美国文学英语专业期末考填空题整理
C h a p t e r O n e The Colonial Period and 17th Century Literature of Puritanism
1. John Smith: the first of American literature is written by him. A True relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia(1608),was a long report recording what he saw and heard in New England.
2. 还有一些人道主义作家则认为应与印第安人和平相处，甚至主张与印第安人通婚（Edward Taylor）
3. Such religious and cultural background of the Puritan writers was responsible for the two essential characteristics of the early American literature: their religious subject and imitation of English literary traditions. (elite in New England, 这就是长期美国文学长期没有自己文学的传统的原因之一)
4. Anne Bradstreet’s poems of religious experience and domestic intimacy were unique and genuine, delicate and charming, embodying her profound understanding of religion and humanity.
5. The Colonial Period and 17th Century Literature of Puritanism Historical narrative, poetry(history religions experience), sermons
6.Puritanism was central to colonial American literature, its impact could find expression in almost all respects concerning literature.
7.In keeping with the belief that literature should concern itself primarily with spiritual values, the
popular of Puritan literary forms, since its tight and logical structure, its precise and compact expression, and its avoidance of rhetorical decoration excellently illustrated Puritan aesthetic and moral theories.
8.As to the Puritan concept of beauty, they believed that beauty was, as Thomas Hooker defined, “that sweet correspondence and orderly usefulness the Lord first implanted in the order of things,” thus the Puritans equated beauty with utility and order.
9.Two colonies: 1607 1620
Chapter Two The Period of Enlightenment
1.The 18th century American history witnessed two great revolutions: one was American Revolution and the other was the Enlightenment. (rationalistic spirit/ rationalism, Age of Reason)
2.A major feature of American literature in the 18th century is its “utilitarian tendency”.
3.浪漫主义前驱：Philip Freneau “poems of Romantic fancy” such as The Wild Honey Suckle
4. The prose of the great philosopher-statesman makes up a prominent part of 18th century American literature. It includes two parts. The first is political prose and the second is the prose in other meanings.
3. John Adam , published in Boston Daily 4 anonymous essays. Superficially speaking, his essays were to criticize the Stamp Acts and the other Acts imposed on the northern American.
4. Thomas Pain: Common Sense is the major literary creation to drive the independence of the northern America.
四个原因：the Stamp Acts; no longer the mother; separated by Atlantic ocean; the size of territory.
5.John de Crevecoeur His masterpiece is “Letters from an American Farmer”(1782)
American culture: mother land; experience; new continent
His concept of individualism is quite similar to that of Franklin’s, but his response of confusion to the independence war is quite different from Franklin’s optimism.
6.Benjamin Franklin is the spokes man of Enlightenment movement
The individualism centered on making a fortune illustrated in Autobiography, and the individualism based on Transcendentalism advocated by Emerson and David Thoreau form the material and spiritual basis for the deep-rooted individualism in American history.
Individualism: material aspect (Benjamin Franklin)
Spiritual aspect (Ralph Waldo Emerson and David Thoreau)
7.Phillis Wheatley
She is the first female African American poet. Wheatley ‘s poetry was rediscovered in the 1830s by the new England abolitionists, but it is no exaggeration to say that she has never been better understood than at the present. Her recent critics have not only corrected a number of biographical errors but, more important, have provided a context which her work can be best read and her life understood. This reconsideration shows Wheatley to be a bold and canny spokesperson for her faith and her politics; she early on join the cause of American independence and the abolition of slavery, anticipating that when American Negroes first heard the “sons of liberty” cry for freedom they were chocked by indifference to their own “abject slavery and utter wretchedness.” It doesn’t take a philosopher to see that the exercise of slavery cannot be reconciled with a “principle” that God has implanted in every human breast, “Love of Freedom”. She was correct in reminding him that there could be no justice anywhere if people in authority were deaf to the history of human sorrow.
With the publication of Wheatley’s Poems, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has argued, “Wheatley launched two traditions at once ----- the black American literary tradition and the black woman’s literary tradition, which is unique in the history of literature.”
Race; class; gender
8.The Great Awakening was a in American religious history.
Chapter Three New England Transcendentalism and The Romantic Age
1.The argument between Hamilton and Jefferson led to the formation of two parties in America, one was Federalist Party and the other was Democratic Republican (注意).
2.Expansion : purchasing; annexation; war
3.Philip Freneau is the father of American rationalism literary, a transitional character between neoclassicism and romanticism.
4. Romanticism such a flourishing literature also resulted from the power, imagination, and opportunity quickened by democracy, nationalism, and the rapid growth of economy.
