-
American Literature
I. The Romantic Period
(from
the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the
Civil War)
American
Romantic
period
started
with
the
publication
of
Washington
Irving's
The Sketchbook
and ended
with Whitman's
Leaves of
Grass
. Being a period of the
great flowering of American literature,
it is also called
the American
Renaissance
.
In this period,
America fast burgeoned into a politically,
economically and culturally
independent
country. Democracy and equality became the ideals
of the
country. The
spread
of
industrialism,
sudden
influx
of
immigration,
and
the
westward
expansion
produced something
of an economic boom and a tremendous sense of
optimism and
hope among people. The
nation felt an urge to have its cv xown literary
expression, to
make
known
its
new
experience
that
other
nations
did
not
have.
American
Romanticism
just
answered
the
call.
American
Romanticism
is
derivative
and
different
from
European
counterpart
because
it
was
the
expression
of
real
new
experience and contained an alien
quality for the simple reason that the spirit of
the
place was radically new and alien:
the early puritan settlement, the confrontation
with
the
Indians,
the
frontiersman's
life,
and
the
wild
west.
Besides,
American
people's
ideals of
individualism and political equality and their
dream that America was to be a
new
Garden
of
Eden
for
man
were
distinctly
American.
These
ideals
produced
a
feeling of
strong
enough to
inspire the
romantic imagination
and channel it
into a different style of writing. So most of the
writings in this period
emphasize
the
imaginative
and
emotional
qualities
of
literature,
including
a
liking
for the
picturesque
, the
exotic
, the
sensuous
, the
sensational
, and the
s
upernatural
.
Major American Romantic Writers:
1. Washington Irving
华盛顿?欧文
(1783-1859) was one of
the first American
writers
to
earn
an
international
reputation,
and
regarded
as
the
Father
of
the
American
short stories
. His
The Sketch Book of
Geoffrey
Crayon
, Gent
见闻札记
contains the first modem
American short stories and the first great
American juvenile
literature,
which
includes
his
two
best
remembered
stories,
“Rip
Van
Winkle
and
Legend
of
Sleepy
Hollow.
In
the
Sketch
Book
,
Irving
introduces
the
familiar
essay to America,
and enriched his nation's culture with his
cosmopolitan reflection of
the themes
and modes of British and continental Romanticism.
The clarity, fluency,
grace and
satirical
humor of
Irving's
style have impressed and
influenced
most American
authors.
瑞普?凡?温克尔
is one of the two most famous short
stories
(the
other
is
Legend
of
Sleepy
Hollow
written
by
Irving.
Rip,
an
indolent,
good-natured
Dutch-American,
lives
with
his
shrewish
wife
in
a
village
on
the
1
Hudson during the
years
before the Revolution. He is
a friend
and helper to
all the
people
in the village. But he is immature, self-centered,
careless, anti-intellectual, and
averse
to
'all
kinds
of
profitable
labor.
Because
of
his
irresponsibility
to
his
own
family, he is always scolded and routed
out by his wife. Poor Rip is at last reduced to
despair.
In
a
final
attempt
to
from
the
labor
of
the
farm
and
clamor
of
his
life,
stranger dressed in the
ancient Dutch fashion. He helps him to carry a
keg, and with
him joins a party
silently engaged in a game of ninepins. After
drinking of the liquor
they furnish, he
falls into a sleep which lasts 20 years, during
which the Revolutionary
War takes
place. He awakes as an old man, returns to his
altered village, finds himself
a
stranger to all the villagers, and gets to know
that his wife has long been dead. But
he goes to live with his daughter, now
grown and the mother of a family, and soon
wins new friends by his generosity and
cheerfulness. However, Rip is pleased with his
new
life
chiefly
because
had
got
his
neck
out
of
the
yoke
of
matrimony.
