History And Anthology Of American Literature
Part I The Literature of Colonial America
The earliest settlers included Dutch, Swedes, Germans, French, Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese, The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. At last early in the 17th century, the English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the American history.
Two Important New England Settlements：The Plymouth Colony(The Mayflower Compact); The Massachusetts Bay Colony(The Arbella covenant）
The first American writings：The first writings that we call American were the narratives and journals of these settlements. (wrote in diaries and in journals)
Captain John Smith (1580-1631) was the first American writer and he published eight in all. His works always has long titles.
Early New England Literature
1) A literature of ideas:New England had from the beginning a literature of ideas: theological, moral, historical, political.
2) Theocracy:The first intention in Massachusetts was to found a theocracy—a society in which God would govern through the church. The church thus became the supreme political body.
3) The Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American writing: Over the years the puritans built a way of life that was in harmony with their somber religion, one that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety. These were the Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American writing, including the sermons, books, and letters of such noted Puritan clergyman as John Cotton and Cotton Mather.
4) The American poets: The American poets who emerged in the 17th century adapted the style of established European poets to the subject matter confronted in a strange, new environment. Anne Bradstreet was one such poet.
William Bradford(
威廉·布拉德福德): first governor of Plymouth. He wrote The History of Plymouth Plantation.
The Pilgrim Fathers:English Puritans who went to America in 1620 and founded the colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts
John Winthrop(
约翰·温思罗普): first governor at Boston. He wrote The History of New England. Puritan Thoughts:
1. What was a Puritan?
The ―Puritan‖ was ―a would-be purifier‖. Puritans wanted to make pure their religious beliefs and practices.
2. What did the Puritans want to do?
The Puritans wished to restore simplicity to church services and the authority of the Bible to theology. They felt that the Church of England was too close to the Church of Rome in doctrine, form of worship, and organization of authority. Another point of controversy was that the Church of England was the established church, that is, the official church of the state, and the most extreme Puritans, among them the Plymouth Plantation group, felt the influences of politics and the court had led to corruption within the church.
3. What kind of people were the Puritans?
Puritans include people from the humblest to the loftiest ranks of English society, both educated and uneducated, poor and rich.
Puritan opposition to pleasure and the arts has sometimes been exaggerated, but it is true that their lives were disciplined and hard. Puritans tended to suspect joy and laughter as symptoms of sin. Puritan religious teaching tended to emphasize the image of a wrathful God and to forget his mercy. Puritanism (the practices and doctrines of the Puritans) was the strongest in the New England region and had great influence upon its history, its people and its literature.
John Cotton and Roger Williams:`contradictory examples of Puritans
John Cotton
约翰·科登
The first major intellectual spokesman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, sometimes called ―the Patriarch of New England‖.
Roger Williams
罗杰·威廉姆斯
With Williams begins the history of religious toleration in America, and with him, too, the history of the separation of church and state. Williams advocated the freedom of belief. In him we have a balance to John Cotton.
Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor
安妮·布莱德斯特和爱德华·泰勒
Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, rose to the level of real poetry.
Anne Dudley Bradstreet is one of the most interesting of the early poets.
Bradstreet‘s first published work appeared in London: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.
Edward Taylor: Puritan Preacher and Poet
The best of the Puritan poets was Edward Taylor. His work followed the style and forms of the leading English poets of the mid-seventeenth century.
Part II The Literature of Reason and Revolution (18th)
Two historical event:
I. The American War for Independence 1775-1783
II. Enlightenment
Theology dominated the Puritan phase of American writing. Politics was now the great subject to command the attention of the best minds.
Benjamin Franklin (本杰明·富兰克1706-1790)
Representative works:
1. Poor Richard’s Almanac;
2. The Autobiography:
An introduction of his life to his own son, including four parts written in different times. The first success story of self-made Americans;
Thomas Paine
（托马斯·佩因1737-1809）: Revolutionary War patriot and pamphleteer.
Major works:
1.The Case of the Officers of the Excise (1772);
2. Common Sense (1776);
3. The American Crisis (1776-1783);
4. The Rights of Man (1791 - 92).
Thomas Jefferson(
托马斯·杰弗逊1743-1826): Author of the Declaration of Independence.
