2020年整理美国文学选读复习提纲.pdf

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美国文学复习大纲

• • • •
* Second stage: Transcedentalism (p.56-59) Raph Waldo Emerson: Nature Henry David Thoreau: Walden
• Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter • Herman Melville: Moby Dick • Edgar Allan Poe: Gothic novels • “Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque” • Poe’s position in the world literature (P.114-115)
The first peak of literature in US
• Two stages of Romanticism in the first half of 19th century of US: • * First stage: • Washing Irving: Father of American literature; the first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame • A History of New York • The Sketch Book: “Rip Van Winkle” “Sleepy Hollow” • James F. Cooper: • Leather-stocking Tales: The Pioneer • The Last of the Mohicans • The Prairie • The Pathfinder • The Deerslayer
• American Movement of Enlightenment (P.27-28) Writers of enlightenment Benjamin Franklin: The Authobiography; Poor Richard’s Amanack The Importance of Benjamin Franklin’s “The Autobiography”. (P. 35-37) Thomas Paine: Common Sense; Thomas Jefferson: The Declaration of Independence

美国文学选读复习

History And Anthology of American Literature (VolumeⅠⅡ)美国文学史及选读1、2PartⅠThe Literature of Colonial America殖民主义时期的文学(at the beginning of 17th century)Part Ⅱ The Literature of Reason And Revolution理性和革命时期文学(by the mid-18th century)1．Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence 独立宣言(1776年18世纪中后期)（仔细阅读知道意思）Benjamin Franklin: The AutobiographyThomas Paine: The American Crisis*一、Benjamin Franklin 本杰明·富兰克林1706-1790Symbol of America in the Age of Enlightenment殖民地时期作家。

独立战争前惟一的杰出的美国作家in the colonial period, the only good American author before the Revolutionary War.1．其还是美国第一位主要作家the first major writer非凡表达能力，简洁明了，有点幽默，还是一位讽刺天才as an author he had power of expression, simplicity, a subtle humor. He was also sarcastic.2．他最好作品收录在《自传》“Autobiography”。

“对这个年青的国家来说，他的损失比其它任何人的都要大“his shadow lies heavier than any other man’s on this young nation.二、Thomas Jefferson托马斯·杰弗逊（1743-1826）1．美国历史上最为广泛影响人物his thought and personality have influenced his countryman more deeply and remained more effectively alive.同富兰克林一样具人道主义精神vigorous humanitarian sympathies.启蒙运动的产物a product of the Enlightenment.2．1776年同约翰·亚当斯、本杰明·富兰克林、罗杰·谢尔曼、罗伯特·R·利文斯顿一起起草《独立宣言》with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert R Livingston, he drafted the Declaration of Independence.3．1790-1793任华盛顿内阁中第一任国务卿，as the first American secretary of state. 1800起担任两届美国总统。