According to
literary critics, the
main
themes
of the story include: 1) the
story of man
who
has
difficulties
facing
his
advancing
age;2)
the
contradictory
impulses
in
American
desire
for
leisure;
3)
the
theme
of
escape
from
one’s
responsibilities
and
even one's history; 4) the loss of
identity; 5) the nostalgia for the unrecoverable
past.
Each of these themes is woven
together throughout the tale.
2.
Ralph
Waldo
Emerson
拉尔夫
?
华尔多
?
爱默生
(1803-1882),
the
American
towering figure of
his era, was responsible for bringing
Transcendentalism
to New
England, and he was recognized
throughout his life as the leader of the movement.
He
was
influenced
by
the
aphoristic
genius
of
the
16th-century
French
essayist
Montaigne. His
first book is
Nature
论自然
(1836), which was the
declaration of the
Transcendental
Club.
His
Essays
(1841)
includes
his
best
writings
such
as
The
American
Scholar
论美国学者
,
Self-reliance
论自立
,
The Over-Soul
. His other
works
are
Essays:
Second
Series
(1844),
Representative
Men
(1849),
and
The
Conduct
of
Life
(1860).
For
Emerson,
individualism
is
idealistic.
He
would
have
us
trust
in
< br>providence,
universal spirit that is
the source of all unity and growth. Emerson
believed that if we
Nature
is one of Emerson's best-known and most
influential essays. Nature
is a
lyrical expression of the harmony
Emerson felt between himself and nature. The main
idea
of
the
essay
is
that
nature
inspires
spiritual
understanding
in
human
being.
Emerson expresses the following
Transcendentalist ideas in the essay: 1) Nature is
a
great teacher. 2) Nature is noble. 3)
Nature is a source of comfort. 4) Human beings
are
a
part
of
nature.
5)
The
individual's
perception
of
nature
depends
on
his
or
her
2
state
of
mind.
6)
By
contemplating
nature,
the
individual
can
transcend
to
a
higher
spiritual
plane.
In
this
excerpt,
the
author
accounts
that
the
most
enriching
form
of
solitude
is to be alone with nature, yet because nature is
always present, we tend to
take it for
granted. Children do not, and to understand nature
an adult must have the
spirit of a
child. Nature tells us that we are its creatures,
that we are not alone. It can
provide
perfect joy, a oneness with God, an understanding
of immortal beauty and the
interconnection of all things. However,
the ability to see these
truths lies
within the
viewer; an unhappy person
will see only unhappiness in nature.
3.
Nathaniel
Hawthorne
纳撒尼尔
?
霍桑
(1804-1864)
is
one
of
the
most
interesting,
yet
most
ambivalent
writers
in
the
American
literary
history.
He
is
not
only a moralist,
believing that evil was at the core of human life,
but also a master of
psychological
insight.
In
fact,
he
was
the
first
major
novelist
in
English
to
wed
morality to art, to combine high moral
seriousness with transcendent dedication to art.
His novels include his masterpiece
The Scarlet Letter
红字
(1850),
The
House of the
Seven
Gables
带有
7
个尖阁的房子
(1851),
The
Blithedale
Romance
福谷传奇
(1852)
and
The
Marble
Faun
玉石雕像
(1860).
His
books
of
short
stories
are
two
volumes
of
Twice-Told Tales
(1837
and 1842) and
Mosses from an Old
Manse
(1846).
The
themes
revealed
in
Hawthorne’s
fiction
include
the
consequences
of
pride,
selfishness, and secret guilty; the
conflict between lighthearted and somber attitudes
toward life; the impingement of past
(especially the Puritan past) upon the present;
the
futility of comprehensive social
reforms; the impossibility of eradicating sin from
the
human
heart;
alienation
and
solitude;
nature
and
natural
impulses;
and
unconscious
fantasy and
dream.
Hawthorne is significant for his
style. He wrote in the form of romance because
he thought romance as the predestined
form of American narrative. For him, romance,
unlike the novel,
was
not
tied to
conventional
reality.
