美国文学史复习整理

A m e r i c a n l i t e r a t u r e H i s t o r y 1607---1775 Colonial Period
1775---1865 the Early National Period
1828---1865 Romantic Period in American
1865---1914 Realistic Period
1914---1939 Modern Literature
1939--- Contemporary Period
Chapter 1 Colonial America(1607---1775)
The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. It endured starvation, brutality, and misrule. However, the literature of the period paints America in glowing colors as the land of riches and opportunity. Among the members of the small band of Jamestown settlers was Captain John Smith, an English soldier of fortune. His reports of exploration, published in the early 1600s, have been described as the first distinct American literature written in English.
Mayflower, 1620 ,brought the Pilgrims from England to New England. Christopher Jones Plymouth
Before landing, an agreement for the temporary government of the colony by the will of the majority was drawn up in the famous Mayflower Compact.
Harvard, the first college in the colonies, was founded near Boston in 1636 in order to train new Puritan ministers. The first printing press in America was started there in 1638, and America’s first newspaper , The Boston Newsletter, appeared in 1704.
They did not draw lines of distinction between the secular and religious spheres: All of life was an expression of the divine will----a belief that later resurfaces in Transcendentalism.
Captain John Smith
William Bradford
John Winthrop
Cotton Mather
Anne Bradstreet
Edward Taylor
American Puritanism
•T hey stressed predestination, original sin, total depravity, and l imited atonement from God’s grace.
•T hey went to America to prove that they were God’s chosen people
who would enjoy God’s blessings on earth and in Heaven.
•F inally, they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.
•B oth doctrinaire and an opportunist.
Literary Influence:
•A merican Literature is based on a myth ------ the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden.
•T he American Puritan’s metaphorical made of perception ---- symbolism.
Chapter 2 Edwards·Franklin·Crevecoeur
•J onathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin shared the 18th century between them.
•T hey embodied Puritan naïve idealism and crude materialism.
•D eism
•T hey were not interested in theology but in mans own nature.
Jonathan Edward(1703-1758)
Edwards embodied the spirit of revivalism (Great Awakening)
He has 2 goals:
a.to evoke the original sense of religious commitment.
b. b. speak about the difference between head thinking and heart feeling
Major works:
The Freedom of the Will (1754)
The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758)
The Nature of True Virtue (1765)
Edwards was, probably, at once the first modern American and the country’s last medieval man. Edwards was obviously grappling in all his intellectual life with the knotty problem of reconciling Puritan ideas with the new rationalism of Locke and Newton. Edwards represents the element of piety, the religious passion, the aspect of emotion and ecstasy, of the New England tradition, a tradition that he did his best but failed to revitalize复活. 和discovered, beneath the dogmas of the old theology, a dynamic world filled with the presence of God.
Edwards extends typology beyond the strict limits of the Bible, anticipated the nature symbolism of the nineteenth-century Transcendentalism.
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Life story:
•B orn in 1706 into a poor candle-maker’s family in Boston.
•A t 17 he ran away to Philadelphia to make his own fortune. His entrance onto the city marked the beginning of a long success story of an archetypal kind.
•H e helped found the Pennsylvania Hospital, an academy which led to the University of Pennsylvania, and the American Philosophical Society.
•D uring the War of Independence, he was made a delegate to the Continental Congress and
a member of the committee to write the Declaration of Independence.
•H e was the only American to sign the four documents that created the United States including the Declaration of Independence.
•H e was regarded as the father of the country.
Literary Achievement
•A lmanac autobiography (‘Poor Richard’s Almanac’, ‘Autobiography’ )
His Style
•C lear, plain, formal (the organization of his material is informal)
Major Works:
1)Poor Richard’s Almanac
2)The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
•O n the art of self-improvement
•T he first of its kind in literature------- An a ccount of a poor boy’s rise to wealth and fame and the fulfillment of the American dream
•A Puritan document------a self-examination and self-improvement. The book is a convincing illustration of the Puritan ethic that, in order to get on in the word, one has to be industrious, frugal, and prudent.
•A n eloquent elucidation说明of the fact that Franklin was the spokesman of American
enlightenment, and he represented in America all its ideas.
•T he book celebrates the fulfillment of the American dream.
Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
Work: Letters from an American Farmer (1775)
The first eight of the twelve letters reveal the pride of a man being an American. It is evident that, to Crevecoeur, the American is a new man acting on principles: He is self-sufficient, self-reliant, and essentially self-made. Crevecoeur saw and spoke of the hope of a new Garden of Eden materializing in America.
