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美国文学简史复习资料
美国文学简史
复习资料
美国文学简史复习资料
2016
年
12
月
23
日
目录
殖民时期及十八世纪美国文学
美国浪漫主义早期
新英格兰超验主义
美国浪漫主义后期
美国现实主义文学
美国乡土文学
美国现代诗歌
美国现代小说
美国南方文学
美国现代戏剧
美国黑人文学
美国文学简史复习资料
美国华裔文学
美国文学简史复习资料
殖民时期及十八世纪美国文学
New
England
：
Maine, New
Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island,
and Connecticut,
named by Captain John
Smith
?
Puritanism
Doctrines of Puritanism
：
predestination
（命运神定
),
original sin, total depravity
(
彻底的堕落
),
and
limited atonement
(
有限的赎罪
)from
God
’
s grace
Puritans left Europe for America in
order to prove that they were
God
’
s chosen people who
would
enjoy God
’
s
blessings on earth and in Heaven. They felt that
they were exiles under the special
grace of God to establish a theocracy
in the New World.
Style of
writing
：
the style is fresh,
simple and direct; the rhetoric is plain and
honest
；
a touch of
nobility often traceable to the direct
influence of the Bible
Puritans
’
way of Life
：
hard
work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.
In
Hawthorne
’
s The Scarlet
Letter there is a good description of the
Puritans
’
life.
Main writers
William Bradford
Of Plymouth
Plantation
普利茅斯垦殖记
Thomas Paine
Common Sense
常识；
American
Crisis
美国危机；
The Rights of
Man
人权；
The Age of
Reason
理性时代
Philip
Freneau
The Rising Glory of
America
蒸蒸日上的美洲；
The Wild
Honeysuckle
野金银花
Benjamin Franklin
Autobiogra
phy
富兰克林自传
Thomas
Jefferson
Draft the Declaration of
Independence.
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美国文学简史复习资料
美国浪漫主义早期
Romanticism
Background of
Romanticism
：
Economic boom
and national optimism
；
Favorable literary milieu:
increasing number of magazines
；
Foreign influences: the
Romantic Movement in Europe.
Characteristics
of Romanticism
：
A
rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.
Feelings,
intuitions
and
emotions
were
more
important
for
romantics
than
reason
and
common
sense.
An emphasis on individualism; placing
the individual against the group, against
authority.
Stress on the close
relationship between man and nature.
Fascination with the wild, the
irregular, the indefinite, the remote, the
mysterious, and the strange
Cherishing a strong interest in the
past, especially the medieval.
Features of American
Romanticism
：
New
experience in the American Romanticism.
The
exotic
landscape,
the
frontier
life,
the
westward
expansion,
the
myth
of
a
New
Garden
of
Eden
in
America,
and
the
Puritan
heritage,
etc.,
these
were
all
materials
for
an
indigenous
literature.
A deep influence from the
American Puritanism.
Different
from
their
European
counterparts,
American
romantics
tended
to
moralize,
to
edify
rather than to
entertain.
The
“
n
ewness
”
of the
Americans as a nation.
The
Americans
are
different
from
the
Europeans.
Their
ideals
of
individualism
and
political
equality, and
their dream that America was to be a new Garden of
eden for man were distinctly
American.
The New England Poets:
Henry
W. Longfellow-A Psalm of Life
人生礼赞
Main writers
Washington Irving
The Sketch
Book (1819-1820)
见闻札记
;The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow
睡谷的传说
James Fenimore Cooper
Leather-stocking
Tales
皮裹腿故事集
;The Pioneers
拓荒者
;The Last of the Mohicans
最后一个
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美国文学简史复习资料
莫希干人
;The Prairie
大草原
;The
Pathfinder
探路人
;The
Deerslayer
猎鹿人
新英格兰超验主义
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism
as
a
way
of
knowing,
believes
that
individuals
can
intuitively
receive
higher
truths
otherwise
unavailable
through
common
methods
of
knowing,
thus
transcending
the
limits
of
rationalism.
Some of its major concepts are:
It placed emphasis on
spirit, or the Over-
soul
（超灵）
, as the most
important thing in the universe.
It
emphasized
the
importance
of
the
individual
and
believed
that
the
individual
was
the
most
important element in society and that
the ideal kind of individual was self-reliant and
unselfish.