Romance had the freedom
to
depart
from
novelistic
realism
and
allowed
him
to
treat
the
physical
passions
obliquely without violating the human
heart. Hawthorne felt that psychological truth
was more important than actual truth
and he often used atmosphere to help reach the
truth of the heart. In his fiction,
metaphor and similes abound, most of them
stirringly
fresh
and
effective.
He
wrote
stories
with
narrative
interest,
ease
in
transition,
coherence, and
complexity. One of the means he adopted is making
stories parable in
form and symbolic in
style.
The naive young
protagonist becomes an Everyman named Brown who
will be aged
in one night by an
adventure that makes everyman in this world a
fallen idol.
4. Walt Whitman
华尔特
?
惠特曼
(1819-1892) is a national figure in American
literary
history.
His
Leaves
of
Grass
草
叶
集
has
always
been
considered
a
3
monumental
work,
which
commands
great
attention
because
of
its
unique
poetic
embodiment of
American democratic ideals as written in the
founding documents of
both the
Revolutionary War in the United States and the
Civil War. The giant work has
nine
editions
and
the
first
edition
was
published
in
1855.
In
this
work,
openness,
freedom, and above all, individualism
are all that concerned him. Most of the poems
in
the
work
sing
of
the
and
the
self
as
well.
In
celebrating
the
self,
Whitman
gives
emphasis
to
the
physical
dimension
of
the
self
and
openly
and
joyously
celebrates
sexuality
and
sexual
love.
Pursuit
of
love
and
happiness
is
approved of repeatedly and
affectionately in his lines.
Whitman's
poetry is daring in its rejection of rhyme, meter
and traditional stanza
forms.
He
likes
to
use
verse,
that
is,
poetry
without
a
fixed
beat
or
regular
rhyme scheme. To give form to this
as
repetition
and
parallelism.
To
unify
his
longer
poems,
he
employed
stanzas
of
widely
varying
length,
in
which
an
idea
could
be
developed,
images
could
be
clustered, different things can be
catalogued, and a symbolic pattern could be woven.
More remarkable in Whitman's style is
his use of the poetic
of
of
Myself
is
one
of
the
poems
that
most
fully
capture
the
essence
of
Whitman.
It
is
his
celebration
of
individuality
and
of
his
oneness
with
the
world.
More
than
that,
it
is
a
celebration
of
life
itself.
In
the
poem
the
poet
is
at
once
an
individual and a universal embodiment
of all individuals. That's to say, the poem sets
forth
two
principal
beliefs:
the
theory
of
universality,
which
is
illustrated
by
length
catalogues
of
people
and
thing,
and
the
belief
in
the
singularity
and
equality
of
all
beings in value.
5. Herman
Melville
赫尔曼?麦尔维尔
(1819-1891)
is best-known as the author
of
his
mighty
book,
Moby-Dick
(1851),
which
is
one
of
the
world's
greatest
masterpieces.
His
writings
can
be
divided
into
two
groups,
each
with
something
in
common in the light of the thematic
concern and imaginative focus. His first period
was between 1846 and 1852 after he came
back from these a. His early works are his
best,
among
which
are
Typee
(1846),
Omoo
(1847),
Mardi
(1849),
and
Moby-Dick
,
which
are all sea adventure stories, and also
Redburn
(1849), and
White Jacket
(1850).
The other group includes
The
Confidence-Man
(1857) and
Billy Budd
(Posthumously
1924).
Moby-Dick
白鲸
is
regarded
as
the
first
American
prose
epic.
The
story
is
not
complicated, dealing with Ahab, a man
with
an
overwhelming obsession to
kill
the
whale
which has crippled him on board his ship Pequot in
the chase of the big whale.
Like
Hawthorne, Melville is
a master of
allegory and symbolism. So the objects
or
persons can represent
something else. The Pequod is the microcosm of
human society
4
and the whaling voyage turns out to be
a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the
truth
and
knowledge
of
the
universe,
a
spiritual
exploration
into
man's
deep
reality
and psychology. The
white whale, Moby Dick, symbolizes nature for
Melville, for it
is complex,
unfathomable, malignant, and beautiful as well.
