing. (4). His stories are parable (parable inform) – to teach a lesson

4. Characteristic: Hawthorne was a man with inquiring imagination, meditative mind and dark vision to life.

(1). Much of his writing centers on New England and many his works are moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. (2). His works are considered to be part of the Romantic Movement, but more specifically the dark romanticism. (3). His themes often focus on the hereditary evil of man and sin of humanity.

Herman Melville (1819 –1891)

1. Life:

2. Works: His early works were sea adventures, considered to be the best:

Typee Omoo Mardi

Redburn is a semi-autobiographical novel, concerning the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors White Jacket

Moby Dick is regarded as the Great American Novel, the first American prose epic.

Its surface and the deep meaning: The surface meaning: It is a whaling tale or sea adventure, dealing with Ahab, a man with an overwhelming obsession to kill the whale which has crippled him, on board his ship Pequod in the chase of the big whale.

The deep symbolic theme: Moby-Dick is not merely a whaling tale or sea adventure, considering that Melville is a great symbolist. It turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man's deep reality and psychology. This is shown in Captain Ahab's rebellious struggle against the overwhelming mysterious vastness of the universe and its awesome sometimes merciless forces.

In the perverted grandeur of Captain Ahab and in the beauties and terrors of the voyage of the \however, Melville dramatized his bleak view of the world in which he lived. It is at once godless and purposeless. Man in this universe lives a meaningless and futile life, meaningless because futile. As some critics note, man can observe and even manipulate in a prudent way, but he cannot influence and overcome nature at its source. Once he attempts to seek power over it he is doomed. Here Melville expressed his deep concerns: the equivocal defeats and triumphs of the human spirit and its fusion of creative and murderous urges. Symbolism: Instead of putting the battle between Ahab and the big whale into simple statements, he used symbols, that is, objects or persons who represent something else. Different people on board the ship are representations of different ideas and different social and ethnic groups; facts become symbols and incidents acquire universal meanings; the Pequod is the microcosm of human society and the voyage becomes a search for truth.

The giant Moby Dick may symbolize①mystery of the universe, ②power of the great Nature and③evil of the world

The white whale, Moby Dick, symbolizes nature for Melville, for it is complex, unfathomable, malignant, and beautiful as well. For the character Ahab, however, the whale represents only evil. Moby Dick is like a wall, hiding some unknown, mysterious things behind. Ahab wills the whole crew on the Pequod to join him in the pursuit of the big whale so as to pierce the wall, to root out the evil, but only to be destroyed by evil, in this case, by his own consuming desire, his madness. For the author, as well as for the reader and Ishmael, the narrator, Moby Dick is still a mystery, an ultimate mystery of the universe, inscrutable and ambivalent, and the voyage of the mind will forever remain a search, not a discovery, of the truth.

1) About the sea adventure: it symbols the voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe; a spirit exploration into man‘s deep reality and psychology;

2) About the boat; it symbols the society, and the crew symbol all kinds of people with different social and ethnic ideas;

3) About the white whale: To the author, it symbols nature, it is a complex, unfathomable and beautiful; to the captain Ahab, it is evilness, is a wall. So he will lead all his crew to cut through the wall to dig out all the unknown, mysterious things behind it. To the narrator, Ishmael, it is a mystery.

Pierre is a popular romance intended for the feminine market but provoking an outrageous repudiation.

Billy Budd

4. Point of view:

(1). He never seems able to say an affirmative yes to life: His attitude is the ―Everlasting Nay‖ (negative attitude towards life). (2). One of the major themes of his is alienation (far away from each other).

(3). Other themes: loneliness, suicidal individualism (individualism causing disaster and death), rejection and quest, confrontation of innocence and evil, doubts over the comforting 19c idea of progress 5. Style:

(1). Like Hawthorne, Melville manages to achieve the effect of ambiguity through employing the technique of multiple views of his narratives.

(2). He tends to write periodic chapters.

(3). His rich rhythmical prose and his poetic power have been profusely commented upon and praised. (4). His works are symbolic and metaphorical.

(5). He includes many non-narrative chapters of factual background or description of what goes on board the ship or on the route (Moby Dick)

Gothic novel: is a genre or mode of literature which combines the elements of both horror and romance. Gothic novels are mysterious often involving the supernatural and heavily tinged with horror and they are usually against the background of the medieval ruins or a haunted castle.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 –1849) was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the

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American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of terror and ratiocination, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. 1. Life: ―the jingle man‖ (Emerson)

2. Works: His stories fall into two categories: ―tales of terror‖ and ―tales of ratiocination‖. “Tales of terror”:

The Cask of Amontillado

The Fall of the House of Usher Ligeia

“Tales of ratiocination”:

The Murders in the Rue Morgue The Purloined Letter

Poetry: Edgar Allan Poe believes melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetic tones and the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetic topic in the world.

To Helen The Raven

Annabel Lee is his last complete poem. Like many of Poe's poems, it explores the theme of the death of a beautiful woman.

Plot summary: The poem's narrator describes his love for Annabel Lee, which began many years ago in a so-called \sea\that the narrator believes the seraphim caused her death. Even so, their love is strong enough that it extends beyond the grave and the narrator believes their two souls are still entwined. Every night, he dreams of Annabel Lee and sees the brightness of her eyes in the stars. He admits that every night he lies down by her side in her tomb by the sea. 3. Characters:

(1). His short stories take great efforts on describing the morbid sense and dark side of humans. (2). His thrilling tales examining the depth of human psyche earned him much fame.

(3). In his works, we can see his darkly passionate sensibilities: obsession with death, violence and the appreciation for the beautiful tragic life.

(4). In many of Poe‘s works, setting is used to paint a dark and gloomy picture in our mind. 4. Aesthetic ideas

(1). The short stories should be of brevity, totality, single effect, compression and finality.

(2). The poems should be short, and the aim should be beauty, the tone melancholy. Poems should not be of moralizing. He calls for pure poetry and stresses rhythm.

5. Style – traditional, but not easy to read Romantic Poets

Comparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson

Similarities:

(1). Thematically, in their different ways they both extolled an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of ―American Renaissance‖.

(2). Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the new nation by getting rid of the convention of the iambic pentameter and showing freedom in a new form: they were pioneers in American poetry. Differences:

(1). Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual. (2). Whereas Whitman is ―national‖ in his outlook, Dickinson is ―regional‖.

(3). Whitman has the ―catalogue technique‖ (direct, simple style) which Dickinson doesn‘t have. Walt Whitman (1819 –1892) has been claimed as America's first “poet of democracy\

Free Verse: It is a kind of poetry that lacks regular meters or patterns. The free verse is a rhymed or unrhymed poetry free form the conventional rules of meter. 1. Life:

2. Works: Walt Whitman is radically innovative in the form of his poetry. What he prefers for his new subject is free verse. According to Whitman, the genuine participation of a poet in a common cultural effort was to behave as a supreme individualist. Leaves of Grass (9 editions) commands great attention because of its uniquely poetic embodiment of the democratic ideals, which are written in the founding documents of both the Revolutionary War and the American Civil War. Theme:

(1).In his famous poetry, openness, freedom, and above all, individua1ism (the belief that the rights and freedom of individual people are most important) are all that concerned him.

(2). Whitman brings the hard-working farmers and laborers into American literature, attacks the slavery system and racial discrimination.

(3). In this book he also extols nature, democracy, labor and creation, and sings of man's dignity and equality, and of the brightest future of mankind.

Song of Myself

“I celebrated myself, and sing myself, /And what I assume you shall assume, /For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you”

In this poem Whitman sets forth two principle beliefs: A. The theory of universality (普遍性), which is illustrated by lengthy catalogues of people and things; B. The belief in the singularity (个别性) and equality(平等性) of all beings in value.

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Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

There Was a Child Went Forth This poem describes the growth of a child who learned about the world around him and

improved himself accordingly.

“The horizon’s edge, the flying sea-crow, the fragrance of salt marsh and shore mud. These became part of that child who went forth every day, and who now goes, and will always go forth every day.\

Democratic Vistas

Crossing Brooklyn Ferry Passage to India

3. Literary ideas: Whitman's democratic ideas govern his poetry-writing. 4. Whitman’s poetic characteristics:

(1) The use of a certain pronoun ―I‖ – Whitman's poetic style is marked, first of a1l, by the use of the poetic \all those people in his poems and yet still remains \Whitman\hence a discovery of the self in the other with such identification. In such a manner, Whitman invites his readers to participate in the process of sympathetic identification.

(2). A looser and more open-ended syntactic structure – Whitman's poetry is conversational and casual, in the fluid, expansive, and unstructured style of talking. However, there is a strong sense of the poetry being rhythmical. The reader can feel the rhythm of Whitman's thought and cadences of his feeling.

5. Whitman's language style: Contrary to the rhetoric of traditional poetry, Whitman's is relatively simple and even rather crude. (1). Musicality–Parallelism and phonetic recurrence at the beginning of the lines contribute to the musicality of his poems.

(2). Vocabulary –Whitman's vocabulary is amazing. He would use powerfu1, colorful, as well as rarely-used words, words of foreign origin and sometimes even wrong words.

(3). The use of oral English - Another characteristic in Whitman's language is his strong tendency to use oral English. (4). No fixed rhyme or scheme (5). The habit of using snapshots

(6). Sentences – catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem lines

Emily Dickinson (1830 –1886)

1. Life:

2. Works: Emily Dickinson‘s verse is most aptly characterized as exhibiting sensitiveness to the symbolic implications.

My Life Closed Twice before Its Close Because I Can’t Stop for Death

\the School, where Children strove /At Recess---in the Ring--- /We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain---- /We passed the Setting Sun---”

The School stands for youth; the Fields of Gazing Grain stands for mature period; the Setting Sun stands for end of life.

Why did Death stop for me: In this poem Death appears personified as a courtly beau who insists the speaker put aside the ―labor‖ and ―leisure‖. He arrives in the carriage, having stopped for her because she could not have stopped for him.

Why couldn‘t I stop for Death: Death in this poem was not meant to be an end, the human existence will go on for Eternity. Death gives away to Immortality, and thus, even if the speaker had wanted to, the speaker couldn‘t stop for Death and the grave is merely a brief pause on the journey toward Eternity.

I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I died she wrote about the moment of death

Mine – by the Right of the White Election Wild Nights – Wild Nights

This is my letter to the World is a poem expressing Emily Dickinson‘s Anxiety about her communication with the outside

world.

I like to see it lap the Miles which describes a train, an embodiment of modern civilization.

3. Themes: based on her own experiences/joys/sorrows Religion – doubt and belief about religious subjects Death and immortality

Love – suffering and frustration caused by love Physical aspect of desire

Nature –More than five hundred poems that Dickinson wrote are about nature, in which her general skepticism about the relationship between man and nature is well expressed. Free will and human responsibility 4. Style:

(1). Her poetry is full of images. In her best poems, every word is a picture, so she is regarded as a precursor of imagist poet. (2). Her poetic idiom is noted for its conciseness, directness and plainest words. (3). Her poems are usually short and the first line of her poems is used to be the title. (4). The capital letters in her poems are used for emphasis.