美国文学选读复习资料

[ 美国⽂文学选读 ]!Ⅰ. Authors and their worksAlice Walker The Color PurpleAllen Ginsberg HowlA Supermarket in CaliforniaArthur Miller All My Sons!Death of a Salesman!A View from the Bridge!The Misﬁts!The Archbishop’s Ceiling!The Crucible!After the Fall!The Price!Situation Normal!The Man Who Had All the Luck!A memory of Two Mondays!The American Clock!Archibald MacLeish The Happy MarriageThe Poet of EarthConquistadorArs PoeticaTowers of IvoryStreets in the MoonNew Found LandThe Fall of The CityAirraidAmbrose Bierce The Fiend’s DelightNuggests and Dust Panned out in California Cobwebs from an Empty SkullTales of Soldiers and CiviliansIn the Midst of LifeCan Such Things Be?The Devil’s DictionaryThe ApplicantBenjamin Franklin Poor Richard’s Almanac !The Autobiography!The Way to Wealth!Bret Harte The Luck of Roaring CampBernard Malamud The FixerThe AssistantThe TenantThe Magic BarrelA New LifeGod’s GraceCarl Sandburg Chicago PoemsThe People, YesAlways the Young StrangerIn Reckless EcstasyThe Prairie YearsThe War YearsThe American SongbagHoney and SaltCorn-HuskerFogSmoke and SteelCharles Waddell Chesnutt The Conjure WomanThe Wife of His Youth and Other Story of the Color Line The Sheriff’s ChildrenThe Pioneer of the Color LineThe Marrow of TraditionClifford Odets Waiting for LeftyAwake and SingTill the Day I DieParadise LostGolden Boy’Clash by NightThe Big KnifeThe Country GirlThe Flowering PeachDu Bois E. B. White Stuart LittleCharlotte’s WebQuo Vadimus or the Case for the BicycleOne Man’s MeatThe Points of My CompassOnce More to the LakeE Cumings Tulips and ChimneysThe Enormous RoomVivaNo, ThanksEimiEdgar Allan Poe The Raven and Other Poems!Tamerlane and Other Poems!Al Araaf!Poems!Ligeia!Annabel Lee!The Fall of the House of Usher !The Masque of the Red Death!The Black Cat!The Cask of Amontillado!Murders in the Rue Morgue!The Purloined Letter!The Gold Bug!William Wilson!The Philosophy of Composition!The Poetic Principle!Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque!Sonnet — To Science!To Hellen !The City in the Sea!Israfel !Edgar Lee Masters A Book of VerseMaximilianSpoon River AnthologyEdward Arlington Robinson The Children of the NightCaptain CraigThe Town Down the RiverThe Man Against the SkyAvon’s HarvestEdward Albee The Zoo StoryThe American DreamWho’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?The sandboxEdward Bellamy Looking Backward 2000-1887EqualityThe Duck of Stockbridge :A Romance of Shay’s Rebellion The Blindman’s World and Other StoriesEdwin Charles Markham The Man With the HoeEdmund Wilson Travel in Two DemocraciesTo the Finland StationA Piece of My Mind: Reﬂection at SixtyAxel’s CastleThe Triple ThinkersThe Wound and the BowThe Shores of LightThe Fruits of the MLAEdith Wharton The House of MirthThe Age of InnocenceEthan FromeBunner SisterThe Customs of the CountryA Backward GlanceEzra Pound Hugh Selwyn Mauberley !The Cantos!Exultations!Personae!Cathy!The Spirit of Romance!The Anthology Des Imagistes!Literary Essays!A Few Don’ts by Imagiste!Polite Essays!In a Station of the Metro!Emily Dickinson To Make a Prairie!Success Is Counted Sweetest!I’m Nobody!!Because I could not Stop for Death!I Heard a Fly Buzz When I Died!This is My Letter to the World!My Life Closed Twice Before its Close! Mine-by the Bight of the White Election! Wild Nights — Wild Nights!A narrow Fellow in the Grass!Apparently with no Surprise!I Died for Beauty — but was Scarce!Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant!I Like to See it Lap the Miles!The Brain is Wider than the Sky !As Imperceptibly as Grief!Elmer Rice The Adding MachineElizabeth Bishop North and SouthGeography ⅢIn the Waiting RoomEllen Glasgow The Barren GroundEugene O’Neill Beyond the Horizon!Emperor Jones!The Hairy Ape !Bound East for Cardiff!In the Zone!The Long Voyage Home!The Moon of the Carribeans!The Great God Brown!Strange Interlude!Desire Under the Elm!Morning Becomes Electra!A Touch of the Poet!Anna Christie!The Emperor Jones!All the God’s Children Got Wings!Long Day’s Journey Into Night!The Moon for the Misbegotten!Hughie!More Stately Mansions!The Iceman Cometh!Eudora Welty The Golden ApplesThe Bride of Innisfallen•Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises!A Farewell to Arms!For Whom the Bell Tolls!The Old Man and the Sea!The Torrents of Spring!Men Without Woman!The Winters Take Nothing!To Have and Have Not!A Movable Feast!In Our Time!A Clean Well-Lighted Place!In Another Country!F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby !Tender In the Night!The Side of Paradise!The Beautiful and the Damned !Flappers and Philosophers!Tales of the Jazz Age!The Last Tycoon!Taps at Reveille !The Ice Palace!May Days!The Diamond as Big as the Ritz! Winter Dreams!The Rich Boy!Babylon Revisited!The Crack-Up!Flannery O’Connor A Good Man Is Hard to FindWise BloodThe ViolentBear it AwayFrancis Bret Harte The Luck of Roaring CampTennessee’s PartnerFrank Norris Moran of the Lady LettyMc-TeagueThe Epic of the WheatThe OctopusThe PitA Deal in Wheat and Other stories of the Old and New West Frederick Douglass My Bondage and My FreedomGeorge Santayana Skepticism and Animal FaithThe Realms BeingThree Philosophical PoetsThe Last PuritanGertrude Stein Tender ButtonThe Autobiography of Alice B ToklasHart Crane The BridgeMy Grandfather’s Love LettersWhite BuildingsPraise for an UrnFor the Marriage of Faustus and HellenVoyageHamlin Garland Crumbling IdolMan Travelled Roads/The Return of a PrivateRose of Ducher’s CoolyA Son of the Middle BorderHenry David Thoreau Walden / Life in the Woods!On the Duty of Civil Disobedience!A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River! Civil Disobedience!Life Without Principle!Henry Louis Mencken Bernard Shaw: His PlaysThe Philosophy of NietzscheThe American LanguageHappy DaysNewspaper DaysHeathe DaysHerman Melville Moby Dick / The White Whale!Typee !Omoo!Mardi!Redburn!White Jacket!The Conﬁdence Man !Battle pieces!Clarel!Piazza!Pierre!John Marr and Other Sailors!Timoleon!Billy Budd!Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin!A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp!The Minister’s Wooing!The Pearl of Orr’s Island!Oldtown Folks!Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Song of Hiawatha!Voices of the Night !Ballads and Other Poems!Evangeline!I Shot an Arrow!A Psalm of Life!The Hymn of the Night!The Secret of the Sea!Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems!Tales of a Wayside Inn!An April Day!Paul Revere’s Ride!The Courtship of Miles Standish! Poems on Slavery!The Slave’s Dream!The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls! Henry James The Portrait of a Lady!The Wings of the Dove!The Ambassadors !The Golden Bowl!A Passionate Pilgrim !Roderick Hudson!The American!Daisy Miller!The BostoniansThe Princess of Casamassima!The Spoils of Poynton!The Turn of the Screw!The Awkward Age!The American Scene!The Jolly Corner !The Real Thing and other Tales!French Poets and Novelists !Hawthorne!Partial Portrait!Notes and Reviews!Art of Fiction and other Essays!Hilda Doolittle Sea GardenPear TreeOrchardThe Walls Do Not FallTribute to the AngelsThe Flowering of the RodTribute to FreudHellen in EgyptIrwin Shaw The Young LionsThe Naked and the DeadBury the DeadSailor Off the BremenThe Troubled AirLucy CrownTwo Weeks in Another TownVoices of A Summer DayRich ManPoor ManBeggarmanNightworkBread upon the WatersJack London The Call of the Wild!White Fang!The Law of Life!Love of Life!The Heathen!To Build a Fire!The Pearls of Parlay!The Son of the Wolf!The Sea-Wolf!The People of the Abyss!The Iron Heel!Marti Eden !How I Become a Socialist!The War of the Classes!What Life Means to Me!Revolution!The Mexican !Under the Deck Awings!Jack Kerouac On the RoadThe Town and the CityThe SubterraneansThe Dharma BumsVisions of Cody Doctor SaxMaggie CassidyMexico City BluesLonesome TravellerJean Toomer CaneJohn Greenleaf Whittier Snow-boundVoice of FreedomThe Tent on the Beach and Other Poems IchabodA Winter IdylJohn Dos Passos The Three SoldiersManhattan TransferU. S. A.(The 42 Parallel;1919;The Big Money) District of ColumbiaThe Adventures of a Young ManNumber OneThe Grand DesignOrient ExpressJohn Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath!In Dubious Battle!Cup of Gold!Tortilla Flat!The Moon is Down!Of Mice and Men!Cannery Row!The Pearl!The Red Pony(The Leader of the People;!The Gift;The Great Mountains;The Promise)! John Updike Rabbit Run, Redux, Is Rich, at RestJoseph Heller Catch-22We Bombed in New HavenSomething HappenedGood as GoldGod KnowsJames Langston Hughes Mulatto !The Weary Blues!Fine Clothes to the Jew!The Dream Keeper and Other Poems! Shakespeare in Harlem!Dreams!Me and the Mule!Boarder Line !Dear Lovely Death!I Wonder as I Wander!The Best of Simple!James Fenimore Cooper The Leather-stocking Tales!The Spy!The Pilot!The Littlepage Manus Cripts!The Pioneer!The Last of Mohicans!The Prairie!The Pathﬁnder !The Deerslayer!James Farrel Studs LoniganJudgement dayDanny O’NeilBernard CarrCalico ShoesGuillotine PartyA Note on Literary CriticismLiterature and MoralityJames Jones From Here to EternityJames Baldwin Go Tell It on the Mountain!Nobody Knows My Name!The Fire Next Time!Note of a Native Son!J. D. Salinger Catcher in the RyeThe Young FolksFrannyZooeyRaise High the Roof BeamCarpentersSeymour: An IntroductionJoel Chandler Harris Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings Kate Chopin The Awakening !Katherine Anne Porter The Leaning Tower and Other StoriesA Ship of FoolsThe Flowering JudasPale Horse, Pale RiderThe Old OrderOld MortalityThe Jilting of Granny WeathrallMaria ConceptionThe Never Ending WrongLillian Hellman The Children’s HourThe Little FoxesWatch on the RhineThe Searching WindThe Autumn GardenTos in the AtticThe Days to ComeAnother Part of the ForrestAn Unﬁnished WomanPentimentoScoundrel TimeLorraine Hansberry Raisin in the SunLouise Erdrich Love MedicineThe Beet QueenTracksThe Crown of ColumbusThe Bingo PalaceTales of Burning LoveThe Antelope WifeThe Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Hors The Master Butchers Singing ClubFour SoulsThe Painted DrumThe Plague of DovesShadow TagLulu’s BoysMalcolm Cowley Blue JuniataThe Dry SeasonThe Exile’s ReturnA Second Flowering / The Other War •Mark Twain !The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County !The Innocents Abroad!The Gilded Age!The Adventure of Tom Sawyer!The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn!Life on the Mississippi!A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court! The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson!Following the Equator!The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg!The Mysterious Stranger !The Prince and the Pauper!How to Tell a Story!Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc!Martin Luther King, Jr. I Have a DreamStride Toward FreedomStrength To LoveWhy We Can’t WaitWhere Do We Go From HereMaya Angelou Still I RiseMichael Gold 120 MillionChange The WorldThe Hollow ManJew Without MoneyHoboken BluesFiesta Battle Hymn!Nathaniel Hawthorne Twice-told Tales!Mosses from an Old Manse!The Blithedale Romance !The Scarlet Letter!The House of the Seven Gables!The Minister’s Black Veil!Young Goodman Brown!The Birthmark!The Snow-Image!Rappaccini’s Daughter!Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment!The Marble Faun!Nathanael West The Dream Life of Balso SnellThe Day of LocustMiss LoneyheartsNorman Mailer The Armies of the NightBarbary ShoreThe Deer ParkAn American DreamThe White NegroO Henry The Man Higher UpSixes and SevensThe Gift of MagiThe Police and the HymnThe Last LeafPaul Lawrence Dumbar We Wear the MaskPhilip Roth Goodbye, ColumbusPortnoy’s ComplaintThe Ghost WriterZuckerman UnboundThe Anatomy LessonPhilip Freneau Rising Glory of America!The British Prison Ship!To the Memory of the Brave Americans! The Wild Honeysuckle!The Indian Burying Ground !Ralph Waldo Emerson Essay!Nature!Self-reliance!Representative Men!English Traits!The Conduct of Life!May-Day and Other Pieces!The American Scholar!Days !The Humble Bee!The Rhodo!The Transcendentalist !Divinity!The Oversoul!Ralph Waldo Ellison Invisible Man!Shadow and Act!Going to the Territory!Robert Bly The Light Around the BodyThe SixtiesRobert Frost A Boy’s WillWest-Running BrookA Further RangeMending WallAfter Apple-PickingThe BirchesNorth of BostonNew HamphshireMountain IntervalA Witness TreeFire and IceStopping by Woods on a Song EveningThe Road Not Taken!Robert Penn Warren All the King’s MenRobert Lowell Life StudiesLord Weary’s CastleThe DolphinSkunk HourFor SaleWalking in the BlueFor the Union DeadRichard Wright Native SonUncle Tom’s ChildrenBlack Boy: A Record of ChildhoodThe OutsidersThe Long DreamEight MenSarah Orne Jewett Deephaven and Other StoriesThe Country of Pointed FirsSaul Bellow Dangling ManMr. Sammler’s PlanetThe VictimAnderson the Rain KingHerzogSeize the DayThe Adventure of Augie MarchThe Dean’s DecemberMore Die of HeartbreakThe TheftThe ActualRavelsteinThe Last AnalysisLooking for Mr. GreenHumboldt’s GiftStephen Crane Maggie: A Girl of the Streets!The Red Badge of Courage!The Open Boat!The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky!The Blue Hotel!Sinclair Lewis Main StreetBabbittDur Mr WrennThe JobArrowsmithElmer GantryDodsworthIt can’s Happen HereKingsblood RoyalSherwood Anderson Winesburg, OhioWindy McPherson’s SonMarching MenMid-American ChantsThe Book of the GrotesquePoor WhiteThe