美国文学简史笔记(常耀信)
美国文学史及选读复习笔记（1-2册）
美国文学史及选读复习笔记（1-2册）History And Anthology of American Literature (V olumeⅠⅡ)美国文学史及选读1、2PartⅠThe Literature of Colonial America殖民主义时期的文学1. 17世纪早期English and European explorers开始登陆美洲。
在他们之前100多年Caribbean Islands, Mexico and other Parts of South America已被the Spanish占领。
2. 17th早期English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts(弗吉尼亚和马萨诸塞)开始了美国历史3. 美国最早殖民者(earliest settlers)included Dutch ,Swedes ,Germans ,French ,Spaniards ,Italians and Portuguese (荷兰人，瑞典人，德国人，法国人，西班牙人，意大利人及葡萄牙人等)。
4. 美国早期文学主要为the narratives and journals of these settlements采用in diaries and in journals(日记和日志)，他们写关于the land with dense forests and deep-blue lakes and rich soil.5. 第一批美国永久居民：the first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown,Virginia in 1607(北美弗吉尼亚詹姆斯顿)。
6. 船长约翰?史密斯Captain John Smith他的作品(reports of exploration)17th 早期出版，被认为是美国第一部真正意义上的文学作品in the early 1600s,have been described as the first distinctly American literature written in English.他讲述了filled with themes, myths, images, scenes, character and events,吸引了朝圣者和清教徒前往lure the Pilgrims and the Puritans.7. 美国第一位作家：1608年Captain John Smith写了封信《自殖民地第一次在弗吉尼亚垦荒以来发生的各种事件的真实介绍》“A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Colony”.8. 他的第二本书1612年《弗吉尼亚地图，附：一个乡村的描述》“A Map of Virginia: with a Description of the Country”.9. 他一共出版了八本书，其中有关于新英格兰的历史及描述。
美国文学介绍(殖民主义时期)
Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607
❖ Many of the people who settled in the New World came
to escape religious persecution.
Two Important New England Settlements
1948: T. S. Eliot 艾略特(USA/UK)
❖ 1980: Czeslaw Milosz
米沃什
(Poland/USA)
❖ 1987: Joseph Brodsky
布罗德斯基
(USSR/USA)
❖ Basic common qualities of American Writers: Independent，独立精神 Individualistic，个性意识 Critical，批判精神 Innovative，革新意识 Humorous，幽默风格
How to use the textbook？
❖ 1. the authors ❖ 2. the works ❖ 3. the new words ❖ 4. the related questions
The relationship between English & American Literatures?
❖ Within such a short period, American literature
swiftly developed well matured began to receive international recognition has exercised an impactful effect upon world
2022年中山大学英语语言文学考研真题和答案
2022年中山大学英语语言文学考研真题和答案2022年中山大学外国语学院《英语语言文学》考研全套内容简介•中山大学外国语学院《833英语语言文学》历年考研真题汇总（含部分答案）•全国名校英美文学考研真题详解说明：本部分收录了本科目近年考研真题，提供了答案及详解，并对常考知识点进行了归纳整理。
此外提供了相关院校考研真题，以供参考。
2．教材教辅•刘炳善《英国文学简史》（第3版）笔记和考研真题详解•刘炳善《英国文学简史》（第3版）配套题库【考研真题精选＋章节题库】•刘炳善《英国文学简史》（第3版）网授精讲班展开视频列表•胡壮麟《语言学教程》（第5版）笔记和考研真题详解•胡壮麟《语言学教程》（第5版）配套题库【考研真题精选＋章节题库】•常耀信《美国文学简史》（第3版）笔记和考研真题详解•常耀信《美国文学简史》（第3版）配套题库【考研真题精选＋章节题库】•常耀信《美国文学简史》（第3版）网授精讲班展开视频列表说明：以上为本科目参考教材配套的辅导资料。
•试看部分内容第一部分考研真题精选一、填空题1. Ch o m s ky p ro po se s th at th e co u r se o f l an gu age a cquisition is determined by a(n) _____language faculty.（中山大学2018研）【答案】innate查看答案【解析】乔姆斯基认为语言习得的过程是由人的内在语言机制决定的。
2. _____ refers to the role language plays in communicati o n(e.g. to e x pre ss i de as, at ti tu de s) o r i n parti cu l a r social situations (e.g. Religious, legal).（北二外2016研）【答案】Fun ctio n查看答案【解析】本题考查语言学中对“语言的功能”的定义。
美国文学史1.Colonial American Lite
3.its Influence on Am literature 1)its optimism has exerted a great influence on American literature 2)Puritan’s metaphorical mode of perception changed gradually into a literary symbolism
Introduction Am literature is one of the youngest national literature in the world. It became a colony of Britain in the early 17th century. And the American Independence War stretched from 1776 to 1783. The short history can be divided into several stages: 1.the colonial period It stretched roughly from the settlement of Am in the early 17th C through the end of the 18th. (The first permanent settlement in America was established by English in 1607 in Virginia. Following this one,anothor 3 colonies was set up in Am,including the one by the Puritans---The Massachusetts Bay Colony.)
常耀信美国文学讲义PPT课件
American poetry experimenting
The new age demanded proper literary
expression. Between 1912 and 1922 there came a great poetry boom in which about 1000 poets published over 1000 volumes of poetry. Indeed, to express the modern spirit, the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. Affected by the postwar disillusionment and loss of faith， the poets employ meaningless destruction of young lives in the war and the bankruptcy of the rotten civilization as themes. America has become “spiritual wasteland”.
