课桌椅样样齐备-祖国在我心中征文

总体：

1． Anne Bradstreet（The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America）
①Contemplation
②To My Dear and Loving Husband
2. Benjamin Franklin
①The Autobiography (early American Dream)
3. Philip Freneau (Poet of American Revolution; The Father of American Poetry)
①The Wild Honey Suckle
②The Indian Burying Ground
③To a Caty-Did
4. Washington Irving (The Father of American Short Story; first American writer of
imaginative literature to gain international fame; regarded as Father of American
literature.)
①The legend of Sleep Hollow
②Rip Van Winkle
③The Sketch Book(the beginning of American Romanticism)
5. James Fennimore Cooper
①The Last Mohicans
②Leather Stocking Tales
6. William Cullen Bryant
① Thanatopsis
② To a Water Fowl
7. Edgar Allen Poe (Father of Modern Short Story; Father of Psychoanalysis
criticism)
①To Helen
②The Raven
③The Fall of the House of Usher
④The Black Cat
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson (leading New England transcendentalist)
①Nature
②Self-Reliance
③The American Scholar
9. Henry David Thoreau (an active transcendentalist)
①Walden
10. Nathaniel Hawthorne (a master of symbolism; first great American writer of
fiction to work in moralistic tradition. combined the American romanticism with
puritan moralism; created a new genre psychological romance)
①The Scarlet Letter
②Twice Told Tales
③The Marble Faun

④Blithedale Romance
⑤The Minister’s Black Veil
11. Herman Melville
①Moby Dick
12. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (the fireside poet; love of nature, love for the
past)
①A Psalm of Life
②The Slave’s Dream
③My Lost Youth
④The Song of Hiawatha
13. Walt Whitman
①Leaves of Grass(first genuine epic poem)
②Song of Myself
③I Sit and Look Out
④ Beat！Beat！Drums！
14. Emily Dickinson (the theme of her poetry concern religion, life, death, marriage,
immorality, nature etc.)
①I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed
②I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
③A Bird Came Down the Walk
④I Died for Beauty ___but Was Scarce
⑤I Hear a Fly Buzz ___When I Died
⑥Because I Could not Stop for Death
WashingtonIrving
Bracebridge Hall
布雷斯布里奇田庄
(1822)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Tales of a Traveller
旅客谈
(1824)
Christopher Columbus (1828)
c. writing characteristics
(1) humorous: the function of his writing is to amuse, to entertain instead of teaching or
instruction
(2) vivid and true character portrayal
(3) finished (refined) and musical language, thus regarded as “the Amn. Goldsmith”
d. analysis on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow(选自the sketch book
见闻札记
)
1. the story:setting,character, plot
2. theme:conflicts and praise
conflict betw. Ichabod and Brom
conflict betw. the village and the outside world
James Fenimore Cooper
The Spy (1821): a historical novel
The Pilot (1824): a sea novel
Leatherstocking Tales
皮裹腿故事集
(1823-1841): frontier novels
The Last Mohicans (1826) (Colonial War betw. Britain and France)
e. writing features:

strong points: we can see a variety of incidents and tensions, complicated plot and
structure and a beautiful description of nature.
Weak points: characterization is weak. There is unsatisfactory description of characters
(esp. female). He is not free from syntactical awkwardness, heavy-handed attempt at
humor. “Where Irving excels Cooper is weak.” Dialect is not authentic.
Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House Usher
Feature:
i. brevity (15 pages)
ii. Single effect
iii. originality in theme
To Helen
It was inspired by the beauty of the mother of a schoolmate of Poe in Richmond,
Virginia.
The poem is famous for a number of things:
1. its rhyme scheme: ababb
2. its varied line lengths
3. its metaphor of a travel on the sea
4. its oft-quoted lines:

theme: praise the ideal love and beauty and ancient Greek and Roman civilizations
The Raven
乌鸦

theme: the lament over the death of a beautiful woman
tone: melancholy
Transcendentalism (essayists, poets, novelists)
Their journal is “The Dial”.
Definition: Transcendentalism is idealism. (Emerson)
b. features
(1) stress on Oversoul, that is spirit.
(2) stress the importance of individual.
(3) fresh conception of nature.
c. significance
(1) inspired a whole generation of writers such as Whitman, Melville and Dickinson.
(2) dresses man’s subjective initiative as opposed to materialism.
(3) liberated people from Calvin’s original sin
d. limitation
(1) shallow: cut off from real life or reality; initiated by the rich, they were limited in a
certain circle. So, in some degree, they have been cut off from social life and can’t
understand the sufferings of the common people.
(2) inward contradiction: gain knowledge by intuition, shows its idealistic aspect.
R.W. Emerson (
Ralph Waldo)

Nature(1836): the Bible of New England transcendentalism
The American Scholar (1837):
The Divinity School Address
神学院致辞
(1838)

Essays (18411847)
Representative Men (1850)
English Traits (1856)
Poems (1847)
d. significance
(1) He embodied a new nation’s desire and struggle to assert its own identity in its
formative period.
(2) his stress on individualism
Limitation:self-centered, individual
His ideas influence a lot of writers such as Dikinson, Hawthorne and Whitman.
Henry David Thoreau
A Week on the Concord and MerrimackRivers
康考德和梅里马克河上的一周
(1849)
Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
Civil Disobedience不服从论(1849, an address)
c. Walden
main ideas:
(1)on self-cultivation and human perfectibility, elevated from Puritan original sin, believe
in inner virtue and inwardly grace
(2) criticism on civilization and capitalism
(3) only truth and knowledge can’t be taken away, trust in future and in man
Style: pithy (colloquial sayings), vivid description, symbols and images
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Twice-Told Tales (1837): a collection of short stories
Mosses from an Old Manse
古屋青苔
(1846): another collection of short stories
The House of the Seven Gables
七个尖角的阁楼
(1851): on the effect of a curse
The Scarlet Letter (1850): masterpiece
It’s not a love story, trying to show the moral, emotional and psychological effects of sin
on his characters.
“A”: Adultery-Able- Angel
“A” on chest: sinner, confessed, died, shows an honest man
Moral: man should be true and honest and ready to show one’s worst to the world（批评
与自我批评）
Herman Melville
Typee (《泰比》1846)
Omoo (《奥穆》1847)
Mardi (《马尔迪》1847)
这三部作品描写塔希提群岛和马吉萨斯群岛以及他在岛上的奇遇。
Redburn (《莱德勃恩》1849)：描写了他的第一次航海经验以及在利物浦港贫民窟的
见闻。
White Jacket (《白外套》1850)：根据他在美国海军军舰上服役时期的生活体验写成。
Pierre (《皮埃尔》1852)
Israel Potter (《伊斯莱尔·波特》1855): historical novel
Piazza Tales (《广场故事》1856): a collection of short story

Moby Dick (《白鲸》1851): masterpiece
(1) a whaling book: an encyclopedia of whalingdescription of a whaler’s life
(2) a tragedy about man fighting against universe (hostile)Man in this universe lives a
meaningless and futile life, meaningless because futile.
Man can observe and even manipulate in a prudentway, but he cannot influence and
overcome nature at its source.
(3) alienation异化:
between man and man
between man and society (ship)
between man and nature
Ahab is the best representative.
To him the world exists for his sake. His selfhood must be asserted at the expense of all
else: lives may be sacrificed, and nature may have to be vanquished in order that he may
do what he wills.
Richard Chase says: the idea Melville conveys in it is emotional,
physical
(5) theme: quest
(6) symbolism
the voyage: a metaphor for
experience
the Pequod皮阔德: the ship of the American soul
the endeavor of the crews:
Moby Dick: (many interpretations) the symbol of nature
W. C. Bryant
the analysis on To a Waterfowl
致水鸟

It is the
It is a poem of nature in quatrains rhyming in abab.
theme: from a bird and its flight to an ordinary person and his course of life, this poem
conveys that everything in nature is under the beneficence and protection of the Power.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Theme: idealized love, children, family and friendship
A Psalm of Life
The poem is divided into 9 stanzas, each composed of two iambic tetrameter lines and
two trochaic trimeter lines rhyming abab.
The first two stanzas refute the pessimism that life is but a dream, affirming the contrary
that life is real.
The following stanzas urge the reader to act in the present and to leave
great people did in order to inspire the followers.
The last stanza ends with a resounding note while admonishing people to learn to wait
as well as to labor.
Realism（the 19th-century literary movement that reacted to romanticism by insisting on a
faithful, objective presentation of the details of everyday life.）
features:
 ive description (concern for the commonplacethe low)

 ii. criticism of society and reality, exposing and criticizing the society; the writers’
dissatisfaction; no longer eulogize human glority
 iii. verisimilitude逼真性(true to details)
 iv. influenced by bourgeois’ 中产阶级democratic ideas (not overthrow but reform,
changes)
 v. reformative: to reform the society, not to change completely
 features: Naturalism（A post- Darwinian movement of the late 19th century that tried to
apply the ）is a theory which applied scientific
concepts and methods to such problems as plot development and characterisation.
 Comparison between Realism and Naturalism:
 Realism.
 i. objective
 ii. creation of types
 iii. influenced by British Rom. works with hope
 Naturalism
 i. scientific accuracy
 ii. collect material from their lives
 t this, hopelessgloomy picture of the society
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass《草叶集》,
(1) themes
 i. unity of all man and of man within universe
 ii. equality of all man
 iii. cycle of life and death
 iv. enthusiastic idea toward Westward Expansion
 v. brotherhood
d. Song of Myself
自我之歌

