1.American Naturalism
American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. In the decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this chance world he was both helpless and hopeless.
European writers like Emile Zola had developed this acute social consciousness. They saw man’s life as governed by the two forces of heredity and environment, forces absolutely beyond man’s control.
American naturalism had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Darwinism. American literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romanticism predecessors, the naturalism emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that the destiny of humanity was misery in
life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.
2.Imagist poetry/ Imagism
1)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.
2)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 dominate image.
3)Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles:
A.direct treatment of subject matter;
B.economy of expression;
C.as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase, not in the sequence of metronome.
4)Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is a well-known imagist poem.
3. The Lost Generation
1) The lost generation is a term first used by stein to describe the post-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.
2) Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest
American literature to date.
3) The three best-known representatives of lost generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.
4. Yoknapatawpha saga
Most of Faulkner’s works are set in the American South, with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness. They are about people from a small region in Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County, which is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkner’s childhood memory about the town of Oxford in his native Lafayette County. With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom. The Yoknapatawpha stories deal, generally, with the historical period from the Civil War up to the 1920s when the First World War broke out, and people of a stratified society, the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the blacks. As a result, Yoknapatawpha County has become an allegory or a parable of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society. The Yoknapatawpha saga is Faulkner’s real achievement.
5. Sister Carrie
Author: Theodore Dreiser. His main works are "Sister Carrie", "American Tragedy"; "The Titan"; "Nigger Jeff”.
Plots: Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel by Thedore Dreiser about a young county girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream by first becoming a mistress to men that she perceives as superior and later as a famous actress. It tells the story of two characters: Carrie Meeber, an ordinary girl who rises from a low-paid wage earner to a high-paid actress, and Georango Hustwood, a member of the upper middle class who falls from his comfortable lifestyle to a life on the streets. Neither Carrie nor Husthood earn their fates through virtue or vice, but rather through random circumstance. Their successes and failures have no moral value; this stance marks Sister Carrie as a departure from the conventional literature of the period.
6. The Great Gatsby
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
First publishes in 1925, it is set on Long Island’s North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922. The novel takes place following the World War·American society enjoyed prosperity during the “roaring” 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers. After its republishing in 1945 and 1933, it quickly found a wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of The Great Gatsby has become a standard test in high school and university course on American literature
in countries around the world and is ranked second in the Modern Library’s lists of the 100 Best novels of the 20th century.
7. A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms is a novel by Emest Hemingway set during the Italian campaign of WWI. The book, publish in 1929, is a Lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The title is taken from a poem by 16th-century English dramatist George Peele.
A Farewell to Arms is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of population. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway’s stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as “the premier American war novel from that decade WWI”.
2. Mending Wall
Mending Wall is a metaphorical poem written by Robert Frost in blank verse, published in 1914. This poem is set in the countryside and is about one man questioning why he and his neighbor must rebuild the stone wall dividing their farms each spring. The stone wall at Frost’s farm in Derry, which he described in Mending Wall.
While living in England with his family, Frost was exceptionally homesick for the farm in New Hampshire where he had lived with his
wife from 1900 to 1909. Despite the eventual failure of the farm, Frost associated his time in New Hampshire with a peaceful, rural sensibility that he instilled in the majority of his subsequent poems. “Mending Wall” is autobiographical on an even more specific level: a French-Canadian named Napoleon Guay had been Frost’s neighbor in New Hampshire, and the two had often walked along their property line and repaired the wall that separated their land.
3. The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost is one of the finest of rural New England’s 20th century pastoral poets. His poems are great combination of wisdom, harmony and serenity. They are simple at first sight, but demand readers for deep reading to grasp further meaning beyond surface.
This poem consists of four stanzas of five lines. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB. the rhymes are strict and masculine, with notable exception of the last line. There are four stressed syllables each line, varying on iambic tetrameter base.
The Road Not Taken tells about life choice. Man’s life is metaphorically related to a journey filled with twists and turns. One has to consider a lot before making a wise choice. Though the diverged roads seem identical, they actually lead to different directions, which symbolize different fates.
A less than rigorous look at the poem may lead one to believe that Frost’s
moral is embodied in those lines. The poem is taken as a call to independence, preaching originality and Emersonian self-reliance. The poem deconstructs its conclusion stanza by stanza.
