英美文学考点(美国文学部分)

. 美国文学部分

浪漫主义时期The Romantic Period

第一位：washington irving

1.A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, which written under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a great success.

2. The Sketch Book won a international fame on both sides of the Atlantic.

3. ―Rip Van Winkle‖ and ―The Legend of Sleepy Hollow‖ got ideas form German legends.

4. the Bracebrige Hall and Tales of a Traveler.

5. the Alhambra is usually regarded as Irving’s ―Spanish Skethch Book‖. Only because it has a strong flavor of spanish culture.

6.Iring’s taste was essentially conservative.

7. washing Iving’s has always been regarded as a writer who perfected the best classic sytle that American Literature ever produced.

8. Washing Iving is worth the honor of being ―the American Goldsmith‖for his literary craftsmanship.

9. Irving’s pervasive theme of nostalgia怀旧的) for the unrecoverable past is at once made unforgettable.

第二位：Emerson

1. Transcendentalism ---the romantic period in the history of American literature.

2. the chief spokesman of this spiritual movement is Ralph Waldo Emerson

3. transcendental club, the unofficial manifesto for the club is Nature.

4. Nature did not establish him as an important American writer, his last reputation began

with the publication of Essays, which convey the best of his philosophical discussions and transcendental pursuits. Such as The American Scholar , Self-Reliance , The Over-Soul.

5. The Poet, a reflection upon the aesthetic problems of the present state of American

literature

6. The Experience, a discussion about the conflict between idealism and ordinary life.

7.transcendentalism---with its focus on the intuitive konwledge of human beings to grasp

the absolute in the universe and the divinity of man. Emerson put forward his philosopy of over-soul, the importance of individual, nature.

8.emerson and other transcendentalists believed that there should be a emtotional

comunication between a individual soul and the universal over-soul.

9. a ―transparent eyeball‖ marks a paradoxical state of being, in which one is merged into

nature, the over-soul. While at the same time retaining a unique perception of experience.

10. emerson’s essays often have a casual style, for most of them were derived from his

journals and lectures.

11. 堪称“the American Scolar‖

12. in the essay Emerson clearly expresses the main priciples of his transcendentalist pursuit and his

love for nature.

第三位：Hawthorne

1. Hawthorne remains one of the most interesting, yet most ambivalent (矛盾情感)writers in the

American literary history.

2. The Twice-Told Tales, a collection of short stories which attracted critical attention.

3. The Mosses of an Old Manse, Snow-Image and other Twice-Told Tales best demonstrate

Hawthorne’s early obsessions with the moral and phycological consequences of pride, selfishness and secret guilt that manifest themselves in human beings.

4. The Scarlet Letter often regarded as the best of his works, tells a simply but very moving story in

which 4 people living in a Puritan Community are involved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different ways.

5. The House of the Seven Gables

6. The Blithedale Romance(福谷传奇) is a novel he wrote to reveal his own experiences on the Brook

Farm and his own methods as a psychological novelist.

7. The Mable Faun(玉石雕像) set in Italy, the book is concerned about the dark aberrations(失常方面)

of human spirit.

8. The Birthmark

9. The Young Goodman Brown –everyone possesses evil secret

10. The Minister’s Dark Veil

11. The Rappaccini’s Daughter

12. Hawthorne’s view of man, human history originates, to a great extent, in Puritanism

13. The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter 反清教思想，同时反清教思想on the one

hand, it provides him with a subject, on the other hand, with the Puritan world and society as a historical background, he disscusses some of the most improtant issues that concern the moral life of man and human society.

14. the structure and form of his writings is always carefully worked out to cater for the thematic

concern.(精心设计的)

15. allegorist预言家symbolist

第四位：walt whitman

1. Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s representative work, 体现了American democratic ideals 反映了

American Independent War and Cival War.

