安徽大学出版社美国文学选读期末复习资料

1、美国文学选读期末复习资料合师院11级英语陈山山整理The Colonial Period or The Enlightenment and Revolution PeriodAmerican 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 Richards Almanac 格言历书 - A Collection of maxims, or proverbs,

2、on thevalue of work and savings for success. 2、The Autobiography 自传-“美国梦”的根源 3、参与起草独立宣言American RomanticismThe 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 cu

3、ltural 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

4、 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 pe

5、rception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and mans societies as a source of corruption.2、 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 arts sake.”He was father of psycho

6、analytic 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 o

7、f 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

8、England clergymen（牧师）. 散文家、诗人、超验主义的哲学的主要倡导者。 American TranscendentalismAs 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 f

9、ound 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: The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thin

10、g in the universe. 思想 超灵 宇宙 The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society. 个体+社会 The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was not purely matter. It was ali

11、ve, filled with Gods 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 amb

12、ivalent（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 Le

13、tter. 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

14、 in the story;Arthur Dimmesdale-intelligent and emotional.Symbolism in his worksHawthorne 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

15、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.6、 Henry David Thoreau 亨利大卫梭罗As a young man, Thoreau took a more than usual in

16、terest in the natural world. Like Emerson, but more than him, he saw nature as a genuine restorative, healthy influence on mans 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

17、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 Thoreaus own transcendental philosophy. 7、 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 be

18、at 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,

19、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Ones 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 D

20、ied 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: societyDickinson: inner life of the individualMost of her poems are about death and immortality. Nature is to her both benevolent and cruel.Emily was an en

21、ergetic 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 Im Nobody!The Age of RealismThe war led many t

22、o 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

23、 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 How

24、ells, Mark Twain, Henry JamesJames 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

25、 James had apparently laid greater emphasis on the “inner world” of man.10、 Mark Twain 马克吐温Writing: humor and local colorismThe 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

26、 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 w

27、ritten 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 cha

28、racter 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 Twains most representative work) The Adve

29、ntures 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 color

30、ism.-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 decayedromanticism, is remarka

31、ble.人物：Huckleberry Finn、Jim、Tom Sawyer、Widow Douglas and Miss Watson、PapThe 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

32、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.American Naturalism 自然主义-Living in a cold, indifferent, and essentially Godless world, man was no longer

33、 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 i

34、mpact of Darwins 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.

35、The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral与道德无关的, 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；OHenryJack London：The Call

36、of the Wild；Martin EdenO.Henry (William Sydney Porter)：The Gift of the Magi；The Cop and the anthemTheodore Dreiser：Trilogy of Desire: 1.The Financier 2. The Titan 3. The Stoic； Sister Carrie； Jennie Gerhardt； An American TragedyThe Modern PeriodThe Modern Period ：The 1920s-1930s ( the second renaiss

37、ance 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.EliotThe historic and cultural background-The USAs participation in World Warmarked a crucial stage in the nations evoluti

38、on 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 th

39、eories 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

40、 Lost GenerationThe 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 Hemingways presence that “You are all a lost generation.”Gertrude Stein used the term to describe the pos

41、t-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 othe

42、rs.Winners of Nobel Prize for Literature during this periodSinclair Lewis (1930) 第一个获奖的美国人(特点：Main Street, Babbitt); Eugene ONeill (1936); Pearl S. Buck (1938); T.S. Eliot (1948); William Faulkner (1949); Ernest Hemingway (1954); John Steinbeck (1962)十四、F. Scott Fitzgerald 弗斯科特菲茨杰拉德American DreamIn

43、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 P

44、aradise 人间天堂 The Beautiful and the Damned 漂亮的冤家 Flappers and Philosophers 姑娘们与哲学家们 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 GatsbyJay Gatsby is a man driven by greed, ambition and, most of all, an unwavering desire for a woman he m

45、et 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 Islands Gold Coast, he yearns to rekindle his romance with the woman who stole his heart years before. But when the chance finally arrives, a sha

46、dow 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 WilsonThe 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

47、），Wilson（汤姆情妇的丈夫）15、 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 liv

48、e 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 an

49、d 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：Yoknapatawp

50、ha 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) 喧嚣与骚动，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

51、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 heroesa noble but tragic

52、 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.Major Works: 1.The Sun Also Rises 1926

53、(Jake Barnes) 太阳照样升起 2.A Farewell to Arms 1928 (a tragic story about war and love) (Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley) 永别了，武器 3.For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940 (Spanish civil war) (Robert Jordan) 丧钟为谁而鸣，取材于Donne的一句诗 4.The Old Man and the Sea 1952 (Santiago) 老人与海The 20th Century American Poets（）Two c

54、haracteristic strains：introspection自省&social criticismImagism 意象派A poetic movement of England and the U.S. that flourished from 1909 to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing直接处理主题” and the economy of wording简化措辞. “poetic techniques to re

55、cord exactly the momentary impressions”An Imagist poem, therefore, often contains a single dominant image, or a quick succession of related images. Its effect is meant to instantaneous.The imagist movement drew form a variety of poetic traditions. Greek, Provencal and Japanese poetry are among the many acknowledged sources of Imagism and Pounds poetry.Three main principles of the Imagist Movement (1912) :1 direct treatment of poetic su