1、A Rose For Emily
(1)The features of the novel with examples:
Firstly, a rose is symbolizing love and a pledge of faithfulness. A rose for somebody can also mean a kind of memorial, an offering, in memory of somebody. Emily is denied by love and the title has an ironic meaning. Secondly, the narration of "A Rose for Emily" does not follow a normal chronological order. Instead, it shifts in time frequently and gives out bits of information about the main character, Miss Emily, in such a way that the reader has to piece them together by himself. The following implicit chronology has been worked out on the basis of the information from the text.
Thirdly,in "A Rose for Emily" author chooses "we", the people of the town, as the collective narrator. The first sentence of the story says, "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to the funeral..." And in the following parts "we" frequently appear as the narrator. Fourthly, in this story, Faulkner makes best use of the Gothic devices in narration, and, the deformed personality and abnormality Emily demonstrates in her relationship with her sweetheart is dramatized in such a way that we feel shocked and thrilled as we read along. The whole
room was just like a tomb, gloomy and macabre the story was also set under a depressive atmosphere.
(2) Comments on Emily
Under the suppression of her father, Emily became unsocial and isolated. Puritan value had great influence on Emily. As a kind of revolt, Emily fell in love with someone unacceptable at all cost. At last, she chose to destroy what she loved.
2、Discus with details on the theme about the American Dream in the Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby was written in the year 1925, when it was the high ly prosperous time of America after the World War I. In the book, the auth or F. Scott Fitzgerald creates the main character Jay Gatsby, a young man around thirty years old who rose from a poor childhood to become incredi bly wealthy. Through the whole life of Gatsby we can see that he is the re presentative of the people who pursue the American dream in the 1920s w ith easy money and relaxed social values. After attaining the material wea lth, there are no clearly outlined steps to take.
Gatsby’s dream falling down represents the American dream falling down. Then why the American dream should fail in the end. I think that t he following two reasons can explain it.
Firstly, Gatsby builds up an illusionary dream. He instills Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor possesses. Th
ough later he comes to know that Daisy is not the girl she once was and s he doesn’t love him. But he cannot stop dreaming and continues to pursue the old days. Gatsby’s dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, j ust as the American dream in the 1920s is ruined by the unworthiness of it s object—money and pleasure. Gatsby’s dream of a perfect Daisy collaps es in the book which represents the collapse of the whole American drea m.
Secondly, from the beginning he uses a wrong way to achieve his dr eam and this would finally lead to his dream coming into failure. He gets rich through illegal way and hopes to attract Daisy by his money. The Am erican dream of Gatsby corrupts as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpasses more noble goals. This certainly cannot win the love o f Daisy. More importantly, the sharp contrast between the ideal and the re ality will inevitably result in the breakup of the dream. The American dre am destroys not only for the profound social and historical reasons but als o being deeply concerned with the self-destructive characters of Gatsby. When Gatsby’s simple and na?ve characters are confronted with the cold s ociety and moral decay of America which is represented by Daisy and To m, there will be no place for Gatsby to escape but he has to die in the end. The idea of Amercan dream still hold true in today’s time. It may be wealt h, fame, love or power. But one thing never changes about American drea m. That is everyone desires something in life, and everyone strives to get
it. Gatsby is a prime example of pursuing Amercan dream.
3、Comment on the major characters and the theme in A Farewell to Arms
Theme: As the title suggests, it’s in many ways an antiwar novel, but it would not be fair to connect this novel with a literature of pacifism or social protest. In the novel’s system, violence is not necessarily wrong—Henry feel no remorse for shooting the engineering sergeant, and the reader believes Henry when he tells Catherine that he will kill the police if they come to attest him.
Nevertheless, A Farewell to Arms opposes the thoughtless violence, massive destruction. And sheer senselessness of war. It also criticizes the psychological damage that war inflicts on individuals and populations. The aim of the novel is not to protest war or encourage peace; it is simply to describe the hostility and violence of a universe in which such a conflict is possible.
And there is another theme: the relationship between love and pain. At the beginning, Catherine wanted to distance herself from pain of loss, while Henry wanted to get as far away from talk of the war as possible. In each other, they found temporary comfort. But the couple’s feelings for each other quickly pass from an amusement that distracts them to the very
fuel that sustains them.
