-
.-
American Puritanism
殖民地时期
( roughly from the settlement of
America in the early 17th century through the end
of
the 18th)
一、
作品：
1
、
Poor Richard's
Almanac
《格言历书》
---
A Collection of maxims, or
proverbs, on the value of
work and
savings for success.
2
、
The
Autobiography
《自传》
---
“美国梦”的根源
3
、参与起草《独立宣言》
Benjamin
Franklin
本杰明?富兰克林
浪漫主义
American
Romanticism
The Romantic
Period stretches from
the end of the
18th century to the outbreak of the Civil
War
. It is a period of the
great flowering of American literature.
The social and cultural background of
Romanticism
The young
Republic was flourishing into a politically,
economically and culturally independent
country.
The Romantic
writings revealed unique characteristics of their
own in their works and they grew on
the
native lands.
The
desire for
an escape from society and a return to nature
became a permanent
convention of
American literature.
The
American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted
great influences over American moral
values.
Romantics frequently
shared certain general
characteristics
:
moral
enthusiasm
,
faith in
va
lue of individualism and intuitive
perception
, and a presumption that
the natural world
was a
sourc
e of goodness and
man’s
societies
as a source of corruption.
二、
Edgar Allan Poe
埃德加
·
爱伦
·
坡
---poet, short story
writer and literary critic (48 poems,70 short
stories)
He greatly
influenced the devotees of
“Art
for
art’s
sake.”
He was
father of psychoanalytic criticism
(
心理分析批评
), and the detective
story.
诗歌的精髓就是
追求美
小说的主题常常是
恐怖
和
死亡
，其中还运用了
象征手法
。
The Poetic Principle :
1. The poem, should be short, readable
at one sitting;
2.
Beauty (the rhythmical creation of beauty);
3. Melancholy
忧伤
(especially the death of a
beautiful woman).
.-
代表作：
The Fall of the House of
Usher
《厄舍大厦的倒塌》
Ligeia
《莉盖亚》
Annabel Lee
《安娜贝
尔
·
李》
The Raven
《乌鸦》
The Cask of Amontillado
《阿芒提拉多的酒桶》
---gothic novel
人物：蒙特利瑟
Montresor,
弗图纳多
Fortunato
，筵席
上男人将喝醉的死对头哄骗至地窖并砌墙活
埋的故事。
三．爱默生
Emerson =
The chief
spokesman of New England
Transcendentalism
超验主义
He was a
descendent
（后裔）
of
a long line of New England clergymen
牧师【
pastor
】
.
散文家、诗人、超验主义的哲学的主要倡导者。
American Transcendentalism
As a philosophical and
literary movement, American Transcendentalism
(also known as
“
American Renaissance
”)
flourshed in New England
from the 1830s to the Civil
War
. It is
the high tide of
American romanticism and its doctrines found their
greatest literary advocates
in
Emerson and
Thoreau.
Transcendentalists spoke for
the cultural rejuvenation and against the
materialism of American society.
Transcendentalism
超验主义
(+ H. D. Thoreau;
Nathaniel Hawthorne; )
The
major features of Transcendentalism:
①
The
Transcendentalists placed
emphasis on
spirit,
or the
Oversoul,
as the most
important
thing in the
universe
.
思想
超灵
宇宙
②
The Transcendentalists stressed the
importance of the
individual.
To them, the
individual
is the most
important element of Society
.
个体
+
社会
③
The
Transcendentalists offered a fresh
perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or
God
. Nature was not purely
matter. It was alive, filled with God’s
overwhelmin
g presence.
自然
+
上帝
代表作：
Nature
《论自然》
---the Bible of Transcendentalism by
Emerson
；
Self-Reliance
《论自助》
---
是表达他的超验主
义观点的最重要作品之一
一
The American
Scholar
《论美国学者》
；
The
Over-soul
《论超灵》
四、
Nathaniel
Hawthorne
纳撒尼尔·霍桑
---
effected by
超验主义
He was born into a
prominent
Puritan family.
One of
the most
ambivalent
（矛盾的）
writers
in the American literary history.
主要成就：
美国心理分析小说的开创者
浪漫主义小说家
心理小说家
代表作：
Mosses from an Old Manse
《古宅青苔》
;
.-
Twice-Told Tales
《故事重述》
;
The Marble Faun
《玉石雕像》
;
The
House of the Seven Gables
《带有七个尖角阁的房子》
The
Scarlet Letter
《红字》
Many of his earlier stories had treated
themes that led to The Scarlet Letter.
