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英语专八美国文学

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American Literature

第一阶段独立革命之前（十七世纪中期之前）The Literature before the Revolution of Independence

第一节美国本土文学（美国印第安传统文学）

Native American Literature (The Traditional Literature of the American Indians)

Three stages of development: traditional literature---transitional literature---modern literature

第二节北美殖民时期文学（十六世纪末—十七世纪中）Literature of Colonial Settlements

John Smith (1580-1631)---the “first author” in the history of American literature;第一位美国作家

---A True Relation with a Description of the Country (1608) 《关于弗吉尼亚的真实叙述》

was considered to be the “first book” in American literature.美国文学史上的“第一部作品”

第三节清教思想的表述 Puritanism

American Puritanism stressed predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement from God’s grace.

第二阶段独立革命时期（17C中期—18C末）The Literature around the Revolution of Independence

With Franklin as its spokesman, the literature of this period experienced an age of reason and order. Thomas Jefferson’s attitude, that is, a firm belief in progress, and the pursuit of happiness, is typical of the period we now call Age of Reason.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) God help those who help themselves.	Poor Richard’s Almanac
	The Autobiography	a book of self-improvement
Thomas Paine (1737-1809) the Father of American Revolution	Common Sense	the greatest Revolutionary pamphlets
	The American Crisis	a series of 16 pamphlets
	Rights of Man; The Age of Reason
Philip Freneau (1752-1832) the poet of the American revolution the Father of American Poetry	The British Prison Ship	英国囚船
	The Rising Glory of America	美国的荣耀蒸蒸日上
	The Indian Burying Ground	印第安人殡葬地 lyric
	The Wild Honey Suckle	野金银花

第三阶段浪漫主义时期（十八世纪末—十九世纪中后期）

American Romanticism was also called American Renaissance. Romantics shared characteristics: moral enthusiasm, individuality and intuitive perception.

早期的浪漫主义作家 Pre-Romanticism
Washington Irving (1783-1859) the first prose stylist of American Romanticism; the Father of American Literature; the first American to achieve international literary reputation.	A History of New York
	The Sketch Book (the beginning of the American romanticism)	Rip Van Winkle The Legend of Sleepy Hollow the most famous and frequently anthologized tales
	Tales of a Traveler; The Alhambra
James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851) developed three kinds of novels: novels about the revolutionary past, sea novels and the American frontier novels.	The Spy
	Leather Stocking Tales (frontier novels)	The Pioneers(the first true romance); The Last of the Mohicans(the best) The Prairie The Deerslayer; The Pathfinder
	The Pilot	Belong to sea novels
炉边诗人 Fireside Poets/ New England Poets: first put American poetry on an equal footing with British poetry.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) the first American poet to write the narrative poems; have his bust placed in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey	Voices of the Night
	A Psalm of Life		The most famous work
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) One of the America’s earliest poets; Stressed the American self consciousness	The Fountain; The White-Footed Deer
	The Forest Hymn; The Flood of Years
	Thanatopsis《死亡随想》		His most famous nature poem
超验主义作家 Writers in Transcendentalism Transcendentalism, which appeared after 1830, marked the maturity of American Romanticism and the first Renaissance in the American literature. It laid emphasis on spirit and individual and nature. Nature—“The universe is composed of nature and the soul. Spirit is present everywhere.” This new voice led American Romanticism to the period of New England Transcendentalism, which was the most significant development of American literature in the mid-19th century. Actually transcendentalism is a philosophical school which absorbed some ideological concerns of American Puritanism and European Romanticism. Emerson and Henry Thoreau were the representatives.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)	Nature (1836)	the manifesto of American transcendentalism
	The American Scholar	America’s Declaration of Intellectual Independence
	Self-Reliance	论自立
	The Transcendentalist;
	Divinity Scholl Address	神学院演说
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)	Walden （masterpiece） a great Transcendentalist work	It stresses the importance of thought over material circumstance
	Civil Disobedience
American romanticism reached its peak with the appearance of the major authors of the 19th century such as Ellen Poe, Whitman and Emily Dickson in poetry, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in fiction.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) the father of the American detective stories; the first American Professional writer	Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque			His first collection of short stories.
	The Fall of the House of Usher
	The Raven; The Helen
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) the most ambivalent writer in the American literature history; the first great American writer of fiction; a master of symbolism; major works in human soul	Mosses from an Old Manse古宅青苔
	The Scarlet Letter (masterpiece)			The way to write this novel suggests that American Romanticism adapted itself to American puritan moralism.
	The House of the Seven Gables			有七个尖角阁楼的房子
	The Blithedale Romance福谷传奇
	The Marble Faun玉石雕像
Herman Melville (1819-1891)	Moby Dick (a Shakespeare tragedy)			The first American prose epic
	Typee 泰比
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) the father of free verse in poetry	Leaves of Grass (Be praised as “Democratic Bible” and “American Epic”)			It marked the end of the American romanticism and the birth of truly American poetry.
	Song of Myself
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) Abundant use of dashes	This is My Letter to the World			The theme is usually religion, life and death, love and marriage, etc. Her poetic idiom is noted for directness, plainest words and brevity.
	I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died

第四阶段现实主义时期（十九世纪中期—二十世纪初）American Realism

Major Features: 1) Straightforward or matter-of-fact manner;

2) Focus on commonness of the lives of the common people;

3) Objective rather than idealistic view of human nature;

4) Present moral visions;

5) Usually open ending.

American industrialization was the first important factor of the development of American Realistic literature. This was the beginning of the Age of Realism, which is also called “the Gilded Age” by Mark Twain.

