1美国文学

Major Periods of American Literary Development

1.Early American Literature 1 620-1820

ⅠThe Literature of Colonial America

ⅡThe Literature of Reason and Revolution

2. American Romanticism 1820-1865

3. American Realism 1865-1910

4. American Modernism 1910-1960

Part I The Literature of Colonial America

Historical Background

The earliest settlers included Dutch, Swedes, Germans, French, Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese.

1. Early history:

1) In 1492, Christopher Columbus found the new continent called America.

2) The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. （John Smith）英国第一个登陆的城市

3) In 1620, 102 passengers sailed on the ship Mayflower across the sea and settled on the new continent “New England”.

Puritan thoughts:

Why did the Puritans come to America? What do you know about them?

–to reform the Church of England

–to escape religious persecution, in search of religious freedom

–to have an entirely new church

Belief---Puritanism(Calvinists: a code of values; a philosophy of life)---- took roots in the New World

Puritans wanted to “purify the church” to its or iginal state, because they thought the church was corrupted and had too many rituals

The dominating values of the Puritan were：A. hard work B. thrift C. piety D. sobriety（影响其文风）

Doctrines of Puritans

taking religion as the most important thing; living for glorifying God;

believing predestination, original sin, total depravity, limited atonement

Features of American Puritan

Idealist---dream：they would build the new land to an Eden on earth.

more practical, tougher---the severe conditions; struggle for survival; preoccupied with business

and profits

Enduring shaping influence on literature

1.Basis of American literature: All literature is based on a myth – Garden of Eden.

2.Contributing to the development of Symbolism（象征主义）: a technique, widely used

3.Influencing the style of literature: simple, fresh and direct (just as the style of the Authorized Version of Holy Bible)

Symbolism（象征主义）

Symbolism means using symbols in literary works. The symbol means something that represents or stands for abstract deep meaning.

Literature

What are the first writing?

The first writings that we call American were the narratives and journals of these settlements. histories, letters, travel books, contract, government charters ,statement, autobiographies, sermons

John Smith (1580–1631)

the 1st American Writer ; soldier, sailor,

A True Relation of Such Occurrences & Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Colony. (1608)（成名作）《殖民地第一次在弗吉尼亚开拓以来发生的各种事件的真实介绍》

A Map of Virginia: with a Description of the Country《弗吉尼亚地图：一个乡村的描述》. General History of Virginia《弗吉尼亚通史》---famous tale of the Indian princess Pocahontas saved him from the wrath of her father Powhatan

William Bradford and John Winthrop

William Bradford“五月花”号上的领导者，《五月花号公约》的主要起草人，后来成为普利茅斯殖民地的总督

he History of Plymouth Plantation《普利茅斯种植园史》

–account of the Puritans ; represent his life of faith （P 6 a verse)

–other writings: letters, proses, a narrative poem

–simplicity, earnestness, direct reporting, readable, moving

John Winthrop（约翰·温思罗普，美国殖民地领导人,马萨诸萨湾清教徒总督）–The History of New England《新英格兰史》: candid, simplicity, honesty

Both Bradford’s and Winthrop’s works are records of the historical events, of direct and vigorous prose style

John Cotton and Roger Williams

John Cotton

–the spiritual leader of the community and its guiding influence toward the ideal of theocracy(a state ruled by the church).

–Called “the patriarch(教父) of New England”

–He wrote several books of hard-hitting Puritan argument, but his primary influence was through the pulpit.

–much more concerned with authority than with democracy (in suppressing differences of opinion).

Roger Williams

–more democratic in his view of church government

–With him begins the history of religious toleration in America. （seperation of church from state政教分离）

– A key into the language of America《开启美国语言的钥匙》

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor (poetry)

Anne Bradstreet（布拉兹特利）：the first noted poetess in colonial period

Some verses on the Burning of Our House

The Spirit and the Flesh

The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America美国新崛起的第十位缪斯女神

She became known as the “Tenth Muse” who appeared in America.