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Chapter 3 The Age of Realism

1. What is Realism?

Realism: It refers to an attempt in literature or art to represent life as it really is without sentimentalizing and idealizing it. Realism often depicts the daily life and common speech of ordinary people. Realism entered American literature after the Civil War. William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James were the pioneers of realism in the U.S. 2. The literary characteristics of the Realistic Period in American literature

(1). Guided by the principle of adhering to the truthful treatment of 1ife, the realists touched upon various contemporary social and political issues. (In their works, instead of writing about the polite, we11--dressed, grammatica1ly correct middle--class young people who moved in exotic places and remote times, they introduced industrial workers and farmers, ambitious businessmen and vagrants, prostitutes and unheroic soldiers as major characters in fiction. )

(2). They approached the harsh realities and pressures in the post-Civil War society either by presenting a picture of modern life in its various occupations, c1ass stratifications and manners, or by a psychological exploration of man's subconsciousness. 3. The main ideas of Realists of America:

The harsh life and disillusion from the dark memories of the Civil War made the nation dislike the romance; the new generation of writers came up with new inspirations:

1) They were interested in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the actuality of any aspect of life;

2) People‘s attention was now directed the interesting features/things of everyday existence/things -something brutal, sordid/mean, class struggle etc.

3) The authors introduced common people such as: industrial workers and farmers, ambitious businessmen, vagrants, prostitutes/street girls, and unheroic soldiers in fiction;

4) American writers displayed native trends in portrayal of the landscape ad social surface realistically; 5) They formed perfect vernacular style in language;

6) Some authors explored and exploited/used the literary possibilities of the interior life/psychology, such as Henry James; 7) The representatives were: Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells;

In short, they set the example and pictured the future course for the modernism (in the subject, themes, techniques, and styles of fiction)

4. The period from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to the Age of Realism (The Gilded Age) in the literary history of the United States, why did it happen and what characters did it have?

1) The American society after the Civil War provided rich soil for the rise and development of Realism, and Civil War affected the social and the value system of the country, America had transformed into an industrialized and commercialized society. 2) The war stimulated the technological development; the booming economy and industry stepped up urbanization; 3) The phenomenon of polarization is serious; People became doubtful about the human nature and the grace of God; 4) Gone was the frontier, the spirit of the frontier, the spirit of freedom and the American dream. 5. What is Local Colorism?

Post-Civil War America was large and diverse enough to sense its own local differences. Regional voices had emerged. “Local colorism” is a unique variation of American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well--defined region or province. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specific setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, costumes, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience; they recorded the facts of a unique environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the loca1e. Their materials were necessarily limited and topics disparate, yet they had certain common artistic concerns. Writers whose works are characterized with local colors are Mark Twain, Sarah Orne Jewett, Joseph Kirkland and Hamlin Garland.

Three Giants in Realistic Period:

The three dominant figures of the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Together they brought to fulfillment native trends in the realistic portrayal of the 1andscape and social surfaces, brought to perfection the vernacular style, and explored and exploited the literary possibilities of the interior life.

William Dean Howells (1837 –1920) – “Dean of American Realism”

1. Realistic principles: “Nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” (1). Realism is ―fidelity to experience and probability of motive‖. (2). The aim is ―talk of some ordinary traits of American life‖.

(3). Man in his natural and unaffected dullness was the object of Howells‘s fictional representation.

(4). Realism is by no means mere photographic pictures of externals but includes a central concern with ―motives‖ and psychological conflicts.

(5). He condemns novels of sentimentality and morbid self-sacrifice, and avoids such themes as illicit love.

(6). Authors should minimize plot and the artificial ordering of the sense of something ―desultory, unfinished, and imperfect‖. (7). Characters should have solidity of specification and be real.

(8). Interpreting sympathetically the ―common feelings of commonplace people‖ was best suited as a technique to express the spirit of America.

(9). He urged writers to winnow tradition and write in keeping with current humanitarian ideals. (10). Truth is the highest beauty, but it includes the view that morality penetrates all things.

(11). With regard to literary criticism, Howells felt that the literary critic should not try to impose arbitrary or subjective

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evaluations on books but should follow the detached scientist in accurate description, interpretation, and classification. 2. Works:

Venetian Life

The Rise of Silas Lapham Criticism and Fiction A Chance Acquaintance A Modern Instance

A Hazard of New Fortunes

3. Features of His Works (1). Optimistic tone

(2). Moral development/ethics

(3). Lacking of psychological depth

Psychological Realism: It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters‘ thoughts and motivations. Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism and his is novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.

Henry James (1843-1916) is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th century \novels and the founder of psychological realism. 1. Life:

2. Works: The author is best at dramatizing the collisions between two very different cultural systems on an international scene.

Literary career: three stages

(1). James took great interest in international themes: his treatment with the c1ashes between two different cultures and the

emotional and moral problems of Americans in Europe, or Europeans in America.

The American

Daisy Miller the author tries to portray the young woman as an embodiment of the free spirit of the New World.

The story: Frederick Winterbourne, the narrator of the story, is an American expatriate. While visiting Switzerland, he meets the newly rich Mrs. Miller from New York, her son Randolph and her daughter Daisy. The Millers come from America that advocates freedom and individuality so when they live among the Europeans they do not pay any attention to the complex code that underlies behavior in European society. Winterbourne is shocked at Daisy’s innocence and her mother’s unconcern when Daisy accompanies him to the castle of Chillon. Later he meets the Miller in Rome, where Daisy has aroused suspicion by being seen constantly with Giovanelli, a third-rate Italian, without being engaged. Daisy is abandoned by her former friends, because they think she has gone too far. Spending all the evenings in the Colosseum, Daisy is infected with Roman fever. She falls ill with malaria, and a week afterward dies. At her funeral Giovanelli tells Winterbourne that Daisy was “the most beautiful young lady I ever saw, and the most amiable?and the most innocent.”

The theme of the novel: Daisy Miller is one of James’s early works that dealt with the international theme. To set against a large international background, usual1y between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cu1tures with two different groups of peop1e representing two different value systems: American innocence in contact and contrast with European decadence and the moral and psychological complications arising therefore.

“I should think it might be arranged,” Winterbourne was thus emboldened to reply. : Couldn’t you get some one to stay----for the afternoon---with Randolph?” Miss Miller looked at him a moment; and then with all serenity, “I wish you’d stay with him!” she said.

Please analyze the character of Daisy Miller: She is the American Girl in Europe, a celebrated type who embodies the spirit of the New World. However, innocence, the keynote of her character, turns out to be an admiring but a dangerous quality and her defiance of social taboos in the Old World finally brings her to a disaster in the clash between two different cultures.

The Portrait of a Lady is the story of a spirited young American woman, Isabel Archer, who \overwhelming. She inherits a large amount of money and subsequently becomes the victim of Machiavellian scheming by two American expatriates.

(2). 1882~1895: inter-personal relationships and some plays Daisy Miller (play)

(3). In his last and major period, James returned to his \theme. (1895~1900): novellas and tales dealing with childhood and adolescence, then back to international theme The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story novella written by Henry James. What Maisie Knew The Wings of the Dove The Ambassadors The Golden Bowl The Bostonians

The Art of Fiction is the most famous literary criticism

2. Characters:

(1). International theme: James‘s fame generally rests upon his nove1s and stories with the international theme. These nove1s are always set against a large international background, usual1y between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cu1tures with two different groups of peop1e representing two different value systems. American innocence and unsophistication are in contact and contrast with European personalities of degeneration and sophistication. The typical pattern of the conf1ict between the two cultures wou1d be that of a young American man or woman who goes to Europe and affronts his or her destiny. The unsophisticated boy or girl wou1d be beguiled, betrayed, cruelly wronged at the hands of those who pretend to stand for

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the highest possible civilization. Marriage and 1ove are used by James as the focal point of the confrontation between the two value systems, and the protagonist usual1y goes through a painful process of a spiritual growth, gaining knowledge of good and evil from the conflict: However, we may misinterpret Henry James if we think he makes an antithesis, in his international novels, of American innocence versus European corruption. James admires European cultures.

(2). Narrative point of view (Avoiding omniscient point of view): One of James's literary techniques innovated to cater for this psychological emphasis is his narrative “point of view.” James avoids the authorial omniscience as much as possible and makes his characters reveal themselves with his minimal intervention. So it is often the case that in his novels we usually learn the main story by reading through one or severa1 minds and share their perspectives. This narrative method proves to be successful in bringing out his themes.

(3). Psychological realism (forefather of stream of consciousness): James’s realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner life of human beings than with overt human actions. His best and most mature works will render the drama of individual consciousness and convey the moment-to-moment sense of human experience as bewilderment and discovery. And we observe people and events filtering through the individual consciousness and participate in his experience. This emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousness proves to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and has great influence on the coming generations. 3. Style – “stylist”:

Language: With a large vocabulary, he is always accurate in word selection, trying to find the best expression for his literary imagination.

Mark Twain(1835--19l0) is a great literary giant of America, whom H.L.Mencken considered “the true father of our national literature.” Mark Twain is the pen name of Samuel L. Clements. Mark Twain was an American author, satirist, humorist, and lecturer who drew his childhood along the Mississippi River to create many novels. He is best known for his novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which has been called ―the great American Novel‖.

Local Colorism: Local Colorism or Regionalism as a trend, first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to write or present the local colors in a truthful depiction, usually a very small part of the world. 1. Life: 2. Works:

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County his frontier tale brought him recognition from a wider

public.

The Gilded Age His social satire written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, The novel explored the scrupulous ―The two advantages‖:

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is usually regarded as a classic book written for boys about their particular horrors and joys The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a boy’s book specially written for the adults, is Twain’s most representative work,

describing a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim , and the book from which \modern American literature comes\

individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values, and gave its name to the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War era.

The story:

This novel begins with Huck under the motherly protection of the Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson. When his father comes to demand the boy’s fortune, Huck pretends that he has transferred the money to Judge Thather, so his father catches him and puts him into a lonely cabin. One night, after his father is drunken, Huck escapes to Jackson’s island and meets Miss Watson’s runaway slave, Jim. They start down the river on a raft. After several adventures, the raft is hit by a steamboat and the two are separated. Huck swims ashore and is saved by the Grangerford family, whose feud with the Sheperdsons causes bloodshed. Later, Huck discovers Jim and they set down again, giving refuge to a gang of frauds: the “Duke”and “King,” whose dramatic performances culminate in the fraudulent exhibition of the “Royal Nonesuch.” Huck also witnesses the lynching and murder of a harmless drunkard by an Arkansas aristocrat on the shore. When he finds that some rogues intend to claim legacies as Peter Wilks’s brother, Huck interferes on behalf of the three daughters, and the scheme is failed by the arrival of the real brothers. Then he discovers that the “King” has sold Jim to Mrs. Phelps, Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally. At the Phelps farm, Huck and Tom try to rescue Jim. In the rescue, Tom is accidentally shot and Jim is recaptured. Later, Tom reveals that the rescue is necessary only because he “wanted the adventures of it.” It is also disclosed at the end of the novel that Huck’s father has died, so Huck’s fortune is safe. Theme: The novel is a vindication of what Mark Twain called “the damned human race.” That is the theme of man’s inhumanity to man---of human cruelty, hypocrisies, dishonesties, and moral corruptions. Mark Twain’s theme contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is best known for Mark Twain’s wonderful characterization of “Huck,” a typical American boy whom its creator described as a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience,” and remarkable for the raft’s journey down the Mississippi river, which Twain used both realistically and symbolically to shape his book into an organic whole.