Major Characters:
Henry, his attitude of war is from full-hearted to disgustful. The attitude of life is from taking the life as a game to pursuing love. And the attitude of setback and misfortune from hard fight to aimless. Catherine, she thinks the love should be life standards and life should be bright and wisdom.
4、Discuss with the details on the theme of the Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie is the early representative in American naturalism. It tells the story of two characters: Carrie Meeber, an ordinary girl who rises from a low-paid wage earner to a high-paid actress, and Geogre Hurstwood, a member of the upper middle class who falls from his comfortable lifestyle to a life on the streets. Neither Carrie nor Hurstwood earn their fates through virtue or vice, but rather through random circumstance. Their successes and failures have no moral value; this stance marks Sister Carrie as a departure from the conventional literature of the period.(以上可以简写)
And the theme of this novel can be described as the following words:
①American Dreams: each of Dreiser’s characters in Sister Carrie search for their own “American Dreams”. Carrie is filled with the expectations of acquiring the finer things in life. And Drouet pursues the other
appointments that represent his dream, such as a beautiful woman to adorn his arm and his own home.
②Change and Transformation:Carrie and Hurstwood undergo dramatic changes from the beginning of the novel to the end. Carrie’s transition takes her from country to bumpkin to glamorous actress. And Hurstwood’s transition moves him from prominent and trusted businessman, husband, and father to homeless street beggar.
③Choices and Consequences:Hurstwood makes one choice that dramatically affects the rest of his life. While all choices result in consequences, those consequences can be positive or negative. Hurstwood’s decision to take the money from his employer’s safe starts his way to the eventual suicide.
④Class Conflict: Industrial growth brought the United States a period of prosperity during the late 1800s and early 1900s. With factories flourishing, job opportunities were abundant. People made good money in factory management positions and other white-collar jobs. Factory workers, however, not only earned low incomes, but they also worked long hours. Consequently, a wide division existed between the wealthy and the poor.
⑤Identity: Carrie’s transformation from the beginning of the novel to the end occurs as a result of her responses to her experiences. she never really has an identity but adjusts her “act” to fit the situation.
⑥Sex: In the early 1900s, the morals and virtues of the Victorian era still guided people's actions. People with proper upbringing did not speak of sex. The public was shocked that Dreiser's characters so openly participated in explicit relationships and that Dreiser seemed to take it granted.
1. Transcendentalism The origin of it is a philosophical and literary movement centered in Concord and Boston, which marks the summit of American Transcendentalism. 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. The major features of American Transcendentalism are:It emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. It stressed the importance of the individual. To them the individual was the most important element of society. It offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. 2.Romanticism The Romanticism period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a term associate with imagination boundlessness, and in critical usage is contrasted with classicism which is commonly associated with reason and restriction. The features of Romanticism are: American Romanticism was in a way derivative: American romantic writing was some of them modeled on English and European works. American romanticism was in essence the expression of "a real new experience "and contained"an alien quality".Representatives:William Cullen Bryant; Henry Longfellow and James Cooper, Washington Irving. 3.Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.The representatives are Howells, James, and Mark Twain. 4. Naturalism American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. The background of naturalism are: In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this chance world he was both helpless and hopeless.Major Features of it are:Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.Representatives of it such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. 5.New Criticism The New Criticism as a school of poetry and criticism established itself in the 1940s as an academic orthodoxy in the United States. The school has its beginning in the 1920s. It focus on the analysis of the text rather paying attention to external elements such as its social background, its author's intention and political attitude, and its impact on society. Then it explores the artistic structure of the work rather than its author's frame of mind or its reader's responses. It also see a literary work as an organic entity, the unity of content and form, and places emphasis on the close reading of the text. These New Critics included T.S. Eliot,I.A.Richards,John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and some other critics. The New Criticism has tended to divorce criticism from social and moral concerns, which was to become one salient feature of the movement. 6.Imagism: Between 1912 and 1922 there came a great poetry boom in which about 1000 poets published over 1000 volumes of poetry. Indeed ,to express the modern spirit, the sense of fragmentization and dislocation, was in large measure the aim of quite a few modern literary movements, of which Imagism was one.The first Imagist theorist, the English writer T.E.Hulme. Hulme suggests that modern art deals with expression and communication of momentary phases in the poet's mind. The most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of dominant image.It is a literary movement launched American poets early in the 20th century that advocated the use of free verse, common speech patterns, and clear concrete images as a reaction to Victorian sentimentalism. The representatives are Ezra pound, William Carlos Williams and some other poets.