Theme:
Puritan
severity toward sex
and matrimony and
its tendency to
suppress bright color
and t
rue feelings.
The Scarlet
Letter
《红字》
：
Hester Prynne
---strong-willed, impetuous, a king of
compassionate, maternal figure;
Pearl
---innocent, perceptive;
Roger
Chillingworth---a man deficient in human warmth,
true evil in the story;
Arthur
Dimmesdale---intelligent and emotional.
[Symbolism in his works
Hawthorne is a master of symbolism,
which he took from the Puritan tradition
清教徒传统
and bequeathed to
American literature in a revivified form. In his
masterpiece, by using
Pearl as a
thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the
consequence the sin of adultery has
brought to the community and people
living in that community. With the scarlet A as
the
biggest symbol of all, which is
ambiguous, he proves himself to be one of the best
]
symbolists.
五、
Herman Melville
赫尔曼
·
梅尔维尔
The early
sailing experiences
were
rewarding.
代表作：
White
Jacket
《白外衣》
Billy Budd
《毕利
·
伯德》
,
Typee
《泰比》
,
Omoo
《欧穆》
,
Mardi
《玛地》
.
Moby Dick 1851
《白鲸》
---
百科全书式性质
/
海洋作品
/
动物史诗（
《熊》
福克纳、
人与海》
海明威、《白鲸》梅尔维尔）
[
Moby Dick represents the
sum total of
Melville’s
bleak view of the world
in
which he lived. It is at once
Godless
and purposeless
. Man in this
universe lives a meaningless and futile
life,
meaningless
because
futile.
Once he attempts to seek power
over it he is doomed. The idea that man can make
the world for himself is nothing but a
Transcendentalist folly. Moby Dick thus
reveals the basic pattern of 19th
century American life:
loneliness and
suicidal
individualism in a self-
styled democracy
.
(a
negative reflection upon Transcendentalism)
Symbolism in Moby
Dick
：
《老
.-
---It is
regarded as the first American prose epic. It is
not merely a whaling tale or sea
adventure,
considering that Melville is
a great symbolist. It turns out to be a symbolic
voyage of the mind in
quest of the
truth
寻找真理
and knowledge of
the universe, a spiritual exploration into
man’s
deep reality and
psychology.
---Different people on
board the ship are representations of different
ideas and different social
and ethnic
groups; facts become symbols and incidents acquire
universal meanings; the Pequod is
the
microcosm of human society and the voyage becomes
a search for truth. The white whale,
Moby Dick, symbolizes nature for
Melville, for it is complex, unfathomable
难以理解的
,malignant
恶
性的
, and beautiful as well.
]
六．
H. D. Thoreau
梭罗
and his work
Walden
瓦尔登湖
not
only fully demonstrates Emersonian ideas of self-
reliance but also develops
and tests
Thoreau’s own transcendental
phil
osophy.
七．
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
朗费罗
Features of
Longfellow’s poetic works
1)
lChief
romantic tendencies as humanitarian attitude, love
of nature and love of beauty.
2)
lThe first
American poet to write narrative poems.
3)
lConventional
style and subjects
4)
lGenerally simple ideas expressed
musically and powerfully.
5)
lSimplicity and detachment from the
deep problems of contemporary life
19
世纪美国最伟大的
浪漫主义诗人
之一。
传统派，励志型。
诗集：
《夜吟》
Voices of the Night
《歌谣及其他》
Ballads and Other
Poems
《伊凡杰琳》
Evangeline
《海依华沙之歌》
The Song of Hiawatha
诗歌：
《我射出一支箭······》
I Shot an Arrow...
A Psalm of Life
《生命颂
/
人生颂》
< br>---
第一首被完整地介绍到中国的美国诗歌
八、
Walt Whitman
沃尔特·惠特曼
美国著名诗人、人文主义者，他创造了诗歌的
自由体
（
Free Verse---without a fixed beat or
regular rhyme
scheme.
）
，
The
first edition of
Leaves of Grass
《草叶集》
was published in 1855.
In this giant work,
openness, freedom
, and above
all,
individualism
are all
that
concerned him.
Writing features of Whitman
---A singer for the ideals of equality,
democracy and human dignity.