The development of the Far West was the second important factor to promote the literary development. (The Gold Rush)

Local color fiction had a brief vogue when Realism first emerged in America.

改革者和废奴主义者 The Reformers and Abolitionists
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)	Uncle Tom’s Cabin （the anti-slavery movement）		“the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war”---林肯
现实主义作家 Realism Writers Realism came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. A realistic writer is more objective than subjective, more descriptive than symbolic. Realists looked for truth in everyday truths.
William Dean Howells (1837-1920)	The Rise of Silas Laphams 塞拉斯·拉帕姆的发迹	example of the American realism novels
	A Modern Instance	一个现代的例证
	A Hazard of New Fortunes	新财富的危害（3部小说）
Henry James (1843-1916) the founder of psychological realism	Daisy Miller	“an outrage to American girlhood”
	The Portrait of a Lady	masterpiece
	The Ambassadors 大使们	a comedy of American and European manners
	The Wings of the Dove
乡土文学作家 Local Colorism Writers The ultimate aim of the local colorists or Regionalism is to write or present local characters of their regions in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.
Mark Twain (1835-1910) the true father of our national literature; literary artist\ social critic; be famous for colloquial style and localism the first literary giant---broke out of the narrow limits of local color; described the breadth of American experience	The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country卡拉维拉斯县驰名的跳蛙
	The Innocents Abroad
	The Gilded Age
	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
	The Prince and the Pauper			a historical romance
	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn “all modern American literature comes” by Hemingway			one of the greatest books of western literature and civilization; in colloquial style; Humanitarianism ultimately triumphs.
自然主义作家 Naturalism Writers American Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic.
O · Henry (1862-1910) the father of the modern short story	The Cop and the Anthem; The Last Leaf; The Gift of Magi
Jack London (1876-1916) the founder of psychological realism; spokesman of the working class	The Son of the Wolf			His first collection of short stories
	The Call of the Wild; White Fang
	Martin Eden			the novel into which he put most of himself
	The Sea Wolf
Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)	Sister Carrie			a poor girl who goes to Chicago to pursue the American dream
	Jennie Gerhardt; Trilogy of Desire
	The Financier; The “Genius”
	The American Tragedy			His greatest work
Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941) 舍伍德·安德森	Winesbury, Ohio 俄亥俄州瓦恩斯堡镇			a collection of 23 interrelated stories of small-town life; won him a foremost position in contemporary American literature
Stephen Crane (1871-1900) the pioneer who wrote in the naturalistic tradition	The Red Badge of Courage			landmark in American literary Naturalism
	Maggie: A Girl of the streets			the first naturalistic novel in America
	The Open Boat

第五阶段现代主义时期（二十世纪初—）American Modernism

Modernism used to show the literary art possessing outstanding characteristics in conception, feeling, form and style after the WWⅠ. It means cutting off history and a sense of despair and loss. It refused to accept the traditional concept of value and all traditional ideological influences.

第一节现代诗歌 Modern Poetry

Ezra Pound (1885-1972) the father of modern American poetry; the father of Imagist Poetry, the most influential leader of the Imagist Movement	have influences on the modernist in Britain and America after WWⅡ
	In a Station of the Metro
	The Cantos	awarded the Bollingen Prize
Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) the most welcome of the New England poetry; combined traditional verse forms with a clear American local speech rhythm	New Hampshire The Road Not Taken Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening A Boy’s Will
Wallace Stevens (1876-1955)	The Auroras of Autumn	the most consistent, self-assured spokesman for the rationalist humanist tradition.
Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) poet, playwright, literary critic his teacher: Ezra Pound	Ash Wednesday
	Murder in the Cathedral
	The Waste Land	a central text of modernism
	The Hollow Man; The Sacred Wood
	Gerontion 小老头

第二节现代小说 Modern Fiction

Ernest Hemingway the spokesman for the Lost Generation; theme---courage in face of tragedy; the Nobel Prize in Literature 1954	A Farewell to Arms
	For Whom the Bell Tolls
	The Sun Also Rises	the image of the lost generation
	The Old Man and the Sea (win the Pulitzer Prize)	Theme: man can be destroyed but not defeated
	Death in the Afternoon	The depiction of the bullfight
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) the literary spokesman of the Jazz Age	This Side of Paradise Tales of the Jazz Age Tender Is the Night The Last Tycoon
	The Great Gatsby (masterpiece)	embodies the disillusionment of the American Dream
Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) the first American author to win the Nobel Prize	Main Street
	Badditt 巴比特	the picture of the middle-class business world of post-war America
John Steinbeck (1902-1968) the foremost writer of the Great Depression the Nobel Prize (1962)	The Grapes of Wrath	Won a Pulitzer Prize
	The Pearl
	Of Mice and Men
Jerome David Salinger (1919-) 杰罗姆·戴维·塞林格	The Catcher in the Rye 麦田守望者	the youngster’s rebellions against the dubious values of the adult world
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)	Howl 嚎叫
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)	On the Road
John Updike (1932-) the most realistic of all the postwar realists	The Rabbits Series	the sweet lonesome singer of Protestant mediocrity
William Faulkner (1897-1962) Nobel Prize for literature (1950)	As I Lay Dying
	Light in August
	The Sound and the Fury	a story of “lost innocence” technique: stream of consciousness
	Absalom, Absalom! 押沙龙！	a historical novel
Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) 尤金·奥尼尔 the leading playwright of the modern period of American literature	Long Day’s Journey Into Night	Marked the climax of his literary career and the coming age of American drama
	Beyond the Horizon	Nobel Prize (1936)