美国文学选读复习手册.doc

美国文学选读复习资料
浪漫主义
American Romanticism
The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a period of the great flowering of American literature.
The social and cultural background of Romanticism
The young Republic was flourishing into a politically, economically and culturally independent country.
The Romantic writings revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native lands.
The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature.
The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values.

爱默生
Emerson = The chief spokesman of New England Transcendentalism 超验主义
He was a descendent of a long line of New England clergymen牧师【pastor】.

American Transcendentalism
As a philosophical and literary movement, American Transcendentalism (also known as “ American Renaissance”) flourshed in New England from the 1830s to the Civil War. It is the high tide of American romanticism and its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalists spoke for the cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society.
Transcendentalism 超验主义(+ H. D. Thoreau; Nathaniel Hawthorne; )
The major features of Transcendentalism:
① The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. 思想 超灵 宇宙
② The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society. 个体+社会
③ The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was not purely matter. It was alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence. 自然+上帝

Emerson’s代表作：Nature；Self-Reliance；The American Scholar；The Over-soul；

H. D. Thoreau 梭罗and his work
Walden 瓦尔登湖not only fully demonstrates Emersonian ideas of self-reliance but also develops and tests Thoreau’s own transcendental philosophy.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 朗费罗
Features of Longfellow’s poetic works
l Chief romantic tendencies as humanitarian attitude, love of nature and love of beauty.
l The first American poet to write narrative poems.
l Conventional style and subjects
l Generally simple ideas expressed musically and powerfully.
l Simplicity and detachment from the deep problems of contemporary life
Daybreak；The Bells

William Faulkner(1897-1962 1949 Nobel price
“Stream of Consciousness” 意识流or “interior monologue”,内心独白 is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce.
The Sound and the Fury (1929) 人物??
As I Lay Dying (1930)
Light in the August ( 1932)
Absalom, Absalom (1936)
Go Down Moses (1942)

Ernest Hemingway
Iceberg Principle (Theory):冰山法则
The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
Code hero
a noble but tragic hero; fighting with the overwhelming force; though he knows that he will be defeated at last, he decides to act like a hero. In one sense Hemingway wrote all his life about one theme, which is neatly summed up in the famous phrase “grace under pressure”
Major Works:
The Sun Also Rises 1926 (Jake Barnes)
A Farewell to Arms 1928 (a tragic story about war and love) (Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley)
For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940 (Spanish civil war) (Robert Jordan)
The Old Man and the Sea 1952 (Santiago)

Herman Melville
代表作：白鲸Moby Dick Other Works are: Billy Budd,Typee, Omoo, Mardi.
Symbolism in Moby Dick：It is regarded as the first American prose epic. 散文史诗？
It turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth 寻找真理and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man’s deep reality and psychology.
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 white whale, Moby Dick, symbolizes nature for Melville, for it is complex, unfathomable难以理解的, malignant恶性的, and beautiful as well.

Realism 浪漫主义之后，现代主义之前
As a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism with the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Romanticism and sentimentalism, and paved the way to Modernism.
This literary interest in the so-called “reality” of life started a new period in the American literary writing known as The Age of Realism.
Psychological Realism
It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. And Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it.

The three dominant figures of the period are William Dean Howells豪威尔斯, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Mark Twain and Howells seemed to have paid more attention to the “life” of the Americans, and Henry James had apparently laid greater emphasis on the “inner world” of man.

William Dean Howells：The Rise of Silas Lapham
Henry James：The Portrait of a Lady (Isabel Archer; Madam Merle; Gilbert Osmond)
Daisy Miller (Daisy; Mr. Winterbourne; Mr. Giovanelli)

Mark Twain = Samuel Langhorne Clemens Missouri Writing: humor and local colorism 地方特色
The characteristics of local colorism
Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories. This particular concern about the local character of a region came about as “local colorism,” a unique variation of American literary realism.
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” brought him recognition from a wider public. His best works were produced when he was in the prime of his life：Life on the Mississippi & The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Mark Twain’s most representative work：The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
His humor, a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism, is remarkable.

Nathaniel Hawthorne effected by 超验主义
One of the most ambivalent writers in the American literary history.
The Scarlet Letter:红字
Other works: Mosses from an Old Manse; Twice-Told Tales; The Marble Faun; The House of the Seven Gables
He is a master of symbolism, which he took from the Puritan tradition 清教徒传统and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form.
In his masterpiece, by using Pearl as a thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community. With the scarlet A as the biggest symbol of all, which is ambiguous, he proves himself to be one of the best symbolists.

