美国文学选读知识复习材料

American Puritanism 殖民地时期

( roughly from the settlement of America in the early 17th century through the end of the 18th)

一、Benjamin Franklin 本杰明?富兰克林

作品：

1、Poor Richard's Almanac 《格言历书》--- A Collection of maxims, or proverbs, on the value of work and savings for success.

2、The Autobiography 《自传》---“美国梦”的根源

3、参与起草《独立宣言》

浪漫主义American Romanticism

The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a period of the great flowering of American literature.

The social and cultural background of Romanticism

The young Republic was flourishing into a politically, economically and culturally independent country.

The Romantic writings revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native lands.

The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature.

The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values.

Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in va lue of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a sourc e of goodness and man’s societies as a source of corruption.

二、Edgar Allan Poe 埃德加·爱伦·坡

---poet, short story writer and literary critic (48 poems,70 short stories)

He greatly influenced the devotees of “Art for art’s sake.”

He was father of psychoanalytic criticism (心理分析批评), and the detective story. 诗歌的精髓就是追求美

小说的主题常常是恐怖和死亡，其中还运用了象征手法。

The Poetic Principle :

1. The poem, should be short, readable at one sitting;

2. Beauty (the rhythmical creation of beauty);

3. Melancholy 忧伤(especially the death of a beautiful woman).

代表作：The Fall of the House of Usher 《厄舍大厦的倒塌》

Ligeia 《莉盖亚》

Annabel Lee 《安娜贝尔·李》

The Raven 《乌鸦》

The Cask of Amontillado 《阿芒提拉多的酒桶》---gothic novel

人物：蒙特利瑟Montresor, 弗图纳多Fortunato ，筵席上男人将喝醉的死对头哄骗至地窖并砌墙活埋的故事。

三．爱默生

Emerson = The chief spokesman of New England Transcendentalism 超验主义

He was a descendent（后裔）of a long line of New England clergymen牧师【pastor】. 散文家、诗人、超验主义的哲学的主要倡导者。

American Transcendentalism

As a philosophical and literary movement, American Transcendentalism (also known as “American Renaissance”) flourshed in New England from the 1830s to the Civil War. It is the high tide of American romanticism and its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates

in Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalists spoke for the cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society.

Transcendentalism 超验主义(+ H. D. Thoreau; Nathaniel Hawthorne; )

The major features of Transcendentalism:

①The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important

thing in the universe. 思想超灵宇宙

②The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual

is the most important element of Society. 个体+社会

③The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was not purely matter. It was alive, filled with God’s overwhelmin g presence. 自然+上帝

代表作：Nature《论自然》---the Bible of Transcendentalism by Emerson ；

Self-Reliance 《论自助》 ---是表达他的超验主义观点的最重要作品之一

一The American Scholar《论美国学者》；

The Over-soul 《论超灵》

四、Nathaniel Hawthorne纳撒尼尔·霍桑 --- effected by 超验主义

He was born into a prominent Puritan family.

One of the most ambivalent（矛盾的）writers in the American literary history.

主要成就：美国心理分析小说的开创者浪漫主义小说家心理小说家

代表作：Mosses from an Old Manse 《古宅青苔》;

Twice-Told Tales 《故事重述》;

The Marble Faun 《玉石雕像》;

The House of the Seven Gables 《带有七个尖角阁的房子》

The Scarlet Letter《红字》

Many of his earlier stories had treated themes that led to The Scarlet Letter.

Theme:

Puritan severity toward sex and matrimony and its tendency to suppress bright color and t rue feelings.

The Scarlet Letter《红字》：

Hester Prynne---strong-willed, impetuous, a king of compassionate, maternal figure;

Pearl---innocent, perceptive;

Roger Chillingworth---a man deficient in human warmth, true evil in the story;

Arthur Dimmesdale---intelligent and emotional.

[Symbolism in his works

Hawthorne is a master of symbolism, which he took from the Puritan tradition 清教徒传统

and bequeathed to American literature in a revivified form. In his masterpiece, by using

Pearl as a thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community. With the scarlet A as the biggest symbol of all, which is ambiguous, he proves himself to be one of the best ] symbolists.

五、Herman Melville 赫尔曼·梅尔维尔

The early sailing experiences were rewarding.

代表作： White Jacket 《白外衣》

Billy Budd《毕利·伯德》,

Typee《泰比》,

Omoo《欧穆》,

Mardi《玛地》.

