The Enlightenment And Revolution

一、 Benjamin Franklin

介绍：inventor, scientist, author, political statesman

作品：Poor Richard’s Almanack穷查理历书

        The Way to Wealth致富之道

        The Autobiography自传

        Plain Truth

        A Narrative of the Late Massacres

        Persona

        American Dreams

        A Dissertion on Liberty and Necessity, Pain And Pleasure(pamphlet)

作品分析：Poor Richard’s Almanack

（塑造了一个humorious的形象，margins有格言）

             The Autobiography自传

（三部分，在第二部分提出“13virtues”）

风格：plain, adopt styles accordingly, practical，care about readers’ needs

批评：霍桑：“格言很少涉及duty，都在讲钱”

       马克吐温：“老是教育年轻男孩不浪费时间”

       D.H. Lawrance：“men can be perfected”这个观点不现实

二、 Thomas Paine

作品：Common Sense 常识

        American Crisis 美国危机

        Rights of Man 人的权利

三、 Philip Freneau

地位：Poet of American Revolution( 通过对美国的celebration和对英国的satire体现)

作品：The Wild Honeysuckle野生的金银花

        The Beauties of Santa Cruz

        The Rising Glory of America蒸蒸日上的美洲

        To the Memory of the Brave Americans纪念美国勇士

American Romanticism

一、Washington Irving

介绍：fiction writer, historian, biographer

地位：第一个achieve international recognition的American writer

        Ambassdor of American Literature

作品：The Sketch Book（The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle）见闻札记

        The Life And Adventures of Christopher Columbus

        A History of New York纽约的历史

        Salmagundi

        Astoria(第一部biography of American business mogul)

风格：humor, irony, vivid characterization, finished style, definiteness of America

优点：suggestive；humor和irony里有understanding；passion；体现law of change

缺点：lack intellectual depth, virtually silent

二、James Fenimore Cooper

介绍：novelist

地位：the first successful American novelist

作品：Leatherstocking Tales(create a mythic hero,帮助人们建立对美国的appreciation):The Pioneers拓荒者, The Last of Mohicans最后的莫希干人, The Prairie大草原, The Pathfinder探路者, The Deerslayer杀鹿者

        Sea stories：The Pilot; Red Rover; The Two Admirals; Wing and Wing

        Social Criticism:The Notions of Americans

       其他：Sasotastoe

             The Little Manuscripts利特佩奇的手稿

风格：self-evaluation; class division; frontier life

评价：把他和Walt Scott相比

        马克吐温说他accurate

三、Ralf Waldo Emerson

介绍：poet, essayist, orator

地位：father of American Literature

        Leading spokesman of American transcendentalism

        Defender of individualism

思想来源：Coleridge, Confucianism

             Pantheism和个人联系得出over-soul,再得出organic art(form 是intuition的体现，intuition是over-soul的体现)

作品：The American Scholar论美国学者（Declaration of intellectual independence）

        Nature论自然

        Representative Men代表人物

        Divinity School Address神学院演说

        Essays散文集(The Oversoul论超灵; Self-reliance论自立; Compensation; The Poet)

风格：humor, irony, vivid characterization, finished style, definiteness of America

缺点：forget to bring the audience to the height he preaches

四、Henry David Threau

作品：Waldon瓦尔登湖

        Civil Disobedience抵制公民政府

        A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

风格：passion(被wit和irony平衡); energy; thinking in imagery

贡献：把爱默生的想法付诸行动

       进行social criticism和political stance he take

       Gandhi的passive resistance借鉴了他，Gandhi又影响了马丁路德金

五、Nathaniel Hawthorne

作品：The Scarlet Letter红字布朗

        Young Goodman Brown年轻的古德曼

        The House of Seven Gables有七个尖角阁的房子

        The Blithedale Romance福谷传奇

        The Marble Faun玉石雕像

风格：elevated; restrain in rhetoric; graceful and polished

        作品中用allegory、symbol，存在ambiguity

六、Herman Melville

作品：Moby Dick白鲸（elevated,像Shakespeare的drama; close to19世纪美国的epic）

       Billy Bud比利巴德

       Typee泰比

       Bartleby the Scrivener

       Benito Cereno

       Redburn雷得本

七、Edgar Allan Poe

地位：Precusor of New Criticism of 20^th century(因为提出了poetic principle：poetic meaning are shown by own composition and utterance)

