美国文学 常耀信 书中关键词分类整理

FATHER FIGURES1.Benjamin Franklin for quite some time he was regarded as t he father of hiscountry, even more than Washington was.2.To say that Washington Irving was father of American literature is not muchexaggeration.3.Pound, who called Walt Whitman a "pigheaded father," recognized himnonetheless as a father figure who led the break from the past.4.Edgar Allan Poe was father of many things, one of which is psychoanalyticcriticism, the other being the detective story.5.Ezra Pound’s Cantos, especially his Pisan Cantos, became the new model forcontemporary poets with its features such as its autobiographical and personal tone, and its open, spontaneous, and sometimes agrammatical style. And he became a father figure.6.Wallace Stevens was a very successful business man, rising to the position ofvice-president in a Connecticut insurance company, while at the same time writing poetry of a kind which was to make him a father-figure among contemporary poets.7.William Carlos Williams has been recognized as a forefather of open verse.8.For Faulkner the younger writer expressed his respect for the older more thanadequately when he stated that Sherwood Anderson was "the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on." Anderson has been called "a writer's writer."9.Susan Glaspell has been regarded by some people as "mother of Americandrama."SPOKESMAN1.With Benjamin Franklin as its spokesman, eighteen-century Americaexperienced an age of enlightenment, reason, and order like England and Europe.2.Ralph Waldo Emerson became the most eloquent spokesman of NewEngland Transcendentalism.3.In political-social ideas and attitudes Henry James, writing about the wealthy,deep-rooted leisure class, became in a way its spokesman, stressing travel,cosmopolitanism, manners, and taste as indices to social superiority.4. F. Scott Fitzgerald was essentially a 1920s person. He was part of it andeventually died with it. Inside he knew it well. Outside he saw it ironically.And he continued to write about it right until his death. Even The Last Tycoon is not a book about anything else. He thus became the spokesman of a crucial and revealing period in the cultural history of his country.5.Allen Ginsberg will be remembered, first and foremost, as the spokesman ofthe postwar Beat Generation in American literary history.MANIFESTO1.McTeague has been called "the first full-bodied naturalistic American novel"and "a consciously naturalistic manifesto."2.The Waste Land which, revealing as it does the spiritual crisis of postwarEurope, read like the manifesto of the "Lost Generation" and established Eliot's position as the leader not only of new American poetry, but of a whole generation of writers later to be identified as "Waste Land Painters" like Hemingway and Faulkner.THE GREATEST1.Roger Williams was one of the greatest Puritan dissenters in the early days ofPuritan theocracy in New England.2.With the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthornebecame famous as the greatest writer living then in the United States (as indeed some critics put it) and his reputation as a major American author has been on the increase ever since.3.Edgar Allan Poe was, Bernard Shaw said on the centenary of his birth, "thegreatest journalistic critic of his time"; his poetry is "exquisitely refined"; and his tales are "complete works of art."4.Carl Sandburg is the greatest of the prairie poets.5.Randall Jarrell was a very famous critic of his time. He was probably thegreatest poet-critic of his generation.6.Frederick Douglass’ was the greatest voice of the African Americans in thenineteenth century.7.The Four Quartets is the best work of the later phase of T. S. Eliot’s career,and some critics claim that it is one of best long poems (if not the best) to come out of the twentieth century.8.William Faulkner has been considered America's greatest novelist to comeout of the twentieth century. The best of his fictions, which deal with basic human nature and the basic patterns of human behavior, rank among the most enduring works of world literature.9.The thirties also witnessed the vogue of the hard-boiled novels, of which thebest was perhaps John O'Hara's (1905-1970) Appointment in Samara (1934).10.In a sense the thirties can be called the decade of John Dos Passos. He was theleading naturalist of the Depression, and his masterwork, U. S. A., was probably the best work that came out of the period.FIRST1.William Bradford led the Mayflower endeavor and became the first governorof the Plymouth Plantation that he established with his group of Pilgrim Fathers.2.Anne Bradstreet is the first describes the initial response of a Puritan to adisastrous occurrence.3.One most prominent among these writers was Charles Brockden Brown,whose first novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale (1798) has been regarded as the first American novel.4.The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was probably the first of its kind inliterature.5.Washington Irving was the first American writer of imaginative literature togain international fame.6.The Pioneers’ historical importance lies in the fact that it was probably thefirst true romance of the frontier in American literature. (Leatherstocking Tales)7.They are among the first Indians to appear in American fiction and probablythe first group of noble savages. (Leatherstocking Tales)8."The Raven" is thus a perfect illustration of his theory on poetry. A goodspecimen of a poem which does not say very much is his "The Bells", which isan elaborate display of pure technique with little or no substance. Its poetry exists in its ingenious creation of sounds. All sounds, vowels and diphthongs for example, and all poetic devices such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance are brought into full play for the "rhythmical creation of beauty."This was one of the reasons why Edgar Allan Poe was and has been regarded as one of the first aesthetes in literary history.9.Edgar Allan Poe was the first author in American literature to make theneurotic the heroic figure, the protagonist, in his stories.10.Henry James, by emphasizing the inner awareness and inward movements ofhis characters in face of outside occurrences rather than merely delineating their environment in any detail, became probably the first of the modern psychological analysts in the novel and anticipated in his works the modern stream-of-consciousness technique so widely employed in the first decades of this century. ("the legend of the Master")11.Sherwood Anderson took his cue from Mark Twain and became, as RichardBridgman puts it, about the first writer after Twain to take the vernacular as a serious way of presenting reality.12.William Faulkner declared, "In my opinion, Mark Twain was the first trulyAmerican writer, and all of us since are his heirs, who descended from him." 13.Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is the first uncompromising naturalisticnovel in America.14.McTeague has been called "the first full-bodied naturalistic American novel"and "a consciously naturalistic manifesto."15.The first Imagist theorist is the English writer T. E. Hulme.16.It is the Imagism that helped to open the first pages of modern English andAmerican poetry.17.T. S. Eliot's was a highly refined sensibility. He was one of the first if not thefirst to sense the futility and fragmentization of modern life and see modern society at its most disgusting. As Archibald MacLeish, one of his followers, noted eloquently, Eliot's poetry said more about the modern chaos in fifty or sixty lines than all the social critics and their volumes put together. But his search for order, form, and discipline led him toward conservatism and to religion for salvation.18.Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. T. S. Eliot readThe Great Gatsby three times and concluded that it was "the first step thatAmerican fiction has taken since Henry James."19.In Our Time is interesting precisely because, for the first time, a Hemingwayhero appears on the scene to learn to live in grace under pressure.20.In the last words of Harry Morgan, the hero of To Have and Have Not: "Aman alone ain't got no bloody chance." Here for the first time Hemingway's old individualistic postulate gave way to a fresh faith in the social destinies of men.21.Sartoris (1929) revealed Faulkner's fuller development as a writer. For the firsttime, he entered his fictional county and began to create a world of his own. 22.Sherwood Anderson was probably the first writer since Mark Twain to writein the colloquial style.23.The first American author to win the Nobel Prize for literature, Sinclair Lewishas been called the worst important writer in American Literature. / Sinclair Lewis, though "Edwardian" in form, wrote to pave his way for the first Nobel Prize in literature that an American ever won.24.Whereas Nathanael West was little known when alive, he has received goodposthumous critical attention and has been regarded as one of best writers to come out of the 1930s and the first important postwar novelist. He is seen as a predecessor to the American novelists of the absurd in the 1960s.25.Susan Glaspell founded with her husband the first influential noncommercialtheater troupe in America.26.In 1965 Arthur Miller was elected the first American president of theinternational P. E. N. (International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists).27.Hanay Geiogamah was the first Native American to bring out his collection ofplays in 1980.28.The first to call for a new American verse in the postwar period, CharlesOlson has remained an influence on contemporary American poetry. He was one of the first, if not the first, to locate clearly the problem with American poetry in the 1950s.29.After graduation, J. D. Salinger attended a short-story writing class atColumbia University, and published his first story "The Young Folks" in the Story magazine. This was the first time Salinger dealt with the subject of a boy thrown into the adult world to shift for himself.30.Postwar American drama has been said to begin with the staging of The GlassMenagerie in 1945. Its author, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), has certainly become one of the greatest American dramatists to go down in the country's literary history.31.John Barth was the first to announce that the traditional novel is dead, andthat traditional novelistic resources have been exhausted. A whole new way of writing would have to be found for the novel to continue as a genre.32.Catch-22 was the first book in America to treat the absurdist theme withabsurdist techniques. It protests against the absurdity of modern America as embodied by the military power structure it describes.33.John Barth was born in Maryland and became a college writing teacher inthe early 1950s. Both were significant facts of his life because the first relates him to the "southern" literary tradition of Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, and the second places him among a generation of writers many of whom have to do with the academia.34.The African American novel began to make its presence felt in mid-nineteenthcentury when Williams Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States(1853) appeared in print in London. Brown describes Clotel as Thomas Jefferson's daughter by his slave, and exposes the evils of slavery and the hypocrisy of public officials.35.The first African American to publish her novel in the United States wasHarriet Wilson, whose Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859) focuses on race and class relations.36.W. E. B. DuBois(1868-1963), the intellectual leader of African Americanprotest at that time. DuBois went to Harvard where he became the first African American to receive a Ph. D.37.Rita Dove (1952- ), the first African American poet who was appointed to theposition of Poet Laureate of the United States in 1994.38.Following the first Native American novel, Life and Adventures of JoaquinMurieta (1854), imaginative writing has improved with time.39.The first commercially successful Asian American writer was C. Y. Lee(1917- ) whose first novel, The Flower Drum Song (1955) was adapted for Broadway and for a movie.40.The American romanticists finally won in the first flowering of Americanliterature.。