 (1) influence of Transcendentalism: praise of individualism
 (2) cycle of life and death
 (3) ideal of democracy: equality between different races and brotherhood
Emily Dickinson
A Bird came down the walk
I died for Beauty---but was Scarce
I Heard a Fly buzz---when I died---
Because I could not stop for Death-
H.B. Stowe
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851): masterpiece
significance:
 ified and strengthened abolitionist sentiment;
 2. gave a better balanced, more specific picture of plantation life;
 3. praised the merits of slaves and showed great sympathy for them
Henry James
 The American (1877): begins with international theme
 Daisy Miller (1878): brings the author first international fame






The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Ambassadors (1903)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Portrait of A Lady
贵妇画像
:masterpiece
It tells about the fate of one of those splendid Jamesian American girls, Isabel Archer,
arriving in Europe, full of hope, and with a will to live a free and noble life, only to fail
prey to the sinister designs of two vulgar and unscrupulous expatriates, Madam Merle
and Gilbert Osmond
International theme国际主题:
 the meeting of America and Europe; American innocence in contact and contrast with
European decadence and the moral and psychological complications arising therefrom;
for the American it was a process of progression from inexperience to experience, from
innocence to knowledge and maturity. Those American heroes or heroins who
confronting European sophistication, either triumphed over it or were overwhelmed.
Mark Twain
 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Count
卡拉维拉斯县有名的跳蛙
(1865):a short
story
 The Innocents Abroad
国外的无辜者
(1869): letters on his travelling in Europe and Near
East
 Roughing It
苦行记
(1872): on his experience in the western America
 The Gilded Age (1873): his first novel, collaborated with Charles Dudley Warner
 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
哈克贝利·费恩历险记
(1884): masterpiece
 Life on the Mississippi(1883)
 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
误闯亚瑟王宫
(1889)
 The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
败坏了哈德莱堡的人
(1900)
 The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
e. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
 1. It is
 2. themes:
 1)picaresque以流浪汉和无赖为题材的(adventure story)
 2) moral growth of Tom
 3. techniques: verisimilitude, humor, colloquial style
Deadpan（铁面幽默）: oral humorthe teller has a strict face but the listeners are laughing.
Language: dialects as forms of art
Jack London
 The People of the Abyss
深渊居民
(1903): about London's slum
 The Iron Heel铁蹄(1908): the first proletarian criterion novel which envisages the
development of fascism
 The Call of the Wild野性的呼唤(1903): the most widely read book
 The Sea Wolf
海狼
(1904)
 These two novels reflect the ideas of the law of survival and the will to power
 Martin Eden
马丁伊登
(1909): a reflection of the contradiction between these
competeing beliefs

c. Martin Eden--theme:the failure of American Dream. After he realized his dream of getting
into the upper class, he also realized the emptiness of it and committed suicide.

individualism, it was accepted as an indictment of socialism; written to show that man
cannot live for himself alone, it was accepted as a demonstration that success made for
death. Had Martin Eden been a socialist he would not have died.
 Consciously London meant the novel to show that only a belief in the people, only the
devotion of one's life to a cause greater than onself, could give life any real meaning.
T. Dreisser西奥多·德莱塞
 Sister Carrie 嘉莉妹妹(1900): the first novel, masterwork
 Jannie Gerhardt (1911)
 The Fanancier (1912)
 The Titan (1914)
 The Stoic (1947)
 The Genius (1915)
 An American Tragedy
美国悲剧
(1925)
 Dreiser Looks at Russia(1928)
c. Sister Carrie
 theme:the emptiness of Ameircan Dream
 i. jungle law
Famous actress bank manager(the unfit is bound to die) <——
Country girl (able to follow her instinct) commit suicide
ii. chance and luck
iii. criticism of American values: money and sex —the standards to see if a person is
successful
 iv. concern for the poor
Jazz Age: the Jazz Age lasted from 1919-1929, the decade enjoyed economic prosperity. The
war and economic boom encouraged a breaking with the tradition (Puritanism). People upheld
the value of money-making and pleasure- seeking.
Ezra Pound埃兹拉·庞德
Imagism意象派
 Pound became the most important figure. Imagist poetry reached the peak of literature
for three things appeared:
 i. a manifesto
 ii. three principles
 iii. a lot of writings
 Pound said, an image is
instant of time.
In a Station of the Metro
在地铁车站

 1. This is the much-quoted masterpiece of Pound and a representative of the Imagist
poetry.
 2. In form, the poem is similar to the Japanese haiku, a two-line couplet with rhymes.
Pound's poem reminds the Chinese of two lines by a Tang poet, Bai Juyi. When
describing the sad yet beautiful face of Yang Huifei, a Tang emperess, the poet wrote,





 The beautiful face, lonesome with tears;
 A pear branch, radiant with rain.
 3. The poem is a representative of Imagist poems in that the image of petals on a wet,
black bough best represents the picture of those lovely faces in the crowd and that the
image is dominant in the poem---the image itself is the poem.
T.S. Eliot
poetry:
 Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
 Poems (1920)
 The WasteLand (1922)
 The Hollow Men (1925)
 Ash Wednesday (1930)
 Four Quartets (1943)
plays:
 Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
 Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
 The Cocktail Party (1950)
 The Confidential Clerk (1954)
critical essays:
 The Sacred Wood (1920)
 For Lancelot Andrews (1928)
 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
 After Strange Gods (1934)
 On Poetry and Poets (1957)
c. The Waste Land
荒原

 5 parts: The Burial of Dead, The Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, What
the Thunder Said
 chief characteristics
 1. quotations and allusions暗示
 2. objective correlative
 3. juxtaposition并列: mingle brand image with common image
 4. use of antiquity古风
The Love Song

other modern westerners who are between passion and timidity, between
desire and impotence
4. theme
 This poem reflects the decadent modern civilization and the nightmarish inferno in
which modern Westerners are living in.
5. techiniques
 1) irony
 2) striking images
 3) the form of dramatic monologue
 The poem is written in irregular lines, with but a few rhymes.

Robert Frost
b. Characteristics
 1. not in the main stream of modern poetry, but with conventional form and plain
language. That’s why he’s the most popular poet in the 20th century.
 2. a kind of a regionalist----New England, but not local colorism. He used New England as
a metaphor for the whole world and universe.
 3. a plain poet using symbols from everyday country life. Simple symbols but express
deep meanings.
The Road Not Taken
 1. The poem was written in very regular lines with iambic pentametre and rhyme
scheme of abaab.
 2. The symbolic meaning of the two divergent roads is rather clear. They represent any
important decisions in one's life.
 3. details:
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
 1. It is a lyric poem with iambic tetrametre and interlocking enclosed rhyme.
 2. It represents a moment of relaxation from the onerous journey of life, an almost
aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation of natural beauty which is wholesome and
retorative against the chaotic existence of modern man.
The Lost Generation
 : It is a term in frequent use after WWI in reference to the young men who
survived physically but were afterwards spiritually and morally adrift. So the lost
generation refers to disillusioned writers who wrote after WWI. Many of them went to
the battle. After the war, they rebelled against former ideals and values and can’t find
new ones to replace.
 2. It first coined by Gertrude Stein. In Paris, she opens the door to American expatriates.
She once said to Hemingway, “You’re all a lost generation.”
 was used as preface to The Sun Also Rises. Then it became popular. Fitzgerald once
said they are “a generation grown up to find all gods died, all wars fought, all faith in
men shaken”.
Ernest Hemingway
 way themeherosituation. Theme: “grace under pressure”
sm: negative attitude towards the world. There is only one thing man is
certain---death
 3. devotion to truth. He believes the writer's job is to tell truth.
c. style
 g principle. The meaning here is that the writer should say only one eighth, in
such a way that the remaining seven eighths be discerned and provided by the reader.
 ge: short, common, fundamental words, simple sentence, effect of
the language: clearness, cleanness and great care.
 ue: plays a very important part in his writings. Hemingway’s dialogue can show
setting, development of plot, characters, even theme.
 tic way: he uses showing instead of telling. He likes to describes actions (kiss,
withdraw hand) vividly instead of mental description.

 ism
 of stream of consciousness
d. A Farewell to Arms
 1. If we say The Sun Also Rises tells why they lost, this novel describes how they lost.
Thus it can be read as a footnote to the former.
 2. the double meanings of the title
 3. the hero Henry: Hemingway's hero
 4. theme: war and love. It shows a world of complete unreason and reflects the mood of
the post-war generation.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
b. The Great Gatsby
 Theme:
 1. about reality and atmosphere of 1920s
 2. failure of American Dream
de towards the rich: paradoxical
 He is charmed by the rich.
 He is critical of the rich who are corrupted themselves and meanwhile corrupting others.
d. attitude towards the Jazz Age: insider and outsider
John Steinbeck
b. The Grapes of Wrath
愤怒的葡萄