The Declaration of Independence was an act of the Second Continental Congress, adopted on July 4, 1776, which declared that the Thirteen Colonies in North America were "Free and Independent
Philip Freneau (菲利浦·弗瑞诺1752 - 1832)
Philip Morin Freneau was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. Remembered as the poet of the American Revolution and the father of American poetry, he was a transitional figure in American literature.
“The Wild Honey Suckle”His nature poem, ―The Wild Honey Suckle‖ , is considered an early seed to the later Transcendentalist movement taken up by William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau.
In this poem the poet expressed a keen aware-ness of the loveliness and transience of nature. He not only meditated on Mortality but also celebrated nature. The poem implies that life and death are inevitable law of nature.
―The wild honey suckle‖is Philip Freneau's most widely read natural lyric with the theme of transience.
The central image is a native wild flower, which makes a drastic difference from elite
flower images typical of traditional English poems.
The poem showed strong feelings for the natural beauty, which was the characteristic of romantic poets.
The poem was written in regular 6-line tetrameter stanzas, rhyming: ababcc. The structure of the poem is regular, so it has the neoclassic quality of proportion and balance.
The line―the space is but an hour―contains a hyperbole stressing the transience of life. The tone of the poem is both sentimental and optimistic.
Part III The Literature of Romanticism
Literary Characteristics: Romanticism; Transcendentalism.
1. Romanticism
The attitudes of America‘s writers were shaped by their New World environment and an array of ideas inherited from the romantic traditions of Europe. A new romanticism had appeared in England in the last years of the 18th century. It spread to continental Europe and then came to America early in the 19th century.
Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the 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.
2. Transcendentalism (超验主义)
The phase of New England Transcendentalism is the summit of American Romanticism.
It is a philosophical view, a notion, a concept, an idea, a way of looking at things, a set of attitudes about man, God, and the universe, a way of how to get to the basic truth of the universe. Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as "the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses".
The representative writers of Transcendentalism are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
3.The growth of cultural nationalism aroused American artists to write patriotic songs, to paint vast panorama of American scenes, and to design monumental buildings that would register the grandeur of the American people and their land.
---music: most American music remained derivative; Francis Scott Key‘s ―Star –Spangled Banner‖
---painting: the Hudson River School
---architecture: Gothic buildings
B. Literature:1)Literature ceased to be primarily didactic, a servant of politics and religion.
2) Imaginative literature became intense, personal, and symbolic as more writers came to perceive themselves as prophets and seers. Moved by a call for a national literature, writers celebrated America‘s meadows, groves, and streams, its endless prairies, dense forests, and vast oceans.
3) The desire for an escape from society, and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature
4) Romantic writers displayed increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters.
5) Nationalism stimulated a greater literary interest in America’s language and its common people. Noah Webster: An American Dictionary of the English Language.
6) New England literary renaissance (“flowering of New England”)
Washington Irving (华盛顿·欧文1783-1859) .
1) Irving is the first belletrist in American literature, writing for pleasure at a time when writing was practical and for useful purposes.
2) He is the first American literary humorist.
3) He has written the first modern short stories. The short story as a genre in American literature probably began with Irving's The Sketch Book.
4) He is the first to write history and biography as entertainment
5)He was the first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame. Washington Irving, (1783-1859) American author, short story writer, essayist, poet, travel book writer, biographer, and columnist. Two famous short stories in The Sketch Book: "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow".
"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a short story by Washington Irving. The story is set in the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town, New York, in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a priggish schoolmaster from Connecticut, who competes with Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt, a buff and tough man, for the hand of eighteen-year-old Katrina Van Tassel. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" follows a tradition of folk tales and poems involving a supernatural wild chase.
James Fennimore Cooper (
詹姆斯·芬尼莫·库珀1789-1851): The first important American novelist begin his literary career on a dare.
