美国文学答案

清教主义Puritanism：On the one hand, Puritanism is a highly strict religious doctrine. The Puritans were determined to find a place on the new continent where they could worship God in the way they thought true Christians should.
On the other hand, Puritanism also has its practical aspect. The Puritans had to work hard in order to make a living and be ready for any misfortunes and tragic failures that might lie in wait for them.
先验主义Transcendentalism：
It was a form of idealism, or philosophical Romanticism. It was a way of knowing the belief that man can intuitively transcend the limits of the senses and of logic and receive directly higher truth and greater knowledge denied to other methods of knowing ---was another form of a classic American value-individualism. In fact, it was also another form of the American Dream, the ability to succeed by one’s own efforts . It was an ethical guide to life for a young nation.
Imagists意象派：
They are a group of English and American poets whose poetic tenets are: use of the common and “exact” word; creation of new rhythms; absolute freedom in choice of subject; presentation of sharp image; hard and clear poetry, never blurred or indefinite; concentration and suggestiveness. Among the imagist poets are Doolittle, Richard Aldington, Edith Sitwell, Pond
Realism现实主义
Realism aimed at the interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism , or romantic color. Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism，p eople’s attention was now directed to the interesting features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid , and to the open portrayal of class struggle.
Robert Frost:
. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times 获奖理由：begins in delight,and ends in wisdom.
主要作品：Mountain Interval（山间）New Hampshire
West-Running Brook（小溪）， A Further Range (山外边) A Witness Tree
A Steeple Bush (尖塔丛), In the Clearing (林间空地).
雪夜停马在林边Stopping By W oods On A Snowy Evening：
1.Summary:
The scene of this poem is a cold, snowy evening of early winter. The principal characters are the poet, a horse, and a winter night.
2. Analysis:
1)The form is regular iambic tetrameter (four-beat lines); the rhyme scheme is a fairly complex one, aaba, bbcb.
2) Contrasts:
impractical poet and the practical owner of the woods;
the poet and his horse;The present natural world and the future world
未选择的路The Road Not Taken
1.Introduction:
It was included in Mountain Interval.
In reality, it concerns the important decisions which one must make in life, when one must give up one desirable thing in order to possess another. Then, whatever the outcome, one must accept the consequences of one’s choice for it is n ot possible to go back and have another to choose differently.
It is the feeling that, no matter what kind of choice one makes, he will always have the suspicion in the back of his mind that the other road, too, could have been taken One cannot know, when he makes a choice, what the results of his decision will be. Rather than being sorry that he took the untravelled road, the poet seems to be saying that he would probably do the same thing again.
The rhyme scheme: abaab. This rhyme scheme reflects the spe aker’s efforts to shape his life into a pleasing and coherent form
简答：
1 白鲸的象征意义
1. The Pequod a symbol of doom. It is painted a gloomy black and covered in
whale teeth and bones, literally bristling with the mementos of violent death.
It is, in fact, marked for death. Adorned like a primitive coffin, the Pequod becomes one.
2. Moby Dick
Moby Dick possesses various symbolic meanings for various individuals.
1) Symbol of nature for human beings, because it is mysterious, powerful,
unknown.
2) Symbol of evil for the Captain Ahab.
3) Symbol of good and purity because of its whiteness.
• 3 Voyage of the Pequod
Symbol of the pursuit of ideals, adventure, and the hunt in the vast wilderness.
4 Ahab：Symbol of solipsism, revenge and then evil.
5 Starbuck：Symbol of good and noble.
• 6 the Doubloon：Symbol of the lure of evil and enticements to greed.
•7 Sea:Symbol of vastness, loneliness, and isolation.
2 美国现实主义
Time: the latter half in the 19th century, (1870s--1880s)
Features: a. verisimilitude of details derived from observation
b. representative in plot, setting and character
c. an objective rather than an idealized view of human experience
Theme: the world of experience of the commonplace and the familiar and the low. Style: genteel , graceful prose ( Howells and Henry James)
plain and rough ( Mark Twain)local color writers
Representative writers:
1.William Dean Howells,The Rise of Silas Lapham and Criticism and Fiction.
2.Henry James,Daisy Miller, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Art of Fiction.
3.Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Life on the Mississippi
3海明威的冰山理论. Iceberg Theory
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about，the may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough ,will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them .The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water .
4 伟大的盖茨比象征
Gatsby: the country’s history
Daisy: seemingly beautiful American Dream
Tom: commercialization which brought the country only moral depravity
Nick: hope of the country
Theme:Disillusionment of American Dream in the materialized America.
书中重点：
1 the first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown,Virginia in 1607.the first American writer is Captain John Smith.作品：A Map of Virginia:with a Description of the Country.
2 Anne Bradstreet（puritans）:the first notable poet in America.她的诗是对上帝的歌颂
3 Benjamin Franklin:There was only one writer in the colonial period,whose works are read today.this is Benjamin Franklin.He is the only good American author before the Revolutionary War.他发明了消防队眼镜路灯暖气电炉等。