1. significance
 1) it’s a great social document in 1930s.
 2) A protest novel. In the novel, the author attacks the decadence, wickedness and
cruelty of banks and land owners and the current social system as a whole.
 3) themes: unity and faith
unity: Steinbeck believes that strength lies in the unity of people and he also stresses on
individualism.
faith: The Great Depression was the most miserable period in the 20th century. Even
though people suffered a lot, they still held on their hope and will live on.
2. characters:
 Ma Joad (the mother): embodiment of the theme. She asked Rose to save the stranger.
 1) she realized unity would bring people strength.
 2) the faith in future
 Tom: shows the change from I (individualism) to we (unity)
 Jim Casy: a preacher he developed himself from a labor to an organizer and set up the
guiding principle and after his death, Tom took over his role. The initial of his name:
J.C.---Jesus Christ
William Faulkner
Sound and Fury:divided into 4 parts
 1. themes:
 a) downfall of the South. The south was in deterioration. It’s going from bad to worse.
The present and the past form a contrast from Benjy’s eyes. He’s an idiot so his
reactions were distinctive feeling. He felt strongly the loss of love. The downfall of Mr.
Campson was not only a personal one but also a universal one---the society was in

disorder.
 b) conflict between the oldyoung generations
A Rose For Emily


殖民主义与独立革命时期文学

浪漫主义文学

现实主义文学

现代主义文学

非裔文学与美国戏剧

后现代文学

美国华裔文学



重要作家
选读作品

The Way to Wealth

Rip Van Winkle
;
Nature;
Walden
；
The Scarlet Letter
Leaves of Grass; Moby-Dick;
Benjamin Franklin；
Washington Irving Ralph Waldo
Emerson; Henry David Thoreau；
Nathaniel Hawthorne; Walt

Whitman; Herman Melville；
Mark Twain; Henry James;
Theodore Dreiserer
Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn; Daisy Miller;Sister
Carrie
Ezra Pound F. Scott Fitzgerald;
Earnest Hemingway; William
Faulkner;
In a Station of the Metro; The
Great Gatsby; The Old Man
and the Sea; The Sound and
the Fury;
Toni Morrison; Eugene O’Neill;
Arthur
Williams
Milller; Tennessee
Beloved; Long Day's Journey
into Night; Death of a
Salesman; A Street car Named
Desire
Saul Bellow; Jerome David
Salinger; Joseph Heller; John
Updike; Pearl S. Buck;
Amy Luth Tan; Maxine Hong
Kingston; David Huang
什么是文学？
Herzog; Catcher in the Rye;
Catch-22;Rabit,run;
The
Good Earth

The joy luck club; China
Men; Mrs butterfly

Modern definition:
We can define literature as language artistically used to achieve
identifiable literary qualities and to convey meaningful messages.
Literature is characterized by beauty of expression and form and by
universality intellectual and emotional appeal.
定义美国文学：
• American literature mainly refers to literature produced
American English by the people living in the United States.
美国作家的品质：
• Independent
• Individualistic
• Critical
• Innovative
• Humorous
文学发展：
in

诗歌：Poetry:
1) Traditionalism
2) Idiosyncratic poets
3) Experimental poetry

4) Surrealism and Existentialism
5) Women and Multiethnic poets
6) Native American poetry
7) African- American poetry
8) Asian-American poetry
9) New Directions
Contemporary American Literature A. Novels since 1945
• 1. War Novels
• John Hersey(1914-): Hiroshima (46); The Wall (50)
• James Gould Cozzens (1903- ): Guard of Honor (1948)
• Erwin Shaw (1913-84): The Young Lion (48)
• James Jones (1921-77): From Here to Eternity (51)
• Herman Wouk (1915- ): The Cain Mutiny (51); Winds of War (71);
• War and Remembrance (79)
• Norman Mailer (1923-): The Naked and the Death (48)
• Joseph Heller (1923-): Catch-22 (61); Closing Time (1994, a sequel)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007): Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
• Thomas Pynchon (1937- ): The Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
• 2. Jewish American Novelists
• Saul Bellow (1915-2005) Dangling Man (44); The Victim (47);The
Adventures of Augie March (53);

• Seize the Day(56); Henderson the Rain King(59); Herzog (64); Mr.
Sammler’s Planet (70); Humbolt’s Gift (75); Dean’s December (82);
The Actual (97)
• Bernard Malamud (1914-86)
• Novels: The Natural (52); The Assistant (57); A New Life (61); The
Fixer (66); Dubin’s Life (79); God’s Grace (82).
• Collection: The Magic Barrel (58); Idiots First (63); Rembrandt’s
Hat(73)
• Issac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)
• Yiddish Works: Satan in Goray (34); The Family Moskat (45); Gimpel
the Fool (53); The Magician of Lublin (59).
• English Works: The Spinoza of Market Street(61); The Slave (62);
The Manor (67)
• 2. Jewish American Novelists
• Philip Roth (1933- )
• Goodbye, Columbus (59); Portnoy’s Complaint (69); The Breast (72);
• The Professor of Desire (77); The Ghost Writer (79); Zuckerman
Unbound (81)
• The Anatomy Lesson (83); Patrimony (91); Operation Shylock (93);
Sabbath Theatre (95); American Pastoral (97); I Married a
Communist (98); The Human Stain (2000); The Dying Animal (2001);
Plot Against American (2004); Every Man (2006); Exit The Ghost

(2007)
• Paul Auster(1947- )
• City of Glass (85); Ghosts (86); The Locked Room (86); The Country
of Last Things (87); The Music of Chance (1990);Mr. Vertigo (94);
Timbuktu (99)
• Cynthia Ozick (1928- )
• Trust (66); Bloodshed (76); Levitation (82); The Shawl (89);
• The Cannibal Galaxy (83); The Messiah of Stockholm (87)
• 4. Novels Against the Cultural Norm
• Jerome David Salinger (1919- )
• The Young Folks (40); The Catcher in the Rye (51); Nine Stories (53)
• Fanny and Zooey (61); Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (63)
• William Burroughs (1914- )
• Beat Novels: Junky (53); Naked Lunch (59)
• Scientific Novels: The Soft Machine (61); The Wild Boys (71);
Exterminator (73); Cities of the Red Night(81); The Place of Dead
Roads (83)
• Jack Kerouac (1922-69)
• On the Road (57); The Dharma Bums (58); Desolation Angels (65)
• mental Novels
• John Hawks (1925- )
• The Cannibal (49); The Lime Twig (61);Second Skin (64); The Blood

Oranges (71); Travesty (76); The Passion Artist (79)
• John Barth (1930- )
• The Floating Opera (56); The End of the Road (58); The Sot-Weed
Factor (60); Giles Goat-Boat (66); Lost in the Funhouse
(68);Chimera (71); Letters (79); Once Upon a Time (94)
• William H. Gass (1924- )
• Omensetter’s Daughter (66); The Tunnel (95)
• Donald Barthelme (1931-89)
• Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (68); Snow White (67)
诺贝尔文学奖：
• 1930 Scinclair Lewis Main Street
• 1936 Eugene O’Neill The Hairy Ape
• 1938 Pearl S. Buck The Good Earth
• 1949 William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
• 1954 Earnest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
• 1962 John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
• 1976 Saul Bellow Herzog
• 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer Gimpel the Fool
• 1987 Joseph Brodsky Six Years Later
• 1993 Toni Morrison Beloved

第二章：American Literature in the Colonial and Revolutionary

Periods(1607 -1800)
Puritanism

1) 清教主义：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 （ɒˈsterəti） 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 （'tenits.）

Revolutionary Periods (1756-1800)
特点：
• 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.
• 作家：

• Colonial period: William Bradford(1590-1657); Anne
Bradstreet(1617-1672); Jonathon Edwards(1702-1758); Edward
Taylor (1642-1729)
• Revolutionary period: Roger
Thomas
Williams(1603-1683)
Paine(1737-1809);
John
Philip Woolman(1720-1772);
Freneau(1752-1832); Benjamin Franklin(1706-1790)
• 作家及作品：
William Bradford——Of Plymouth Plantation
Anne Bradstreet——The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
Thomas Paine——Common Sense
Benjamin Franklin——Poor Richard's Almanack（'ɔ:lmənæk）
(under the pseudonym （'su:dənim ）“Richard Saunders” )
《穷理查年鉴》
The Way to Wealth ( also known as Father Abraham's Sermon)
《致富之路》
Autobiography《富兰克林自传》
第三章：Romanticism

解释：Simply speaking, Romanticism is a literary movement
associated with imagination and boundlessness, as contrasted with
classicism, which is commonly associated with reason and restriction.
The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U. S. was

Transcendentalism
1. Transcendentalism
The overall movement shared similar philosophies. These
philosophies rested on the Lockian concept of Idealism
and Kant's belief in intuition.
Emerson believe that: the spark of divinity lies within
man; that everything in the world is a microcosm of
existence; that the individual soul is identical to
Over-Soul. By meditation, by communing with nature,
through work and art, man could attain an understanding
of beauty and goodness and truth.
(超验主义)
John Locke Kant
an Renaissance
（美国文艺复兴）The literary scene of the period was dominated by a
group of New England writers, the “Brahmins”. They advocated
reforms in church, state, and society, contributing to the rise of free
religion and the abolition movement and to the formation of various
utopian communities
3. The Representatives of the American Romanticism
Washington Irving——
1) His earliest work was a sparkling, satirical History of New York（《纽

约史》）
2) The Sketch Book (1819-20 as Geoffrey Crayon) - contains ‘Rip Van
Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ （《见闻札记》）
3) The Life of George Washington (1855-59, five volumes)（《华盛顿
传》）
Nathaniel Hawthorn——The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville——Moby Dick
Edgar Allen Poe——The Raven
；
The Black Cat
II. The Poets
 Walt Whitman free verse
. free verse:
a modern form of poetry which does not follow any specific
rhyme or metrical scheme, although it does not completely
abandon the basic poetic precepts of heightened language and
sonics.