To my dear and loving Husband

If ever two were one，then surely we.

If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;

If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold

Or all the riches that East doth hold.

My love is such that rivers cannot quench

Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense.

Thy love is such I can no way repay, The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.

Then while we live，in love let’s so persevere That when we live no more, we may live ever. 如果曾经两人默契，那是我和你。

如果有丈夫被妻子钟爱，那就是我和你。如果有妻子与丈夫幸福温馨，同我比一比,女士们，如果可能。

我珍惜你的爱胜过黄金矿藏，

胜过东方拥有的无尽宝藏，

我的爱百川之水不能浇熄，

除了你的爱，别无它物能够平抑。

你的爱如此丰盛我无法回报，

只能祈求上天给予你许多酬劳。

在世之时，让我们如此相亲相爱，

百年之后，我们才能使生命永在。

Contemplations 沉思

I heard the merry grasshopper then sing.

The black-clad cricket bear a second part; They kept one tune and played on the same string,

Seeming to glory in their little art.

Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise And in their kind resound their Maker's praise, 我听到蚱蜢欢快的歌声

接着又听到黑壳子蟋蟀开始吟唱

好像为自己的艺术水平正在得意洋洋

他们在同一根琴弦上齐声唱

小精灵声音此起彼伏

犹如歌颂各自造物主的模样

Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth no higher

我哑口无言，能比他们唱的更嘹亮？lays?

The poem is written by the puritan poet Anne Bradstreet, who was the pioneering poet of American literature.

Hearing the singing of the grasshopper and cricket, she thought these creatures were praising the God--their Maker.

Thus she began to search her own soul-- whether it could become closer to the God.

This is the right idea of Puritans, who dreamed to purify the Church and Christianity and dedicate themselves to God.

Edward Taylor

his work treated religious themes, with many poems based directly on the Psalms(圣经旧约中的赞美诗）. His poems enriched American poetic heritage.

美国文学史习题 (1)

I. Multiple choice. Please choose the best answer among the four items. (10 x 1’= 10’) 1. In American literature, the 18th century was the age of Enlightenment. ____ was the dominant. 2. The short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is taken from Irving’s work named ____. 3. Which of the following is not the characteristic of American Romanticism? 4. The short story “Rip Van Winkle” reveals the __ attitude of its author.

5.Stylistically, Henry James’ fiction is characterized by ___. 6.Transcendentalist doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in ___ and Thoreau. 7.Which is regarded as the “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”? 8.____ is considered Mark Twain’s greatest achievement.

美国文学名词解释

1. Transcendentalism The origin of it is a philosophical and literary movement centered in Concord and Boston, which marks the summit of American Transcendentalism. 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. The major features of American Transcendentalism are:It emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. It stressed the importance of the individual. To them the individual was the most important element of society. It offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. 2.Romanticism The Romanticism period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a term associate with imagination boundlessness, and in critical usage is contrasted with classicism which is commonly associated with reason and restriction. The features of Romanticism are: American Romanticism was in a way derivative: American romantic writing was some of them modeled on English and European works. American romanticism was in essence the expression of "a real new experience "and contained"an alien quality".Representatives:William Cullen Bryant; Henry Longfellow and James Cooper, Washington Irving. 3.Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.The representatives are Howells, James, and Mark Twain. 4. Naturalism American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. The background of naturalism are: In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this chance world he was both helpless and hopeless.Major Features of it are:Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.Representatives of it such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. 5.New Criticism The New Criticism as a school of poetry and criticism established itself in the 1940s as an academic orthodoxy in the United States. The school has its beginning in the 1920s. It focus on the analysis of the text rather paying attention to external elements such as its social background, its author's intention and political attitude, and its impact on society. Then it explores the artistic structure of the work rather than its author's frame of mind or its reader's responses. It also see a literary work as an organic entity, the unity of content and form, and places emphasis on the close reading of the text. These New Critics included T.S. Eliot,I.A.Richards,John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and some other critics. The New Criticism has tended to divorce criticism from social and moral concerns, which was to become one salient feature of the movement. 6.Imagism: Between 1912 and 1922 there came a great poetry boom in which about 1000 poets published over 1000 volumes of poetry. Indeed ,to express the modern spirit, the sense of fragmentization and dislocation, was in large measure the aim of quite a few modern literary movements, of which Imagism was one.The first Imagist theorist, the English writer T.E.Hulme. Hulme suggests that modern art deals with expression and communication of momentary phases in the poet's mind. The most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of dominant image.It is a literary movement launched American poets early in the 20th century that advocated the use of free verse, common speech patterns, and clear concrete images as a reaction to Victorian sentimentalism. The representatives are Ezra pound, William Carlos Williams and some other poets.