The Leatherstocking Tales (1823 - 41):
The Deerslayer (1841) <<杀鹿者>>
The Last of the Mohicans (1826) <<最后的莫希干人>>
The Pathfinder (1840) <<探路者>>
The Pioneer (1823) <<拓荒者>>
The Prairie (1827) <<大草原>>
Natty Bumppo:
several names for the same character: Hawk-eye, the Pathfinder, the Deerslayer, Leatherstocking; a typical frontier man: honest, simple, innocent, generous; represents brotherhood of man, nature and freedom; an ideal American, or a perfect example / father image of the frontier man.
William Cullen Bryant (
威廉·卡伦·布莱恩特1794---1878)
Thanatopsis (view of death)---masterpiece of American poetry
This poem had three main points it wished to make, the final one being the most important:
1) Live life fully in order to die well and comfortably.
2) In death, all are joined with Nature and with each other for eternity.
3) This comfort and togetherness in death may only be obtained through death.
What Greek words were combined to make the title? How do the meanings of these words contribute to the meaning of the poem?
---Thanatos (death) Opsis (seeing).The title presents the poem as a way of seeing death.
Define the following words; consider the context of the poem: shroud, pall, narrow house, and sepulcher. How do these words and their meanings impact the meaning of the poem?
---All of these words are associated with death and burial. This furthers the idea of the poem presenting a way of looking at death.
The tone of this poem shifts. What is the tone in the first part of the poem? When does the tone shift? What is the tone after the shift?
---The tone in the first part of the poem is forbidding, stern, final and then shifts to one of comfort. How is this poem an example of a historical piece?
---It represents part of the view of the time period.
How is this a Romantic poem?
---The speaker hears the voice of nature, turns to nature for comfort. It presents a William Wordsworth’s nature. The recurring theme of death seems to be quite constant throughout the genre of Romanticism. Bryant attempts to make death a comfortable feeling, referring to the word couch as something you can simply curl up and feel good in.
How is this a Calvinist poem?
---Look at the poem as religious counsel. Many elements of Calvinistic beliefs are present.
To a Waterfowl
Bryant's poem begins with a waterfowl in flight and a hunter below. The bird's instinct allows it to fly to safety. In spite of the danger, hardships and temptations on the way, the bird continues its flight to its destination. As the speaker watches the bird, he ponders the mysteries of migration. Bryant parallels the bird's instinct to a "Power." Even though humans have no real instinct to guide them to safety, there is a "Power" or God that will guide them to safety.
In the last paragraph of the poem Bryant seems to be comparing our life with God to that of a waterfowl. He says: "He who from zone to zone, Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight, In the long way that I must tread alone, Will lead my steps aright."
He is saying that throughout our life wherever we go God is going to be with us guiding us down the right path. And in times when we think we must go alone, he too will be with us then. He never leaves us long enough for us to fall, just long enough for us to learn from what we do.
Edgar Allan Poe (
埃德加·阿伦·坡1809—1849): The father of the modern detective story. American poet, short-story writer, and literary critic
"The Fall of the House of Usher" is a short story of Gothic horror written in first-person point of view.
Major characters
1. Narrator, a friend of the master of the House of Usher. When he visits his friend, he witnesses terrifying events.
2. Roderick Usher, the master of the house. He suffers from a depressing malaise characterized by
strange behavior.
3. Madeline Usher, twin sister of Roderick. She also suffers from a strange illness. After apparently dying, she rises from her coffin.
Main Theme
The central theme of "The Fall of the House of Usher" is terror that arises from the complexity and multiplicity of forces that shape human destiny. Dreadful, horrifying events result not from a single, uncomplicated circumstance but from a collision and intermingling of manifold, complex circumstances.
Other Themes
Evil----incest (乱伦); Isolation; Failure to Adapt; Madness; Mystery; Strange Phenomena Symbolism
The Fungus-Ridden Mansion---Decline of the Usher family.
The Collapsing Mansion---Fall of the Usher family.
The ―Vacant eye-like‖ Windows of the Mansion---(1) Hollow, cadaverous eyes of Roderick Usher; (2) Madeline Usher‘s cataleptic gaze; (3) the vacuity of life in the Usher mansion.