American Naturalism 自然主义
The impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory达尔文进化论 on the American thought and the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school of realism: American naturalism.
The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral与道德无关的, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity遗传 and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion湮没 in death. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity.
代表作家
Stephen Crane；Frank Norris；Theodore Dreiser；Edwin Arlington Robinson；Upton Sinclair；Jack London；O’ Henry
Stephen Crane：Maggie: A Girl of the Streets；The Red Badge of Courage；The Open Boat；
The Black Riders and Other Lines；War Is Kind
Edwin Arlington Robinson：Richard Cory
Jack London：The Call of the Wild；The White Fang；The Sea Wolf；Martin Eden
Upton Sinclair：The Jungle
O.Henry (William Sydney Porter)：The Gift of the Magi；The Cop and the anthem
Theodore Dreiser：Trilogy of Desire:1.The Financier2. The Titan3. The Stoic；
Sister Carrie；Jennie Gerhardt；An American Tragedy

The 20th Century American Poets：
Two characteristic strains：introspection自省&social criticism
T.S.Eliot：The Waste Land
Imagism 意象派
A poetic movement of England and the U.S. that flourished from 1909 to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. “poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impressions”
Three main principles of the Imagist Movement (1912) :
[1] direct treatment of poetic subjects
[2] elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, to use no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
[3] rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome.

Ezra Pound：Idaho爱达荷洲worked for the Italian government in WW II, engaged in some radio broadcasts of antiSemitism and pro-Fascism.
代表作:Cantos; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley; In a Station of the Metro; Cathay
William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow
E.E.Cummings: L(a; r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
Wallace Stevens: Anecdote of the Jar

The 20th Century American Poets:
Major Features
1. The relationship of art and life; reality and imagination; fact and miracle; chaos and order.
2. References to painting, music, and color.
3. Abstract, philosophical, and difficult. He saw poetry as a personal transaction between self and reality.
4. Meticulous language, though frequently exotic; coined words, and some are employed simply for sound effects.
Robert Frost: Fire and Ice; Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; The Road Not Taken
Major Features:
1. His verse was terrifying at first, showing the dark side of human life and society. Later, filled with sunshine.
2.New England as the setting; The subjects come from daily life of ordinary life;Rural poetry in pastoral tradition. ( Wordsworth; Emerson)
3.His themes include landscape and people of New England, loneliness and poverty of isolated farmers, beauty, terror and tragedy in nature.
Simple language, a graceful style and traditional forms of poetry.
诗歌鉴赏：In both "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken," the speaker hesitates on route. Compare the hesitations. Do they derive from the same impulse and misgiving or are they distinct?
Langston Hughes: The first prominent black writer in American literary history.
Poet Laureate of Harlem & O’ Henry of Harlem
A poet, playwright, novelist, song writer, biographer, editor, newspaper columnist, translator, lecturer.
主要作品：The Weary Blues, The Dream keeper and Other Poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew
Harlem Renaissance
In the 1920s in America, there was an upsurge of Black literature, popularly known as the “Harlem Renaissance”, out of which such eminent literary figures as Langston Hughes grew. So, “Harlem Renaissance” is a burst of literary achievement in the 1920s by Negro playwrights, poets and novelists who presented new insights into the American experience and prepared the way for the emergence of numerous Black writers after mid-twentieth century.
The Harlem Renaissance began with a work entitled: New Negro: An Interpretation (by Alain Locke).
Dialect, folklore, and Jazz.

The Modern Period
Part I The 1920s-1930s ( the second renaissance of American literature)
l The Roaring Twenties (economically)
l The Jazz Age (socially)
l “lost” and “waste land” (spiritually)
There had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences.
Darwinism(Darwin), Socialism (Karl Marx), Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)

The Lost Generation
The term “Lost Generation” came from Gertrude Stein, who had a salon in her house for English and American expatriates in Paris. The Phrase was a remark she made to a mechanic in Hemingway’s presence that “You are all a lost generation.”

Gertrude Stein used the term to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. The term is commonly applied to Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings and some others.

Winners of Nobel Prize for Literature during this period
Sinclair Lewis (1930); Eugene O’Neill (1936); Pearl S. Buck (1938); T.S. Eliot (1948); William Faulkner (1949); Ernest Hemingway (1954); John Steinbeck (1962)
Sinclair Lewis
l Main Street (masterpiece) (a bitter satire on the life style of American small towns)
Carol Milford // Will Kennicott
l Babbitt

Some other famous writers and poets:
Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio; Hands; Paper Pills
F. Scott. Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby; This Side of Paradise; Tender is the Night; The Beautiful and the Damned
The Last Tycoon ( unfinished)
John Dos Passos
Ezra Pound
Robert Frost
American Dream
The is the idea held by many in the United States that through hard work, courage and determination one could achieve prosperity繁荣. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations.
The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America. He states: "The American Dream is "that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. ….It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position."
In the United States’ Declaration of Independence独立宣言, our founding fathers: "…held certain truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, t