2. Leaves of Grass has nine editions. In this giant work, openness, freedom, individualism are all that

concerned him. His aim was nothing less than to express some new poetic feelings and to initiate poetic traditon in which difference should be recognized.

3. the poet’s essential purpose was to indentify his ego with the world and more specifically with the

democratic ―en-masse‖ of the America, which is established in the openning lines of the ―Song of Myself‖

4. most of poems in Leaves of Grass sing of the ―en-masse‖and the self as well.

5. politically committed 政治抒情诗such as Dump Taps

6. Cavalry Crossing a Ford, Whitman expressed much mouring for the sufferings of the young lives in

the battlefield and showed a determination to carry on fighting until the final victory.

7. when Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d mournful as these poems are, a reader can detect a thin

trace of ecstasy for the victory of the progress.

8. Whitman’s potetic style is marked by the use of the poetic‖Ⅰ‖

9. free verse, that is , poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.

10. parallelism and phonetic recurrence at the beginning of the lines are contribute to the musicality of

his poems.

11. one of the most often-used methods in his poems is to make colors and images fleet past the mind’s

eye of the readers.

第五位Herman Melville

1. Moby-Dick is his masterpiece.

2. Billy Budd, his second famous work

3. Melville’s writings can be divided into two groups, each with something in common in the light of the

thematic concern and imginative focus.

4. Typee, Omoo, Mardi which drew from his adventures among the people of the south pacific island.

Redburn is a semi-autobiographical novel, concerining the sufferings of a genteel youth among the brutal sailors. Whitejacket relates his life on the United States of man-of –war.

5. pierre 作者本意是想发动妇女文学革命，但却遭到强烈反对，结果名声下降。

6. Bartleby , the Scrivenr, a short story symbolizing the loniness and anonymity and passivity of a little

man in the big city. Benito Cereno, a novella about a ship whose black slave cargo munity holds their captain a terrorized hostage. The Confidence- Man, explore the paradoxes of belief and the optimisms and hypocrisies of American life.

7. Billy Budd, which again deals with the sea and sailors , and the theme of the conflice betwwen

innocence and corruption.

8. Moby-Dick is regarded as the first American prose epic.

9. 有关人物和文章主题意思请细看教科书。

第二部分

现实主义时期The Realistic Period

1. The period of ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the age of realism in the literary

history of the United States.

2. Realism was a reaction against the romanticism or a move away from the bias and towards romance

and self-creating fictions, and paved the way for modernism.

3. Mark Twain referred to as the Gilded Age.

4. William Dean Howells Criticism and Fiction. He confess I do not care to judge any work of the

imagination without first applying this test to it .

5. The three prominent writers of the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James.

6. they approached the harsh realities and pressures in the post-cival War society either by a

comprehensive picture of modern life in its various occupations , class stratifications and manners, or by a psycological exploration of man’s subconsciousness.

7. Tough the three prominent writers wrote more or less at the same time, they differed in their

understanding of the ―truth‖. Mark Twain and Howells paid more attention to the ―life‖of the Americans. Henry James had apparently laid a greater emphasis on the innner world of man.

Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived. Mark Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forfront of his stories. This particular concern about the local character of a region came about as the local colorism, a unique variation of American literary realism.

8. 除了Mark Twain, the other local colorists may include Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland,

Joseph Kirkland.

9. Generally, their writhings are concerned with the life of a small and well-defined region or province.

The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. Local colorists are consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes. Yet for all

their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to miutely accurate desciptions of the life of their regions.

10. 达尔文进化论对美国思想的影响和19世纪法国文学对美国的影响，产生了other school of realism,

American naturalism. Darwin, in his The Origin of Species, Descent of Man hypothesized that over the millennia man had evolved from the lower way of life.

11. In a word, naturalism is evolved from the realism when the author’s tune become less serious and

less sympothetic but more ironic and pessimistic. It is no more than a different philosophical approach to reality ,or to human exsistence.

