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美国文学史

A Concise History of American Literature

What is literature?

Literature is language artistically used to achieve identifiable literary qualities and to convey meaningful messages.

Chapter 1 Colonial Period

I.Background: Puritanism

1.features of Puritanism

(1)Predestination: God decided everything before things occurred.

(2)Original sin: Human beings were born to be evil, and this original sin can be

passed down from generation to generation.

(3)Total depravity

(4)Limited atonement: Only the “elect” can be saved.

2.Influence

(1) A group of good qualities –hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety (serious and

thoughtful) influenced American literature.

(2)It led to the everlasting myth. All literature is based on a myth – garden of Eden.

(3)Symbolism: the American puritan’s metaphorical mode of perception was chiefly

instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctly

American.

(4)With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple and direct; the rhetoric is

plain and honest, not without a touch of nobility often traceable to the direct

influence of the Bible.

II.Overview of the literature

1.types of writing

diaries, histories, journals, letters, travel books, autobiographies/biographies, sermons

2.writers of colonial period

(1)Anne Bradstreet

(2)Edward Taylor

(3)Roger Williams

(4)John Woolman

(5)Thomas Paine

(6)Philip Freneau

III.Jonathan Edwards

1.life

2.works

(1)The Freedom of the Will

(2)The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended

(3)The Nature of True Virtue

3.ideas – pioneer of transcendentalism

(1)The spirit of revivalism

(2)Regeneration of man

(3)God’s presence

(4)Puritan idealism

IV.Benjamin Franklin

1.life

2.works

(1)Poor Richard’s Almanac

(2)Autobiography

3.contribution

(1)He helped found the Pennsylvania Hospital and the American Philosophical

Society.

(2)He was called “the new Prometheus who had stolen fire (electricity in this case)

from heaven”.

(3)Everything seems to meet in this one man –“Jack of all trades”. Herman Melville

thus described him “master of each and mastered by none”.

Chapter 2 American Romanticism

Section 1 Early Romantic Period

What is Romanticism?

●An approach from ancient Greek: Plato

● A literary trend: 18c in Britain (1798~1832)

●Schlegel Bros.

I.Preview: Characteristics of romanticism

1.subjectivity

(1)feeling and emotions, finding truth

(2)emphasis on imagination

(3)emphasis on individualism – personal freedom, no hero worship, natural goodness

of human beings

2.back to medieval, esp medieval folk literature

(1)unrestrained by classical rules

(2)full of imagination

(3)colloquial language

(4)freedom of imagination

(5)genuine in feelings: answer their call for classics

3.back to nature

nature is “breathing living thing” (Rousseau)

II.American Romanticism

1.Background

(1)Political background and economic development

(2)Romantic movement in European countries

Derivative – foreign influence

2.features

(1)American romanticism was in essence the expression of “a real new experience

and contained “an alien quality” for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place”

was radically new and alien.

(2)There is American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. American romantic

authors tended more to moralize. Many American romantic writings intended to

edify more than they entertained.

(3)The “newness” of Americans as a nation is in connection with American

Romanticism.

(4)As a logical result of the foreign and native factors at work, American romanticism

was both imitative and independent.

III.Washington Irving

1.several names attached to Irving

(1)first American writer

(2)the messenger sent from the new world to the old world

(3)father of American literature

2.life

3.works

(1) A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch

Dynasty

(2)The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (He won a measure of international

recognition with the publication of this.)

(3)The History of the Life and V oyages of Christopher Columbus

(4) A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada

(5)The Alhambra

4.Literary career: two parts

(1)1809~1832

a.Subjects are either English or European

b.Conservative love for the antique

(2)1832~1859: back to US

5.style – beautiful

(1)gentility, urbanity, pleasantness

(2)avoiding moralizing – amusing and entertaining

(3)enveloping stories in an atmosphere

(4)vivid and true characters

(5)humour – smiling while reading

(6)musical language

IV.James Fenimore Cooper

1.life

2.works

(1)Precaution (1820, his first novel, imitating Austen’s Pride and Prejudice)

(2)The Spy (his second novel and great success)

(3)Leatherstocking Tales (his masterpiece, a series of five novels)

The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneer, The

Prairie

3.point of view

the theme of wilderness vs. civilization, freedom vs. law, order vs. change, aristocrat vs.

democrat, natural rights vs. legal rights

4.style

(1)highly imaginative

(2)good at inventing tales

(3)good at landscape description

(4)conservative

(5)characterization wooden and lacking in probability

(6)language and use of dialect not authentic

5.literary achievements

He created a myth about the formative period of the American nation. If the history of

the United States is, in a sense, the process of the American settlers exploring and

pushing the American frontier forever westward, then Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales

effectively approximates the American national experience of adventure into the West.

