美国文学_名词解释
美国文学
1.殖民地时期及独立革命战争时期的美国文学
Philip Freneau（菲利普﹒弗瑞诺）
(1)He was considered as the “Poet of the American revolution” as the most outstanding poet in America of the 18th century. (2)He was a satirist, a bitter polemicist. (3)He wrote many poems encouraging revolution and encouraging the glory that would be won by overcoming the British.
The Wild Honey Suckle 《野金银花》
The Indian Burying Ground 《印第安人的殡葬地》
The British Ship《英国囚船》
The Rising Glory of America 《美洲光辉的兴起》
(1)The Wild Honey Suckle is Freneau’s best lyric (2)It anticipated the 19th—century use of simple nature imagery.
The Indian Burying Ground anticipated romantic primitivism and the celebration of the “Noble Savage”.
Thomas Jefferson（托马斯﹒杰弗逊）
The Declaration of Independence《独立宣言》
(1)The Declaration of Independence was adopted July 4, 1776. (2)It not only announced the birth of a new nation, but also expounded a philosophy of human freedom. (3)It lists 13 cruelties committed by the King of Britain. (4)The famous lines are: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”(5) Thomas Jefferson’s thought was inspired by the thoughts of John Locke.
2.浪漫主义时期的美国文学
Calvinism（加尔文主义）
(1)Calvinism refers to the religious teachings of John Calvin and his followers. (2) Calvin taught that only certain persons, the elect, were chosen by God to be saved, and these could be saved only by God’s grace. (3) Calvinis m forms the basis for the doctrines and practices of the Huguenots, Puritans, Presbyterians, and the Reformed churches.
American Romanticism（美国浪漫主义）
(1) American Romanticism is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature. (2) It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings ,intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense. They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group. They affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and the strange. They stressed the element “Americanness” in their works. (3)It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (4) Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance.” (5) American Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.
Transcendentalism（超验主义）
(1) Transcendentalism refers to the religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in New England in the middle 1800’s, which emphasized the importance of individual inspiration and intuition, the Over—soul, and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore, self—reliant. (2)New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European Romanticism.
Free verse（自由体诗歌）
(1)Free verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conventional rules of meter.(2) Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19th century. (3)Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead the free rhythms of natural speech. (4)Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps, the most notable example.
Symbol（象征）
(1) Symbol means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacle that stands for something else, usually something less palpable than the named symbol. (2) The relationship between the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Allegorical symbols usually express a neater
equivalence with what they stand for than the symbols found in modern realistic fiction.
Theme（主题）
(1) Theme means the unifying point or general idea of a literary work. (2) It provides an answer to such questions as “What is the work about?”(3)Each literary work carries its own theme or themes. For example, King Lear has many themes, among which are blindness and madness.
3.现实主义与自然主义时期的美国文学
American Naturalism(美国自然主义)
(1)The American Naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to account for the 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)American 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.
Darwinism(达尔文主义)
(1)Darwinism is a term that comes from Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
(2)Darwinist think that those who survive in the world are the fittest and those who fail to adapt themselves to the environment will perish. They believe that man has evolved from lower forms of life. Humans are special not because God created them in His image, but because they have successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and have passed on their survival-making characteristics genetically.
(3)Influenced by this theory, some American naturalist writers apply Darwinism as an explanation of human nature and social reality.
Local Colorists(乡土作家)
(1)Generally speaking, the writing of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town.
(2)Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historian of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a
present that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the locale.
(3)Major local colorists include Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain , Kate Chopin, etc.
Theodore Dreiser(西奥多·德莱塞)
He is generally acknowledged as one of America’s literary naturalists.
Works Sister Carrie《嘉莉妹妹》
(1) Sister Carrie tells about a poor country girl (Carrie Meeber) who goes
to Chicago to pursue the American Dream.
(2) The novel shows Dreiser’s naturalistic view about life by illustrating
the purposelessness of life.