Through the eyes of Huck, the innocent and reluctant rebel, we see the pre-Civil War American society fully exposed and at the same time we are deeply impressed by Mark Twain’s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.

“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt tow things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to my self: All right, then, I’ll go to hell”----and tore it up. It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never though no more about reforming.”

Why did he think \It is the climax of the Huck‘s inner struggle on the Mississippi, when Huck is conflicting whether or not he should write a letter to tell Miss Watson where Jim is, and he is contradicting by the two

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opposing forces between his heart and his head, between his affection for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape. Huck‘s final decision -to follow his own good hearted moral impulse rather than conventional village morality. During his thinking Huck thinks of the consequence of helping Jim (the runaway slave), he might go to hell, \with the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows.

Analyze the characteristic of the hero: Huck is an innocent and reluctant rebel, a typical American Boy with a \deformed conscience\by Mark Twain‘s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wildness and civilization. Life on the Mississippi tells a story of his boyhood ambition to become a riverboat pilot.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

With the publication of The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg (l900) and The Mysterious Stranger (1916), the change in Mark Twain from an optimist to an almost pessimist could be felt and his cynicism and disillusionment with what Twain referred to as the “damned human race” became obvious. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg The Mysterious Stranger The Autobiography

The Innocence Abroad an account of American tourists in Europe which pokes fun at the pretentious, decadent and

undemocratic Old World in a satirical tone.

Roughing It in which Twain describes a journey that works its way farther west.

The Prince and the Pauper

Goldsmith’s Friend Abroad Again To the Person Sitting in Darkness

3. Style:

(1). A local colorist –As a local colorist, he preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on.

(2). The use of vernacular –His words are col1oquial, and have concrete and direct effect. His is sentence structures are simp1e, even ungrammatical, which is typical of the spoken 1anguage.

(3). Humor –It is fun to read Twain to begin with, for most of his works tend to be funny, containing some practical jokes, comic details, witty remarks, etc., and some of them are actually tall ta1es.

4. Take examples to analyze the style and theme of Mark Twain: Mark Twain is a great literary of America, H. L. Mencken considered him \

1) Twain‘s works like The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi shaped the views of America and combined American folk humor and serious literature together;

2) The adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn proved to be the milestone in American literature, and they were the record of a vanishing way of life in the pre-Civil War Mississippi. The books were noted for their unpretentious, colloquial, poetic, humorous, innocent and free style;

3) The language of Twain was simple, direct, lucid and faithful to truth -\

4) Twain was famous for a local colorist, who presented social life through portraits of the local characters of his region -people living in the area, the landscape, the customs, dialects, costumes. Especially the theme of the Mississippi valley and the West;

5) The work of Twain was always confined to a particular region, historical moment, strong accent, intensified humor to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism.

Comparison of the three “giants” of American Realism:

1. Theme: Howells – middle class; James – upper class; Twain – lower class

(1) While Mark Twain and Howells paid more attention to the ―life‖ of the Americans; Henry James laid a greater emphasis on the‖ inner world‖ of man. He came to believe that the literary artist should not simply hold a mirror to the surface of social life in particular times and places. In addition, the writer should use language to probe the deepest reaches of the psychological and moral nature of human beings. He is a realist of the inner life.

(2) Though Twain and Howells both presented the truth of the American society, they had different emphasis. Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived, while Twain preferred to have his own region and people depicted, which is known as “local colorism”, a unique variation of American literary realism.

2. School: Howells belonged to the smiling/genteel realism and Twain belonged to local colourism and colloquialism and James is the founder of psychological realism. American Naturalism

American Naturalism: The American Naturalism is a new and harsher realism which accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin‘s evolutionary theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works which are regarded as combinations of inherited attributes and their habits were conditioned by the social and economic forces. Naturalistic writers usually depict the sordid side of life and their characters are severely limited by their environment or heredity. It implies a philosophical meaning instead of literature technique.

Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late 19th century. The general tone of this school is hopeless, despair and gloomy and they focused on the ugly side of the society. It prepares the way for the writing of 1920s‘ ―lost generation‖.

Stephen Crane (1871 –1900)

1. Life: 2. Works:

Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) which critics generally consider the first work of American literary Naturalism.

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The Red Badge of Courage (1895) is a short novel that focuses on the development of a young soldier after he enlists in the

Union Army during the American Civil War. The novel presented a realistic portrait of the youth and the battle he fights with the enemy and himself; it centers on the maturation of a naive youth who matures into a young soldier in the crucible of war. This book is obviously under the influence of naturalistic idea that is human being is at the mercy of fate or a pitiless universe. In this book, nature carries on with its business regardless what happens to man. Like an unfeeling machine, it functions as its usual way without heed to humans in peril. The Red Badge of Courage has a distinctive style which is often described as naturalistic, realistic, and impressionistic or a mixture of the three. Told in a third-person limited point of view, the novel reflects the inner-experience of Henry Fleming, a young soldier who flees from combat, rather than upon the external world around him. Short stories:

Open Boat The Blue Hotel

An Experiment in Misery

1. Life: 2. Works:

Frank Norris (1870 –1902)

McTeague is the manifesto of American naturalism. It tells the story of a couple's courtship and marriage, and their subsequent

descent into poverty, violence and finally murder as the result of jealousy and avarice.

Trilogy (he‘s been working on, but only finished the first two of before his death): a trilogy on the production, distribution, and consumption of wheat.

The Octopus: A Story of California is Norris‘ best work based on an actual clash between farmers in San Joaquin valley and the South Pacific Railroad

The Pit: A Story of Chicago concentrates the distribution of wheat.

Theodore Dreiser (1871 –1945) was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters that succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature 1. Life:

2. Works: Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).

Sister Carrie With the publication of Sister Carrie, Dreiser became one of the most significant American writers of literary naturalism.

Plot: Carrie Meeber is the protagonist of the story. Penniless and “full of the illusions of ignorance and youth,” she leaves her rural home to seek work in Chicago. On the train, she becomes acquainted with Charles Drouet, a salesman. In Chicago, she lives with her sister and sister-in-law, and works for a time in a shoe factory. Meager income and terrible work condition oppress her imaginative spirit. After a period of unemployment and loneliness, she accepts Drouet and becomes his mistress. During his absence, she falls in love with Drouet’s friend George Hurstwood, a middle-aged, married, comparatively intelligent and cultured saloon manager. They finally elope, first to Montreal and then to New York. They live together for more than three years. Carrie becomes mature in intellect and emotion, while Hurstwood, away from the atmosphere of success on which his life has been based, steadily declines. So their relations become strained. At last, she thinks him too great a burden and leaves him. Hurstwood sinks lower and lower. After becoming a beggar, he commits suicide, while Carrie becomes a star of musical comedies. But in spite of her success, she is lonely and dissatisfied.

Jennie Gerhardt

The trilogy:

①The Financier

In Philadelphia, Frank Cowperwood, whose father is a banker, makes his first money by buying cheap soaps on the market and selling them back with profit to a grocer. Later, he gets a job in Henry Waterman & Company, and leaves it for Tighe & Company. He also marries an affluent widow, in spite of his young age. Over the years, he starts misusing municipal funds with the aid of the City Treasurer. In 1871, the Great Chicago Fire redounds to a stock market crash, prompting him to be bankrupt and exposed. Although he attempts to browbeat his way out of being sentenced to jail by intimidating Mr. Stener, politicians from the Republican Party use their influence to use him as a scapegoat for their own corrupt practices. Meanwhile, he has an affair with Aileen Butler, a young girl, subsequent to losing faith in his wife. She vows to wait for him after his jail sentence. Her father, Mr. Butler dies; she grows apart from her family. Frank divorces his wife. Sometime after being released, he invests in stocks subsequent to the Panic of 1873, and becomes a millionaire again. He decides to move out of Philadelphia and start a new life in the West. ②The Titan

Cowperwood moves to Chicago with his new wife Aileen. He decides to take over the street-railway system. He bankrupts several opponents with the help of John J. McKenty and other political allies. Meanwhile, Chicago society finds out about his past in Philadelphia and the couple are no longer invited to dinner parties; after a while, the press turns on him too. Cowperwood is unfaithful many times. Aileen finds out about a certain Rita and beats her up. She gives up on him and has an affair with Polk Lynde, a man of privilege; she eventually loses faith in him. Meanwhile, Cowperwood meets young Berenice Fleming; by the end of the novel, he tells her he loves her and she consents to live with him. However, the ending is bittersweet as Cowperwood has not managed to obtain the fifty-year franchise for his railway schemes that he wanted. ③The Stoic

Cowperwood, still married to his estranged wife Aileen, lives with Berenice. He decides to move to London, England, where he intends to take over and develop the underground railway system. Berenice becomes close to Earl Stane, while Frank has an affair with Lorna Maris, a relative of his. Meanwhile he tries to fix Aileen up with Tollifer, but she becomes enraged when she finds out it was a ruse. Finally, Cowperwood dies of Bright's disease. His inheritance is squandered in lawsuits. Aileen dies shortly after.

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Berenice travels to India, where she is moved by poverty. Back in the United States, she realises there is poverty there too, and decides to set up a hospital for the poor, as Cowperwood intended.

The Genius

An American Tragedy is the greatest work written by Theodore Dreiser

3. Theme: Dreiser’s literary naturalism (or American naturalism):

As a genre, naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even tragic. Dreiser described earthly existence as “a welter of inscrutable forces,” in which was trapped each individua1 human being. In his words, Man is a “victim of forces over which he has no control.” To him, life is \natural forces -- especially those of environment and heredity. (Dreiser’s naturalism found expression in almost every book he wrote. In Sister Carrie Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of 1ife and attacking the conventional moral standards. After a series of incidents and coincident, Carrie obtains fame and comfort while Hurstwood loses his wealth, social position, pride and eventually his life. In his \of Desire,\Dreiser's focus shifted from the pathos of the helpless protagonists at the bottom of the society to the power of the American financial tycoons in the late 19th century. An American Tragedy proves to be his greatest work and by entit1ing this book with such a name, Dreiser intended to tell us that it is the social pressure that makes Clyde's downfal1 inevitable. Clyde's tragedy is a tragedy that depends upon the American social system which encouraged people to pursue the \4. Style:

(1). Unpolished style –Though the time sequence is clear and the plot is straight forward, he has been always accused of being awkward in sentence structure, inept and occasionally wrong in word selection and meaning, and mixed and disorganized in voice and tone.