第一位Mark Twain

第二位Henry James

1、 Henry James was the first American writer to conceive his career in international theme.

2、 William James, who made great contribution to the theory of stream-of-consciousness

technique.

3、 The materialistic bent of the American life and its lack of culture and sophistication, be believed,

could not provide him with enough materials for great literary works.

4、 1915. he became a naturalized British citizen. The order of Merit

5、 it is his novels and literary essays that make him a fascinating case in the American literary

history and a conspicuous figure in world literature.

6、 The literary career of Henry James is generally divided into 3 periods. In the firsr period, James

took great interest in international themes. In almost all the stories and novels during this period, James treated with great care the clashes between 2 different cultures and moral and emotional problems of Americans in Europe,or Europeans in America.

7、The American, tells a story about a young and innocent American confronting the complexity of

the European life

8、Daisy Miller, a novells about a young American girl who gets killed by Winter in Rome. Brought

James international fame for the first time.

9、The Europeans, the scene is shifted back to the America, where some Europeans, who are

actually expatriated Americans, learn with difficulty to adapt themselves to the American life.

10、The Portrait of A Lady, Henry James’s masterpiece, which incanates clashes between

the Old world and the New in the life journey of an American girl in a European cultural environment.

11、James experimented with different themes and forms in his middle period.

△The Bostons, which satirized the women liberation that took place in Boston.

△The Princess Casamassima, which exposed the anarchist conspiracy in the slum of London.

△The Private Life. The Death of a Lion . the Middle Years讲的是艺术家与社会的关系，艺术家不应该为了情感而牺牲真理。

△The Turn of the Screw,a story about the troubled and abnormal psychology of oppressed chiildren, in which the whole household is terrorized by ―ghosts‖.

△The Beast in the Jungle,which focuses on the imaginative obsession of the some haunted women and men with their personal disater in future.

12、In the last and major period, James returned to his international theme

From 1895 to 1900. he worte novellas and stories dealing with the childhood and adolescence.

△What Maise knows. The Wings of the Dove. The Ambassadors. The Golden Bowel these demanding novels are widely considered to be Jame’s most influential contribution to the literature.

Jame’s fame usually rests upon the novels and stories with the international theme.

△Henry Jame’s literary criticism

The Art of Fiction clearly indicates the aim of novel is to present life.

△Henry Jame’s realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter. This emphasis on the psychology and human consciousness proves to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and has great influence on the coming generations.This is why Henry Jame is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th-century stream-of-consciousness and the founder of the psychological realism

Henry James is not only one of the most important realist of the period before the First World War, but also the most expert stylist of his time.

第三位Emily Dickinson

△Dickinson’s poetry writing began in the early 1850s, altogether, he wrote1775 poems.

△Letter to the world, a way to bridge her private world with the public.

△Dickinson’s poems are usually based on her own experiences, her sorrows and joys.

△I heard a Fly Buzz- When I died,a poem universally considered to one of her masterpieces.

△Love is another subject Dickinson dwelt on. One of group her love poems treats the suffering and frustratio love can cause. If you were coming in the Fall、There came a Day at summer’s full、I can’t live with you.

△The other group of love poems focuses on the physical aspect of desire.

I am wife- I’ve finished that. I’m ceded- I’ve stopped being theirs

△ A few examples to show Dickinson’s confusion and doubt about the role of the women in the 19th century America.

△Dickinson’s poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no titles, hence always quoted by their first lines. Ther is a particular stress pattern, in which dashes are used as a musical device to creat cadence and captial letter as a means of the emphasis.

△The form of her poetry is more or less like that of the hymns in community churches, familiar, communal, and sometimes, irregular.

This is my letter to the World. I heard a Fly buzz- when I died.

I like to see it lap the miles. Because I could not stop for Death

第四位：Theodore Dreiser

△Theodore Dreiser is generally acknowledged as one of America’s literary naturalists.