(3) The dominant symbol of the novel is the rocking chair that is the rocking chair that is
indicative of the uncertainty of life.
Jennie Gerhardt《珍妮姑娘》
Trilogy of Desire《欲望》三部曲
a. The Financier《金融家》
b. The Titan《巨人》
c. The Stoic《斯多》
The Genius 《天才》
An American Tragedy 《美国的悲剧》
(1) An American Tragedy is Dreiser’s greatest work and the title of the
Book implies Dreiser intention to tell us that it is the social pressure
that makes Clyde’s downfall inevitable.
(2) Clyde’s tragedy is a tragedy that depends upon the American social
system which encouraged people to pursue the “dream of success ” at
all costs.
Sherwood Anderson (舍伍德·安德森)
(1)He has been called the first of America’s “psychological writers”because he first explored the motivations and frustrations of his fictional characters in terms of Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychology.
(2)He tremendously influenced such writers as Hemingway and Faulkner.
Works Winesburg, Ohio《小镇畸人》
(1) Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of 23 interrelated stories of
samll-town life. These stories sound morbid and grotesque, but
Underneath them runs a strong desire to communicate, and love and
be loved.
(2) It won the author a foremost position in contemporary American
literary.
4.现代时期的美国文学
The Lost Generation (迷惘的一代)
(1)The Lost Generation is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.
(2)Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.
(3)The three best-know representatives of Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.
(4)Others usually included among the list are Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Imagism (意象派诗歌)
（1）Imagism came into being in Britain ans U.S. around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation.
（2）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.
（3）Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles:
i) direct treatment of subject matter;
ii) economy of expression;
iii) as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of
metronome.
（4）Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known imagist poem.
The Beat Generation (垮掉的一代)
（1）The members of the Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity.
（2）The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.
（3）The major beat writings are Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Howl became the manifesto of the Beat Generation.
American Dream (美国梦)
（1）American Dream refers to the dream of material success, in which one, regardless of social status, acquires wealth and gains success by working hard and good luck.
（2）In literature, the theme of American Dream recurs. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby comes from the west to the east with the dream of material success. By bootlegging and other illegal means he fulfilled his dream but ended up being killed. The novel tells the shattering of American Dream rather than its success.
Expressionism (表现主义)
（1）Expressionism refers to a movement in Germany early in the 20th century, in which a number of painters sought to avoid the representation of external reality and, instead, to project a highly personal or subjective vision of the world.
（2）Expressionism is a reaction against realism or naturalism, aiming at presenting a post-war world violently distorted.
（3）Works noted for expressionism include: Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, etc..
（4）In a further sense, the term is sometimes applied to the belief that literary works are essentially expressions of their own authors’ moods and thoughts; this has been the dominant assumption about literature since the rise of Romanticism.
Feminism (女权主义)
(1) Feminism incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for women and an ideology of social
transformation aiming to create a world for women beyond simple social equality.
(2) In general, feminism is the ideology of women’s liberation based on the belief that women suffer
injustice because of their sex. Under this broad umbrella various feminists offer differing analyses of the causes, or agents, of female oppression.
(3) Definitions of feminism by feminists tend to be shaped by their training, ideology or race. So, for
example, Marxist and Socialist feminists stress the interaction within feminism of class with gender and focus on social distinctions between men and women. Black feminists argue much more for an integrated analysis which can unlock the multiple systems of oppression.
Hemingway Code Hero (海明威式英雄)
（1）Hemingway Hero, also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong, more sensitive, enjoys the pleasures of life (sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.
（2）Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Henry in A Farewell to Arms and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea are typical of Hemingway Hero.
Harlem Renaissance (哈莱姆文艺复兴)
（1）Harlem Renaissance refers to a period of outstanding literary vigor and creativity that occurred in the United States during the 1920s.
（2）The Harlem Renaissance changed the images of literature created by many black and white American writers. New black images were no longer obedient and docile, instead they showed a new confidence and racial pride.
(3) The leading figures are Langston Hughs, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, etc..
