AMERICANLITERATURE.doc

AMERICAN LITERATURE
Part I The Early American Literature
(1620--1781)

Chapter I The Seventeenth Century Literature
I. Puritanism in American Literature
1. The first of American literature was not written by an American, but by John Smith, a British captain, who thus became the first American writer. (A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia)
2.The first American woman poet Anne Bradstreet.

Chapter II The Eighteenth Century Literature
I. Major works of this period
Franklin’s Autobiography , Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and Thomas Jefferson’s The Declaration of Independence.
II. Philip Freneau.
He has been entitled the “Father of American Poetry.”

PART II THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM
(1770-1875)
Chapter III American Literature of Pre-Romanticism
I. The Rise of Romanticism
1.The literary movement of American romanticism was generally divided into two stages: pre-romanticism and post-romanticism. The former refers to the beginning stage from 1770s to 1830s; the latter includes thirty year’s flowering time before American Civil War(1865-1860), and ten year’s declining time after the Civil War(1865-1875). The representative writers of pre-romanticism are Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant(1794-1878), and those of post-romanticism are novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville; poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier ,Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson; essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, etc.
2. The Characteristics of Romanticism
In brief, romanticists thought highly of individual status and role in the world. The romanticists preferred the innate or intuitive perception by the heart of man. They thought that man was essentially of goodwill, only the civilized society made him degenerate. They pointed out, the means to uproot evils and to save mankind was habits, and to return to “natural primitive state.”
3.Washing Irving(1783-1859)
a. He was the first great prose stylist of American romanticism, author of the first American short stories and familiar essays , the first American author to achieve international distinction, and has a significant position in the history of American literature.
b. Major works
The Sketch Book(including the immortal “Rip Van Winkle,” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,”)

William Cullen Bryant(1794-1878)
I. He is the first American lyric poet
II. Another treasure that Bryant left was his poetic translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey .

Chapter IV American Literature of Post-Romanticism
I. New England Transcendentalism
1. Transcendentalism
It was the product of a combination of foreign influence and American native Puritan tradition. Though based on the doctrines of ancient and modern European philosophers, particularly Immanuel Kant, the movement took on special significance in the United States, where it so largely dominated many New England authors. They seemed in general harmony in their conviction that within the nature of man there was something which “transcended” human experience-an intuition and personal revelation, There was also the effect of oriental thought on the western works.
2. The contents of Transcendentalism
New England Transcendentalism expressed a new outlook or new ideas on life. “The Universe is composed of Nature and the Soul,” it held. “Spirit is present everywhere. ” It had a considerable influence on the consciousness of man .
a. Transcendentalism laid emphasis first on spirit as “the sun in the material world”, or on the Oversoul.
b. Secondly, it placed emphasis on the importance of the individual-the most important element in the society.
c. Transcendentalism laid stress on Nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God.
d. Fourthly, it also stressed on community living and the dignity of manual labor as an opposition to mechanization.
3. The first renaissance of American literature
The rise of romanticism and the prevalence of Transcendentalism, along with the speedy development of politics, economy, and culture in American society, brought the flowering of American literature in the 19 th century, which could be regarded as the first renaissance.
4. Major writers
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Particularly Thoreau’s Walden, Emerson’s Nature are the two monumental works of Transcendentalism.
Walt Whitman
I. He was a great democratic poet. He is the first great American poet to use this form of free verse.
II. Free Verse
It is a poetic style without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. Free verse has no regular meter, rhythm, or line length and depends on natural speech rhythms and the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables. Leaves of Grass.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
I. He has been considered to be the first great American writer of fiction.
II. Economical Novel
The Scarlet Letter is called an economical novel because there are only three chief characters-or four if we include the child Pearl. The three are Pearl’s mother, Hester Prynne the adulteress; her implacable old husband Roger Chillingworth; and Arthur Dimmesdale,the pious young minister who has fathered her child, and who in failing to confess his sin, endures agonies of guilt.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I. Major Works
Hyperion, Voices of the Night , Evangeline , The Song of Hiawatha, Tales of a Wayside Inn
II. His excellent translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy was published in 1867.
Edgar Allan Poe
I. He is the first American professional writer and the first writer of the detective story in the world.(The Raven )
Harriet Beecher Stowe
President Lincoln praised her as “the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”(Uncle Tom’s Cabin )

PART III THE AGE OF REALISM AND NATURALISM
(1875-1914)
Chapter V American Literature of the Middle
and Late 19th Century
Realism in America
I. The factors that resulted in the realism
It was the product of the changes in American politics and economic development.
1. American industrialization was the first important factor of the development of American realistic literature.
2.The development of the Far West, pioneering in the vast stretches of undeveloped country between the Mississippi and the Pacific, was the second important factor to promote the development of American realistic literature.
3. Thirdly, the scientific progress gave multi-faceted influence upon American literary realism. Up to now, the intelligentsia had accepted Darwin’s doctrine of evolutionism. From evolutionism and Darwinism was born the philosophical ideology truly belonging to America itself-pragmatism. The true meaning of pragmatism was that the aim of an ideology or knowledge laid in the direction of behavior and any “truth” should be tested buy its practical effects.
4.Fourthly, American realistic literature was the product opposing “genteelism” which was a general mood advocating eminent family and elegance. The post Civil War period was also called the Genteel Age. The word “genteel” refers to refinement in manner, fashion, elegance, pretentious respectability, and prudish taste.
II. Local Color Fiction
Local color fiction had a brief vogue when realism first emerged in the United States. It mixed romantic plots with realistic descriptions of things which were readily observed, i.e. , with the customs, dialects, sights, smell, and sounds of regional America. The American writers of local color such as Bret Harte, and Mark Twain presented some ingenious and authentic regional stories of the life of the common people. Local color fiction reached its culmination in the 1880s, but by the turn of the century it had lost its vogue and begun to decline since its subject matter was more and more limited and its most popular writers were caught in its set practices or turned to adopt other artistic forms. Hamlin Garland defined local colorism as having “such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native.”