        Father of 侦探小说（A Purloined Letter）

作品：The Cask of Amontillado

        The Fall of the House of Usher厄舍古屋的倒塌

        The Raven乌鸦

        To Hellen致海伦

        Narratives of Arthur Gordon Pym(novel)

        Philosophy of Composition(poem should be short; one setting读完; achieve single effect)

        The Descent into the Maelstrom

        Annabel Lee安娜贝尔李

风格：master of moods; rhyme; rhythm; onomatopoeia

评价：Tennyson和Emerson批评他

        Yeats和James赞美他

贡献：影响了Dreiser和Faulkner

八、Walt Whitman

地位：the first poet to write homosexual, repressed sexual disire

作品：Leaves of Grass草叶集(principle: all feeling)

        Song of Myself自我之歌

        When Lilacs Lost in the Dooryard Bloom’d小院丁香花开时

        O Captain! My Captain

        Democratic Vistas民主的前景

        Specimen

        Memoranda

风格：free verse; alliteration; anaphora; parallelism

贡献：Emerson赞扬他

        影响了五四运动和郭沫若

九、Emily Dickinson

作品：I’m Nobody Who Are You

        I Died for Beauty

        The Soul Selects Her Own Society

        I Dwell in Possibility

        They Shut Me Up in Prose

        Wild Nights Wild Nights

风格：many dashes; individualized rhythm to vision and authenticity

十、Harriet Beecher Stowe

作品：Uncle Tom’s Cabin汤姆叔叔的小屋

        A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp德雷德阴暗大沼地的故事片        

优点：use her sensuality for serious purpose

缺点：sensual; mild at first; 对黑人生活的描述limited

American Realism

一、Mark Twain

地位：the greatest humorist in 19^th century

        One of the pioneers of local colorism

作品：The Adventures of Tom Sawyer汤姆索亚历险记

        The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn哈克贝利费恩历险记

        Roughing it苦行记

        The Innocent’s Abroad傻瓜出国记

        The Celebrated Jumping Frog加拉维拉县有名的跳蛙

        The Gilded Age镀金时代

        The Prince and the Pauper王子与贫儿

        The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg败坏哈德莱堡的人

        The Million Pound Note 百万英镑

        A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court亚瑟王宫中的美国佬

风格：把childhood experience变成classic novels

        对innocence的irony包括对American naivety和对British pretenciousness的mockery

四类小说：personalized fiction; travel fiction; historical romance; tall tales

二、Henry James

地位：the master of novel as an art form

        The first American writer who developed international dimensions of American Literature

作品：The Wings of the Dove鸽翼

        The Ambassador大使

        The Golden Bowl金碗

        Daisy Miller苔瑟米乐

        The Turn of the Screw

        The American

       The Portrait of a Lady贵妇人画像

       The Bostonians波士顿人

       The Real Thing 真货色

风格：dependent clause sentence; elaborate; good at manipulating narrative point of view

作品主题：international theme（英美关系）

             Emotion of life

             Artist theme

三、Stephen Crane

地位：shape the American short fiction

作品：Maggie: A Girl of the Street街头女郎梅姬

        The Red Badge of Courage红色英勇胸章

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

        The Open Boat小划子

        The Monster

风格：pessimistic detachment; psychological insights; objective and accurate language

四、Jack London

地位：one of the most talented and prolific writer

作品：The Call of the Wild野性的呼唤

        White Fang白獠牙

        The Sea-wolf海狼

        Love of Life热爱生命

风格：chronological; simple; common speech

主题：与evolutionary theory和classless society有关（people are evolved animals whose behaviors are determined by laws of nature）

五、Theodore Dreiser

作品：Sister Carrie嘉莉姐妹

        An American Tragedy美国的悲剧

        The Second Choice

风格：chronological

主题：男女为寻求性欲、权力、物质的满足

作品关键词：determinism

六、Kate Chopin

作品：The Awakening(a local color, romantic, realist, feminist novel)