Impressionism (印象主义)
（1）Impressionism is a style of painting that gives the impression made by the subject on the artist without much attention to details. Writers accepted the same conviction that the personal attitudes and moods of the writer were legitimate elements in depicting character or setting or action.
（2）Briefly, it is a style of literature characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather than realistic moods.
美国文学史复习提纲 名词解释
I. Explain the following literary terms(名词解释). 1. Romanticism The most profound and comprehensive idea of romanticism is the vision of a greater personal freedom for the individual. Appeals to imagination; Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, gen iality. Subjectivity: in form and meaning. 2 American transcendentalism American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860). For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. 3 Realism: ―nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.‖ the Civil war a. verisimilitude of details derived from observation b. representative in plot, setting and character c. an objective rather than an idealized view of human experience or（American 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.） 4. Modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at the turn of the 20th century with its core period between World War I and World War II and continuing into the 21st century. 5、American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature. 6、Transcendentalism: In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18th century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. The transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. They found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson’s essay Nature was the major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. 7、Free verse: free verse is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventio nal rules of meter. Free verse was first written and labeled by a group of French poets of the late 19th century. Their purpose was to deliver poetry from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate the free rhythms of natural speech. Walt Whitman was the precursor who wrote lines of varying length and cadence, usually not rhymed. The emotional content or meaning of the work was expressed through its rhythm. Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many modern American poets, including Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg. 8、Naturalism: A more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. Naturalism was a new and harsher realism. It
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.
History and Anthology of American Literature 美国文学史及选读 笔记
History and Anthology of American Literature Part I The Literature of Colonial America 1.Historical Introduction ·The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. ·Among the members of the small band of Jamestown settlers was Captain John Smith. His reports of exploration have been described as the first distinctly American literature written in English. 2.Early New England Literature ·The American poets who emerged in the 17 century adapted the style of established European poets to the subject matter confronted in a strange, new environment. Anne Bradstreet was one such poet. John Smith 1.The first American writer. 2.Works: (1)A true Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Colony (2)A Map of Virginia with a Description of the Country (3)The General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles William Bradford & John Winthrop 1.William Bradford: 曾任普利茅斯总督 ·Work: Of Plymouth Plantation《普利茅斯垦殖记》 2.John Winthrop: 曾任马萨诸塞湾总督，波士顿总督 ·Work: The History of New England from 1630 to 1649《新英格兰历史：1630-1649》 John Cotton & Roger Williams 1.John Cotton: 清教徒牧师和作家 ·The first major intellectual spokesman of Massachusetts Bay Colony was John Cotton, sometimes called “the Patriarch of New England”. 2.Roger Williams: 出生于伦敦的进步宗教思想家，曾长期受到英国殖民当局的迫害 ·He was interested in the Indian language ·Work：A Key into the Language of America 《阿美利加语言的钥匙》 Anne Bradstreet & Edward Taylor 1.Anne Bradstreet：美国第一位作品得以发表的女诗人 ·Work：The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America《第十位缪斯》 2.Edward Taylor：美国清教派牧师和诗人，被公认为美国19世纪前最重要的诗人 ·The best of the Puritan poets Part II The Literature of Reason and Revolution 1.Background: In the seventies of the eighteenth century the English colonies in North America rose in arms against their mother country. The War of Independence lasted for eight years(1775-1783) and ended in the formation of a federative bourgeois democratic republic—the United States of America. 2.American Enlightenment（美国启蒙运动）dealt a decisive blow to the Puritan traditions and brought to life secular
美国文学史名词解释
1、the Lost Generation In general, the post-World War I generation, but specifically a group of U.S. writers who came of age during the war and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926). The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from a U.S. that, b asking under President Harding's “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the '20s. They were never a literary school. In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period. The last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald's Tender Lost generation The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos. 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 society. Hemingway later used the phrase as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises. It consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams and Archibald MacLeish. 2、Iceberg Theory It is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway. The meaning of a piece is not immediately evident, because the crux of the story lies below the surface, just as most of the mass of a real iceberg similarly lies beneath the surface. Iceberg Theory Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” sugge sts that the writer include in the text only a small portion of what he knows, leaving about ninety percent of the content a mystery that grows beneath the surface of the writing. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of
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.