Triumph of the Egg and Other Stories Horses and MenI Want to Know WhyMany MarriagesDark LaughterDeath in the Woods and Other Stories Sylvia Plath The ColossusArielWinter TreesThe Bell JarPoint ShirleyTennessee Williams A Streetcar Named DesireThe Glass MenagerieCat on a Hot Tin RoofSummer and SmokeThe Rose TattooCamino RealOrpheus DescendingSuddenly Last SummerThe Sweet Bird of Youth The Night of the LguanaT. S. Eliot The Waste Land !Prufrock and Other Observations!The Burial of the Dead!A Game of Chess!The Fire Sermon!Death By Water!What the Thunder Said!Ash Wednesday!Four Quarters!Murder in the Cathedral!Family Reunion!Cocktail Party!Theodore Dreiser Sister Carrie!Jannie Gerhardt!An American Tragedy!Trilogy of Desire!Financer / The Titan / The Stoic!Nigger Jeff!Theodore Roethke The Waking PoemsOn the Poet and His Craft: Selected Prose Thomas Paine Common Sense!American Crisis !Rights of Man!The Age of Reason!Thomas Wolfe Look Homeward, AngelOf Time and the RiverThe Web and the RockYou Can’t Go Home AgainThe Hills BeyondFrom Death to MorningThomas Jefferson Declaration of IndependenceTruman Capote In Cold BloodToni Morrison Song of Solomon!Beloved!The Bluest Eye!Sula!Tar Baby!Jazz!Paradise!Love!A Mercy!Recitatif!Upton Sinclair The JungleSpring and HarvestKing CoalOilBostonDragon’s TeethVilla Cather Oh, Pioneers!My AntoniaA Lost LadyThe Professor’s HouseDeath Comes to the ArchbishopMiss JewettWashington Irving The Sketch Book!The Legend of Sleepy Hollow!Rip Van Winkle!History of New York!The Life of George Washington!Bracebridge Hall!Talks of Traveller!The Alhambra!William Cullen Bryant To a Waterfowl!The Fountain!The Yellow Violet!Thanatoppsis!The White Footed Deer!A Forest Hymn!The Flood of Years!William E.B Dubois Souls of Black Folk!The Philadelphia Negro!John Brown!The Black Flame!William Dean Howells Criticism and Fiction!The Rise of Silas Lapham!A Modern Instance!A Hazard of Now Fortunes!A Traveller from Altruia!From the Eye of the Needle!Novel-Writing and Novel-Reading! William Carlos Williams PatersonDes ImagistesCollected Later PoemsCollected Early PoemsThe Red WheelbarrowSpring and AllSour GrapesThe Desert MusicThe Journey of LovePictures from BrueghelAsphodalThat Green FlowerThe Widow’s Lament in Spring The Dead BabyThe Sparrow, to My FatherIn the American GrainThe Great American NovelProletarian PortraitWilliam Faulkner The Sound and the Fury!Light in August! Absalom! Absalom!!Go down, Moses!Soldier’s Pay!As I Lay Dying!Sartoris!The Hamlet!The Town!The Mansion!The Marble Faun!Dry September!Barn Burning!William Inge Come Back, Little ShebaPicnicWalt Whitman Leaves of Grass!One’s Self I Sing!O Captain! My Captain!!Song of Myself!I Hear America Singing!Song of the Broad-Axe!When Lilacs Lost in the Dooryard Bloom’d! Democratic vistas!The Tramp and Strike Question !I Sit and Look Out!Wallace Stevens The Man with the Blue GuitarThe Necessary AngelAnecdote of the JarHarmoniumNotes Toward a Supreme FictionPeter Quince at the ClavierSunday MorningThe Auroras of Autumn!!!Ⅱ解释术语!!Aestheticism 唯美主义：is an intellectual and art movement supporting the emphasis of aesthetic values more than social-political themes for literature, ﬁne art, music and other arts.!Angry young man 奋⻘青：a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950s. The group's leading members included John Osborne and Kingsley Amis .They showed an equally uninhibited disdain for the drabness of the postwar welfare state, and their writings frequently expressed raw anger and frustration as the postwar re forms failed to meet exalted aspirations for genuine change.!Allegory 寓⾔言:An allegory is a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and action, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the primary level of signiﬁcation, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of signiﬁcation.!Criticism 批判主义：is the practice of judging the merits and faults of something. To criticize does not necessarily imply "to ﬁnd fault", but the word is often taken to mean the simple expression of an objection against prejudice, or a disapproval of something. Often criticism involves active disagreement, but it may only mean "taking sides". It could just be an exploration of the different sides of an issue.!Critical realism 批判现实主义:is the theory that some of our sense-data (for example, those of primary qualities) can and do accurately represent external objects, properties, and events, while other of our sense-data (for example, those of secondary qualities and perceptual illusions) do not accurately represent any external objects, properties, and events. In short, critical realism refers to any position that maintains that there exists an objectively knowable, mind-independent reality, whilst acknowledging the roles of perception and cognition.!Classicism古典主义：the ideas and styles that are common in the literature, art, and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome; a traditional style of art, literature, music, architecture, etc., that is usually graceful and simple with parts that are organized in a pleasing way!Dadaism 达达主义: a form of artistic anarchy born out of disgust for the social, political and cultural values of the time. It embraced elements of art, music, poetry, theatre, dance and politics. Dada was not so much a style of art like Cubism or Fauvism; it was more a protest movement with an anti-establishment manifesto.!Determinism 决定论:is the philosophical position that for every event, including human interactions, there exist conditions that could cause no other event. "There are many determinisms, depending on what pre-conditions are considered to be determinative of an event or action.” Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have sprung from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and considerations.!Existentialism 存在主义:is a term that has been applied to the work of a number of nineteenth and twentieth century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, took the human subject — not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual and his or her conditions of existence — as a starting point for philosophical thought.!Free verse ⾃自由体诗:Free verse, or “open form” verse, is printed like traditional verse in short lines instead of with the continuity of prose, but it differs from traditional verse by the fact that its rhythmic pattern is not organized into a regular metrical form. Most free verse also has irregular lengths, and either lacks rhyme or uses it only sporadically.!golden age ⻩黄⾦金时代：the most ﬂourishing period in the history of a nation, literature, people, etc.!Gilded age 镀⾦金时代：the age of wealth and poverty, of progress and decline, and the age of gaudy excesses.!Hippie 嬉⽪皮⼠士：a member of a counterculture, originally a youth movement that started in the United States and United Kingdom during the mid-1960s and spread to other countries around the world.!Imagism 意象主义:Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. Imagism has been described as the most inﬂuential movement in English poetry since the activity of the Pre-Raphaelites. As a poetic style it gave Modernism its start in the early 20th century, and is considered to be the ﬁrst organized Modernist literary movement in the English language. Imagism is sometimes viewed as 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development.!Idealism 理想主义:In philosophy, idealism is the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing. In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas—especially beliefs and values—shape society.!Industrialism 产业主义:An economic and social system based on the development of large-scale industries and marked by the production of large quantities of inexpensive manufactured goods and the concentration of employment in urban factories.! Individualism 个⼈人主义:is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology, or social outlook that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual. Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and so value independence and self-reliance and advocate that interests of the individual should achieve precedence over the state or a social group, while opposing external interference upon one's own interests by society or institutions such as the government.!Local colorism 乡⼟土特⾊色(主义）：literary works that emphasizes the characteristics of their own region, deeply rooted in America, in local soil and culture. For the first time, the rich variety of American life and American people are fully presented in literary works.Local colorist is mostly concerned with the characteristics of people and life of their own regions. As a result, local colorists in different regions together presented a most colorful and comprehensive picture of America and American life, best presented not only the history of the country but the development of the nation and its culture.Literature ⽂文学：language artistically used to achieve identiﬁable literary qualities and to convey meaningful messages.! Modernism 现代主义:It is the term referring to the literary, artistic and general culture of the first half of the twentieth century. Modernism is distinguished by its general rejection of previous literary traditions, particularly those of the late nineteenth century and of bourgeois society.!Materialism 唯物主义:Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are identical with material interactions.!Magic realism 魔幻现实主义： is an artistic genre in which magical elements or illogical scenarios appear in an otherwise realistic or even “normal” setting, which has been widely used in relation to literature, art and ﬁlm. The magical realists aim to highlight reality as opposed to traditional way of presenting or reﬂecting reality, to express the irony in everyday events that we tend to ignore and to blur the boundary between real and unreal.!Naturalism ⾃自然主义: Naturalism is a growth of realism, a prominent literacy movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as romanticism or surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic or even supernatural treatment. !New criticism 新批判主义:was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.!Primitivism 原始主义:Primitivism is a preference for the supposedly free and contented existence found in a “primitive” way of life as opposed to the artiﬁcialities of urban civilization. It had a particular prominence in the 18th century Europe and 19th century America, contributing to the values of Romanticism.!Predestination 宿命论:in theology, is the doctrine that all events have been willed by God, usually with reference to the eventual fate of the individual soul. Explanations of predestination often seek to address the "paradox of free will", whereby God's omniscience seems incompatible with human free will. In this usage, predestination can be regarded as a form of religious determinism; and usually predeterminism.!Psychological realism ⼼心理现实主义:refers to works of prose ﬁction which places more than the usual amount of emphasis on interior characterization, and on the motives, circumstances, and internal action which springs from, and develops, external action. The psychological realism is not content to state what happens but goes on to explain the motivation of this action. In this type of writing character and characterization are more important than usual, and they often delve deeper into the mind of a character than novels of other genres.!Post-romanticism 后浪漫主义:refers to a range of cultural endeavors and attitudes emerging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after the period of Romanticism. Herman Melville and Thomas Carlyle are post-Romantic writers. Flaubert's Madame Bovary is a post-Romantic novel. The period of post-romanticism in poetry is deﬁned as the late nineteenth century, and includes the poetry of Tennyson.!Post-modernism 后现代主义:is a late-20th-century movement in the arts, architecture, and criticism that was a departure from modernism. Postmodernism includes skeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, history, economics, architecture, ﬁction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained signiﬁcant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought.!Postmodernism is a blanket term covering a wide range of diverse experimentation that has been going on since the end of World War II. It is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 1960s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and styles — most noticeably in television, advertising, commercial design, and pop video.!。

美国文学史复习大纲

美国文学史复习大纲一：作家作品1.Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio(小镇畸人，1919) The Triumph of the Egg(鸡蛋的胜利，1921)2.John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath(愤怒的葡萄，1939，strong sociological novel,1940年获普利策奖（Pulitzer Prize)),1962年获诺贝尔文学奖①the foremost novelist of the American Depression.美国大萧条时期最杰出的小说家。

②代表作：“Of Mice and Men”《人鼠之间》portrayed the tragic friendship between two migrant workers “The Grapes of Wrath”《愤怒的葡萄》regarded as masterpiece ,showed the migration of the Okies from the Dust Bowls to California ,a migration that ended in broken dreams and misery but at the same time affirmed the ability of the common people to endure and prevail. Theme : strength comes from unity i-we ;faith in life; struggle to live better2.John Dos Passos: 约翰多斯帕索斯His trilogy U.S.A(美利坚)---The 42nd Parallel(北纬42度，1930), 1919(1932), The Big Money(1936), Three Soldiers。