Moby Dick 1851 《白鲸》---百科全书式性质/海洋作品/动物史诗（《熊》福克纳、《老人与海》海明威、《白鲸》梅尔维尔）

[Moby Dick represents the sum total of Melville’s bleak view of the world

in which he lived. It is at once Godless and purposeless. Man in this

universe lives a meaningless and futile life, meaningless because futile.

Once he attempts to seek power over it he is doomed. The idea that man can make

the world for himself is nothing but a Transcendentalist folly. Moby Dick thus

reveals the basic pattern of 19th century American life: loneliness and suicidal individualism in a self-styled democracy.

(a negative reflection upon Transcendentalism)

Symbolism in Moby Dick：

---It is regarded as the first American prose epic. It is not merely a whaling tale or sea adventure, considering that Melville is a great symbolist. It turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth 寻找真理

and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man’s deep reality and psychology.

---Different people on board the ship are representations of different ideas and different social and ethnic groups; facts become symbols and incidents acquire universal meanings; the Pequod is the microcosm of human society and the voyage becomes a search for truth. The white whale, Moby Dick, symbolizes nature for Melville, for it is complex, unfathomable难以理解的,malignant恶性的, and beautiful as well.]

六．H. D. Thoreau 梭罗and his work

Walden 瓦尔登湖not only fully demonstrates Emersonian ideas of self-reliance but also develops and tests Thoreau’s own transcendental phil osophy.

七．Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 朗费罗

Features of Longfellow’s poetic works

1)lChief romantic tendencies as humanitarian attitude, love of nature and love of beauty.

2)lThe first American poet to write narrative poems.

3)lConventional style and subjects

4)lGenerally simple ideas expressed musically and powerfully.

5)lSimplicity and detachment from the deep problems of contemporary life

19世纪美国最伟大的浪漫主义诗人之一。传统派，励志型。

诗集：《夜吟》Voices of the Night

《歌谣及其他》Ballads and Other Poems

《伊凡杰琳》Evangeline

《海依华沙之歌》The Song of Hiawatha

诗歌：《我射出一支箭······》I Shot an Arrow...

A Psalm of Life 《生命颂/人生颂》---第一首被完整地介绍到中国的美国诗歌

八、Walt Whitman 沃尔特·惠特曼

美国著名诗人、人文主义者，他创造了诗歌的自由体

（Free Verse---without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.），

The first edition of Leaves of Grass 《草叶集》 was published in 1855.

In this giant work, openness, freedom, and above all, individualism are all that concerned him.

Writing features of Whitman

---A singer for the ideals of equality, democracy and human dignity.

---Songs for himself, for the labour of common American people, natural creation, the independen ce of the country, love and friendship, and for the memorizing of President Lincoln. ---Free verse,

rhythmical unit, phonetic recurrence.

诗歌：

《我歌唱自我》One's Self I Sing

《噢，船长！我的船长！》O Captain! My Captain!

九、Emily Dickinson（19世纪唯一出名的女作家）

---I Died for Beauty, because I could not stop for Death.

美国女诗人，狄金森一生都没有离开过自己的家乡，对她的诗歌风格产生直接影响的是爱默生的诗歌，她的诗歌预示了20世纪诗歌的诞生。

宅女，想象力，诗歌（死亡、爱情、失败、无标点

）

Whitman: society

Dickinson: inner life of the individual

Most of her poems are about death and immortality. Nature is to her both benevolent and cruel. Emily was an energetic and outgoing woman while attending the Academy and Seminary.

Most of her poems are about life and nature. They are short; many of them are based on a single image or symbol.

作品：《要描绘一片草原······》 To Make a Prairie

《最美妙的胜利感觉》 Success Is Counted Sweetest

《我是无名之辈》 I'm Nobody!

[The war led many to question the assumptions shared by the transcendentalists ---- natural good ness, the optimistic view of nature and man, benevolent God. It taught men that life was not good, man was not and God was not.

As a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism with the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Romanticism and sentimentalism, and paved the way to Modernism. This literary interest in the so-called “reality” of life started a new period in the American literary writing known as The Age of Realism. ]

The three dominant figures of the period:

William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James

James wrote mostly of the upper reaches of American society.

Howells concerned himself chiefly with middle class life.

Twain dealt largely with the lower strata of society.

