英美文选总复习.doc

Unit 1 Benjamin Franklin
-writer, scientist, political economist
Literary works

Style

Significance

Literary works

Poor Richard’s Almanac
---gives advice in maxims, that is proverbs with practical wisdom.

Autobiography
---most important work. It has lasting charm to those who are pursuing their American dream in America.

Style

clear and even plain

rather formal , but the organization is informal.

full of his humor and satire.
Significance
the first self-made man in America
considered as the symbol of American dream
symbol of America in the age of Enlightenment
brought the colonial era to a close.
a Jack of all trades
Unit2 Edgar Allan Poe
-writer, poet and critic
Works

Comment
Works
Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque 《奇异怪诞故事集》
The Murders in the Rue Morgue 《毛格街杀人案》
The Fall of the House of Usher《厄舍古屋的倒塌》
The Masque of the Red Death 《红色死亡的化妆舞会》
The Cask of Amontillado《一桶酒的故事》
The Philosophy of Composition 《创作哲学》
The Poetic Principle《诗歌原理》
The Raven《乌鸦》
Comment
Master of horror;

the father of the detective story ;

the first master of the short-story form

advocacy “art for art’s sake”.
New England Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Henry David Thoreau

Ⅰ.Transcendentalism
started in the early 19th century and flourished in New England
summit of American Romanticism.
the first American intellectual movement, represented a new way of intellectual thinking in America
leaded by Emerson with his book Nature
Transcendentalism
Major features ---
Spirit or Oversoul: the universe is composed of Nature and Soul. Spirit is everywhere.
Individualism: the most important element in society, the divinity of individual.
Nature: is a connecting link between God and man. It is a symbol of the Spirit.

Transcendentalism
Influences---
American: an ethical guide to life for a young nation ; stressed religious tolerance; helped to create the first American renaissance
American culture: individualism; seclusion; morality; environmental protect; women movement; anti-slavery;
American literature: Scarlet Letter; Moby Dick; Hackberry Finn; The Awakening;

Ⅱ. Unit3 Ralph Waldo Emerson
- essayist and poet
Significance

Main Works

Influences
Significance
brought back the influence of European Romanticism.
founded a Transcendentalists' Club and published a journal
became the most eloquent spokesman of Transcendentalism.
his aesthetics brought about a revolution in American literature. It marked the birth of true American poetry.
called for an independent culture

Main Works
Essays:
Nature ★ 《论自然》
American Scholar《论美国学者》
3.Essays《论文集》
4.Representative Men 《人类代表》
Poems:
1. Poems《诗集》
2. May Day《五月节》

Influences
Nature , the Bible of Transcendentalism
“The American Scholar”, regarded as “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”
“Self-Reliance”, the importance of cultivating oneself. “ believe yourself ” is his main point of ethics
Ⅲ. Unit 6 Henry David Thoreau
-an essayist, philosopher and poet
Main Works

Points of view

Evaluation

Walden

Main Works
1. “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience”《论公民的不服从》

2.Two very important works：
Walden ★ 《沃尔登》
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River《在康科德与梅里马克河上一周》

Points of view
1. He did not like the way a materialistic America was developing.
2. He hated the human injustices represented by the slavery system.
3. Like Emerson, but more than him, Thoreau saw nature as a genuine restorative, healthy influence on man’s spiritual well-being.
4. He has faith in the inner virtue and inward, spiritual grace of man.
5. He was very critical of modern civilization.
6. He preferred a simplified life.

Evaluation
influenced by Emerson and was Emerson’s man of action
regarded as a prophet of individualism in American literature
His first major influence is his thought of nonviolent struggle expressed in his “Civil Disobedience”
second major influence is his call of “Back to Nature”.

Walden
described the author’s extremely simple life
on self-culture and human perfectibility
criticized the modern civilization and told people to leave the life of hurry and bustle and to sink themselves in nature
Spiritual richness is real wealth
Use metaphor, pun, allusion

Unit 4 Nathaniel Hawthorne
-novelist and short story teller
Significance
Main Works
Points of View
Theme
Style
The Scarlet Letter

Significance
1. He was a master of psychological insight.

