美国文学整理(共29页).docx

精选优质文档-----倾情为你奉上introductionThe periods of American literature1.The colonial period (约1607 - 1765)The main features Puritanism2.The period of Enlightenment and the Independence War (1765 -1800)Benjamin Franklin3.The romantic period (1800 - 1865)(1)The early romanticism -------------------------Washington Irving James Fenimore Cooper(2)“New England Transcendentalism” or “American Renaissance (1836 - 1855)”-----------Emerson Thoreau Whitman Dickinson Hawthorne Melville Allan Poe4.The realistic period (1865 - 1914)(1)Midwestern Realism --------------William Dean Howells(2)Cosmopolitan Novelist--------------Henry James(3)Local Colorism-------------Mark Twain(4)Naturalism-------------Stephen Crane Jack London Theodore Dreise5.The period of modernism (1914 - 1945)(1)Modern poetry: experiments in form (Imagism)----Ezra Pound T.S.Eliot Robert Frost(2)Prose Writing: modern realism (the Lost Generation)----F.Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway William Faulkner(3)Novels of Social Awareness---------Sinclair Lewis John Steinbeck Richard Wright(4)The Harlem Renaissance-------Langston Hughes Zora Neals Hurston(5)The 20th Century American Drama---Eugene O’Neil Tennessee Williams Arthur Asher Mille6.The Contemporary Literature (1945 -) American Poetry Since 1945: the Anti-traditionAmerican Prose Since 1945: Realism and Experimentation.Nobel Prize winner1930 Scinclair Lewis Main Street1936 Eugene O’Neill The Hairy Ape 1938 Pearl S. Buck The Good Earth1949 William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury1954 Earnest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises1962 John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath1976 Saul Bellow Herzog1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer Gimpel the Fool 1987 Joseph Brodsky Six Years Later1993 Toni Morrison Beloved Lecture 2 American Literature in the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods(1607 -1800)1.From 1607, American writing began with the work of English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of readers in the mother country. Some of these early works reached the level of literature, as William Bradford in New England. From the beginning, however, the literature of New England was also directed to the edification（教导） and instruction of the colonists themselves, intended to direct them in the ways of the godly. The writing in this period was essentially two kinds: (1) practical matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting, travel, etc. designed to inform people “at home” what life was like in the new world, and, often, to induce their immigration; (2) highly theoretical, generally polemical（好辩的）, discussions of religious questions.Furthermore, the influential Protestant work ethic, reinforced by the practical necessities of a hard pioneer life, inhibited（抑制） the development of any reading matter designed simply for leisure-time entertainment.(It is the belief that work itself is good in addition to what it achieves; that time saved by efficiency or good fortune should not be spent in leisure but in doing further work; that idleness is always immoral and likely to lead to even worse sin since “the devil finds work for idle hands to do”. This belief later developed into the American philosophic idea Puritanism.)2. The Main Features of this period(1)American literature gr ew out of humble origins. Diaries, histories, journals, letters, commonplace books, travel books, sermons, in short, personal literature in its various forms, occupy a major position in the literature of the early colonial period. (2)In content these early writings served either God or colonial expansion or both. In form, if there was any form at all, English literary traditions were faithfully imitated and transplanted. (1)The Puritanism formed in this period was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and American literature. Puritanism(1)Simply speaking, American Puritanism just refers to the spirit and ideal of puritans who settled in the North American continent in the early part of the seventeenth century because of religious persecutions. In content it means scrupulous moral rigor, especially hostility to social pleasures and indulgences, that is strictness, sternness and austerity in conduct and religion.(2)To some extent it is a state of mind, a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the American breathes, rather than a set of tenets Revolutionary Periods(1756-1800)Main features Puritanism: doctrines of predestination, original sin, total depravity and limited atonement.Social Awareness：Essays, pamphlets, and political documents for purposes of social reform, revolutionary agitation and philosophical declaration.Main figuresColonial period: William Bradford(1590-1657); Anne Bradstreet(1617-1672); Jonathon Edwards(1702-1758); Edward Taylor (1642-1729)Revolutionary period: Roger Williams(1603-1683) John Woolman(1720-1772); Thomas Paine(1737-180。