专八人文常识辅导材料(美国文学).doc

American Literature: A Concise History
I. Review
1. Who wrote The American? (2008)
A. Herman Melville B. Nathaniel Hawthorne
C. Henry James D. Theodore Dreiser

2. Death of a Salesman was written by____. (2007)
A. Arthur Miller B. Ernest Hemingway
C. Ralph Ellison D. James Baldwin

3. The novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is written by___. (2006)
A. Scott Fitzgerald B. William Faulkner
C. Eugene O’Neil D. Ernest Hemingway

4. William Sydney Porter, known as O’Henry, is most famous for_____. (2005)
A. his poems B. his plays
C. his short stories D. his novels

II. Historical Periods

1. Colonial Period: 17th~18th (faith → reason)
2. Romantic Period: end of 18th to the Civil War ★
3. The Age of Realism: 1865-1890 ★
4. The Age of Naturalism: 1890-1900
5. Modern Period: 1912-1945 ★
6. Postwar Realism: 1950s-1960s
7. Postmodernism: 1960s-1980s

III. Key Figures

1. Benjamin Franklin
2. James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving; Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson/Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville (R. W. Emerson, H.D. Thoreau)
3. O’Henry, Henry James, Mark Twain
4. Stephan Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London
5. Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, R.L. Frost/Ernest Hemingway, F.S. Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck/Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller
6. Jerome Salinger
7. Nabokov

Mark Twain: ① Trend: realism (local colorism) ② Genre: fiction ③ Masterpiece: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ④ Distinctive Style: vernacular language ⑤ Other Important Works

IV. Sample

1. American literature produced only one female poet during the 19th century. She was __________.
A. Anne Bradstreet B. Jane Austen
C. Katherine Anne Porter D. Emily Dickinson

2. The first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was a sharp social critic, whose name was __________.
A. T.S. Eliot B. Sinclair Lewis
C. Ernest Hemingway D. William Faulkner

3. Which of the following is NOT included in Dreiser’s
trilogy of desire concerning the ruthlessness of
capitalists?
A. The Genius B. The Financier
C. The Titan D. The Stoic

4. With Howells, James, and Mark Twain active on the scene, __________ became the major trend in the seventies and eighties of the nineteenth century.
A. sentimentalism B. romanticism
C. realism D. naturalism

5 From 1732 to 1758, Franklin wrote and published his famous __________, an annual collection of proverbs.
A. Autobiography
B. Poor Richard’s Almanac
C. Common Sense
D. The General Magazine

6. “The American Renaissance” is the period of ______ in the history of American literature.
A. local colorism B. Romanticism
C. Transcendentalism D. Colonism

7. _________ is Mark Twain’s master work, the one book from which as Hemingway noted, “All modern American literature comes”.
A. The Gilded Age
B. Life on the Mississippi
C. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
D. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

8. _______ is the only American playwright awarded Nobel Prize of Literature.
A. Arthur Miller B. Eugene O’Neill
C. Tennessee Williams D. Sinclair Lewis

9. Which of the following does NOT belong to “Beat Generation”?
A. Jack Kerouac B. F. S. Fitzgerald
C. Allen Ginsberg D. William Burroughs

10. __________ is identified as the father of modern American poetry, who also plays an important role in transmitting Chinese culture to the English-speaking world.
A. T. S. Eliot B. Robert Frost
C. Ezra Pound D. Walt Whitman

I. Colonial Period: 17th~18th
The influence of Puritanism on writing:
fresh, simple and plain
traceable to the direct influence of the Bible
frequent reference to the technique of symbolism

Anne Bradstreet
The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America
Michael Wigglesworth
The Day of Doom
Edward Taylor: a metaphysical poet

Benjamin Franklin: the spokesman of the American Enlightenment (Age of Reason/Great Awakening); created the image of the Yankee
pseudonym: Silence Dogood
Poor Richard’s Almanac
Autobiography

Thomas Paine (his style: plain)
Common Sense—the first pamphlet urging immediate independence from Britain; his most famous pamphlet; the greatest of the Revolutionary pamphlets

Philip Freneau
The first American-born poet; Poet of the American Revolution
Theme: nationalism
The beginning of American Romanticism