For the character Ahab,
however,
the
whale
represents
only
evil.
Moby
Dick
is
like
a
wall,
hiding
some
unknown mysterious things behind. Ahab
wills the whole crew on the Pequod to join
him in the pursuit of the big whale so
as to pierce the wall, to root out the evil, but
only to be destroyed by evil, in this
case, by his own consuming desire, his madness.
For the author, as well as for reader
and
Ishmael, the narrator, Moby Dick is
still a
mystery,
an
ultimate
mystery
of
the
universe,
inscrutable
and
ambivalent,
and
its
white color may signify
death and corruption as well as purity, innocence,
and youth.
And the voyage of the mind
will forever remain a search, not a discovery, of
the truth.
6. Edgar Alan Poe
(1809-1849) is a famous fictional
writer, a poet as well as a
literary
critic. His major writings include
The
Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
,
Fall of the House of
Usher
Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque.
7. James Fenimore
Cooper
(1789-1851) is the first
important American novelist.
His
lasting fame rests on his frontier stories,
especially the five novels that comprise
the
Leatherstocking
Tales
(1823-1841).
In
their
order
of
events,
the
novels
are
The
Deerslayer
,
The
Last of the Mohicans
,
The
Pathfinder
,
The
Pioneers
, and
The
Prairie
.
II. The
Realistic Period (1865-1914)
The
American
society
after
the
Civil
War
provided
rich
soil
for
the
rise
and
development
of
Realism.
The
fifty
years
between
the
end
of
the
Civil
War
and
the
Outbreak
of
the
First
World
War
is
one
of
the
periods
in
the
American
history
characterized with
changes
, in relation to
every aspect of American life,
politically
,
economically, culturally and
religiously
. But the changes were not
all for the better.
The
rapid
development
of
industrialization
and
mechanization
soon
produced
extremes of wealth and poverty.
The concentration on power and wealth
gave birth
to
buccaneers,
tycoons
and
slums,
and
ghettos
as
well
.
For
most
people,
life
became a struggle for survival. People
became dubious about the human nature and
the
benevolence
of
God,
which
the
Transcendentalists
cared
most.
Gone
was
the
frontier
and the spirit of the frontiersman, which is the
spirit of freedom and human
connection,
and gone was place to escape for the
American Dream
. In place of
all
this is what Mark Twain referred to
as
The Gilded
Age
.
As a literary movement,
realism
was a reaction
against Romanticism or a move
away from
the bias towards romance and self-creating
fictions, and paved the way of
Modernism.
It
expressed:
the
concern
for
the
world
of
experience,
of
the
commonplace,
and
for
the
familiar
and
the
low.
Realistic
writers
emphasized
the
5
fidelistic
reflection
of
human
reality,
which
is
most
clearly
expressed
by
William
Dean
Howells in his
Criticism and Fiction
(1891). The three dominant
figures
of the
period
are
William
Dean
Howells,
Mark
twain,
and
Henry
James
.
While
Mark
Twain and
Howells
seemed to have paid more
attention to the
Henry
James
apparently
laid
a
greater
emphasis
on
the
world
of
man.
Though Twain and
Howells both shared the same concern in presenting
the
truth of
the American
society
, they had different emphasis.
Howells focused his discussion
on
the
rising
middle
class
and
the
way
they
lived,
while
Twain
showed
particular
concern
about
the
local
character
of
a
region
.
This
local
colorism
is
a
unique
variation of American literary realism.
The other local colorists are Sarah Orne Jewett,
Joseph Kirkland and Hamlin Garland.
The
impact
of
Darwin's evolutionary theory
on the American thought and the
influence of the 19th century
French literature
on the
American man of letters gave
rise
to
yet
another
school
of
realism
;
American
naturalism.