△Influence by Balzac, Charles Darwin. Herbert Spenser

△Short fictions: Nigger Jeff, His Theresa, Old Rogaum

△The trilogy of Desire: The Financier, The Titan. The Stoic斯多葛

△The Genius, a classic story of a ―misunderstood artist‖, was once condemned for obscenity and blasphemy.

△In 1925, Dreiser’s greatest work An American Tragedy appeared.

△In 1927, he accepted an invitation to visit Russia and wrote Dreiser Looks at Russian the following year, he joined Communist Party shortly before his death in 1945.

△Literary naturalism: naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as improtant deterministic forces of individualized characters who are presented in special and detailed circumstances.

△In Sister Carrie, Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards.

△An American Tragedy proves to be his greatest work and by entitling this book with such a name,

Dreiser intended to tell us it is the social pressure that makes Clyde’s downfall inevitable.

△Clyde’s tragedy is a tragedy that depends upon the American social system which encouraged people to pursue the ―dream of success‖ at all costs.

△One of the desires is for money which was a motivating purpose of life in the United States in the late 19th century.

△There is no comment , no judgement but facts of life in stories.

第三部分：The Modern Period

△the First World War, became the emblem of all wars in the twentieth century, which means violence, devastation, blood and death.

△United State’s participation in World War I marked a crucial stage in the nation’s evolution to a world power.

△The idea of ―seize the day‖ or‖ enjoy the present‖ was pervasive, as opposed to placing all hope in future.

△In a word, there was a decline in moral standard and the first few decades of the twentieth century was best decribed as a spiritual wasteland.

△Apart from Darwinism, which was still a big influence on the writers of this period, the two thinkers whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period were the German Karl Marx and the Austrian Sigmund Freud.

△Marx was a sociologist who believed that the root cause of all behavior was economic, and that the leading feature of the economic life was the division of the society in to antagonistic classes based on a relation to the means of production.

△Freud propounded an idea of human beings themselves as grounded in the ―unconscious‖ that controlled a great deal of overt behavior, and made the practice of the psychoanalysis which emphasized the improtance of the unconsicous and irration in the human psyche.

△In painting, both the Frech impressionist and the German expressionist artists avoided the representation of external reality and depicted the human reality in a rather subjective point of view.

△Disillusioned and disgusted by the frivolous, greedy, and heedless way of life in America, they began to write and they wrote from their own experiences in the war.

△In ―the Lost Generation‖ or modern American literature are famous poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost.

△Ezra Pound----a leading spokesman of the famous imagist movement in the history of American literature can never be ignored and his one-image poem best demonstrates his principles of what a new poetry should be.

△While sharing the same pursuit of imagism, Willam Carlos Williams rooted his poetic imagination in American native tradition.

△Robert Frost is always liked by the Americans because the subject and the landscape of his poems are forever New England and his simplicity never fails to reveal some profound truth.

△ E. E.Cumings, disregarding grammar and punctuation, used ―i‖ instead of I to refer to himself as

a protect againse self-importance.

△Wallace Stevens, whose style is more cultivated and refined, focused his attention on man and things in his world.

△待续

第一位：Ezra Pound

△Ezra Pound, a leading spokesman of the ―Imagist Movement‖,was one of the most improtant poets in his time.

△Pound’s poetic works include twelve volume of verse which were later collected and published in Collectde Early Poems of Ezra Pound, and Personae, and some longer pieces as Hugh Sewlyn Mauberley and his life’s work, the one hundred and sixteen Cantos that he published beween 1916 and 1969. pound’s earlier poetry is saturated with the familiar poetic subjects that characterize the 19th century Romanticism.

△Critical essays: Make It New, The ABC of Reading , Literary essays, Polite essays. These essays best reflected Pound’s appraisals of literary traditions and of modern writing.