美国文学选读复习资料全

American Puritanism 殖民地时期( roughly from the settlement of America in the early 17th century through the end of the 18th)一、Benjamin Franklin 本杰明•富兰克林作品：1、Poor Richard's Almanac 《格言历书》--- A Collection of maxims, or proverbs, on the value of work and savings for success.2、The Autobiography 《自传》---“美国梦”的根源3、参与起草《独立宣言》浪漫主义American RomanticismThe 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 RomanticismThe 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.Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in va lue of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a sourc e of goodness and man’s societies as a source of corruption.二、Edgar Allan Poe 埃德加·爱伦·坡---poet, short story writer and literary critic (48 poems,70 short stories)He greatly influenced the devotees of “Art for art’s sake.”He was father of psychoanalytic criticism (心理分析批评), and the detective story. 诗歌的精髓就是追求美小说的主题常常是恐怖和死亡，其中还运用了象征手法。

（完整word版）美国文学史复习要点整理【手动】

（完整word版）美国文学史复习要点整理【手动】美国文学史整理一、Colonial America 殖民时期1、New England：Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, andConnecticut.2、Doctrines of Puritanism清教American Puritanism stressed predestination（命运神定), original sin（原罪）, total depravity (彻底的堕落), and limited atonement (有限的赎罪)from God’s grace.3、Writing style：fresh, simple and direct and with a touch of nobility；the rhetoric is plain andhonest.4、Life style：hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.5、Main writer:①Thomas Paine 托马斯·潘恩work：Common Sense (1776) 《常识》American Crisis (1776-1783)《美国危机》The Rights of Man《人权》The Age of Reason《理性时代》②Benjamin Franklin（本杰明·富兰克林）Poor Richard’s Almanac《穷查理历书》Autobiography 《富兰克林自传》③Thomas Jefferson 托马斯·杰弗逊Declaration of Independence (1776)《独立宣言》二、American Romanticism (early period) 浪漫主义前期1、Characteristics：①A rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.反对理性主义的客观性。

美国文学史复习纲要

1. The Colonial PeriodThe settlement of America in the early 17th century--- the end of the 18th century.The major topicThe major figures2. The Romantic PeriodCovering the first half of the19th century.•The major points:3. The Age of RealismThe Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. Covering the end of the 19th century and the first decade of 20th century.•It expresses the concern for the commonplace and the low, and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.•4. American Naturalism•From the first decade of twentieth century to the First World War.•The major figures: Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and O. Henry5 American ModernismThe literature between the two world wars. This is the most important period in6. American Postmodernism•From the World War II up to now.•Postmodernist writers: John Barth, Philip Roth, Thomas Pinchon, Ishmael Reed and Don Delillo.•The flourishing of minoritarian literature: Jewish-American, African-American and Asian-American literatureis an account of a person’s life written by that person or a book written by oneself about one’s own life. It is characterized by the simplicity of diction, syntax and expression, lucidity of the narrative. Benjamin Franklin…s Autobiography is a good example.Puritanism:Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans, who became American‟s founding fathers. They advocated highly religious and moral principles.The American Puritans were idealists. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God.Puritanism has a profound influence on the early American mind and literaturePoor Richard’s Almanac Autobiography Romanticism1800-1865Characteristics of Romanticism (derivative independent)o an innate and intuitive perception of man, nature and society—reliance on the subconscious, the inner life, the abnormal psychologyo an emphasis on freedom, individualism and imagination—rebellion against neoclassicism which stressed formality, order and authority o a profound love for nature—nature as a source of knowledge, nature asa refuge from the present, nature as a revelation of the holy spirito the quest for beauty—pure beautyo the use of antique and fanciful subject matters—sense of terror, Gothic, grotesque, odd and queerMoby-Dick is regarded as the first American prose epic. His ideas:The world is at once Godless and purposelessMan cannot influence and overcome nature at its sourceThemes 1 alienation 2 Rejection and Quest3criticism against Emersonian self-reliant individualSymbolThe Pequod -------- of human society. The voyage ----- search and discovery. The whale Moby Dick------nature Queequeg's coffin ---- symbolizes life and death. The whiteness of Moby Dick --- death and corruption and purity, innocence and youth; final mystery of the universe.The ship on the ocean----- symbol of the whole world with people in quest of its瓦尔登湖A psalm of lifeSonnet—To science abab cdcd efef ggTo Helen ABABB CDCDC AEEAE五行诗节1. Free from the traditional iambic pentameter and writes free verse2. Parallelism3. Phonetic recurrence systematic repetition of words and phrases or sounds4. Long catalogs, giving free rein to poetic imaginationHer poetry is a clear illustration of her religious-ethical and political-social ideas.largest portion of Dickinson‟s poetry concerns andoriginal in art and famous for the economy of expression in diction and the frequent use of dashes.Her poems are short and implicit in meaning. She is regarded as the forerunner of modernism in American poetryThemes: death love natureFrequent use of dashesTranscendentalism.浪漫主义运动的表现形式-超验主义it‟s Romanticism on the Puritan soil Transcendentalism has been defined as the recognition in man of the capacity of acquiring knowledge transcending the reach of the five senses, or of knowing truth intuitively, or of reaching the divine without the need of an intercessor.placed emphasis on spirit, or the Over soul as the most important thing in the universe stressed the importance of the individualoffered a fresh perception of nature a symbolic of the Spirit or Godstressed the power of intuition.He firmly believes in the transcendence of the “Oversoul”.2. Emerson’s Idealism. He sees the world as phenomenal, and emphasizes theneed for idealism, for idealism sees the world in God3. Emerson’s View on Spirit. He sees spirit pervading everywhere4.Emerson’sView on Man. man is made in the image of God and is just a little less then Him.man is divine.5. Emerson’s View on Individuality and Self-Reliance. The individual is the mostimportant of all. E For him, if man depends upon himself, cultivates himself and brings out the divine in himself, he can hope to become better and even perfect.So men should and could be self-reliant.6. Emerson’s Nature. A natural implication of Emerson‟s view on nature is that the world around is symbolicRealismHis later works become darker and more obscure, showing his discontent and disappointment toward the social reality. His last works shows his acute pessimism, despair, skepticism determinism.Humor local color satireThe Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”The Adventures of Tom Sawyer The Adventures of Huckleberry FinnThe Gilded Age Life on the Mississippi A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court The Man That Corrupted Hardleybug The Mysterious StrangerThe Innocents Abroad Roughing It Pudd'nhead WilsonAmerican ClaimantNaturalismIs a critical term applied to the method of literary composition that aims at a detached, scientific objectivity in the treatment of natural man•It is thus more inclusive and less selective than realism, and holds to the philosophy of determinism.•It conceives of man as controlled by his instincts or his passions, or by its social and economic environment and circumstances.•Since in this view man has no free will, the naturalistic writer does not attempt to make moral judgments•Since in this view man has no free will, the naturalistic writer does not attempt to make moral judgments.•In a word, naturalism is evolved from realism when the author‟s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic.CharacteristicsA literary trend that prevailed in 1890s in America.1) Emphasis on reality, objectivity, no exaggeration, give no comments andcriticizing;2) The naturalists would go to the slums and describe the poverty and crime;3) Be concerned about the influence of social environment. According to them,human beings are victims of the crushing forces of heredity and environment.Explain human activities and human society according to biological law, highlight the effect of animal instincts and heredity on human beings.5) Apply scientific experiment to writing, try to test human feelings in variouskinds of environment.6) The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile.7) Hold very pessimistic attitude towards human society, and this pessimism oftengoes to determinism.Representatives: CharacteristicFrank Norris（弗兰克·诺里斯）dehumanizedStephen Crane（斯蒂芬·克莱恩）- determinedTheodore Dreiser（西奥多·德莱塞）- moved by inner and outer forcesJack London（杰克·伦敦beyond conscious moral control McTeague Octopus the Pit Vandover and the BruteMaggie: A Girl of the Streets The red badge of courage Sister Carrie Modernism现代主义时期•During the first decades of the 20th century, modernism became an international tendency against positivism and representational art in art and literature. Modernism was the consequence of the transformation of society brought about by industrialism and technology. The essence of modernism wasa break with the past, and it also fostered a belief in art and literature as anavenue to self-fulfillment. The feature was its strong and conscious break with traditional forms, perceptions, and techniques of expressions, and its great concern with language and all aspects of its medium.•It was persistently experimental. Stream of consciousness, the use of myth as a structural principle, and the primary status given to the poetic image, all challenged traditional representation.•Generally speaking, this new desire in craftsmanship and skill was one of the hallmarks of the early decades of the 20th century.Imagism意象派（诞生于现代主义时期）It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry characterized by the use of concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, metrical freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. It was initially led by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell.（no fuss, frill, or ornament）,（precision and economy of expression）,（free verse form and music）.Launch Imagism setting down the Imagist principlesThe Cantos 《诗章》威廉·卡洛·威廉斯avoided complexity andobscure华莱士·斯蒂文斯Simple lines: an emphasis on vocabulary and imagery rather than prosodyThe faith in poetry : when no one believes in God, it is necessary to believe in something else, such as poetry, a thing created by imaginationAnecdote of the Jar罗伯特The most popular 20th Century American Poet, A four-timeStyl e 1rejected the revolutionary poetic principles of his contemporaries, choosingthe old-fashioned way to be new.• 2 employ the plain speech of rural New Englanders.3 use the simple, short, traditional forms of lyrics and Narrative, can probemysteries of darkness and irrationality in the bleak and chaotic landscapes of an indifferent universe where man stand alone, unaided and perplexed.Fire and ice Fire - a symbol of desire, or love. Ice - a symbol of hatredtwo weaknesses of human beings that are as destructive as natural disasters The road not taken it does not moralize about choice, it simply says that choice is inevitable but you never know what your choice will mean until you have lived itStopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening The poem is primarily oriented towards the pleasures of the scene and the responsibility of life. Metaphors:• Promises –Our own promises or duties that we must fulfill.Miles - experience we must travel through before deathThe apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black boughthe Great Gatsby 1926The Sun Also Rises 1926, A Farewell to Arms , 1929,the Wasteland.Main Street 1920an American TragedyAmerican Dream:The American Dream is that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for every man, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement. It is not a dream of martial wealth, but a dream of social order. People try to get success no matter what kind of circumstances of birth or position they came from.The lost generationIt refers to the writers who were devoid of faith, values and ideals and who were alienated from the civilization the capitalist society advocated. It includes Ernst Hemingway, F. S.Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, Louis Bromfield., and E.E.Cummings, Ezra Pound，who rebelled against former values and ideas, but replaced them only by despair or a cynical hedonism. They were frustrated by the WWI and returned from that “Great War”to their own country only to find the grim reality that the social values and civilization were hollow.Short storyIt is a fictional prose tale of no specified length, but too short to be published as a volume on its own. It concentrates on a single event with one or two characters. It flourished in the magazines of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in the USA, which has a particularly strong tradition. Edgar Allen Poe was considered as the father of modern short story. His short stories like the cast of Amontillado and the Black cat are famous.Jazz Age⏹American industry developed fast. The nation is full of bouncingebullience, fearful of nothing, confident smug isolationism.⏹Socially, decline of idealism. Patriotism became cynical disillusionment.Unity of family weakened. There appeared the revolt of the Younger Generation. They escaped responsibility and assumed immorality.⏹After WWI, people found that the war which cost millions of lives failedto provide an abiding solutions to the world’s problems, that the war was just the traps of political leaders. Such a disillusionment about the value of war, accompanied by the booming of American economy drove people to cynical hedonism. People experiment with new amusements. They restlessly pursued stimulus and pleasures, wallow in heavy drinking, fast driving and casual sex. By these, they hoped to seek relief from serious problems.Hemingway heroThey live adventures-filled lives that were driven by courage and limited by fear. They hide a sensitive heart from tough exterior.” Grace under press” is their motto. Its heroes are hemmed in by forces beyond their control.AntiheroIt is a central character in a dramatic or narrative work who lacks the qualities ofnobility and magnanimity expected of traditional heroes in romances and epic.Like the character “Henry” in the work of a farewell to arms.SymbolTraditional FormsBallad(民谣)A ballad is a story told in song, usually in 4-line stanzas, with the second and fourth lines rhymed. “The Geste of Robin HoodHeroic CoupletIt refers to a couplet consisting of two rhymed lines of iambic pentameter and written in an elevated style. Sonnet 18Spenserian stanza•It is a stanza with eight lines of iambic pentameter and a concluding Alexandrine with the rhyme pattern abab bcbc c. The Faerie QueeneBlank verse素体诗，无韵诗•Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter.•It became widely used in dramatic poetry and narratives.Now that/ the gloo/my sha/dow of /the night,Longing/ to view/ Orion/’s drizz/ling look,Leaps from/ the an/tarc/tic world/ unto/ the skyAnd dims/ the wel/kin with/ her pi/tchy breath ----Doctor FaustusFree verseMeans the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conventional rules of meter. It can free the poets from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and recreate instead the free rhythms of natural speech.Beat GenerationTheatre of absurd. the 1950sBlack humor.the 1960s。