ChapterFive
The Modern Period
Section 1 The 1920s Introduction The 1920s is a flowering period of American literature. It is considered “the second renaissance” of American literature. The nicknames for this period: (1) Roaring 20s – comfort (2) Dollar Decade – rich (3) Jazz Age – Jazz music
北京第二外国语学院外国语言学及应用语言学考研参考书笔记
叶蜚声、徐通锵：《语言学纲要》，北京：北京大学出版社，1997 年版。
袁行霈主编：《中国文学史》，北京：高等教育出版社，2005 年版。 童庆炳主编：《文学概论》，北京：高等教育出版社，1998 年版。 黄伯荣：《现代汉语》，北京：高等教育出版社，1991 年版。 郭锡良：《古代汉语》北京：商务印书馆，2004 年版。
复试参考书：
更多资料下载：
无指定参考书，但要关注时事（中英文）。
才思教育考研考博全心全意
注：该专业统考科目不含第二外语，但复试过程中将有第二外语口语和听力测试，考试形式 为对话问答。我校二外语测试的科目为二外日语、二外法语、二外德语、二外俄语和二外西 班牙语，考生可任选一门参加考试，入学后考生按照选定的二外语科目参加二外语学习。
【翻译】（考试题型：韩译中，中译韩）
【韩国文学】(考试题型：选择题，简答题，分析题 )
【韩国文化】( 考试题型：填空题，选择题，简答题, 分析题 )
1．《韩中翻译教程》、《中韩翻译教程》，张敏 等编著，北京大学出版社，
2005 年。
2.《韩国现代文学作品选》（韩文），尹允镇 等编著，上海交通大学出版
818 综合考试（阿）：
1. 《阿拉伯语与阿拉伯文化》周烈，外语教学与研究出版社，1998 年。
2. 《阿拉伯通史》纳忠，商务印书馆，1997 年。
3. 《阿拉伯伊斯兰文化史纲》，孙承熙，昆仑出版社，2001 年。
4. 《阿拉伯文学通史》，仲跻昆，译林出版社，2010 年。
《阿拉伯文学选集》齐明敏、薛庆国、张洪仪、陈冬云，外语教学与研究出版社，2004 年。
2021南京大学英语语言文学考研参考书真题经验
南京大学——英语语言文学下面给大家分享一下南京大学英语语言文学专业考研初试经验分享，希望大家都能考到理想的成绩。
本人英语专业应届生，一战。
写这个贴一方面是自己复习的时候有时会感到有一些迷茫，觉得特别无助，希望我的分享能在考研党们迷茫的时候给大家的复习带来一些小小的帮助~ 还有一方面是用我的复习经历激励一下大家：我的复习时间推进看起来惨不忍睹，一切都没有按照计划来，到了还剩两个月的时候，我觉得压力很大什么都没看，觉得没有戏，准备好要二战了可是又很矛盾，不想二战，但直到最后我都没有自暴自弃，而是抓住每分每秒想尽量让自己爆发小宇宙创造奇迹，事实证明这是有回报的，请小伙伴们无论多痛苦都要坚持到最后！千万不要破罐子破摔想着再战算了，一战可以过就不要二战，这次可以过就不要把希望寄托在下一次！下面是我惨不忍睹的时间推进（这是我个人整体的复习推进，可以选择跳过直接看下面各科目的复习经验。
这个放出来是想告诉大家就算到了最后什么也没看并不代表自己就应该自暴自弃，请抱着希望坚持到最后，坚持不下去的时候就来看这个喝鸡汤吧）：2月：决定学校、考研方向。
看经验贴，记下要看的书目。
心中并没有大体的复习规划。
3月-6月：联系上一届的前辈，又确定了一些需要的书目。
由于该学期我在上美国文学的课程（教科书不同），就根据学校的进度缓慢地带着看美国文学选读（十分龟速，三个月一半都没看完）。
这一学期除了自身课业以外，我一直忙着院里戏剧大赛的排练，又一时兴起在网上参加了一个翻译社每月都保证千字以上的翻译，另外我一直在做日剧的校对，所以给考研复习的时间可谓很少。
但我一直在安慰自己，我做的这些其实也并非与考试复习毫无关联。
但还是感受到了接下来复习时间的紧迫，我决定暑假一定要把两本选读过完。
7月：按照计划，一边看常耀信的美国文学简史，一边看完了第一遍美国文学选读。
并且隔几天就带着看一点文学导论的内容。
（之前说了由于课内在上美国文学，所以就先带着看美国文学了，正常还是先看英国文学比较好） 8月-10月：我拍拖了（我心想考研可以二战，爱情飞走就再抓不住了) 请把这个当做反面教材）。
美国文学简史American Literature Poetry
American Literature: PoetryINTRODUCTIONAmerican Literature: Poetry, verse in English that originates from the territory now known as the United States. American poetry differs from British or English poetry chiefly because America’s culturally diver se traditions exerted pressure on the English language, altering its tones, diction, forms, and rhythms until something identifiable as American English emerged. American poetry is verse written in this form of English.The term American poetry is in some ways a contradiction. America represents a break with tradition and the invention of a new culture separate from the European past. Poetry, on the other hand, represents tradition itself, a long history of expression carried to America from a European past. American poetry thus embodies a clearly identifiable tension between tradition and innovation, past and future, and old forms and new forms. American poetry remains a hybrid, a literature that tries to separate itself from the tradition of English literature even as it adds to and alters that tradition.American poetry could be defined differently, however, especially if it is not limited to poetry in English. Without that qualifying term, American poetry has its origins in the rich oral traditions of Native American cultures. Each of these cultures developed complex symbolic tales of the origins and history of its people, akin to epic poems in the European tradition. These tales were performed as part of rituals and passed on through memorization from one generation to the next. Some of them have been translated into English. Yet these works tend to vanish from most histories of American poetry because they were part of ongoing performances based in spoken rather than written language. Moreover, their rhythms and sounds are bound to the native languages in which they evolved.Other cultures have contributed to the rich heritage of American poetry. Spanish-language poetry has been produced in America from the time of the earliest Spanish explorers to current Hispanic and Chicano and Chicana poetry. American poetry traditions also have thrived in many other languages, from Chinese to Yiddish, as the result of centuries of immigration to the United States.But most people mean by American poetry those rhythmic, memorable, and significant verse forms composed in English in the United States or in lands that became the United States. This overview of more than 300 years of American poetry tracks the creation of a national literature identifiably different from that of any other nation. In the 1600s colonial poets responded to the challenges of their new world and expressed the hopes and fears of Europeans who settled there. In the years following the Declaration of Independence (1776) American poets created a patriotic poetry as a defining literature for the new nation. A powerful new kind of poetry flowered in the mid- and late 19th century among the first poets to be born and raised as actual citizens of the United States. American modernist poetry emerged in the first half of the 20th century, as many writers sought to subdue nationalist impulses in their poetry and define themselves as part of an international advance in the arts. Finally, in the second half of the 20th century a multiplicity of diverse voices redefined American poetry. For information on American prose or drama, see American Literature: Prose; American Literature: Drama.I I BEGINNINGS: 1600S THROUGH THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION(1775-1783)From the beginning until well into the 19th century, widespread agreement existed that American poetry would be judged by British standards, and that poetry written in America was simply British poetry composed on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Yet in responding to British styles, American poetry took inspiration from the new physical environment and the evolving culture of the colonies. In the process it recorded a subtle shift from poets who were dependent imitators to poets who spoke for and in the language of the new nation.A New England PuritanPoetryPuritans who had settled in New England were the first poets of the American colonies. Most Puritan poets saw the purpose of poetry as careful Christian examination of their lives; and private poems, like Puritan diaries, served as a forum where the self could be measured daily against devout expectations. Puritan leaders deemed poetry a safe and inspiriting genre, since they considered the Bible itself to be God’s poetry. Thus poetry became the literary form that allowed devout believers to express, with God’s help, divine lessons. Other genres, such as drama and fiction, were considered dangerous, capable of generating lies and leading to idle entertainment instead of moral uplift.Puritan poets had grown up in England during a period when Christian epic poetry—culminating in Paradise Lost (1667) by John Milton—was considered the highest literary accomplishment. When they came to America they maintained their cultural allegiances to Britain. Anne Bradstreet looked to British poets Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser; Edward Taylor looked to poets George Herbert and John Donne.Bradstreet was the first poet in America to publish a volume of poetry. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was published in England in 1650. Bradstreet had lived in England until 1630, when at the age of 18 she arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where she spent the rest of her life. Although Bradstreet wrote many poems on familiar British themes and produced skilled imitations of British forms, her most remarkable works responded directly to her experiences in colonial New England. They reveal her attraction to her new world, even as the discomforts of life in the wilderness sickened her. Her poetry contains a muted declaration of independence from the past and a challenge to authority.Although Bradstreet’s verses on the burning of her house in 1666 and poems on the death of three grandchildren end by reaffirming the God-fearing Puritan belief system, along the way they also question the harsh Puritan God. Further, Brads treet’s work records early stirrings of female resistance to a social and religious system in which women are subservient to men. In “The Prologue” (1650), Bradstreet writes, “I am obnoxious to each carping tongue / Who says my hand a needle better fits, / [than] A poet’s pen.