The
American
naturalists
accepted
the
more
negative
implications
of
this
theory
and
used
it
to
account for
the behavior of those characters in literary works
who were conceived
as
more
or
less
complex
combinations
of
inherited
attributes,
their
habits
conditioned
by
social
and
economic
forces
.
They
chose
their
subjects
from
the
lower rank of society, and portrayed
misery and poverty of the
demonstrably
victims
of
society
and
nature
.
One
of
the
most
familiar
themes
in
American naturalism is
the theme of
human
,
of
sexual
desire
.
Artistically
naturalistic
writings are usually unpolished in language,
lacking in academic skills and unwieldy
in structure.
Philosophically
the
naturalists
believe that the real and
true is always partially hidden from the eyes of
the individual,
or beyond his control.
It is the very shape of a system that determines
the basis of his
being. Devoid of
rationality and caught in a process in
which he is but a part, man
cannot fully understand, let alone
control, the world he lives in; hence he is left
with
no freedom of choice. In a word,
naturalism is evolved from realism when the
author's
tome in writing becomes less
serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and
more
pessimistic,
it
is
more
than
a
different
philosophical
approach
to
reality,
or
to
human
existence.
The
major
American
naturalist
writings
are
Frank
Norris's
Mc
Teague
(1899) and Theodore
Dreiser's
Sister Carrie
.
1. Mark Twain
(1835-1910),
pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is a great
literary giant of America and is
considered the true father of American literature.
As a
serious writer, Twain was actively
concerned with moral ideas in one way or another.
Love, humanity, fidelity, loyalty,
duty, courage, and hard work are high virtues in
his
moral code. In his writing, he
tries to reveal those who never betray their
nature can
achieve moral greatness. As
a complicated author, Twain in his early writing
is able to
6
laugh with lightness because he was
delighted with the fresh land and invigorated by
the pioneering spirit. However,
laughter and humor didn't last long. They were
slowly
replaced in his later work by
bitter sneer and satire
.
Consequently, Twain changed
from an
optimist to a
misanthrope
.
He was now doubtful of mankind and humanity.
Some
critics
link
this
change
with
the
tragic
events
of
his
later
life,
but
the
basic
reason is that the
older Twain
no longer takes
things at their face value; after many
years of traveling he encountered more
often than not
the dark side of social
life and
the wicked corners of human
nature.
Twain is known as a
local colorist
, who
preferred to
present social life
through
portraits
of the
local characters of his regions, including people
living in that area,
the
landscape,
and
other
peculiarities
like
customs,
dialects,
costumes
and
so
on.
Another
fact
that
made
him
unique
is
his
magic
power
with
language,
his
use
of
vernacular
.
His words are colloquial, concrete and direct in
effect, and his sentence
structures
are
simple,
and
even
ungrammatical,
which
is
typical
of
the
spoken
language. And Twain skillfully used the
colloquialism
to cast his
protagonists in their
everyday life.
Besides, Twain is a
master of
humor
and a great deal of his humor is
characterized
by
puns,
straight-faced
exaggeration,
repetition,
and
anti-climax.
His
humor is
not
only of witty remarks
mocking at
small things or
of farcical
elements
making
people laugh, but a kind of artistic style used to
criticize the social injustice
and
satirize the decayed romanticism.
Adventures
of
Huckleberry
Finn
(1884)
marks
the
climax
of
Twain's
literary
creativity.
Hemingway
once
described
the
novel
the
one
book
from
which
modem American literary
literature comes.
Being a boy's book
specially written
for the adults, the
book is
Twain’s most representative
work
, describing
a journey
down the Mississippi undertaken by two
fugitives, Huck and Jim
. Their episodic
set of encounter presents a sample of
the small-town world of America and a survey
of
the
social
world
from
the
bank
of
the
river
that
runs
through
the
heart
of
the
country.
This book is a typical example of the use of
colloquial language. The great
strength
of
the
book
comes
from
the
shape
given
to
it
by
the
course
of
the
raft's
journey down the
Mississippi as Huck and Jim seek their
different kinds of freedom
.