美国文学选读重要的

美国文学选读PPTI. Romantic periodWashington IrvingEdgar Allan PoeNathanial HawthorneWalt WhitmanEmily DickinsonII. Realist periodMark TwainSherwood AndersonStephen CraneTheodore DreiserIII. Modern periodF. S. FitzgeraldErnest HemingwayWilliam FaulknerI. Early Romantics1.1. Backgrounda. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, romanticism occurredand developed in Europe.b. Industrial Revolution and French Revolution (1789) (fighting forliberty, equality and fraternity)c. Inspiration initially came from two great men: one is Frenchphilosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and German writer Goethe (also related to lake poets)Goethe, Rousseau & Lake PoetsJohann Wolfgang von Goethe(1749-1832): stressing feelings and individualityJean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778): to free the individual personality and feelings, to return to natureIn 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge jointly published the “Lyrical Ballads” , which marked the break with the classicism and the beginning of romanticism.d. Neoclassicism, as represented by John Dryden (1631-1700) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744), esteemed objectivity, harmony, rationality, dignity, proportion, and moderation.1.2. Features of the romantic literature1.2.1.Expressiveness:Wordsworth: “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”The romanticists held that the writers should express their emotions, feelings, impressions, instinct, intuition, or their beliefs in their works instead of the imitation of the classical writers.1.2.2. Imagination:1.2.3. Worship of nature：1.2.4. Simplicity：turned to the humble people and the everyday life，adopted the everyday languageRomanticismRomanticism is a term applied to literary and artistic movements of the late 18th and early 19th century. It can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified classicism in general and late 18th-century neoclassicism in particular. (to be continued)It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general.Inspired in part by the libertarian ideals of the French Revolution, the romantics believed in a return to nature and in the innate goodness of humans, as expressed by Jean Jacques Rousseau. (to be continued)They emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. They also showed interest in the medieval, exotic, primitive, and nationalistic. Critics date English literary Romanticism from the publication of William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads in 1798 to the death of Sir Walter Scott and the passage of the first reform bill in the Parliament in 1832.II. American Romanticism(from the end of 18th to the Civil War)2.1. BackgroundA. American PuritanismB. America was striving for political, economic, and culturalindependence from Britain, radical changes took place: Development of industrialism, great immigration, westward expansion, etc. The buoyant mood of the nation called for a new literary expression, and romanticism answered the call.C. The European influence.2.2. Representative romanticists:In poetry: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Henry Longfellow In fiction: James Cooper, Washington Irving, Nathaniel HawthorneLecture 1 .Washington Irving (1783 to 1859)3.3.Appreciation of Rip V an Winkle3.3.1. Main idea(reference to page406)3.3.2. Analysis of the characterRip Van Winkle:Hen-pecked, good-tempered, well-oiled, warm-hearted, lazy, care-free, simple-minded, obedient, irresponsible, a little foolish, etc.His wife:nagging, sharp-tongued, hard-working, uneducated country woman 3.3.3. Analysis of the theme1. A story of man who has difficulty in f acing his age or the author’sconservative attitude towards the American Revolution and the young Republic, and his dissatisfaction with American development2. Criticism of some teachings of Puritanism:Unceasing labor, no play, all kinds of pleasures are condemned, greedy for wealthExpress a strong desire for leisure3. The theme of escape from one’s responsibility and even one’shistory4. The loss of identity3.3.4. Analysis of writing style1. The use of humorHumor (sentences written in a funny way in order to amuse the reader)Jocular humor—Irving (for fun, for amusement)Satirical humor—Mark Twain (to satire, to criticize)Tearful humor—O’ Henry (arouse sympathy on the poor)Black humor—Joseph Heller (humor in facing death)2. Graceful, refined, fluent, dignified and standard language. Hisessays are models of English.3. Romantic imagination and fantasies4. Vivid and picturesque description of setting3.4. Comment on IrvingHe was the first American man of letters to support himself as a professional writer.He was the first American author who explored native themes.He was the first American writer to win international recognition, and was extremely popular in Europe.His popularity came from his humor (use dignified words to for unimportant things/ exaggerate the seriousness of the situation)Conservative in his attitude toward the social changes.Lecture 2 . Edgar Allan PoeIntroduction to poetry1.1. What is poetrya. Emily Dickinson: “when I read something I feel so cold that no fire ca n warm me, I know its poetry; when I read something I feel my head is chopped off, I know it’s poetry.”b. The poet has found the emotion, the emotion has found the word.c. Wordsworth: “All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”.d.“A good poem is the crystalization of word and emotions.”1.2.Types of poetry• 1.2.1. Narrative poetry• a. Epic: long narrative poems that record the adventures of a hero whose exploits [brave or adventurous deeds or action] are important to the history of a nation. As Homeric epics (a blind bard): The Iliad and The Odyssey• b. Ballad: a simple poem(less ambitious than epics) that tells a story.• c. Romance: another type of narrative poem, in which adventure is a central feature.1.2.2. Lyric poetry• a. Epigram[诙谐诗]: short poem expressing an idea in clear and amusing way• b. Elegy: a lament for the dead.• c. Ode: a long stately poem in stanzas of varied length, meter, and form.• d. Sonnet: 14 lines, the Italian (or Petrarchan: 8-line octave + 6-line sestet; typical rhyming: abbaabba+cdcdcd/cdecde) and the English (or Shakespearean: three 4-line quatrains + a concluding 2-line couplet)1.3. Elements of poetry• 1.3.1. V oice: speaker and tone• 1.3.2. Diction: the best words in the best order (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)• 1.3.3. Imagery: a concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea.•Images: visual, aural, tactile, olfactory (something smelled), gustatory (sth tasted)• 1.3.4. Figures of speech: simile and metaphor• 1.3.5. Symbolism: a symbol is any object or action that means more than itself, any object or action that represents sth beyond itself.• 1.3.6. Syntax: the grammatical structure of words in sentences and the development of sentences in longer units throughout the poem.1.3.7. SoundRhyme:two or more words or phrases contain an identical or similar vowel-sound, usually stressed, and the consonant sounds that follow the vowel-sound are identical and preceded by different consonants. eg. bright and night heaven and seven see and theeOn the basis of sound:Exact rhyme: repeat end sounds precisely eg. day — waySlant rhyme: provide an approximate sound eg.sun — boneIdentical rhyme: repeating the entire sound, including the initial consonant, sometimes by repeating the same word in a rhyme position and sometimes by repeating the sound with two senses. eg. two — tooEye rhyme: look alike, but sound different .eg. laughter —daughterOn the basis of the number of syllables:Masculine rhyme: the recurrence of sound is restricted to the final stressed syllable . eg. cold — boldFeminine rhyme: the stressed rhyming syllables are followed by identical unstressed syllableseg. spiteful— delightfulTriple rhyme: the rhyming stressed syllable is followed by two identical unstressed syllableseg. tenderly —slenderlyOn the basis of the position in a lineInternal rhyme: occurs at the beginning, sometimes combined with end rhyme eg. the grains beyond age, the dark veins of her motherEnd rhyme: occurs at the end of a lineeg. Three poets, in three distant ages born,Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.Alliteration is the repetition of consonants, especially at the beginning of words or stressed syllables. Eg. The willows waved violently in the wind. Assonance is the repetition of similar vowel sounds within a noticeable range. Eg. All day the wind breathes low with mellower toneThro’ every holl ow cave and alley lone.Consonance is the repetition of identical consonant sounds before and after different vowels.Eg. tit and tat creak and crack• 1.3.8. Rhythm and meter• a. rhythm: beat we feel in a phrase of music or a line of poetry, the regular recurrence of the accent or stress in poem.• b. foot[音步]: unit of rhythm in a line of poetry containing one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables, as in the four division of “four m an/may c ome/and m en /may g o”• c. meter[格律]: poetic metre with a given number of feet, or fixed arrangement of accented and unaccented syllables.•Rising feet/meter: iamb (iambic), anapest (anapestic)•Falling feet/meter: trochee (trochaic), dactyl (dactylic)•Number of feet per line Mo n ometer Tr imeter Te tr ameter Pentameter Hexameter Hep t ameter Oc t ameter1.4. Some features of poetry• 1.4.1. emotional, passionate,•Expressing and arousing strong feeling such as love, pity, fear, sadness, joy, etc from the author or from the reader• 1.4.2. Symbolic• A symbol is something that stands for something else. In literature, it refers to any word, object, action, or character that embodies and evokes a range of additional meaning and significance.•Imagery is the use of figurative language to produce a picture in the minds of readers or hearers.• 1.4.3. Condensed and vivid language•Language is the most important thing in poetry. Poetic language is the most vivid and condensed language in literature.2.3. Poe’s featuresa. A short story writerstories two kinds:Horror Ratiocination（推理）b. A poetfifty poems typically Romantic in both form and contentc. A literary criticPoe’s poetictheories“The Philosophy of Composition ““The Poetic Principle”Poetry should be short and readable at one sitting, should appeal only to “beauty” (aiming at “an elevating excitement of the soul”)True poetry is “the rhythmical creation of beauty”Poe’s aesthetic theory•a. “Beauty is the sole purpose of the poem.” Poetry must concern itself just with “supernal beauty”, not with the narration of a s tory, nor even with the beauty of particular things.•b. The immediate object of poetry is pleasure, not truth. The function of poetry is not to summarize, nor interpret earthly experience, but to create a mood in which the soul soars.•c. Melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetic tones. Sickness, abnormal love, death of a beautiful woman, are to him, unquestionably, the most poetical topics in the world.•d. The length of writing, both of tales and poetry, should be about 100 lines, so that the reader can be well engaged in it without any interruption. Understanding “The Raven”3.1. Topic of the poem:death: “the death of a beautiful woman is , unquestionably, the most poetic in the world”→a sense of melancholy over the death of a beloved beautiful young woman 3.2. Setting of the poem:midnight: a time associated with the end of lifebleak December: a season associated with the end of lifethe room: warmed and lighted by “dying embers”, associated with the supernaturalthe purple curtains: a color associated with Fu n ereal custom3.3. Mood of the personamelancholic, sorrowful, even desperate (The repetition of the word “Nevermore”increases the speaker’s feelings of pain and loss. This pattern of self-inflicted torture builds in intensity until the speaker breaks down emotionally and demands that the raven “Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door”).3.4. SoundIt takes Poe 4 years to complete “The Raven”→a marvel of regularity:719 feet of which 705 are perfect trochees (1 strong + 1 weak), 10 doubtful trochees and only 4 clearly dactyls (1 strong + 2 weak)Rhyme scheme: abcbbbAlliteration (flirt, flutter; stately, saintly…)Assonance (dreary, weary; napping, tapping, rapping;morrow, borrow, sorrow, with the sound “o”to show one’s sad,sorrow and grief mood; …)Sound and rhythm make the poem musical and melodious. They contribute a lot to the mood and the theme of the writing at the same time.3.5 symbolism3.5.1 Raven: disaster and misfortuneRaven, the large bird-like crow with black feathers, in Western countries, as well as it is in China, is conventionally regarded as an ominous fowl, a symbol of misfortune. Thus with the repetition of the "napping and tapping" the poet was filled "with fantastic terrors never felt before."3.5.2 the "lost Lenore" : the soul of the radiant maiden, beauty and hopeAt the moment when the poet was in the darkness peering, wondering, expecting and whispering Lenore but was just responded with a "nothing more," the Raven, "with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door." A conversation was held and the poet was so comforted with it. For twice, the poet felt the bird "beguiling my sad fancy into smiling."3.5.3 The poet’s strong passion to Lenore: the sub-consciousness of the poetIn the conversation the poet distinctly expressed his strong passion to Lenore. However, the only response from the Raven was "Nevermore." It seems what the poet had expressed is simply the view out of the "id", while the Raven 's words are rather restrictive and seem out of "ego." The poet was too affectionate to Lenore to be restrictive, while the Raven was what warned him to be rational and that what had been lost would return "nevermore."3.5.4 The poet’s frustration: the modern realityThe poet was of the firm belief that in modern society human beings are apa th etic creatures. He was deeply resentful at the people's indifference towards his mourning to Lenore; therefore, he turned to the Raven for comfort. But quite to his disappointment, he was merely responded with a cold "nevermore."Lecture 3:Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804—1864)Introduction to the writerthe great romantic novelist in the nineteenth century . the pioneer of psychological analyst in the history of American literature.1.2. Point of viewBlack vision of human nature: Obsessed by the Calvinistic concept of the original sin, Hawthorne believes human beings are evil-natured and sinful and this sin and evil is ever present in human heart and will pass on from one generation to another. His writings are to show how we are all wronged and wrongers, and avenge one another.1.4. Themes of Hawthorne’s writing⏹ 1. Explore the relationship between the past and the present⏹ 2. Explore the hidden motivations of his characters.⏹ 3. Examine the effect of hidden sin and secret guilt⏹ 4. Moral or immoral, right or wrong is the question Hawthorne alwaystalks about in his works.1.5. Style⏹ 1. His style was soft, flowing and almost feminine.⏹ nguage: smooth, clear, beautiful in sound and meaning⏹ 3.He also frequently uses symbols and settings to reveal thepsychology of the characters.II. Appreciation of “Young Goodman Brown”2.1. The main idea of the work2.2. Understanding of the excerpt2.3. Analysis of the structure⏹At sunset, Goodman Brown leaves his wife Faith, spends the night inthe forest, and at dawn returns a changed man. Within this basic structure, the story further divides into four separate scenes, the first and last of which, that is, the departure from and the return to Salem, are balanced. (to be continued)⏹The night in the forest falls naturally into two parts: the temptation bythe Devil and the meeting of the witch. The two scenes, particularly the former, make full and careful use of the dramatic devices of suspense and climatic arrangement. The climax of the story comes when Brown calls upon his wife to look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one, which is cut off abruptly by anticlimax as the meeting vanishes in a roaring wind, and Brown leaning against the rock finds it chill and damp to his touch.2.4. Analysis of the theme⏹Everyone possesses some evil secret.2.5. Analysis of the writing style⏹ 2.5.1. Ambiguity:⏹Whether the events of the night are actual or dreamlike⏹Whether Brown is lost to the devil or saved by Faith2.5.2. Contrast⏹Day and night⏹Good and Evil⏹The red of fire and blood and the black of night and forest2.5.3. Symbolism⏹day and the town: human convention and society⏹night and forest: symbols of doubt and wandering⏹red: Sin or Evil⏹black: doubt of the reality of either Evil or Good that tortures Brown2.5.4. Allegory⏹The story is often read as a conventional allegory in the sense thatYoung Goodman is everyman, and his journey to the dark forest and his encounter with the devil are symbolic of man’s life journey from innocence to knowledge, from good to evil.⏹Faith, if taken as an allegorical figure, is the incarnation of Christianbelief.III. Comment on the writer⏹ 3.1. the great romantic novelist in the nineteenth century⏹ 3.2. the pioneer of psychological analyst in the history of Americanliterature.Appreciation of The Scarlet Letter⏹1. Main Character:Hester Prynne.Roger Chillingworth.Arthur Dimmesdale3. Character Analysis⏹Hester: brave, strong-minded, warm-hearted, intelligent, sacrificing, decisive⏹Dimmesdale: timid, selfish, irresponsible, cowardly, weak-minded⏹Chillingworth: cold-blooded, dehumanizedTheme of The Scarlet Letter⏹To escape the bondage of religion either on people’s spirit or on people’s natural desire⏹4. Abundant use of symbols⏹A ---adultery⏹angel⏹able⏹Prison—the place that deprived people of spiritual freedom⏹Forest---the nature⏹Rose near the prison—Hester and her love⏹Cap—sth controlling one’s beautyLecture 4:Walt Whitman(1819-1892)1.1. Background of the 1820’s♦ 1. Democratic idealism began to exert influence, the antislavery movement.♦ 2. Democratic and abolitionist literature began to rise. In 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe published her Uncle Tom’s Cabin which was greatly honored by President Lincoln. “the little lady who wrote the book that made this big war.”♦ 3. The American literary field in the 19th century blossomed also with poetry. The most popular poet was Longfellow, because he was most interested in such subjects as home, family, nature and religion and his style was lyrical as well as conventional. But the best poet is no doubt Whitman.1.3. Major work♦Leaves Of Grass: a collection of Whitman’s poems, his lifelong achievement. The most famous pieces are “Song of Myself”, “There Was a Child Went Forth”, “Pioneers! Pioneers!” etc. Whitman experimented in his works with new poetic form of free verse and oral lg. Thus, Leaves of Grass has become landmark in American literary history, which represents the poet, the people, and the nation in the 19th America and celebrates the future of the nation and the ideals of equality and democracy.II. Appreciation of the selected readings2.1. “I hear American singing”♦ 2.1.1.Main idea: This poem is shortest among Whitman’s poems. It presents the reader a picture of the modern Americans: people from all walks of life are singing for their cheerful and creative work and their dream through out American.♦ 2.1.2.Themes: an eulogy to the thriving American nation, the laboring people; the poet’s optimistic attitude toward the world and life.♦ 2.1.3.Tone: Proud, cheerful, optimistic2.2. “There was a child went forth”2.2.1. Understanding of the poem:♦It is a poem about the experience of Whitman the child-poet as well as that of America the newly founded nation. Between the lines, Whitman recaptures the awakening consciousness of the child-poet and the lovely landscape in which the American child matures.♦The child went through several stages to know nature, human beings, his own origin, and at last the wide and endless world of sea. He was energetic, thirsty for knowledge. And the future for him is bright, for he will always go forth every day. By comparing the young nation to a child, Whitman made his optimistic view on its future felt and self-evident.2.2.2. Structure:The structure of the poem is a circular one. The first stanza is an introduction to the child. In the second stanza, it turns out to be a beautiful idyllic landscape where the child came to know nature. However, he went from the idyllic peaceful Eden to the noisy human city in the next stanza, and then came to know the conception of himself in the fourth stanza.♦In the last stanza, he saw his parents and other people in the crowding world. But the poem changes here into another idyllic episode: the beautiful scene on the sea. It is just like a circle. The child came in peace, grew in the crowded society, but went back to peace at the sea. The return to peace is just the beginning of another one. The child will mature day in and day out.2.3. “Song of myself”Theme:♦“Song of myself” , consisting 1345 lines, is the longest poem in Leaves of Grass. “Myself” is the central and principal image in this poem. It refers not only to the poet himself but also to a group of people who had the American national characteristics and the democratic ideals like Whitman.They were pioneers on the American continent: the ironsmiths, the carpenters, the butcher, and the waiters, etc., as listed in the poem.♦These people were optimistic in spirit and strong physically. They live harmoniously with other people in this world as well as with nature. In this song, Whitman sings of nationalism and of the nature of the self in relation to the cosmos and the meaning and purpose of birth and death.Individualism, nationalism, and internationalism or cosmopolitanism, the three contradicting beliefs are reasonably united.♦The selec ted part is the first and the sixth sections of “Song of myself”. In Section one, Whitman talks about the contradictory but also harmonious relations between myself and you, his willingness to live on this soil, and the importance of nature. These ideas are essential to understand Whitman’s philosophy and esp. the whole “Song of myself”♦In Section Six, the poet turns his attention to the grass. He probes into the relationships between the grass and himself/the Lord/a child or a new life/death and so on. The grass is a symbol of life and equality. He suggests the central underlying truth in nature is death. To him, death is not an ending, but the ultimate source of equality and unity. As a natural part of the cycle of life, in death the body becomes part of nature in a different way. Death is immortality, though people do not recognize that.2.4. Analysis of the artistic features♦ 2.4.1. form: free verse♦Oral and powerful lg: Although free verse, he wrote with repeated and parallel sentences to strengthen the feelings. He express what he wanted to express freely, smoothly, and heatedly. His poems are like waves of the sea that rushed to the beach violently, one after another.♦ 2.4.2 the first person narrator: direct and sympathetic to the reader♦ 2.4.3. topic: sex.♦To use his own expression, “he saw the world as a vision of love.” He believes that life is the source of poems, love and enthusiasm are the motives of creation.III. Comments on the writer♦ 3.1. Subject: son of time, feels the pulse of the time. As a romanticist and transcendentalist, he broke the conventional poetic materials, no myth,no romance, no story of king and lords. He sings for self, common people, America, city life, nature, etc.♦ 3.2. Form: (Free verse) poetry without fixed beat or regular rhyme.Whitman is the first great American poet to use this form of poetry, he also used it more skillfully than any other poet.Lecture 5:Emily Dickinson（1830-1886）1.2. Points of viewEmily Dickinson lived a life of self-seclusion. She was a sensitive woman and preferred to explore the inner life of herself other than the social one. Therefore, her poetry usually concerns her meditations on love, religion, death, immortality, and nature. Her world on one hand was small, because it was only a secluded woman’s world. But on the other hand, it was a cosmos, making up of the human inner world and natural outer one.1.2.1. Religious viewsCalvinism with its doctrine of predestination and its pessimistic ideas about life and man’s original sin haunted her during her childhood and adolescence. Because of the Calvinist influence, her view of life is pessimistic and her tone in the poems sounds tragic. In her poetry, we can strongly sense the doubts about the existence of God and the realization of after-life. She was so obsessed with this religious uncertainty that about one third of her poems are about death and immortality, themes that lie at the center of her poetic world.1.2.2. Ideas on loveLove is another subject Dickinson showed great interest in. She herself had lived a lonely life of a spinster. She had once or twice fallen in love with someone. But each time she was frustrated. Some of her love poems reflect the unhappy experiences of hers, such as “I never lost as much but twice”. There are also poems about the longing of physical love, the union of the bodies.1.2.3. Ideas on natureDickinson was also a nature poet. To her, nature is both simple and harmonious. She writes about nature to reveal its simplicity and profundity on one hand, and tries to establish a connection between nature and man on the other, like the transcendentalists. Her poems are full of insights intonature and human life.1.2.4. Ideas on poetry writingEmily Dickinson seemed to consider poetry writing as a private thing.When she was in her early twenties, she began to write poetry. Sometimes she would send her poems with letters to her friends. But she never approved of publishing her poems, for she thought, “Publication is the auction of the mind of man.”So she kept her poems to herself throughout the life. She did not regard herself as a poet. But in her opinion, a poet’s responsibility is to use concrete images to present abstract ideas. Her poems are terse and suggestive.1.3. Special features1.3.1. Experimentation on poetic forms: In poetic style, Dickinsonwas terse, suggestive, and indirect.1.3.2. PersonaDickinson’s poems present no identifiable speaker. It was only a supposed person in the poems. The speaker rarely has an age and often no gender; it emerges from no background and has no purpose beyond the moment of the speech. Her poetry is about personal crises of no particular individuals, nor is it about Emily Dickinson herself: instead, it speaks generally—addressing the human conditions.II. Appreciation of the selected works2.1. Wild Nights—Wild Night!2.1.1. Understanding the poemThis is a poem on love. Although Dickinson is a spinster, she is skillful in writing poems on love.2.1.2. Symbols:boat and the sea: male and female loverswild nights: passionate or wild love2.2. This is my letter to the world2.2.1. Understanding the poem：This is a poem on life.2.2.2. Theme: Dickinson’s proud expectation of a public place among her sweet countrymen.2.2.3. Structure2 stanzas: The first stanza is one sentence. There is a contrast in thisstanza: the World and Nature. The former never wrote to “me”the simple news, while the latter told “me”with tender Majesty. Thus the world is indifferent but nature is amiable. The second stanza is composed of 2 sentences. The first 2 lines reveal the way in which nature commits the news and the last two lines the poet’s request to the countrymen: judge tenderly to me.2.3. I died for Beauty—but was Scarce。

