美国文学选读期末复习资料

美国文学选读期末复习资料

The Colonial Period or The Enlightenment and Revolution Period American Puritanism ( 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、参及起草《独立宣言》

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.

浪漫主义两大主题：爱和大自然的力量

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 value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source 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、Ralph Waldo Emerson 拉尔夫·华尔多·爱默生---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）.

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.

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 overwhelming 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

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. Puritan severity toward sex and matrimony and its tendency to suppress bright color and true 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、《老人及海》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.

Moby Dick相关人名、地名

人名：Ishmael Ahab Queequeg Moby Dick

地名：Pequod Jeroboam (where they meet Gabriel, a prophet.

Samuel Enderby ( whose captain is Boomer)

The Rachel The Delight

六、Henry David Thoreau 亨利·大卫·梭罗

As a young man, Thoreau took a more than usual interest in the natural world. Like Emerson, but more than him, he saw nature as a genuine restorative, healthy influence on man’s spiritual well-being, and regarded it as a symbol of spirit.

Thoreau was very critical of modern civilization. It was, in his opinion, degrading and enslaving man.

新英格兰超验主义的重要作家，最有代表性的两件事情就是在瓦尔登湖畔度过的两年和在监狱度过的一夜。

代表作：On the Duty of Civil Disobedience 《论公民的不服从》

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

七、Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 亨利·沃兹沃思·朗费罗

Features of Longfellow’s poetic works

---Chief romantic tendencies as humanitarian attitude, love of nature and love of beauty.

---The first American poet to write narrative poems.

---Generally simple ideas expressed musically and powerfully. Above all, there is a joyousness in them, a spirit of optimism and faith in the goodness of life which evokes immediate response in the emotions of his readers.

---Simplicity 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 independence 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 Age of Realism

The war led many to question the assumptions shared by the transcendentalists ---- natural goodness, 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 that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native.”The 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）

十一、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 and contrast with European decadence and the moral and psychological complications arising therefrom.

Like Hawthorne, James regarded evil as essentially of inward cause and repeatedly emphasized magnanimity 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 and 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 represent life as he sees it.

American Naturalism 自然主义

---Living in a cold, indifferent, and essentially Godless world, man was no longer free in any sense. He was completely thrown upon himself for survival. Life became a struggle for survival.

---Both Howells and Twain had written their best work and had said what they had to say. Apparently they were too old and too set in their ways to reorientate themselves in the new period. ---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 emergence of naturalism does not mark a radical break with realism. It is a new and harsher realism.The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral及道德无关的, 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；Theodore Dreiser；Jack London；O’Henry

十二、Stephen Crane 史蒂芬·克莱恩

是美国著名的文学家,自然主义手法Naturalism( Human are controlled by laws of environment 环境and heredity遗传)。其作品特点：realistic，naturalistic, impressionistic.同时其作品大多关注社会底层，但比较pessimistic. 《海上扁舟》中运用了自然主义和印象主义（光的变化）的手法

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

The Red Badge of Courage 《红色英勇勋章》；

The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky 《新娘来到黄天镇》

The Blue Hotel 《蓝色旅店》

The Open Boat 《海上扁舟》；人物：船长Captain, 注油工Oiler（最后死了）厨师Cook, 记者Correspondent

A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:

"Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the universe,

"The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation."

---Stephen Crane

Jack London：The Call of the Wild；Martin Eden

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

Theodore Dreiser：Trilogy of Desire: 1.The Financier 2. The Titan 3. The Stoic；

Sister Carrie；

Jennie Gerhardt；

An American Tragedy

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)

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 house 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)

十三、Sherwood Anderson 舍伍德·安德森

代表作：Winesburg, Ohio 《俄亥俄州的温斯堡镇》，又称“小镇畸人”

Hands;

Paper Pills

Winesburg, Ohio

---a short story collection containing more than 20 connected stories about some grotesque people. ---Each story is about one or more people with a ruling kind of passion which distorts their personalities.

---Grotesque people also possesses love, passion and beauty nobody knows because other people in the town only care for money. The collection is a bitter satire on the utilitarianism that prevailed in American society.

---Vivid picture of a small town in transition from rural to industrial; alienation, loneliness, wanting of love and understanding.

十四、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 their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness." …….

作品：The Side of Paradise 《人间天堂》

The Beautiful and the Damned 《漂亮的冤家》

Flappers and Philosophers 《姑娘们及哲学家们》

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 woman 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 finally arrives, a shadow of tragedy is cast over what Gatsby long imagined would be his triumphant moment.

主要人物：Nick Carraway、Jay Gatsby、Daisy Buchanan、Tom Buchanan Jordan Baker、Myrtle Wilson、George Wilson

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）

十五、William Faulkner 威廉·福克纳(1897-1962)

1949 Nobel price:“for his powerful and artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.”

---He is particularly interested in describing the decay of Deep South after the Civil War. Under his pen, the aristocratic families fail to live up to their historical greatness.

---He writes about the histories of a number of southern aristocratic families such as the Compsons, the Sartorises, the Sutpens and the McCaslins. He sees their inevitable fall.

---Faulkner is a difficult writer. He structures his stories in his own original fashion and is proficient in employing a distinctive narrative method. 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) 《喧嚣及骚动》，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

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

He is a legendary hero in American literature. Besides his novels, as a man his life experience is quite a miracle.

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.

Code hero or 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.