文学笔记

美国文学笔记
I. Colonial Period（殖民地时期）（约1607-1765）
II. The Revolutionary period（革命时期) :( 1765-18世纪末）
Benjamin Franklin（1706-1790）
III.The Romantic period （浪漫主义时期）: （1800-1865）
Edgar Allan Poe（1809-1849）
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Henry Daivd Thoreau (1817-1862)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Walt Whitman (1819~1892)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
IV.The Realism and Naturalism（现实主义和自然主义) : （1865-1918）
Mark Twain (1835-1910)
Henry James (1843-1916)
Stephen Crane (1881-1900)
V. The Modern period (现代主义时期）: 1918-1945
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Ernest Hemingway (1899—1961)
Ezra Pound (1885—1972)
Robert Frost（1847-1963）
Eugene O’ Neil (1888-1953)
VI. Contemporary literature（当代文学):（1945- ）

I. Colonial Period（殖民地时期）（约1607-1765）
II. The Revolutionary period（革命时期): (1765-18世纪末）
Benjamin Franklin（1706-1790）：
1. Summary:
One of the greatest founding fathers of the American Nation
First great self-made man in America
The embodiment of American dream
2. Major works:
The Autobiography 《自传》：the first of its kind in literature, one of the classics of the genre
Poor Richard’s Almanack《穷人理查德的年历》


III. The Romantic period （浪漫主义时期）: （1800-1865）
Edgar Allan Poe（1809-1849）
1. Summary:
Novelist, poet, critic
good at writing Gothic(哥特式） and detective fiction
Father of western detective stories and psychoanalytic criticism
2. Major works:
Poetry
The Raven《乌鸦》
To Helen《献给海伦》
Short stories
Horror ( suspense, terror, Insanity, death，Revenge and rebirth）
The Fall of the House of Usher《厄舍古屋的倒塌》
The Masque of the Red Death 《红色死亡的化妆舞会》
The Black Cat《黑猫》
The Cask of Amontillado《一桶白葡萄酒》
Ligeia《丽姬娅》
Detective /ratiocinative(推理的）(originator)
The Purloined Letter 《窃信案》
The Muder in the Rue Morgue 《莫格街谋杀案》
The Mystery of Marie Rog《玛丽.罗热疑案》
The Gold Bug 《金甲虫》


American Transcendentalism
(美国超验主义）
（1830s- Civil War）
Summit of Romanticism/ American Renaissance
1. Appearance
1836, “Nature” by Emerson
2. Features of Transcendentalism
(1). Spirit(思想）/Oversoul（超灵）
(2). importance of individualism
(3). nature – symbol of spirit/God；garment of the oversoul
(4). focus in intuition (irrationalism and subconsciousness)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882):
1. Summary:
American essayist, lecturer, poet
The Founder of Transcendentalism
2. Major works:
Nature《论自然》： the manifesto of American transcendentalism
The American Scholar《论美国学者》: American's Declaration of Intellectual Independ

ence
Self-reliance《论自助》

Henry Daivd Thoreau (1817-1862)
1. Summary:
American Essayist, Poet, Philosopher
2. Major Works
Civil Disobedience ?论公民之不服从?
Walden , or Life in the woods 《瓦尔登湖，或林中的生活》: Walden is a record of Thoreau’s two year experiment of living alone at Walden pond in a self-built house at the edge of the woods.

