美国文学选读复习资料
American Puritanism: the settlement of North American continent by English started in the early 17th century. Under siege from church and crown, it sent an offshoot in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century to the northern English colonies in the New World—a migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England. Puritanism, however was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincident with the founding of New Zealand; it was also a way of being in the world—a style of response to lived experience—that has reverberated through American life ever since. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature.
American Romanticism
The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th \\century through the outbreak of the Civil War.
• Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. (subjectivity)
• For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense.
• They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group, against authority.
• The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts.
New England Poets: William Cullen Bryant; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;
Writers: James Fenimaore Cooper The Spy (1821) The Leatherstocking Tales (1823—1841) The Pilot (1824) The Red Rover (1827) Washington Irving（“The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon” “Bracebridge Hall”“Tales of a Traveller”“The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus ”）
American Transcendentalism
In the realm of art and literature it meant the shattering of pseudo-classic rules and forms in favor of a spirit of freedom, the creation of works filled with the new passion for nature and common humanity and incarnating a fresh sense of the wonder, promise, and romance of life.
Transcendentalism
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. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society.
③ The 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 overwhelming presence.
Writers
Emerson’s：Nature；Self-Reliance；The American Scholar；The Over-soul；
H. D. Thoreau：Walden
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Walt Whitman：Leaves of Grass Emily Dickinson：I Died for Beauty；Because I could not stop for Death
William Faulkner(17-1962 1949 Nobel price
As I Lay Dying (1930)
Light in the August ( 1932)
Absalom, Absalom (1936)
Go Down Moses (1942)
Ernest Hemingway
Iceberg Principle (Theory)
“grace under pressure”
Major Works:
The Sun Also Rises 1926 (Jake Barnes)
A Farewell to Arms 1928 (a tragic story about war and love) (Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley)
For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940 (Spanish civil war) (Robert Jordan)
The Old Man and the Sea 1952 (Santiago)
Herman Melville
代表作：白鲸Moby Dick Other Works are: Billy Budd,Typee, Omoo, Mardi.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Mosses from an Old Manse; Twice-Told Tales; The Marble Faun; The House of the Seven Gables
Realism
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.
Lost generation: The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-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.2>full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the
three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.
American Dream
The is the idea held by many in the United States that through hard work, courage and determination one could achieve prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations.
The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America.
Puritanism
American Puritanism was practice and belief of Puritans. Puritans were the people who wanted to purify the Church of England and then were persecuted in England. They came to America for various reasons. But because they were a group of serious and religious people, they carried a code of value and a philosophy of life. To them, religion was the most important thing. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin, total depravity and limited atonement for God’s grace. They also believed in hard working, piety and sobriety. In a word, American Puritanism exerted great influences upon American thought and literature.
What is “stream-of-consciousness”?
Stream of consciousness is a term coined by William James in his The Principles of Psychology to describe the flow of thoughts of the waking mind. Now it is widely used in a literary context to describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the characters, without resorting(jiezhu) to objective description or conventional dialogue. It was adapted and developed by Joyce, V. Woolf, and others.The ability to represent the flux of a character
’
s thought, impressions, emotions, or reminiscences, often without logical sequence or syntax, marked a revolution in the form of novel at that time.
Era of Modernism（现代主义）
The years from 1910 to 1930 are often called the Era of Modernism, for there seems to have been in both Europe and America a strong awareness of some sort of “break” with the past. Movements in all the arts overlapped and succeeded one another with amazing speed. The new artists shared a desire to capture the complexity of modern life, to focus on the variety and confusion of the twentieth century by reshaping and sometimes discarding the ideas and habits of the nineteenth century. The Era of Modernism was indeed the era of the New.