美国文学史
美国文学史梗概 一、殖民地时代和美国建国初期 最早来自这片新大陆的欧洲移民主要是定居在新英格兰的清教徒和马萨诸塞的罗马天主教徒，二者虽然在教义上有很多不同之处，但他们都信奉加尔文主义：人生在世只是为了受苦受难，而他们唯一的希望是争做上帝的“选民”，死后进天国，相信“原罪”。这时的文学作品也主要反映了这些思想，和欧洲文学一脉相承。 代表作家：考顿·马瑟，乔纳森·爱德华兹，安妮·布拉兹特里特，爱德华·泰勒。 二、18世纪独立战争胜利后，美国经济社会进入稳步发展时期 这一时期是启蒙运动时期（the Enlightenment）,从字面上讲，启蒙运
动就是启迪蒙昧，反对愚昧主义，提倡普及文化教育的运动。但就其精神实质上看，它是宣扬资产阶级政治思想体系的运动，并非单纯是文学运动。它是文艺复兴时期资产阶级反封建、反禁欲、反教会斗争的继续和发展，直接为一七八九年的法国大革命奠定了思想基础。启蒙思想家们从人文主义者手里进一步从理论上证明封建制度的不合理，从而提出一整套哲学理论，政治纲领和社会改革方案，要求建立一个以“理性”为基础的社会。他们用政治自由对抗专制暴政，用信仰自由对抗宗教压迫，用自然神论和无神论来摧毁天主教权威和宗教偶像，用“天赋人权”的口号来反对“君权神授”的观点，用“人人在法律面前平等”来反对贵族的等级特权，进而建立资产阶级的政权。是欧洲第二次思想解放运动。） 主要文学指导思想是“自然神论”（Deism），这个思想认为虽然上帝创造了宇宙和它存在的规则，但是在此之
后上帝并不再对这个世界的发展产生影响。自然神论反对蒙昧主义和神秘主义，否定迷信和各种违反自然规律的“奇迹”；认为上帝不过是“世界理性”或“有智慧的意志”；上帝作为世界的“始因”或“造物主”，它在创世之后就不再干预世界事务，而让世界按照它本身的规律存在和发展下去；主张用“理性宗教”代替“天启宗教”。人生在世，不再是受苦受难以换取来世的新生，而是要消灭种族、性别和信仰的不平等，建立自己的“人间乐园”。 启蒙运动中出现大量优秀的散文作品，并多出自开国元勋之手，如本杰明·富兰克林，托马斯·潘恩，以及托马斯·杰斐逊。 三、19世纪南北战争时期 这一时期的文学先后发展了浪漫主义，现实主义和自然主义。
美国文学史及选读复习重点
Captain John Smith (first American writer). Anne Bradstreet；The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America （colonists living） Edward Taylor(the best puritan poet) John Cotton ”the Patriarch of New England” teacher spiritual leader Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography Poor Richard’s Almanack Thomas Jefferson： Political Career Thoughts The Declaration of Independence we hold truth to be self-evidence Philip Freneau“Father of American Poetry” The Wild Honey Suckle American Romanticism optimism and hope Nationalism Washington Irving“Father of American Literature short story”The first “Pure Writer” A History of New York The Sketch Book marked the beginning of American Romanticism! “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”Rip Van Winkle James Fenimore Cooper Father of American sea and frontier novels Leather stocking Tales The Last of the Mohicans The Pioneers The Prairie The Pathfinder The Deerslayer Edgar Allan Poe father of detective story and horror fiction Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque “MS. Found in a Bottle” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” “The Fall of the House of Usher”“The Masque of the Red Death”“The