        Wiser than A God

        At Fault

        A Point At Issue

主题：conflicts between women’s needs for personhood and conventional expectations

批评：deviate from sexual codes of good societies

Modernism

一、Robert Frost

地位：the most popular modern poet of 20^th century in America

        Poet laureate

作品：The Road Not Taken没有选择的道路

        Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening雪夜林边小驻

        Mending Wall修墙

        A Boy’s Will少年心愿

        North of Boston波士顿之北

风格：stress familiar subjects; accessible language; simple thought; old-fashioned verse form; 人物shrewed and vernacular; stoic moral wisdom

主题：the contemplation of life

二、Sherwood Anderson

地位：one of the first American writers who use psychoanalytical insights for literary purpose

作品：Winesburg, Ohio畸人志

        Godiness: A Tale in Four Parts

风格：select potent moments to create stories; grotesque figures

主题：to see truth in pluralism; analyze human psycho from sexuality; stress artistic value; criticize modern materialism; perception of community can isolate individual

三、Ezra Pound

地位：a knowledgeable poet(multi-lingual, multi-cultural)

        Invent imaginism and found the school of the term

        Leader in supporting artists he thinks worthy(Eliot)

作品：Des Imagists意象派诗选

        The Cantos庞德诗章

        Personae面具

        Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

思想：①usury：capitalism is the basic evil of collapse of civilization,因此把战争和社会弊端归咎于银行家，尤其是犹太人，后支持法西斯

        ②vorticism: imaginism的进化（a unified poetic effect+ dynamic energy）

四、William Faulkner

介绍：novelist

地位：won the Nobel Prize in 1949

作品：The Sound And the Fury愤怒与喧嚣

        As I Lay Dying当我垂死的时候

        Light in August八月之光

        Absalom, Absalom押沙龙，押沙龙

        A Rose for Emily

风格：long sentences; complicated narratives; psychoanalysis; difficult to read; modern and Hellenic thoughts; perspectivism

主题：人、土地、自然关系；人类精神的消亡

作品中三类家庭：decline aristocratic

                     Merchandise

                     African-American’s in South

五、Ernest Hemingway

地位：won the Nobel Prize in1954

        The finest literary stylist of 20^th century in America

作品：The Sun Also Rises太阳照样升起

        For Whom the Bell Tolls丧钟为谁而鸣

        The Big Two-hearted River

        Farewell to Arms永别了武器

        In Another Country

        The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

        The Old Man and the Sea

风格：simple; many nouns and verbs; many coordinate sentences; little adjectives and surbordinate sentences;穿插仪式性活动，创造英雄人物

主题：a sense of loss; meaningless of modern life

思想：ice-berg theory

缺点：too subjective;男性人物比女性人物更加可信

六、F. Scott Fitzgerald

介绍：novelist

地位：Jazz Age and Lost Generation代表人物

作品：The Great Gatsby了不起的盖茨比

        Tender Is the Night夜色温柔

风格：引用unreliable narrator; 创造英雄人物；受自身生活影响

主题：sense of purposelessness; cultural decadence

七、T.S Eliot

地位：won the Nobel Prize in 1948

作品：The Waste Land荒原

        The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock

        Ash Wednesday圣灰星期三

        The Hollow Men

        Four Quartets四个四重奏

风格：many images and metaphors; mellow cadence

八、Wallace Stevens

地位：the most complicated poet of modern time

作品：Sunday Morning

        Harmonium风琴

        Of Modern Poetry

        Snow Man

        …Christian Woman

风格：perspectivism; naturalistic principle; Hellenic spirit; direct; refined; cultivated; ordered

思想：the world is a new history stage; supreme fiction(everything is understood in terms of endless creation)

主题：reality is the integrity of imagination and external world

九、William Carlos Williams

作品：Paterson

        The Red Wheelbarrow红色手推车

        This Is Just to Say

风格：everyday; common; contemporary; hardness and control

十、Richard Wright

作品：Native Son

        Black Boy

        The Man who Lived Underground

名词解释

1. American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God. 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.

2. American Romanticism: The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century. A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, its industrialization, its westward expansion, and a variety of foreign influences were among the important factors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period immediately following the nation’s political independence. Yet, 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 a source of corruption. Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War. The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the nation’s revolutionary heritage and its frontier egalitarianism.

3. American Renaissance：American Renaissance the name sometimes is given to a flourishing of distinctively American literature in the period before the Civil War. This renaissance is represented by the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. Its major works are Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Moby-Dick, and Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The American Renaissance may be regarded as a delayed manifestation of Romanticism, especially in Emerson’s philosophy of Transcendentalism.