…” Bradstreet’s instincts were to love this world more than the promised next world of Puritan theology, and her struggle to overcome her love for the world of nature energizes her poetry.Taylor, a poet of great technical skill, wrote powerful meditative poems in which he tested himself morally and sought to identify and root out sinful tendencies. In “God's Determinations Touching His Elect” (written 1680?), one of Taylor’s most important works, he celebrates God's power in the triump h of good over evil in the human soul. All of Taylor’s poetry and much of Bradstreet’s served generally personal ends, and their audience often consisted of themselves andtheir family and closest friends. This tradition of private poetry, kept in manuscript and circulated among a small and intimate circle, continued throughout the colonial period, and numerous poets of the 17th and 18th centuries remained unknown to the general public until long after their deaths. For them, poetry was a kind of heightened letter writing that reaffirmed the ties of family and friends. Taylor’s poems remained unpublished until 1939, when The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor appeared. Many of Bradstreet’s most personal poems also remained unpublished during her lifetime.Public poetry for the Puritans was more didactic or instructive in nature and often involved the transformation into verse of important biblical lessons that guided Puritan belief. Poet and minister Michael Wigglesworth wrote theological verse in ballad meter, such as The Day of Doom (1662), which turned the Book of Revelation into an easily memorized sing-song epic. Puritan poetry also included elaborate elegies,or poems honoring a person who had recently died. Puritans used these poems to explore the nature of the self, reading the character of the dead person as a text and seeing the life as a collection of hidden meanings.B SouthernSatireColonial poets of the 18th century still looked to British poets of their time, such as Alexander Pope and Ambrose Philips. Both were masters of pastoral verse—poetry that celebrated an idealized English countryside and rural life—and of satirical verse. Initially, this satiric tone was more prevalent in the southern colonies than in New England.Two poets from the Maryland Colony, Ebenezer Cook and Richard Lewis, wrote accomplished satirical poems based on British pastoral models. But their poems cleverly undermine those models by poking fun at the British. Cook’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1708) is a long narrative poem written in rhyming couplets that mocks Americans as a backward people but aims its satire most effectively at the poem’s narrator, who is a British snob. Americans may be laughable, Cook suggests, but they are not as ridiculous as the British with their ignorance and prejudice about Americans.C Revolutionary Era PatrioticPoetryA penchant for satire continued in the American Revolutionary era, when American poetry was centered on Connecticut and a group of poets known as the Connecticut Wits (or Hartford Wits). This group, most of whose members were associated with Yale University, included David Humphreys, John Trumbull, and Joel Barlow. Along with other writers they produced The Anarchiad (1786-1787), a mock epic poem warning against the chaos that would ensue if a strong central government, as advocated by the Federalists, was not implemented in the United States. American poets used the British literary model of the mock epic as a tool to satirize and criticize British culture. Trumbull’s mock epic M’Finga l (1775-1782) lampooned the British Loyalists during the Revolution.Revolutionary-era poets composed more than satire, however. They felt an urgency to produce a serious—even monumental—national poetry that would celebrate the country’s new democratic ideals. Epic poems, they believed, would confer importance and significance on the new nation’s culture. Educated in the classics, these poets were also lawyers, ministers, and busy citizens of the new republic. They did not bother with the question whether a new nation required new forms of poetry, but were content to use traditional forms to write about new subjects in orderto create the first truly American poetry. Whereas traditional epics celebrated past accomplishments of a civilization, American epics by necessity celebrated the future. Examples of such epics include Barlow’s The Vision of Columbus(1787), later revised as The Columbiad (1807); Greenfield Hill (1794) by clergyman Timothy Dwight; and The Rising Glory of America (1772) by Philip Freneau. All offered the prospect of America as the future culmination of civilization.Freneau, the most accomplished patriot poet, was not associated with Connecticut. He was born in New York City and later lived in a variety of places. His range of experience and clarity of expression made him a very popular poet, widely regarded as the first poet who spoke for the entire country. Much of his poetry focused on America’s future greatness, but he also wrote on other subjects, including the beauties of the natural w orld. Such lyric poems as “The Wild Honey Suckle” (1786) and “On a Honey Bee” (1809), can be seen as the first expressions in American poetry of a deep spiritual engagement with nature.D Early BlackVoicesSlavery was the great contradiction in the new nation that had affirmed in its Declaration of Independence a basic belief that “all men are created equal” and have “inalienable” rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Many of the country’s early leaders believed that African slaves were intellectually inferior to whites. Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave, challenged those racist assumptions early on. Brought to America as a young girl, Wheatley was educated by her masters in English and Latin. She became an accomplished poet, and her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral(1773) was published in England. Like the white patriot poets, Wheatley wrote in 18th-century literary forms. But her highly structured and elegant poetry nonetheless expressed her frustration at enslavement and desire to reach a heaven where her color and social position would no longer keep her from singing in her full glory.Wheatley’s poetry, along with that of other slaves, begins a powerful African American tradition in American poetry. In 1746 Lucy Terry, a slave in Massachusetts who was also educated by her owner, wrote the first poem to be published by a black American: 'Bar's Fight.' The poem, which was not published until 1855, describes the victims and survivors of a Native American raid against settler s. It was followed by Jupiter Hammon’s biblically inspired, hymnlike verse, “An Evening Thought; Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries” (1761).Born at the time of the founding of the nation, African American poetry retained its concern with the burning issues of the American Revolution, including liberty, independence, equality, and identity. It also expressed African American experiences of divided loyalties. Just as white Americans experienced divided loyalties in the republic’s early years—unsure whether their identity derived from the new country or from their European past—so too did African Americans, who looked always to their African past and to their problematic American present.I IITHE 19TH CENTURYThe 19th century began with high hopes for poetic accomplishment. The first comprehensive anthologies of American poetry appeared in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. In the first half of the century poets sought to entertain, to inform, and to put into memorable language America’s history, myths, manners, and topography, but they did not seek to forge a radical new poetic tradition. Their poetry built upon tradition, and they met the first great goal of American poetry:that it be able to compete in quality, intelligence, and breadth with British poetry. But just as they achieved this goal, poetic aspirations began to change. By the mid-19th century the new goal for American poetry