△Translations: The Translations of Ezra Pound, Confucius and Shing-Ching

△Imagist movement is a movement that advanced modernism in arts which concentrated on reforming the medium of poetry as opposed to Romanticism, especially Tennyson’s wordiness and high-flown language 夸夸其谈in poetry.

△Pound endorsed the group’s three main priciples.1、which include direct treatment of poetic subjects 2、elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words 3、rhythmical compositon in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome.(单次重复)

△The point of the Imagist , Pound wrote in 1914, is that it does not use images as ornaments.

The image itself is the speech. The image is the word beyong formulated language.超语言形式△Pound’s famous one-image poem‖In a Station of the Metro‖ would serve as a typical example of the Imagist ideas.

△The other important aspects of Pound’s poetic work include his use of myth and personae.

△As to his language, his lines are usually oblique间接yet marvelously compressed.凝练

△I n a station of the Metro. This poem is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris subway station.

△ A River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter. This is a verse letter in which the speaker communicates indirectly, by means of vivid images and shifting tones, the history of her feelings for her absent husband to whom she writes.

△ A Pact : in this poem, Pound started to find some agreement between ―whitmanesque‖ free verse, which he had attacked for its carelessness in composition, and the ―verse libre‖ of the Imagist who showed more concern for formal values.

第二位：Robert Lee Frost

△Though he is usually considered as a regional poer whose subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in New England, he wrote many poems that investigate the basic themes of man’s life in his long poetic career: the individual’s relationships to himself, to his fellowman, to his world, to his God.

△His first collection A Boy’s Will, whose lyrics trace a boy’s development from self-centered idealism to maturity, is markde by an intense but retrained emotion and the characteristic flavor of New England life.

△North of Boston is described by the author as ―a book of people‖, which shows a brilliant insight into New England character and the background that formed it .

△Many poems such as Mending the Wall . Home Burial. Mountain Interval.

△The Road Not Taken,in this meditative poem, the speaker tells us how the course of his life was determined when he came upon two roads that diverged in a wood. Forced to choose, he ―took

the less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.‖ Birches, New Hampshire that won Frost the first of four Pulitzer Prizes includes Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. This is a deceptively simple poem in which the speaker literally stops his love horse in the winter twilight to observe the beauty of the forest scene, and then is moved to continue his journey.

△West Running Brook.

△Collected Poems and A Further Range,更远的山which gathered Frost’s second and third Pulitzer Prizes

△Frost’s fourth Pulitzer Prize was a warded for A Witness Tree which includes “The Gift Outright”- 直率的礼物

△ A religious question: “After Apple-picking”can a man’s best effort satisfy God?This poem is so vivid a memory of experience on the farm in which the end of labor leaves the speaker with a sense of completion and fulfillment yet finds him blocked from the success by winter’s approach and physical weariness.

△ A Masque of Reason and A Masque of Mercy are comic-serious dramatic narratives, in both of which biblical characters in modern settings discuss ethics 伦理and man’s relations to God. 第三位Eugene O’Neill

△Eugene O’Neill is unquestionably the America’s greatest playwright, and the founder of the American drama. He won the Pulitzer Prize four times and was the only dramatist ever to a Nobel Prize.

△James O’Neill—The Count of Monte Cristo

△One-act melodramatic plays at first, including Bound East to Cardiff, which describes the dying sailor Yank and his dream about security and peace that could never exist.

△O’Neill’s full long-length play Beyong the Horizon. The theme of the Beyong the Horizon is the choice between the life and death, interaction of subjective and objective factors. This theme is dramatized more explictly in The Straw and Anna Christie. Anna Christie is more of a success because it deploys the developing complexity of O’Neill’s personal vision, showing us that life is

a closed circle of possibilities that it is impossible to escape.

△Symbolic expressionism : the Emperor Jones, Hairy Ape, All Gods Chillun Got Wings, Desire under the Elms. These plays are daring farays攻击into race relations, class conflicts, sexual bondage, social critiques, and American tragedies on Greek model, what is more, the expressionistic techniques are used in these plays to highlight the theatrical effect of the rapture between the two sides of an individual human being, the private and the public.