The
climax
arises
with
Huck's
inner
struggle
on
the
Mississippi,
when
Huck
is
polarized
by
the
two
opposing
forces
between
his
heart
and
his
head,
between
his
affection
for
Jim
and
the
laws
of
the
society
against
those
who
help
slaves
escape.
With
the
eventual
victory
of
his
moral
conscience
over
his
social
awareness,
Huck
grows. By portraying a white
boy with a sound heart but a deformed
conscience
who does things
from his nature, Twain is favoring the morality of
nature over that of
man.
The
theme of the novel is abou
t slavery and
freedom
. For Huck, the voyage on
7
the Mississippi is to run away from
evils, injustices and corruption of the
civilized
society
. For Jim,
it is to escape from slavery. The book can also be
seen as a journey
of Huck's moral
growth and a satire on sentimentality. In this
novel, Huck wants to
escape
from
this
sentimentality
as
eagerly
as
he
runs
away
from
his
cold-hearted
father. In Huck's eyes, sentimentality
is a bondage to freedom as slavery is: the former
restricts man's soul while the latter
bounds man's body.
The selection
from chapter 31, is one of the most
important places where Mark Twain highlights the
moral growth of Huckleberry Finn. He
grows in a way his moral conscience gets the
upper hand of his social conscience;
his heart wins over his head. Ironically, Huck
still
thinks
he
is
wrong
while
he
is
doing
the
right
thing.
Twain's
manipulation
of
the
language
here helps bring to life an uneducated boy who
grows up in the Mississippi
valley and
is brought up with falsehood and lies about the
white and the black.
The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876) is
regarded a classic book 'written for
boys about their particular horrors and
joys.
Celebrated
Jumping
Frog
of
Calaveras
County
is
a
frontier
tale,
which brought Twain
recognition from wider public
.
Innocence Abroad
is an account of American tourists in Europe,
which pokes
fun at the pretentious,
decadent and undemocratic Old World in a satirical
tone.
Some other works:
Roughing It, Life on the
Mississippi
,
The
Gilded Age
.
2.
Henry
James
(1843-1916) is the first American
writer to conceive his career
in
international
terms.
The
creative
life
of
Henry
James
can
be
divided
into
three
distinctive periods. In the first
period (1865-1882) he produced a number of novels,
among
which
the
most
important
are
The
American
(1877),
Daisy
Miller
(1878)
which
won
him
international
fame
and
which
reveals
James's
fascination
with
his
international theme, namely, American
innocence in face of European sophistication
and The Portrait of a Lady (1881), one
of the most greatest books James ever wrote.
The
second
period
of
his
career
extended
roughly
from
1882
to
1990,
in
which
he
experimented
with
various
subjects
and
forms:
first,
between
1886
and
1890,
three
novels
in
the
naturalistic mode:
The
Bostonians
(1886),
The
Princess
Casamassima
(1886),
The Tragic Muse
(1890); second, between 1895 and 1900,
he tuned to three
dominant
subjects:
troubled
writers
and
artists,
ghosts
and
apparitions,
doomed
or
threatened children and adolescents.
The Turn of the Screw
(1898)
and
The Beast in
the
Jungle
(1903) are good examples of the
period. Between 1890 and 1895, he wrote
seven plays and two of them were staged
but without success. In the third stage, he
returned
to
his
international
theme
and
produced
the
complex
and
profound
novels
such
as
The
Wings
of
the
Dove
(1902),
The
Ambassadors
(1903),
and
The
Golden
8
Bowl
(1904). Critics regard
them as his most mature and his best. They all
deal with
grand
theme
of
freedom
through
perception:
only
awareness
of
one's
own
character and others' provides the
wisdom to live well. The treatment of this theme
in
these books, however, is
characterized by richness of syntax,
characterization, point of
view,
symbolic romance, metaphoric texture, and
organizing rhythms
In
the
last
years
of
his
life
he
wrote
some
American
impressions
and
some
autobiographical
matter,
and
left
two
novels
The
Ivory
Tower
and
The
Sense
of
the
Past
unfinished.
