美国文学史及选读期末复习题

1.C aptain John Smith became the first American writer.

2.T he puritans looked upon themselves as a chosen people.

collection of proverbs written by Benjamin Franklin.

4.T homas Paine’s famous pamphlet Common Sense boldly advocated a “Declaration for Independence”.

5.T homas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston.

has been called the “Father of American Poetry”.

7.I n Washington Irving’s

appeared the first modern short stories and the first great American juvenile literature.

8.C ooper’s enduring fame rests on his frontier stories, especially the five novels that comprise the

is perhaps the peak of William Cullen Bryant’s wok.

“father of American detective stories and American gothic stories”.

10.Emerson believed above all in

and self-reliance.

11.Hawthorne’s stories touch the

deepest roots of man’s

12.Moby Dick is a tremendous chronicle of a whaling voyage in pursuit of a seemingly supernatural white whale.

13.After his death, Longfellow became the only American to be honored with a bust in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.

14.Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, had become an American institution and the most famous literary woman in the world.

15.The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their

16.The poetic style Walt Whitman

Henry James is famous for his international theme of the traditionless American confronting the complexity of European life.

17.Writers of the first postwar era self-consciously acknowledged that they were a “Lost Generation,”devoid of faith and alienated from a

civilization.

18.With the publication of The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway became the spokesman for what Gertrude Stein had called “a lost generation.”

Terms

1.T ranscendentalism

Transcendentalism refers to the religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in New England in the middle 1800’s,

which emphasized the importance of individual inspiration and intuition, the Oversoul, and Nature. New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European Romanticism.

2.N aturalism

Naturalism, a more deliberate kind of realism, usually involves a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. As a literary movement, naturalism was initiated in France. Natural fiction aspired to a sociological objectivity,