美国文学选读复习资料

1、Benjamin Franklin（1706-1790）本杰明·富兰克林He is the representative of the Enlightenment in America in 18th century. Humanist, statesman, writer, scientist, inventor.The Autobiography《自传》♂简析：The book is about the course of Franklin's struggle for success. It tells us the importance of being diligent. The book had a great influence on American people,and changed the destinies of many youth.It is the first America successful biographical work（传记文学）, has an important position in the history of American Literaturel.Poor Richard’s Almanac 《格言历书》♂简析：A collection of maxims （格言），or proverbs, on the value of work and savings for success.2、Edgar Allan Poe(1809-1849) 埃德加·爱伦·坡 Novelist,poet,critic.Good at writing Gothic（哥特式）and detective fiction.Father of western detective stories and psychoanalytic criticism.（扩展：文学理论建树不容忽视，影响深远。

美国文学复习资料

Lecture 1 Washington Irving1. Background Questions:1) What is the duration of American Romanticism?From the end of the 18th century to the Civil War (1861-1865)2) What are the main features of American Romanticism?Irrationalism: opposing rationalism/neo-classicism; focusing on feelings,intuitions and emotions; worshipping ideals, imaginationIndividualism: placing the individual and the common man against the group, against authorityBeing close to nature: the world as a living, breathing being; the close relationshipbetween man and natureSimplicity in style(Other distinctive features of American Romanticism besides the above common features of Romanticism)Objection to puritan moralityThe ―newness‖ of the Americans as a nation independent from the European yoke: newness of America as a nation, their ideals of individualism and political equality, and their dream of America as a new Garden of Eden for man, their national experience of ―pioneering into the west‖2. Selected Reading:Pre-Reading questions:1) What are the artistic features of Irving‘s writing?a. The use of humorb. Graceful, refined, fluent, dignified and standard language. His essays are models of English.c. Romantic imagination and fantasiesd. Vivid and picturesque description of the setting2) What are the different types of humor? Try to find some humorous expressions in the excerpt?a. Different types of humor:Jocular humor—Irving (for fun, for amusement)Satirical humor—Mark Twain (to satire, to criticize)Tearful humor—O‘ Henry (a rouse sympathy on the poor)Black humor—Joseph Heller (humor in facing death)b. There are a lot of examples:When depicting how Rip‘s close friend, his dog Wolf reacts to Rip‘s wife, Dame Van Winkle‘s any movement when it is at home.When introducing the so called celebrities at the small inn where Rip frequents in order to console himself when he is driven from home by his wife, and how Rip‘s wife behaves when she gets to the small inn.Topics for after-reading discussion:1) What kind of people do you think Rip Van Winkle and his wife Dame Van Winkle are? If your future husband/wife is Rip/Dame, what will you do to him/her?Rip Van Winkle: lazy, good-tempered, warm-hearted, hen-pecked, well-oiled,care-free, obedient, irresponsible, etc.His wife: nagging, termagant, sharp-tongued, hard-working country woman2) What are the possible themes of the short story?a. A story of man who has difficulty in facing his advancing age or the author‘s conservative attitude towards the American Revolution and the young Republic, and his dissatisfaction with American developmentb. Puritan teachings (Unceasing labor, no play, all kinds of pleasures are condemned, greedy for wealth) as opposed to the American desire for leisure, for the freedom of the individuals as part of American Romantic ideals.c. Escape from one‘s responsibility and even one‘s historyd. The loss of identity4) For what reasons is Irving considered ―father of American literature‖?Possible reasons:He is the first American author who explores native themes.He is the first American writer to win international recognition, extremely popular in Europe.His popularity comes from his humor (using dignified words to for unimportant things/ exaggerate the seriousness of the situation)―Rip Van Winkle‖ is often considered as the first American short story.Lecture 2 Edgar Allan Poe1. Background questions:1) What is Gothic writing in the 18th century?An 18th-century style of literature which describes romantic adventures in mysterious or frightening settings, like ancient castle, ruins or wilderness. The subject matter is always about murder, violence, rape, incest together with ghostly or supernatural horror sometimes.2) What is romantic in Gothic writing?Gothic style is usually called ―dark romanticism‖. Not like romanticism which tends to convey positively human‘s social, political and moral ideals, Gothic writing is full of violence and horror with the involvement of mysterious and supernatural forces to reveal the dark side of human nature, especially of human morality. Like general romanticism, it is irrational paying much attention to the release of human emotion, imagination, intuition and ideals which are suppressed or neglected by the rationalists.2. Selected Reading :1) What are the elements of poetry?Elements of poetry1. Voice: speaker and tone2. Diction: the best words in the best order (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)3. Imagery: a concrete representation of a sense impression, a feeling, or an idea.Images: visual, aural, tactile, olfactory (something smelled), gustatory (sth tasted)4. Figures of speech: simile and metaphor5. Symbolism: a symbol is any object or action that means more than itself, any object oraction that represents sth beyond itself.6. Syntax: the grammatical structure of words in sentences and the development ofsentences in longer units throughout the poem.7. Sound:a. rhyme: matching of final vowel and consonant sounds in two or more words1. end rhyme (at the ends of lines)2. internal rhyme (within lines)b. alliteration: the repetition of consonant sounds, esp. at the beginning of wordsc. assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds8. Rhythm and metera. rhythm: beat we feel in a phrase of music or a line of poetry, the regular recurrence of the accent or stress in poem.b. foot[音步]: unit of rhythm in a line of poetry containing one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables, as in the four division of ―four man/may come/and men/may go‖c. meter[格律]: poetic metre with a given number of feet, or fixed arrangement of accented and unaccented syllables.Rising feet/meter: iamb (iambic), anapest (anapestic)Falling feet/meter: trochee (trochaic), dactyl (dactylic)Number of feet per lineMonometer Dimeter TrimeterTetrameterPentameterHexameterHeptameterOctameter2) What roles do sound and rhythm play in a poem?Sound and rhythm can make the writing musical and melodious. They contribute a lot to the mood and the theme of the writing at the same time.Topics for after-reading discussion:2) What effect does the raven’s word have on the persona?a. The raven‘s only one word answer to the speaker‘s questions which seems as irrelevant fits the scene quit e well. Each time the raven‘s answer is a sting on the broken heart of the speaker. Therefore, it adds to the sad and melancholic mood of the speaker.b. The repetition of the word ―Nevermore‖ also probes into the value of human being‘s existence philosop hically: as answered by the raven to the speaker, one‘s beloved can never be regained if bereaved.3) What types of techniques has the poet employed in the poem in terms of sound?End rhyme (abcbbb)Alliteration (flirt, flutter; stately, sain tly…)Assonance (dreary, weary; napping, tapping, rapping; morrow, borrow, sorrow, with the sound ―o‖ to show one‘s sad, sorrow and grief mood; burning, turning; peering, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming…)Lecture 3 Nathanial Hawthorne1. Background questions:1) What is New England Transcendentalism?Transcendentalism refers to a kind of attitude that believes in the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses. In another word, transcendentalists believe that man learns things not only through reasoning based on his five senses, or by his own sensual experiences, and that he also learns truth spontaneously, out of his soul or instincts. In a literal sense, it means the belief that knowledge and principles of reality can be obtained by studying thought, not necessarily by practical experiences.In this sense the term is almost synonymous with the word mysticism. It was first applied to the German philosophical systems of Hegel, Kant, and Fichte. Later the word came to be used more loosely to apply to a movement that began in New England around 1830, the spokesman of which was Ralph Waldo Emerson.The three key features of New England Transcendentalism are: First, the Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. Secondly, the transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. Thirdly, they take nature as symbolic of Spirit or God.New England Transcendentalism is important to American literature. It is the summit of American Romanticism. It inspires a whole new generation of famous authors such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson. Without its impetus America might have been deprived of one of its most prolific literary periods in its history.3) How does Hawthorne‘s life experience exert great influence on Hawthorne‘s later literary creation?Hawthorne‘s life experience exerts great influence on hi s literary career. Obsessed by the Calvinistic concept of the original sin, Hawthorne believes human beings are evil-natured and sinful and this sin and evil is ever present in human heart and will pass on from one generation to another. His writings are to show how we are all wronged and wrongers, and avenge one another.1) What is a literary allegory?A literary mode involving extended narratives that produce secondary meanings regarding the story that exists on the surface, or a literary form of indirect representation. Characters in allegorical works frequently serve as metaphors for abstract ideas.3) What is Hawthorne’s writing style?His style is soft, flowing and almost feminine.His language is smooth, clear, beautiful in sound and meaningHe also frequently uses symbols and settings to reveal the psychology of the characters.2) What is the structure of the whole story?At sunset, Goodman Brown leaves his wife Faith, spends the night in the forest, and at dawn returns a changed man. Within this basic structure, the story further divides into four separate scenes, the first and last of which, that is, the departure from and the return to Salem, are balanced. The night in the forest falls naturally into two parts: the temptation by the Devil and the meeting of the witch. The two scenes, particularly the former, make full and careful use of the dramatic devices of suspense and climatic arrangement. The climax of the story comes when Brown calls upon his wife to look up to heaven, and resist the wicked one, which is cut off abruptly by anticlimax as the meeting vanishes in a roaring wind, and Brown leaning against the rock finds it chill and damp to his touch.4) What are the allegorical meanings of Young Goodman, his journey to the dark forest, and his encounter with the devil?The story is often read as a conventional allegory in the sense that Young Goodman is everyman, and his journey to the dark forest and his encounter with the devil are symbolic of man‘s life journey from innocence to knowledge, from good to evil.5) Can you find some symbols in the story? Try to interpret their symbolic meanings.day and the town: human convention and societynight and forest: symbols of doubt and wanderingred: Sin or Evilblack: doubt of the reality of either Evil or Good that tortures BrownLecture 4 Walt Whitman1. Background questions:1) What is free verse?Poetry without fixed beat or regular rhyme. The rhythmical lines vary in length, and there is no fixed metrical pattern. It usually seems formless, but it does have a form or pattern based on repetition and parallel structure. Whitman is the first great American poet to use this form of poetry. He also used it more skillfully than any other poet.2) What do you know about Whitman’s Leaves of Grass?Leaves of Grass is Whitman‘s lifelong achievement. Walt Whitman is a poet with a strong sense of mission, having devoted all his life to the creation of the single poem Leaves of Grass. It goes through several editions altogether and contained many excellent poems in the collection. Generally speaking we can divide the whole period into three parts. They respectively are before and during the civil war and the last one is after war.From the poems which he writes before the civil war, such as ―Song of myself‖, ―There was a child went forth‖, we can easily find the trace of romanticism. He advocates democracy and encourages people to fight for individual rights, and helps them to understand their new status and to define themselves in the new world. Hence, the abundance of themes in his poetry voices freshness. He shows concern for the whole hard-working people and burgeoning life of cities. In celebrating the self, Whitman gives emphasis to the physical dimension of the self and openly and joyously celebrates sexuality.During the civil war, Whitman stood firmly on the side of the North and wrote a series of poems which expressed much mourning for the sufferings of the young lives in the battle field and showed a determination to carry on the fighting dauntlessly until the final victory, all of these poems were gathered as a collection under the title of ―Drum Tapes‖. Besides, he wrote down a g reat many poems to air his sorrow to the death of Lincoln, and one of the famous is ―When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom‘d‖This ground-breaking book breaks with the poetic convention, and its sexuality and exotic and vulgar language bring harsh criticisms on it at the very beginning.One of the major principles of Whitman‘s technique is parallelism or a rhythm of thought in which the line is the rhythmical unit, as in the poetry of the Bible.Another principle of Whitman‘s versification i s phonetic recurrence, i.e. the systematic repetition of words and phrases at the head of the line, in the middle or at the end.Unity, unreality of time and space, evil as only an appearance emerging into good, the equal potential divinity of everything from grass to mankind, the immanence of God in all creation, plentitude, continuity and gradation, the multiplicity of nature, and the need for a poetry commensurate with it—all these find adequate expression in this whole poem.2) Discuss the structure of the poem “There Was a Child Went Forth”.The structure of the poem is a circular one. The first stanza is an introduction to the child. In the second stanza, it turns out to be a beautiful idyllic landscape where the child came to know nature. However, he went from the idyllic peaceful Eden to the noisy human city in the next stanza, and then came to know the conception of himself in the fourth stanza. In the last stanza, hesaw his parents and other people in the crowding world. But the poem changes here into another idyllic episode: the beautiful scene on the sea. It is just like a circle. The child came in peace, grew in the crowded society, but went back to peace at the sea. The return to peace is just the beginning of another one. The child will mature day in and day out.3) What‘s the theme of “Song of Myself”?―Song of myself‖ is the longest poem in Leaves of Grass. ―Myself‖ is the central and principal image in this poem. It refers not only to the poet himself but also to a group of people who had the American national characteristics and the democratic ideals like Whitman. They were pioneers on the American continent: the ironsmiths, the carpenters, the butcher, and the waiters, etc., as listed in the poem. These people were optimistic in spirit and strong physically. They live harmoniously with other people in this world as well as with nature. In this song, Whitman sings of nationalism and of the nature of the self in relation to the cosmos and the meaning and purpose of birth and death. Individualism, nationalism, and internationalism or cosmopolitanism, the three contradicting beliefs are reasonably united.Lecture 5 Emily Dickinson3) In what ways does Dickinson differ from Whitman?Whitman mostly keeps his eye on society, but Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual; Whitman embraces a national outlook, but Dickinson holds a regional one; Whitman‘s language is musical, oral but powerful, on the other hand, Dickinson‘s language is usually concise, direct and simple.2. Pre-Reading questions:1) How does Dickinson view love?She herself had lived a lonely life of a spinster. She had once or twice fallen in love with someone. But each time she was frustrated. Some of her love poems reflect the unhappy experiences of hers, such as ―I never lost as much but twice‖. There are also poems about the longing of physical love, the union of the bodies, as in ―Wild nights! Wild nights!‖. For her, love is unhappiness, and love is passion at the same time.3) Wha t‘s Dickinson‘s attitude toward nature?Dickinson was also a nature poet. To her, nature is both simple and harmonious. She writes about nature to reveal its simplicity and profundity on one hand, and tries to establish a connection between nature and man on the other, like the transcendentalists. Her poems are full of insights into nature and human life.1) How does the poet interpret love in “Wild nights! Wild nights!”?Although Dickinson lives a spinster‘s life, she is good at convey the passi onate love between lovers through her poetry. In ―Wild nights! Wild nights!‖, she compares the boat and the sea to two lovers. The passion of love is deeply buried in the heart, like the stormy night. Love can only be released in such adverse circumstances. It is the wild consummated love, as wild as the stormy night, as perfect as the relationship of boat and sea. Therefore, love is something passionate, something a little tragic.3) What aesthetic principle can you see from her poem ―I died for Beauty, but was Scarce”?Beauty and truth are the same, a reflection of John Keats‘s aesthetic idea. In the poem, Dickinson presents 2 personas: one died for Beauty and one for truth. According to Dickinson, the sacrifice for beauty and the sacrifice for truth are both the glories ends in life.4) How do you understand the image ―fly‖ in the poem ―I heard a Fly buzz when I died‖?In the poem, Dickinson employs a strange image of a fly which is normally disgusting to symbolize the lingering of the dead a mong the human world, and also it‘s perspective of a decaying corpse. The fly is an envoy to the two worlds of life and death. The fly is an insect that has the freedom to fly between death and life. It flies to the dying before the death. It also lead the dead to fly to the next world far away.5) What is the theme of the poem “Because I could not stop for Death”?Death and immortality. Death was immortality. This is what Dickinson considers the mystical relationship between death and immortality.Lecture 6 Mark Twain1.Background questions:1) What do you know about America in the Mid- to Late-Nineteenth Century?"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" was first published in 1865, when Mark Twain was living in the American Southwest, which was still in the process of being settled. The Industrial Revolution had brought machinery and factories to the eastern United States, but most of the country, particularly areas west of the Mississippi River, still relied on the land for economic development. Much of the land in the West was devoted to cattle, and the U.S. government was involved in battles and embroilments with various ways.2) What are the main characteristics of American Realism?Realistic Techniques• 1. Settings thoroughly familiar to the writer• 2. Plots emphasizing the norm of daily experience• 3. Ordinary characters, studied in depth• 4. Complete authorial objectivity• 5. Responsible morality; a world truly reportedPrinciples of Realism• 1. Insistence upon and defense of "the experienced commonplace".• 2. Character more important than plot.• 3. Attack upon romanticism and romantic writers.• 4. Emphasis upon morality often self-realized and upon an examination of idealism.• 5. Concept of realism as a realization of democracy.Characteristics of Realistic Writing• 1. The philosophy of Realism is known as "descendental" or non-transcendental. The purpose of writing is to instruct and to entertain. Realists were pragmatic, relativistic, democratic, and experimental.• 2. The subject matter of Realism is drawn from "our experience," - it treated the common, the average, the non-extreme, the representative, the probable.• 3. The morality of Realism is intrinsic, integral, relativistic - relations between people and society are explored.• 4. The style of Realism is the vehicle which carries realistic philosophy, subject matter, and morality. Emphasis is placed upon scenic presentation, de-emphasizing authorial comment and evaluation. There is an objection towards the omniscient point of view.2) Examine the structure of the story.The frame tale structure of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is one of its most important parts. In a frame tale, one story appears in—that is, it is framed by—another story.Twain has devised a story-within-a-story framing structure also known as a frame or 'envelope' narrative) by making his narrator the reluctant audience for his storyteller, Simon Wheeler, and by distinguishing his storyteller from his protagonist, Jim Smiley.3) From what aspects in the story can you define Mark Twain as a realist?Twain uses local customs of the time, dialect, and examples of social status in his story to create a realistic view of the region in which the story takes place. The way that the characters behave is very distinctive. Dialect is also used to give the reader a convincing impression of the setting in ―The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County‖. The social status of the main characters in this story also was something that Twain took into account in writing this story. Mark Twain is a realist who concentrates on the customs, dialect, and social status of specific regions of the country.1)Humorists generally have a target; they make jokes at someone's expense. Who is the target in the "Jumping Frog" story?Jim Smiley is the primary target. He is a trickster who turns out to be too clever for his own good. The narrator is also a target in Twain's story, a victim of the anonymous trickster who sent him to the garrulous Simon Wheeler. In fact, the narrator's eagerness to escape Wheeler at the end of the story suggests that he may be Wheeler's victim as well.3) What do you think is the possible theme of this story?Culture Clash"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," highlights various aspects of late nineteenth-century American society and culture through the retelling of a tall tale. Central to the story is the idea of conflicting cultures, particularly the clash between the settled, eastern portion of the United States and the still-developing West. At the time Twain wrote the story, the East and its inhabitants had a reputation for being civilized, cultured, and advanced. The West, on the other hand, was still being settled and was considered to be populated by less-educated.4) What kind of humor can you find in this brief masterpiece?Twain combines the vibrant, loquacious storytelling tradition rooted in folk tale, fable, and gossip with the more calculated literary tradition of satire, irony, and wit.Lecture 7 Theodore DreiserPossible Answers to the topics for after-reading discussion:2) Whereas before she looked at department stores and then factories, she now looks at theaters and then department stores. This really marks the transition away from manufacturing that Dreiser upholds throughout the novel. Much the way we see her move from her miller father to the salesman Drouet to the manager Hurstwood, her own job search progresses from manufacturing to selling to acting. For Dreiser, perhaps, the complete abandonment of manufacturing is the highest social achievement, one that Carrie is striving towards.Lcture 8 Francis Scott FitzgeraldHe believes that Daisy may come to a party some night. He thinks his wealth shown in those parties may gain his lover back. This is a sign of a corrupt way of 'winning' love through money and wealth. The American Dream- It rose in the 19th century and was based on the theory that each person, no matter what his background was, could succeed in life as long as he had skill and effort. It was the idea of the self-made man. The Great Gatsby is a novel about what happened to the American dream in the 1920s, a period when the old values that gave substance to the dream had been corrupted by the pursuit of wealth. What Fitzgerald seems to be criticizing in The GreatGatsby is not the American Dream itself but the corruption of the American Dream. Fitzgerald has delayed the introduction of the novel‘s most important figure—Gatsby himself—until the beginning of Chapter III. The reader has seen Gatsby from a distance, heard other chara cters talk about him, and listened to Nick‘s thoughts about him, but has not actually met him (nor has Nick).Chapter III is devoted to the introduction of Gatsby and the lavish, showy world he inhabits. Fitzgerald gives Gatsby a suitably grand entrance as the aloof host of a spectacularly decadent party. Despite this introduction, this chapter continues to heighten the sense of mystery and enigma that surrounds Gatsby, as the low profile he maintains seems curiously out of place with his lavish expenditures. Just as he stood alone on his lawn in Chapter I, he now stands outside the throng of pleasure-seekers. The delay shows he is different from others and Daisy. His difference determines partially his dream is to fail.In his first direct contact with Gatsby, Nick notices his extraordinary smile—―one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it.‖ Nick‘s impression of Gatsby emphasizes his optimism and vitality—something about him seems remarkably hopeful, and this belief in the brilliance of the future impresses Nick, even before he knows what future Gatsby envisions. The romantic dream and future are actually illusions and the mysterious atmosphere highlights the romance and illusions.throwing parties --- standing as an outsidera good library --- real books with uncut literaturea grand mansion --- the host‘s living in a small bedroomvarious rumours ---truththe gap between perception and reality.At the party, as he looks through Gatsby‘s books, Owl Eyes states that Gatsby has captu red the effect of theater, a kind of mingling of honesty and dishonesty that characterizes Gatsby‘s approach to this dimension of his life. The party itself is a kind of elaborate theatrical presentation, and Owl Eyes suggests that Gatsby‘s whole life is m erely a show, believing that even his books might not be real. The novel‘s title itself—The Great Gatsby—is suggestive of the sort of vaudeville billing for a performer or magician , subtly emphasizing the theatrical and perhaps illusory quality of Gatsby‘s life.ThemesThe Great Gatsby is an examination of American myth in the 20th century. Fitzgerald deliberately depicts Gatsby as a mysterious person so as to achieve the effect that Gatsby is American Everybody. The death, or rather the murdering, of Gatsby poignantly points at the truth about the withering of the American Dream and the ironic effect it has produced upon the whole American myth.Character portrayalJay Gatsby: Gatsby in the novel represents the newly rich upstart, vulgar in his ostentatious [showy] wealth. However, he becomes a kind of new American Adam. He is ―great‖, because he is dignified and ennobled by his dream and his mythic vision of life.Nick Carraway: Nick is both a narrator and a character in this novel. He leads us to the dignity and depth of Gatsby‘s character, and suggests the relation of his tragedy to the American situation. But as a character, Carraway has his own likes and dislikes. Since Carraway himself is。