5. The works of Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant made American literature works advance shoulder to shoulder with European literature. The genuine independence of American literature was achieved by the contributions of those men of letter as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.
6. Washington Irving The Sketch Book《札记集》, a collection of essays, sketches, and stories, including the immortal “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”, appeared serially in the years 1819 to 1820, securely established Irving’s reputation at home and abroad, and designated the beginning of American romanticism.
Escapism; revolution
The nature plays an important role in the novel. She is not only the shelter but also the parameter of the changing world.
7.William Cullen Bryant
Long famous as the first American lyric poet of distinction, William Cullen Bryant glorified the morning of the American national literature. (the beginning of romanticism)
In 1811, he had finished the first draft of his best known poem “Thanaopsis”, whose publication in 1817 brought him not only his first success but also general attention to his extraordinary genius. His first collection Poems appeared in Boston in 1821, which included “To a Waterfowl”《致水鸟》, “Thanatopsis”《死亡随想曲》and “The Yellow Violet”《黄色的堇香花》established his position in the history of American literature.
Nature was the chief theme of Bryant’s poetry, and besides, religion, and concern for humanitarian reforms and national morality were persistent themes. Nature is the symbol of God.
8.So we can call the romanticism before the emergence of Transcendentalism as the pre-romanticism, and the romanticism after Transcendentalism as
post-romanticism.
9.Edgar Allan Poe
As a creative writer and critic, he emphasizes the significance of the art that appeals simultaneously to reason and emotion, and he holds that when the work of art is produced it is no longer a fragment of its creator’s life, nor an adjunct
（附件，附属于）to some didactic purpose, but an object of art created in the cause of beauty.
浪漫主义代表；现实主义先驱
10.Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spokesman of Transcendentalism
Name-sake Ralph Waldo Ellison (黑人Invisible Man)
Not Me Nature virtue intellect
The relationship of nature, man and God forms the basis of Emerson’s concept of “Oversoul”.
His idea is further expressed in “American Scholar” and “The Poet”. Emerson defined the scholars as “Man Thinking” instead of “Thinker”.
11. Nathaniel Hawthorne
The central subject of Hawthorne’s major works was the human soul. Hawthorne probed and pioneered the “romantic legend tradition”. In The House of the Seven Gables, he distinguished romantic legend from novel and confirmed that the former could offer the author the creative freedom in theme and form. Romantic legend did give Hawthorne the freedom to shake off the chain of the contemporary fashion in novel creation, and created a world of “As If”. In this world, reality and imagination reflected mutually and defined one another. With symbolism, the inner conflict of human nature and the individual inner psychology could be illustrated. In the process of Hawthorne’s creation,
we can find that he progressively retreated from the reality and receded into his imagined or symbolized world.
12. In American poetry of the 19th century, there were two developing trends. One was initiated by Bryant, and developed to its consummation in the hands of such poets as Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowel etc.. The poems in this category also depicted the familiar romantic subject matter such as the nature and the mediocre things. But generally speaking, what this kind of poems inherited was more than what they innovated.
The second category was represented by Emerson and Walt Whitman. The poems in this category were deeply influenced by Transcendentalism and brought new factors to American poetry in terms of language style, form, and content. They, to some degree, set about a new development for American poetry.
13.Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
A Psalm of Life 第一首翻成中文的诗歌
14.Walt Whitman
一是free verse, 二是constant change in content, 三是Heterosexuality, 都表现了民主。
Chapter Four The Age of Realism
1.Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is Twain’s best book and the connection and continuation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Many critics see The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn as the great novel of American democracy at least for Huck’s release of the old black slave Jim. The novel has also been called “the school of many late western writers.” One of these, Sherwood Anderson used it as a model for his own Winesburg, Ohio (1919). Ernest Hemingway, whose won style is based on Twain’s, once said, “All modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn.”
Chapter Five American Naturalism
Many American writers adopted this pessimistic form of realism, this so-called “naturalism” view of man.
naturalism, a new and harsher realism.
Chapter Six American Modernism
1.A number of writers who achieved eminence after 1914 ---- Gertrude Stein(命名the last generation), Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson ---- had begun to publish before the beginning of World War One.
2.Sherwood Anderson：Winesburg，Ohio
3. Sigmund Freud: the interpretation of dreams
4. Marcel Proust Remembrance of Things of Past 意识流代表作
5. The poets did this with politics ranging form the libertarian conservatism of Robinson Jeffers and the fascism of Ezra Pound to the radicalism of Langston Hughes.
6. Hemingway identified the rapid change in women’s status after World War One and the general blurring of sex roles that accompanied the new sexual freedom as aspects of modernity that men were simultaneously attracted to and found hard to deal with.