Youth, Day, Old Age and Night
；
WE TWO BOYS TOGETHER
CLINGING
；
To the States
 Emily Dickinson——I Died for Beauty
；
Our Share of Night to Bear

第四章：The American Realism
解释：
1) As a literary movement realism came in the latter half of the
nineteenth century as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism.
It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the
commonplace, and for the low.
2) The American realists advocated “verisimilitude *ˌverɪsɪˈmɪlɪtju:d]
of detail derived from observation”.（源于观察的逼真细节）
Midwestern Realism:
It just refers to William Dean Howells’s realism because he came

from the American Midwest and carefully interweaved the life and
emotions of ordinary middle-class there in his works.
Regionalism (local color writing):
 Simply it means The use of regional detail in a literary or artistic
work.
 Local colorists were interested in realistically depicting life in
different sections of the United States in order to promote
understanding and unification.
 Fiction writers O. Henry, and Mark Twain have been identified
within this tradition.
Naturalism :
The writers of naturalism tore the mask of gentility to pieces
and wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a
cold world, and his lack of dignity in face of the forces of
environment and he'redity（遗传）. In their works there is a desire
to assert one’s human identity, to define oneself against the social
and natural forces one confronts.
The major representatives of American naturalists include Jack
London, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and so
on.

Mark Twain——


哈克贝利…主题：
1) Friendship:
2) Legality vs. Morality
3) Love:
4) Racism
5) Freedom :
6) Mockery of Religion

Theodore Dreiser——Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), Tragic
America (1931) and America is Worth Saving

Jack London ——
The Son of the Wolf (1900) 《狼子》
The People of the Abyss (1903) 《深渊里的人们》
The Call of the Wild (1903)
The Sea Wolf (1904)
White Fang (1906)


《野性的呼唤》
《海狼》
《白牙狼芳》
《铁蹄》
《马丁·伊登》
《毒日子》《天大亮》
The Iron Heel (1908)
Martin Eden (1909)
Burning Daylight (1910)
The Valley of the Moon (1913) 《月亮谷》

Credo
Love of Life
第五章：The American Modernism
解释：Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes
the progressive literature which emerged in the beginning of the 20th
century , particularly in the years following World War I. It embraced the
new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern
world.
特点：
1) Modernism in literature is not easily summarized, but the
key elements are experimentation, anti- realism, individualism and a
stress on the cerebral（理性） rather than emotive（情感） aspects.
2) The work of Modernist writers is characterized by showing the
disenchantment（觉醒）, dislo’cation（错位）, and alienation（疏离）
of men in the world, and by the emphasis on experimentation and
formalism and objectivism.
3) Among American writers, the best-known Modernists are
, Ezra Pound, Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William
Faulkner and so on.
意象派：
Imagism:
1) It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry characterized

by the use of concrete language and figures of speech, modern
subject matter, metrical（韵律） freedom, and avoidance of
romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression
through the use of precise visual images.
4) Pound defined an image as that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, a vortex
or cluster of fused ideas, endowed with energy.（意象是在一瞬间
呈现出的理性和感情的复合体）
Modern Poetry（代表）：
 Ezra Pound (1885- 1972)
 (1888 - 1965)
 Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)
 William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963)
 Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)
 gs (1894 - 1963)
Ezra Pound——The Cantos
；
In a Station of the Metro
Modern Realism (the Lost Generation)
 The Lost Generation:
1) The Lost Generation is a term used to describe a group of
American intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in
the post WWI years to reject the values of American materialism
and to seek the bohemian（波西米亚） lifestyle in Paris.

2) Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of
life, drank excessively, had love affairs .


The main representatives of Lost Generation include F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos

F. Scott Fitzgerald——
This Side of the Paradise (1920)《天堂这边》《人间天堂》
The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)《美丽与毁灭》
Flappers and Philosophers (1920) 《姑娘们与哲学家》
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
end

The Vegetable (1923) 《蔬菜》
《那些忧伤的年轻人》
《爵士时代的故事》
《了不起的盖茨比》：Unexpected
All the Sad Young Men (1926)
Tender is the Night (1934) 《夜色温柔》
Taps at Reveille (1935) 《里维印象》
The Last Tycoon (1941) 《最后的大亨》
The Crack-up, (post- humorous, ed. Wilson, 1945) 《崩溃》
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (ed. Malcolm Cowley, 1951).

《菲茨杰拉德故事集》
Ernest Hemingway——
The Sun Also Rises (1926) 《太阳照常升起》

A Farewell to Arms (1929) 《永别了，武器》
To Have and Have Not (1933) 《有与没有》


For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) 《丧钟为谁而鸣》
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) 《老人与海》

Die in the afternoon (1932) 《死在午后》
《非洲的青山》 Green Hills of Africa (1935)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)《过河入林》
海明威主题：

Success trauma
风格：
He developed a spare, tight, reportorial prose based on
simple sentence structure and using a restricted vocabulary,
precise imagery, and an impersonal, dramatic tone.

• The South:
– The Deep South: South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama,
Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana
– The extended South, including also the border states such as
Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia,

Arkansas and Texas
• Characteristics of southern literature
• a. The importance of family, sense of community, and religion.
• b. The importance of time and place, exploration of the past, sense
of human limitation (moral dilemma).
• c. The use of southern voice and dialect. Most of the novels

William Faulkner——
• The Sound and The Fury (1929)
《喧嚣与骚动》

– Describes the decay and downfall of an old southern
aristocratic family, symbolizing the old social order, told
from four different points of view
• As I Lay Dying (1930)
《我弥留之际》

• Sanctuary (1931)
《圣殿》

--Temple’s Stockholm Syndrome
• Light in August (1932)
《八月之光》

• Absalom, Absalom (1936)
《押沙龙！押沙龙！》

– Set in early 19th- cent. Jefferson, shows the tragic downfall
of the dynastic desires of the planter Colonel Sutpen
• Go Down, Moses (1942)
《去吧，摩西》


主题：
1. The spiritual deterioration which characterizes modern life stems

from the loss of love and want of emotional response.
2. The story also tells a story of deterioration from the past to the
present and the author idealizes the past.
意识流：
Stream of Consciousness
Telling a story by recording the thought of one character, describing
the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events,
rather than the events themselves, without regard to logical argument or
narrative sequence


第六章：The 20
th
Century American Drama and African-American
literature
American drama：
American drama imitated English and European theater until well
into the 20th century. Often, plays from England or translated
from European languages dominated theater seasons.

Eugene O’Neill——
Beyond the Horizon (1920)
The Emperor Jones (1920)
Anna Christie (1922)
The Hairy Ape (1922)




《天边外》
《琼斯皇帝》
《安娜·克里斯蒂》
《毛猿》

Desire Under the Elms (1925) 《榆树下的欲望》
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Strange Interlude (1928) 《奇怪的插曲》
Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) 《伊雷特拉的哀伤》
The Iceman Cometh (1939, 1946) 《送冰人来了》
Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939-41, 1956) 《长日入夜行》
Arthur Asher Miller——
Man Who Had All the Luck (1944) 《吉星高照的人》
All My Sons (1947) 《我的儿子们》
Death of A Salesman (1949) 《推销员之死》
The Crucible (1958) 《萨勒姆的女巫》
A Memory of Two Mondays (1955)《纪念两个星期一》
A View From the Bridge (1957) 《桥头眺望》
After the Fall (1964) 《沉沦之后》
《维系事件》 Incident at Vichy (1965)
The Price (1968) 《代价》
写作特点：
Miller wrote plays on broad social themes. He put a
special emphasis on depicting the inner thoughts of individuals
and their conflicts with the morality of their society
Miller's plays often depict how families are destroyed by false
values. Especially his earliest efforts show his admiration for the

classical Greek dramatists.
Death of a Salesman (1949) brought Miller international fame, and
become one of the major achievements of modern American
theatre.

Tennessee Williams——
The Glass Menagerie 《玻璃动物园》
A Streetcar Named Desire 《欲望号街车》
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof《热铁皮屋顶上的猫》
Summer and Smoke《夏天与烟雾》

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire
in 1948 and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.
The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The Night of the Iguana (1961)
received New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards.
His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo received the Tony Award for
best play.
ⅡAfrican American Literature
• Colonial and Early American (1773-1860)
• Antebellum (1860-1865)
• Post-war and Reconstruction (1865-1900)
• Pre-World War I (1900-1917)

• The Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937)
• Naturalism and Modernism (1937-1960)
• Contemporary (1960-present)
作家：Langston Hughes(休斯)——Dreams, James Weldon
Johnson（约翰逊）, and W.E.B. Du Bois (杜博斯) Claud Mckay(麦
凯)and etc.
“If We Must Die” by Mckay

Modernism and Post-modernism
• Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Richard Wright: Native son
• Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man
• The outpouring of African American literature in the 1980s and
1990s by such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker.
• In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
• 1970 The Bluest Eye 《最蓝的眼睛》
• 1973 Sula 《秀拉》
• 1977 Song of Solomon 《所罗门之歌》
• 1981 Tar Baby 《黑宝贝》
• 1988 Beloved 《宠儿》
• 1992 Jazz 《爵士乐》
• 1999 Paradise 《天堂》

• 1993 Love 《爱》
• 2008 A Mercy 《恩惠》
•
第七章：The American Post-Modernism
特点：Characteristics:
– Rejection of rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing parody（恶
搞）, irony and playfulness.
– Favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and
discontinuity.
– Emphasis on the de-structured, de-centered, de- humanized
subject.
• 解释：Beat writers are a group of American writers in the late
1950s, led by the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist Jack
Kerouac. Writers of the beat generation dropped out of
middle-class society in search of ‘beatific’ （极乐）ecstasy through
drugs, sex, and Zen Buddhism.
• Jewish literature refers to published creative writings by American
Jews about their American experiences. This kind of writings is
shown in Jewish perspective.