美国文学与文化_论文

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美国文学重点整理

美国文学重点整理 美国文学题型： 1.60分三篇小说，三个诗歌，作者，出处，作品分析 2.20分名词解释 3.20分论述 1. 20世纪美国文学发展的经济背景 关键词： Urbanization（new farm machines, rising productivity, rising leisure time）Industrialization(electric lights, camera, telephone, radio, type writer) Commercialization Globalization. Philosophy: Schopenhauer叔本华 Nietzsche 尼采 Jean Paul Freud 补充：Fitzgerald：tender is the night, all the sad young man, the rich boy, 2. What is Lost Generation? ①It is a term to describe a group of American intellectuals, poets, artists and writers who fled to France in the post WWI years to reject the values of American materialism and to seek the bohemian lifestyle in Paris. ②It is full of youthful idealism, seeking the meaning of life, drank excessively, have love affairs,creating some of the finest American literature to date. ③American poet Gertrude Stein coined this expression, speaking to Hemingway, she said, you are all a lost generation.the term stuck the mystique surrounding these individuals continues to fancy us. ④Main representatives: F. Scott.Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos 3. What is modernism? Main features. A cultural movement that generally includes the progressive art and architecture, design, literature, music, dance,painting and other visual arts which emerged in the beginning of the 20century, particularly in the years following WWI. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against late 19th century academic and historic tradition, and embraced the new economic ,social and political aspects of the emerging modern world. The avant-garde movements that followed including impressionism, post-impressionism, cubism（立体主义）, futurism, expressionism, contructivism（构

美国文学名词解释

Allegory is a narrative that serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories are written in the form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and almost any other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a story that has characters, a setting, as well as other types of symbols, that have both literal and figurative meanings. One well-known example of an allegory is Dante’s The Divine Comedy.In Inferno, Dante is on a pilgrimage to try to understand his own life, but his character also represents every man who is in search of his purpose in the world. Alliteration is a pattern of sound that includes the repetition of consonant sounds. The repetition can be located at the beginning of successive words or inside the words. Poets often use alliteration to audibly represent the action that is taking place. Aside is an actor’s speech, directed to the audience, that is not supposed to be heard by other actors on stage. An aside is usually used to let the audience know what a character is about to do or what he or she is thinking. Asides are important because they increase an audience's involvement in a play by giving them vital information pertaining what is happening, both inside of a character's mind and in the plot of the play. Gothic is a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects. Gothic literature was named for the apparent influence of the dark gothic architecture of the period on the genre. Also, many of these Gothic tales took places in such “gothic” surroundings. Other times, this story of darkness may occur in a more everyday setting, such as the quaint house where the man goes mad fro m the "beating" of his guilt in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.”In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were told from many different points of view. CATHARSIS is an emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragic artistic work. IMAGERY: A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the "mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of literature. It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a poem, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor. Surrealism is an artistic movement doing away with the restrictions of realism and verisimilitude that might be imposed on an artist. In this movement, the artist sought to do away with conscious control and instead respond to the irrational urges of the subconscious mind. From this results the hallucinatory, bizarre, often nightmarish quality of surrealistic paintings and writings. Sample surrealist writers include Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, and Franz Kafka.