was to create something very different from British poetry. Innovative poets, particularly Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, led the way.A The FiresidePoetsWilliam Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and John Greenleaf Whittier constituted a group sometimes called the Fireside Poets. They earned this nickname because they frequently used the hearth as an image of comfort and unity, a place where families gathered to learn and tell stories. These tremendously popular poets also were widely read around the hearthsides of 19th-century American families. The consensus of American critics was that the Fireside Poets first put American poetry on an equal footing with British poetry.Bryant gained public recognition first and is best remembered for “Thanatopsis,” published in 1821 but written when he was a teenager. Still widely anthologized, this poem offers a democratic reconciliation with death as the great equalizer and a recognition that the “still voice” of God is embodied in all processes of nature. During a busy life as a lawyer and editor of the New York Evening Post, Bryant wrote accomplished, elegant, and romantic descriptions of a nature suffused with spirit.Longfellow was the best known of the Fireside Poets, and it was with him that American poetry began its emergence from the shadow of its British parentage. His poetic narratives helped create a national historical myth, transforming colorful aspects of the American past into memorable romance. They include Evangeline (1847), which concerns lovers who are separated during the French and Indian War (1754-1763), and The Song of Hiawatha (1855), which derives its themes from Native American folklore. No American poet before or since was as widely celebrated during his or her lifetime as Longfellow. He became the first and only American poet to be honored with a bust in the revered Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, England.The accomplishments of the other Fireside Poets were various. Lowell’s Biglow Papers (1848) added to the American tradition of long satirical poems. Holmes wrote several memorable short po ems such as “The Chambered Nautilus” (1858). Whittier became best known for Snow-Bound (1866), a long nostalgic look at his Massachusetts Quaker boyhood, when the family gathered around the fireside during a snowstorm.B AbolitionistPoetryDuring the 19th century, black and white poets wrote about the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of slaves. George Moses Horton, a North Carolina slave, was the first Southern black poet. Joshua McCarter Simpson was a black poet from Ohio whose memorable songs of emancipation were set to popular tunes and sung by fugitive slaves. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper wrote passionate abolitionist and early feminist poems that called both blacks and whites to action against oppression. James M. Whitfield wrote powerful poems criticizing America for its failure to live up to its ideals. In his long poem “America” (1853), he writes: “America, it is to thee, / Thou boasted land of liberty,— / It is to thee I raise my song, / Thou land of blood, and crime, and wrong.”Black poets at this time appropriated the language and style of the predominantly white, mainstream patriotic America. In using mainstream language, these black poets showed their white audiences how differently songs of liberty and freedom sounded from the perspective of those who had been left out of the “all men are created equal” equation. Black poets also often expressed themselves with irony and ambiguity so that different audiences heard different intonations and meanings, a double voicing that would become central to later African American writing.White abolitionist poets, from their more privileged social position, could afford to be more confrontational about the issue of slavery. Whittier was a fiery abolitionist whose numerous antislavery poems were collected in Voices of Freedom(1846). Longfellow’s Poems on Slavery (1842) forms a long-forgotten but illuminating contribution to the tradition of American political poems. Lowell also was an ardent abolitionist.C WaltWhitmanA newspaper reporter and editor, Whitman first published poems that were traditional in form and conventional in sentiment. In the early 1850s, however, he began experimenting with a mixture of the colloquial diction and prose rhythms of journalism; the direct address and soaring voice of oratory; the repetitions and catalogues of the Bible; and the lyricism, music, and drama of popular opera. He sought to write a democratic poetry—a poetry vast enough to contain all the variety of burgeoning 19th-century American culture.In 1855 Whitman published the first edition of Leaves of Grass, the book he would revise and expand for the rest of his life. The first edition contained only 12 untitled poems. The longest poem, which he eventually named “Song of Myself,” has become one of the mos t discussed poems in all of American poetry. In it Whitman constructs a democratic “I,” a voice that sets out to celebrate itself and the rapture of its senses experiencing the world, and in so doing to celebrate the unfettered potential of every individual in a democratic society. Emerging from a working class family, Whitman grew up in New York City and on nearby Long Island. He was one of the first working-class American poets and one of the first writers to compose poetry that is set in and draws its energy from the bustling, crowded, diverse streets of the city.Whitman later added a variety of poems to Leaves of Grass. They include “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (1856), in which Whitman addresses both contemporary and future riders of the ferry, and “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (1860), a reverie about his boyhood on the shores of Long Island. Other poems were about affection between men and about the experiences and sufferings of soldiers in the Civil War (1861-1865).Whitman’s work was initially embraced more fully in Britain than in the United States. An influential 1872 anthology, American Poems, published in England and edited by English literary critic William Michael Rossetti, was dedicated to Whitman and gave him more space than any other poet. From then on American poetry was judged not by how closely it approximated the best British verse, but by how radically it divorced itself from British tradition. Rough innovation came to be admired over polished tradition.D EmilyDickinsonEmily Dickinson, along with Whitman, is one of the most original and demanding poets in American literature. Living her whole life in Amherst, Massachusetts, Dickinson composed nearly2,000 short, untitled poems. Despite her productivity, only a handful of Dickinson’s poems were published before her death in 1886. Most of her poems borrow the repeated four-line, rhymed stanzas of traditional Christian hymns, with two lines of four-beat meter alternating with two lines of three-beat meter. A master of imagery that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed manifold variations within her simple form: She used imperfect rhymes, subtle breaks of rhythm, and idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation to create fascinating word puzzles, which have produced greatly divergent interpretations over the years.Dickinson’s intensely private poems cover a wide range of subjects and emotions. She was fascinated with death, and many of her poems struggle with the contradictions and seeming impossibility of an afterlife. She carries on an argument with God, sometimes expressing faith in him and sometimes denying his existence. Many of her poems record moments of freezing paralysis that could be death, pain, doubt, fear, or love. She remains one of the most private and cryptic voices in American literature.Because of Dickinson’s prominence, it sometimes seems that she was the only female poet in America in the 19th century. Yet nearly a hundred women published poetry in the first six decades of the 1800s, and most early anthologies of American poetry contained far more women writers than appeared in anthologies in the first half of the 20th century. Dickinson’s work can be better understood