美国文学 复习大纲

美国文学
1THE LITERATURE OF COLONIAL AMERICA
1.1 The first permanent English settlement in North America was
established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.
1.2 The first writing that we call American were the narratives and
journals of these settlements.
1.3The first American writer is Captain John Smith,settled in
Jamestown.
1.4 The first American poet is
1.5 Puritan Thoughts:the puritans establish their own moral and
religious principles known as American Puritanism, which became one of the enduring influences in American literature. American Puritanism stressed on predestination, depravity, original sin, and salvation of selected few from God's grace. With such doctrines in their minds, Puritans left Europe for America in order to establish a theocracy in the new world. over the years in new homeland they establish a new way of life stressed on hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety( 其中也包括个人主义再现)
1.6Anne Bradstreet
-------the first poet in America by crisis
-------the first woman poet in America
-------she settled in Massachusetts
------ The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
2THE LITERATURE OF REASON AND REVOLUTION
2.1主要文体------ politics essay
2.2 The War for Independence-----1776-1783---ended in the formation of
a Federative bourgeois democratic republic- the United States of
America
2.3 Benjamin Franklin-----思想：自助者天助（God helps those who help themselves）
2.4 Thomas Paine----- Great Commoner of Mankind
----- Rights of Man; The Age of Reason; Agrarian Justice
American Crisis (a series of 16 pamphlets)
2.5 P32 ①for though the flame of liberty may sometimes cease to shine,
the coal can never expire.------ spirit / enthusiasm of struggle
② but if a thief breaks into my house---- British government
2.6★Philip Freneau-----美国前期浪漫主义的代表诗人/ the most
outstanding writer of the post-Revolutionary period
----- “The Poet of Revolution”
----- “Father of American Poetry”(连线)
----- he settled in Mount Pleasant, near Freehold, New
Jersey
---- The Wild-Honey Suckle(If nothing once, you nothing lose)
3THE LITERATURE OF ROMANTICISM
3.1起止时间：Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book(1819-1820)---
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass(1858)
3.2浪漫主义的一般特点：moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of
individualism and intuitive perception, a presumption that the natural
world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of
corruption.
3.3Oversoul: an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things
come and of which all thing are a part.
3.4美国国歌：Star-Spangled Banner
3.5Literature from: novels, short stories, poems.
3.6The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became
a permanent convention of American literature.
3.7★Washington Irving---- Father of American short stories(连线)
-----the messenger sent from the new world to the
old world
----- the first great prose stylist of American
romanticism
----- Sketch Book (33篇文章+ 1篇自传)
----- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
3.8James Fenimore Cooper--------The founder of the frontier stories
-------- two kinds of immensely popular stories:
the sea adventure tale; the frontier saga.
The best of his many sea romances was The
Pilot
---------★连线Leatherstocking Tales(The
Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The
Pathfinder, The Pioneers, The Prairie)
------“The nearest approach yet to an
American epic”
3.9William Cullen Bryant-----Thanatopsis（意为view of death）
To a Waterfowl
3.10★Edgar Allan Poe------ the founder of detective stories
-------To Helen: perfumed sea(one’s home land)
of yore (cherish the ancient time/ancient beauty) bore to (brought to);
wont to (be accustomed to)
classic face (face of classic beauty) To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that
was Rome (the great achievement in Greece and Rome) --------Annabel Lee (①倒数第二个stanza 运用
comparison 的手法表现了对LEE 的爱。

②
dissever: depart。

③押韵: abbabcb )
------- The Fall of the House of Usher（连线）
3.11Ralph Waldo Emerson-----------his belief: individualism,
超验主义CLUB的发言人 Independence of mind, self-reliance
----------- Nature; The American Scholar;
The Divinity School Address
Representative Men; English Traits
----------选择The American Scholar was
regarded as intellectual Declaration of Independence
-----------P165 Nature ( ①maugre: in
spite of; ②什么样的人能看到真正的nature? Someone
who retains the spirit of infancy even into the era of
manhood。

③I become a transparent eye-ball:
characterizes the paradoxical state of being in which
one is merged into nature even while retaining a unique
perception of the experience. ④ I am nothing. I am all:
体现了天人合一。