The Expressionism and Surrealism ：
Against the Cultural Norm

Borrowed various experimental forms and techniques in probing
the inner world in detail.
It has been a search for a way to connect an oppressed response
to society and history and an awareness of individual loneliness

Joseph Heller——Something Happened《出了毛病》, Good as Gold
《像高尔得一样好》, Picture This《如此美景》, God Knows《天
晓得》, his first novel, Catch-22
• Catch-22 is defined as a law that is illegal to read. Ironically, the
place where it is written that it is illegal is in Catch-22 itself. It is yet
again defined as the law that the enemy is allowed to do anything
that one can't keep him from doing. In short, then, Catch-22 is any
paradoxical, circular reasoning that catches its victim in its illogic
and serves those who have made the law.
• 主题：The Absolute Power of Bureaucracy
• The Impotence of Language
Saul Bellow——
• Dangling Man《晃来晃去挂起来的人》
• The Victim 《受害者》
• The Adventure of Augie March《奥基·马奇历险记》
• Henderson the Rain King《雨王汉德逊》
• Herzog 《赫索格》

• Mr Sammler’s Planet 《塞姆勒先生的行星》
• Humboldt’s Gift 《洪堡的礼物》
• Seize the Day 《且乐今朝》
主题：
• Ccontemporary society is a threat to human life and human
integrity.
• Modern people tend to become paranoid(妄想狂）, high-strung
（高度紧张）, impotent（无力）, and lose their sanity.

er——The Young Folks 《年轻人》
Nine Stories 《故事九篇》
Franny andZooey; 《弗兰尼与佐伊》
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters《木匠们，把屋梁升高》
Seymour: An Introduction 《西摩其人》
The Cather in the Rye 《麦田守望者》

John Updike——(1960) Rabbit, Run 《兔子跑吧》
(1971) Rabbit
，
Redux 《兔子归来》
(1981) Rabbit Is Rich 《兔子富了》
(1990) Rabbit At Rest 《兔子歇了》
(2001) Rabbit Remembered 《记忆中兔子》
A & P

主题：The principal themes are religion, sex, America as well as
death.
His novels often act as dialectical theological辩证神学 debates
between the book itself and the reader to challenge the reader as
the plot runs its course.

Pearl S. Buck——赛珍珠译著《水浒传》（首版）
• A Bridge for Passing 《桥》
• Come, My Beloved 《来吧，亲爱的》
• Command the Morning 《命令与清晨》
• East Wind: West Wind 《东风：西风》
• Fighting Angel 《搏斗的天使》
• Fourteen Stories 《十四个故事》
• The Good Earth 《大地》
• The Hidden Flower 《匿花》
• Imperial Woman 《西太后》

名词解释：
1. American Puritanism
it comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to
American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言） and
salvation（拯救） were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard- working,
piousness（虔诚,尽职）， thrift and sobriety（清醒） were praised.
2. Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18
th
century in

Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used in
American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19
th
century who
stimulated（刺激） the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the
mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves
freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays,
fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.
3. 2. Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement that
flourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism
and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of
God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The
representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.
4. Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and
early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and
background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else
than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的)
authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive
natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语)
language and satirical(讽刺的) humor
5. Stream of consciousness（意识流）： It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is
the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts,
feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences
them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke
through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the
unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。
6. American 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

7. Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American
naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变） that
undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists
dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme
objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes
who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature
described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at
bettering the world through social reform.
8. Imagism（意象派）: It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from
1909 to movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct
treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement
were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.
9. Modernism： It was a complex and diverse （复杂多样的） international movement in
all the creative arts （创造性艺术）， originating about the end of the 19th century. It
provided （出现） the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made
up of many facets （方面）， such as symbolism， surrealism （超现实主义）， cubism
（立体主义）， expressionism， futurism （未来主义）， ect
10. The Lost generation： it refers to a group of young intellectuals （知识分子） who
came back from war， were injured （受伤害） both physically （身体上） and mentally
（精神上）. They lived by indulging （放任） themselves in the Bohemian （波西米
亚） way of life. Their American dream was disillusioned （破灭了）. The best
representative of the lost generation was Ernest Hemingway.
11. American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as
long as heshe 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.
12. The Harlem Renaissance：refers to the flowering of African American literature, art,
and drama during the 1920s and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York, the
movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Black novelists,
poets, painters, and playwrights began creating works rooted in their own culture

instead of imitating the styles of Europeans and white Americans.

总体：

1． Anne Bradstreet（The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America）
①Contemplation
②To My Dear and Loving Husband
2. Benjamin Franklin
①The Autobiography (early American Dream)
3. Philip Freneau (Poet of American Revolution; The Father of American Poetry)
①The Wild Honey Suckle
②The Indian Burying Ground
③To a Caty-Did
4. Washington Irving (The Father of American Short Story; first American writer of
imaginative literature to gain international fame; regarded as Father of American
literature.)
①The legend of Sleep Hollow
②Rip Van Winkle
③The Sketch Book(the beginning of American Romanticism)
5. James Fennimore Cooper
①The Last Mohicans
②Leather Stocking Tales
6. William Cullen Bryant
① Thanatopsis
② To a Water Fowl
7. Edgar Allen Poe (Father of Modern Short Story; Father of Psychoanalysis
criticism)
①To Helen
②The Raven
③The Fall of the House of Usher
④The Black Cat
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson (leading New England transcendentalist)
①Nature
②Self-Reliance
③The American Scholar
9. Henry David Thoreau (an active transcendentalist)
①Walden
10. Nathaniel Hawthorne (a master of symbolism; first great American writer of
fiction to work in moralistic tradition. combined the American romanticism with
puritan moralism; created a new genre psychological romance)
①The Scarlet Letter
②Twice Told Tales
③The Marble Faun

④Blithedale Romance
⑤The Minister’s Black Veil
11. Herman Melville
①Moby Dick
12. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (the fireside poet; love of nature, love for the
past)
①A Psalm of Life
②The Slave’s Dream
③My Lost Youth
④The Song of Hiawatha
13. Walt Whitman
①Leaves of Grass(first genuine epic poem)
②Song of Myself
③I Sit and Look Out
④ Beat！Beat！Drums！
14. Emily Dickinson (the theme of her poetry concern religion, life, death, marriage,
immorality, nature etc.)
①I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed
②I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain
③A Bird Came Down the Walk
④I Died for Beauty ___but Was Scarce
⑤I Hear a Fly Buzz ___When I Died
⑥Because I Could not Stop for Death
WashingtonIrving
Bracebridge Hall
布雷斯布里奇田庄
(1822)
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
Tales of a Traveller
旅客谈
(1824)
Christopher Columbus (1828)
c. writing characteristics
(1) humorous: the function of his writing is to amuse, to entertain instead of teaching or
instruction
(2) vivid and true character portrayal
(3) finished (refined) and musical language, thus regarded as “the Amn. Goldsmith”
d. analysis on The Legend of Sleepy Hollow(选自the sketch book
见闻札记
)
1. the story:setting,character, plot
2. theme:conflicts and praise
conflict betw. Ichabod and Brom
conflict betw. the village and the outside world
James Fenimore Cooper
The Spy (1821): a historical novel
The Pilot (1824): a sea novel
Leatherstocking Tales
皮裹腿故事集
(1823-1841): frontier novels
The Last Mohicans (1826) (Colonial War betw. Britain and France)
e. writing features:

strong points: we can see a variety of incidents and tensions, complicated plot and
structure and a beautiful description of nature.
Weak points: characterization is weak. There is unsatisfactory description of characters
(esp. female). He is not free from syntactical awkwardness, heavy-handed attempt at
humor. “Where Irving excels Cooper is weak.” Dialect is not authentic.
Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House Usher
Feature:
i. brevity (15 pages)
ii. Single effect
iii. originality in theme
To Helen
It was inspired by the beauty of the mother of a schoolmate of Poe in Richmond,
Virginia.
The poem is famous for a number of things:
1. its rhyme scheme: ababb
2. its varied line lengths
3. its metaphor of a travel on the sea
4. its oft-quoted lines:

theme: praise the ideal love and beauty and ancient Greek and Roman civilizations
The Raven
乌鸦

theme: the lament over the death of a beautiful woman
tone: melancholy
Transcendentalism (essayists, poets, novelists)
Their journal is “The Dial”.
Definition: Transcendentalism is idealism. (Emerson)
b. features
(1) stress on Oversoul, that is spirit.
(2) stress the importance of individual.
(3) fresh conception of nature.
c. significance
(1) inspired a whole generation of writers such as Whitman, Melville and Dickinson.
(2) dresses man’s subjective initiative as opposed to materialism.
(3) liberated people from Calvin’s original sin
d. limitation
(1) shallow: cut off from real life or reality; initiated by the rich, they were limited in a
certain circle. So, in some degree, they have been cut off from social life and can’t
understand the sufferings of the common people.
(2) inward contradiction: gain knowledge by intuition, shows its idealistic aspect.
R.W. Emerson (
Ralph Waldo)

