美国文学考试整理

人物——头衔&作品

Anne Bradstreet: the first American woman writer

Benjamin Franklin ﹙the first person to pick out American dream and the 1st writer to write autobiography,

the first self-made American)

Washington Irving ( Father of American literature)

Ralph Waldo Emerson (the founder of transcendentalism)

Walt Whitman (the pioneer of American poem revolution)

Ezra Pound (the founder of imagism movement)

T.S. Eliot (Nobel Prize winner)

F. Scott Fitzgerald (spokesman of Jazz Age)

Ernest Hemingway (Nobel Prize winner, typical writer of lost generation)

William Faulkner (Nobel Prize winner)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

William Cullen Bryant

Thomas Paine :Common sense

Thomas Jefferson :Declaration of Independence

Washington Irving ：The Sketch Book , “Rip Van Winkle”, “The Legend of sleepy Hollow”

James Fenimore Cooper :The Leather-stocking Tales

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Self Reliance , The Poet, The American scholar

Henry David Thoreau :Walden

Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass, Song of myself ,O Captain, My Captain!

Emily Dickinson : I’m Nobody

Edgar Allan Poe: :The Raven, Annabel Lee, To Helen

Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter

Herman Melville :Moby Dick

Henry James(p64): Daisy Miller, The Portrait of A Lady

Mark Twain(p75) :The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ;The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

(Hemingway once said that all modern American literature comes from the book written by Mark Twain )

Sherwood Anderson: Winesburg, Ohio

Stephen Crane: The Red Badge of Courage.

Theodore Dreiser :Sister Carrie An American Tragedy The Trilogy of Desire

Frank Norris: The Octopus

Jack London: The Call of the Wild

Ezra Pound: The cantos In a Station of the Metro

T.S. Eliot :The Waste Land

(William said that the publish of The Waste Land like an atom, destroy our world.)

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“

Wallace Stevens: Anecdote of the Jar

Robert Frost: The road not taken Stopping by woods on a Snowy Evening

F. Scott Fitzgerald: This Side of Paradise:The Great Gatsby；Tender is the Night

；

The Last tycoon

Ernest Hemingway:The Old Man and the Sea;The sun also rises;A farewell to arms ;

For Whom the Bell Tolls Short story : A Clean Well-lighted Place

William Faulkner:(Yoknapatawhpa County) The Sound and the Fury; Light in August;

Abslom, Abslom

；

Go down, Moses

John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath; Of Mice and Men

Puritanism清教主义: origin, doctrines, relationship with American literature

Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the

protestant church who wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrines of

predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from

God. American literature in the 17

th

century mostly consisted of Puritan literature. Puritanism had an enduring

influence on American literature. It had become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, so much a part of

national cultural atmosphere, rather than a set of tenets.

Romanticism浪漫主义

An approach from ancient Greek: Plato A literary trend: Germany&England& France

Fields: literature, philosophy, art, religion etc.

（背景） spread of sudden influx of immigration

pioneers pushing the frontier further west/Economic boom

D.A promising new land with prevailed optimistic moods

（原因）A. Fast development of the new nation (flood of immigrants; pioneers pushing the frontier further west;

industrialization; economic boom; a promising new land with prevailed optimistic moods)

B. Development of journalism (Some influential periodicals appeared, such as The Atlantic Monthly.

They need more literary productions.)

C. Foreign influence (Review history of English literature.) (from the 18th century classicism to

sentimentalism to Pre-Romanticism to Romanticism which can be divided into passive group and active group)

(most influential British writers to American Romanticists-Walter Scott)

（特征）A. subjectivity: stressing emotion rather than reason

B. Stressing freedom, individuality, humanity

C. Idealism rather than materialism

D. close relationship with nature, belief in supernatural elements

Transcendentalism先验主义

A broad, philosophical movement in New England during the Romantic era (peaking between 1835 and 1845).

It stressed the role of divinity in nature and the individual ‘s intuition, and exalted feeling over reason.