4. American Dream: The American Dream is the faith held by many in the United Stated of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity.   These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations. Nowadays the American Dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as a measure of success and/or happiness.

5. American Transcendentalism: the emergence of the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place during the late 1820s and 1830s. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe. They stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society. They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses. Emerson’s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism”.

6. Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writers, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to express a very complex idea or set of ideas by means of symbols rather than by direct sentences.

7. Symbol:  in the simplest sense, anything that stands for or represents something else beyond it---usually an idea conventionally associated with it. Objects are symbols and words are also symbols. In literary usage, a symbol is a especially evocative kind of image; that is, a word or phrase referring to a concrete object, scene, or action which also has some further significance associated with it.

8. Free verse: free verse is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to rules of meter. Each line is end-stopped and is a rhythmic unit. Free verse was first written and labeled by a group of French poets of the late 19th century. Their purpose was to deliver poetry from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate the free rhythms of natural speech. Walt Whitman was the precursor who wrote lines of varying length and cadence, usually not rhymed. The emotional content or meaning of the work was expressed through its rhythm. Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many modern American poets, including Ezra Pound.

9. Realism: It is, in literature, an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization. In part, Realism was a reaction against the Romantic emphasis on the strange, idealistic, and long- ago and far- away. It is most often associated with the literary movement in 19th - century France. Realism has been chiefly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday life among the middle and lower classes, where character is a product of social factors and environment is the integral element in the dramatic complications. It includes naturalism, regionalism and local color writing.

10. Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s. It is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else. Native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial authenticity, as local colorists tried to immortalize the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular language and satirical humor. 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. For example, The Awakening and Roughing It.

11. American Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. Jack London and Stephen Crane are representative figures.

12. Modernism: is a general term applied to the wide range of experimental and  avant-garde trends in literature of the early 20th century, including symbolism, futurism, expressionism, imagism, Dada, and surrealism, along with the innovations of related writers. It was characterized by a conscious rejection of established rules of 19^th century. Modernist writers tended to see themselves as an avant-garde departed with bourgeois values and disturbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. Modernist writers often write with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories.

13. First person narrator: will normally be restricted to his or her partial knowledge and experience and therefore will not give us access to other characters’ hidden thoughts. This way makes works more reliable and is beneficial for delivering thoughts. Henry James is good at manipulating different narrators.

14. Imagism: came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image. Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles: a direct treatment of subject matter, economy of expression, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, Pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known imagist poem.

15. Ice-berg theory: If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Hemingway’s writing is minimalist and sparse, with few adverbs or adjectives. He includes only essential information, often omitting background information, transitions and dialogue tags. He often uses pronouns without clear antecedents.

16. Jazz age: The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between World War I and World War II, particularly in north America. With the rise of the great depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term” Jazz Age”.

17. The lost generation: It refers to a group of young intellectuals who came back from war, were injured both physically and mentally. They lived by indulging themselves in the Bohemian way of life. Their American dream was disillusioned. The best representative of the lost generation was Ernest Hemingway.

18. Hemingway Code Hero: Hemingway Code Hero ,also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong more sensitive, enjoys the pleasures of life in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself. Barnes in the Sun Also Rises is typical of Hemingway Code Hero.

19. The Harlem Renaissance: refers to the flowering of African American literature, art, and drama during the 1920s and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Black novelists, poets, painters, and playwrights began creating works rooted in their own culture instead of imitating the styles of Europeans and white Americans. Richard Wright is a representative figure.

20. Perspectivism: is the belief that a truth is something relative to a perspective and therefore reality is interpretable from many perspectives. Perspectivism is translated into various formal experiments. The use of William Faulkner is a prime example. The inclusion of perspectives based on gender, race and class is also a manifestation.

21. Colloquialism: The use of informal expression appropriate to everyday speech rather than to the formality of writing and differing in pronunciation, vocabulary or grammar. An example is Kipling’s ballad.

22. Origin stories: are those dramatizing tribal interpretations of how the earth originated or of how people established relationships with plants, animals and the cosmos. A characteristic original story is the Earth-driven story that typically tells of a great flood which once covered the earth. Earth beings who floated on the huge expanse of water made several attempts, in vain, to find land until an animal brought mud under the water to create, magically, the earth.