(2). Deficient characterization –readers are sometimes burdened with massive detailed descriptions of characters and events. (3). Lack in imagination –There is no comment, no judgment but facts of life in the stories. (4). Journalistic method – (5). Techniques in painting – Section 2 The 1930s

Writers of 1930s:

(1). Social concern and social involvement

(2). Revival of naturalistic tradition of Dreiser and Norris

John Dos Passos (1896 –1970) 1. Life:

2. Works: Considered one of the Lost Generation writers, Dos Passos published his first novel in 1920, One Man's Initiation: 1917. It was followed by an antiwar story, Three Soldiers, which brought him considerable recognition. His 1925 novel about life in New York City, titled Manhattan Transfer, was a commercial success and introduced experimental stream-of-consciousness techniques into Dos Passos's method.

U.S.A. trilogy: Dos Passos used experimental techniques in these novels, incorporating newspaper clippings, autobiography, biography, ―Camera Eye‖ and fictional realism to paint a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the 20th century.

①The 42nd Parallel (1930) covers the period in which America emerged as an industrial giant, the ―machine‖ which was to dominate and impede the free growth of the individual life.

②1919 (1932) is a record of the First World War, a continuation of ―dehumanizing‖ process that has been going on as in the first book.

③The Big Money (1936) documents the booming twenties. 3. Style: He is a stylist in his own way.

(1). Dos Passos is noted for the use of simple diction, impressive images, rhythmical sentences and parallels. (2). His language has the typical features of 20th century colloquial style in America.

John Steinbeck (1902 –1968) was an American writer. He is widely known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), East of Eden (1952) and the novella Of Mice and Men (1937). Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Novels: He wrote some romantic books such as Cup of Gold (1929), The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933) but none of them made any stir on the literary scene.

Tortilla Flat (1935) Dustbowl trilogy:

①In Dubious Battle (1936) This first novel tells the story of a fruit pickers' strike in California which is both aided and

damaged by the help of \

②Of Mice and Men (1937) is a tragedy that was written in the form of a play in 1937. The story is about two traveling ranch workers, George and Lennie, trying to work up enough money to buy their own farm/ranch. As it is set in 1930's America, it provides an insight into The Great Depression, encompassing themes of racism, loneliness, prejudice against the mentally ill, and the struggle for personal independence.

③The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is set in the Great Depression and describes a family of sharecroppers, the Joads, who were driven from their land due to the dust storms of the Dust Bowl. The Moon Is Down (1942)

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East of Eden (1952)

The Winter of Our Discontent (1961)

Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962)

Short stories:

The Red Pony The Pearl

3. Point of view:

(1). His best writing was produced out of outrage at the injustices of the societies, and by the admirations for the strong spirit of the poor.

(2). His theme was usually simple human virtues, such as kindness and fair treatment, which were far superior to the dehumanizing cruelty of exploiters. 4. Characters:

(1). As an American novelist, John Steinbeck uses many literary devices, such as metaphor, simile, imagery and figurative language along with descriptive words to develop his characters and vividly describe their surroundings.

(2). He often populated his works with struggling characters and thus his works often examined the lives of working class and migrant workers during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

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Chapter 5 The Modern Period

The styles and features of the modernists in writing:

(1) The characteristics of the modernistic works are discontinuity and fragmentation. (In fiction, the accepted continuity of chronological development was upset by Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner, and James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of the character‘s thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles.)

(2) The biggest shift is from the external to the internal, from the public to the private, from the chronological to the psychic, from the objective description to the subjective projection. (In modernist literature, the individual is more important than the society. Specifically, the modernist writers are fascinated with how the individual adapts to the changing world.)

(3) Modern American writers in general emphasize the sensory images as the direct conveyer of experience. (In poetry, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts with images and allusions.) (4) Their language is direct, compressive, vivid and sparing of words.

(5) Modern fiction tended to employ the first person narration or limit the reader to one character‘s point of view. This limitation accorded with the modernistic vision that truth does not exist objectively but is the product of a personal interaction with

reality.

Section 1 Poetry in the 1920s

Imagism: A poetic movement that flourished in England and even more vigorously in America. It was planned and exemplified by a group of poets as a revolt against the sentimental and discursive poetry at the turn of the century. The typical imagist poetry is written in free verse and undertakes to be as precise and terse as possible. Meanwhile imagist poetry likes to express the writer‘s momentary impression of a visual object or scene and the impression is often rendered by means of a metaphor without indicating a relation.

Image: We usually think with words, many of our thoughts come to us as pictures or imagined sensations in our mind. Such imagined pictures or sensations are called images. Images can appeal to other senses as well: touch, taste, smell, and hearing. Imagery(意象) : Words or phrases that create pictures, or images in readers‘ mind.

Allusion: A reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to. An allusion may be drawn from history, geography, literature, or religion.

American Imagist: Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot and Carl

Sanburg

Ezra Pound (1885 –1972)

1. Life:

2. Works: His best-known works include Ripostes (1912), Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920) and his unfinished 120-section epic, The Cantos (1917–1969).

The poetry: His contribution to poetry began with his promotion of Imagism, a movement that called for a return to more Classical values, stressing clarity, precision and economy of language, and had an interest in verse forms such as the Japanese Haikus.

In a Station of the Metro

(1) Theme: This poem is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris subway station. He sees the faces, turned variously toward light and darkness, like flower petals which are half absorbed by, half resisting, the wet, dark texture of a bough. (2) The one image in this poem: This poem is probably the most famous of all imagist poems. In two lines it combines a sharp visual image or two juxtaposed images (意象叠加) \the Metro suggest both the impersonality and haste of city life and the greater transience of human life itself. The word \is a well-chosen one which has a two-fold meaning: Firstly, it means a visible appearance of something real. Secondly, it builds an image of a ghostly sight, a delusive and unexpected appearance.

(3) Pound uses the fewest possible words to convey an accurate image, which is the principle of the Imagist poetry. This poem looks to be a modern adoption of the haiku form of Japanese poetry which adapts the 3-line, 17 syllable and where the title is an integral part of the whole. The poem succeeds largely because of its internal rhymes: station/apparition; Metro/petals/wet; crowd/bough. Its form was determined by the experience that inspired it, involving organically rather than being chosen arbitrarily.

\Ezra Pound uses the figure of speech of metaphor. Here \poetry comes from Chinese poetics.

Homage to Sextus Propertius Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

Cantos (117 poems) The Cantos can be notoriously difficult in some sections, but delightfully beautiful in others. Few have made

serious study of the long poem; fewer, if anyone at all, have had the courage to declare that they have conquered Pound; and many seem to agree that the Cantos is a monumental failure.

The translations: They have not only cast light on Pound's affinity to the Chinese and his strenuous effort in the study of Oriental literature, but also offered us a clue to the understanding of his poetry and literary theory.

Cathay

The Translation of Ezra Pound Confucius Shih-Ching

Make It New Literary Essays

The ABC of Reading

The critical essays: Essays best reflect Pound's appraisals of literary traditions and of modern writing.

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Polite Essays

3. Style:

(1) He is the leader of the Imagist Movement: Led by the American poet Ezra Pound, Imagist Movement is a poetic movement that flourished in the U.S. and England between 1909 and 1917. It advances modernism in arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism, especially Tennyson's wording and high-flown language in poetry. Pound set three main principles as guidelines for Imagism: (1). direct treatment of poetic subjects, (2). elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words (3). rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome. The primary Imagist objective is to avoid rhetoric and moralizing, to stick closely to the object or experience being described, and to move from explicit generalization. The leading poets are Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, D.H.Lawrence, etc. Pound's famous one-image poem \

(2) His use of myth and personae: Pound argued that the poet cannot relate a delightful psychic experience by speaking out directly in the first person: he must \a myth or a piece of the earlier literature, or a \and present successfully. (Persona: It is an invented person; a character in drama or fiction. In literary criticism, persona is sometimes used to refer to a person figuring in, for example, a poem, someone who may or may not represent the author himself. ) (3) His language: His lines are usually oblique yet marvelously compressed. His poetry is dense with personal, literary, and historical allusions, but at the expense of syntax and summary statements.

T. S. Eliot (1888 –1965) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

1. Life: Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39. 2. Works: Poems

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock —started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement.J. Alfred Prufrock is a man of inactivity.

\yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes,/ The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the windowpanes/ Linked its tongue into the corners of the evening,/ Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains.\

The sentence \the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo\that repeats in the poem for several times symbolizes the remote and faraway things; it implies the inability to face up with the reality and the life of the hero.

\implies that the hero was unable to face up with the life and reality bravely, but he was anxious to find time passing so quickly that he was very depressed. The passage shows the tragic character of the indecision of the young man.

\have measured out my life with coffee spoons; /I know the voices dying with a dying fall/Beneath the music from the father room. /So how should I presume? \The speaker presumes that he will propose marriage to a girl, but he dare not. The Excerpt shows the futile and boring life of the upper class. (Every day, they drink coffee, listen to music, but they can‘t really enjoy the pleasure of life, leading a boring life.)

\Interpret: If he had been a crab on the ocean bed, maybe he would have been better. The motion of the crab suggests futility and growing old.

\ The sentence implies the speaker‘s incapability of facing up to love and to life. He is always fearful that others will see through his ideas and truth of falling love, which makes himself live in frightening and restlessness.

Plot: The poem follows the conscious experience of a man, Prufrock (relayed in the \the Modernists), lamenting his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, with the recurrent theme of carnal love unattained. Critical opinion is divided as to whether the narrator leaves his residence during the course of the narration. The locations described can be interpreted either as actual physical experiences, mental recollections, or as symbolic images from the unconscious mind, as, for example, in the refrain \Gerontion

The Waste Land (epic)

Characters: The feature of this poem first lies in its theme. In The Waste Land, the Western culture is regarded as a waste land. From

the theme of The Waste Land we can see the thematic concern of the modernism—loneliness, isolation and despair. And the charm of this poem is more in its language. Eliot has made radical innovation in modern poetry writing by experimenting various techniques. These techniques in this poem include subtle ironies, disconnected passages, the contrast between the present and past, the mixture of the erudition and common speech and the juxtaposition of mythic or symbolic images from the past literary works. Thus he has woven the whole poem into a web of imagery and allusions. The thematic concern of this poem along with his experimenting techniques has great impact to the modern literature.

Theme: The Waste Land is a poem concerned with the spiritual breakup of a modern civilization in which human life has lost its meaning, significance and purpose of life.

