英语专业美国文学期末考试复习资料--个人整理

一Colonial America

1.The first English colony: Jamestown in Virginia in 1607

2Puritanism :Influence on American value system: simplicity, freedom, independence, hard work, etc.

3Anne Bradstreet，once called “Tenth Muse”

二Reason and Revolution

1.Benjamin Franklin---Poor Richard’s Almanac

Modeled on farmers’annual calendar; kept publishing for many years;

includes many classical sayings,

2.Thomas Paine

Common Sense: a strong push for the Revolution Warfour parts (British enslavement of the colonies; praising democratic election; America’s economic and military potential to protect the rights of people)

三Romanticism

An expression of an individual’s feeling and experiences; imagination & nature

The first literary Renaissance, in the history of American literature. It stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

1.Washington Irving (1783-1859)

(1)Literary status: the first American to earn an international reputation; Father of the American short stories

(2)Tow short stories----“Rip V an Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: Americanized versions of European folk tales, from German legends, but achieving a distinct American tone and theme

(3)The Sketch Book:The first modern short stories and the first great American juvenile literature, winning him international popularity

2.James Fenimore Cooperthe first major American writer to deal imaginatively with American

life, a critic of the political, social and religious problems of the day.

Leatherstocking Tales

Including: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer

Centre Character: Natty Bumppo (an ideal romantically; various names: Leatherstocking, Deerslayer, Pathfinder, Hawkeye; with two noble red men: Mohican Chief Chingachgook and his son, Uncas)

3.William Cullen Bryant

Literary status: one of America’s earliest naturalist poets; “the American Wordsworth”

most famous poems: “Thanatopsis”; “To a Waterfowl”

4.Edgar Allen Poe

The Raven:The poem is a verse-narrative and has 108 lines in 18 stanzas.

Transcendentalism

Nature’s voice pushed American Romanticism into a new phase, the phase of New England Transcendentalism, the summit of American Romanticism.

5.Henry David Thoreau

Literary status: a thorough practitioner of Transcendentalism; greatly influenced by Emerson (more radical) Civil Disobedience(在什么情况下写的：没交战争税，入狱)

Walden (Walden is a faithful record of his reflections when he was in solitary communion with nature, an eloquent indication that he not only embraced Emerson’s Transcendentalist philosophy but went even further to illustrate that pantheistic quality of nature.)

6Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter 《红字》(a simple but very moving story in which four people living in a Puritan community are involved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different ways, showing the reader the tension between society and individuals)

7.Herman Melville

a master of allegory and symbolism

most of his novels based on sea sailors and adventur e except The Confidence-Man(1857) Literary achievements: Moby Dick

四Realism

1Walt Whitman ---Innovative poetic form: “free verse 自由体诗” (poetry without a fixed

beat or regular rhyme scheme; intriguing the reader’s own imagination); a looser and more open-ended syntactical structure; lines and sentences of different lengths; few compound sentences

2.Theodore Dreiser(填空题)

(1)欲望三部曲The Financier The Titan The Stoic

(2) American Tragedy为什么叫美国悲剧-------典型地反应了当时美国人对财富的追求

2.Mark Twain

(1)The Gilded Age 《镀金时代》: written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, exploring the individualism in a world of unstable values, naming the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War

(2).Mark Twain的贡献：making colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country

3.Henry James