It offered a
fresh view of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or
God.
Significance
A group of
new writers apply transcendental ideas in their
works
Weakness
Transcendentalism tended to become
mysticism.
sometimes resulted in
rampant individualism
make moral
indignation an irrelevant emotion.
Main writers
Ralph Waldo
Emerson(
超验主义领袖）
Nature
（标志性之作）
;The
American Scholar
论美国学者
Henry David Thoreau
Walden:informal,spontaneous and so
easy. His sentences are concentrated and
vigorous.
美国浪漫主义后期
High
Romantics in fiction
Nathaniel
Hawthorne
The Scarlet
letter
红字；
The House of Sever
Gables
有七个尖角阁的房子
Herman Melville
Moby-Dick
白鲸；
Pierr
e
皮埃尔
High
Romantics in poetry
?
Edgar Allen Poe-the father of modern
horror story and detective story
Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque
怪诞故事集；
The
Raven
乌鸦
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美国文学简史复习资料
Literary theories (on poetry)
Poetical principles
Length: there is a distinct limit to
all works of literary
art
—
the limit of a single
sitting.
Province: Beauty
is the sole legitimate province of the poem.
Tone:
Sadness
is
the
tone
of
Beauty
’
s
highest
manifestation.
Melancholy
is
the
most
legitimateof all the
poetical tones. Death of a beautiful woman is the
most poetical topic in the
world.
The immediate object of poetry is
pleasure, not truth.
Poe
defines true poetry as
“
the
rhythmical creation of
beauty
”
, and declares that
music is the
perfection of
the soul, or idea, of poetry.
Walt
Whitman
Leaves of
Grass
草叶集
?
Emily Dickinson
Features of
Dickinson
’
s poems
Dickinson
’
s
style
is
characteristic
of
frequent
use
of
dashes,
sporadic
capitalization
of
nouns,convoluted
and
ungrammatical
phrasing,
off-rhymes,
broken
meters,
bold
and
unconventional and often startling
metaphors, and aphoristic wit. Her poetry prepares
for modern
poetry in the 20th century.
lyric. Her poems are
remarkable for their variety, subtlety, and
richness.
brevity and
intensity.
unorthodox
syntax and punctuation.
innovation in
rhyme. One the whole, her poetry is irregular in
rhyme and rhythm.
美国现实主义文学
Realism
Historical background
Impact
of the Civil War
Changes in
national economic life
Concentration of wealth and power
Polarization of
the rich and the poor
(This was the beginning of what Mark
Twain called
“
The Gilded
Age
”
—
an age of extremes:
of decline and
progress, of poverty and dazzling wealth, of gloom
and buoyant hope.)
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美国文学简史复习资料
Closing of the frontier
Definition
based
on
the
accurate,
unromanticized
observation
of
human
experiences.
It
insists
on
precise
description,
authentic action and dialogue, moral honesty, and
a democratic openness in subject
matter
and style.
Realism as a
literary movement refers to the approach of
realist fiction occurred at the later part of
the 19th century.
Realism, as a broader term, is also
inclusive of naturalism, regionalism and local
color writing.
Major features
Realism
reacts
against
Romanticism
’
s
emphasis
on
intuition,
imagination,
a
dreamy
sense
of
wonder, idealism, faith
in nature, and general optimistic belief in the
goodness of things.
Realists claim that they seek truth
that is verifiable by experience and have
practical consequences;
they do not
seek abstract truth.
Realists
believe
that
literature
imitates
reality.
They
are
attentive
to
such
details
as
dialect,
customs, and
experiences that are commonplace and
“<
/p>
real
”
.
Realists try to describe a small
portion of the knowable world in order to maintain
“
objectivity.
”
Main Writers
William Dean Howells
The
Rise of Silas
Lapham
塞拉斯·拉帕姆发迹记
Henry James
The Portrait of
a Lady
贵妇画像
Literary Theory
Art and life:Art must be related to
life; it must be life transformed and changed so
that the art
form would give the truthful impression
of actuality.
Point of view
Psychological
realism
（心理现实主义）
:by
emphasizing the inner awareness and inward
movements of
his characters in face of outside occurrences
became the
first of the modern psychological analysts in the
novel
modern stream-of-
consciousness technique
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