1) The poem presents a panorama of physical disorder and spiritual desolation;

2) It reflects the mood of disillusionment, frustration, and despair of the whole post-war generation; 3) It concerns with the spirit breakup that man has lost his meaning, significance, and purpose of life; 4) The poem criticized the civilized world for its horror, menace, anguish and futility.

The Burial of the Dead A Game of Chess The Fire Sermon Death by Water

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What the Thunder Said Hollow Man Ash Wednesday Prelude 序曲

Four Quartets is Eliot‘s last work. Murder in the Cathedral Sweeney Agonistes The Rock (play) The Family Reunion The Cocktail Party The Confidential Clerk The Elder Statesman

Critical essays

Plays: He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

The Sacred Wood

Essays on Style and Order Elizabethan Essays

The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticisms After Strange Gods

3. Characters: The modern society is futile and chaotic. Only poets can create some order out of chaos. The method to use is to compare the past and the present.

(1). Eliot‘s poetry mainly exposes the sterility and futility of the Western culture, reveal the disillusionment and frustration of people and quest for a spiritual regeneration.

(2). In his poetic composition, Eliot is inclined to the use of symbolism, juxtaposition and complex allusions. (3). There is no fixed style in his poems.

Wallace Stevens (1879 –1955) was an American Modernist poet. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Harmonium was Stevens‘ first book of poetry

The Auroras of Autumn Collected Poems The Snow Man

The Man with the Blue Guitar Sunday Morning Anecdote of the Jar

Symbols: The wild rural Tennessee, chaotic and formless, is the symbol of the world of nature or reality. The round jar, a man-made object, represents the world of art or imagination, which gives form and meaning to the world of nature or reality.

William Carlos Williams (1883 –1963) was an American poet closely associated with modernism and imagism. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Poetry collections

The Tempers

The Collected Later Poems Paterson

Prose

In the American Grain

Robert Frost (1874 –1963) was the Pulitzer winner on four occasions whose work was first recognized in England and

then in America. 1. Life:

2. Works: – poems Poetry collections:

A Boy’s Will His first collection is marked by an intense but restrained emotion and the characteristic flavor of New England life North of Boston (1914)is described by the author as \book of people \which shows a brilliant insight into New England character and the background that formed it. Many of his major poems are collected in this volume, such as Mending the Wall, in which Frost saw man as learning from nature the zones of his own 1imitations, and Home Buria1, which probes the darker corners of individual lives in a situation where man cannot accept the facts of his condition. Fire and Ice (1920)

Mountain Interval (mature) (19l6) contains such characteristic poems as The Road Not Taken, Birches.

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\down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth\

In this meditative poem, the speaker tells us how the course of his life determined when he came upon two rods that diverged in a wood. Forced to choose, he ―took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.‖ He seems to be giving a suggestion to the reader: \

New Hampshire that won Frost the first of four Pulitzer Prizes includes Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, which stems from the ambiguity of the speaker's choice between safety and the unknown.

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep” The second sleep refers to die.

West-Running Brook (1928) poses disturbing uncertainties about man's prowess and importance. A Witness Tree includes The Gift Outright which he later recited at President Kennedy‘s inauguration Poems:

After Apple-Picking Frost took up a religious question: can a man's best efforts ever satisfy God? \Of apple-picking: I am overtired/ Of the great harvest I myself desired\From these lines we can conclude that the speaker is tired of the work of apple-picking.

3. The artistic features: Robert Frost combined the traditional verse form: the sonnet, rhyming couplet, blank verse with American colloquial speech of New England farmers with his own diction and syntax.

(1). Unlike his contemporaries in the early 20th century, he did not break up with the poetic tradition nor made any experiment on form. Instead, he learned from the tradition.

(2). He made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression.

(3). Many of his poems are fragrant with natural quality. He understands the terror and tragedy in nature, but also its beauty. Images and metaphors in his poems are drawn from the country life and the pastoral landscape. 4. The theme concerned:

(1). Generally Frost is considered a regional poet whose subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in New England. These thematic concerns include the terror and tragedy in nature, as well as its beauty, and the 1oneliness and poverty of the isolated human being. But first and foremost Frost is concerned with his love of life and his belief in a serenity that only came from working usefully, which he practiced himself throughout his life. (He regarded work as ―significant toil‖.)

(2). Frost wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man's life: the individual's relationships to himself, to his fellow-man, to the world, and to his God. Profound meanings are hidden underneath the plain language and simple form. His poetry, by using nature as a storehouse of analogy and symbol, often probes mysteries of darkness and irrationality in the bleak and chaotic landscapes of an indifferent universe when men stand alone, unaided and perplexed.

Carl Sandburg

1. Life: 2. Works:

E. E. Cummings (1894 –1962) Edward Estlin Cummings ―a juggler with syntax, grammar and diction‖ –

individualism, ―painter poet‖ 1. Life:

2. Works: Cummings, disregarding grammar and punctuation, always used \self-importance

Tulips and Chimneys

Hart Crane was an American poet. Finding both inspiration and provocation in the poetry of T. S. Eliot, 1. Life:

2. Works: Crane wrote modernist poetry that was difficult, highly stylized, and ambitious in its scope.

Voyages a powerful sequence of erotic poems. They were written while he was falling in love with Emil Opffer, a Danish merchant mariner.

White Buildings contains many of Crane‘s best lyrics, including \ The Bridge

Marianne Moore was an American Modernist poet and writer noted for her irony and wit. 1. Life: 2. Works:

The Pangolin and Other Verse Collected Poems

Novels in the 1920s

The Jazz Age: It describes the period in America history following the end of WWⅠ, continuing through the roaring 20th and ending with the onset of the Great Depression. It marked the period of changing values alongside a soaring stock market. F. Scott Fitzgerald is often claimed the literary spokesman of the Jazz Age. His masterpiece is The Great Gatsby.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 –1940) was an American author of novels and short stories, whose works are the paradigm writings of the Jazz Age, a term he coined himself. 1. Life:

2. Works: Fitzgerald’s fictional world is the best embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz Age, in which he shows particular interest in the upper-class society, especially of those young people.

Novels: He finished four novels: This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby—his most famous—and Tender Is the Night.

This Side of Paradise His first novel This Side of Paradise was so successful that it won for him not only wealth and fame, but

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also the expensive prize of Zelda Sayre. He has been regarded as the prototype of a series of rich, beautiful women.

The Beautiful and the Damned His second novel increased his popularity, which also portrays the emotiona1 and spiritual collapse of a wealthy young man during an unstable marriage. The coup1e in the novel were undoubtedly modeled after Fitzgerald himself and Zelda.

The Great Gatsby made him one of the greatest American novelists.

Narrative point of view – Nick: He is related to everyone in the novel and is calm and detected observer who is never quick to make judgements.

The theme of the novel: The Great Gatsby, by summarizing the experiences and attitudes of the glamorous and wild 1920s, deals with the bankruptcy of the American Dream, which is high1ighted by the disillusionment of the protagonist's personal dream due to the clashes between his romantic vision of life and the relentless reality. American Dream is a popular belief that people can achieve success, whether it is wealth, fame or love through honest hard working in a new world of liberty, equality, chances and promises. Yet in the 1920s, the American Dream was bankrupt in the sense that the wealthy people were spiritually disorientated and morally corrupted. The fact that the rich people turned to be more indifferent and careless brought forth the disillusionment of American Dream.

\once. A wafer of a moon was shining over Gatsby’s house, making his still glowing garden. A sudden emptiness seemed to flow now from the windows and the great doors, endowing with complete isolation the figure of the lost, who stood on the porch, his stand up in a formal gesture of farewell.\

The Great Gatsby is a novel that is set against the ending of the war. The passage hints at the meaninglessness, spiritual emptiness and vanity of such a lift of pleasure-seeking. There is a tragic sense that the \failure magnifies to a great extent the end of the American Dream. (However, the affirmation of hope and expectation is self-asserted in Fitzgerald‘s artistic manipulation of the central symbol in the novel, the green light).

Tender is the Night in which he traces the decline of a young American psychiatrist whose marriage to a beautiful and wealthy patient drains his personal energies and corrodes his professional career. The Last Tycoon (A fifth, unfinished novel)

Short stories: Fitzgerald also wrote many short stories that treat themes of youth and promise along with despair and age.

Flappers and Philosophers Tales of the Jazz Age All the Sad Young Men Taps at Reveille

3. Theme: American Dream

(1). He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the so-called ―American Dream‖ is false in nature. Only those who were dishonest could become rich.

(2). He found that wealth altered people‘s characters, making them mean and distrusted. He thinks money brought only tragedy and remorse.

(3). His novels follow a pattern: dream – lack of attraction – failure and despair. 4. Style: Fitzgerald is a great stylist in American literature.

(1). His style, closely related to his themes, is explicit and chilly.

(2). He uses the scenic method in his chapters, leaving the tedious process of transition to the readers' imagination. (3). He also employs the device of having events observed by a \

Ernest Hemingway (1899 –1961)

1. Life:

2. Works: He published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works. Three novels, four collections of short stories, and three non-fiction works were published posthumously. Many of these are considered classics of American literature. Novels

The Torrents of Spring (1926)

The Sun Also Rises (1926) Hemingway's first true novel, casts light on \novel are a group of wandering, amusing, but aimless peop1e, who are caught in the war and removed from the path of ordinary life. A Farewell to Arms (1929) In this novel , Hemingway not to only emphasizes his belief that man is refute the idea of nature as an expression of either God's design or his beneficence and to suggest that man is doomed to be entrapped .

Plot: The novel is divided into five books. In the first book, Rinaldi introduces Henry to Catherine Barkley; Henry attempts to seduce her, and their relationship begins. While on the Italian front, Henry is wounded in the knee by a mortar shell and sent to a hospital in Milan. The second book shows the growth of Henry and Catherine's relationship as they spend time together in Milan over the summer. Henry falls in love with Catherine and, by the time he is healed, Catherine is three months pregnant. In the third book, Henry returns to his unit, but not long afterwards the Austrians break through the Italian lines in the Battle of Caporetto, and the Italians retreat. Henry kills an engineering sergeant for insubordination. After falling behind and catching up again, Henry is taken to a place by the \the Italian defeat. However, after seeing and hearing that everyone interrogated is killed, Henry escapes by jumping into a river. In the fourth book, Catherine and Henry reunite and flee to Switzerland in a rowboat. In the final book, Henry and Catherine live a quiet life in the mountains until she goes into labor. After a long and painful birth, their son is stillborn. Catherine begins to hemorrhage and soon dies, leaving Henry to return to their hotel in the rain. To Have and Have Not (1937)

For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) The novel graphically describes the brutality of civil war and represents a new beginning in Hemingway‘s career as writer. The novel is based on his experiences during the Spanish Civil War, with an American protagonist

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named Robert Jordan who fights with Spanish soldiers for the Republicans. In the end, the manner of his dying convinces people that life is worth living and there are causes worth dying for.