Works:
To Helen is a poem about the ideal woman that can only exist by imagination, a woman that was the Goddess of the soul. Poe uses an allusion to refer to Helen. Helen can refer to the Greek goddess of light or Helen of Troy who is considered to be the most beautiful woman ever alive. In the poem, beauty, death (of a beautiful woman) and the past are combined together. The places where western civilization originated, such as the Mediterranean Sea, Greece and Rome, and the Holy Land (Christianity) are referred to in each of the three stanzas respectively, which may indicate the decease of the past glory and grandeur of the civilization.
The Raven;
Annabel Lee:In the poem, Poe examines a theme which he examines in many of his works: the death of a beautiful woman. It is a poem written in memory of his deceased young wife Virginia Clemm. The poem is permeated with melancholy. The poem coincides with Poe‘s poetics. It is readable at one sitting. In the poem, Poe examines a theme which he examines in many of his works: the death of a beautiful woman, which, according to him, is ―unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.‖The poem is permeated with melancholy as he believes ―melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetic tones.‖ And it is rhythmic.
The poem has got the elements of a fairy tale.
1) It has the beginning of a fairy tale (1st stanza).
2) The couple's love originated from their childhood.
3) Annabel Lee died because "the angels" envied the couple's great love and, with a cold wind, they killed Annabel Lee, who was then carried away and buried in a sepulchre in the kingdom by the sea.
4) However, unlike The Raven, in which the narrator believes he will "nevermore" be reunited with his love, Annabel Lee says the two will be together again.
5) On moonlit nights, the speaker will go and lie down by the side of his deceased young wife
Ralph Waldo Emerson(拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生1803-1882): was an American author, poet, and philosopher; founder of Transcendentalism
Beliefs: 1) individualism; 2) independence of mind; 3) self-reliance
Major works
1) Nature ( a book which declared the birth of Transcendentalism)
2) Some other essays preaching his thoughts: "The Poet", "Self-reliance" and "The American Scholar":America‘s Declaration of Intellectual Independence.
Henry David Thoreau(
亨利·戴维·梭罗1817-1862): the truest disciple / follower of Emerson. He put into practice many of Emerson‘s theories.
Major Works:
1) A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
2) Walden: description of his life near the pond called Walden belonging to Emerson The author lived there for nearly two years with only an axe at the beginning. This book was a failure in his own time but became very popular in the 20th century.
Nathaniel Hawthorne(纳撒尼尔·霍桑1804-1864) ---a 19th century American novelist and short story writer.
Hawthorne‘s unique gift was for the creation of strongly symbolic stories which touch the deepest roots of man‘s moral nature.
Major works:
Short story collections: Twice-Told Tales《故事新编》; Moses from an Old Manse《古屋青苔》Novels: The Scarlet Letter《红字》; The House of Seven Gables《七个尖角阁的房子》; The Blithedale Romance《福谷传奇》; The Marble Faun《大理石神像》.
The Scarlet Letter, published in 1850, is a Gothic American romance novel. The finest example is the recreation of Puritan Boston, “The Scarlet Letter”. In this novel each word, image, and event works toward a single effect. It is a complex story of guilt, its effects upon various persons, and how deliverance is obtained for some of them. Everybody was sinner. Sinning is universal.
Major themes
1) The theme of the story should be the moral, emotional and psychological effects of sin on people and its redemption.
2) The Scarlet Letter is a cultural allegory, in which the author indirectly tells the future of Puritanism.
3) The Scarlet Letter is an example in which American Romanticism adapted itself to American Puritanism.
Characterization
Hester Prynne --- the visible ―A‖
Arthur Dimmesdale --- the invisible ―A‖
Roger Chillingworth --- the maker of ―A‖
Pearl --- the living ―A‖
Symbolic meanings of the “A”
1) Pearl --- Angel
2) Roger Chillingworth--- Avenge
3) Hester Prynne---a). Adultery; b). Agony or Anguish; c). Alone or Alienation;
d). Art; e). Arrogance; f).Admirable; g). Affection; h). Able
i). Amazon (Greek Mythology: A member of a nation of women warriors reputed to have lived in Scythia.); j) Angel
4) Arthur Dimmesdale
a) AD --- adultery; b) the inner ―A‖ (Adultery --- Agony or Anguish); c) Alienation.