Crevecoeur also saw and spoke of the illusory nature of that dream. Starting from the ninth letter, he began to speak with a voice of a definitely disillusioned man. There in the same New World, he became aware of the existence of slavery, avarice, violence, famine and disease, and all other forms of the Atlantic.
Chapter 3 American Romanticism·Irving·Cooper
American Romanticism
1.Characteristics of Romanticism:
Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. (subjectivity)
For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense.
They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group, against authority.
The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts.
Typical literary forms of romanticism include ballad, lyric, sentimental comedy, problem novel, historical novel , gothic romance, metrical romance, sonnet.
2. Distinctive features of American Romanticism
•the end of the 18th \century through the out break of the Civil War.
•strongly influenced by European culture
•American romantics tended to moralize
3. Main contents: the exotic landscape , the frontier life, the westward expansion, the myth of a New Garden Eden in America (the native materials) New England Poems
•It produced a feeling of “Newness” which inspired the romantic imagination..
4. Representatives:
•New England Poets: William Cullen Bryant; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;
•Writers: James Fenimaore Cooper, Washington Irving
Elements of Romanticism
•Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations.
•Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.
•Experimentation: in science, in institutions.
•Mingling of races: immigrants in large numbers arrive to the US.
•Growth of industrialization: polarization of north and south; north becomes industrialized, south remains agricultural
Romantic Subject Matter
• 1. The quest for beauty: non-didactic, “pure beauty”
• 2. The use of the far-away and non-normal----antique and fanciful:
• a. In historical perspective: antiquarianism; antiquing or artificially aging; interest in the past.
• b. Characterization and mood: grotesque, Gothicism, sense of terror, fear; use of the odd and queer.
• 3. Escapism----from American problems
• 4. Interest in external nature: for itself, for beauty
• a. Nature as source for the knowledge of primitive.
• b. Nature as refuge.
• c. Nature as revelation of God to the individual.
Romantic Attitude
•Appeals to imagination; use of the “willing suspension of disbelief.”
•Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality.
•Subjectivity: in form and meaning.
Romantic Techniques
• 1. Remoteness of settings in time and space.
• 2. Improbable plots.
• 3. Inadequate or unlikely characterization.
• 4. Authorial subjectivity.
• 5. Socially “harmful morality”, a world of “lies”
• 6. Organic principle in writing: form rises out of content, non-formal.
•7. Experimentation in new forms: picking up and using obsolete patterns.
•8. Cultivation of the individualized, subjective form of writing.
Washington Irving (1783-1859)
1.Masterpieces:
“The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon” (1819-1820)
“Bracebridge Hall”
“Tales of a Traveller”
“The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus ”
The Sketch Book (1819), contains two most enduring stori es “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. In both these stories, Irving aims at creating a past in which history and myth blend into each other, providing for a rapidly changing American society kind of historical tradition so apparent in England and so apparently absent in the new nation.The plots of both stories are based on old German folk tales. However, Irving fills them with the “local color” of New York’s Hudson River Valley. In “The Legend”, Irving tells of a Connecticut schoolmaster plying his trade near Tarrytown, New York, among the Dutch families there. A fervent believer in witchcraft and the spirit world, Ichabod Crane is also one of the few educated men in the community, and as such is a notable figure in the area.
In all, The Sketch Book contains thirty-two stories. The majority are on European subjects, mostly English. Like many important American writers after him, Irving found that the rich, older culture of the Old World gave him a lot of material for his stories. Few of his stories are really original. “We are a young people,” he explains in the preface, “and must take our examples and models from the existing nations of Europe”.
A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809)---------his first book
2. Comment
•His stories, essays, histories, and biographies win him the acclaim as the 1st prose stylist of American romanticism.
•He was the first American author to win international recognition, and was extremely popular in Europe.
•I n his ‘Sketch Book’ appeared the First American modern American short stories and the first great American juvenile literature.
•He perfected the best classic style that American literature ever produced.
•Humor, ironic
3．Features which characterize Irving’s writing:
1) Irving avoids moralizing as much as possible
2) he is good at enveloping his stories in an atmosphere, the richness of which is often more than compensation for the slimness of plot.
James Fenimore Cooper (1789----1851)
Cooper's first novel Precaution (1820)was an imitation of Jane Austin’s novels and did not meet with great success.
His second, The Spy (1821), was based on Sir Walter Scott’s W averly series, and told an adventure tale about the American Revolution, set in Westchester Country. The protagonist was Harvey Birch, a supposed loyalist who actually was a spy for George Washington, disguised as “Mr. Harper”. The book brought Cooper fame and wealth and he gave up farming.