---Songs
for himself, for the labour of common American
people, natural creation, the
independen
ce of the country, love and
friendship, and for the memorizing of President
Lincoln. ---Free verse,
.-
rhythmical unit, phonetic recurrence.
诗歌：
《我歌唱自我》
One's Self I Sing
《噢，船长！
我的船长！》
O Captain! My Captain!
九、
Emily Dickinso
n
（
19
世纪唯一出名的女作家）
---I Died for Beauty, because I could not
stop for Death.
美国女诗人，
狄金森一
生都没有离开过自己的家乡，
对她的诗歌风格产生直接影响的是爱默生的诗歌，
她的诗歌预示了
20
世纪诗歌的诞生。
宅女，想象力，诗歌（死亡、爱情、失败、无标点
）
Whitman:
society
Dickinson: inner life of the
individual
Most of her poems are
about death and immortality. Nature is to her both
benevolent and cruel.
Emily was an energetic and outgoing
woman while attending the Academy and Seminary.
Most of her poems are about life and
nature. They are short; many of them are based on
a single
image or symbol.
作品：《要描绘一片草原······》
To Make a
Prairie
《最美妙的胜利感觉》
Success Is
Counted Sweetest
《我是无名之辈》
I'm Nobody!
The Age of
Realism
[
The war
led many to question the assumptions shared by the
transcendentalists ---- natural
good
ness, the optimistic view of nature
and man, benevolent God. It taught men that life
was not
good, man was not and God was
not.
As a literary movement, the Age
of Realism came into existence after Romanticism
with the Civil
War It was a reaction
against
“the
lie”
of Romanticism and
sentimentalism, and paved the way to
Modernism. This literary interest in
the so-called
“reality”
of
life started a new period in the
American literary writing known as The
Age of Realism.
]
The three dominant figures of the
period:
William Dean Howells, Mark
Twain, Henry James
James
wrote mostly of the
upper reaches of
American society.
Howells
concerned
himself chiefly with middle
class life.
Twain dealt largely with
the lower strata of society.
Mark Twain and Howells
seemed to have paid more attention to
the
“life”
of the
Americans
, and
Henry James
had apparently
laid greater emphasis on the
“inner
world”
of man.
十、
Mark Twain
马克·吐温
.-
Writing:
humor
and local colorism
The
characteristics of local colorism:
---Twain preferred to have his own
region and people at the forefront of his stories.
This particular
concern about the local
character of a region came about as
“local
colorism”
a unique variation
of
American literary realism.
---Local Colorism or Regionalism first
appeared in the late 1860s and early seventies in
America.
Hamlin Garland defined local
colorism as having
“
such
quality of texture and background tha
t
it could not have been written in any other place
or by anyone else than a
native.
”
T
he
ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create
the illusion of an
indigenous
土产
的
little world with qualities that tell it apart
from the world outside.
---Local colorists concerned themselves
with presenting and interpreting the local
character of
their regions. They
tended to idealize and glorify, but they never
forgot to keep an eye on the
truthful
color of local life.
代表作：
Life on the
Mississippi
《密西西比河上》
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
《汤姆
·
索亚历险记》
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
《哈克贝里
·
费恩历险记》
---(Mark
Twain’s
most representative work)
[ The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
---The
novel is written in a language that is totally
different from the rhetorical language used by
Emerson, Poe, and Melville.
---His characters, confined to a
particular region and to a particular historical
moment, speak with
a strong accent,
which is true of his local colorism.
---The rich material of his boyhood
experience on the Mississippi became the endless
resources
for his fiction, and the
Mississippi valley and the West became his major
theme.
---His humor, a kind of
artistic style used to criticize the social
injustice and satirize the decayed
romanticism, is remarkable.
]
人物：
Huckleberry Finn
、
Jim
、
Tom
Sawyer
、
Widow Douglas and
Miss Watson
、
Pap The Duke and
Dauphin (
公爵和法国皇太子）
Henry James
亨利·詹姆斯
作品：
The Portrait of a Lady
《一个女士的画像》
Daisy Miller
《黛西·密勒》
The
international theme:
the meeting of
America and Europe, American innocence in contact
a
nd contrast with European decadence
and the moral and psychological complications
arising there
from.
Like
Hawthorne, James regarded evil as essentially of
inward cause and repeatedly emphasized
m
agnanimity and the beauty of goodness.
Psychological Realism
心理现实主义