Nature(1836): the Bible of New England transcendentalism
The American Scholar (1837):
The Divinity School Address
神学院致辞
(1838)

Essays (18411847)
Representative Men (1850)
English Traits (1856)
Poems (1847)
d. significance
(1) He embodied a new nation’s desire and struggle to assert its own identity in its
formative period.
(2) his stress on individualism
Limitation:self-centered, individual
His ideas influence a lot of writers such as Dikinson, Hawthorne and Whitman.
Henry David Thoreau
A Week on the Concord and MerrimackRivers
康考德和梅里马克河上的一周
(1849)
Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
Civil Disobedience不服从论(1849, an address)
c. Walden
main ideas:
(1)on self-cultivation and human perfectibility, elevated from Puritan original sin, believe
in inner virtue and inwardly grace
(2) criticism on civilization and capitalism
(3) only truth and knowledge can’t be taken away, trust in future and in man
Style: pithy (colloquial sayings), vivid description, symbols and images
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Twice-Told Tales (1837): a collection of short stories
Mosses from an Old Manse
古屋青苔
(1846): another collection of short stories
The House of the Seven Gables
七个尖角的阁楼
(1851): on the effect of a curse
The Scarlet Letter (1850): masterpiece
It’s not a love story, trying to show the moral, emotional and psychological effects of sin
on his characters.
“A”: Adultery-Able- Angel
“A” on chest: sinner, confessed, died, shows an honest man
Moral: man should be true and honest and ready to show one’s worst to the world（批评
与自我批评）
Herman Melville
Typee (《泰比》1846)
Omoo (《奥穆》1847)
Mardi (《马尔迪》1847)
这三部作品描写塔希提群岛和马吉萨斯群岛以及他在岛上的奇遇。
Redburn (《莱德勃恩》1849)：描写了他的第一次航海经验以及在利物浦港贫民窟的
见闻。
White Jacket (《白外套》1850)：根据他在美国海军军舰上服役时期的生活体验写成。
Pierre (《皮埃尔》1852)
Israel Potter (《伊斯莱尔·波特》1855): historical novel
Piazza Tales (《广场故事》1856): a collection of short story

Moby Dick (《白鲸》1851): masterpiece
(1) a whaling book: an encyclopedia of whalingdescription of a whaler’s life
(2) a tragedy about man fighting against universe (hostile)Man in this universe lives a
meaningless and futile life, meaningless because futile.
Man can observe and even manipulate in a prudentway, but he cannot influence and
overcome nature at its source.
(3) alienation异化:
between man and man
between man and society (ship)
between man and nature
Ahab is the best representative.
To him the world exists for his sake. His selfhood must be asserted at the expense of all
else: lives may be sacrificed, and nature may have to be vanquished in order that he may
do what he wills.
Richard Chase says: the idea Melville conveys in it is emotional,
physical
(5) theme: quest
(6) symbolism
the voyage: a metaphor for
experience
the Pequod皮阔德: the ship of the American soul
the endeavor of the crews:
Moby Dick: (many interpretations) the symbol of nature
W. C. Bryant
the analysis on To a Waterfowl
致水鸟

It is the
It is a poem of nature in quatrains rhyming in abab.
theme: from a bird and its flight to an ordinary person and his course of life, this poem
conveys that everything in nature is under the beneficence and protection of the Power.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Theme: idealized love, children, family and friendship
A Psalm of Life
The poem is divided into 9 stanzas, each composed of two iambic tetrameter lines and
two trochaic trimeter lines rhyming abab.
The first two stanzas refute the pessimism that life is but a dream, affirming the contrary
that life is real.
The following stanzas urge the reader to act in the present and to leave
great people did in order to inspire the followers.
The last stanza ends with a resounding note while admonishing people to learn to wait
as well as to labor.
Realism（the 19th-century literary movement that reacted to romanticism by insisting on a
faithful, objective presentation of the details of everyday life.）
features:
 ive description (concern for the commonplacethe low)

 ii. criticism of society and reality, exposing and criticizing the society; the writers’
dissatisfaction; no longer eulogize human glority
 iii. verisimilitude逼真性(true to details)
 iv. influenced by bourgeois’ 中产阶级democratic ideas (not overthrow but reform,
changes)
 v. reformative: to reform the society, not to change completely
 features: Naturalism（A post- Darwinian movement of the late 19th century that tried to
apply the ）is a theory which applied scientific
concepts and methods to such problems as plot development and characterisation.
 Comparison between Realism and Naturalism:
 Realism.
 i. objective
 ii. creation of types
 iii. influenced by British Rom. works with hope
 Naturalism
 i. scientific accuracy
 ii. collect material from their lives
 t this, hopelessgloomy picture of the society
Walt Whitman
Leaves of Grass《草叶集》,
(1) themes
 i. unity of all man and of man within universe
 ii. equality of all man
 iii. cycle of life and death
 iv. enthusiastic idea toward Westward Expansion
 v. brotherhood
d. Song of Myself
自我之歌

 (1) influence of Transcendentalism: praise of individualism
 (2) cycle of life and death
 (3) ideal of democracy: equality between different races and brotherhood
Emily Dickinson
A Bird came down the walk
I died for Beauty---but was Scarce
I Heard a Fly buzz---when I died---
Because I could not stop for Death-
H.B. Stowe
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851): masterpiece
significance:
 ified and strengthened abolitionist sentiment;
 2. gave a better balanced, more specific picture of plantation life;
 3. praised the merits of slaves and showed great sympathy for them
Henry James
 The American (1877): begins with international theme
 Daisy Miller (1878): brings the author first international fame






The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Ambassadors (1903)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Portrait of A Lady
贵妇画像
:masterpiece
It tells about the fate of one of those splendid Jamesian American girls, Isabel Archer,
arriving in Europe, full of hope, and with a will to live a free and noble life, only to fail
prey to the sinister designs of two vulgar and unscrupulous expatriates, Madam Merle
and Gilbert Osmond
International theme国际主题:
 the meeting of America and Europe; American innocence in contact and contrast with
European decadence and the moral and psychological complications arising therefrom;
for the American it was a process of progression from inexperience to experience, from
innocence to knowledge and maturity. Those American heroes or heroins who
confronting European sophistication, either triumphed over it or were overwhelmed.
Mark Twain
 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Count
卡拉维拉斯县有名的跳蛙
(1865):a short
story
 The Innocents Abroad
国外的无辜者
(1869): letters on his travelling in Europe and Near
East
 Roughing It
苦行记
(1872): on his experience in the western America
 The Gilded Age (1873): his first novel, collaborated with Charles Dudley Warner
 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
哈克贝利·费恩历险记
(1884): masterpiece
 Life on the Mississippi(1883)
 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
误闯亚瑟王宫
(1889)
 The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
败坏了哈德莱堡的人
(1900)
 The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
e. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
 1. It is
 2. themes:
 1)picaresque以流浪汉和无赖为题材的(adventure story)
 2) moral growth of Tom
 3. techniques: verisimilitude, humor, colloquial style
Deadpan（铁面幽默）: oral humorthe teller has a strict face but the listeners are laughing.
Language: dialects as forms of art
Jack London
 The People of the Abyss
深渊居民
(1903): about London's slum
 The Iron Heel铁蹄(1908): the first proletarian criterion novel which envisages the
development of fascism
 The Call of the Wild野性的呼唤(1903): the most widely read book
 The Sea Wolf
海狼
(1904)
 These two novels reflect the ideas of the law of survival and the will to power
 Martin Eden
马丁伊登
(1909): a reflection of the contradiction between these
competeing beliefs

c. Martin Eden--theme:the failure of American Dream. After he realized his dream of getting
into the upper class, he also realized the emptiness of it and committed suicide.

individualism, it was accepted as an indictment of socialism; written to show that man
cannot live for himself alone, it was accepted as a demonstration that success made for
death. Had Martin Eden been a socialist he would not have died.
 Consciously London meant the novel to show that only a belief in the people, only the
devotion of one's life to a cause greater than onself, could give life any real meaning.
T. Dreisser西奥多·德莱塞
 Sister Carrie 嘉莉妹妹(1900): the first novel, masterwork
 Jannie Gerhardt (1911)
 The Fanancier (1912)
 The Titan (1914)
 The Stoic (1947)
 The Genius (1915)
 An American Tragedy
美国悲剧
(1925)
 Dreiser Looks at Russia(1928)
c. Sister Carrie
 theme:the emptiness of Ameircan Dream
 i. jungle law
Famous actress bank manager(the unfit is bound to die) <——
Country girl (able to follow her instinct) commit suicide
ii. chance and luck
iii. criticism of American values: money and sex —the standards to see if a person is
successful
 iv. concern for the poor
Jazz Age: the Jazz Age lasted from 1919-1929, the decade enjoyed economic prosperity. The
war and economic boom encouraged a breaking with the tradition (Puritanism). People upheld
the value of money-making and pleasure- seeking.
Ezra Pound埃兹拉·庞德
Imagism意象派
 Pound became the most important figure. Imagist poetry reached the peak of literature
for three things appeared:
 i. a manifesto
 ii. three principles
 iii. a lot of writings
 Pound said, an image is
instant of time.
In a Station of the Metro
在地铁车站

