美文学作家写作风格

The Writing Style of American Authors

Irving’s style

1) First Irving avoids moralizing as much as possible; he wrote to amuse and entertain, which departs to no small extent from the basic principles of his Puritan forebears. 2) Then he is good at enveloping his stories in an atmosphere, the richness of which is often more than compensation for the slimness of plot.

3) His characters are vivid and true so that they tend to linger in the mind of the reader.

4) The humor that has built itself into the very texture of his writings is such that reading him, it is difficult not to smile and occasionally even chuckle.

5) The finished and musical language and the patent workmanship have been among the points of critical attention for a long time.

Cooper’s style

1) Cooper is good at inventing plots. He can complicate one quickly and well. His

plots are sometimes quite incredible, it is true, but his stories are immensely intriguing.

2) His landscape descriptions are majestic and suggestive of Sir Walter, the legendary

spirit of whose border tales might have been a source of inspiration for him.

3) The fact that he had never been to the frontier and among the Indians and yet could

write five huge epic books about them is an eloquent proof of the richness of his imagination.

4) His style is dreadful, his characterization wooden and lacking in probability, and

his language, his use of dialect, is not authentic.

Hawthorne’s style

1)The structure and the form of his writings are always carefully worked out to cater for the thematic concern.

2) Hawthorne discusses sin and evil in almost all his works because of his “black”vision.

3) He is good at exploring the complexity of human psychology. So his works are full of mental activities.

4) Hawthorne is a master of symbolism, which he took the Puritan tradition and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form.

Whitman’s Style

1)His style is marked by the use of the poetic “I”, to invite readers to participate in

the process of sympathetic identification.

2)He is innovative in terms of the form of poetry: free verse. He depends on

parallelism and phonetic recurrence for its structure and cadence.

3)He catalogues things into different waves of feeling. The great majority of his

poems employ the line, instead of the conventional foot, as the stylistic unit.

4)One of the most often-used methods is make colors and images fleet past the

mind’s eye of the reader like those of kaleidoscope.

5) He uses oral English to make it an effective way to express freely the feelings of

the common people. He chooses powerful, colorful words as well as rarely-used