美国文学知识美国文学教学教案

American Literature

Early American Literature: Colonial Period to 1815

1.In Native American oral literature, three main types of stories could be found: origin stories,

trickster tales, and historical narratives.

2.Conventionally, we view that Captain John Smith (1580—1631) was the first American writer,

who wrote the “First book of American”—A True Relation to Virginia.

3.The American dream for the Puritans, as the Massachusetts Puritan governor John Winthop

put it, was to build a “city on the hill.”

4.Anne Bradstreet was a woman poet in the colonial period. Her “domestic”poems and the

Contemplations are today recognized as her best literary achievement.

5.In 1692, the biggest witchcraft hunting took place in Salem. One of the eight judges was the

great grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne. As a notorious historical event, the Salem trials also provided, in the 20th century, the basis and material for Arthur Miller’s drama The Crucible and Maryse Conde’s novel I, Tituba.

6.Poor Richard’s Almanac was written by Benjamin Franklin. “Early to bed and early to rise,

makes a man healthy wealthy and wise,”proverbs like this showed Franklin’s wisdom. He also wrote The Way to Wealth and Autobiography.

7.The Declaration of Independence was drafted by Thomas Jefferson in June, 1776. It is a

national symbol of liberty and a monument to Jefferson as a statesman and author. American Romanticism: 1815-1865

8.The Age of American Romanticism generally referred to the fifty-year period from 1815 till

1865.

9.“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” are today two of Washington Irving’s

best known stories.

10.James Fenimore Cooper created an enduring American mythic hero in his Leather-stocking

novels, writing on such subjects as the Revolution, the frontier, and the wilderness.

11.“Thanatoposis (meditation on death),”was a poem written by William Cullen Byrant, a

romantic poet in his passion for American wilderness and for a culturally independent America.

12.Transcendentalism, as a way of knowing (or epistemology), believes that individuals can

intuitively receive higher truths otherwise unavailable through common methods of knowing, thus transcending the limits of rationalism.

13.Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading spokesman for Transcendentalism, is today regarded as the

“Father”of American literature. His famous essays include “Nature”, “The American Scholar”, “Self-reliance”, “The Over-Soul”, etc. “Self-Reliance”epitomizes Emerson’s practical philosophy and is most quoted. The idea of non-conformity—“Trust thyself”—is keeping with Emerson’s Puritan inheritance.

14.Henry David Thoreau is primarily remembered by two of his works: Walden (1854) and the

essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849). They were written as a result of two of his most extreme acts: that he went to live in a hut in the woods by the Walden Pond, and that he once refused