He turned the west and frontier as a useable past and he helped to introduce western

tradition to American literature.

Section 2 Summit of Romanticism – American Transcendentalism

I.Background: four sources

1.Unitarianism

(1)Fatherhood of God

(2)Brotherhood of men

(3)Leadership of Jesus

(4)Salvation by character (perfection of one’s character)

(5)Continued progress of mankind

(6)Divinity of mankind

(7)Depravity of mankind

2.Romantic Idealism

Center of the world is spirit, absolute spirit (Kant)

3.Oriental mysticism

Center of the world is “oversoul”

4.Puritanism

Eloquent expression in transcendentalism

II.Appearance

1836, “Nature” by Emerson

III.Features

1.spirit/oversoul

2.importance of individualism

3.nature – symbol of spirit/God

garment of the oversoul

4.focus in intuition (irrationalism and subconsciousness)

IV.Influence

1.It served as an ethical guide to life for a young nation and brought about the idea that

human can be perfected by nature. It stressed religious tolerance, called to throw off

shackles of customs and traditions and go forward to the development of a new and

distinctly American culture.

2.It advocated idealism that was great needed in a rapidly expanded economy where

opportunity often became opportunism, and the desire to “get on” obscured the moral

necessity for rising to spiritual height.

3.It helped to create the first American renaissance – one of the most prolific period in

American literature.

V.Ralph Waldo Emerson

1.life

2.works

(1)Nature

(2)Two essays: The American Scholar, The Poet

3.point of view

(1)One major element of his philosophy is his firm belief in the transcendence of the

“oversoul”.

(2)He regards nature as the purest, and the most sanctifying moral influence on man,

and advocated a direct intuition of a spiritual and immanent God in nature.

(3)If man depends upon himself, cultivates himself and brings out the divine in

himself, he can hope to become better and even perfect. This is what Emerson

means by “the infinitude of man”.

(4)Everyone should understand that he makes himself by making his world, and that

he makes the world by making himself.

4.aesthetic ideas

(1)He is a complete man, an eternal man.

(2)True poetry and true art should ennoble.

(3)The poet should express his thought in symbols.

(4)As to theme, Emerson called upon American authors to celebrate America which

was to him a lone poem in itself.

5.his influence

VI.Henry David Thoreau

1.life

2.works

(1) A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River

(2)Walden

(3) A Plea for John Brown (an essay)

3.point of view

(1)He did not like the way a materialistic America was developing and was

vehemently outspoken on the point.

(2)He hated the human injustice as represented by the slavery system.

(3)Like Emerson, but more than him, Thoreau saw nature as a genuine restorative,

healthy influence on man’s spiritual well-being.

(4)He has faith in the inner virtue and inward, spiritual grace of man.

(5)He was very critical of modern civilization.

(6)“Simplicity…simplify!”

(7)He was sorely disgusted with “the inundations of the dirty institutions of men’s

odd-fellow society”.

(8)He has calm trust in the future and his ardent belief in a new generation of men. Section 3 Late Romanticism

I.Nathaniel Hawthorne

1.life

2.works

(1)Two collections of short stories: Twice-told Tales, Mosses from and Old Manse

(2)The Scarlet Letter

(3)The House of the Seven Gables

(4)The Marble Faun

3.point of view

(1)Evil is at the core of human life, “that blackness in Hawthorne”

(2)Whenever there is sin, there is punishment. Sin or evil can be passed from

generation to generation (causality).

(3)He is of the opinion that evil educates.

(4)He has disgust in science.

4.aesthetic ideas

(1)He took a great interest in history and antiquity. To him these furnish the soil on

which his mind grows to fruition.

(2)He was convinced that romance was the predestined form of American narrative.

To tell the truth and satirize and yet not to offend: That was what Hawthorne had in

mind to achieve.

5.style – typical romantic writer

(1)the use of symbols

(2)revelation of characters’ psychology

(3)the use of supernatural mixed with the actual

(4)his stories are parable (parable inform) – to teach a lesson

(5)use of ambiguity to keep the reader in the world of uncertainty – multiple point of

view

II.Herman Melville

1.life

2.works

(1)Typee

(2)Omio

(3)Mardi

(4)Redburn

(5)White Jacket

(6)Moby Dick

(7)Pierre

(8)Billy Budd

3.point of view

(1)He never seems able to say an affirmative yes to life: His is the attitude of

“Everlasting Nay” (negative attitude towards life).

(2)One of the major themes of his is alienation (far away from each other).

Other themes: loneliness, suicidal individualism (individualism causing disaster

and death), rejection and quest, confrontation of innocence and evil, doubts over

the comforting 19c idea of progress

4.style

(1)Like Hawthorne, Melville manages to achieve the effect of ambiguity through

employing the technique of multiple view of his narratives.