Features
1) depicting psychology
2). symbolism
3). supernatural elements
4). excellent craftsmanship (delicate structure; refined language)
Herman Melville
赫尔曼·麦尔维尔1819-1891
Moby-Dick, his masterpiece, is both an intense whaling narrative and a symbolic examination of the problems and possibilities of American democracy;
1) a very philosophical & metaphysical novel
2) a story of revenge
3) a Shakespearean tragedy
Major characters
Protagonist: Ahab --- Captain of the Pequod
Antagonist: Moby-Dick --- the Whale, symbolizing the forces working against Ahab.
Ishmael Pequod seaman and narrator of the action (the only surviver)
Symbolism
Pequod --- inevitable death;
The voyage --- the search for the ultimate truth;
Moby Dick---Nature; evil / evil force; human destiny; American capitalism.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow(
亨利·沃兹沃思·朗费罗1807-1882)--- U.S. poet
A Psalm of Life
The lyrical form of this poem is abab.
The ?psalmist‘ is thus the poet himself. Literally, the psalmist is of course King David.
This is a very inspirational poem. This psalm brings out feelings of confidence -- strength and belief in oneself. The message is very clear.Just live. Don't be hindered by the fear of oncoming, certain death, or whatever mistakes you may have made before, live by the second and only plan ahead that far. Make of life what you can, strive to accomplish your dreams, work hard for self gratification, learn to love and to be loved.
The Slave’s Dream
The poem talks about the cruelty of slavery. By comparing the two kinds of lives the slave lived in his native land Africa and here in America and by depicting the slave‘s death, the poem breathes Longfellow‘s indignation at the shameful and infamous system of slavery.
My Lost Youth
Longfellow‘s boyhood was spent mostly in his native town, Portland, Maine, which he never ceased to love, and whose beautiful surroundings and quiet, pure life he has described in his poem "My Lost Youth" .In nine-line stanzas, whose meter is reminiscent of ballad measure, the poem recalls the poet‘s youth in Portland, Maine. Each stanza ends with the refrain of a Lapland song "A boy's will is the wind's will, / And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." The two lines are repeated in each stanza in a way which is in line with its content and mood.
The Song of Hiawatha ---The first epic of Indians written in America.
Part IV The Literature of Realism
The Civil War (1860 –1865)
It is the beginning of what Mark Twain called ―The gilded age‖/ a gingerbread era--An age of excess and extremes, of decline and progress, of poverty and dazzling wealth, of gloom and buoyant hope, of a prosperous surface and developing evils in society.
The decline of romanticism and the beginning of realism.
Realism
(1)a mode of writing that gives the impression of recording or reflecting faithfully an actual way of life;
(2) a real and objective representation of actuality (here and now), the ordinary and the local;
(3) the call for ―reality and truth‖;
(4) the description of typical characters in typical circumstances.
Henry James, William Dean Howells and Mark Twain are three staunch advocates of 19th American realism.
William Dean Howells the arbiter and the most important champion to start realism .
Realism and local colorism
Realism first appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam (混合物) of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things was immediately observable: the dialects, customs, sights, and sounds of regional America.
Bret Harte was the first American writer of local color to achieve wide popularity, presenting stories of western mining towns with colorful gamblers, outlaws, and scandalous women.
Harte, Harriet Beacher Stowe, Kate Chopin, Joel Chandler Harris, and Mark Twain provided regional stories and tales of the life of America‘s Westerners, Southerners, and Easterners. Local color fiction reached its peak of popularity in the 1880s, but by the turn of the century it had begun to decline. Naturalism
1) Naturalism is a new and harsher realism;
2) a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment;
The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment, that religious ―truths‖ were illusory, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death.
