吴伟仁美国文学第一册学习指南填空题集合

1、1. early in the seventeenth century, the english settlements in virginia and massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the american national history.2. the earliest settlers in america include dutch, swedes, germans, french,spaniards, italians and portuguese.3. the first permanent

2、english settlement in north america was established at jamestown, virginia, in 1607.4. captain john smiths reports of exploration, published in the early 1600s, have been described as the first distinctly american literature to be written in english.5. there was a little of the religious ferment ans

3、 zeal that inspired such a tide of literature to flow puritan new england.6. the puritans had come to new english for the sake of religious freedom, while virginia had been planted mainly as a commercial venture.7. hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety were the puritan values that dominated much of

4、the earliest american writing, including the sermons, books, and letters of such noted puritan clergymen as john cotton and cotton mather.8. william bradford, first governor of plymouth, and john winthrop, who held the same post at boston, were superior to even the remarkable qualities that distingu

5、ished many of their associations. each has left a priceless gift: the former, the history of plymouth plantation, the latter, the history of new england.9. the best way to learn more of the colonial puritan mind is to meet two important figures, john cotton and roger williams.10. most puritan verse

6、was directly plodding, but the work of two writers, anne bradstreet and edward taylor, rose to the level of real poetry.1. who were the earliest settlers? where were they then? who was the most influential group?2. what were the first american writings?3. could you give a description of american pur

7、itans?1. as we have seen, theology dominated the puritan phase of american writing. politics was the next great subject to command the attention of the best minds.2. freedom was won as much by the fiery rhetoric of thomas paines common sense and the eloquence of the declaration of independence as by

8、 the weapons of washington or lafayette.3. the british government hampered colonial economy by requiring americans to ship raw materials abroad and to import finished goods at prices higher than the lost of making them in this country.4. american enlightenment dealt a decisive blow upon the puritan

9、traditions and brought to life secular education and literature.5. the secular ideals of american enlightenment were exemplified in the life and career of benjamin franklin, who instructed his countrymen as a printer, not a priest.6. in 1783, the year the united states achieved its independence, noa

10、h webster declared, “america must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for the arts as for arms” .7. born in boston in 1706, benjamin franklin went to philadelphia as a young man and began his career as a printer.8. from 1732 to 1758, franklin wrote and published his famo

11、us poor richards almanac, an annual collection of proverbs.9. thomas paine was the “great commoner of mankind”, son of a nominal quaker of thetford, england.10. on january 10,1776, paines famous pamphlets common sense appeared.11. philip freneau is perhaps the most outstanding writer of the post-rev

12、olutionary period.12. freneau was neoclassical by training and taste yet romantic in essential spirit.13. for a few years, writing with sporadic fluency, freneau earned his living variously as farmer, journalist and sea captain.14. as a poet, freneau heralded american literary independence, his clos

13、e observation of nature distinguished his treatment of indigenous wild life and other native american subjects.15. freneau has been called the “ father of american poetry”, and it i ultimately in a historical estimate that freneau is important.1. what is your impression upon the person of benjamin f

14、ranklin?2. what belief does the autobiography stand for？3. what is thomas paines common sense about?4. what does freneaus poem the wild hony suckle indicate?5. say something about the style of the autobiography1. in 1828 the election of the frontier hero andrew jackson as the seventh president of th

15、e united states had brought an effective end to the “virginia dynasty” of american president.2. the united states had been a republic of small landlords, without sharp contrasts of wealth.3. through the first half of the century the pursuit of simplicity, utility and perfection remained an american

16、characteristic.4. in 1837 the first college-level institution for women mount holyoke female seminary, opened in massachusetts to serve the “muslin sex”.5. washington irving sketch book became the first work by an american writer to win financial success on both sides of the atlantic.6. the attitude

17、s of americas writers were sharped by their new world environment and an array of ideas inherited from the romantic traditions of europe.7. romantic values were prominent in american politics, art and philosophy until the civil war.8. as a moral philosophy, transcendentalism was neither logical nor

18、systematized.9. romantic writers placed increasing value on the free expression of emotion and displayed increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters.10. in 1828 noah webster published an american dictionary of the english language.11. at mid-century a cultural reawakening brought

19、a “flowering of new england”. led by hawthorne, emerson, and thoreau and stirred by the teachings of transcendentalism, writers of boston and nearby towns and villages produced a new england literary renaissance.12. washington irving was the first great prose stylist of american romanticism, and his

20、 familiar style was destined to outline the formal prose of such contemporaries as scott and cooper, and to provide a model for the prevailing prose narrative of the future.13. washington irving was the first great belletrist, writing always for pleasure, and to produce pleasure.14. the spy by coope

21、r was a rousing tale about espionage against the british during the revolutionary war.15. cooper launched two kinds of immensely popular stories the sea adventure tale and the frontier saga.16. coopers enduring fame rests on his frontier stories, especially the five novels that comprise the leathers

22、tocking tales.17. in their order of events, the novels in the leatherstocking tale are the deerslayer, the last of the mohicans, the pathfinder, the pioneers and the prairie.18. the central figure in the novels, natty bumppo, goes by the various names of leatherstocking, deerslayer, pathfinder, and

23、hawkeye.19. in 1817, the stately poem called “ thanatopsis” by william cullen bryant introduced the best poet to appear in america up to that time.20. ralph waldo emerson was responsible for bringing transcendentalism to new england.21. emerson believed above all in individualism, independence of mi

24、nd and self-reliance.22. two speeches the american scholar and the divinity school address by emerson made him famous.23. emersons truest disciple, the man who put into practice many of emersons theories, was henry david thoreau.24. for thoreau, as for emerson, self-reliance and independence of mind

25、 ranked above all.25. the essay civil disobedience stated thoreaus belief that no man should violate his conscience at the command of a government.26. the house of the seven gables deals with the effects of a curse, and though the tale itself is fiction, the germ of the story sprang from the authers

26、 family history.27. the book moby-dick is a tremendous chronicle of a whaling voyage in pursuit of a seemingly supernatural white whale.28. what baffled its early readers of moby-dick was the books wild extravagances of mood and language, its effect of what the modern critic van wyck brooks calls “

27、a shredded shakespearean play”.29. irving had been notably successful in domesticating european subject matter while employing a british prose style: now longfellow domesticated european meters as in his adoption of classical greek meters to tell the story of evangeline bellefontaine.30. the gentleness, sweetness and