 1. This is the much-quoted masterpiece of Pound and a representative of the Imagist
poetry.
 2. In form, the poem is similar to the Japanese haiku, a two-line couplet with rhymes.
Pound's poem reminds the Chinese of two lines by a Tang poet, Bai Juyi. When
describing the sad yet beautiful face of Yang Huifei, a Tang emperess, the poet wrote,





 The beautiful face, lonesome with tears;
 A pear branch, radiant with rain.
 3. The poem is a representative of Imagist poems in that the image of petals on a wet,
black bough best represents the picture of those lovely faces in the crowd and that the
image is dominant in the poem---the image itself is the poem.
T.S. Eliot
poetry:
 Prufrock and Other Observations (1917)
 Poems (1920)
 The WasteLand (1922)
 The Hollow Men (1925)
 Ash Wednesday (1930)
 Four Quartets (1943)
plays:
 Sweeney Agonistes (1932)
 Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
 The Cocktail Party (1950)
 The Confidential Clerk (1954)
critical essays:
 The Sacred Wood (1920)
 For Lancelot Andrews (1928)
 The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (1933)
 After Strange Gods (1934)
 On Poetry and Poets (1957)
c. The Waste Land
荒原

 5 parts: The Burial of Dead, The Game of Chess, The Fire Sermon, Death by Water, What
the Thunder Said
 chief characteristics
 1. quotations and allusions暗示
 2. objective correlative
 3. juxtaposition并列: mingle brand image with common image
 4. use of antiquity古风
The Love Song

other modern westerners who are between passion and timidity, between
desire and impotence
4. theme
 This poem reflects the decadent modern civilization and the nightmarish inferno in
which modern Westerners are living in.
5. techiniques
 1) irony
 2) striking images
 3) the form of dramatic monologue
 The poem is written in irregular lines, with but a few rhymes.

Robert Frost
b. Characteristics
 1. not in the main stream of modern poetry, but with conventional form and plain
language. That’s why he’s the most popular poet in the 20th century.
 2. a kind of a regionalist----New England, but not local colorism. He used New England as
a metaphor for the whole world and universe.
 3. a plain poet using symbols from everyday country life. Simple symbols but express
deep meanings.
The Road Not Taken
 1. The poem was written in very regular lines with iambic pentametre and rhyme
scheme of abaab.
 2. The symbolic meaning of the two divergent roads is rather clear. They represent any
important decisions in one's life.
 3. details:
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
 1. It is a lyric poem with iambic tetrametre and interlocking enclosed rhyme.
 2. It represents a moment of relaxation from the onerous journey of life, an almost
aesthetic enjoyment and appreciation of natural beauty which is wholesome and
retorative against the chaotic existence of modern man.
The Lost Generation
 : It is a term in frequent use after WWI in reference to the young men who
survived physically but were afterwards spiritually and morally adrift. So the lost
generation refers to disillusioned writers who wrote after WWI. Many of them went to
the battle. After the war, they rebelled against former ideals and values and can’t find
new ones to replace.
 2. It first coined by Gertrude Stein. In Paris, she opens the door to American expatriates.
She once said to Hemingway, “You’re all a lost generation.”
 was used as preface to The Sun Also Rises. Then it became popular. Fitzgerald once
said they are “a generation grown up to find all gods died, all wars fought, all faith in
men shaken”.
Ernest Hemingway
 way themeherosituation. Theme: “grace under pressure”
sm: negative attitude towards the world. There is only one thing man is
certain---death
 3. devotion to truth. He believes the writer's job is to tell truth.
c. style
 g principle. The meaning here is that the writer should say only one eighth, in
such a way that the remaining seven eighths be discerned and provided by the reader.
 ge: short, common, fundamental words, simple sentence, effect of
the language: clearness, cleanness and great care.
 ue: plays a very important part in his writings. Hemingway’s dialogue can show
setting, development of plot, characters, even theme.
 tic way: he uses showing instead of telling. He likes to describes actions (kiss,
withdraw hand) vividly instead of mental description.

 ism
 of stream of consciousness
d. A Farewell to Arms
 1. If we say The Sun Also Rises tells why they lost, this novel describes how they lost.
Thus it can be read as a footnote to the former.
 2. the double meanings of the title
 3. the hero Henry: Hemingway's hero
 4. theme: war and love. It shows a world of complete unreason and reflects the mood of
the post-war generation.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
b. The Great Gatsby
 Theme:
 1. about reality and atmosphere of 1920s
 2. failure of American Dream
de towards the rich: paradoxical
 He is charmed by the rich.
 He is critical of the rich who are corrupted themselves and meanwhile corrupting others.
d. attitude towards the Jazz Age: insider and outsider
John Steinbeck
b. The Grapes of Wrath
愤怒的葡萄

1. significance
 1) it’s a great social document in 1930s.
 2) A protest novel. In the novel, the author attacks the decadence, wickedness and
cruelty of banks and land owners and the current social system as a whole.
 3) themes: unity and faith
unity: Steinbeck believes that strength lies in the unity of people and he also stresses on
individualism.
faith: The Great Depression was the most miserable period in the 20th century. Even
though people suffered a lot, they still held on their hope and will live on.
2. characters:
 Ma Joad (the mother): embodiment of the theme. She asked Rose to save the stranger.
 1) she realized unity would bring people strength.
 2) the faith in future
 Tom: shows the change from I (individualism) to we (unity)
 Jim Casy: a preacher he developed himself from a labor to an organizer and set up the
guiding principle and after his death, Tom took over his role. The initial of his name:
J.C.---Jesus Christ
William Faulkner
Sound and Fury:divided into 4 parts
 1. themes:
 a) downfall of the South. The south was in deterioration. It’s going from bad to worse.
The present and the past form a contrast from Benjy’s eyes. He’s an idiot so his
reactions were distinctive feeling. He felt strongly the loss of love. The downfall of Mr.
Campson was not only a personal one but also a universal one---the society was in

disorder.
 b) conflict between the oldyoung generations
A Rose For Emily


殖民主义与独立革命时期文学

浪漫主义文学

现实主义文学

现代主义文学

非裔文学与美国戏剧

后现代文学

美国华裔文学



重要作家
选读作品

The Way to Wealth

Rip Van Winkle
;
Nature;
Walden
；
The Scarlet Letter
Leaves of Grass; Moby-Dick;
Benjamin Franklin；
Washington Irving Ralph Waldo
Emerson; Henry David Thoreau；
Nathaniel Hawthorne; Walt

Whitman; Herman Melville；
Mark Twain; Henry James;
Theodore Dreiserer
Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn; Daisy Miller;Sister
Carrie
Ezra Pound F. Scott Fitzgerald;
Earnest Hemingway; William
Faulkner;
In a Station of the Metro; The
Great Gatsby; The Old Man
and the Sea; The Sound and
the Fury;
Toni Morrison; Eugene O’Neill;
Arthur
Williams
Milller; Tennessee
Beloved; Long Day's Journey
into Night; Death of a
Salesman; A Street car Named
Desire
Saul Bellow; Jerome David
Salinger; Joseph Heller; John
Updike; Pearl S. Buck;
Amy Luth Tan; Maxine Hong
Kingston; David Huang
什么是文学？
Herzog; Catcher in the Rye;
Catch-22;Rabit,run;
The
Good Earth

The joy luck club; China
Men; Mrs butterfly

Modern definition:
We can define literature as language artistically used to achieve
identifiable literary qualities and to convey meaningful messages.
Literature is characterized by beauty of expression and form and by
universality intellectual and emotional appeal.
定义美国文学：
• American literature mainly refers to literature produced
American English by the people living in the United States.
美国作家的品质：
• Independent
• Individualistic
• Critical
• Innovative
• Humorous
文学发展：
in

诗歌：Poetry:
1) Traditionalism
2) Idiosyncratic poets
3) Experimental poetry

4) Surrealism and Existentialism
5) Women and Multiethnic poets
6) Native American poetry
7) African- American poetry
8) Asian-American poetry
9) New Directions
Contemporary American Literature A. Novels since 1945
• 1. War Novels
• John Hersey(1914-): Hiroshima (46); The Wall (50)
• James Gould Cozzens (1903- ): Guard of Honor (1948)
• Erwin Shaw (1913-84): The Young Lion (48)
• James Jones (1921-77): From Here to Eternity (51)
• Herman Wouk (1915- ): The Cain Mutiny (51); Winds of War (71);
• War and Remembrance (79)
• Norman Mailer (1923-): The Naked and the Death (48)
• Joseph Heller (1923-): Catch-22 (61); Closing Time (1994, a sequel)
• Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007): Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
• Thomas Pynchon (1937- ): The Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
• 2. Jewish American Novelists
• Saul Bellow (1915-2005) Dangling Man (44); The Victim (47);The
Adventures of Augie March (53);

