美国文学电子教案2

Chapter Two： ：
The Period of Enlightenment
Two Great Revolutions
The Eighteenth century American history witnessed two great revolutions: one was American Revolution, the other was Enlightenment.
The New Ideas Outside America
Voltaire (1694-1778) and Rousseau (1712-1778) in France and Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Daniel Defoe (16591731) and Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) in England were all great voices of the new concept of the universe that was radically different from the hitherto domineering(极权) Christian position of original sin and predestination(宿命论).
Calvinism :Jonathan Edwards
Constantly in collision with these ideas were the persistent Calvinist beliefs and tenets(原理) that man was, since the Fall, basically evil and enslaved by his sense of sin, and that God was all, and would in His mercy and love work for man’s salvation, but as for man, all he could do (if ever there was anything he could do) was to worship the Almighty and hope. Though Newton’s idea was very influential over the minds of the people in the eighteenth century, the Calvinist position did not seem to be dead. The best testimony that it was still, on the contrary, very much alive was the “Great Awakening” in North America, in fact a series of religious revivals which occurred in the 1730s and 1740s, Jonathan Edwards was probably the last great voice that was ever heard in America to reassert(重复主张) the Calvinist stance(立场) so as to bring the people back to its fold.
Deism
The deists hold that God is indeed the creator of the universe, “the maker of the clock,” but He has left it to operate according to natural law. Thus the best way to worship God is to study his handiwork(手工艺), namely, the natural world and the human world, and to do good things to mankind.
American Thinking during This Period
Eighteenth-century American thinking was dominated, by and large, by two basic patterns of thought. Toward the latter part of the seventeenth century, a completely new view of the universe came into being. With the publication of Newton’s “Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica” in which his laws of motion and the idea of universal gravitation were embodied, the universe became, in the minds of thinking people, something mechanical, like a clock, subject, instead of to the close supervision of God, to certain physical and mechanical laws. This gave rise to a whole set of new ideas and philosophies, predominant among which was deism(自然 神论).
Britain’s Attitude toward America
The growth, particularly the industrial growth, led to intense strain with England. The British government did not want colonial industries competing with those in England. The British wanted the colonies to remain politically and economically dependent on the mother country. They took a series of measures to insure this dependence. They hampered colonial economy by requiring Americans to ship raw materials abroad and import finished goods at prices higher than the cost of making them in this country. Politically, the British government forced dependence by ruling the colonies from overseas and by taxing the colonies without giving them representation in Parliament.
American Revolution
American Revolution led the nation to independence and exerted on the development of American society an influence greater and more enduring than any historical event in the preceding American history.
The Attitude of America toward Britain
In the seventies of the 18th century the English colonies in North America rose in arms against their mother country. The War for Independence lasted for eight years (1776-1783) and ended in the formation of a Federative bourgeois democratic republic—the United States of America.
Mid-eighteenth Century Colonial America
By the mid-eighteenth century colonial America was no longer a group of scattered, struggling settlements. It was a series of neighboring, flourishing colonies with rapidly expanding, mixed populations. The word “state”, which suggests as independent government, was beginning to replace “colony” in the people’s thinking—an important sign of the political trend.
Enlightenment
Enlightenment was an intellectual movement whose rationalistic spirit inspired American men of letters and brought them into a new horizon beyond the limitation of prevailing Puritanism.
Important Political and Literary Figures
The two revolutions produced a number of outstanding, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson whose literary talent enabled them to be political leaders with more dynamic, and even made literature become part of the revolution.
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The New Ideas Outside America
Rousseau, in his famous Social Contract, for example, declared to a bewildered world that man is by nature good and free. Alexander Pope wrote in his Essay on Man the famous line, "The proper study of mankind is man." The encyclopedists like Diderot (1713-1784) brought out their 35-volume monumental encyclopedia to offer a rational explanation of the universe, to celebrate Newton's discoveries and all the advances of science, to show what man's reason can achieve. The idea of order became the watchword of the day. Everything fell into some order, like Newton's "clock," and all had a place in the divine plan. All these ideas were very much in the air in America then, and no one represented them better than Benjamin Franklin. With Franklin as its spokesman, eighteen-century America experienced an age of enlightenment, reason, and order like England and Europe.
The Attitude of America toward Britain
The restless, growing American states could not accept this design for their future. If they had been given real liberty to order their own lives and develop their economic growth, Americans might have been willing to remain loosely associated with the mother country. However, short-sighted British policies continued to stir colonial unrest.