美国文学史及其选读期末复习资料题

1.Captain John Smith became the first American writer.

2.The puritans looked upon themselves as

a chosen people.

is an annual collection of proverbs written by Benjamin Franklin.

4.Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet Common Sense boldly advocated a “Declaration for Independence”.

5.Thomas 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.In Washington I rving’s

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

8.Cooper’s enduring fame rests on his frontier stories, especially the five novels

William Cullen Bryant’s wok.

is considered “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

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 Corne r 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 lives were

controlled by and the

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.Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism refers to the religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in New England in the m iddle 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.Naturalism

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, offering detailed and fully researched investigations into unexplored corners of modern society. The most significant work of naturalism in English being Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.

The Lost Generation

The term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American Literary notables who lived in Paris from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein herself. More generally, the term is being used for the young adults of Europe and America during World War I. They were “lost” because after the war many of them