2. He was a very important moralist novelist in the 19th century.

3. His original writing style profoundly influenced his contemporary writers and some other American writers after him.

Main Works

The Scarlet Letter ★《红字》
Twice-Told Tales《故事重述》
Mosses from an Old Manse《古宅青苔》
The House of the Seven Gables《带有七个尖角阁的房子》
The Blithedale Romance《福谷传奇》
The Marble Faun《玉石雕像》

Points of View
He disagrees with transcendentalism.
He believes that evil educates.
Whenever there is sin, there is punishment. Sin or evil can be passed down from generation to generation.
Evil is at the core of human life. Hawthorne has a “black” vision of life and human beings.
Theme
1. New England regional past and American past

2. Secret guilt and evil

3. Alienation and solitude

4. Original sin and its influence

5. Complexity of human psychology; “interior of the heart”
Style
1. The use of symbolism

2. Revelation of character’s psychology

3. The use of supernatural mixed with the actual

4. Allegory—to teach or preach

5. The use of ambiguity to keep the reader in the world of uncertainty

The Scarlet Letter
best-known novel
Social life of Puritan in New England in 17th century
Symbolism: A = Adultery angel able\ability
Characters:
Hester Prynne: truth, love and beauty
Dimmesdale: a split personality, hypocrisy
Chillingworth: wickedness, darkness, hatred, evil, defect in human personality
Pearl: hope

Unit 5 Herman Melville
-novelist and poet

Reputation

Main Works

Reputation
an adventure writer
regarded as great as Whitman, and Faulkner
creates the first American prose epic, Moby Dick
Moby Dick is recognized as one of the greatest American novels
Main Works
1.Novels:
Typee《泰比》
Omoo《欧穆》
Mardi《玛地》
Redburn《雷得本》
White Jacket《白外衣》
Moby Dick ★ 《白鲸》
—Melville’s masterpiece, a significant philosophical work on spiritual exploration
Pierre
The Confidence Man《骗子的化妆表演》

2. Collections of Poems:（了解）
Battle Pieces《战事集》
Clarel《克拉瑞尔》
John Marr and Other Sailors《约翰·玛尔和其他水手》
Timoleon《梯摩里昂》
The Backround of American
Realism
时间：19世纪后半页，尤指19世纪70，80年代
失去希望的美国人去了西部，人们变得更实际的面对生活
因为国家的发展，渐渐有人失去了浪漫的想象逐渐转向务实。因此，现实主义的时代来了。
就像马克吐温的The Gilded Age 《镀金时代》所描述，美国社会表面繁荣，贫穷的阴暗面同样在发展.
American Realism
Mark Twain（1835--1910）
Life story / Works / Style Main works / Reputation
Henry James（1843—1916)
Life story / Woks / Others
Life Story
Real name : Samuel Langhorne
Clemens
他是美国的幽默大师、小说家、作家，也是著名演说家。
He lived in a town named Hannibal along the Mississippi when he was a child. His life experience in the town was used in his famous novels.

Continue
When he was 12,his father died and he left hometown and lived on all kinds of odd jobs .
After marriage he moved to New England and gradually became a famous writer.
His late life was a tragedy.(因患不治之症身亡）。
Three stages of his thought and works
1. Active ,humor and lively
2. Full of acid(尖酸的，刻薄的） and critical words
3. A little disappointed and pessimistic (悲观的）
Works
A. Short story:
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” （第一部幽默短篇）
“The Million Pound Note”
“Running for Governor”
B. Novels
The Gilded Age（美国现实主义文学开山之作）
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Prince and the Pauper
Life on Mississippi
C. Social Critic-- wrote lots of passages criticizing the racial discrimination .
Writing Style
Colloquial language, dialects(方言）
Local color（乡土特色）
Sentences: simple, brief, sometimes ungrammatical
Humor
Tall tales: highly exaggerated（夸张） stories
Social criticism: satire on the ugly things in society

Local Colorism
乡土特色已经成为一种趋势，在19世纪60年代末和1870年代初美国文学占主导地位。它是美国现实主义文学的变化

它指的是在散文的设置，方言，习俗，服饰等方面有其自身的区域性代表特色 和思维方式。
Representatives:
Mark Twain Harriet Beecher Stowe(斯托夫人） William Faulkner Willa Cather

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
This is a “tall tale” filled with the kind of exaggeration and comedy that characterize the frontier life.(幽默、夸张 、讽刺相结合）
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Twain chose to use the colloquial style in this novel--- a very important contribution to American literature.
Features of the language used in the novel: mostly Anglo-Saxon in origin, short, concrete and direct in effect; sentence structure is mostly simple or compound; repetition of words; ungrammatical elements.