Late Romanticism
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864):
1. Summary:
American novelist and short story writer
2. His point of view : Hawthorne is influenced by Puritanism（清教主义） deeply.
(1). Evil is at the core of human life
(2).whenever there is sin, there is punishment. Sin or evil can be passed from generation to generation
(3). Evil educates.
(4). He has disgust in science. One source of evil is overweening (自负的) (too proud of oneself) intellect . His intellectual characters are villains, dreadful and cold-blooded
3. Major Works
The Scarlet Letter《红字》

Herman Melville (1819-1891): Novelist, Poet
Major works:
Moby Dick 《白鲸》,1851
Main characters:
Ishmael(以实玛利）: the narrator
Ahab（埃哈伯）: the protagonist
Moby Dick

Walt Whitman (1819~1892)
1. Summary:
American poet, essayist, journalist, and humanist/
The father of free verse（自由诗）
2. Major works:
Leaves of Grass《草叶集》
Famous poems
Song of Myself《自我之歌》
One’s Self I Sing 《我歌唱一个人的自己》
O Captain! My Captain! 《噢，我的船长！我的船长！》
3. Writing themes (almost everything):
? equality of things and beings
? divinity of everything
? Immanence（无所不在） of God
? democracy
? evolution of cosmos（宇宙）
? multiplicity of nature
? self-reliant spirit
? death, beauty of death
? expansion of America
? brotherhood and social solidarity（团结一致） (unity of nations in the world)
? pursuit of love and happiness
4. Style: “free verse（自由诗）: the verse that does not follow a fixed metrical pattern, the verse without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.
(1).Parallelism（排比）
(2).phonetic recurrence（同字起句法）（the repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of the line, in the middle or at the end)
(3).the use of a certain pronoun “I” (the first person narrator)
(4).strong tendency to use oral English
(5).the habit of using snapshots
(6).a looser and more open-ended syntactic structure
(7).use of conventional image
(8).vocabulary – powerful, colourful, rarely used words of foreign origins, some even wrong
(9). sentences – catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem lines
5. Significance of Leaves of Grass
Leaves of Grass, either in content or in form, is an epoch-making work in American literature:
→Its democratic content marked the shift from Romanticism to Realism.
→Its free-verse form broke from old poetic conventions to open a new way for American poetry.

Emily Dickinson

(1830-1886)
1. Summary: American poet
She wrote altogether 1775 poems, of which only 7 appeared in print in her lifetime.
2. Some famous poems:
I Died for Beauty
Because I Can’t Stop for Death
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass
I Heard a Fly Buzz—When I Died
ToMake a Prairie
I’m Nobody
3. Theme
Mainly based on her own experiences/joys/sorrows (inner world):
(1). Death and immortality
(2) .Love—sufferings and frustration caused by love
(3) .Nature-Kind and cruel
(4). Religion-doubt and belief about religious subjects
(5) .Beauty (beauty, truth and goodness are ultimately one)
(6). physical aspect of desire
(7). free will and human responsibility
4. Style
1). Poems without titles
2) .Use of capital letters –emphasis and dashes-create cadence (抑扬顿挫）
3).Economy of expression. (Plainest words, directness, brevity)
4). Short poems, mainly two stanzas
5). Fresh and strange images
6) .Bold and unconventional and often startling metaphors
7) .Rhetoric techniques: personification —make some abstract ideas vivid
8). off-rhyme(半韻) and defamiliarization(陌生化）

IV. The American Realism 现实主义时期 (1865-1918)
1. Three Giants in Realistic Period
William Dean Howells – “Dean of American Realism”
Henry James
Mark Twain
2. Comparison:
Theme:
Howells – middle class
James – upper class
Twain – lower class
Technique:
Howells – smiling/genteel realism
James – psychological realism
Twain – local colourism and colloquialism

Mark Twain (1835-1910):
1. Summary:
American writer, short story writer/
Humorist
2. Major works:
The Celebrated jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865)
《卡拉维拉县弛名的跳蛙》
Innocents Abroad (1869) 《傻子国外旅行记》
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) 《汤姆.索亚历险记》
Life on the Mississippi (1883) 《密西西比河上》
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1886)《哈克贝里.费恩历险记》: All modern American literature comes from his masterpiece “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”——Ernest Hemingway
3. Style:
(1). colloquial language（口语）, vernacular (本土的）language, dialects
(2). local colour
(3). syntactic feature: sentences are simple, brief, and sometimes ungrammatical
(4). humour
(5). tall tales (highly exaggerated) （荒诞不经的故事）
(6). social criticism (satire on the different ugly things in society)
4. Contribution
One of Mark Twain’s significant contributions to American literature lies in the fact that he made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country.