3) influence of the teachings of Charles Darwin----natural selection and the survival of the fittest
At the turn of the century, the American literary scene = romanticism + local colorism + realism + naturalism
Walt Whitman(
沃尔特·惠特曼1819-1892): was one of the great innovators in American literature. Song of Myself
1) It opens the Leaves of Grass;
2) ―Song of America‖ / ―Song of the New Nation‖
3) portraying various aspects of American life, esp those of ordinary people
4) self--- Self includes and is everything and everyone in the universe.
5) the joy of the common man
6) a world of equality and democracy
I Sit and Look out
theme: the failure of democracy and the social and moral corruption in America
Emily Dickinson(
爱米丽·狄金森1830-1886):the poet called "The Belle of Amherst". Her poetry in unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no titles, hence are always quoted by their first lines.
I heard a Fly buzz ---- when I died
The poetess is watching her own death and recording the process. Instead of seeing God and hearing the songs of angels yearned for by Puritans upon death she heard a fly buzz, which is really ironic.
Fly: sets off the stillness in the room;blocks off the light (from heaven);suggests a coming decadence---the speaker loses the opportunity of gaining immortality after death.The fly plays an important role in the speaker‘s experience of death. The poem is, in part, about ―the conflict between preconception and perception.‖ The person on his or her deathbed shifts perspective from ―the ritual of dying‖ to ―the fact of death.‖ The fly, by inte rrupting the dying speaker with its ―Blue — uncertain stumbling Buzz —‖ obliterates his or her false notions of death. T he sound of the fly represents ―the last conscious link with reality.‖ The poem lacks any hint of a life after death.
Because I could not stop for Death
In the poem, a woman tells the story of how she is busily going about her day when a polite gentleman by the name of Death arrives in his carriage to take her out for a ride, but, in reality, the speaker is watching and recording her own funeral. Incidentally mentioned, the third passenger in the coach is a silent, mysterious stranger named Immortality. Thus begins one of the most famous examples of personification and figurative language in American literature.
Death takes the woman on a leisurely, late-afternoon ride to the grave and beyond, passing playing children, wheat fields, and the setting sun—all reminders of the cyclical nature of human life—along the way. The woman describes their journey with the casual ease one might use to recount a typical Sunday drive. They pause a moment at her grave, perhaps Death‘s house, which ―seemed / A Swelling of the Ground,‖ and then continue their never-ending ride ―toward Eternity.”
In the end, through a brilliant use of hyperbole, or intentional exaggeration, the woman insists that all the centuries that have since passed have felt ―shorter than the Day”that she took that fateful carriage ride which revealed to her for the first time the true meaning of Immortality.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
哈丽雅特·比彻·斯托1811-1896: only one female prose writer in 19th century. Uncle Tom's Cabin--- stories of three slaves —Tom, Eliza, and George
Major themes
1) the evil and immorality of slavery;
2) the moral power and sanctity of women;
3) the exploration of the nature of Christianity and its fundamental incompatibility with slavery. Style
Uncle Tom's Cabin is written in the sentimental and melodramatic style common to 19th century sentimental novels and domestic fiction (also called women's fiction).
Mark Twain
马克·吐温1835-1910
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Life on the Mississippi; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
O. Henry(
欧·亨利1862-1910): American short story writer.
Name at birth: William Sydney Porter
Many of his stories tell about the lives of poor people in New York, as well as in other places, his works abound in good-natured humor. The title of one of his book, The Four Million, indicates that he considered all the people of New York City worth writing about, and not simply the upper ―Four Hundred.‖His stories are usually short, the plots are exceedingly clever and interesting; humor abounds, and the end is always surprising.Often there are two endings: first an unexpected ending, then another, which is quite a different one a still better surprise.
Henry James(
亨利·詹姆斯1843-1916): the founder of psychological realism. The forerunner of ―Stream of consciousness‖ novels.
International theme, Psychological realism, Contribution to the art of fiction.
Daisy Miller won him international renown;
The most ambitious novel: The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse
The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors , and The Golden Bowl were his great final novels. Psychological realism
Many consider Henry James to be the master of the psychological novel.
Jack London (
杰克·伦敦1876-1916): novelist
The Son of the Wolf, The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf ,
The stress upon the primitive survival of the fittest in both books stemmed from the author's belief in many of Charles Darwin's theories of evolution.