(2)He tends to write periodic chapters.

(3)His rich rhythmical prose and his poetic power have been profusely commented

upon and praised.

(4)His works are symbolic and metaphorical.

(5)He includes many non-narrative chapters of factual background or description of

what goes on board the ship or on the route (Moby Dick)

Romantic Poets

I.Walt Whitman

1.life

2.work: Leaves of Grass (9 editions)

(1)Song of Myself

(2)There Was a Child Went Forth

(3)Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

(4)Democratic Vistas

(5)Passage to India

(6)Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

3.themes –“Catalogue of American and European thought”

He had been influenced by many American and European thoughts: enlightenment,

idealism, transcendentalism, science, evolution ideas, western frontier spirits,

Jefferson’s individualism, Civil War Unionism, Orientalism.

Major themes in his poems (almost everything):

●equality of things and beings

●divinity of everything

●immanence of God

●democracy

●evolution of cosmos

●multiplicity of nature

●self-reliant spirit

●death, beauty of death

●expansion of America

●brotherhood and social solidarity (unity of nations in the world)

●pursuit of love and happiness

4.style: “free verse”

(1)no fixed rhyme or scheme

(2)parallelism, a rhythm of thought

(3)phonetic recurrence

(4)the habit of using snapshots

(5)the use of a certain pronoun “I”

(6) a looser and more open-ended syntactic structure

(7)use of conventional image

(8)strong tendency to use oral English

(9)vocabulary – powerful, colourful, rarely used words of foreign origins, some even

wrong

(10)sentences – catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem lines

5.influence

(1)His best work has become part of the common property of Western culture.

(2)He took over Whitman’s vision of the poet-prophet and poet-teacher and recast it

in a more sophisticated and Europeanized mood.

(3)He has been compared to a mountain in American literary history.

(4)Contemporary American poetry, whatever school or form, bears witness to his

great influence.

II.Emily Dickenson

1.life

2.works

(1)My Life Closed Twice before Its Close

(2)Because I Can’t Stop for Death

(3)I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I died

(4)Mine – by the Right of the White Election

(5)Wild Nights – Wild Nights

3.themes: based on her own experiences/joys/sorrows

(1)religion – doubt and belief about religious subjects

(2)death and immortality

(3)love – suffering and frustration caused by love

(4)physical aspect of desire

(5)nature – kind and cruel

(6)free will and human responsibility

4.style

(1)poems without titles

(2)severe economy of expression

(3)directness, brevity

(4)musical device to create cadence (rhythm)

(5)capital letters – emphasis

(6)short poems, mainly two stanzas

(7)rhetoric techniques: personification – make some of abstract ideas vivid

https://www.sodocs.net/doc/837590160.html,parison: Whitman vs. Dickinson

1.Similarities:

(1)Thematically, they both extolled, in their different ways, an emergent America, its

expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of

“American Renaissance”.

(2)Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the new nation by

breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom

in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry.

2.differences:

(1)Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner

life of the individual.

(2)Whereas Whitman is “national” in his outlook, Dickinson is “regional”.

(3)Dickinson has the “catalogue technique” (direct, simple style) which Whitman

doesn’t have.

Edgar Allen Poe

I.Life

II.Works

1.short stories

(1)ratiocinative stories

a.Ms Found in a Bottle

b.The Murders in the Rue Morgue

c.The Purloined Letter

(2)Revenge, death and rebirth

a.The Fall of the House of Usher

b.Ligeia

c.The Masque of the Red Death

(3)Literary theory

a.The Philosophy of Composition

b.The Poetic Principle

c.Review of Hawthorne’s Twice-told Tales

III.Themes

1.death –predominant theme in Poe’s writing

“Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everything in Poe’s writings is dead.”

2.disintegration (separation) of life

3.horror

4.negative thoughts of science

IV.Aesthetic ideas

1.The short stories should be of brevity, totality, single effect, compression and finality.

2.The poems should be short, and the aim should be beauty, the tone melancholy. Poems

should not be of moralizing. He calls for pure poetry and stresses rhythm.

V.Style – traditional, but not easy to read

VI.Reputation: “the jingle man” (Emerson)

VII.His influences

Chapter 3 The Age of Realism

I.Background: From Romanticism to Realism

1.the three conflicts that reached breaking point in this period

(1)industrialism vs. agrarian

(2)culturely-measured east vs. newly-developed west

(3)plantation gentility vs. commercial gentility

2.1880’s urbanization: from free competition to monopoly capitalism

3.the closing of American frontier

II.Characteristics

1.truthful description of life

2.typical character under typical circumstance

3.objective rather than idealized, close observation and investigation of life

“Realistic writers are like scientists.”

4.open-ending:

Life is complex and cannot be fully understood. It leaves much room for readers to think by themselves.

5.concerned with social and psychological problems, revealing the frustrations of

characters in an environment of sordidness and depravity

III.Three Giants in Realistic Period

1.William Dean Howells –“Dean of American Realism”

(1)Realistic principles

a.Realism is “fidelity to experience and probability of motive”.

b.The aim is “talk of some ordinary traits of American life”.

c.Man in his natural and unaffected dullness was the object of Howells’s fictional

representation.

d.Realism is by no means mere photographic pictures of externals but includes a

central concern with “motives” and psychological conflicts.

e.He condemns novels of sentimentality and morbid self-sacrifice, and avoids such

themes as illicit love.

f.Authors should minimize plot and the artificial ordering of the sense of something

“desultory, unfinished, imperfect”.

g.Characters should have solidity of specification and be real.

h.Interpreting sympathetically the “common feelings of commonplace people” was

best suited as a technique to express the spirit of America.

i.He urged writers to winnow tradition and write in keeping with current

humanitarian ideals.

j.Truth is the highest beauty, but it includes the view that morality penetrates all things.

k.With regard to literary criticism, Howells felt that the literary critic should not try to impose arbitrary or subjective evaluations on books but should follow the detached scientist in accurate description, interpretation, and classification.

(2)Works

a.The Rise of Silas Lapham

b. A Chance Acquaintance

c. A Modern Instance

(3)Features of His Works

a.Optimistic tone

b.Moral development/ethics

https://www.sodocs.net/doc/837590160.html,cking of psychological depth

2.Henry James

(1)Life

(2)Literary career: three stages

a.1865~1882: international theme

●The American

●Daisy Miller

●The Portrait of a Lady

b.1882~1895: inter-personal relationships and some plays

●Daisy Miller (play)

c.1895~1900: novellas and tales dealing with childhood and adolescence, then back

to international theme

●The Turn of the Screw

●When Maisie Knew

●The Ambassadors

●The Wings of the Dove

●The Golden Bowl

(3)Aesthetic ideas

a.The aim of novel: represent life

https://www.sodocs.net/doc/837590160.html,mon, even ugly side of life

c.Social function of art

d.Avoiding omniscient point of view

(4)Point of view

a.Psychological analysis, forefather of stream of consciousness

b.Psychological realism

c.Highly-refined language

(5)Style –“stylist”

https://www.sodocs.net/doc/837590160.html,nguage: highly-refined, polished, insightful, accurate

b.V ocabulary: large

c.Construction: complicated, intricate

3.Mark Twain (see next section)

Local Colorism

1860s, 1870s~1890s

I.Appearance

1.uneven development in economy in America

2.culture: flourishing of frontier literature, humourists

3.magazines appeared to let writer publish their works

II.What is “Local Colour”?

Tasks of local colourists: to write or present local characters of their regions in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.

Regional literature (similar, but larger in world)

●Garland, Harte – the west

●Eggleston – Indiana

●Mrs Stowe

●Jewett – Maine

●Chopin – Louisiana

III.Mark Twain – Mississippi

1.life

2.works

(1)The Gilded Age

(2)“the two advantages”

(3)Life on the Mississippi

(4) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

(5)The Man That Corrupted Hardleybug

3.style

(1)colloquial language, vernacular language, dialects

(2)local colour

(3)syntactic feature: sentences are simple, brief, sometimes ungrammatical

(4)humour

(5)tall tales (highly exaggerated)

(6)social criticism (satire on the different ugly things in society)

https://www.sodocs.net/doc/837590160.html,parison of the three “giants” of American Realism

1.Theme

Howells – middle class

James – upper class

Twain – lower class

2.Technique

Howells – smiling/genteel realism

James – psychological realism

Twain – local colourism and colloquialism

Chapter 4 American Naturalism

I.Background

1.Darwin’s theory: “natural selection”

2.Spenser’s idea: “social Darwinism”

3.French Naturalism: Zora

II.Features

1.environment and heredity

2.scientific accuracy and a lot of details

3.general tone: hopelessness, despair, gloom, ugly side of the society

III.significance

It prepares the way for the writing of 1920s’ “lost generation” and T. S. Eliot.

IV.Theodore Dreiser

1.life

2.works

(1)Sister Carrie

(2)The trilogy: Financier, The Titan, The Stoic

(3)Jennie Gerhardt

(4)American Tragedy

(5)The Genius

3.point of view

(1)He embraced social Darwinism – survival of the fittest. He learned to regard man

as merely an animal driven by greed and lust in a struggle for existence in which

only the “fittest”, the most ruthless, survive.

(2)Life is predatory, a “game” of the lecherous and heartless, a jungle struggle in

which man, being “a waif and an interloper in Nature”, a “wisp in the wind of

social forces”, is a mere pawn in the general scheme of things, with no power

whatever to assert his will.

(3)No one is ethically free; everything is determined by a complex of internal

chemisms and by the forces of social pressure.

4.Sister Carrie

(1)Plot

(2)Analysis

5.Style

(1)Without good structure

(2)Deficient characterization

(3)Lack in imagination

(4)Journalistic method

(5)Techniques in painting

Chapter 5 The Modern Period

Section 1 The 1920s

I.Introduction

The 1920s is a flowering period of American literature. It is considered “the second renaissance” of American literature.

The nicknames for this period:

(1)Roaring 20s – comfort

(2)Dollar Decade – rich

(3)Jazz Age – Jazz music

II.Background

a)First World War –“a war to end all wars”

(1)Economically: became rich from WWI. Economic boom: new inventions.

Highly-consuming society.

(2)Spiritually: dislocation, fragmentation.

b)wide-spread contempt for law (looking down upon law)

1.Freud’s theory

III.Features of the literature

Writers: three groups

(1)Participants

(2)Expatriates

(3)Bohemian (unconventional way of life) – on-lookers

Two areas:

(1)Failure of communication of Americans

(2)Failure of the American society

Imagism

I. Background

Imagism was influenced by French symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese literature “haiku”

II. Development: three stages

1.1908~1909: London, Hulme

2.1912~1914: England -> America, Pound

3.1914~1917: Amy Lowell

III. W hat is an “image”?

An image is defined by Pound as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas” “endowed with energy”. The exact word must bring the effect of the object before the reader as it had presented itself to the poet’s mind at the time of writing.

IV. Principles

1.Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective;

2.To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;

3.As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the

sequence of a metronome.

V. Significance

1.It was a rebellion against the traditional poetics which failed to reflect the new life of

the new century.

2.It offered a new way of writing which was valid not only for the Imagist poets but for

modern poetry as a whole.

3.The movement was a training school in which many great poets learned their first

lessons in the poetic art.

4.It is this movement that helped to open the first pages of modern English and American

poetry.

VI. Ezra Pound

1.life

2.literary career

3.works

(1)Cathay

(2)Cantos

(3)Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

4.point of view

(1)Confident in Pound’s belief that the artist was morally and culturally the arbiter

and the “saviour” of the race, he took it upon himself t o purify the arts and became

the prime mover of a few experimental movements, the aim of which was to dump

the old into the dustbin and bring forth something new.

(2)To him life was sordid personal crushing oppression, and culture produced nothing

but “intangible bondage”.

(3)Pound sees in Chinese history and the doctrine of Confucius a source of strength

and wisdom with which to counterpoint Western gloom and confusion.

(4)He saw a chaotic world that wanted setting to rights, and a humanity, suffering

from spiritual death and cosmic injustice, that needed saving. He was for the most

part of his life trying to offer Confucian philosophy as the one faith which could

help to save the West.

5.style: very difficult to read

Pound’s early poems are fresh and lyrical. The Cantos can be notoriously difficult in

some sections, but delightfully beautiful in others. Few have made serious study of the

long poem; fewer, if anyone at all, have had the courage to declare that they have

conquered Pound; and many seem to agree that the Cantos is a monumental failure.

6.Contribution

He has helped, through theory and practice, to chart out the course of modern poetry.

7.The Cantos –“the intellectual diary since 1915”

Features:

(1)Language: intricate and obscure

(2)Theme: complex subject matters

(3)Form: no fixed framework, no central theme, no attention to poetic rules

VII. T. S. Eliot

1.life

2.works

(1)poems

●The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

●The Waste Land (epic)

●Hollow Man

●Ash Wednesday

●Four Quarters

(2)Plays

●Murder in the Cathedral

●Sweeney Agonistes

●The Cocktail Party

●The Confidential Clerk

(3)Critical essays

●The Sacred Wood

●Essays on Style and Order

●Elizabethan Essays

●The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticisms

●After Strange Gods

3.point of view

(1)The modern society is futile and chaotic.

(2)Only poets can create some order out of chaos.

(3)The method to use is to compare the past and the present.

4.Style

(1)Fresh visual imagery, flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm

(2)Difficult and disconnected images and symbols, quotations and allusions

(3)Elliptical structures, strange juxtapositions, an absence of bridges

5.The Waste Land: five parts

(1)The Burial of the Dead

(2) A Game of Chess

(3)The Fire Sermon

(4)Death by Water

(5)What the Thunder Said

VIII. Robert Frost

1.life

2.point of view

(1)All his life, Frost was concerned with constructions through poetry. “a momentary

stay against confusion”.

(2)He understands the terror and tragedy in nature, but also its beauty.

(3)Unlike the English romantic poets of 19th century, he didn’t believe that man could

find harmony with nature. He believed that serenity came from working, usually

amid natural forces, which couldn’t be understood. He regarded work as

“significant toil”.

3.works – poems

the first: A Boy’s Will

collections: North of Boston, Mountain Interval (mature), New Hampshire

4.style/features of his poems

(1)Most of his poems took New England as setting, and the subjects were chosen

from daily life of ordinary people, such as “mending wall”, “picking apples”.

(2)He writes most often about landscape and people – the loneliness and poverty of

isolated farmers, beauty, terror and tragedy in nature. He also describes some

abnormal people, e.g. “deceptively simple”, “philosophical poet”.

(3)Although he was popular during 1920s, he didn’t experiment like other modern

poets. He used conventional forms, plain language, traditional metre, and wrote in

a pastured tradition.

IX. e. e. cummings

“a juggler with syntax, grammar and diction” –individualism, “painter poet”

Novels in the 1920s

I. F. Scott Fitzgerald

1.life – participant in 1920s

2.works

(1)This Side of Paradise

(2)Flappers and Philosophers

(3)The Beautiful and the Damned

(4)The Great Gatsby

(5)Tender is the Night

(6)All the Sad Young Man

(7)The Last Tycoon

3.point of view

(1)He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the so-called

“American Dream” is false in nature.

(2)He had always been critical of the rich and tried to show the integrating effects of

money on the emotional make-up of his character. He found that wealth altered

people’s characters, making them mean and distrusted. He thinks money brought

only tragedy and remorse.

(3)His novels follow a pattern: dream – lack of attraction – failure and despair.

4.His ideas of “American Dream”

It is false to most young people. Only those who were dishonest could become rich.

5.Style

Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose is smooth,

sensitive, and completely original in its diction and metaphors. Its simplicity and

gracefulness, its skill in manipulating the relation between the general and the specific

reveal his consummate artistry.

6.The Great Gatsby

Narrative point of view – Nick

He is related to everyone in the novel and is calm and detected observer who is never

quick to make judgements.

Selected omniscient point of view

II.Ernest Hemingway

1.life

2.point of view (influenced by experience in war)

(1)He felt that WWI had br oken America’s culture and traditions, and separated from

its roots. He wrote about men and women who were isolated from tradition,

frightened, sometimes ridiculous, trying to find their own way.

(2)He condemned war as purposeless slaughter, but the attitude changed when he took

part in Spanish Civil War when he found that fascism was a cause worth fighting

for.

(3)He wrote about courage and cowardice in battlefield. He defined courage as “an

instinctive movement towards or away from the centre of violence with

self-preservation and self-respect, the mixed motive”. He also talked about the

courage with which to face tragedies of life that can never be remedied.

(4)Hemingway is essentially a negative writer. It is very difficult for him to say “yes”.

He holds a black, naturalistic view of the world and sees it as “all a nothing” and

“all nada”.

3.works

(1)In Our Time

(2)Men Without Women

(3)Winner Take Nothing

(4)The Torrents of Spring

(5)The Sun Also Rises

(6) A Farewell to Arms

(7)Death in the Afternoon

(8)To Have and Have Not

(9)Green Hills of Africa

(10)The Fifth Column

(11)For Whom the Bell Tolls

(12)Across the River and into the Trees

(13)The Old Man and the Sea

4.themes –“grace under pressure”

(1)war and influence of war on people, with scenes connected with hunting, bull

fighting which demand stamina and courag e, and with the question “how to live

with pain”, “how human being live gracefully under pressure”.

(2)“code hero”

The Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive

and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words. That is an individualist

keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place.

These people are usually spiritual strong, people of certain skills, and most of them

encounter death many times.

5.style

(1)simple and natural

(2)direct, clear and fresh

(3)lean and economical

(4)simple, conversational, common found, fundamental words

(5)simple sentences

(6)Iceberg principle: understatement, implied things

(7)Symbolism

III.Sinclair Lewis –“the worst important writer in American literature”

1.life

2.works

(1)Main Street

(2)Babbitt

(3)Arrowsmith

(4)Dodsworth

(5)Elmer Gantry

3.point of view – satirical critic of American middle class

(1)Lewis showed the villagers to be narrow-minded, greedy, pretentious and corrupt.

(2)He attacked middle class for its indifference to art and culture, and its assumption

that economic success made it superior.

4.style

(1)photographic, verisimilitude

(2)colloquialism

(3)characterization: he often created a type of character rather than an individual

(4)old fashioned in theme

(5)lack in psychological exploration

IV.Willa Cather

1.life

2.works

(1)Alex ander’s Bridge

(2)O Pioneers

(3)The Song of the Lark

(4)My Antonia

3.features of her works

(1)She was one of the few “uneasy survivors of the nineteenth century”. Hanging onto

the traditional values, she was never able to come to terms with modernity.

(2)Old west becomes in most of her novels the centre of moral reference against

which modern existence is measured.

(3)She withdraws in her later fiction into the historical past.

(4)She often uses women protagonists in her novels.

Southern Literature

I.Heritage

American southern literature can date back to Edgar Allen Poe, and reach its summit with the appearance of the two “giants” – Faulkner and Wolfe. There are southern women writers –Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O’Connor.

II.Southern Myths – guilt, failure, poverty

1.Chevalier heritage

2.Agrarian virtue

3.Plantation aristocracy

4.Lost cause

5.White supremacy

6.Purity of womanhood

Southern literature: twisted, pessimistic, violent, distorted

Gothic novel: Poe

III.William Faulkner

1.life

2.literary career: three stages

(1)1924~1929: training as a writer

●The Marble Faun

●Soldier’s Pay

●Mosquitoes

(2)1929~1936: most productive and prolific period

●Sartoris

●The Sound and the Fury

●As I Lay Dying

●Light in August

●Absalom, Absalom

(3)1940~end: won recognition in America

●Go Down, Moses

3.point of view

He generally shows a grim picture of human society where violence and cruelty are

frequently included, but his later works showed more optimism. His intention was to

show the evil, harsh events in contrast to such eternal virtues as love, honour, pity,

compassion, self-sacrifice, and thereby expose the faults of society. He felt that it was a

writer’s duty to remind his readers constantly of true values and virtues.

4.themes

(1)history and race

He explains the present by examining the past, by telling the stories of several

generations of family to show how history changes life. He was interested in the

relationship between blacks and whites, especially concerned about the problems

of the people who were of the mixed race of black and white, unacceptable to both

races.

(2)Deterioration

(3)Conflicts between generations, classes, races, man and environment

(4)Horror, violence and the abnormal

5.style/features of his works

(1)complex plot

(2)stream of consciousness

(3)multiple point of view, circular form

(4)violation of chronology

(5)courtroom rhetoric: formal language

(6)characterization: he was able to probe into the psychology of characters

(7)“anti-hero”: weak, fable, vulnerable (true people in modern society)

He has a group of women writers following him, including O’Connor and Eudora Welty Section 2 The 1930s

Radical 1930s

I.Background

Great Depression (1929 “Black Thursday”)

II.Literature

1.Writers of the 1920s were still writing, but they didn’t produce good works.

2.The main stream is left-oriented.

III.Writers of 1930s

1.social concern and social involvement

2.revival of naturalistic tradition of Dreiser and Norris

IV.John Steinbeck

1.life

2.works

(1)Cup of Gold

(2)Tortilla Flat

(3)In Dubious Battle

(4)Of Mice and Men

(5)The Grapes of Wrath

(6)Travels with Charley

(7)Short stories: The Red Pony, The Pearl

3.point of view

(1)His best writing was produced out of outrage at the injustices of the societies, and

by the admirations for the strong spirit of the poor.

(2)His theme was usually simple human virtues, such as kindness and fair treatment,

which were far superior to the dehumanizing cruelty of exploiters.

4.style

(1)poetic prose

(2)regional dialect

(3)characterization: many types of characters rather than individuals

(4)dramatic factors

(5)social protect: spokesman for the poverty-stricken people

5.The Grapes of Wrath

Chapter 6 The Post-War Period: 50s & 60s

I.Historical Background – multi-faceted

1.Cold War

2.McCarthyism (persecution of communists)

3.Korean War

4.Civil Rights Movement

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

II.Literature in the 1950s

1.Regional literature emerged from the south, etc. Many women writers appeared.

2.Dramatists wrote about everyday people, e.g. Arthur Miller.

3.Minority literature developed quickly.

III.Literature in the 1960s

This period is the rising period of post-modern literature. Many forms of post-modern fiction appeared, such as metafiction, surfiction, parafiction, self-reflexive fiction, self-begetting fiction, anti-novel, etc. The literature in this period is considered as “multi-cultural” literature.

The same mood in this period is despair, but continuing to search absurdity of modern life;

lonely, but searching for the meaning of existence; identity.

Section 1 Poetry

I.Features

1.Some poets found inspiration in the past.

2.Poetry became more attuned to political and social issues of the period.

3.Poets became more visible in American public life.

4.There was no prescribed form for poetry.

5.Poets became more political. Themes such as homosexuality, racism, etc. are included

in the poems. In 1960s, poetry became more and more political.

II.Schools of Poetry (time, representatives, major features)

1.Confessional Poets: Robert Lowell

The greatness of Lowell lies in the fact that, in talking candidly about himself, he is

examining the culture of his nation. The identification of personal experience with that

of an age has always ensured greatness and even immortality as it did.

2.Black Mountain Poets: Charles Olson

There is an emphasis on the importance of the moments of awareness. It portrays a

world of “awakened, contemplative awareness”, one in which civilization appears alien,

cold, and almost unreal.

3.Beat Generation: Alien Ginsberg

In the fifties, there was a widespread discontentment among the post-war generation,

whose voice was one of protest against all the mainstream culture America had come to

represent.

Section 2 Fiction

I.General Features

1.matter of fact

2.frank, amazingly detailed about war experiences

https://www.sodocs.net/doc/837590160.html,cking social consciousness

II.Overview

1.Post-war Realism: Cheever, Oates

2.Black Novel: Richard Wlight, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Malcolm, Leroi Jones

3.Jewish Novel: Saul Bellow

III.Post-War Realism

1.Features

(1)Naturalistic depiction has become explicit: old-fashioned realism is combined with

modernism.

(2)While following the realistic and naturalistic tradition, these writers borrowed

various experimental forms and techniques in probing the inner world in detail.

(3)It has been a search for a way to connect an oppressed response to society and

history and an awareness of individual loneliness.

2.J. D. Salinger

(1)Life

(2)Point of view

One of his frequent themes is young people longing for simplicity and truth instead

of complexity and hypocrisy of the life they observed around them. In his novels,

he questions the moral foundations of society and often places innocent idealist

characters in setting where a vicious, corrupt society could destroy them. Although

his stories are often pessimistic, the characters represent hope rather than despair.

They want to affirm truth. They deplore the lies with which the society conceals its

own corruption. They withdraw the society, become drop-outs rather than

participants in the society.

(3)Catcher in the Rye

IV.Black Humour

1.definition: to deal with tragic things in comic ways to make it more powerful and more

tragic.

It refers to the use of morbid and absurd 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.

2.Features

(1)Comic way to express tragic situations

(2)Creation of anti-hero

(3)Illogical narrative structure

3.Joseph Heller

(1)Life

(2)Catch-22

It is not only a war novel, but also a novel about people’s life in peaceful 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.

Language: circular conversation, wrenched cliché

Jewish Literature

I.Definition

Jewish literature refers to published creative writings by American Jews about their

American experiences. This kind of writings is shown in Jewish perspective.

II.Historical Background

III.Emergence: after WWII

IV.Jewish Point of View

1.Jews believe that God has sent perpetual sufferings to his chosen people to strengthen

and purify them, and they are the “chosen people”.

2.Humour is a prominent aspect of Jewish point of view. It is often a twisted kind of

comedy to keep them from despair. Jews are able to laugh at themselves, so some of

their best humour is self-mocking.

3.Jews lay emphasis upon the power of intellects. The power to understand their own

experience to judge their own life rationally to think well is considered a high virtue.

4.Self-teaching is at the heart of almost all Jewish novels. The Jewish heroes often try to

seek a rational interpretation of the world through their own experience in it.

V.Saul Bellow

1.life

2.works

(1)Dangling Man

(2)The Adventures of Augie March

(3)Henderson the Rain King

(4)Herzog

(5)Mr. Sammler’s Planet

(6)Humboldt’s Gift

(7)The Dean’s December

3.point of view

(1)Saul Bellow’s strength lies in his faith in man and man’s ability to offer a “spirited

resistance to the forces of our time”. As he sees it, modern man has lived through

frustration and defeat, managed to grapple with destructive historical pressures,

and striven for “certain durable human goods” – truth, freedom, and wisdom.

(2)He is highly critical of modern life in which the old value system is no longer

functioning. His major characters are all concerned to find a way that would keep

American civilization from going under. They body forth Bellow’s credo that art

h as “something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos”, and

that “a novelist begins with disorder and disharmony and goes toward order by an

unknown process of the imagination”.

4.characteristics of his heroes

Most of Saul Bellow’s hero es are marginal men, alienated or absurd characters caught

between their own inadequacies and those imposed upon them by their friends and

society. Most of them are Jewish intellectuals or writers who try to discover the

queerness of existence and overcome it. Struggling with the impersonality of the

physical world, agonized by their own awareness of morality, his protagonists laugh at

their own deficiency with irony because it relieves despair. The hunger for community,

yet they hold back because that world have to betray the sanctity of their private self in

order to achieve it.

5.style: realism + modernism

Chapter 7 American Drama

I.Brief Introduction

1.17th century

●Ye Bare and Ye Cubb (1665) by William Darby

2.18th century

●American subjects began to be treated seriously. The first tragedy is The Contrast

(1787) by Royal Tyler. It is considered “typical American play” about American

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