)
3.12Henry David Thoreau----------Walden
----------he puts into practice many of Emerson’s theories 3.13Nathaniel Hawthorne(文学史上最受争议的作家)
---------- The House of the Seven Gables（小说集）
-----------The Scarlet Lette r（美国心理分析小说）
3.15 Herman Melville-------- Moby Dick(it is regarded as the first American prose epic. It is a tremendous chronicle of a whaling voyage in pursuit of a seemingly supernatural white whale. In the novel, the narrator is Ishmael. The voyage symbolizes the search for the truth. The giant Moby Dick symbolized the mystery of the universe, the power of the great nature, and the evil of the world. /the rebellious struggle of Captain Ahab against the overwhelming, mysterious vastness of the universe and its awesome, sometimes merciless forces)
---------- Moby Dick was called “a shredded Shakespearean
play”
---------- Melville confided to Hawthorne that it had
been “broiled in hell-fire,”referring to the
turbulence of his own spirit from which the book
sprang.
----------- With flashes of Melville’s best fire,
Billy Budd, like Moby-Dick, uses a ship as
symbol of society and searchingly examines the
problems of good and evil.
3.14Henry Wadsworth Longfellow------------ A Psalm of Life
(第一首引入中国的英文诗)
第二册
1THE LITERATURE OF REALISM—Mark Twain called the ages The Gilded Age 1.1 现实主义起始时间：1865-1917（内战结束-美参战）
1.2 Naturalism:(具有自然主义倾向的一部作品Sister Carrie)
②5个特征：It emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment, that religious “truths” were illusory, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death.
③3 major concepts of literary naturalism in the broad abstract way: Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment; the universe is cold, Godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires. Life becomes a struggle for survival; the literary naturalists have a major difference from the realists. The naturalists also describe real life, the way things really are.
④为什么说NATURALISM 是悲观的？
Because it believes man was the victim of the several forces hard to
control in this world. Man was a weak and incompetent animal, and man himself could not master his own fate, man was no longer free.
1.5 Free verve ---- poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.
1.6 Walt Whitman------- Leaves of Grass; Song of Myself
--------为什么以草叶命名？草叶代表大众，Whitman讴歌的是普通大众同时也是其代表。

他深爱着这片土地，深爱着人民，深爱着祖国。

（仅供参考，自由发挥）
--------评价Whitman的写作风格：he used free verse; he was good at parallel structure, repeating the first word in each line and envelope structure. His theme was democracy.
-------- Song of Myself中“I”：any individual in America/ the
self as part of American nation; “you”: anyone/common people;
loaf: wander; at my ease: in my wandering; formd: be created from;
in perfect health: in one’s prime; harbor: accept; without check:
without considering; original energy: real intention of nature.
1.7 Emily Dickinson-----唯一没有的诗歌主题是战争（选择）
1.8 Harriet Beecher Stowe------Uncle Tom’s cabin另一个名字是The Man
Was a Thing
1.9 Mark Twain------The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(美国现代小说之源
said by Hemingway)
1.10 O.Henry------ Four Million; Retrieved Reformation; The Gift of the Magi; A Municipal Report; An Unfinished Story; Phoebe; A Lickpenny Lover; The Furnished Room
1.11 Henry James----- the father of stream of consciousness
------ The Portrait of A Lady女主名字：Isabel Archer ------- Jame’s theme is international theme which is the conflict between traditionless American and complexity of European
life(The American; Daisy Miller这两部被称作an outrage to American girlhood)
1.12 Stream of Consciousness--- The term was first used by Willam James in The Principles of Psychology. It is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions. It involves
sub-consciousness and is affected by psychology.
1.13 Jack London----- The people of the abyss
1.14 Theodore Dreiser----- Sister Carrie; Trilogy of Desire (In The Financier; The Titan; The Stoic);An American Tragedy(American greatest work)
2 TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE
2.1Ezra Pound---- In a Station of the Metro(①有4个意象：apparition，faces, petals and bough;②为什么用apparition 不用appearance？because apparition refers to sometimes something clear and sometimes not clear. Apparition makes the scene mysterious )
------ 对中国文化有一定了解，并写有《华夏集》Thaythey 2.3 Robert Frost----The Road Not Taken(road: life journey;主题：人生面临很多选择，一旦决定了走哪条路就要无悔地走下去。

供参考，自由发挥 )
-----民族诗人，新英格兰诗人
2.4 Thomas Stearns Eliot-----The Hollow Men
2.5 F.Scott Fitzgerald------The Great Gatsby（narrator is Nick; it is from the selected omniscient point view）; Tender is the Night
------ Jazz Age 的代表人物
2.7 获得过诺贝尔文学奖的：Ernest Hemingway--- Farewell to Arms
John Steinbeck----- The Grapes of Wrath
William Faulkner------ 无
Eugene O’Neil
2.8 Ernest Hemingway---- 3部反战作品A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also
Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls
-----第一部作品：Three Stories and Ten Poems
-----Iceberg Principle: understatement, implied things 2.9 Code Hero---The Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly Masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action and one of few words. That is an individualist keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place. These people are usually spiritual strong people of certain skills, and most of them encounter death many times.
2.10 William Faulkner-------南方派的代表人物；Yoknapatawpha(杜撰)
------ A Rose for Emily
2.11 Catch-22------- has come to mean something like” a proviso that trips one up no matter which way one turns”. Today, the phrase is an idiomatic expression in the English language, meaning a self-contradictory dilemma.
-------- Joseph Heller
2.13 华裔作家-----J.S.Huang (黄玉雪,美国华裔文学之母)林语堂; 赵健秀
(Frank Qin); 任碧莲 (Jesse Ren)；
------汤亭亭 (Maxine Hong King);---The Woman Warrior
谭恩美 (Amy Tan);--- The Joy Luck Club喜福会
2.14 第一位获得诺贝尔文学奖的黑人女作家---- Toni Morrison。