美国文学史概述及选读复习资料

美国文学史American Literature in the colonical and Revolutionary:1.Benjamin Franklin(本杰明.富兰克林)2.hilip Freneau 菲利普·费瑞诺Benjamin Franklin(本杰明.富兰克林)1)"Poor Richard's Almanac" 穷人查理德的年鉴(以笔名Richard Sunders)2)“annual collection of proverbs “流行谚语集(It soon became the most popular bookof its kind, largely because of Franklin's shrewd humor, and first spread his reputation) 3)The Way to Wealth (Father Abraham’s Sermon)致富之道(as the “perface to Poor RichardImproved)4)The Autobiography自传(18世纪美国唯一流传至今的自传)5)Founded the Junto, a club for informal discussion of scientific, economic and politicalideas. 建立了一个秘密俱乐部，讨论的主题是政治、经济和科学等时事方面的问题.6)established America's first circulating library, founded the college--University ofPennsylvania. 建立了美国第一个可租借的图书馆，还创办了一所大学——就是现在的宾夕法尼亚大学.7)first applied the terms "positive" and "negative" to electrical charges.8)Writer,printer,publisher,scientist,philanthropist,and diplomat,he was the most famousand respected private figure of his time.The Rising Glory of America蒸蒸日上的美洲；The British Prison Ship英国囚船；To the Memory of the Brave Americans纪念美国勇士-----同类诗中最佳；The Wild Honeysuckle野生的金银花；The Indian Burying Ground印第安人殡葬地(1)poet and political journalist 诗人和政治方面的新闻记者(2)perhaps the most outstanding writer of the post-revolutionary period.(3)has been called the "Father of American Poetry" 美国诗歌之父(4)Imaginative and melancholy treatment of nature and human life,and sharp satire against the British tyranny19th Century American LiteratureWashington Irving(华盛顿.欧文)1．James Fenimore Cooper(詹姆斯.芬尼莫.库珀)2．Nathaniel Hawthorne(纳萨尼尔.霍桑)3．Edgar Allan Poe （埃德加.阿伦.坡）4．Henry Daived Thoreau(亨利.戴维.梭罗)5．Herman Melville(赫尔曼.麦尔维尔)6．Walt Whiteman(沃尔特.惠特曼)The Rise of American Romanticism• One of the most important periods in the history of American literature, stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War(1861-65).• It started with the publication of Washington Irving's e T he h Sketch Book(1820) and ended with Whitman's s Leaves f of Grass(1855)..Romanticism的特点：frequently shared certain general characteristics, moral enthusiam,faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and apresumption that he natural world was a source of corruption.浪漫主义之间大多是相通的，都注重道德，强调个人主义价值观和直觉感受，并且认为自然是美的源头，人类社会是腐败之源。

美国文学史及选读复习笔记(1-2册)精编版

在他们之前100多年Caribbean Islands, Mexico andother Parts of South America已被the Spanish占领。

美国文学选读复习资料

美国文学选读复习资料美国文学选读复习资料美国文学是世界文学宝库中的一颗璀璨明珠，承载着美国历史、文化和社会的精华。

作为文学爱好者和学生，对于美国文学的了解和掌握是必不可少的。

本文将为大家提供一份美国文学选读的复习资料，帮助大家更好地理解和欣赏美国文学的经典之作。

一、美国文学的起源与发展美国文学的起源可以追溯到十七世纪的殖民地时期。

最早的美国文学作品是早期殖民者的日记、教会纪实和历史记录，如《普利茅斯纪事》和《马萨诸塞纪事》。

随着殖民地的发展和美国独立战争的爆发，美国文学逐渐形成了自己的独特风格和主题，如《飘》、《红字》和《汤姆·索亚历险记》等。

二、美国文学的主题与特点美国文学的主题广泛而多样，涵盖了对自由、平等、个人主义和社会正义的探索。

美国文学作品常常关注社会问题和人类命运，如种族歧视、性别平等、战争和社会阶级等。

同时，美国文学也以其写实主义和现实主义的风格著称，力求真实地描绘社会生活和人物形象。

三、美国文学的代表作品1.《钢铁是怎样炼成的》这是美国作家海明威的代表作之一，通过描写一战期间的士兵们的生活和战争的残酷性，展现了人性的脆弱和战争的荒谬。

2.《了不起的盖茨比》这是美国作家菲茨杰拉德的代表作之一，以20世纪20年代的纽约社交圈为背景，描绘了财富、爱情和欲望的交织，对美国梦的追求和破灭进行了深刻的探讨。

3.《杀死一只知更鸟》这是美国作家哈珀·李的代表作之一，通过一个小女孩的视角，揭示了种族歧视和社会不公的问题，以及人性的复杂性和善恶的边界。

4.《老人与海》这是美国作家海明威的另一部代表作品，通过一个老渔夫与大海的搏斗，探讨了生命的意义和人与自然的关系。

5.《傲慢与偏见》这是英国作家简·奥斯汀的作品，虽然不是美国文学，但对美国文学的影响深远。

通过描写女主角伊丽莎白·班纳特的成长和婚姻观念的转变，探讨了社会等级、婚姻和爱情的主题。

四、美国文学的影响与意义美国文学不仅仅是一种艺术形式，更是美国文化和民族精神的重要组成部分。

2020年英美文学选读教案以及复习要点

英美文学选读教案以及复习要点英美文学选读教案以及复习要点专业八级资料 Lecture 1 William Shakespeare 1. Introduction of the course (1) This course is called Selected Readings in English and American Literature, a pulsory course for you. It will be finished in 12 weeks. And in each week well meet each other two times. (2) In this course, you will have to read some original works taken from English and American classics. It may be a little bit difficult for you. However, its also a chance for you to know some great treasury in world literature and Ill help you understand them. (3)Comparing with the literary history courses, this course mainly focuses on original productions. The course book is a nice one with classical works and detailed notes. (4) For the final test, 10% will be decided by your attendance, 20% by your homework and 70% by the test paper. About the homework, after we finish each writer, Ill give you a name list of remended works written by the writer. In the whole semester, you should choose at least one piece of English writers works and one piece of American writers works remended by me. And then you should write a small paper on the piece of works you chose. That means you should turn in two papers in the whole semester. (5) A very important suggestion: previewthe productions before the class; otherwise itll be very difficult for you to catch me in the class. 2. William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) (1) Historical Background A. Queen Elizabeth I: a powerful England with the fast development of capitalism B. Renaissance: an intellectual movement sprung first in Italy in the 14th century and gradually spread all over Europe. Two features are striking of this movement. The one is a thirsting curiosity for the classical literature. Another is the humanism, which means the new feeling of admiration for human beauty and human achievement. C. Shakespeare lived in such a period and also such a period made him the most famous and most important English writer. (2) Life (Read paragraph 1 and 2 on page 1 after class. These two paragraphs are the introduction of the great writers life.) A. His plete works include 37 plays, 2 narrative poems and 154 sons. B. He is mainly famous for his great plays, especially the outstanding Four Great Tragedies. (Hamlet, King Lear, Othello and Macbeth) He is also the author of some other famous plays, such as Romeo and Juliet, but today well learn the excerpt from one of his great edies - The Merchant of Venice, which well talk about a little bit later. C. Shakespeares sons are also very good. Well first introduce Son 18, the most famous son written byShakespeare. (3) Son 18 A. A son is a lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. It was introduced to England from Italy by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. (It is a very popular poem form and used widely in English literature. In the Elizabeth era, Edmund Spenser was also famous for his sons. And later, John Milton, Byron and Keats all contributed excellent sons.) B. Though the son is a fixed form, but the rhyme scheme of the son is not fixed. (few minutes for students to find out this poems rhyme scheme.) Answer: abab cdcd efef gg. This is a typical rhyme scheme used by Shakespeare in all his sons. C. Explain the poem sentence by sentence. temperate: moderate or mild; rough winds: strong winds; darling: lovely; lease: 租约;plexion: appearance; dim: darken with cloud; brag: boast; D.(discuss) Theme: expressing the deep love to his friend (4) The Merchant of Venice A. Famous edy written by Shakespeare in his youth B. Setting: Venice, the Middle Age C. Characters: Bassanio, Antonio, Shylock, Portia (let students discuss the characters) Portia: Shakespeares ideal woman, beautiful, intelligent, cultured, gracious, independent, a daughter of Renaissance Shylock: most suessful character, a Jew, a greedy and merciless usurer and also avictim of racial discrimination and religious persecution (sympathy) D. Plot: Read the introduction from P3 to P4. E. (Discuss)Theme: Mercy wins over malice. F. The selection is the most famous scene of the whole play and also the climax of the play. (Ask students to read it thoroughly after the class.) In the class, well learn a short part taken from the scene. (P10 to P11, the famous statement about mercy made by Portia) G. (the last but not least) form of the play: verse drama written in blank verse mostly blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. Soon after blank verse was introduced by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in his translation of Virgils works, it became the standard meter for Elizabethan and later poetic dramas and some poets, such as John Milton, also employed this form to write their long poems. (5) Remended Reading Son 29; Son 73; Son 116; Four great tragedies; Romeo and Juliet; A Midsummer Nights Dream 3. Homework 1. Preview the next chapter about John Milton.2. Find out the form and rhyme scheme of the poem To Cyriack Skinner on P23. Lecture 2 John Milton (1608 0 1674) (Comparing with William Shakespeare, few people read his great productions today. However, he is also a classical writer in English Literature.) 1. Historical Background (Discussion: Any important event happened during Miltons life time in Britain )English Bourgeois Revolution The conflicts between King (James I and then Charles I) and the Parliament Profound conflicts: the Old Feudalism and New Capitalism In religion: The Anglican Church and the Puritan The consequence of those contradictions: the Civil War (1642 - 1649) The King was executed in 1649 and monarchy was abolished. Oliver Cromwells dictatorship (1649 - 1660) The Restoration: Charles II and then James II Glorious Revolution (1688) 2. Life born in a rich and cultured family - handsome and hardworking - graduated from Cambridge University and got master degree - six years private study and the most knowledgeable poet in Britain - writing pamphlets for the Commonwealth - blind in 1652 - arrested and fined after restoration - produced three great poems in plain life Most important works - three great poems: Paradise Lost (1667); Paradise Regained (1671); Samson Agonistes (1671) (poetic drama) Besides three great poems in his late years, he also wrote some excellent sons including the one well learn today.3. To Cyriack Skinner (Ask the questions of homework) (Answer: Son; abba abba cdcdcd) (1) Form: Son (2) Rhyme scheme: abba abba cdcdcd (different with William Shakespeares sons) (3) Explain the poem sentence by sentence (4) (Discussion) Theme: the authors positive attitude towards his blindness (another sonon blindness seems more discouraged.) 4. Paradise Lost (《失乐园》) (1) Miltons masterpiece; greatest epic written in the English language *epic(史诗): it is a long verse narrative on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or the human race. Notice the differences between traditional epics and literary epics. Paradise Lost is a literary epic. (2) Its a long epic including 12 books. The plot is taken from the Old Testament of Holy Bible. *Holy Bible对于理解西方文化最重要的经典,分为《旧约》(The Old Testament)和《新约》(The New Testament)两部分,这两部分写于不同的时期,而且使用的文字不同,《旧约》主要用希伯莱语写成,《新约》则用希腊文写成.圣经最早曾被翻译成希腊文,然后是拉丁文,在欧洲各国通行.《圣经》英译始自8世纪,但各种版本都不算通行,直到Martin Luther宗教改革之后,1611年出现的Authorized Version 至今通行,对英国的语言和文学影响极大.推荐阅读英文版《圣经》节选或房龙《圣经的故事》中文版. Plot: (paragraph two on P24) revolt of Satan and some other angels 0 their defeat and throwing into the Hell 0 temptation of Adam and Eve 0 expulsion of Adam and Eve (3) Theme: to justify the ways of God to man (su内容仅供参考。

美国文学选读复习提纲

Proses:Natha n Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter-Chapter 2Hawthorne:心理分析小说，以宗教罪恶观sin评价社会。