Part I The Literature of Colonial America I．Historical Introduction The colonial period stretched roughly from the settlement of America in the early 17th century through the end of the 18th. The first permanent settlement in America was established by English in 1607. ( A group of people was sent by the English King James I to hunt for gold. They arrived at Virginia in 1607. They named the James River and build the James town.) II．The pre-revolutionary writing in the colonies was essentially of 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, discussions of religious questions. III．The First American Writer The first writings that we call American were the narratives and journals of these settlements. They wrote about their voyage to the new land, their lives in the new land, their dealings with Indians. Captain John Smith is the first American writer. A True Relation of such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Colony (1608) A Map of Virginia: A Description of the Country (1612) General History of Virgini a (1624): the Indian princess Pocahontas Captain John Smith was one of the first early 17th-century British settlers in North America. He was one of the founders of the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. His writings about North America became the source of information about the New World for later settlers. One of the things he wrote about that has become an American legend was his capture by the Indians and his rescue by the famous Indian Princess, Pocahontas. IV．Early New England Literature William Bradford and John Winthrop John Cotton and Roger Williams Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor V．Puritan Thoughts 1. The origin of puritan In the mediaeval Europe, there was widespread religious revolution. In the 16th Century, the English King Henry VIII (At that time, the Catholics were not allowed to divorce unless they have the Pope's permission. Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife because she couldn't bear him a son. But the Pope didn't allow him to divorce, so he) broke away from the Roman Catholic Church & established the Church of
湖州师范学院外国语学院2008— 2009学年第二学期 《美国文学》期末考试试卷（A卷）答案暨评分标准 I. Write the names of the authors. (10%) ①Walt Whitman ②Edgar Allen Poe ③Wallace Stevens ④Franklin Norris ⑤Stephen Crane ⑥William Faulkner ⑦Sinclair Lewis ⑧John Steinbeck ⑨Langston Hughes ⑩Tennessee Williams II. Fill in the following blanks with appropriate information.（10%） ①New England ②Regionalism or Local color writing ③semi-autobiographical ④anti-realism ⑤Imagist ⑥Santiago ⑦multiple narrations or points of view ⑧1930 ⑨Harlem Renaissance ⑩Eugene O’Neill III. Choose only one answer form the four choices as the most appropriate answer. （20%） 1－5. A D C B B 6－10. D B E B A IV. Identify the author and the title of the work from which each of the following excerpts is taken. And then answer the question after each excerpt. (20%) Passage 1 the author: Walt Whitman (1%) the title of the work : Songs of Myself (1%) Question: What is the poet celebrating? (2%) The poet is celebrating individualism and nationalism, singing of all those people who form the American nationality.
Allegory is a narrative that serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories are written in the form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and almost any other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a story that has characters, a setting, as well as other types of symbols, that have both literal and figurative meanings. One well-known example of an allegory is Dante’s The Divine Comedy.In Inferno, Dante is on a pilgrimage to try to understand his own life, but his character also represents every man who is in search of his purpose in the world. Alliteration is a pattern of sound that includes the repetition of consonant sounds. The repetition can be located at the beginning of successive words or inside the words. Poets often use alliteration to audibly represent the action that is taking place. Aside is an actor’s speech, directed to the audience, that is not supposed to be heard by other actors on stage. An aside is usually used to let the audience know what a character is about to do or what he or she is thinking. Asides are important because they increase an audience's involvement in a play by giving them vital information pertaining what is happening, both inside of a character's mind and in the plot of the play. Gothic is a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects. Gothic literature was named for the apparent influence of the dark gothic architecture of the period on the genre. Also, many of these Gothic tales took places in such “gothic” surroundings. Other times, this story of darkness may occur in a more everyday setting, such as the quaint house where the man goes mad fro m the "beating" of his guilt in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.”In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were told from many different points of view. CATHARSIS is an emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragic artistic work. IMAGERY: A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the "mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of literature. It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a poem, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor. Surrealism is an artistic movement doing away with the restrictions of realism and verisimilitude that might be imposed on an artist. In this movement, the artist sought to do away with conscious control and instead respond to the irrational urges of the subconscious mind. From this results the hallucinatory, bizarre, often nightmarish quality of surrealistic paintings and writings. Sample surrealist writers include Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, and Franz Kafka.