if read in the context of these poets.Lydia Huntley Sigourney was a popular early-19th-century poet whose work set the themes for other female poets: motherhood, sentiment, and the ever-present threat of death, particularly to children. She developed, among other forms, the same hymn stanza that Dickinson used, although she experimented with fewer variations on it than Dickinson, and her poetry was simple and accessible. The work of Sigourney, along with that of Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Frances Sargent Locke Osgood, Alice and Phoebe Cary, and Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt, was dismissed by most 20th-century critics until feminist critics began to rediscover the ironic edge to what had before seemed to be conventional sentimentality. The work of these and other women poets offers a window into the way 19th-century culture constructed and understood such concepts as gender, love, marriage, and motherhood.Poe, Melville, andOthersOther poets who tried out distinctive new forms included Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. Poe devoted great effort to writing poetry that was unlike anything before it. A careful craftsman, he examined in detail the effects that his every poetic choice had. Poe’s poetry earned little respect from his contemporaries, who dismissed him as “the jingle man.” He had, said Whitman, “the rhyming art to excess.” Yet Poe’s nightmarish scenes, unnerving plots, and probings of abnormal psychology gave his poetry, as well as his tales, a haunting, memorable quality that makes him one of the most admired innovators in American literature. The opening lines of his best-kno wn poem, “The Raven” (1845), demonstrate Poe’s love of rhyming and his use of varying rhythm: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.”Melville, though much better known as a novelist, nonetheless wrote powerful poetry about the Civil War, collected in Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866). He later wrote a long and mysterious poem, Clarel (1876), about his search for faith, his struggle with doubt, and his anxiety about the decline of civilization.Lesser-known innovators of the 19th century include Jones Very, Sidney Lanier and Henry Timrod. Very was a Massachusetts poet who produced strikingly original religious sonnets. Lanier was a Georgia poet who sought to reproduce in language the effects of music. Timrod, a Southern poet who was known as “the laureate of the Confederacy,” wrote some notably original and dark poetry in the 1860s.Toward the 20thCenturyWhitman had hoped that his work would generate new energy in American poetry. But when he died in 1892, the American poetic scene was relatively barren. Most of the major poets had died and no successor to Whitman was emerging. William Vaughn Moody, a poet born in Indiana, wrote The Masque of Judgement(1900), which was the first in a series of verse dramas about humanity’s spiritual tortures and eventual spiritual victory. Stephen Crane, best known for his novels, published two volumes of poetry, The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895) and War Is Kind and Other Poems (1899). In their tone and fragmented form, his grim poems anticipate the concerns of many modern writers. But neither poet lived far into the 20th century.I VTHE 20TH CENTURYBy 1900 the United States was far different from the new nation it had been a hundred years earlier. Westward expansion, waves of immigration, and increasing urbanization all combined to create a physically larger, more populous, and far more diverse country than its founders could have imagined. These changes are tracked mor e visibly in America’s fiction than in its poetry, but the nation’s growing diversity is evident in the diverse voices of 20th-century American poets. American poetry in the opening decades of the century displayed far less unity than most anthologies and critical histories indicate. Shifting allegiances, evolving styles, and the sheer number of poets make it difficult to categorize 20th-century poetry.A RegionalismIn the last decades of the 19th century, American literature had entered a period of regionalism, exploring the stories, dialects, and idiosyncrasies of the many regions of the United States. Dialect poetry—written in exaggerated accents and colorful idioms—became a sensation for a time though it produced little of lasting value. However, one major poet who rose to fame on the basis of his dialect poems was Paul Laurence Dunbar, a black writer from Ohio. Dunbar’s dialect poems, which romanticized the life of slaves in the pre-Civil War South, were extremely popular. His volumes Oak and Ivy (1893) and Majors and Minors(1895) brought attention to African American literature, although the dialect poems later embarrassed many black poets. Dunbar also wrote many nondialect poems, and through his work initiated an important debate in African American literature about what voices and materials black writers should employ.Other regions and groups developed their own distinctive voices. Kansas-born Edgar Lee Masters achieved success with Spoon River Anthology(1915). His poetic epitaphs (commemorations) capture the hidden passions, deceits, and hopes of Midwesterners buried in the fictional Spoon River cemetery. Edwin Arlington Robinson explored the lives of New Englanders in his fictional Tilbury Town through dramatic monologues—poems written entirely in the voice。
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A Concise History of American LiteratureWhat is literature?Literature is language artistically used to achieve identifiable literary qualities and to convey meaningful messages.Chapter 1 Colonial PeriodI.Background: Puritanism1.features of Puritanism(1)Predestination: God decided everything before things occurred.(2)Original sin: Human beings were born to be evil, and this original sin can bepassed down from generation to generation.(3)Total depravity(4)Limited atonement: Only the “elect” can be saved.2.Influence(1) A group of good qualities –hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety (serious andthoughtful) influenced American literature.(2)It led to the everlasting myth. All literature is based on a myth – garden of Eden.(3)Symbolism: the American puritan’s metaphorical mode of perception was chieflyinstrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctlyAmerican.(4)With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple and direct; the rhetoric isplain and honest, not without a touch of nobility often traceable to the directinfluence of the Bible.II.Overview of the literature1.types of writingdiaries, histories, journals, letters, travel books, autobiographies/biographies, sermons2.writers of colonial period(1)Anne Bradstreet(2)Edward Taylor(3)Roger Williams(4)John Woolman(5)Thomas Paine(6)Philip FreneauIII.Jonathan Edwards1.life2.works(1)The Freedom of the Will(2)The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended(3)The Nature of True Virtue3.ideas – pioneer of transcendentalism(1)The spirit of revivalism(2)Regeneration of man(3)God’s presence(4)Puritan idealismIV.Benjamin Franklin1.life2.works(1)Poor Richard’s Almanac(2)Autobiography3.contribution(1)He helped found the Pennsylvania Hospital and the American PhilosophicalSociety.(2)He was called “the new Prometheus who had stolen fire (electricity in this case)from heaven”.(3)Everything seems to meet in this one man –“Jack of all trades”. Herman Melvillethus described him “master of each and mastered by none”.Chapter 2 American RomanticismSection 1 Early Romantic PeriodWhat is Romanticism?●An approach from ancient Greek: Plato● A literary trend: 18c in Britain (1798~1832)●Schlegel Bros.I.Preview: Characteristics of romanticism1.subjectivity(1)feeling and emotions, finding truth(2)emphasis on imagination(3)emphasis on individualism – personal freedom, no hero worship, natural goodnessof human beings2.back to medieval, esp medieval folk literature(1)unrestrained by classical rules(2)full of imagination(3)colloquial language(4)freedom of imagination(5)genuine in feelings: answer their call for classics3.back to naturenature is “breathing living thing” (Rousseau)II.American Romanticism1.Background(1)Political background and economic development(2)Romantic movement in European countriesDerivative – foreign influence2.features(1)American romanticism was in essence the expression of “a real new experienceand contained “an alien quality” for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place”was radically new and alien.