Plot: Robert Jordan is an American in the International Brigades who travels to Spain to oppose the fascist forces of Francisco Franco. As an experienced dynamiter, he was ordered by a communist Russian general to travel behind enemy lines and destroy a bridge with the aid of a band of local antifascist guerrillas, in order to prevent enemy troops from being able to respond to an upcoming offensive. (The Soviet Union aided and advised the Republicans against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Similarly, Hitler's Nazis and Mussolini's Italy provided Franco with military aid.) In their camp, Robert Jordan encounters María, a young Spanish woman whose life had been shattered by the execution of her parents and her rape at the hands of the Falangists (part of the fascist coalition) at the outbreak of the war. His strong sense of duty clashes with both guerrilla leader Pablo's unwillingness to commit to an operation that would endanger himself and his band, and his newfound lust for life which arises out of his love for María. However, when another band of antifascist guerrillas led by El Sordo are surrounded and killed, Pablo decides to betray Jordan by stealing the dynamite caps, hoping to prevent the demolition. In the end Jordan improvises a way to detonate his dynamite, and Pablo returns to assist in the operation after seeing Jordan's commitment to his course of action. Though the bridge is successfully destroyed, it may be too late for the purposes of delaying enemy troop movements rendering the mission pointless, and Jordan is maimed when his horse is shot out from under him by a tank. Knowing that he would only slow his comrades down, he bids goodbye to María and ensures that she escapes to safety with the surviving members of the guerillas. He refuses an offer from another fighter to be shot and lies in agony, hoping to kill an enemy officer and a few soldiers before being captured and executed. The narration ends right before Jordan launches his ambush. Across the River and into the Trees (1950)

The Old Man and the Sea (1951) It is a representation of life as a struggle against unconquerable natural forces Short story collections

In Our Time (1925) His first book presents a Hemingway hero called Nick Adams. Exposed to and victimized by violence in various forms, Nick becomes the prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could muster, confronts situations which are not of his own choosing yet threaten his destruction. Men Without Women (1927) Winner Take Nothing (1933)

The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938) Short stories

Indian Camp (1925) The Killers (1927) Non-fiction

Death in the Afternoon (1932) Green Hills of Africa (1935)

3. Themes – “grace under pressure”:

(1). The Lost Generation: It refers to, in general, the post-World WarⅠgeneration, but specifically a group of expatriate disillusioned intellectuals and artists, who experimented on new modes of thought and expression by rebelling against former ideals and values and replacing them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. The remark of Gertrude Stein, \―addressed to Hemingway, was used as an epigraph to Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, which brilliantly describes those expatriates who had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types of writing. The generation was \in the sense that they were disillusioned with the war-wrecked world and spiritually alienated from a U.S. that seemed to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotional barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, E.E.Cummings, and many other writers who made Paris the center of their literary activities in the 1920s.

(2). The Hemingway Code: It refers to some protagonists in Hemingway's works. In the general situation of Hemingway's novels, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos and man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. Those who survive and perhaps emerge victorious in the process of seeking to master the code with a set of principles such as honor, courage, endurance, wisdom, discipline and dignity are known as %under pressure\The Old Man and the Sea. Though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physical1y destroyed but never defeated spiritually. Obviously, Hemingway's limited fictional world implies a much broader thematic pattern and serious philosophica1 concern. Hemingway Code Heroes plainly embody Hemingway's own values and view of life.

(3). Hemingway code hero: It is a concept from Hemingway‘s works, code hero is defined by Hemingway as a man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honor, courage and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful and always painful. Code hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action and one of few words. This kind of people is spiritual strong, with certain skills and most of them encounter death many times. Hemingway uses his code hero, who is named in most of his novels as Nick Adams to teach us a creative and disciplined way of life.

4. Style: Hemingway was highly praised by the Nobel Prize Committee for\his powerful style- forming mastery of the art‖ of creating modern fiction.

(1). He uses short, simple and conventional words and sentences have an effect of clearness and terseness. Seemingly simple and natural, Hemingway‘s style is actually polished and tightly controlled, but highly suggestive. (2). Hemingway develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain.

(3).Iceberg principle: Hemingway believed the true meaning of a piece of writing should not be evident from the surface story, rather, the crux of the story lies below the surface and should be allowed to shine through. Southern Literature

Heritage: American southern literature can date back to Edgar Allen Poe, and reach its summit with the appearance of the two

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―giants‖ –William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe. There are southern women writers – Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O‘Connor.

The Southern Renaissance: It was the revival of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s. The Southern Renaissance changed the traditional southern literature with its three main themes: ① The burden of history in a place where many people still remembered salary, reconstruction, and a devastating military defeat. ② Focus on the South‘s conservative culture, especially how an individual could exist without losing a sense of identity. ③ The South‘s troubled history in regards to racial issues. The representative writer is William Faulkner with his A Rose for Emily.

William Faulkner (1897 –1962) is one of the most important writers in both American literature generally and Southern literature specifically. Though his work was published as early as 1919, and largely during the 1920s and 1930s, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. 1. Life:

2. Work s: Literary career: three stages 1924~1929: training as a writer

The Marble Faun (1924) a volume of poetry Soldiers' Pay (1926) Mosquitoes (1927)

1929~1936: most productive and prolific period Sartoris / Flags in the Dust (1929 / 1973)

The Sound and the Fury喧哗与骚动(1929) was considered as the work of a major writer. As I Lay Dying (1930) Sanctuary (1931)

Light in August (1932) Pylon (1935)

Absalom, Absalom! (1936) The Unvanquished (1938)

1940~end: won recognition in America Go Down, Moses (1942) Intruder in the Dust (1948) A Fable (1954) The Town (1957) The Mansion (1959) The Reivers (1962) Short stories

A Rose for Emily (1930)

3. Theme: Most of the major themes are directly related to the tragic collision or confrontation between the old South and the new South (or the civilized modern society) represented by different characters in his novels.

(1). Faulkner‘s major concern is the inevitable loss of the American South. He probes the inner lives of those who live in the south and tries to cope with the problems of a society in decline and transition. (Take his The Sound and Fury for example, this novel is a complex account of the breakdown of the once distinguished and honored Compson family. We can see the new social and economic order that emerges after the war has not lost the secret of the positive moral values. And it also adopted more ruthless and ambitious ways of the industrialized and mechanized North. So the characters in this novel are often disturbed and in some sense driven insane by moral confusion and social decay.)

(2). He explains the present by examining the past, by telling the stories of several generations of family to show how history changes life. He was interested in the relationship between blacks and whites, especially concerned about the problems of the people who were of the mixed race of black and white, unacceptable to both races.

4. Style: He was a master of his own particular style of writing. He has a group of women writers following him, including O‘Connor and Eudora Welty (1). Complex plot

(2). Stream of consciousness: he was able to probe into the psychology of characters. (3). Multiple points of view, circular form (4). Violation of chronology

(5). ―Anti-hero‖: weak, fable, vulnerable (true people in modern society)

Yoknapatawpha County as the setting: Most of Faulkner's works are set in a sma1l region in Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County, which is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkner's childhood memory about the town of Oxford in Lafayette County. With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom. Generally, the Yoknapatawpha stories deal with the historical period from the Civil War up to the 1920s when the First World War broke out, and people of a stratified society, the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the blacks. As a result, Yoknapatawpha County has become a parable of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society. The Yoknapatawpha saga is Faulkner's real achievement.

Sinclair Lewis (1885 –1951) – ―the worst important writer in American literature‖ In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, ―for his vigorous and graphic art of description and his ability to create, with wit and humor, new types of characters.‖

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1. Life:

2. Works: His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American society and capitalist values, as well as for their strong characterizations of modern working women.

Main Street is a satirical novel written by Sinclair Lewis, and published in 1920.

Plot: Carol Milford is a liberal, free-spirited young woman, reared in the metropolis of Saint Paul, Minnesota. She marries Will Kennicott, a doctor, who is a small-town boy at heart. When they marry, Will convinces her to live in his home-town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota (a town modeled on Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the author's birthplace). Carol is appalled at the backwardness of Gopher Prairie. But her disdain for the town's physical ugliness and smug conservatism compels her to reform it.

She speaks with its members about progressive changes, joins women's clubs, distributes literature, and holds parties to liven up Gopher Prairie's inhabitants. Despite her friendly, but ineffective efforts, she is constantly derided by the leading cliques. She finds comfort and companionship outside her social class. These companions are taken from her one by one. In her unhappiness, Carol leaves her husband and moves for a time to Washington, D.C., but she eventually returns. Nevertheless, Carol does not feel defeated: “I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women!”

Babbitt Largely a satire of American culture, society, and behavior, it critiques the vacuity of middle-class American life and its pressure toward conformity. An immediate and controversial bestseller, Babbitt is one of Lewis‘s best-known novels and was influential in the decision to award him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1930.

Arrowsmith Elmer Gantry Dodsworth

Ann Vickers (1933)

3. Point of view – satirical critic of American middle class:

(1). In Lewis‘s works, the villagers are often narrow-minded, greedy, pretentious and corrupt.

(2). He attacked middle class for its indifference to art and culture, and its assumption that economic success made it superior. 4. Style:

(1). Photographic, verisimilitude (2). Colloquialism

(3). Characterization: he often created a type of character rather than an individual (4). Old fashioned in theme

(5). Lack in psychological exploration

Sherwood Anderson (1876 –1941) was an American novelist and short story writer. Writers he has influenced include Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe. It was Anderson's influence which saw both Faulkner and Hemingway first published. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Short Story Collections:

Winesburg, Ohio (1919) His most enduring work. It is a collection of short related stories, which could be defined as a novel. The stories are centered on the protagonist George Willard and the fictional inhabitants of the town of Winesburg, Ohio. The Triumph of the Egg (1921) Horses and Men (1923)

Death in the Woods and Other Stories (1933) Novels:

Poor White (1920)

Many Marriages (1923) Dark Laughter (1925)

Tar: A Midwest Childhood (1926, semi-autobiographical novel)

Gertrude Stein (1874 –1946)

1. Life: 2. Works:

Three Lives was American writer Gertrude Stein's first published book. The book is separated into three stories, \

\Lena‖. The three stories are independent of each other, but all are set in Bridgepoint, a fictional town based on Stein‘s hometown of Baltimore, MD.

Objects and Rooms each containing prose under subtitles.

The Making of Americans

Tender Buttons is the best known of Gertrude Stein's \— Food, How to Write

Four Saints in Three Acts

Willa Cather (1873–1947) was an American author who achieved recognition for her novels about frontier life on the

Great Plains, such as O Pioneers! My ántonia, and The Song of the Lark. 1. Life: 2. Works:

O Pioneers! (Prairie Trilogy)

The Song of the Lark (1915) (Prairie Trilogy) My ántonia (1918) (Prairie Trilogy)

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A Lost Lady (1923)

The Professor's House (1925)

Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927) Shadows on the Rock (1931)

3. Features of her works:

(1). She was one of the few ―uneasy survivors of the nineteenth century‖. Hanging onto the traditional values, she was never able to come to terms with modernity.