Reputation
他曾被W.D.Howells誉为：文学史上的林肯。
海明威曾经写下: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn… It’s the best book we’ve had… There was nothing before.
威廉·福克纳称马克·吐温为“第一位真正的美国作家，我们都是继承他而来”。
海伦·凯勒曾言：“我喜欢马克吐温——谁会不喜欢他呢？即使是上帝，亦会钟爱他，赋予其智慧，并于其心灵里绘画出一道爱与信仰的彩虹。
Henry James（life story）
He is a novelist, critic
Born in a wealthy and cultured family
Attended Harvard Law School but read literary works there
Toured in Europe and met many famous writer
Wanted to be a critic in New York but could not endure the prevailing materialism
In 1876, left for England and became an English citizen in 1915
Works
The American
Daisy Miller
The Portrait of a Lady(被普遍认为是他的名作）
The Bostonians
The Turn of the Screw
The Wings of the Dove
The Ambassadors
The Golden Bowl
His literary criticism:
“The Art of Fiction”

Others
“The international theme”
国际主题是詹姆斯的一个重要写作方向，代表作:The American Scene《美国所见》
他创造的“Psychological Realism”，成为20世纪的“意识流”的先行者。

Comparison
writers
characters techniques

Henry James
Upper class
Psychological Realism（心理现实主义）
Mark Twain Lower class Local color and colloquialism

Unit 7 19th-Century American Poets
1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807~1882)
2.Edgar Allan Poe (1809~1849)
3. Walt Whitman (1819~1892)
4.Emily Dickinson(1830~1886)

Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow (1807-1882)

1. Life story Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a New England poet. He was born in Portland in Maine on February 27 in 1807. His father was a well-to-do lawyer. After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1826, Longfellow traveled for three years in France, Germany, Italy, and England to learn modern languages. When he returned home, he took up the career as a college professor of foreign languages at Bowdoin and Harvard. He received honorary degrees from the Oxford and Cambridge Universities when he was in Europe from 1868 to 1869. At the same time, Queen Victoria gave him a private audience. His seventy-fifth birthday was celebrated nationally in America. He died in Cambridge, the village outside Boston on March 24, 1882.

2.works
Voices of the Night 1839
Ballads and Other Poems 1842
Evangeline 1847
The Song of Hiawatha
— It is the first American epic in blank verse about the American Indians.
-I Shot an Arrow…
-A Psalm of Life

3. Style
1) He wrote about American subjects, but always in European style.

2) He had a melancholy vision of life, but his poems have a manly, affirmative note.

3) Many critics complain that his writing is too sentimental and romantic.

4) The gentleness, sweetness, and purity were the very qualities that made his poetry popular during his lifetime.

4. Significance

1) He was the first American poet to write narrative poems. And he helped create a national myth in his historical narratives and patriotic poems.
2) He was the first American poet to be honored by having his bust placed in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. This indicates that his poetry has been highly appreciated in Britain.
3) Being a highly learned and cultivated man, he represent Victorian culture in America.
4) He was the leading figure of the Boston Brahmin Poets (the patrician, well-educated poets in New England).
5) He was one of the classroom poets whose portraits were put up in the classroom to be honored by the students.
6) He exercised a great influence in bringing European culture to the U.S., and likewise did much to popularize American folk themes abroad.

Poems by Poe

SONNET- TO SCIENCE
TO HELEN

1. Life story

Walt Whitman (1819-1892), was an outstanding American poet in the 19th century. He was born on May 31, 1819 in West Hills farming community on Long Island, New York in a poor family. The family moved to Brooklyn in 1823. He received very little education. After doing odds jobs, he began his literary career. After 1880 he began to gain his recognition as a poet. He was poor all his life and never married. He died at Camden on March 26, 1892.
2. Literary works

Whitman devoted himself to complete
his only collection of poems:
Leaves of Grass
The collection ran nine editions in 1855, 1856,
1860, 1867, 1871,1876, 1881, 1889, 1891-92,
containing 12 poems in the first edition and
more than 400 poems in the last.

Leaves of Grass

It is significant that the poet entitled his book “Leaves of Grass”. He once said that:
“Where there is earth, where there is water, there is grass.”

Grass, the most common thing with the greatest vitality, is an image of the poet himself, a symbol of the then rising American nation and an embodiment of Whitman’s ideals about democracy and freedom.

Some famous poems in the Collection:
“Song of Myself”
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”
One’s Self I Sing
O Captain! My Captain!

3. Theme

“Whitman was a catalog of American and European thought.” he was influenced by many American and European thoughts: enlightenment, idealism, transcendentalism, evolution ideas, western frontier spirits, Jefferson’s individualism, the Civil War unionism, and orientalism (Chinese and Indian philosophies).
1) equality
2) Divinity（神性） → individualism
3) Democracy
4) Expansion of America
5) Brotherhood and social solidarity
6) Pursuit of love and happiness
7) Multiplicity of nature
→ The themes of Whitman are well revealed in his short poem “One’s Self I Sing