(2)There is American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. American romanticauthors tended more to moralize. Many American romantic writings intended toedify more than they entertained.(3)The “newness” of Americans as a nation is in connection with AmericanRomanticism.(4)As a logical result of the foreign and native factors at work, American romanticismwas both imitative and independent.III.Washington Irving1.several names attached to Irving(1)first American writer(2)the messenger sent from the new world to the old world(3)father of American literature2.life3.works(1) A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the DutchDynasty(2)The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (He won a measure of internationalrecognition with the publication of this.)(3)The History of the Life and V oyages of Christopher Columbus(4) A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada(5)The Alhambra4.Literary career: two parts(1)1809~1832a.Subjects are either English or Europeanb.Conservative love for the antique(2)1832~1859: back to US5.style – beautiful(1)gentility, urbanity, pleasantness(2)avoiding moralizing – amusing and entertaining(3)enveloping stories in an atmosphere(4)vivid and true characters(5)humour – smiling while reading(6)musical languageIV.James Fenimore Cooper1.life2.works(1)Precaution (1820, his first novel, imitating Austen’s Pride and Prejudice)(2)The Spy (his second novel and great success)(3)Leatherstocking Tales (his masterpiece, a series of five novels)The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneer, ThePrairie3.point of viewthe theme of wilderness vs. civilization, freedom vs. law, order vs. change, aristocrat vs.democrat, natural rights vs. legal rights4.style(1)highly imaginative(2)good at inventing tales(3)good at landscape description(4)conservative(5)characterization wooden and lacking in probability(6)language and use of dialect not authentic5.literary achievementsHe created a myth about the formative period of the American nation. If the history ofthe United States is, in a sense, the process of the American settlers exploring andpushing the American frontier forever westward, then Cooper’s Leatherstocking Taleseffectively approximates the American national experience of adventure into the West.He turned the west and frontier as a useable past and he helped to introduce westerntradition to American literature.Section 2 Summit of Romanticism – American TranscendentalismI.Background: four sources1.Unitarianism(1)Fatherhood of God(2)Brotherhood of men(3)Leadership of Jesus(4)Salvation by character (perfection of one’s character)(5)Continued progress of mankind(6)Divinity of mankind(7)Depravity of mankind2.Romantic IdealismCenter of the world is spirit, absolute spirit (Kant)3.Oriental mysticismCenter of the world is “oversoul”4.PuritanismEloquent expression in transcendentalismII.Appearance1836, “Nature” by EmersonIII.Features1.spirit/oversoul2.importance of individualism3.nature – symbol of spirit/Godgarment of the oversoul4.focus in intuition (irrationalism and subconsciousness)IV.Influence1.It served as an ethical guide to life for a young nation and brought about the idea thathuman can be perfected by nature. It stressed religious tolerance, called to throw offshackles of customs and traditions and go forward to the development of a new anddistinctly American culture.2.It advocated idealism that was great needed in a rapidly expanded economy whereopportunity often became opportunism, and the desire to “get on” obscured the moralnecessity for rising to spiritual height.3.It helped to create the first American renaissance – one of the most prolific period inAmerican literature.V.Ralph Waldo Emerson1.life2.works(1)Nature(2)Two essays: The American Scholar, The Poet3.point of view(1)One major element of his philosophy is his firm belief in the transcendence of the“oversoul”.(2)He regards nature as the purest, and the most sanctifying moral influence on man,and advocated a direct intuition of a spiritual and immanent God in nature.(3)If man depends upon himself, cultivates himself and brings out the divine inhimself, he can hope to become better and even perfect. This is what Emersonmeans by “the infinitude of man”.(4)Everyone should understand that he makes himself by making his world, and thathe makes the world by making himself.4.aesthetic ideas(1)He is a complete man, an eternal man.(2)True poetry and true art should ennoble.(3)The poet should express his thought in symbols.(4)As to theme, Emerson called upon American authors to celebrate America whichwas to him a lone poem in itself.5.his influenceVI.Henry David Thoreau1.life2.works(1) A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River(2)Walden(3) A Plea for John Brown (an essay)3.point of view(1)He did not like the way a materialistic America was developing and wasvehemently outspoken on the point.(2)He hated the human injustice as represented by the slavery system.(3)Like Emerson, but more than him, Thoreau saw nature as a genuine restorative,healthy influence on man’s spiritual well-being.(4)He has faith in the inner virtue and inward, spiritual grace of man.(5)He was very critical of modern civilization.(6)“Simplicity…simplify!”(7)He was sorely disgusted with “the inundations of the dirty institutions of men’sodd-fellow society”.(8)He has calm trust in the future and his ardent belief in a new generation of men. Section 3 Late RomanticismI.Nathaniel Hawthorne1.life2.works(1)Two collections of short stories: Twice-told Tales, Mosses from and Old Manse(2)The Scarlet Letter(3)The House of the Seven Gables(4)The Marble Faun3.point of view(1)Evil is at the core of human life, “that blackness in Hawthorne”(2)Whenever there is sin, there is punishment. Sin or evil can be passed fromgeneration to generation (causality).(3)He is of the opinion that evil educates.(4)He has disgust in science.4.aesthetic ideas(1)He took a great interest in history and antiquity. To him these furnish the soil onwhich his mind grows to fruition.(2)He was convinced that romance was the predestined form of American narrative.To tell the truth and satirize and yet not to offend: That was what Hawthorne had inmind to achieve.5.style – typical romantic writer(1)the use of symbols(2)revelation of characters’ psychology(3)the use of supernatural mixed with the actual(4)his stories are parable (parable inform) – to teach a lesson(5)use of ambiguity to keep the reader in the world of uncertainty – multiple point ofviewII.Herman Melville1.life2.works(1)Typee(2)Omio(3)Mardi(4)Redburn(5)White Jacket(6)Moby Dick(7)Pierre(8)Billy Budd3.point of view(1)He never seems able to say an affirmative yes to life: His is the attitude of“Everlasting Nay” (negative attitude towards life).(2)One of the major themes of his is alienation (far away from each other).Other themes: loneliness, suicidal individualism (individualism causing disasterand death), rejection and quest, confrontation of innocence and evil, doubts overthe comforting 19c idea of progress4.style(1)Like Hawthorne, Melville manages to achieve the effect of ambiguity throughemploying the technique of multiple view of his narratives.(2)He tends to write periodic chapters.(3)His rich rhythmical prose and his poetic power have been profusely commentedupon and praised.(4)His works are symbolic and metaphorical.