专八人文常识辅导材料(美国文学)

American Literature: A Concise History I. Review
2005-2011真题中美国文学部分出现过哪些重要作家？这些作家分别代表哪些文学流派？
如何高效地梳理美国文学简史？
1. Who wrote the famous pamphlet, The Common Sense,
before the American Revolution? (2011)
A. Thomas Jefferson.
B. John Adams.
C. Thomas Paine.
D. Benjamin Franklin.
2. Which of the following best explores American myth
in the 20th century? (2011)
A. Beyond the Horizon.
B. The Sun Also Rises.
C. The Sound and the Fury.
D. The Great Gatsby.
3. The Financier is written by ______. (2010)
A. Mark Twain
B. Henry James
C. William Faulkner
D. Theodore Dreiser
4. Who among the following is a poet of free verse? (2009)
A. Ralph Waldo Emerson.
B. Walt Whitman.
C. Herman Melville
D. Theodore Dreiser.
5. Who wrote The American? (2008)
A. Herman Melville
B. Nathaniel Hawthorne
C. Henry James
D. Theodore Dreiser
6. Death of a Salesman was written by____. (2007)
A. Arthur Miller
B. Ernest Hemingway
C. Ralph Ellison
D. James Baldwin
7. The novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is written by___. (2006)
A. Scott Fitzgerald
B. William Faulkner
C. Eugene O’Neil
D. Ernest Hemingway
8. 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
考点：重要作家及其作品；作家及其作品类型、风格已考体裁：长篇小说4，短篇小说1，戏剧1，诗歌1，散文1（先把少量的戏剧诗歌散文领域的著名作家梳理清楚，再重点复习主流小说家，最后整理边缘作家如黑人作家和女性作家）
重要流派：romanticism1, realism2, naturalism1, modernism3
重要作家：Theodore Dreiser3, Ernest Hemingway2, Henry James2, Herman Melville2, William Faulkner2, Mark Twain, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Arthur Miller, Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O’Neil, O’Henry, F.S. Fitzgerald
讨论：上述四大流派的大致历史时期？
将重要作家和流派进行匹配
II. Historical Periods
1. Colonial Period: 17th~18th
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
可按几次大的战争大致分段：独立战争、南北战争（内战）、一战、二战
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，William Faulkner /Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller
6. Jerome Salinger
7. Nabokov
梳理清楚纵向的历史时期后，再细看各个时期重要作家。

从以下五个方面进行掌握：代表的流派；擅长的体裁；代表作；作品风格；其它重要作品。

例如：Mark Twain: ① Trend:realism (local colorism)②
Genre:fiction ③Masterpiece:The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn④Distinctive Style:vernacular language⑤Other Important Works:The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Life on the Mississippi; The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, etc.
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 the only American playwright awarded Nobel Prize of Literature.
A. Arthur Miller
B. Eugene O’Neill
C. Tennessee Williams
D. Sinclair Lewis
8. Which of the following does NOT belong to ―Beat
Generation‖?
A. Jack Kerouac
B. F. S. Fitzgerald
C. Allen Ginsberg
D. William Burroughs
9. __________ 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
10. ______ is regarded as the predecessor of detective
stories.
A. Edgar Allan Poe
B. Nathaniel Hawthorne
C. Washington Irving
D. O’Henry
11. Stephen Crane’s ________ is the first naturalist
novel in American literature.
A. The Red Badge of Courage
B. The Blue Hotel
C. Maggie, a Girl of the Streets
D. War is Kind
以下资料的整理参考了《美国文学大纲》一书，吴定柏编著，上海外语教育出版社，1998。

此书为八级考试美国文学部分的权威参考书。

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
honor s: 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: representative work of ―Lost Generation‖
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: spokesman of Jazz Age
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; an examination of American myth in the 20th century.
“梦”暗示没有实现的理想，而“神话”则暗示虚妄的幻想。

从文学的角度看,“美国之梦”为民族文学提供了主题，“美国神话”则是这种主题得以表达的手段。

★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 shallown ess 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
eath of a Salesman—his masterpiece
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-modernism
Unlike modernism, which suggested a historic period, post-modernism described a sensibility, a feeling for innovation.
Controllable vs. uncontrollable;
Order vs. disorder
Realistic vs. nihilistic
The fundamental rule: the absurd and the arbitrary Style: fragmented, discontinuous, ironic, and full of black humor
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Beat Generation
Women Writers
Black Literature
1. Beat Generation
The term is associated with the first half of the 1950s.
★Jack Kerouac—the founder of the Beat Generation who first used the term; On the Road
★Allen Ginsberg—the poet laureate of the Beat Generation; Howl
Lawrence Ferlinghetti opened the City Lights Bookstore, the headquarters of the Beats.
William Burroughs
Women Writers: 1) Before the 20th C
Anne Bradstreet—the first lady of colonial literature in America
Emily Dickinson—America’s greatest woman poet Margaret Fuller—Women in the Nineteenth Century: America’s first landmark feminist treatise
Women Writers: 2) Of the 20th C
Katherine Anne Porter
Joyce Carol Oates
Sylvia Plath
Joanna Russ
Alice Walker: a black woman writer
Langston Hughes—the ―Poet Laureate of Harlem‖/ ―O. Henry of Harlem‖
Richard Wright—protest fiction, Native Son
James Baldwin—race & homosexuality: two themes Ralph Ellison—Invisible Man
★Toni Morrison (female)—Beloved, Nobel Prize (1993) (the second American woman writer to enjoy the honor) (the first American woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature: Pearl Buck)
Southern Literature
The South is known as the Bible Belt.
★William Faulkner—the foremost southern writer of the 20th C; Nobel Prize (1950)
The Sound and the Fury—Stream of Consciousness Yoknapatawpha County
William Styron—Sophie’s Choice。