Two of London's best books are semiautobiographical - Martin Eden and John Barleycorn.
Theodore Dreiser 西奥多·德莱塞1871-1945
A pioneer of naturalism in American literature.
U.S. novelist. Dreiser was the foremost American literary naturalist and author of two of the most significant works of early-twentieth-century American fiction, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy.
Comment on Sister Carrie:
Sister Carrie, about a young kept woman who goes unpunished for her transgressions, was denounced as scandalous.
1) In this novel, Dreiser expressed his naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards.
2) The novel best embodies his naturalistic belief that while men are controlled by heredity, instinct and chance, a few extraordinary and unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate wordlessly and instead strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose for their existence.
3) To Sister Carrie, the world is cold and harsh. Alone, helpless, she moves along like a mechanism driven by desire and catches blindly at any opportunities for a better existence, opportunities first offered by Drouet, and then by Hurstwood. A feather in the wind, she was totally at the mercy of forces she cannot comprehend, still less to say control. The famous picture of Carrie sitting in a rocking chair in her room in the evening, rocking back and forth, is a picture of Carrie’s drifting with the tide. She has no control, no freedom of will.
Trilogy of Desire : The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic.
Dreiser‘s greatest and most successful novel, An American Tragedy.
An American Tragedy The identification of potency with money is at the heart of Dreiser‘s greatest and most successful novel.
Part V Twentieth-century Literature
Background:
①World War I，America have great profit.
②Jump in technology (automobile / radio) 科技方面的跳跃（汽车/收音机）
③ol：is a poetic movement of England and the United States, flourished from 1909-1917. Its credo, expressed in Some Imagist Poets, included the use of the language of commod moral code breaks 旧道德体系破碎
The Effect of the First World War: A Turning Point in the American Literature
Imagism意象派n speech, project matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration.
The Lost Generation: It is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-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.
Modernism现代主义：is loosely a synonym of anything contemporary. Strictly, especially in literary criticism, which began in the late 19th century and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. They pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one.
现代主义的标志：T. S. Eliot’s ―The Waste Land, the most significant American poem of the twentieth century, helped to establish a modern tradition of literature rich with learning and allusive thought.
The Iceberg Theory (also known as the "theory of omission") is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway.
典型的迷惘一代：F. Scott Fitzgerald, ―The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway ―The Sun Also Rises; A Farwell to Arms
William Faulkner ―The Sound and the Fury
Ezra Pound 埃兹拉·庞德1885-1972:Pound and Eliot became the early leaders in restoring to
poetry the use of literary reference as an imaginative instrument.
Modern poet who wrote The Cantos
Edwin Arlington Robison埃德温·阿林顿·罗宾逊1869-1935: one of the most productive of the new poets of the 20th century.
Robert Frost 罗伯特·弗洛斯特1874-1963
The poet who wrote The Road Not Taken
Carl Sandburg 卡尔·桑德堡1878-1967
Author of the poem Chicago
Wallace Stevens 华莱士·斯蒂文斯1879-1955
The poet and insurance man who wrote The Emperor of Ice Cream
Thomas Stearns Eliot托马斯·斯特恩斯·爱略特1888-1965
F· Scott Fitzgerald F·司格特·菲茨杰拉德1896-1940
Ernest Hemingway厄恩斯特·海明威1899-1961 : “mastery of the art of modern narration”.
The Sun Also Rises Hemingway became the spokesman for what Gertrude Stein had called ―a lost generation‖.
The Old Man and the Sea (triumphant even in defeat)
John Steinbeck约翰·斯坦贝克1902-1968: the foremost novelist of the American Depression.
Theme: the universal theme of ―the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself‖.
The Grapes of Wrath showed the migration of the ―Okies‖ from the ―Dust Bowls‖ to California, a migration that ended in broken dreams and misery but at the same time affirmed the ability of the common people to endure and prevail.
William Faulkner威廉·福克纳1897-1962
The trilogy on the Snopes family: The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion.