作者：2015级阳明一班 张梦佳
作者简介：英语专业 大三 联系方式（15757460515、680515） 专业积点分排名保持前三
笔记内容概述：美国文学史笔记，涵盖美国早期文学至近现代文学一些主要的作家及其重要作品，（主要为课本重难点内容摘要）
Benjamin Franklin
Life
1. Inventor:
invented the lightening rod
2. Scientist:
proved the identity of lightening and electricity by his famous kite experiment
3. Printer:
set up his own printing press and succeeded through his industry and thrift
4. Political Statesman:
elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly, later became President of Pennsylvania
His reform projects: 1. improved lightning and pavements of the streets, 2. established Pennsylvania Hospital, 3. organized armed defense for Quaker Province, 4. established Philadelphia Academy (later became the University of Pennsylvania), 5. established the library company of Philadelphia.
5. Diplomat:
persuaded French to support American Course (War of Independence)
negotiated the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War
6. Revolutionary hero:
Helped Structure the Declaration of Independence
7. An author:
Poor Richard’s Almanacs（穷查理德年鉴）
The Way to Wealth
The Autobiography
Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion
Persona
Plain Truth
A narrative of the Late Massacres
His Proverb:
Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
13 virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, humility
Writing style: plain, practical, lucid, attainable
Criticism:
Nathaniel Hawthorn: his works talk about small duty, all about getting money and saving it
Mark Twain: he is always telling boys how not to waste time
D.H. Lawrence: man cannot be perfected
Philip Freneau (poet of American Revolution
Significance:
1. His enthusiastic celebration of all things American produced some exceptional poems, making him a forerunner of American Romanticism.
2. He used satire as a man poetic device and a political weapon against the British during the war.
His works:
The Rising Glory of America
The Beauties of Santa Cruz
To a Wild Honeysuckle
To the Memory of the Brave Americans
Oh, Mr. Paine’s Rights of Man
The India Burying Ground
Washington Irving
1. Fiction writer, Historian, biographer
2. His works:
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent
(including Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow)
A history of New York
Salmagundi
A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus
3. Literary style
Humor, vivid characterization, irony, finished style
Suggestive, highlights attitudes and moods
A passion for life, kindness, understanding, humanity
Rip Van Winkle
Rip is the protagonist in the story told by a third person omniscient narrator, a tale found in the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker. Rip came from a line of gallant Dutch ancestors. He had no skill in any profitable labor, and is henpecked. To escape from the labor of the farm and clamor of his wife, he strolled into woods. He came to the top of koatskill mountains and was about to descend. Then he heard a call-“Rip Van Winkle”. It was from a short square built old fellow, dressed in the antique Dutch Fashion. Rip drank liquor, and fell into deep sleep. When he woke, 20 years had passed and everything changed. His house became empty and his wife has gone. The sign in front of the inn turned from the portrait of King George in his red coat to the image of George Washington in blue uniform. Young men there were talking about the rights of citizens, elections, members of congress, liberty. Rip preferred making friends among the rising generation.
James Fenimore Cooper
1. Significance:
The first successful American novelist
2. Works (romantic life on frontiers of history of Navy)
The Spy
The Pioneers
The Pilot
The Last of Mohicans
The Prairie
The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer
3. Contribution
Created an enduring American mythic hero
Developed an appreciation for American things
Showed the emergence of class divisions
Proved an important social critic
4. Criticism
Mark Twain: Cooper is inaccurate
Ralph Waldo Emerson
1. Significance:
The father of American Literature
The leading spokesman for Transcendentalism
2. A conceptual revolution
The American Scholar
A fervent defender of individualism (The Over Soul)
Organic art:
Appropriate form of poem is an expression of poet’s intuition, while the poet’s intuition is a welling out from the universal mind
Synthesized from several cultural sources: Coleridge, German Idealism, Brahmanism and Hinduism, Confucius
3. The first quotable American winter
Lecturer, poet, orator, essayist
Works:
The American Scholar,
Nature (including The Over-Soul, Compensation, Self-reliance, The Poet)
Representative Men
Divinity School Address
Henry David Thoreau
1. Works:
Walden (live in a hut in the woods by the Walden Pond)
Civil Disobedience (refused to pay tax to protest against the Mexican War)
2. Implication of Walden:
1. Against materialism
2. Objected to the division of labor
3. To prove how far he could see himself from the hypocrisies and unnecessary complexities of commercial society
Walden
1. Structured on the four seasons (from summer to spring)
2. Narrative: how he worked to produce the minimum essentials of food and shelter
3. Influence: a reminder for people not to forget the pleasure of living near to Nature
4. Style:
A heighted passion
A living energy
Thinking in imagery
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1. Themes of his works:
Guilty strains of human nature
Contradiction between intellect and intuition
Morally irresponsible search for knowledge (scientist)
Male withdraw from marriage
2. Works:
The Scarlet Letter (the first great American novel)
The House of the Seven Gables
The Blithedale Romance
The Marble Faun
3. Style:
Elevated in diction + restrained in rhetoric = graceful and polished
Convey truth through allegory, symbol, ambiguity
The scarlet Letter
1. 200 years earlier in Boston area
2. Adulterous love between Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne
3. Focus of the novel: the moral situation in long years in which they have to endure suffering,
4. Hester Prynne, penalized by the community, beared the scarlet “A”openly
Arthur Dimmesdale conceals his sin deeply, killed by Roger Chillington
5. Hester and her daughter Pearl: image of life (Angel)
Mark Twain
Indispensable, delightful
The greatest humorist in the 19th century
① One of the pioneers in stories that captures the local color of the West
② Childhood experience → transformation (classic novels) → showed a genuine hatred for social hypocrisy and pretentiousness through his use of humor
③ Ironist: irony of innocence → multidimensional understanding of innocence + mocks American naivety and European Pretentiousness
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Tom Sawyer Huckleberry Finn Joe Harper → Injun Joe starred to death treasures
Becky Thatcher lost (a huge dark cave) → lead to safety
Prankish child-innocence over-sentimentality
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (run-away motif)
Huck (run from depraved father) → Jim (escapes from being sold)
raft south thieves, murder, feuding, fugitive con-men
nurtured love → renounces upbringing in South → help Jim escape
discovery of conscience → material for irony (heroics avoid damnation + I always thought you were white inside)
Narrative: Huck Finn, saltier speech
a homeless boy, suspicion of any attempt to civilize him
Four types:
① personalized fiction The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day
② Travel fiction The Innocents Abroad, Roughing it Yankee in
③ Historical romance The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut
④ Tall tales The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavera Country
The Men that Corrupted Hadleyburg
Henry James
a master of the novel as an art form
Themes:
1. The international theme
① American-European relationship
② Among the first American writers who developed the international or dimensions of American lien
③ “real” psychological question
2. An intense interest in the emotion of life
① Historical interruption → not knowing what to do (interregnum空位期)
② Christian-classical ideal → new ideal (technology, science, finance, expansion)
③ 
Society\People: decay, sterile, living on conventions without any force of conviction
④ Moral conviction: life is indestructible + outrage
3. Artist theme: create artists conflicts with society (lack aesthetic awareness)
Narrative style:
1. in multiple, well balanced, dependent clauses in elaborate sentences
2. shows skills in manipulate the narrative point of view
① The first person point of view “The Turn of Srew”
② The limited omniscient (third person) narrator
Novels: The Bostonians, The Portrait of a Lady, The American
Novellas: Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw
Three great late novels: The Wings of Dove, The Golden Bowl, The Ambassadors
William Pean Howells
Socialist writer, most vocal advocate of new Anti-Romantic Realism
The Campaign Life of Abraham Lincoln (elected)
Criticism and Fiction
Naturalism
Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot
Characteristics:
1. Strove for objectivity
2. Interested in commonplace in contemporary life
3. More conscious of philosophical foundations ← scientific, socioeconomic
① The Darwinist belief: humans are highly evolved animals
respond to environmental forces like other animals→to survive
② Existence of human person ← is limited by where, when
Only the fittest survives in the life struggle
③ Eliminates the ethical problem
4. characters: the lowest in the social stratum + violence + sex. Break through taboos
Stephen Crane
His fiction shapes the modern American short fiction
Style:
Pessimistic detachment + psychological insights. Objective + accurate
Maggie: a girl of the streets → mockery of the theory = moral quanty
The Red Badge of Courage → Henry Fleming
Impressionistic studies of elemental fear, one associated with shame, the other with the failure of of courage in military combat.
Short stories:
The Open Boat
The Monster
The Bride Covens to Yellow Sky