华裔美国文学作品中的中国文化

华裔美国文学作品中的中国文化 华裔美国文学作为美国文学的一部分，是美国多元文化下的必然产物。美国华裔文学作家因其身份的特殊性，在文学创作过程中有意无意地将中国文化运用其中，使其作品体现了中美文化的杂糅。本文首先介绍华裔美国文学的发展历史，其后对华裔美国文学作品中的中国文化的利用进行探析进而阐释其背后的意义所在。 标签：华裔美国文学；中国文化 引言 华裔美国文学发展至今已有百余年历史，作为美国文坛的一支力量，它经历了从边缘走向主流，最终被正式纳入美国文学史的艰辛历程。吴冰教授在他的文章这样定义华裔美国文学，“凡是华裔美国人从自身出发描写的在美生活的故事都属于华裔美国文学，大多数的华裔美国文学是有美国国籍、华人血统的作家笔下的作品。”美国是个多移民的国家，华裔美国文学作品中的语言不仅限于英语，因此华裔美国文学包括华裔美国英语文学和华裔美国华文文学。作为美国出生成长起来的华人后裔，他们在社会和文化环境方面都受到美国的影响，他们不可能像父辈那样对中国传统有着深刻的、全面的认识。但祖辈们对自己身上血脉的情结又难免使后代受到中国传统文化的影响。因此，美国华裔作家作品中所表现的文化是中国文化和美国文化的杂糅。他们所描述的文化是他们眼中的、华裔美国人的文化，也并非纯正的中国传统文化。 一、华裔美国文学发展溯源 （一）开创阶段 华人移民美国的第一次浪潮始于19世纪中期，从此开始到20世纪中期是华裔美国文学的萌芽和开创阶段。华人移民美国由于受到排斥和歧视，通过主动请愿，书写抗议书等形式表达心声，希望能够改善生存状况。早期的华裔美国文学作品数量有限，内容单一，形式松散。但此后逐渐形成了具有族裔性的文学作品，代表作品有刘裔昌（Pardee Lowe）的《父与子》（Father and Glorious Descendant，1943）和黄玉雪（Jade Snow Wong）《华女阿五》（Fifth Chinese Daughter，1945）。他们的作品大多有这样的特点：向美国人真实地介绍中国社会文化的丰富多彩，以此消除美国人因地域、文化的差异对中国人产生的误读；希望融入美国社会，消除一切不公平的对待和种族歧视，试图改善华人在美国的不平等待遇。 （二）发展阶段 20世纪中期至70年代是华裔美国文学的发展阶段，华裔移民经历着中美文化的冲击碰撞。在此阶段，华裔美国文学作品多以自传性题材为主，将写作出发点聚焦在华人特殊社会身份和文化认同上，借描述华人在美国的生活经历来表现

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American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism（资本主义）, its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights. American Puritanism清教主义: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the protestant church who wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrines of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. American literature in the 17th century mostly consisted of Puritan literature. Puritanism had an enduring influence on American literature. It had become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, so much a part of national cultural atmosphere, rather than a set of tenets. Transcendentalism 超验主义: Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. Transcendentalists spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. It placed emphasis on spirit, or the Over soul, as the most important thing in the world. It stressed the importance of individual and offered a fresh perception nature ad symbolic of the spirit of God. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thorough. American Naturalism自然主义: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. The naturalists attempt to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by environment and heredity. It emphasized that the world was amoral, the men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. American Naturalism(美国自然主义文学)：The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to account for t he behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.2) naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.3>Dreiser is a leading figure of his school. The Gilded Age镀金时代:the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrial economy. The end of the Gilded Age coincided with the Panic of 1893, a deep depression. The depression lasted until 1897 and marked a major political realignment in the election of 1896. After that came the Progressive Era. The Lost Generation: The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who used “a lost generation” to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I experiences and disillusioned with American