In 1823 appeared The Pioneers. It started his preoccupation with a series of frontier adventures and pioneer life, in which he spent about twenty years. The novels depicted the adventures of Natty Bumppo, also called Leatherstocking or Hawkeye, and his Indian companion Chingachgook. They included such classics as The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, and The Prairie (1827).
Cooper had the idea of transporting Leatherstocking to the Far West while he was writing The Last of the Mohicans.
The Spy (1821)
The Leatherstocking Tales (1823—1841)
The Pilot (1824) The Red Rover (1827)
Literary Achievements:
The lst successful American novelist
In his fiction he dealt with the themes of wilderness versus civilization, freedom versus law, order versus change, aristocrat versus democrat, and natural rights versus legal rights.
Cooper developed 3 kinds of novels:
--the 1st kind is the novels about the revolutionary past (“The Spy”);
--the 2nd is the sea novels (he also was the 1st writer to write a novel on the sea, “The Pilot”);
--the 3rd i s novels about the American frontier (“The Pioneers ”, “The Pathfinder” and “The Deerslayer” )
“The Leather Stocking Tales”---------Natty Bumppo
Comment:
•the characters in his fiction help create that part of American mythology: the story of the cow boy, the winning of the American West (daring frontiersman and friendly Indian) •Among his comtemporaries, Cooper was no doubt the best in exploring the possibilities of the American frontier in fiction.
Chapter 4 New England Transcendentalism·Emerson·Thoreau
New England Transcendentalism
Backgrounds:
1.Ralph Waldo Emerson published ‘Nature’ in 1836 which represented a new way of
intellectual thinking in America.
2.‘The Universe is composed of Nature and the Soul, Spirit is present everywhere. ’
3.romantic idealism on Puritan soil
4.1836, the Transcendental Club
Transcendentalism
In the realm of art and literature it meant the shattering of pseudo-classic rules and forms in favor of a spirit of freedom, the creation of works filled with the new passion for nature and common humanity and incarnating a fresh sense of the wonder, promise, and romance of life.
Major Concepts (main ideas)
‘transcendere’: to rise above, to pass beyond the limits
Believe people could learn things both from the outside world by means of the 5 senses and from the inner world by intuition.
It placed spirit first and matter second
It took nature as symbolic of spirit or God. (All things in nature were symbols of the spiritual, of God’s presence. Nature could exercise a healthy and restorative influe nce on human mind.)
It emphasized the significance of the individual (the individual was the most important element in society, the ideal kind of individual was self-reliant and unselfish.) Religion was an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal ‘oversoul’.
Comments:
A manifestation of romantic movement in literature and philosophy
An ethical guide to life of America （the positive life ）
Emerson, Thoreau, Dickinson, etc created one of the most prolific periods in the history of American literature
Never a systematic philosophy. It borrowed from many sources, but lacked of logical connection, finally, it turned to mysticism.
Major writers and Literary Works
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803----1882) Henry David Thoreau (1817----1862)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803----1882)
•Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission.
•The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years.
•In it, Emerson accused the church of acting "as if God were dead" and of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit.
•Emerson's philosophy has been called contradictory, and it is true that he consciously avoided building a logical intellectual system because such a rational system would have negated his Romantic belief in intuition and flexibility.
•
Achievement:
•‘Nature’ has been called “the manifesto of American transcendentalism”
•‘The American Scholar’ has been called “America’s Declaration of Intellectual
I ndependence”
•American way instead of imitating things foreign.
•The contribution both for philosophy and literature
•His perception of humanity and nature as symbols of universal truth encouraged the development of the American symbolist movement.
•Emphasize the common life worth of highest art
•Believed the work’s form was determined by the writer’s perception of the higher truth he found symbolized in nature.
Most of his major ideas –the need for a new national vision, the use of personal experience, the notion of the cosmic Over-Soul, and the doctrine of compensation -- are suggested in his first publication, Nature (1836).
Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862)
•If Ralph Waldo Emerson was the philosopher of Transcendentalism, Thoreau was its most devoted practitioner.
•While Emerson wrote and lectured about Transcendentalism, Thoreau tried to live as a transcendentalist.
Life Story:
•Classically educated at Harvard
•Father, John, was a pencil maker
•Siblings Helen, John, and Sophia
•Lived in and around Concord, Mass., all his life
•Two books published in his lifetime--neither sold well
The Walden Experiment
•From 1841 –1843 Thoreau decided to conduct an experiment of self-sufficiency by building his own house on the shores of Walden Pond and living off the food he grew on his farm.
Major Work: Walden
•Thoreau later documented his experiment in his famous memoir Walden.
