美国文学史及选读考试整理

Washington Irving

Bracebridge Hall布雷斯布里奇田庄(1822)

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Tales of a Traveller旅客谈(1824)

Christopher Columbus (1828)

c. writing characteristics

(1) humorous: the function of his writing is to amuse,

to entertain instead of teaching or instruction

(2) vivid and true character portrayal

(3) finished (refined) and musical language, thus

regarded as “the Amn. Goldsmith”

d. analysis on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow(选自the

sketch book见闻札记)

1. the story:setting,character, plot

2. theme:conflicts and praise

conflict betw. Ichabod and Brom

conflict betw. the village and the outside world James Fenimore Cooper

The Spy (1821): a historical novel

The Pilot (1824): a sea novel

Leatherstocking Tales皮裹腿故事集(1823-1841):

frontier novels

The Last Mohicans(1826) (Colonial War betw.

Britain and France)

e. writing features:

strong points: we can see a variety of incidents and

tensions, complicated plot and structure and a

beautiful description of nature.

Weak points: characterization is weak. There is

unsatisfactory description of characters (esp. female).

He is not free from syntactical awkwardness,

heavy-handed attempt at humor. “Where Irving

excels Cooper is weak.”Dialect is not authentic. Edgar Allan Poe

The Fall of the House Usher

Feature:

i. brevity (15 pages)

ii. Single effect

iii. originality in theme

To Helen

It was inspired by the beauty of the mother of a

schoolmate of Poe in Richmond, Virginia.

The poem is famous for a number of things:

1. its rhyme scheme: ababb

2. its varied line lengths

3. its metaphor of a travel on the sea

4. its oft-quoted lines:

"To the glory that was Greece,/And the grandeur that

was Rome."

theme: praise the ideal love and beauty and ancient

Greek and Roman civilizations

The Raven乌鸦

theme: the lament over the death of a beautiful

woman

tone: melancholy

Transcendentalism (essayists, poets, novelists)

Their journal is “The Dial”.

Definition: Transcendentalism is idealism. (Emerson)

b. features

(1) stress on Oversoul, that is spirit.

(2) stress the importance of individual.

(3) fresh conception of nature.

c. significance

(1) inspired a whole generation of writers such as

Whitman, Melville and Dickinson.

(2) dresses man’s subjective initiative as opposed to

materialism.

(3) liberated people from Calvin’s original sin

d. limitation

(1) shallow: cut off from real life or reality; initiated

by the rich, they were limited in a certain circle. So,

in some degree, they have been cut off from social

life and can’t understand the sufferings of the

common people.

(2) inward contradiction: gain knowledge by

intuition, shows its idealistic aspect.

R.W. Emerson (Ralph Waldo)

Nature(1836): the Bible of New

England transcendentalism

The American Scholar(1837): "America's Declaration of Intellectual

The Divinity School Address神学院致

辞(1838)

Essays (1841/1847)

Representative Men (1850)

English Traits (1856)