(5)He includes many non-narrative chapters of factual background or description ofwhat goes on board the ship or on the route (Moby Dick)Romantic PoetsI.Walt Whitman1.life2.work: Leaves of Grass (9 editions)(1)Song of Myself(2)There Was a Child Went Forth(3)Crossing Brooklyn Ferry(4)Democratic Vistas(5)Passage to India(6)Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking3.themes –“Catalogue of American and European thought”He had been influenced by many American and European thoughts: enlightenment,idealism, transcendentalism, science, evolution ideas, western frontier spirits,Jefferson’s individualism, Civil War Unionism, Orientalism.Major themes in his poems (almost everything):●equality of things and beings●divinity of everything●immanence of God●democracy●evolution of cosmos●multiplicity of nature●self-reliant spirit●death, beauty of death●expansion of America●brotherhood and social solidarity (unity of nations in the world)●pursuit of love and happiness4.style: “free verse”(1)no fixed rhyme or scheme(2)parallelism, a rhythm of thought(3)phonetic recurrence(4)the habit of using snapshots(5)the use of a certain pronoun “I”(6) a looser and more open-ended syntactic structure(7)use of conventional image(8)strong tendency to use oral English(9)vocabulary – powerful, colourful, rarely used words of foreign origins, some evenwrong(10)sentences – catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem lines5.influence(1)His best work has become part of the common property of Western culture.(2)He took over Whitman’s vision of the poet-prophet and poet-teacher and recast itin a more sophisticated and Europeanized mood.(3)He has been compared to a mountain in American literary history.(4)Contemporary American poetry, whatever school or form, bears witness to hisgreat influence.II.Emily Dickenson1.life2.works(1)My Life Closed Twice before Its Close(2)Because I Can’t Stop for Death(3)I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I died(4)Mine – by the Right of the White Election(5)Wild Nights – Wild Nights3.themes: based on her own experiences/joys/sorrows(1)religion – doubt and belief about religious subjects(2)death and immortality(3)love – suffering and frustration caused by love(4)physical aspect of desire(5)nature – kind and cruel(6)free will and human responsibility4.style(1)poems without titles(2)severe economy of expression(3)directness, brevity(4)musical device to create cadence (rhythm)(5)capital letters – emphasis(6)short poems, mainly two stanzas(7)rhetoric techniques: personification – make some of abstract ideas vividparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson1.Similarities:(1)Thematically, they both extolled, in their different ways, an emergent America, itsexpansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of“American Renaissance”.(2)Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the new nation bybreaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedomin form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry.2.differences:(1)Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the innerlife of the individual.(2)Whereas Whitman is “national” in his outlook, Dickinson is “regional”.(3)Dickinson has the “catalogue technique” (direct, simple style) which Whitmandoesn’t have.Edgar Allen PoeI.LifeII.Works1.short stories(1)ratiocinative storiesa.Ms Found in a Bottleb.The Murders in the Rue Morguec.The Purloined Letter(2)Revenge, death and rebirtha.The Fall of the House of Usherb.Ligeiac.The Masque of the Red Death(3)Literary theorya.The Philosophy of Compositionb.The Poetic Principlec.Review of Hawthorne’s Twice-told TalesIII.Themes1.death –predominant theme in Poe’s writing“Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everything in Poe’s writings is dead.”2.disintegration (separation) of life3.horror4.negative thoughts of scienceIV.Aesthetic ideas1.The short stories should be of brevity, totality, single effect, compression and finality.2.The poems should be short, and the aim should be beauty, the tone melancholy. Poemsshould not be of moralizing. He calls for pure poetry and stresses rhythm.V.Style – traditional, but not easy to readVI.Reputation: “the jingle man” (Emerson)VII.His influencesChapter 3 The Age of RealismI.Background: From Romanticism to Realism1.the three conflicts that reached breaking point in this period(1)industrialism vs. agrarian(2)culturely-measured east vs. newly-developed west(3)plantation gentility vs. commercial gentility2.1880’s urbanization: from free competition to monopoly capitalism3.the closing of American frontierII.Characteristics1.truthful description of life2.typical character under typical circumstance3.objective rather than idealized, close observation and investigation of life“Realistic writers are like scientists.”4.open-ending:Life is complex and cannot be fully understood. It leaves much room for readers to think by themselves.5.concerned with social and psychological problems, revealing the frustrations ofcharacters in an environment of sordidness and depravityIII.Three Giants in Realistic Period1.William Dean Howells –“Dean of American Realism”(1)Realistic principlesa.Realism is “fidelity to experience and probability of motive”.b.The aim is “talk of some ordinary traits of American life”.c.Man in his natural and unaffected dullness was the object of Howells’s fictionalrepresentation.d.Realism is by no means mere photographic pictures of externals but includes acentral concern with “motives” and psychological conflicts.e.He condemns novels of sentimentality and morbid self-sacrifice, and avoids suchthemes as illicit love.f.Authors should minimize plot and the artificial ordering of the sense of something“desultory, unfinished, imperfect”.g.Characters should have solidity of specification and be real.h.Interpreting sympathetically the “common feelings of commonplace people” wasbest suited as a technique to express the spirit of America.i.He urged writers to winnow tradition and write in keeping with currenthumanitarian ideals.j.Truth is the highest beauty, but it includes the view that morality penetrates all things.k.With regard to literary criticism, Howells felt that the literary critic should not try to impose arbitrary or subjective evaluations on books but should follow the detached scientist in accurate description, interpretation, and classification.(2)Worksa.The Rise of Silas Laphamb. A Chance Acquaintancec. A Modern Instance(3)Features of His Worksa.Optimistic toneb.Moral development/ethicscking of psychological depth2.Henry James(1)Life(2)Literary career: three stagesa.1865~1882: international theme●The American●Daisy Miller●The Portrait of a Ladyb.1882~1895: inter-personal relationships and some plays●Daisy Miller (play)c.1895~1900: novellas and tales dealing with childhood and adolescence, then backto international theme●The Turn of the Screw●When Maisie Knew●The Ambassadors●The Wings of the Dove●The Golden Bowl(3)Aesthetic ideasa.The aim of novel: represent lifemon, even ugly side of lifec.Social function of artd.Avoiding omniscient point of view(4)Point of viewa.Psychological analysis, forefather of stream of consciousnessb.Psychological realismc.Highly-refined language(5)Style –“stylist”nguage: highly-refined, polished, insightful, accurateb.V ocabulary: largec.Construction: complicated, intricate3.Mark Twain (see next section)Local Colorism1860s, 1870s~1890sI.Appearance1.uneven development in economy in America2.culture: flourishing of frontier literature, humourists3.magazines appeared to let writer publish their worksII.What is “Local Colour”?Tasks of local colourists: to write or present local characters of their regions in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.Regional literature (similar, but larger in world)●Garland, Harte – the west●Eggleston – Indiana●Mrs Stowe●Jewett – Maine●Chopin – LouisianaIII.Mark Twain – Mississippi1.life2.works(1)The Gilded Age(2)“the two advantages”(3)Life on the Mississippi(4) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court(5)The Man That Corrupted Hardleybug3.style(1)colloquial language, vernacular language, dialects(2)local colour(3)syntactic feature: sentences are simple, brief, sometimes ungrammatical(4)humour(5)tall tales (highly exaggerated)(6)social criticism (satire on the different ugly things in society)parison of the three “giants” of American Realism1.ThemeHowells – middle classJames – upper classTwain – lower class2.TechniqueHowells – smiling/genteel realismJames – psychological realismTwain – local colourism and colloquialismChapter 4 American NaturalismI.Background1.Darwin’s theory: “natural selection”2.Spenser’s idea: “social Darwinism”3.French Naturalism: ZoraII.Features1.environment and heredity2.scientific accuracy and a lot of details3.general tone: hopelessness, despair, gloom, ugly side of the societyIII.significanceIt prepares the way for the writing of 1920s’ “lost generation” and T. S. Eliot.IV.Theodore Dreiser1.life2.works(1)Sister Carrie(2)The trilogy: Financier, The Titan, The Stoic(3)Jennie Gerhardt(4)American Tragedy(5)The Genius3.point of view(1)He embraced social Darwinism – survival of the fittest. He learned to regard manas merely an animal driven by greed and lust in a struggle for existence in whichonly the “fittest”, the m ost ruthless, survive.