(2). In most of her novels, old west becomes the centre of moral reference against which modern existence is measured. (3). She often uses female protagonists in her novels.

Thomas Wolfe (1900 –1938) was a major American novelist of the early 20th century. Wolfe wrote four lengthy novels. He is known for mixing highly original, poetic, rhapsodic, and impressionistic prose with autobiographical writing. His books, written and published from the 1920s to the 1940s, vividly reflect on American culture and mores of the period, albeit filtered through Wolfe's sensitive, sophisticated and hyper-analytical perspective. He became very famous during his own lifetime. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Look Homeward, Angel (1929) Of Time and the River (1935)

The Web and the Rock (1939) [published posthumously] You Can't Go Home Again (1940) [published posthumously]

Katherine Anne Porter (1890 –1980) was a Pulitzer-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. 1. Life:

2. Works: Her 1962 novel Ship of Fools was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her short stories received much more critical acclaim. She is known for her penetrating insight; her work deals with dark themes such as betrayal, death and the origin of human evil.

Short story collections

Flowering Judas and Other Stories (1930) The Leaning Tower and Other Stories (1934) Collected Stories and Other Writings

The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Novel Short novels

Ship of Fools (1962) (American film, 1965)

Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) is a collection of three short novels by American author Katherine Anne Porter published in 1939.

While these three short novels Old Mortality, Noon Wine and the eponymous Pale Horse, Pale Rider have been described as novellas, Ms Porter referred to them as short novels.

Plot summary: The title story \is about the relationship between a newspaper woman, Miranda, and a soldier, Adam, during the influenza epidemic of 1918. In the course of the narrative, Miranda becomes sick and delirious, but recovers, only to find that Adam has died of the disease, which he likely caught while tending to her.

Eudora Welty (1909 –2001) was an American author of short stories and novels about the American South. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Short story collections A Worn Path (1940)

The Golden Apples (1949) Novels

Delta Wedding (1946)

Carson McCullers

1. Life:

2. Works: Her other novels have similar themes and are all set in the South. Novels

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter explores the spiritual isolation of misfits and outcasts of the U.S. South. Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941) The Member of the Wedding (1946) Clock Without Hands (1961)

Nathanael West

1. Life: 2. Works: Novels

The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) A Cool Million (1934)

The Day of the Locust (1939)

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American Drama

Eugene O’Neil (1888 –1953) is unquestionably America's greatest playwright. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times

and was the only dramatist ever to win a Nobel Prize (1936). He is widely acclaimed “founder of the American drama.” 1. Life: 2. Works:

Bound East for Cardiff 驶向东方的卡笛夫describes the dying sailor Yank and his dream about the security and peace which could never exist.

Beyond the Horizon 天外边 O'Neill's first full-length play made a great hit and won him the first Pulitzer Prize. Its theme is the choice between life and death, the interaction of subjective and objective factors, and this theme is dramatized more explicitly in The Straw (1921)

Plot summary: The play focuses on the portrait of a family, and particularly two brothers Andrew and Robert. They both fall in love in Ruth. Robert‘s dream is to go off to sea with their uncle Dick, a sea captain while Andrew looks forward to marrying his sweetheart Ruth and working on the family farm as he starts a family. But Ruth decides to marry Robert who then gives up his dream and lives on the farm. Because Robert fails to run the farm, their life is going down, which damages the relationship between him and Ruth. Then Robert dies of lung illness. Before his death he tells Andrew that they are all losers because they don‘t follow their dreams.

Anna Christie 安娜·克利斯蒂(1921) which is more of a success because it deploys the developing complexity of O'Neill's personal vision, showing us that life is a closed circle of possibi1ities from which it is impossible to escape.

Between 1920 and 1924 came his prominent achievements in symbolic expressionism: These plays are daring forays into race relations, class conflicts, sexual bondage, social critiques, and American tragedies on the Greek model. What is more, the expressionistic techniques are used in these plays to highlight the theatrical effect of the rupture between the two sides of an individual human being, the private and the public. The Emperor Jones 琼斯皇帝 The Hairy Ape毛猿

All God's chillun Got Wings (1924) Desire under the Elms榆树下的欲望

Synopsis: Widower Ephram abandons his New England farm to his three sons, who hate him but share his greed. Eben, the youngest and brightest sibling, feels the farm is his birthright, as it originally belonged to his mother. He buys out his half-brothers' shares of the farm with money stolen from his father, and Peter and Simeon head off to California to seek their fortune. Later, Ephraim returns with a new wife, the beautiful and headstrong Abbie who hopes she can inherit the old man‘s farm. But due to his age, Abbie can‘t have a baby to secure her heritage, so she seduces Eden. Soon after, Abbie bears Eben's child, but lets Ephraim believe that the child is his, in the hopes of securing her future with the farm. The proud Ephraim is oblivious as his neighbors openly mock him as a cuckold. Madly in love with Eben and fearful it would become an obstacle to their relationship, Abbie kills the infant. An enraged and distraught Eben turns Abbie over to the sheriff, but not before admitting to himself the depths of his love for her and thus confessing his own role in the infanticide.

Built on the success of these expressionistic experimentations, O'Neill reached out to extend his mastery of the stage and worked up to the summit of his career. He concerned himself with some non--realistic forms to contain his tragic vision in a number of his plays:

The Great God Brown 大神布朗(l926) fuses symbolism, poetry, and the affirmation of a pagan idea1ism to show how materialistic civilization denies the life--giving impulses and destroys the genuine artist. All the characters are wearing masks, only when they reveal their nature and secrets, they put off their masks in order to show human‘s double personalities.

Lazarus Laughed 撒拉路笑了(1927) makes full use of the Bible, Greek choruses, Elizabethan tirades, expressionist masks, populous crowd scenes, and orchestrate laughter. In this play Lazarus comes back from his grave, which symbolizes that man can conquer death and get love and happiness. Strange Interlude (l928)

Late in his life: he produced the best and greatest plays of the modern American theater.

The Iceman Cometh 送冰的人来了(l946) proves to be a masterpiece in the way it is a complex, ironic, deeply moving exploration of human existence, written out of a profound insight into human nature and constructed with tremendous skill and logic.

Long Day's Journey into Night 进入黑夜的漫长旅程 (1956) can be read autobiographically. However, like most great works of literature, the play reaches beyond its immediate subject, dedicated not only to the life of the American family, but also \the life of Man, to Life itself.\and simultaneously marks the climax of O'Neill's literary career and the coming of age of American drama. 3. Theme:

(1). O'Neill is always remembered for his tragic view of life and most of his plays deal with the basic issues of human existence and their predicament: life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration, etc.

(2). the characters in his plays are described as seeking meaning and purpose in their lives in different ways, some through love, some through religion, others through revenge, but all meet disappointment and despair.

(3). His dramatic thought fol1owed a tragic pattern, from a celebration of \So, his final dramas became ―transcendental‖, in the way that the dramatization of man's effort in finding the secret of life results in reconciliation with the tragic impossibility.

4. Style: O‘Neill‘s was constantly experimenting with new styles and forms for his plays.

(1). He introduced the realistic or even the naturalistic aspect of life into the American theater. (He borrowed freely from the best

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traditions of European dramas, be it Greek tragedies, or the realism of Ibsen, or the expressionism of Strindberg, and fused them into the organic of his own.)

(2). In those expressionistic plays, abstract and symbolic stage settings are used to set off against the emotional inner selves and subjective states of mind; lighting and music are employed to convey the changes of mood.

(3). He wrote long introduction and directions for all the scenes, explaining the mood and atmosphere. (4). He sometimes wrote the actors‘ lines in dialect. 5. Point of view：His purpose is to get the root of human desires and frustrations. He showed most characters in his plays as seeking meaning and purpose in their lives, some through love, some through religion, some through revenge, all met disappointment. The characters seem to share O‘Neil‘s perplexities of human nature. As a result of his tragic and nihilistic view of life, his works, in general, indicated chaos and hopelessness. 6. His position/contributions;

(1). With him, American drama developed into a form of literature. (He was the first playwright to explore serious themes in the American theatre and to carry out experiments with theatrical conventions.)

(2). He successfully introduced the European theatrical trends of realism, naturalism and expressionism to the American stage, and used them as the devices to express his interest in life and humanity.

(3). He makes the greatest contributions to establishing the modes of the American modern drama. (With his success in the realism and expressionism, he turned others from the traditions of romantic comedy and melodrama which had bound the American stage for so long.)

Tennessee Williams (1911 –1983)

1. Life: 2. Plays:

The Glass Menagerie

A Street Car Named Desire is a 1947 play written by American playwright Tennessee Williams for which he received

the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1948.

Summer and Smoke Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

3. Theme:

(1). He writes about violence, sex, homosexuality (taboos in drama). Some of his plays rooted in southern social scene.

(2). The characters are often unhappy wanderers; lonely, vulnerable women indulged in memory of the past or illusion of the future. (3). He was attracted to bizarre characters and their predicament. He looked deeply into the psychology of the outcasts of society. (4). He saw life a game which cannot be won. Almost all his characters are defeated.

Arthur Miller (1915 –2005)

1. Life: 2. Plays:

The Man Who Had All the Luck All My Sons

Death of a Salesman

Willy Loman is an insecure, self-deluded travelling salesman. He believed wholeheartedly in the American Dream of easy success and wealth, but he never achieves it. Nor does his son fulfill his hope that he will succeed where he has failed. When his illusions begin to fail under the pressing realities of his life, his mental health begins to unravel. The overwhelming tensions caused by his disparity, as well as those caused by societal imperatives drives Willy to commit suicide.

The Crucible is an allegory of McCarthyism, when the U.S. government blacklisted accused communists.

A View from the Bridge

3. Theme: dilemma of modern man in relation to family and work Theatre of the Absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd: The term is used for particular plays written by a number of primarily European playwrights, as well as the style of theatre which has evolved from their works. Departing from the realistic characters, situations and all of the theatrical conventions, their plays are quite random and meaningless on the surface with meaningless plots, repetitive or nonsensical dialogue and dramatic non-sequiturs. Samuel Beckett‘s Waiting for Godot is one of good examples.

Edward Albee

1. Life: 2. Plays:

Zoo Story

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

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Section 1 Poetry

New Criticism: It is a movement in literary theory that dominates American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasizes close reading, particularly poetry, to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.

Confessional Poetry: It is a kind of modern poetry in which poets speak with openness and frankness about their lives. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Saxton are the most important American confessional poets.

The greatness of Robert Lowell lies in the fact that, in talking candidly about himself, he is examining the culture of his nation. The identification of personal experience with that of an age has always ensured greatness and even immortality as it did.

Black Mountain Poets: They are a group of mid-20th century American postmodernist poets centered on Black Mountain College. There is an emphasis on the importance of the moments of awareness. It portrays a world of ―awakened, contemplative awareness‖, one in which civilization appears alien, cold, and almost unreal.