Henry James (1843-1916)
1. Summary:
An American and British novelist, literary critic
Founder of psychological realism
First of the modern psychological novelist
Initiator of the international theme: American innocence in face of European sophistication
2. Major works:
Daisy Miller （1878）《戴茜?

米勒》
The Portrait of a Lady (1881) 《贵妇的肖像》
The Wings of the Dove (1902)《鸽翼》
The Ambassadors (1903)《专使》
The Golden Bowl (1904)《金碗》
The Art of Fiction(1884)《小说的艺术》
3. His Point of view
(1). Psychological analysis, forefather of stream of consciousness
(2).Psychological realism
(3). Highly-refined language
4. Style – “stylist”
(1). Language: highly-refined, polished, insightful, and accurate
(2).Vocabulary: large
(3). Construction: complicated, intricate

Naturalism（自然主义）
1. Background:
(1). Darwin’s theory: “natural selection”
(2).Spenser’s idea: “social Darwinism”
(3). French Naturalism: Zora
2. Features
(1). environment and heredity
(2). scientific accuracy and a lot of details
(3). general tone: ironic and pessimistic, hopelessness, despair, gloom, ugly side of the society

Stephen Crane (1881-1900)
1. Summary:
Novelist, poet
Pioneer in the naturalistic tradition
Precursors（先驱） of Imagist poetry
2. Major Works:
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets 《街头女郎麦姬》: the first naturalistic novel in America
The Red Badge of Courage 《红色英勇勋章》
The Open Boat《海上扁舟》

V. AMERICAN MODERNISM (1918-1945)
（美国现代主义）
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
1. Summary:
Famous American novelist, short story writer, and essayist
the representative of the 1920s
the spokesman for the Jazz Age
one of the“lost generation” writers
2. Major Works
This Side of Paradise (1920) 《人间天堂》
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) 《爵士乐时代的故事》
Tender Is the Night (1934) 《夜色温柔》
The Great Gatsby (1925) 《了不起的盖茨比》:
Narrative point of view – Nick Carraway
Theme: The decline of the American Dream
3. His Point of view
(1). He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the so-called “American Dream” is false in nature.
(2). He had always been critical of the rich and tried to show the integrating effects of money on the emotional make-up of his character. He found that wealth altered people’s characters, making them mean and distrusted. He thinks money brought only tragedy and remorse.
(3). His novels follow a pattern: dream – lack of attraction – failure and despair.
4. His ideas of “American Dream”
It is false to most young people. Only those who were dishonest could become rich.

William Faulkner (1897-1962)
1. Sumary:
An American novelist and poet
Initiator of American Southern Renaissance
One of the most influential modern novelists of 20th century
Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1949
2. Major Works:
The Sound and the Fury 《喧哗与骚动》
As I Lay Dying 《在我弥留之际》
Light in August 《八月之光》
Absalom, Absalom 《押沙龙，押沙龙！》
Go Down, Moses 《去吧，摩西》
Barn Burning 《烧牲口棚》
Yoknapatawpha County（约克纳帕塔法

县）:
--- A fictional county in northern Mississippi, the setting for most of William Faulkner’s novels and short stories, and patterned upon Faulkner’s actual home in Lafayette County, Mississippi.
3. Major Themes of his Works
(1). history and race
(2). Deterioration
(3). Conflicts between generations, classes, races, man and environment
(4). Horror, violence and the abnormal
4. Faulkner's narrative technique
(1).Withdrawal of the author as a controlling narrator
(2). Dislocation of the narrative time: The most characteristic way of structuring his stories is to fragment the chronological time.
(3). the modern stream-of-consciousness（意识流） technique and the interior monologue（内心独白）：
(4). Multiple points of view（多重视角）
(5). symbolism and mythological and biblical（圣经的） allusions