Mark Twain and Howells seemed to have paid more attention to the “life” of the Americans, and Henry James had apparently laid greater emphasis on the “inner world”

of man.

十、Mark Twain 马克·吐温

Writing: humor and local colorism

The characteristics of local colorism:

---Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forefront of his stories. This particular concern about the local character of a region came about as “local colorism” a unique variation of American literary realism.

---Local Colorism or Regionalism first appeared in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. Hamlin Garland defined local colorism as having “such quality of texture and background tha t it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native.” T he ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous土产

的 little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside.

---Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life.

代表作： Life on the Mississippi 《密西西比河上》

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 《汤姆·索亚历险记》

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 《哈克贝里·费恩历险记》

---(Mark Twain’s most representative work)

[ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

---The novel is written in a language that is totally different from the rhetorical language used by Emerson, Poe, and Melville.

---His characters, confined to a particular region and to a particular historical moment, speak with a strong accent, which is true of his local colorism.

---The rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the West became his major theme.

---His humor, a kind of artistic style used to criticize the social injustice and satirize the decayed romanticism, is remarkable. ]

人物：Huckleberry Finn、Jim、Tom Sawyer、Widow Douglas and Miss Watson、

Pap The Duke and Dauphin (公爵和法国皇太子）

Henry James 亨利·詹姆斯

作品：The Portrait of a Lady 《一个女士的画像》

Daisy Miller 《黛西·密勒》

The international theme: the meeting of America and Europe, American innocence in contact a nd contrast with European decadence and the moral and psychological complications arising there from.

Like Hawthorne, James regarded evil as essentially of inward cause and repeatedly emphasized m agnanimity and the beauty of goodness.

Psychological Realism 心理现实主义

It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts an d motivations. And Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to re present life as he sees it.

American Naturalism 自然主义

The impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory达尔文进化论 on the American thought and

the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school of realism: American naturalism.

The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral与道德无关的, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity遗传 and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion湮没 in death.

代表作家

Stephen Crane；Frank Norris；Theodore Dreiser；Edwin Arlington Robinson；Upton Sinclair；Jack London；O’ Henry

Stephen Crane：Maggie: A Girl of the Streets《街头女郎麦姬》；

The Red Badge of Courage；《红色英勇勋章》The Open Boat；《海上扁舟》

Theodore Dreiser：Trilogy of Desire:1.The Financier2. The Titan3. The Stoic；

Sister Carrie；Jennie Gerhardt；An American Tragedy

O.Henry (William Sydney Porter)：The Gift of the Magi；The Cop and the anthem

The Modern Period

The Modern Period ：The 1920s-1930s ( the second renaissance of American literature)

又称：---The Roaring Twenties (economically)

---The Jazz Age (socially)

---“lost”and “waste land”(spiritually)，其中，“lost”来源：Gertrude Stein “waste land”来源T.S.Eliot

The historic and cultural background

---The USA’s participation in World WarⅠmarked a crucial stage in the nation’s evolution to a world power.

---By the second decade of the 20th century, the USA had become the most powerful industrialized nation in the world.

---There was a decline in moral standard and the first few decades of the 20th century was best described as a spiritual wasteland.

There had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences. Darwinism (Darwin), Socialism (Karl Marx), Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)

The Lost Generation

The term “Lost Generation” came from Gertrude Stein, who had a salon in her hou se for English and

American expatriates in Paris. The Phrase was a remark she made to a mechanic in Hemingway’s presence that “You are all a lost generation.”

Gertrude Stein used the term to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.

The term is commonly applied to Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings and some others.

Winners of Nobel Prize for Literature during this period : Sinclair Lewis (1930) 第一个获奖的美国人(特点：Main Street, Babbitt); Eugene O’Neill (1936); Pearl S. Buck (1938); T.S. Eliot (1948); William Faulkner (1949); Ernest Hemingway (1954); John Steinbeck (1962)

十一、F. Scott Fitzgerald 弗·斯科特·菲茨杰拉德

American Dream

In the United States’ Declaration of Independence独立宣言, our founding fathers: "…

held certain truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by th eir Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the Pursuit of H appiness." …….