△With the non-realistic form to contain his tragic vision: Lazarus Laughed, (won the third Pulitzer Prize)strange Interlude. The Great God Brown

△The Iceman Cometh is his masterpiece

△Long Day’s Journey Into Night has gained its status as a world classic and simutaneously marks the climax of O’Neill’s literary career and the coming age of American drama.

△Of all plays O’Neill wrote, many of them are tragedies,dealing with the basic issues of human existence and predicament(困境)：life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation疏远and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration,etc.

第四位Fransis Scott Fitzgerald

△Fransis Scott Fitzgerald is often acclaimed the literary spokesman of the Jazz Age.

△His first novel: This Side of Paradise

△His second short stories and novels: The Beautiful and Damned.following a similar theme seen

in This Side of Paradise, it portrays the emotional and spiritual collapse of a wealthy young man during an unstable marriage.

△The Great Gatsby, which made him one of the greatest American novelists.

△The tender is the Night, in which he traces the decline of a young American psychiatrist whose marrige to a beautiful and wealthy patient drains榨干his personal energies and corrodes毁坏his professional career.

△Short-story writer: All the Sad Young Men. Flappers and Philosophers. Taps at Reveille.

Tales of the Jazz Age.

△His best short story is the Babylon Revisited, which depicts an American’s return to Paris in the 1930s and his regretful realizaiton that the past is beyond his reach, since he can neither alter it nor make any amends.

△Fitzgerald’s ficitonal world is the best embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz Age, in which he shows a particular interest in the upper-class society, especially the upper-class young people.△Fitzgerald is the great stylist in American literature.

△He follows the Jamesian tradition in using the scenic method in his chapters.

第五位：Ernest Hemingway

△In Our Time is the first book to present a Hemingway hero—Nick Adams, short story about the growth of a young man call Nick Adams from the childhood in Michigan Woods and his return as

a war veteran.

△The Sun Also Rises is Hemingway’s first true novel.

△Hemingway’s second big success is A Farewll to Arms,telling us the story about the tragic love affair of a wounded American soldier with a British nurse.

△His later work: For Whom the Bell Tolls.(一个美国志愿者参加西班牙内战，尽管他知道他的奋斗注定要失败，但是他还是继续斗争为了freedom and democracy.) The Old Man and the Sea.(讲的是人类与自然的斗争)

△Other works: 1、Men without Women is a collection of short stories. Including ①Undefeated

②The Killers

③Fifty Ground

2、Death in the Afternoon Hemingway presents his philosophy about life and

death through the depection of the bullfight as a kind of microcosmic tragedy.

3、The Green Hills of Affrica is about how the writer can survive against the

threats to his talents of genteel traditions in America: success , money, and

domestic entanglements.

4、The Snows of Kilimanjano tells a brilliant short story about a mortally wounded

American writer who attempts to redeem his imagination from the corrosions

of wealth and domestic strife.

5、To Have and Have Not is one of many to show Hemingway’s characteristic

pattern of a lonely individual struggling against nature and the environment. △the dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eight of it being above water.

△Indian Camp: the title indicates that the material is contemporary and to some extent, representative of the early twentieth-century experience. A reference to the well-known phrase from ―the Book of Common Prayer‖ :‖give us peace in our time, O’Lord‖. The title is very ironic because there is no peace in the story. The book, arranged in a chronological order, introduces readers to Nick Adams from his childhood to adolescence and manhood. In the later stories,

Nick is wounded. The wound is a symbol and the climax for a process of the development of the character of Hemingway Hero; it is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace.失去尊严

第五位：William Faulkner

△Of Faulkner’s literary works, four novels are mastepieces by any standards; The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! Go Down, Moses!

△His first novel is Soldier’s Pay.

△His first short story is A Rose for Emily