-Why are women especially the elder ones so harsh and intolerant to Hester?1. Startled or astonished by the beauty, elegant and dignity of Hester.2. The patriarchal society let women have eternalized patriarchal ideas, unfavorable for women adulterers.-How does the author portray Hester Prynne?1. Core impressive image: the artistically and fantastically made letter A .2. Appeara nee-What does the scarlet letter with gold thread and elaborate embroidery( 朿9绣)suggests?1. Clue of Hester ' s attitsh e makes a mockery of her punishment by making this plain symbol of adultery into a gorgeousdecorati on.2. To n egate the awful meaning of the letter.3. as punishment, 血红色的A 字象征这人们反对human nature ,lush, 有devilish 意味，而Hester wants to changeher huma n reality, to make it prettier tha n it really is.-What does “ A” sta nd for?Adultery/A ngel (appeari ng in the sky whe n gover nor dies)/Able (Hester gains in flue nee)-What kind of pers on is Chilli ngworth?1. Devil or devil ' s emissary or SataicDld intellect and old age , without hominine feelings from heart and soul.2. In Hester ' s recalling, he is "…pale. ”Herman Melville: Moby Dick-Ch apter 41 Character Capta in AhabImage of America n: an idealist and an egoni st.Willa Cather: Miss JewettSarah Orne Jewett' s poetic principlesJewett both as a writer and a pers onCather ' s poetic principlesAs a writer, Jewett has her own writing style.She focuses on the places where she lives and loves, and makes them subject-matters of her stories. (Wherever she might be, She carried the Maine shore-country with her. She loved it by instinet, and in the light of wide experienee, from near and from afar. Every day, in every seas on of the year, she enjoyed the beautiful country in which she had the good fortune to be born. Her love of the Maine country was the supreme happ in ess of her life. Her stories were but reflect ions, quite incidental, of that peculiar and intensely personal pleasure. Take ,for instanee, that dear, daybreak paragraph which begins By the Morning Boat ”：On the coast of Maine …'P127 paragraph 3)She writes with delightful humor that comes from her delicate and tactful han dli ng of her n ative Ian guage.(Her pers onal opinions she voiced lightly, half-humorously; any expression was spontaneous, the outgrowth of the immediate con versati on.) And, the dist inctive thi ng about Miss Jewett is that she has her own in dividual voice.(her comme nt on the story of a mule) Sherwood An ders on: The Triumph of the EggF. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great GatsbyEast and West Egg represent, respectively, the split among upper class society of old-monied, aristocratic families and the 'nouveau riche" families whose fortunes were recently made. In the time setting for this novel, this division was distinct and very relevant "Old money" was considered morE respe匚lablE than Tl new money" and this is evident in the social depiction of life in East Egg and life in West Egg. Consider, for example, how Daisy (who lives in East Egg) considers Gatsby's (a West Egg resident) parties to be decadent and jnliike the(:ivilized gathering£ she is a匚customed to atteriding.Nick ultimately returns west because he has become disillusioned with east coast society. He left the west r like many people of his era, in search of a richer, broader, cultural experience. After his experiences with Gatsby r Nick finds the east 白ndit£ attendant lifestyle to be contemptible and lacking in authenticity.East Egg and West Egg together represent the ongoing divisions in society. East Egg is where the M real" aristocrats live: those with older money and established credentials. West Egg is where the new money lives, and is not considered as classy.Nick retums to West Egg because, while he has some social credenti^h that might allow him to live in East Egg； he is trying to make something of himself, ina way like Gatsby, his neighbor, and the western community is for those stillconstructing their identities*Ernest Hemi ngway: A Clea n, Well-Lighted PlaceExistential ism and the “ LostGeneration "Although Hemingway was writing years before existentialism became a prominent culture idea, his questioning of life and his experiences as a searching member of the lost generation gave his work existe ntialist overt on es.Noth ingn ess: (nada) an existe ntial an gst about his place in the uni verse and an un certa inty about the meaning of life . The struggle to deal with despair : the older waiter cannot actually stave off despair: in effective methods in cludi ng: money(bar)/mocki ng prayers (religio n)The Older Waiter: Lonely, recognizes himself in the old man and sees his own future.The Youn ger Waiter: n a^Ve and insen sitive, immature, dem on strates a dismissive attitude toward huma n life in gen eral. Symbols: The caf - t h e opposite of nothingnessDeceptive pacing: 写作风格从简，导致故事节奏忽快忽慢。

美国文学史复习提纲

美国文学史复习提纲I. Explain the following literary terms.1. RomanticismThe most profound and comprehensive idea of romanticism is the vision of a greater personal freedom for the individual. Appeals to imagination; Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality. Subjectivity: in form and meaning.2 American transcendentalismAmerican transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860). For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains.3 Realism: ―nothing more and nothing less than the tru thful treatment of material.‖ theCivil wara. verisimilitude of details derived from observationb. representative in plot, setting and characterc. an objective rather than an idealized view of human experience4. Modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at theturn of the 20th century with its core period between World War I and World War II and continuing into the 21st century.II. Questions and Answers. Give brief answers to each of the following questions in English.1. What is local color？an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things immediately observable: the dialects, customs, sights, and sounds of regional America‖2. What is American Puritanism1). Total Depravity - the concept of Original Si2). Unconditional Election - the concept of predestination3). Limited Atonement - Jesus died for the chosen only, not for everyone.4). Irresistible Grace - God's grace is freely given, it cannot be earned or denied.5). Perseverance of the "saints" - those elected by God have full power to interpret the will of God, and to live uprightly. If anyone rejects grace after feeling its power in his life, he will be going against the will of God.3. Analyze Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.themes in autobiography: Self- Improvement Mind: Self-education Body: Physical ActivityBehavior: Moral Perfection Religion: The best service to God is to be good to man Benjamin Franklin and aspects of The American DreamRags to Riches: Impotence to Importance: A Philosophy of Individualism:Freewill vs. Determinism: Hope and Optimism:The Autobiography is a record of self-examination and self-improvement.Benjamin Franklin was a spokesman for the new order of the 18th century enlightenment The Autobiography is a how-to-do-it book, a book on the art of self-improvement. (for example, Franklin’s 13 virtues)Through telling a success story of self-reliance, the book celebrates, in fact, the fulfillment of the American dream.The Autobiography is in the pattern of Puritan simplicity, directness, and concision4. What is Imagism?It is a movement of English and American poets in revolt from Romanticism, which flourish 1910-1917. The characteristic products of the movement are more easily recognized than its theories defined: they tend to be short ,composed of short lines of musical cadence rather than metrical regularity, to avoid abstraction, and to treat the image with a hard, clear precision rather than with overt symbolic intent.As part of the modernist movement, away from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources to help them create a new poetic expression, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images. III. Topic discussion.1. Discuss Allen Poe’s literar y achievements with his works.famous American poet, short-story writer and critic father of detective storymaster of gothic novel forerunner of symbolisma father of detective storyPoe introduced of a new form of short fiction--- the detective story.Th e word ―detective‖ did not exist in English at the time thatPoe was writing, but the genre has become a fundamental mode of twentieth-century literature and film.b) master of gothic novelGothic novel, a genre that rose with Romanticism in Britain in the late eighteenth century, explores the dark side of human experience—death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts, and haunted landscapes. Poe brought the Gothic to America.Gothic novels originated from The Castle of Otranto, written by Horace Walpole in Britain at the end of the 18th century, which created the early classical Gothic novel mode.It leads habitually with darkness and horror. Gothic elements include horror, mystery, supernatural phenomenon, misfortune, death, haunted houses, and family curses.C Literary criticPoe is one of the few American writers who not only wrote poetry, but also wrote about how to write poetry. His critical essays on poetry include The Poetic Principle, and The Philosophy of Composition.Poe remained the most controversial and most misunderstood literary figure in the history of American literature.2. Analyze Freneau’s The Wild Honeysuckle.野金银花Fair flower, that dost so comely grow, 美好的花呀，你长得：这么秀丽，Hid in this silent, dull retreat, 却藏身在这僻静沉闷的地方——Untouched thy honey'd blossoms blow, 甜美的花儿开了却没人亲昵，Unseen thy little branches greet; 招展的小小枝梢也没人观赏；No roving foot shall crush thee here, 没游来荡去的脚来把你踩碎，No busy hand provoke a tear. 没东攀西摘的手来催你落泪。

英美文学选读大纲整理

英美文学选读大纲整理英国文学第一章文艺复兴时期考核知识点（一）文艺复兴时期概述及人文主义思潮对文学创作的影响（二）文艺复兴时期主要作家的文学创作思想及其代表作品的主题结构、人物塑造、语言风格、艺术手法、社会意义等。

1.威廉莎士比亚2.约翰弥尔顿考核要求（一）文艺复兴时期概述1.识记：（1）文艺复兴时期的界定（2）历史文化背景2.领会：（1）文艺复兴运动的意义与影响（2）文艺复兴时期的文学特点（3）人文主义的主张及文学的影响3.应用：文艺复兴、人文主义及玄学诗等名词的解释（二）该时期的重要作家1.一般识记：重要作家的文学生涯2.识记：重要作品及主要内容3.领会：重要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物塑造、语言风格、艺术手法、社会意义等4.应用：（1）莎士比亚诗歌的主题、意象（2）喜剧《威尼斯商人》的主题和主要人物的性格分析（3）哈姆雷特的性格分析（4）史诗《失乐园》的结构、人物性格、语言特点等的分析第二章新古典主义时期考核知识点（一）新古典主义时期概述1.新古典主义时期英国社会的政治、经济、文化背景2.启蒙运动3.新古典主义时期英国文学的各种派别及其特点4.新古典主义文学基本主张与特色（二）新古典主义时期主要作家的文学创作思想及其代表作的主题结构、人物塑造、语言风格、艺术手法、社会意义等1.丹尼尔笛福2.乔纳森斯威夫特3.亨利菲尔丁考核要求（1）新古典主义时期概述1.识记：（1）新古典主义时期的界定（2）政治、经济背景2.领会：（1）启蒙运动的主张与文学的艺术特色（2）新古典主义时期文学的艺术特色3.应用：启蒙运动、新古典主义、英雄双行诗、英国现实主义小说等名词的解释（二）该时期的重要作家1.一般识记：重要作家的创作生涯2.识记：重要作品及主要内容3.领会：重要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构、人物刻画、语言风格、艺术特色、社会意义等4.应用（1）《格列佛游记》的社会讽刺（2）菲尔丁的"散文体史诗"第三章浪漫主义时期考核知识点（一）浪漫主义时期概述1.浪漫主义时期英国社会的政治、经济、文化背景2.浪漫主义文学分行的基本主张3.英国浪漫主义文学的特点4.浪漫主义对同时代及后世英国文学的影响（二）浪漫主义时期主要作家的文学创作思想及其代表作品的主题结构、人物塑造、语言风格、艺术手法及社会意义等1.威廉布莱克2.威廉华兹华斯3.珀比雪莱4.简奥斯汀考核要求（一）浪漫主义时期概述1.识记：（1）浪漫主义时期的界定（2）历史文化背景2.领会：（1）浪漫主义思潮的意义与影响（2）浪漫主义文学创作的基本主张及对后世文学的影响3.应用：（1）名词解释：浪漫主义（2）浪漫主义时期文学特点的分析（二）该时期的重要作家1.识记：浪漫主义时期的重要作家、他们的代表作品及其主要内容2.领会：重要作家的创作思想、艺术特色及代表作品的主题结构、人物塑造、语言风格、社会意义等。

2020年新编美国文学复习提纲名师精品资料

第一部分殖民时期一、时期综述（关于清教的应该都是重点）1、清教徒采用的文学体裁：A、narratives 日记B> journals 游记2、清教徒在美国的写作内容：① their voyage to the new land ②adapting themselves to un familiar climates and crops③about deali ng with In dia ns ④ guide to the new land, en dless boun ty,invitation to bold spirit★ 3、清教徒的想法：① Puritans want to make up pure their religious beliefs and practices. 净化信仰和行为方式② wish to restore simplicityto church services and the authority of the Bible to theology. 重建教堂，提供简单服务，建立神圣地位③look upon themselves as a chosen people, and it follow logically that anyone who challe nged their way of lif e is opposing God ' s will and is not to be accepted. 认为自己是上帝选民，对他们的生活有异议就是反对上帝。

④Puritan oppositio nto pleasure and the arts sometimes has bee n exaggerated. 反对对快乐和艺术的追求到了十分荒唐的地步。

⑤religious teachi ng tended toemphasize the image of a wrathful God. 强调上帝严厉的一面，忽视上帝仁慈的一面。

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Proses:
Nathan Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter-Chapter 2
Hawthorne: sin
-Why are women especially the elder ones so harsh and intolerant to Hester?
1. Startled or astonished by the beauty, elegant and dignity of Hester.
2. The patriarchal society let women have eternalized patriarchal ideas, unfavorable for women adulterers.
-How does the author portray Hester Prynne?
1. Core impressive image: the artistically and fantastically made letter A.
2. Appearance
-What does the scarlet letter with gold thread and elaborate embroidery() suggests?
1. C lue of Hester’s attitude: she makes a mockery of her punishment by making this plain symbol of adultery into a
gorgeous decoration.
2. To negate the awful meaning of the letter.
3. as punishment, A human nature ,lush, devilish Hester wants to change
her human reality, to make it prettier than it really is.
-W hat does “A” stand for?
Adultery/Angel (appearing in the sky when governor dies)/Able (Hester gains influence)
-What kind of person is Chillingworth?
1. Devil or devil’s emissary or Satan: cold intellect and old age, without hominine feelings from heart and soul.
2. In Hester’s recalling, he is “…pale.”
Hester Chillingworth
Young, beautiful, perfect in figure Old(in his decaying age), ugly, deformed, cold and
indifferent
Herman Melville: Moby Dick-Chapter 41
Character Captain Ahab
Image of American: an idealist and an egonist.
Willa Cather: Miss Jewett
Sarah Orne Jewett’s poetic principles
Jewett both as a writer and a person
Cather’s poetic principles
As a writer, Jewett has her own writing style.
She focuses on the places where she lives and loves, and makes them subject-matters of her stories. (Wherever she might be, She carried the Maine shore-country with her. She loved it by instinct, and in the light of wide experience, from near and from afar. Every day, in every season of the year, she enjoyed the beautiful country in which she had the good fortune to be born. Her love of the Maine country was the supreme happiness of her life. Her stories were but reflections, quite incidental, of that peculiar and intensely personal pleasure. Take ,for instance, that dear, daybreak paragraph which begins “By the Morning Boat”:
“On the coast of Maine…”P127 paragraph 3)
She writes with delightful humor that comes from her delicate and tactful handling of her native language.(Her personal opinions she voiced lightly, half-humorously; any expression was spontaneous, the outgrowth of the immediate conversation.)
And, the distinctive thing about Miss Jewett is that she has her own individual voice.(her comment on the story of a mule)
Sherwood Anderson: The Triumph of the Egg
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway: A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
Exist entialism and the “Lost Generation”: Although Hemingway was writing years before existentialism became a prominent culture idea, his questioning of life and his experiences as a searching member of the lost generation gave his work existentialist overtones.
Nothingness: (nada) an existential angst about his place in the universe and an uncertainty about the meaning of life. The struggle to deal with despair: the older waiter cannot actually stave off despair: ineffective methods including: money (bar)/mocking prayers (religion)
The Older Waiter Lonely, recognizes himself in the old man and sees his own future.
The Younger Waiter: naïve and insensitive, immature, demonstrates a dismissive attitude toward human life in general. Symbols: The café- the opposite of nothingness
Cleanliness and good lighting Order and clarity
Nothingness Chaotic, confusing and dark
Style: minimalist/”icebe rg principle”
Deceptive pacing: Conveys only the most essential information in the scene. Saul Bellow: Looking for Mr. Green
Character analysis: Raynor and Field
Poets:
19th Century:
Walt Whitman: One’s Self I Sing
Emily Dickinson: I’m Nobody!/ Success Is Counted Sweetest
20th Century:
Wallace Stevens: Anecdote of the Jar
William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow
William Carlos Williams: Spring and All
Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken
===
Robert Lowell: Skunk Hour
Allen Ginsberg: A Supermarket in California。

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