（原因）foreign influences: 1) introduction of idealistic philosophy from Germany and France;

2) Oriental mysticism such as Hinduism and philosophy of the Chinese Confucius

and Mencius;

native influence: American Puritan tradition

（特征） of New England Transcendentalism （key point）

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

universe.

2 The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual.

3 The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God.

（文学代表） of New England Transcendentalism -- （key point）

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803--1882)拉尔夫.瓦尔多.爱默生founder

Henry David Thoreau (1817--1862)亨利.大卫.梭罗

Realism 现实主义

it is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. It

places more than the usual amount of emphasis on interior characterization and on the motives, and internal

action which springs from and develops external action. In Psychological Realism, character and

characterization are more than usually important. Henry James is considered a great master of psychological

realism.

Local colorism乡土文学

1）Generally speaking, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region

or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town.

2) Local colorists were 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 minutely accurate

descriptions of the life of their regions, they worked from personal experience to record the facts of a local

environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the local.

3) major local colorists is Mark Twain.

Naturalism 自然主义

American Naturalism自然主义: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. The naturalists attempt

to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who

were determined by environment and heredity. It emphasized that the world was amoral, the men and women

had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was

misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas naturalism pervaded the works of

such American writers as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.

American Naturalism(美国自然主义文学)：The American naturalists accepted the more negative

interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in

literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits

conditioned by social and economic forces.2) naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in

writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a

gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.3>Dreiser is a leading figure of his school.

Modernism 现代主义

During the first decades of the 20th century,modernism became an international tendency against positivism and

representational art and literature .

It began in Germany in the 1890s, spread worldwide,and ended in the early 1940s.

The essence of modernism: was a break with the past, and also fostered a belief in art and literature as a

avenue to self-fulfillment.

Ways of expression: symbolism,impressionism,post-impressionism,futurism, constructivism, imagism,

vorticism, expressionism, dadaism, and surrealism.

（特征）ism dramatized discontinuity

中断

and imminent severance

分离

from the past, its values and

artistics forms by incorporating them in new literary production.

ism had a sence of fragmentation

分裂感

in social communities and the fragmentation within

the individual himself.

distinctive feature of literary modernism was its strong and conscious break with traditional

forms,perceptions and techniques of expression, and its great concern with language and all

aspects of medium. It was persistently experimental。

Imagism 意象主义

Three influences:

French symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese literature “haiku”

(特征) a spirit of revolt against conventions,imagism was anti-romantic and anti-Victorian.

m produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern.

a sense,imagism was equivalent to naturalism in fiction.

m tired to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretaion or

comment by the poet.

The Lost Generation 迷惘的一代

A group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group never

formed a cohesive literary movement, but it consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest

Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams, Thornton Wilder, Archibald MacLeish, and Hart

Crane. The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who, in a conversation with

Hemingway, used an expression she had heard from a garage manager, une géneration perdue ("a lost

generation"), to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I (1914-1918) experiences and

disillusioned with American society. Hemingway later used the phrase as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also

Rises (1926)

the jazz age 爵士乐时代

The Jazz Age, also known as the American High, describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years

between World War I and World War II, particularly in North America, largely coinciding with the Roaring

Twenties; with the rise of the Great Depression, the values of this age saw much decline. The focus of the

elements of this age, in some contrast with the Roaring 20s, in historical and cultural studies, are somewhat

different, with a greater emphasis on Modernism perse.

American dream 美国梦

American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually

implies a successful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism（资本主义）, its

associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华） and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights.

Free verse自由诗体

Poetry without a fixed beat or regulat rhyme scheme .

Original sin原罪

Oversoul 超灵

It is called by Emerson was an all-pervading unitary spiritual power of goodness, omnipotent, from which all

things came and of which everyone was a part. It existed in nature and in humanity alike and constituted the

chief element of the universe. Generally, the Ovesoul referred to spirit or God as the most important thing in the

universe.