II. Romantic Period: 1) Early Romantics
New England Poets (Fireside/Schoolroom Poets):
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The song of Hiawatha—the first American epic in blank verse about the American Indians
The first American poet to be honored by having his bust placed in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey
William Cullen Bryant: the American Wordsworth
Thanatopsis (pondering on death)—his greatest poem
Novelist:
James Fenimore Cooper: the first successful American novelist
32 novels
3 kinds:
about the revolutionary past—The Spy
about the sea—The pilot
★about the frontier—The Leatherstocking Tales (The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer; protagonist: Natty Bumppo-- “the essential American soul” by D. H. Lawrence)

Story Writer and Prose Stylist:
Washington Irving
The Sketch Book won him international fame
“Rip Van Winkle” & “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
“Crayon” style
Introduced the familiar essay to America

II. Romantic Period: 2) Transcendentalists
New England Transcendentalism=American Renaissance
Features:
It stressed the power of intuition.
It placed spirit first and matter second.
It took nature as symbolic of spirit or God.
It emphasized the significance of the individual.
It envisioned religion as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “Oversoul”.
It held that commerce was degrading.
The Transcendental Club & their journal The Dial

Essayists:
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transcendentalism’s most seminal force
The Lyceum Movement
Nature— “the manifesto of American transcendentalism”
The American Scholar— “America’s Declaration of Intellectual Independence”

Henry David Thoreau
His first major influence: nonviolent struggle as expressed in his “Civil Disobedience”
His second major influence: call of “Back to Nature”
Walden—a classic of American prose; reads like a diary of a nature lover
Symbolism

II. Romantic Period: 3) High Romantics
Edgar Allan Poe
Literary theories:
1) A theory of Poetry
The most important purpose of poetry is the creation of beauty (English as a medium of pure musical and rhythmic beauty).
The tone of its highest manifestation is one of sadness.
The death of a beautiful woman is the most potential topic.
death – predominant theme in Poe’s writing
“Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everything in Poe’s writings is dead.”
2) About His Fiction
The mental world of the people should be illuminated.
The principle of concentration and thematic totality should be stressed.
Truth rather than beauty is often the aim of the tale.
Literary achievements:
The Raven—his most famous narrative poem
Detective stories, ratiocinative stories & science fiction
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Masque of the Red Death

Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass (9 editions)—America’s first genuine epic poem
Style: free verse
The envelope structure, catalogue technique, thought rhythm
Represents a turning point in the history of American poetry

Emily Dickinson
For the whole 19th century she was the only woman poet who enjoys high academic esteem today.
Poems
Themes:
religion – doubt and belief about religious subjects
death and immortality
love – suffering and frustration caused by love
physical aspect of desire
nature – kind and cruel
free will and human responsibility

Nathaniel Hawthorne—the first American romancer; the first major novelist in English to wed morality to art
His novels were perhaps the deepest and most psychological in the 19th century.
The Scarlet Letter
Hester Prynne, Pearl, Chillingworth, Dimmesdale
Point of view: Evil is at the core of human life. Wherever there is sin, there is punishment. Sin or evil can be passed from generation to generation.

Herman Meiville—an adventure writer, known as “a man who lived with cannibals”
Moby Dick—the first American prose epic; the greatest American novel by some critics
A symbol to represent cruel, brutal, malicious powers of nature
The technique of multiple views
Style: highly symbolic and metaphorical

III. The Age of Realism
Features:
truthful description of life
typical character under typical circumstance
objective rather than idealized, close observation and investigation of life
“Realistic writers are like scientists.”
open-ending:
Life is complex and cannot be fully understood. It leaves much room for readers to think by themselves.

William Dean Howells
Productive except the genre of poetry
The Rise of Silas Lapham

William Sydney Porter (O. Henry)
The surprise ending is his specialty, e.g. “The Cop and the Anthem”.
Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio

★Henry James: novels of manners
Developed the international novel
Daisy Miller established his reputation at home and abroad (theme: American innocence vs. European sophistication)
The Ambassadors: his most “perfect” work of art, claimed by himself
3 influential subjects: children, new women and artists
Theory of fiction in his The Art of Fiction
Chief criterion: showing rather than telling
honors: the first of the “modern psychological novelists”
A “realist of the inner life”
A bridge of American and European cultures

Local Colorism
The late 1860s to early 1870s
To write or present local characters of their regions in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.
Hamlin Garland’s “Under the Lion’s Paw”
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin—the greatest of all anti-slavery literature

Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)— “the Lincoln of our literature”; the true father of American literature
One famous essay: “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”
His greatest achievement: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Other works: His penname was made famous by “The Notorious Jumping Frog of the Calaverus County”;
The Gilded Age: a satire against corruption
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Life on the Mississippi
colloquial language, vernacular language, dialects
local colour
syntactic feature: sentences are simple, brief, sometimes ungrammatical
humour
tall tales (highly exaggerated)
social criticism (satire on the different ugly things in society)

III. The Age of Realism: Comparison
Theme
Howells – middle class
James – upper class
Twain – lower class
Technique
Howells –genteel realism
James – psychological realism
Twain – local colorism and colloquialism

IV. The Age of Naturalism
Realism vs. Naturalism:
Though naturalists also describe real life, they present harsher reality, usually the violent, sensational, unpleasant, and ugly aspects of life.
Their writing style and technique were more innovative.

Stephan Crane--pessimism
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets—the first naturalistic novel written by an American
The Red Badge of Courage—his most famous book about the American Civil War
Style: realistic, naturalistic, and impressionistic
Frank Norris--optimism
McTeague—the first full-bodied naturalistic American novel
The Octopus—his most impressive prose epic

Theodore Dreiser–“the wheelhouse of American naturalism”
Sister Carrie: a slave to her heredity and to her environment
An American Tragedy: his masterpiece
Style: journalistic method of reiteration, word-pictures, sharp contrast, stubborn honesty

Jack London
The Son of the Wolf—first collection of the stories
The Call of the Wild—an all-time best seller
His fiction has the unusual and intriguing power of ancient myth.
The originator of a new type of writing: rough realism

V. Modern Period: 1) Poetry
Sub-branches:
Imagism, symbolism, impressionism, futurism, constructivism, surrealism, etc
Features:
Modernism dramatized discontinuity.
Modernists had a sense of fragmentation.
It has a strong and conscious break with tradition. (stream of consciousness)

V. Modern Period 1) Poetry
Ezra Pound—the father of modern American poetry
Cantos—his major work of poetry
Cathay—a volume of Chinese translations
Style: clarity, precision and a direct conversational diction, economy of verse
Imagism

T. S. Eliot—a poet, a playwright, and a literary critic
He declared himself a “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion”
The Waste Land—a central poem of modernism; reads like a manifesto of the “Lost Generation”
Five segments
Organizing principle: the myth of death and rebirth

New England Poets:
E. A. Robinson won Pulitzer for three times.
Robert Lee Frost—the most popular American poet from 1914 to his death
He won Pulitzer for four times.
Pastoral poetry

V. Modern Period 2) Fiction
Lost Generation:
The term was first used by Gertrude Stein.
Ernest Hemingway—a Nobel Prize Winner (1954)
The Sun also Rises
A Farewell to Arms: established his reputation as a great American writer
For Whom the Bell Tolls
The Old Man and the Sea
Telegraphic style
Iceberg theory of writing
“the code hero”

Francis Scott Fitzgerald
This Side of Paradise—his first novel the first American novel depicting the casual dissipations of “flaming youth”
The Great Gatsby—his best novel which deals with the frustration and despair resulting from the failure of the American dream
★Sinclair Lewis—the first American writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature (1930)
Main Street satirizes the smug provincial complacency of the middle class
Babbitt—his masterpiece
The word “babbittry” means energetic shallowness and self-satisfaction
Satiric monologue

John Steinbeck—the foremost writer of the Great Depression
The Grapes of Wrath—his masterpiece, won a Pulitzer Prize
A combination of naturalist and symbolist technique

V. Modern Period: 3) Drama
Eugene O’Neill—the founder of modern American drama
3 Pulitzer Prizes & the Nobel Prize
Introduced trends of realism, naturalism and expressionism
Beyond the Horizon
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Tennessee Williams
The Glass Menagerie
A Streetcar Named Desire—won him his first Pulitzer Prize
Colloquial southern speech
Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman—his masterpiece; an American myth and a contemporary tragedy

VI. Postwar Realism
John Cheever—short fiction
John Updike—the most realistic of all the postwar realists; “Olinger” stories
James Thurber—the greatest American literary humorist of the 20th century
Jerome Salinger—a representative of alienated young Americans; generation gap
The Catcher in the Rye—a modern Huck Finn

VII. Post-modernism: Fiction
Modernism vs. post-m