James believes
that life develops from initial innocence through
experience to a
higher innocence. He
emphasizes the importance of self-reliance and
self-knowledge;
he cherished the value
of individual human integrity and sees the
development of each
individual's
potential as the greatest good. He is very
critical of European decadence
and
corruption,
he
also
exposes
American
simple-mindedness
and
obsession
with
business competition.
James was concerned with
of
the novel. He held that an author should avoid
artificial omniscience as much as
possible
and
that
it
is
better
to
make
characters
reveal
themselves
with
minimal
intervention of the
author. His particular method of telling a story
is the illumination
of the situation
and characters through a central consciousness, a
character he would
focus on. This way
of telling a story is to take the mind of a person
who is there and
knows only what is in
his mind, so he or she can only report what he or
she sees, how
he
or
she
feels.
Usually
the
character's
thoughts,
meditation
and
consciousness
are
presented
as
a
very
elaborate
internal
monologue,
so
the
reader
is
within
the
character's mind and has his or her
inner vision. Thus James, by emphasizing the inner
awareness
and
inward
movements
of
his
characters
in
face
of
outside
occurrences
rather than merely delineating their
environment in any detail, became probably the
first of the modem psychological
realist in the novel and anticipated in his works
the
modem stream-of-consciousness
technique so widely employed in the first decades
of
twentieth century.
James's
language
and
style
are
different
from
Twain'
colloquialism,
James's
language
is
exquisite
and
elaborate.
He
is
often
highly
refined
and
insightful.
He
possesses
a
large
scope
of
vocabulary
from
which
he
carefully
chooses
exact
and
precise
words,
and
cunningly
arranges
them.
In
a
word,
his
language
is
of
Such style does not make for
an easy reading.
3. Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886) is,
in
a sense,
a link between her
era
and the
literary
sensitivities of the turn of the century in
America. She wrote altogether 1,775
poems, of which only seven had appeared
during her lifetime. Dickinson's poems are
9
usually
based
on
her
own
experiences,
her
sorrows
and
joys.
But
within
her
little
lyrics she addresses
those issues that concern the whole human beings,
which include
religion, death,
immortality, love, and nature. In her poetry, we
can strongly sense the
doubts
about
the
existence
of
God
and
the
realization
of
after-life.
She
was
so
obsessed
with this religious uncertainty that about one
third of her poems are about
death
and
immortality.
Her
love
poems
are
about
the
longing
of
physical
love,
the
union of the bodies.
They are mostly written in an allegorical way,
with rich images
and symbols to imply
the sexual desire. As a nature poet, she tries to
reveal nature's
simplicity
and
profundity
on
one
hand,
and
tries
to
establish
a
connection
between
nature and man on the other, like the
transcendentalists.
Dickinson's poetry
is unique and unconventional in its own way. Her
poems have
no titles, hence always
quoted by their first lines.
In her poetry there is
a
particular
stress
pattern,
in
which
dashes
are
used
as
a
musical
device
to
create
cadence
and
capital letters as a
means of emphasis. Her poetic idiom is noted for
its laconic brevity,
directness
and
plainness.
She
frequently
uses
personae
to
render
the
tone
more
familiar to the reader,
and personification to vivify some abstract ideas.
Dickinson's
poetry, despite its
ostensible formal simplicity, is remarkable for
its variety, subtlety
and richness; and
her limited private world has never confined the
limitless power of
her creativity and
imagination.
I
Could
Not
Stop
for
Death---
reveals
that
death
comes
unexpectedly and brings us to eternity.
In this poem, the poet presents a persona who
recalls the time when she died. Death
was kind and gentle. And immortality was with
death.
Therefore
when
the
persona
was
riding
towards
death,
she
was
also
walking
towards
immortality.