Ernest Hemingway (1899—1961)
1. Summary:
Novelist and short-story writer
One of the great American writers of the 20th century
The Spokesman of the “Lost Generation” （American writers after World War I self-consciously acknowledged that they were lost generation, devoid of faith and alienated from the Western civilization．）
Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1954 （for his “mastery of the art of modern narration”）

2. Major works
The Sun Also Rises 《太阳照常升起》
A Farewell to Arms《永别了，武器》
For Whom the Bell Tolls 《丧钟为谁而鸣》 / 《战地钟声》
The Old Man and the Sea 《老人与海》
A Clean, Well-lighted Place 《一个干净，明亮的地方》
3. Major Themes
(1).The “Nada”(虚无) Concept
(2).Grace under pressure(压力下的优雅）
“Man is not made for defeats. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
------The Old Man and the Sea
(3). Code Hero（准则英雄/ 硬汉）
a. The Hemingway hero is not a thinker; he is a man of action.
b.“Grace under pressure is their motto.
c.The Hemingway code heroes are best remembered for their indestructible(不可毁灭的） spirit.
4. Artistic features
(1) .The iceberg（冰山） technique
The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.
(2). Language style
a. simple and natural
b.direct, clear and fresh
c. lean and economical
d.simple, conversational, common found, fundamental words
e. simple sentences
f. Iceberg principle: understatement, implied things
g.Symbolism

Ezra Pound (1885—1972)
1. Summary:
A leading spokesman of the “Imagist Movement”(意象主义运动）
One of the most influential American poets and critic
2. Major works:
Cathay:《华夏集 》《神州集 》《中国诗章》
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley《休?赛尔温 ?毛伯利》
Cantos /《诗章》
3. Imagism (1909-1917)
(1) .Background: Imagism was influenced by French symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese literature “haiku”
(2). Defintion : The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold t

hat the most effective means to express the these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image.
(3): Manifesto of Imagism:
? Direct treatment
? Economy of expression
? New rhythm
In a station of the Metro《在一个地铁站》: a quintessential（典型的） imagist text

Robert Frost（1847-1963）
1. Summary:
the most popular American poet
Won Pulitzer Prize four times
Received honorary degrees from forty-four colleges and universities
Read “ The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961
2. Famous Poems:
Fire and Ice《火与冰 》
The Road Not Taken 《未选择的路 》
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 《雪夜伫立林边有感 》
Mending Wall《补墙》
After Apple-Picking《摘罢苹果 》
3. Frost’s writing feature
His combination of the traditional verse pattern and a colloquial distinctive language (New England Speech)

Eugene O’ Neil (1888-1953)
1. Summary:
America's greatest playwright
Won the Pulitzer Prize four times
Won Nobel Prize in 1936
Founder of the American drama
2. Major Works
Beyond the Horizon (1920) 《天边外》
The Emperor Jones(1920) 《琼斯皇帝》
The Hairy Ape (1922)《毛猿》
Desire under the Elms (1924) 《榆树下的欲望》


1. Imagism: Imagism is a literary movement which came into being in Britain and U.S .around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image. Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known imagist poem.
2. The Lost Generation: The “Lost Generation” is a term used to characterize a general motif of disillusionment of American literary notables who lived in Europe, mostly Paris, after the First World War. Figures identified with the “Lost Generation ”included authors and artists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound , Sherwood Anderson and so on.

3. Local Colorism: Local Colorism or Regionalism as a trend first came to prominence in the late 19th century in America. The local colorists were devoted to capturing the unique customs, manners, speech, folklore, and other qualities of a particular regional community, usually in humorous short stories. The most famous of the local colorists was Mark Twain, with his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
4. Multiple points of view: The employment of several narrators or narrative points of views to tell a story, thus making the structure of the book somewhat radioactive. For example, The Sound and the Fury uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view.