(2)Life is predatory, a “game” of the lecherous and heartless, a jungle struggle inwhich man, being “a waif and an interloper in Nature”, a “wisp in the wind ofsocial forces”, is a mere pawn in the general scheme of things, with no po werwhatever to assert his will.(3)No one is ethically free; everything is determined by a complex of internalchemisms and by the forces of social pressure.4.Sister Carrie(1)Plot(2)Analysis5.Style(1)Without good structure(2)Deficient characterization(3)Lack in imagination(4)Journalistic method(5)Techniques in paintingChapter 5 The Modern PeriodSection 1 The 1920sI.IntroductionThe 1920s is a flowering period of American literature. It is considered “the second renaissance” of American literature.The nicknames for this period:(1)Roaring 20s – comfort(2)Dollar Decade – rich(3)Jazz Age – Jazz musicII.Backgrounda)First World War –“a war to end all wars”(1)Economically: became rich from WWI. Economic boom: new inventions.Highly-consuming society.(2)Spiritually: dislocation, fragmentation.b)wide-spread contempt for law (looking down upon law)1.Freud’s theoryIII.Features of the literatureWriters: three groups(1)Participants(2)Expatriates(3)Bohemian (unconventional way of life) – on-lookersTwo areas:(1)Failure of communication of Americans(2)Failure of the American societyImagismI. BackgroundImagism was influenced by French symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese literature “haiku”II. Development: three stages1.1908~1909: London, Hulme2.1912~1914: England -> America, Pound3.1914~1917: Amy LowellIII. W hat is an “image”?An image is defined by Pound as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas” “endowed with energy”. The exact word must bring the effect of the object be fore the reader as it had presented itself to the poet’s mind at the time of writing.IV. Principles1.Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective;2.To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;3.As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in thesequence of a metronome.V. Significance1.It was a rebellion against the traditional poetics which failed to reflect the new life ofthe new century.2.It offered a new way of writing which was valid not only for the Imagist poets but formodern poetry as a whole.3.The movement was a training school in which many great poets learned their firstlessons in the poetic art.4.It is this movement that helped to open the first pages of modern English and Americanpoetry.VI. Ezra Pound1.life2.literary career3.works(1)Cathay(2)Cantos(3)Hugh Selwyn Mauberley4.point of view(1)Confident in Pound’s belief that the artist was morally and culturally the arbiterand the “saviour” of the race, he took it upon himself to purify the arts and becamethe prime mover of a few experimental movements, the aim of which was to dumpthe old into the dustbin and bring forth something new.(2)To him life was sordid personal crushing oppression, and culture produced nothingbut “intangible bondage”.(3)Pound sees in Chinese history and the doctrine of Confucius a source of strengthand wisdom with which to counterpoint Western gloom and confusion.(4)He saw a chaotic world that wanted setting to rights, and a humanity, sufferingfrom spiritual death and cosmic injustice, that needed saving. He was for the mostpart of his life trying to offer Confucian philosophy as the one faith which couldhelp to save the West.5.style: very difficult to readPound’s early poems are fresh and lyrical. The Cantos can be notoriously difficult insome sections, but delightfully beautiful in others. Few have made serious study of thelong poem; fewer, if anyone at all, have had the courage to declare that they haveconquered Pound; and many seem to agree that the Cantos is a monumental failure.6.ContributionHe has helped, through theory and practice, to chart out the course of modern poetry.7.The Cantos –“the intellectual diary since 1915”Features:(1)Language: intricate and obscure(2)Theme: complex subject matters(3)Form: no fixed framework, no central theme, no attention to poetic rulesVII. T. S. Eliot1.life2.works(1)poems●The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock●The Waste Land (epic)●Hollow Man●Ash Wednesday●Four Quarters(2)Plays●Murder in the Cathedral●Sweeney Agonistes●The Cocktail Party●The Confidential Clerk(3)Critical essays●The Sacred Wood●Essays on Style and Order●Elizabethan Essays●The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticisms●After Strange Gods3.point of view(1)The modern society is futile and chaotic.(2)Only poets can create some order out of chaos.(3)The method to use is to compare the past and the present.4.Style(1)Fresh visual imagery, flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm(2)Difficult and disconnected images and symbols, quotations and allusions(3)Elliptical structures, strange juxtapositions, an absence of bridges5.The Waste Land: five parts(1)The Burial of the Dead(2) A Game of Chess(3)The Fire Sermon(4)Death by Water(5)What the Thunder SaidVIII. Robert Frost1.life2.point of view(1)All his life, Frost was concerned with constructions through po etry. “a momentarystay against confusion”.(2)He understands the terror and tragedy in nature, but also its beauty.(3)Unlike the English romantic poets of 19th century, he didn’t believe that man couldfind harmony with nature. He believed that serenity came from working, usuallyamid natural forces, which couldn’t be understood. He regarded work as“significant toil”.3.works – poemsthe first: A Boy’s Willcollections: North of Boston, Mountain Interval (mature), New Hampshire4.style/features of his poems(1)Most of his poems took New England as setting, and the subjects were chosenfrom daily life of ordinary people, such as “mending wall”, “picking apples”.(2)He writes most often about landscape and people – the loneliness and poverty ofisolated farmers, beauty, terror and tragedy in nature. He also describes someabnormal people, e.g. “deceptively simple”, “philosophical poet”.(3)Although he was popular during 1920s, he didn’t experiment like other modernpoets. He used conventional forms, plain language, traditional metre, and wrote ina pastured tradition.IX. e. e. cummings“a juggler with syntax, grammar and diction” –individualism, “painter poet”Novels in the 1920sI. F. Scott Fitzgerald1.life – participant in 1920s2.works(1)This Side of Paradise(2)Flappers and Philosophers(3)The Beautiful and the Damned(4)The Great Gatsby(5)Tender is the Night(6)All the Sad Young Man(7)The Last Tycoon3.point of view(1)He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the so-called“American Dream” is false in nature.(2)He had always been critical of the rich and tried to show the integrating effects ofmoney on the emotional make-up of his character. He found that wealth alteredpeople’s characters, making them mean and distrusted. He thinks money broughtonly tragedy and remorse.(3)His novels follow a pattern: dream – lack of attraction – failure and despair.4.His ideas of “American Dream”It is false to most young people. Only those who were dishonest could become rich.5.StyleFitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose is smooth,sensitive, and completely original in its diction and metaphors. Its simplicity andgracefulness, its skill in manipulating the relation between the general and the specificreveal his consummate artistry.6.The Great GatsbyNarrative point of view – NickHe is related to everyone in the novel and is calm and detected observer who is neverquick to make judgements.Selected omniscient point of viewII.Ernest Hemingway1.life2.point of view (influenced by experience in war)(1)He felt that WWI had brok en America’s culture and traditions, and separated fromits roots. He wrote about men and women who were isolated from tradition,。