山东农业大学美国文学对于文学大家欧文爱伦坡霍桑简介与评价

Washington Irving（father of American literature）1. He is the first belletrist(pure art writer) in American literature, writing for pleasure at a time when writing was practical and for useful purposes (Franklin).

2. He is the first American literary humorist.

3. He has written the first modern short stories.

4. He is the first to write history and biography as entertainment.

5. He introduced the nonfiction prose as a literary genre.

6. His use of the gothic looks forward to Poe.

Writing style

Gentility,urbanity,pleasantness

Enveloping stories in an atmosphere

Vivid and true character

Humor smiling while reading

Musical language

His famous writing

The Sketch Book《见闻札记》

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow《睡谷的传说》

The analysis of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

The story: It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a priggish schoolmaster from Connecticut, who compete with Abraham”Brom Bones” V an Brunt, a buff and tough man, for the hand of eighteen-old Katrina V an Tassel.

Ichabod Crane: shrewd, credulous, self-assertive, coward, commercial.

Theme: one of the great theme of American literature and American folklore is the clash between the city and the country, between civilization and the wilderness. Influence:

The book touched the American imagination and foreshadowed the coming of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, in whose hands the short story attained a degree of perfection as a literary tradition.

It also marked the beginning of American Romanticism.

Edgar Allan Poe: (内容很多自己挑着看)

Major Themes

1. Love -- usually of a mourning man for his deceased beloved.

2. Pride -- physical and intellectual.

3. Beauty -- of a young woman either dying or dead.

4. Death -- a source of horror.

Paradoxes in Poe

1. His life - basically insecure and highly emotional, but his writing is structured.

2. Poe was a romantic writer, but he emphasized rationality.

3. He presents realistic details in gothic settings.

4. There is a paradox in Poe's critical thinking - he believed in individual creativity but advocated classical norms - the ideal length of a poem, suggested Poe, is 100 lines.

Influence of Poe

1. Influenced writers of split personality.

2. Influenced literary criticism.

3. Influenced writers dealing with the disintegration of personality.

Poe's Four Types of Short Stories

1. Arabesque（奇特）- strange; use of the supernatural; symbolic fantasies of the human condition;

2. Grotesque（古怪）– funny, heightening of one aspect of a character

3. Ratiocinative （推理）- detective fiction.

4. Descriptive（描述）

Poe's Aesthetic Theory of Effect

Evaluation

father of modern short story

father of detective story

father of psychoanalytic criticism

1.He is the father of psychoanalytic criticism. In deed, Poe places the

subconscious condition of the mind under investigation and probes beneath the surface of normal existence. What interests him most is the deep abyss of the unconscious and subconscious mental activity of the people, the subterranean recesses秘密的深处of the mind at work.

2.He was the first author in American literature to make the neurotic神经病患

者the heroic figure, the protagonist, in his stories.

3.His theories for the short story and poetry are remarkable in their clarity even

if they lack intellectual detachment超然and catholicity普遍性宽容of taste.

4.His tale The Murders in the Rue Morgue, an ingenious独创性detective

story, became the ancestor of the genre.

5.As a short story writer, Poe was a fascinating man of imagination interested in

deduction推论and induction归纳. And half a dozen of his stories belong to （Ratiocinative推理）

6.His aesthetics and conscious craftsmanship, his attack on “the heresy of