Mark Twain
I. major works
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Innocents Abroad, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
II. Picaresque novel.
Also called novel of the road, it strings the incidents on the line of the hero’s travel.

Chapter VI American Literature at the
Turn of the Century
Naturalism in America
I. Pessimistic realism
Literary naturalism may be regarded as the new development of literary realism, and was sometimes called “pessimistic realism.” The naturalistic writers were philosophical pessimists. They explained that man was the product of social processes and forces and of an inevitable kind of social evolution. In the term of “naturalism,” the meaning of the word “nature ” is different from what we often mean by the word of “nature.” It does not mean “to reflect nature truthfully,” but to put a man into a mechanized world, and the man was the victim of several forces hard to control in this world. This ideology of “framing up man” was the “core ” of naturalistic literature.
II. major works
Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Financier and An American Tragedy, Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology
III. Characteristics of Naturalistic literature
The main characteristics of naturalistic literature are that first it seems that the naturalistic writers depicted the social reality objectively. They turned literary creation into a mechanical record of society, and never made comments on the characters and their behaviors. Secondly, the viewpoint from which naturalistic writers understood problems was “non-moral,” and was not controlled by the contemporary moral and ethical sense, he stood away from “what is right or wrong, good or evil.” Thirdly, the creative material of a naturalistic writer was infinite. He may make no secret of describing sexual love and man’s selfish desire. He not only discarded the traditional morals, but used the language any nasty circumstances needed without scruple.
IV. Poetry of naturalism
Arlington Robinson(The Town Down the River and The Man Against the Sky), William Vaughn Moody
V . Dramas
O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon, and The strange Interlude.

PART IV THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
AMERICAN LITETATURE
Chapter VII American Literature Between the Two World Wars
I. major works
T. S. Eliot and The Waste Land, Ernest Hemingway and his The Sun Also Rises, William Faulkner and his The Sound and the Fury, Eugene O’Neill and his The Long Days Journey Into Night.
II. Lost Generation
After the First World War some young disappointed American writers, such an Hemingway, Pound, Cummings, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their place of exile and used their wartime experience as the basis for their works. Most of them had been shocked or wounded in the war. They had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types of writing which had never been tried before. Those young English and American expatriates, men and women, were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life was undercut and defeated. They were called the “Lost Generation”. The name of it was given by Gertrude Stein, the American woman writer who spent most of her adult life in Paris, where she told the young Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.”
III. Hemingway’s works
A Farewell To Arms , The Sun Also Rises, Men Without Women, The Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls
IV. Modernism
“Modernism” is used to show the literary art possessing outstanding characteristics in conception, feeling, form and style after the First World War. It mainly makes a feature of “breaking with the traditional Western cultural foundation conscientiously, cautiously and thoroughly,” That is to say, the modern writers discarded the traditional literary form, subject and technique of expression, but used totally different imagination to open a new way to take completely new literary creation. To be more exact, modernism means “cutting off history,” a “sense of alienation, a “sense of loss” and a “sense of despair.” It discarded not only the history, but also the society in which the history relied to exist. It refused to accept the traditional concept of value and all traditional ideological influences. It even refused to adopt the rhetorical devices they had used. Compared with the social man, it paid more attention to the individual person and his innate world; compared with self-consciousness, it paid more attention to “sub-consciousness” (meaning not the things to be done intentionally or deliberately); compared with the scientific deduction, it would rather sing the praises of the mythological heroes.
V. Imagism
The literary movement “Imagism ” was begun by Ezra Pound, an expatriate American poet and a few friends who wanted to rid poetry of the “bad habits” that they felt nineteenth-century poets had fallen into: the use of too many words; the use of words no longer in actual speech; repetitious subject matter; and the use of tired poetic patterns, especially traditional stanzas and meters. The Imagists wanted “direct treatment of the ‘thing’,” the economy of expression and the use of a dominant image, and a rhythm like that of a musical phrase - the three Imagist principles in poetic creation. Imagist poems are usually written in “free verse” – verse with no fixed rhythm – and are often quite short. They use one quick image to capture an emotion, to freeze one moment in time, e. g. Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Hilda Doolittle’s “Oread,” and William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
VI. Eugene O’neill
Desire Under the Elms, Strange Interlude , Mourning Becomes Electra, The Emperor Jones , Mourning Becomes Electra, Long Day’s Journey Into Night ,The Hairy Ape
VII. The second renaissance of American literature
It thrived along with the rise of the Lost Generation in the 1920s , and attained the zenith of prosperity in the 1930s. This was the people’s literature at that time, in which the human tragedy was deeply probed through the works of such writers as Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, T. S. Eliot, and Eugene O’Neill, with the help of the symbolic and modern technique of expression.
VIII. Hemingway
1. code hero and despairing courage
Hemingway had created a new type of fictional character whose basic response to life appealed very stron