作品：The Side of Paradise 《人间天堂》

The Beautiful and the Damned 《漂亮的冤家》

Flappers and Philosophers 《姑娘们与哲学家们》

Tales of the Jazz Age 《爵士乐时代的故事》

Tender is the Night 《夜色温柔》

The Crack-up 《崩溃》

The Last Tycoon (unfinished)

The Great Gatsby

Jay Gatsby is a man driven by greed, ambition and, most of all, an unwavering desire for a woma n he met before the Great War, when he was poor and she was unobtainable. As Gatsby reinvents himself in an attempt to buy his way into the social elite of Long Island's Gold Coast, he yearns to rekindle his romance with the woman who stole his heart years before. But when the chance final ly arrives, a shadow of tragedy is cast over what Gatsby long imagined would be his triumphant m oment.

The Great Gatsby 《了不起的盖茨比》被视为美国文学“爵士时代”的象征，以美国梦American Dream为主线。“迷惘的一代”人物: Gatsby盖茨比，Daisy黛西，Tom汤姆，Nick尼克，Myrtle （汤姆的情妇），Wilson（汤姆情妇的丈夫）

十二.William Faulkner(1897-1962 1949 Nobel price:“for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.”

“Stream of Consciousness”意识流or “interior monologue”,内心独白 is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It

was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce.

He often employs stream of consciousness narrative, discards and notion of chronological order, uses multiple narrations, shifts between the present and past tense, and tends toward impossibly long and complex sentences.

写作特点、内容：

?Yoknapatawpha Country---以故乡为原型虚构的，表现南方贵族家庭的没落

?Southern family

?The Town of Jefferson

作品: The Sound and the Fury (1929) 《喧嚣与骚动》，取自莎士比亚的《麦克白》As I Lay Dying (1930) 《我弥留之际》

Light in the August ( 1932) 《八月之光》

Absalom, Absalom (1936) 《押沙龙，押沙龙！》

Go Down Moses (1942) 《去吧，摩西》

23部长篇小说，11个短篇小说，7个诗集，6个电影剧本，1个电视剧剧本

十三.Ernest Hemingway 厄内斯特·海明威---“迷惘的一代”作家的主要人物

Iceberg Principle (Theory):冰山法则

The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

文学作品能看到的只要外在的1/8, 影响力深邃，随着时代不同人而改变，不会失去光泽；万物之所以精彩在于深藏不露

Code hero 铁汉子Hemingway heroes

a noble but tragic hero; fighting with the overwhelming force; though he knows that he will be defeated at last, he decides to act like a hero. In one sense Hemingway wrote all his life about one theme, which is neatly summed up in the famous phrase “grace under pressure”（重压下的风度）Major Works:

The Sun Also Rises 1926 (Jake Barnes) 《太阳照常升起》

A Farewell to Arms 1928 (a tragic story about war and love) (Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley) 《永别了，武器》

For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940 (Spanish civil war) (Robert Jordan) 《丧钟为谁而鸣》，取材于Donne的一句诗

The Old Man and the Sea 1952 (Santiago) 《老人与海》

The 20th Century American Poets：

Two characteristic strains：introspection自省&social criticism

[T.S.Eliot：The Waste Land

1. The relationship of art and life; reality and imagination; fact and miracle; chaos and order.

2. References to painting, music, and color.

3. Abstract, philosophical, and difficult. He saw poetry as a personal transaction between self and reality.

4. Meticulous language, though frequently exotic; coined words, and some are employed simply for sound effects.]

Imagism 意象派

A poetic movement of England and the U.S. that flourished from 1909 to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing”(直接处理主题) and the economy of wording. 简化措辞

poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impressions”

Three main principles of the Imagist Movement (1912) :

[1] direct treatment of poetic subjects

[2] elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, to use no word that does not contribute to the presentation.

[3] rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome.

意象派诗人：Ezra Pound、Wallace Stevens、William Carlos Williams

十四. Ezra Pound埃兹拉·庞德：

Idaho爱达荷洲Education: University of Pennsylvania 9 languages

worked for the Italian government in WW II, engaged in some radio broadcasts of anti-Semitism and pro-Fascism.