Captain John Smith (first American writer). Anne Bradstreet；The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America （colonists living） Edward Taylor(the best puritan poet) John Cotton ”the Patriarch of New England” teacher spiritual leader Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography Poor Richard’s Almanack Thomas Jefferson： Political Career Thoughts The Declaration of Independence we hold truth to be self-evidence Philip Freneau“Father of American Poetry” The Wild Honey Suckle American Romanticism optimism and hope Nationalism Washington Irving“Father of American Literature short story”The first “Pure Writer” A History of New York The Sketch Book marked the beginning of American Romanticism! “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”Rip Van Winkle James Fenimore Cooper Father of American sea and frontier novels Leather stocking Tales The Last of the Mohicans The Pioneers The Prairie The Pathfinder The Deerslayer Edgar Allan Poe father of detective story and horror fiction Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque “MS. Found in a Bottle” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” “The Fall of the House of Usher”“The Masque of the Red Death”“The
1、The Colonial Period（1607-1765） American Puritanism ( in the early 17th century through the end of the 18th) 北美第一位女诗人Anne Bradstreet(宗教气息，夫妻恩爱) Edward Taylor 都受英国玄学派影响（metaphysical） 2、The Enlightenment and Revolution Period Benjamin Franklin:Poor Richard's Almanac The Autobiography---“美国梦”的根源 3、American Romanticism（end of 18th to the civil war） American writers emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature. 早期浪漫主义Washington Irving father of American Literature
大四美国文学期末考试题型及例题： 1.选择/对错60分（40道选择，20个对错） 2.名词解释10分（5个） 3.选段配对10分（5个） 4.问答20分（10/2） 1．历史：Father / poetess… 2. 名作家：Hemingway, Faulkner, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson 3．作品：The W asteland/Moby Dick/Scarlet Letter 1.a)选择题（40个，40分） 1. At the age of reason and revolution, Americans were influenced by the European movement called the ________. A. Chartist Movement B. Romanticist Movement C. Enlightenment Movement D. Modernist Movement 2. Which is NOT connected to Benjamin Franklin? ________ A. He was born in a poor family. B. He was a pious puritan. C. He was phrased as “Jack of all trades”. D. He was a master of diplomacy. 3. Ernest Hemingway is noted for the following EXCEPT ________. A. Lost Generation B. Iceberg theory C. American Dream D. Code Heroes 4. Which character is NOT from The Scarlet Letter? ________ A. Hester Prynne B. Roger Chillingworth C. Captain Ahab D. Pearl 5. Jack London’s semi-biographical novel ________well presents the disillusionment of American Dream. A. The American Tragedy B. The Call of the Wild C. Martin Eden D. The Grapes of Wrath b)判断对错题（20个，20分） 1. Poe’s masterpiece “To Helen” is written to memorize his deceased wife. (F) 2. The tone of “Annabel Lee” is optimistic and hopeful. (F) 3. Mark Twain's novel Jumping Frog was an artistic failure, but it gave its name to the America of the postbellum period which it attempts to satirize. (F) 4. Sister Carrie ended up in tragedy because she could not control her fate. (F)
American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism（资本主义）, its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights. American Puritanism清教主义: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the protestant church who wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrines of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. American literature in the 17th century mostly consisted of Puritan literature. Puritanism had an enduring influence on American literature. It had become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, so much a part of national cultural atmosphere, rather than a set of tenets. Transcendentalism 超验主义: Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. Transcendentalists spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. It placed emphasis on spirit, or the Over soul, as the most important thing in the world. It stressed the importance of individual and offered a fresh perception nature ad symbolic of the spirit of God. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thorough. American Naturalism自然主义: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. The naturalists attempt to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by environment and heredity. It emphasized that the world was amoral, the men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. American Naturalism(美国自然主义文学)：The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to account for t he behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.2) naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.3>Dreiser is a leading figure of his school. The Gilded Age镀金时代:the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrial economy. The end of the Gilded Age coincided with the Panic of 1893, a deep depression. The depression lasted until 1897 and marked a major political realignment in the election of 1896. After that came the Progressive Era. The Lost Generation: The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who used “a lost generation” to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I experiences and disillusioned with American