This
is
what
Dickinson
considers
the
mystical
relationship
between
Death
and
immortality.
The
poem
is
a
devout
expression
of
faith
that
nevertheless
recognizes
the
mixed
feelings
human
beings
have
toward
death.
By
personifying death and immortality,
Dickinson makes her message strongly felt.
4.
Theodore
Dreiser
(1871-1945)
is
generally
acknowledged
as
one
of
great
America's
literary
naturalists
.
He
was
left-oriented
in
his
political
view.
He
had
been
very
sympathetic
with
the
poor,
unhappy
people.
He
was
sorry
for
the
social
misery
and
injustice
in
capitalist
society.
In
his
surmise
and
understanding,
communism might
be
a
cure for those social
evils.
His interest
in
communism was
just a continuation o his pursuit of
the answers for human destiny. In his novels,
he
tries to show the ideas
of naturalism that emphasizes heredity and
environment
as
important
deterministic
forces
shaping
individualized
characters
who
a
represented in special and detailed
circumstances
. So characters in his
books are
often subject to the control
of the natural forces---especially those of
environment and
heredity.
In
his
writing,
Dreiser
tries
to
condemn
American
dream
as
a
destructive
10
illusion
through
his
tragic
protagonists.
To
illustrate
the
folly
of
the
American
Dream,
he
undertakes
to
portray
the
unequipped
individual
who
adopts
the
recognized goals of American life and
struggles futilely to attain them
Dreiser's
style
has
been
a
controversial
aspect
of
his
work
from
the
beginning.
Critics tend to
think that his novels are formless at times and
awkwardly written, and
his
characterization
is
found
deficient
and
his
prose
pedestrian
and
dull,
and
his
diction is worn, tasteless, inexact and
clumsy, but his very energy proves to be more
than a compensation. His stories are
always solid and intensely interesting with their
simple
but
highly
moving
characters.
Dreiser
is
good
at
employing
the
journalistic
method of
reiteration to burn a central impression into the
reader's mind. His interest
in painting
is reflected in his taste for word-pictures, sharp
contrast, truth in color, and
movement
in outline. Here lies the power and permanence
that have made Dreiser one
of America's
foremost novelists.
Sister
Carrie
is
the
best-known
novel
written
by
Dreiser,
tracing
the
material
rise
of Carrie Meeber and the tragic decline of
G
. W. HursOedipaltwood. The central
theme of this novel is
the
effect of the misguided and misdirected American
dream
of success
. This novel
best embodies Dresser’s naturalistic belief that
while
men are
controlled and
conditioned by heredity, instinct and chance, a
few extraordinary
and
unsophisticated
human
beings
refuse
to
accept
their
fate
wordlessly
and
instead
strive,
unsuccessfully,
to
find
meaning
and
purpose
for
their
existence
.
Carrie,
as
one
of
such,
senses
that
she
is
merely
a
cipher
in
an
uncaring
world
yet
seeks
to grasp the mysteries of life and thereby
satisfies her desires for social status
and material comfort. So in this novel,
Dreiser best expressed his naturalistic pursuit
by
expounding
the
purposelessness
of
life
and
attacking
the
conventional
moral
standards. Carrie obtains her success
because she behaves according to the desires and
aspirations
in
her
heart.
Yet
Hursthood
loses
his
wealth,
social
position,
pride
and
eventually his life also because of
uncontrolled desires.
An
American Tragedy
is Dreiser's greatest
work, in which the author intended
to
tell us that it is the social pressure that makes
Clyde's downfall inevitable. Clyde's
tragedy is a tragedy that depends upon
the American social system which encouraged
people to pursue the
of
Desire
:
The
Financier
(1912),
The
Titan
(1914)
and
The
Stoic
(1947).
III. The Modern Period
(1914-)
In the early 20th century,
nothing had more important and long-lasting effect
on
America than the two great world
wars. America entered the era of big industry and
big technology, a mechanized age that
deprived individuals of their sense of identity.
11