代表作: Cantos《诗章》; Hugh Selwyn Mauberley《休·赛尔温·毛伯利》;

In a Station of the Metro《在一个地铁车站》; Cathay《中国/华夏集》

William Carlos Williams 威廉·卡洛斯·威廉斯:The Red Wheel barrow 《红色手推车》

E.E.Cummings: L(a; r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r

十五. Robert Frost罗伯特·弗罗斯特:

罗伯特·弗罗斯特是20世纪最受欢迎的美国诗人。他曾赢得4次普利策奖和许多其他的奖励及荣誉，被称之为美国文学中的桂冠诗人。被称作“新英格兰诗人”，传统诗歌形式和五音抑扬格诗行，他的诗歌精雕细琢，没有一个字是多余的。

Major Features:

1. His verse was terrifying at first, showing the dark side of human life and society. Later, filled with sunshine.

2. New Englandas the setting; the subjects come from daily life of ordinary life; Rural poetry in

pastoral tradition. (Wordsworth; Emerson)

3. His themes include landscape and people of New England, loneliness and poverty of isolated farmers, beauty, terror and tragedy in nature.

4. Simple language, a graceful style and traditional forms of poetry.

作品： A Boy’s Will 《一个男孩的意愿》North of Boston 《波士顿的北部》

New Hamphshire 《新罕布什尔》Collected Poems 《诗集》

A Further Range 《又一片牧场》 A Witness Tree 《标记树》Fire and Ice 《火与冰》

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening 《雪夜林边驻脚》

The Road Not Taken 《未选择的路》

诗歌鉴赏：In both "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Road Not Taken," the speaker hesitates on route. Compare the hesitations. Do they derive from the same impulse and misgiving or are they distinct?

十六. Langston Hughes（兰斯顿·休斯）:

The first prominent black writer in American literary history.

---Poet Laureate of Harlem 哈莱姆桂冠诗人

---O’Henry of Harlem

---A poet, playwright, novelist, song writer, biographer, editor, newspaper columnist, translator, lecturer.

[Harlem Renaissance 哈莱姆文艺复兴

---In the 1920s in America, there was an upsurge of Black literature, popularly known as the “Harlem Renaissance”, out of which such eminent literary figures as Langston Hughes grew. So, “Harlem Renaissance”is a burst of literary achievement in the 1920s by Negro playwrights, poets and novelists who presented new insights into the American experience and prepared the way for the emergence of numerous Black writers after mid-twentieth century.

---The Harlem Renaissance began with a work entitled: New Negro: An Interpretation (by Alain Locke).

---Dialect, folklore, and Jazz. ]

作品：The Weary Blues 《萎靡的布鲁斯》Fine Clothes to the Jew 《抵押给犹太人的好衣服》The Dream Keeper and Other Poems 《梦乡人》

The Post-War Period 战后

Historical Background

1. Cold War

2.McCarthyism （persecution of communists）

3. The Vietnam War; the Korean War

4. Civil Rights Movement

5. Counter-culture Movement: political, economical and military achievement

Literature：

This period is the rising period of post-modern literature. Many forms of post-modern fiction appeared. The same mood in this period is despair, but continuing to search absurdity荒谬 of modern life; lonely, but searching for the meaning of existence; identity.

The Beat Generation 行为怪癖的一代垮掉的一代

The Beat Generation is a group of American young writers and artists popular in

the 1950s and early 1960s, known especially for their use of non-traditional forms and their rejection of conventional social values.

The term "Beat" was reportedly coined by Jack Kerouac in the late 1940s, quickly becoming a slang term in Americaafter World War II, meaning "exhausted" or "beat down" and provided this generation with a definitive label for their personal and social positions and perspectives.

[The core group consisted of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs。

Jack Kerouac（凯鲁亚克）：On the Road (1957),

Allen Ginsberg（艾伦·金斯堡）：Howl (1956)

William S. Burrough：Naked Lunch (1959)

Black American Literature：Ralph Ellison（艾利逊）: Invisible Man

Black Humor

To deal with tragic things in comic ways to make it more powerful and more tragic.

It refers to the use of morbid病态的 and absurd荒谬的 for darkly comic purpose. It carries the tone of anger, bitterness in the grotesque situation of suffering, anxiety, and death. It makes the reader laugh at the blackness of modern life. The writers usually do not laugh at the characters.]

主要作家：Joseph Heller; Thomas Pynchon; Kurt Vennegut; Vladimir Nabokov, etc

It is not only a war novel, but also a novel about people’s life in peacef ul time. This novel attacked the dehumanization of all contemporary institutions and corruptions of individuals who gain power in institutions. Armed-forces are the most outrageous example of the two evils.

人物：Yossarian、Doc Daneeka、The Chaplain、Colonel Cathcart、Milo Minderbinder

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he would have to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and di dn’t have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle. “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” he observed. “It’s the best there is,” Doc Daneeka agreed.