发现了电池的正负极。

His best writing is found in his own Autobiography.影响：“His shadow lies heavier than any other man’s on this young nation.”
4 Thomas Paine:作品：小册子Common Sense和American Crisis
Franklin recommending him as “an ingenious worthy young man”.
5 Thomas Jefferson(美国第三任总统):写了独立宣言The Declaration of Independence:we hold these truths to be self-evident,that all Men are created equal,that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,that among these are Life,Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.(书P37)
6 Philip Freneau: the most understanding writer of the post-Revolutionary period.“the poet of the revolution”“Father of American Poetry”主要作品：The House of Night,The British Prison Ship,The wild Honey Suckle(书P45),The Indian Burying Ground
7 Francis Scott Key’s“Star-Spangled Banner”borrowed the music of an English drinking song.In the 1820s American painters began to turn from the conventions of eighteenth century aristocratic portraiture.The Hudson River School of landscape painters emerged.
8 In 1828 Noah Webster published An American Dictionary of the English Language.
9 Washington Irving “Father of American Imaginative literature”
“Father of the American short story”
was the first great prose stylist of American romanticism.In his Sketch Book appeared the first modern short stories and the first great American juvenile literature.（美国浪漫主义文学的开篇-见闻札记）作品:A History of the Life and Voyages of Grandada,The Alhambra,Legends of the Conquest of Spain,“Rip Van Winkle”“The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow”（睡谷传奇）
10Edgar Allan Poe father of modern short story，father of detective story ，father of psychoanalytic criticism 作品：“The Fall of the House of Usher”
《厄舍古屋的倒塌》，The Raven（书P129），Israfel
Annabel Lee ，To Helen
11Emerson was responsible for bringing Transcendentalism to New England. 相信个人独立和自助（书P161）作品：The American Scholar,Nature
12Nathaniel Hawthorne 作品：Mosses From an Old Manse (古屋青苔)
House of the Seven Gables (七个尖角阁的房子)，The Blithedale Romance (福谷传奇)，The Marble Faun (玉石雕像)，The Scarlet Letter(Major characters:Hester , Dimmesdale , Chillingworth ,Pearl ) 字母A的意义变化：Adultery → Able-angel Melville called him“the greatest brain with the greatest heart”in American literature. 13Herman Melville 作品：Moby Dick
14Naturalism:the pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such writers as Stephen Crane,Frank Norris,Jack London,Henry Adams,and Theodore Dreiser. Their detailed descriptions of the lives of the down-trodden and the abnormal.
15Walt Whitman 作品：Leaves of Grass自我之歌（书10）
16Emily Dickinson 写作主题; love,nature,suffering,faith,death 作品见书21
17Harriet Beecher Stowe作品：Uncle Tom’s Cabin
18Mark Twain（作品背景是密西西比河）The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,The Adventures of HuckleberryFinn,Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper
19O.Henry:现实主义时期最重要的小说家作品:The Four Million,The Gift of the Magi,An Funished Story,The Cop and the Anthem
20Henry James 美国小说之父作品：The American(international theme of the tradtionless American ),Daisy Miller(which one American critic described as“an outrage to American girlhood”but which brought James his first international fame.)三部曲：The Wings of the Dove,The Ambassadors,The Golden Bowl
21Jack London自然主义代表人物作品：The Sea-Wolf，Martin Eden，The White Fang，The Call of the Wild，To Build a Fire
22Theodore Dreiser 作品：Sister Carrie（materialism），Jennie Gerhardt，An American Tragedy，The Financier，The Titan，The Stoic ，The Genius （欲望三部曲）
23Ezra Pound the father of modern poetry. 作品：In a Station of the Metro
24Carl Sandburg Fog
25Robert Frost诗圣取材于英格兰作品：Mountain Interval（山间），New Hampshire，West-Running Brook，A Further Range（山外边），A Witness Tree，
A Masque of Mercy (1947), A Steeple Bush (尖塔丛), In the Clearing（林间空地）The Road Not Taken（was included in Mountain Interval）：One cannot know, when he makes a choice, what the results of his decision will be. Rather than being sorry that he took the untravelled road, the poet seems to be saying that he would probably do the same thing again.
26 F. Scott Fitzgerald 爵士时代Major Works：This Side of Paradise，
Flappers and Philosophers，The Beautiful and Damned，Tales of the Jazz Age，The Great Gatsby，Tender Is the Night，The Last Tycoon
27 Earnest Hemingway works:The Sun Also Rises，For Whom the Bell Tolls，The Old Man and the Sea(1954年获诺贝尔奖)，A Farewell to Arms，The Snows of Kilimanjaro The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber 创作理论：冰山原则to Hemingway,man’s greatest achievement is to show grace under pressure,or he described in the sun also rises,as holding the “purity of line through the maximum of exposure”
The Old Man and The Sea：
Symbolism: Santiago--- mankind , sea---nature and environment; marlin---purpose of life; shark--- the evil force which control human’s fate
Theme: the importance of life lies in the process of searching and resistance
A Farewell to Arms（二战为背景士兵可以在战场上逃走）：
主题：The Grim Reality of War，The Relationship between Love and Pain
28 John Steinback:The Grapes of Warth
29 William Faulkner(1950年获诺贝尔文学奖) Works:The Sound and the Fury（浮躁与喧嚣），Light in August（八月之光），Absalom! Absalom!
Go Down, Moses，The Hamlet（小屋）, The Town, The Mansion，A Rose for Emily。