Civil Disobedience
•Another work that was a result of Thoreau’s Walden Experiment was his essay Civil Disobedience.
•Civil Disobedience has been a highly influential work that has inspired peaceful activists such as Ghandi and Martin Luther King Jr.
•Famous Quote: “If... the machine of government... is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.”
Henry David Thoreau (1817---1860)and Walden
•--- a spiritual book
•--- a diary of a nature lover, a classic of American prose (this is a book of essays put together, exploring subjects concerned with Nature, with the meaning of life, and with morality)
3 aims in writing the book:
•to make people evaluate the way he lived and thought;
•to reveal the hidden spiritual possibilities in everyone’s life;
•to condemn the weakness and errors of society
subjects:
•The essentials of life: living rather than getting a living
•It is a condemnation of making social improvement and comfort all important.
•It stresses the importance of thought over material circumstance.
•It has confidence in the individual, and holds that individual freedom breaks down the rules and barriers of society so that the individual can express himself and act on his own principles.
• There is the possibility for and importance of change in one’s spiritual life which is in
harmony with nature.
Style:
•
Prophetic voice •
Direct forceful sentence •
Conversational in tone •
Humor •
Proverbial expressions •
Brief tales, fables and allegories •
Metaphors
Chapter 5 Hawthorne ·Melville
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804----1864)
Themes in Hawthorne’s Writings
• Moral allegories ——a story where everything is symbol, used commonly to instruct
especially in religious matters
• The sinful man
• Hypocrisy (伪善)
• The Dark side of human nature
• Religious in nature
Hawthorne’s Major Works
• Two collections of short stories: Twice-told Tales + Mosses from an Old Manse(古屋青
苔)
• The Scarlet Letter -------His masterpiece, which established him as the Leading
American
native novelist of the 19th century
•The House of the Seven Gables(带有七个尖角阁的房子)
•The Blithedale Romance(福谷传奇)
•The Marble Faun(玉石雕像)
Hawthorne’s Point of View
-------Hawthorne is influenced by Puritanism deeply. He was not a Puritan himself, but he had Puritan ancestors who played an important role in his life and works.
•Evil is at the core of human life.
•Whenever there is sin, there is punishment. Sin or evil can be passed from generation to generation.
•Evil educates
•He has disgust in science. One source of evil is overweening intellect. His intellectual characters are villains, dreadful and cold-blooded
Hawthorne’s aesthetic ideas
1) he took a great interest in history and antiquity.
•To him these furnish the soil on which his mind grows to fruition.
•Trying to connect a bygone time with the very present, he makes the dream strange things look like truth.
2) he was convinced that romance was the best form to describe America
•The poverty of materials+the avoidance of offending the puritan taste—— romances rather than novels to tell the truth and satirize and yet not the offend
Writing Style
• A man of literary craftsmanship, extraordinary in
•The use of symbol: symbols serve as a weapon to attack reality. It can be found everywhere in his writing.
•Revelation of characters’ psychology: he is good at exploring the complexity of human psychology. There isn’t much physical movement going on in his works •The use of supernatural mixed with the actual
•His stories are parable(allegory)——to teach a lesson
•Use of ambiguity to keep the reader in the world of uncertainty——multiple point of view
Comments:
•Hawthorne is significant as a romantic writer because he used the New England regional past as subject and setting for his stories and he showed great concern about the American past.
•He is significant for his themes: the consequences of pride, selfishness, and secret guilty; the conflict between lighthearted and somber toward life; the impingement of •He is significant for his style
He used symbols and setting to reveal the psychology of the characters.
---His style is soft, flowing, and almost feminine.
---He used ambiguity to keep the reader in a world of uncertainty.
Herman Melville (1819----1891)
“Moby Dick”
•Some critics hold it the greatest American novel.
•The book suggests the beauty, terror, and mystery of creation.
•Moby Dick is a symbol of nature.
•Nature is capable of destroying the human world. Nature threatens humanity and thus calls out the heroic powers of the human beings. So the power of the universe is both of blessing and curse.
style:
•Allusions to classical myths
• A threefold quality in his writing: the style of fact, the style of oratory celebrating the fact, and the style of meditaion.
“Moby Dick”
•The original design of Moby Dick made sense within the romantic tradition. Melville wanted to write a romantic text on the whale fishery, giving much exotic information, derived from encyclopedias and world literature. The characters were to be colorful and picturesque, including the Byronic captain of the whaling ship.
•The result was a novel with MIXED STYLES:
•FICTIONAL ADVENTURE
•STORY
•HISTORICAL DETAIL
•SCIENTIFIC DISCUSSION
•The novel’s plot is built on one basic conflict –AHAB vs. THE WHALE. It is essentially the story of Ahab and his quest to defeat the legendary Sperm Whale Moby Dick, for this whale took Ahab’s leg, causing him to use an ivory leg.
•Whaling described as a ROYAL ACTIVITY(whales were considered prizes significant enough to be a dowry. Oil used in the coronation of kings is sperm oil)
Chapter 6 Whitman·Dickson
Walt Whitman (1819---1892)
Major Work:
Leaves of Grass: 9 editions ,more than 400 poems all written in free verse form, that is , poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. The title implies rebirth, renewal, or green life.
Features of Whitman’s poems:
•The sprawling lines of the poems are often extremely long.
•Parallelism: the parallel lines say the same thing but use different words.
•Envelope structure: the first line begins with the subject, and then more and more lines list modifiers till the verb appears in the last line of the stanza. This is like enclosing a whole list of ideas in an envelope.
•Catalogue technique: means listing. Typical poems by Whitman make long, long lists of images, of sights, sounds, smells ,taste, and touch.
•No regular pattern.
•The verse unit is usually an independent clause.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson(1830--1886)
Dickinson is known for using poetry as private observation.
Her poems are carefully crafted in rhyme and meter.
subjects: love, death, religion, immortality, pain, beauty
Theory:
•She regarded the poet as a seer. She thought the poet could grasp truth through her imagination and then the poem would reveal this truth to the reader.
•She believed that poetry contributed to growth and poetry had an impact on one’s life.
•She stressed indirection.
•Her poems demonstrate inconsistence.(The reader can find one of her poems that says one thing about a problem and another poem that says the exact opposite)
Style:
•Lyric
•Influence of Christian tradition
•New England perspective
•Puritan introspection
Chapter 7 Edgar Allen Poe
Edgar Allen Poe(1809—1849)
•Poe established a new symbolic poetry, formulated the new short story in detective and science fiction line, developed an important artistic theory, and laid foundation for analytical criticism. •Poe is generally regarded as a pioneering aesthetician, psychological investigator, literary technician and his influence on American literary circles can never be overrated.
Major Literary Works
•“The Raven” 《乌鸦》
•“Annable Lee” 《安娜贝尔·李》
•“The Sleeper” 《睡梦人》
•“A Dream Within a Dream” 《梦中梦》
•“Sonnet—To Science” 《十四行诗—致科学》
•“To Helen” 《致海伦》
•“The City in the Sea” 《海中的城市》earlier entitled The Doomed City 《衰败的城市》
1.Horror
•Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque«述异集»-------a collection of short stories
•“The Black Cat” 《黑猫》
•“The Cask of Amontillado” （红色死亡假面舞会）
•“The Fall of the House of Usher”
2.Ratiocination（推理）
•“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 《莫格街谋杀案》
•“The Gold Bug”《金甲虫》
•“The Purloined Letter”《被窃的信件》
•“The Mystery of Marie Roget” 《玛丽罗杰谜案》
Literary theory:
•The Philosophy of Composition 《创作原理》
•The Poetic Principle 《诗歌原则》
Themes
•death – predominant theme (“Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everything in Poe’s writings is dead.” )
•horror
•negative thoughts of science
Poe’s theory for poetry
•short but achieve maximum effect
•produce a feeling of beauty in the reader
•"pure“, not to moralize
•He stresses rhythm
•insists on an even(规则的) metrical flow
真实能够满足人的理智,感情能够满足人的心灵, 而美则能激动人的灵魂
Poe’s theory for short story
•Short story should be of brevity, totality, single effect, compression(压缩) and finality. Poe’s achievement
1.His aesthetics, his call for "the rhythmical creation of beauty" have influenced French
symbolists and the devotees of "art for art's sake."
2.He is the father of psychoanalytic(心理分析的) criticism.
3.He is the father of the detective story.
Conclusion about his theories:
•Only short poems could sustain the level of emotion in the reader that was generated by all good poetry.
•The most important purpose of poetry is the creation of beauty
•The tone of its highest manifestation is one of sadness. (The death of a beautiful woman is the most potential topic.)
•The immediate object of poetry is pleasure, not truth.
•Music is essential because it is
•associated with indefinite sensations. (alliteration, assonance, repetition)
•Poe preferred the tale to other fictional such as the novel because it is brief.
•He stressed the principle of concentration and thematic totality.
•The writer must decide the effect first and then determine the incidents.
•Truth rather than beauty is often the aim of the tale.
•The merit of a work of art should be judged by its psychological effect upon the reader. Chapter 8 The Age of Realism·Howells·James
Realism:。