Beat Generation: It referred to a loose-knit group of poets and novelists, writing in the 1950s and early 1960s. They shared a set of social attitudes ~ anti-establishment, anti-political, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, literary, and moral values, and in favour of unfettered self-realization and self-expression.

The most famous literary creations produced by this group should be Allen Ginsberg‘s long poem Howl and Jack Kerouac‘s On the Road. In the fifties, there was a widespread discontentment among the post-war generation, whose voice was one of protest against all the mainstream culture America.

Allen Ginsberg (1926 –1997) was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Chapter 6 The Post-War Period: 50s & 60s

Howl

A Supermarket in California

Section 2 Fiction Postmodernist Novel

Jewish literature: It refers to published creative writings by American Jews about their American experiences. This kind of writings is shown in Jewish perspective. Jewish Point of View:

(1). Jews believe that God has sent perpetual sufferings to his chosen people to strengthen and purify them, and they are the ―chosen people‖.

(2). Humour is a prominent aspect of Jewish point of view. It is often a twisted kind of comedy to keep them from despair. Jews are able to laugh at themselves, so some of their best humour is self-mocking.

(3). Jews lay emphasis upon the power of intellects. The power to understand their own experience to judge their own life rationally to think well is considered a high virtue.

(4). Self-teaching is at the heart of almost all Jewish novels. The Jewish heroes often try to seek a rational interpretation of the world through their own experience in it.

Saul Bellow (1915 –2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times. 1. Life: 2. Works:

(1). The first period: His representative works are Dangling Man and The Victim in which he shows us the absurdity of society and any unexpected thing would bring us disaster. Dangling Man挂起来的人(1944) The Victim (1947)

(2). The second period: (his golden period) In this period, he won the National Book Award three times and in1976 he won the Nobel Prize for literature.

The Adventures of Augie March奥吉·玛琪历险记（1953） — National Book Award for Fiction. This book marked a significant change in his literary creation. In this novel, Bellow exposed the conflict between nature, human and environment which is the major theme of American modern novel.

Henderson the Rain King雨王汉德森 (1959)

Herzog赫索格— National Book Award for Fiction. It composed in large part of letters from the protagonist Moses E. Herzog. Mr. Sammler's Planet赛姆勒先生的行星 Seize the Day只争朝夕

Humboldt's Gift洪堡的礼物Propelled by the success of Humboldt's Gift, Bellow won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976.

The Dean’s December Ravelstein (2000)

3. Point of view:

(1). Saul Bellow‘s strength lies in his faith in man and man‘s ability to offer a ―spirited resistance to the forces of our time‖. As he sees it, modern man has lived through frustration and defeat, managed to grapple with destructive historical pressures, and striven for ―certain durable human goods‖ – truth, freedom, and wisdom.

(2). He is highly critical of modern life in which the old value system is no longer functioning. His major characters are all

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concerned to find a way that would keep American civilization from going under. They body forth Bellow‘s credo that art has ―something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos‖, and that ―a novelist begins with disorder and disharmony and goes toward order by an unknown process of the imagination‖.

4. Characteristics of his heroes: Most of Saul Bellow‘s heroes are marginal men, alienated or absurd characters caught between their own inadequacies and those imposed upon them by their friends and society. Most of them are Jewish intellectuals or writers who try to discover the queerness of existence and overcome it. Struggling with the impersonality of the physical world, agonized by their own awareness of morality, his protagonists laugh at their own deficiency with irony because it relieves despair. The hunger for community, yet they hold back because that world have to betray the sanctity of their private self in order to achieve it.

5. Themes and style (realism + modernism): The author's works speak to the disorienting nature of modern civilization, and the countervailing ability of humans to overcome their frailty and achieve greatness (or at least awareness).

(1). Bellow saw many flaws in modern civilization, and its ability to foster madness, materialism and misleading knowledge. Principal characters in Bellow's fiction have heroic potential, and many times they stand in contrast to the negative forces of society. Often these characters are Jewish and have a sense of alienation or otherness.

(2). Jewish life and identity is a major theme in Bellow's work, although he bristled at being called a \also shows a great appreciation of America, and a fascination with the uniqueness and vibrancy of the American experience.

(3). Bellow's work abounds in references and quotes from the likes of Marcel Proust and Henry James, but he offsets these high-culture references with jokes. Bellow interspersed autobiographical elements into his fiction, and many of his principal characters were said to bear a resemblance to him.

Norman Mailer (1923 –2007)

1. Life:

2. Works: His first novel was The Naked and the Dead and his best work was widely considered to be The Executioner's Song for which he won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Mailer's book The Armies of the Night (Non-fiction) was awarded the National Book Award.

J. D. Salinger (1919 –2010)

1. Life: 2. Works:

The Catcher in the Rye (1951)

Plot summary: Holden Caulfield is the protagonist and the narrator of the novel, a sixteen-year-old junior, who has just been expelled from a school for academic failure. Although he is intelligent and sensitive, he narrates in a cynical and jaded voice. He finds the hypocrisy and ugliness of the world around him almost unbearable, and through his cynicism he tries to protect himself from the pain and disappoint of the adult world. Nine Stories (1953)

Franny and Zooey (1961)

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

3. Point of view: One of his frequent themes is young people longing for simplicity and truth instead of complexity and hypocrisy of the life they observed around them. In his novels, he questions the moral foundations of society and often places innocent idealist characters in setting where a vicious, corrupt society could destroy them. Although his stories are often pessimistic, the characters represent hope rather than despair. They want to affirm truth. They deplore the lies with which the society conceals its own corruption. They withdraw the society, become drop-outs rather than participants in the society.

John Updike (1932 –2009)

1. Life:

2. Works: Updike's most famous work is his Harry Rabbit Angstrom series (the novels Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit at Rest; and the novella Rabbit Remembered), which chronicles Rabbit's life over the course of several decades, from young adulthood to his death. Both Rabbit Is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990) received the Pulitzer Prize. Updike is one of only three authors to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction more than once (the others were Booth Tarkington and William Faulkner).

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Postmodernism: The term postmodernism is used to describe some tendencies in post-world warⅡ literature. Continuing the narrative experiments of modernists, the first generation of postmodernists produced texts that simultaneously questioned and violated the conventions of traditional narrative. The fragment, discontinuity and inter-textuality find a fulfillment in the fragmented, discontinuous and inter-textual form of ―hypertext‖, a computer-generated text with multiple branching links. Postmodernism is fully exemplified in the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and John Fowles.

Postmodernism: It is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative. It emphasizes the role of language, power relations and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp classifications, such as male versus female, straight versus gay, white versus black, and imperial versus colonial.

Black Humour: Black Humour is a kind of drama in which disturbing or sinister subjects, like death, disease and warfare are treated with bitter amusement, usually in a manner accumulated to offence and shock. The purpose of black comedy is to make light of serious and often taboo subject matter, and some comedies use it as a tool for exploring important issues, thus provoking discomfort and serious.

Parody: A humorous imitation of a work of art for comic effect or ridicule. Metafiction:

Chapter 7 Post-war American Novel（The Postmodernist Novel）

Joseph Heller (1923 –1999)

1. Life: 2. Works:

Catch-22 It is not only a war novel, but also a novel about people‘s life in peaceful time. This novel attacked the dehumanization

of all contemporary institutions and corruptions of individuals who gain power in institutions. Armed-forces are the most outrageous example of the two evils. 3. Style:

Language: circular conversation, wrenched cliché

Kurt Vonnegut (1922 –2007)

1. Life:

2. Works: His works such as Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions blend satire, gallows humour and science fiction.

Cat's Cradle (1963)

Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Plot summary: Chaplain's Assistant Billy Pilgrim is a disoriented, fatalistic, and ill-trained American soldier, one who refuses to fight (\Bulge. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse (although there are animal carcasses hanging in the underground shelter) in Dresden. Their building is known as \nf\the POWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar. Because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm.

Billy's near death is the consequence of a string of events. Before the Germans capture Billy, he meets Roland Weary, a jingoist character and bully, just out of childhood like Billy, who constantly chastises him for his lack of enthusiasm for war. When captured, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him hinged, wooden clogs to wear; Weary eventually dies of gangrene caused by the clogs. While dying in a railcar full of POWs, Weary manages to convince another soldier, Paul Lazzaro, that Billy is to blame. Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is \in life.\Lazzaro later pays to have Billy shot and killed with a laser gun after his speech on flying saucers and the true nature of time before a large audience in Chicago, in a balkanized United States on February 13, 1976 (the future at the time of the book's writing).

Ken Kesey (1935 –2001) was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). John Barth (born in 1930) is an American short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictional quality of

his work. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of short stories.

Thomas Pynchon (1937) is an American novelist. Pynchon won the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction and he is

regularly cited by Americans as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. He is noted for his dense and complex novels, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science, and mathematics. 1. Life:

2. Works: he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), and Mason &

Dixon (1997).

William Seward Burroughs (also known by his pen name William Lee, 1914 –1997) was an

American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and painter. He is a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author. The Naked Lunch

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Harlem Renaissance: It was a cultural movement that spanned in 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was called the ―New Negro Movement‖ which was a burst of literary achievement by Negro playwrights, poets and novelists who presented new insights into American experience and prepare the way for the emergence of numerous black writers after mid-twentieth century. Langston Hughes has been regarded as the spokesman of this movement.

Richard Wright (1908 –1960) His work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century. 1. Life: 2. Works:

Chapter 8 Black American Literature

Uncle Tom’s Children Native Son Black Boy

The Outsider (the first novel of existentialism in America, published in France)

3. Theme: His common theme is to condemn racism, urge reform, and criticize evils of society. His books focus on racial conflict and physical violence. They review the devastating effect of institutionalized hatred (hatred brought by social system) and humiliation on black males‘ psyche. They affirmed dignity and humility of society‘s outcasts. He tries to show that people cannot escape from society. Therefore, society must be changed. He is a father figure, especially to the writers of violence.

Ralph Ellison (1914 –1994)

1. Life: 2. Works:

Invisible Man (1952)

James Baldwin

1. Life: 2. Works:

Go Tell It on the Mountain Notes of a Native Son Nobody Knows My Name The Fire Next Time

Toni Morrison (born 1931) is an American novelist, editor, professor and a Nobel Prize winner.

The Bluest Eye Sula

Song of Solomon is the best black novel after Native Son and Invisible Man Tar Baby

Beloved She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Beloved Jazz

Love (trilogy)

1. Life:

2. Works: Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved.

Themes: love, guilt, history, individual, gender, race, religion

Purpose: to empower the black people to act for themselves, to recognize for their own world, own history, own reality Style – many kinds of factors: naturalism, realism, fantasy, reality, magical realism

Alice Walker (born 1944) is an American author, poet, womanist, and activist. 1. Life:

2. Works: She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Once (a collection of poems)

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (―womanism‖ instead of feminism) The Colour Purple (epistolary)

Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to \her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, and pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.

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