• Seize the Day(56); Henderson the Rain King(59); Herzog (64); Mr.
Sammler’s Planet (70); Humbolt’s Gift (75); Dean’s December (82);
The Actual (97)
• Bernard Malamud (1914-86)
• Novels: The Natural (52); The Assistant (57); A New Life (61); The
Fixer (66); Dubin’s Life (79); God’s Grace (82).
• Collection: The Magic Barrel (58); Idiots First (63); Rembrandt’s
Hat(73)
• Issac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991)
• Yiddish Works: Satan in Goray (34); The Family Moskat (45); Gimpel
the Fool (53); The Magician of Lublin (59).
• English Works: The Spinoza of Market Street(61); The Slave (62);
The Manor (67)
• 2. Jewish American Novelists
• Philip Roth (1933- )
• Goodbye, Columbus (59); Portnoy’s Complaint (69); The Breast (72);
• The Professor of Desire (77); The Ghost Writer (79); Zuckerman
Unbound (81)
• The Anatomy Lesson (83); Patrimony (91); Operation Shylock (93);
Sabbath Theatre (95); American Pastoral (97); I Married a
Communist (98); The Human Stain (2000); The Dying Animal (2001);
Plot Against American (2004); Every Man (2006); Exit The Ghost

(2007)
• Paul Auster(1947- )
• City of Glass (85); Ghosts (86); The Locked Room (86); The Country
of Last Things (87); The Music of Chance (1990);Mr. Vertigo (94);
Timbuktu (99)
• Cynthia Ozick (1928- )
• Trust (66); Bloodshed (76); Levitation (82); The Shawl (89);
• The Cannibal Galaxy (83); The Messiah of Stockholm (87)
• 4. Novels Against the Cultural Norm
• Jerome David Salinger (1919- )
• The Young Folks (40); The Catcher in the Rye (51); Nine Stories (53)
• Fanny and Zooey (61); Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (63)
• William Burroughs (1914- )
• Beat Novels: Junky (53); Naked Lunch (59)
• Scientific Novels: The Soft Machine (61); The Wild Boys (71);
Exterminator (73); Cities of the Red Night(81); The Place of Dead
Roads (83)
• Jack Kerouac (1922-69)
• On the Road (57); The Dharma Bums (58); Desolation Angels (65)
• mental Novels
• John Hawks (1925- )
• The Cannibal (49); The Lime Twig (61);Second Skin (64); The Blood

Oranges (71); Travesty (76); The Passion Artist (79)
• John Barth (1930- )
• The Floating Opera (56); The End of the Road (58); The Sot-Weed
Factor (60); Giles Goat-Boat (66); Lost in the Funhouse
(68);Chimera (71); Letters (79); Once Upon a Time (94)
• William H. Gass (1924- )
• Omensetter’s Daughter (66); The Tunnel (95)
• Donald Barthelme (1931-89)
• Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (68); Snow White (67)
诺贝尔文学奖：
• 1930 Scinclair Lewis Main Street
• 1936 Eugene O’Neill The Hairy Ape
• 1938 Pearl S. Buck The Good Earth
• 1949 William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
• 1954 Earnest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises
• 1962 John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
• 1976 Saul Bellow Herzog
• 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer Gimpel the Fool
• 1987 Joseph Brodsky Six Years Later
• 1993 Toni Morrison Beloved

第二章：American Literature in the Colonial and Revolutionary

Periods(1607 -1800)
Puritanism

1) 清教主义：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 （ɒˈsterəti） 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 （'tenits.）

Revolutionary Periods (1756-1800)
特点：
• 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.
• 作家：

• Colonial period: William Bradford(1590-1657); Anne
Bradstreet(1617-1672); Jonathon Edwards(1702-1758); Edward
Taylor (1642-1729)
• Revolutionary period: Roger
Thomas
Williams(1603-1683)
Paine(1737-1809);
John
Philip Woolman(1720-1772);
Freneau(1752-1832); Benjamin Franklin(1706-1790)
• 作家及作品：
William Bradford——Of Plymouth Plantation
Anne Bradstreet——The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America
Thomas Paine——Common Sense
Benjamin Franklin——Poor Richard's Almanack（'ɔ:lmənæk）
(under the pseudonym （'su:dənim ）“Richard Saunders” )
《穷理查年鉴》
The Way to Wealth ( also known as Father Abraham's Sermon)
《致富之路》
Autobiography《富兰克林自传》
第三章：Romanticism

解释：Simply speaking, Romanticism is a literary movement
associated with imagination and boundlessness, as contrasted with
classicism, which is commonly associated with reason and restriction.
The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U. S. was

Transcendentalism
1. Transcendentalism
The overall movement shared similar philosophies. These
philosophies rested on the Lockian concept of Idealism
and Kant's belief in intuition.
Emerson believe that: the spark of divinity lies within
man; that everything in the world is a microcosm of
existence; that the individual soul is identical to
Over-Soul. By meditation, by communing with nature,
through work and art, man could attain an understanding
of beauty and goodness and truth.
(超验主义)
John Locke Kant
an Renaissance
（美国文艺复兴）The literary scene of the period was dominated by a
group of New England writers, the “Brahmins”. They advocated
reforms in church, state, and society, contributing to the rise of free
religion and the abolition movement and to the formation of various
utopian communities
3. The Representatives of the American Romanticism
Washington Irving——
1) His earliest work was a sparkling, satirical History of New York（《纽

约史》）
2) The Sketch Book (1819-20 as Geoffrey Crayon) - contains ‘Rip Van
Winkle’ and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ （《见闻札记》）
3) The Life of George Washington (1855-59, five volumes)（《华盛顿
传》）
Nathaniel Hawthorn——The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville——Moby Dick
Edgar Allen Poe——The Raven
；
The Black Cat
II. The Poets
 Walt Whitman free verse
. free verse:
a modern form of poetry which does not follow any specific
rhyme or metrical scheme, although it does not completely
abandon the basic poetic precepts of heightened language and
sonics.

Youth, Day, Old Age and Night
；
WE TWO BOYS TOGETHER
CLINGING
；
To the States
 Emily Dickinson——I Died for Beauty
；
Our Share of Night to Bear

第四章：The American Realism
解释：
1) As a literary movement realism came in the latter half of the
nineteenth century as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism.
It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the
commonplace, and for the low.
2) The American realists advocated “verisimilitude *ˌverɪsɪˈmɪlɪtju:d]
of detail derived from observation”.（源于观察的逼真细节）
Midwestern Realism:
It just refers to William Dean Howells’s realism because he came

from the American Midwest and carefully interweaved the life and
emotions of ordinary middle-class there in his works.
Regionalism (local color writing):
 Simply it means The use of regional detail in a literary or artistic
work.
 Local colorists were interested in realistically depicting life in
different sections of the United States in order to promote
understanding and unification.
 Fiction writers O. Henry, and Mark Twain have been identified
within this tradition.
Naturalism :
The writers of naturalism tore the mask of gentility to pieces
and wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a
cold world, and his lack of dignity in face of the forces of
environment and he'redity（遗传）. In their works there is a desire
to assert one’s human identity, to define oneself against the social
and natural forces one confronts.
The major representatives of American naturalists include Jack
London, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and so
on.

Mark Twain——


哈克贝利…主题：
1) Friendship:
2) Legality vs. Morality
3) Love:
4) Racism
5) Freedom :
6) Mockery of Religion

Theodore Dreiser——Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928), Tragic
America (1931) and America is Worth Saving

Jack London ——
The Son of the Wolf (1900) 《狼子》
The People of the Abyss (1903) 《深渊里的人们》
The Call of the Wild (1903)
The Sea Wolf (1904)
White Fang (1906)


《野性的呼唤》
《海狼》
《白牙狼芳》
《铁蹄》
《马丁·伊登》
《毒日子》《天大亮》
The Iron Heel (1908)
Martin Eden (1909)
Burning Daylight (1910)
The Valley of the Moon (1913) 《月亮谷》

Credo
Love of Life
第五章：The American Modernism
解释：Modernism is a cultural movement that generally includes
the progressive literature which emerged in the beginning of the 20th
century , particularly in the years following World War I. It embraced the
new economic, social and political aspects of the emerging modern
world.
特点：
1) Modernism in literature is not easily summarized, but the
key elements are experimentation, anti- realism, individualism and a
stress on the cerebral（理性） rather than emotive（情感） aspects.
2) The work of Modernist writers is characterized by showing the
disenchantment（觉醒）, dislo’cation（错位）, and alienation（疏离）
of men in the world, and by the emphasis on experimentation and
formalism and objectivism.
3) Among American writers, the best-known Modernists are
, Ezra Pound, Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William
Faulkner and so on.
意象派：
Imagism:
1) It is a Movement in U.S. and English poetry characterized

by the use of concrete language and figures of speech, modern
subject matter, metrical（韵律） freedom, and avoidance of
romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression
through the use of precise visual images.
4) Pound defined an image as that which presents an
intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, a vortex
or cluster of fused ideas, endowed with energy.（意象是在一瞬间
呈现出的理性和感情的复合体）
Modern Poetry（代表）：
 Ezra Pound (1885- 1972)
 (1888 - 1965)
 Wallace Stevens (1879 - 1955)
 William Carlos Williams (1883 - 1963)
 Robert Frost (1874 - 1963)
 gs (1894 - 1963)
Ezra Pound——The Cantos
；
In a Station of the Metro
Modern Realism (the Lost Generation)
 The Lost Generation:
1) The Lost Generation is a term used to describe a group of
American intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in
the post WWI years to reject the values of American materialism
and to seek the bohemian（波西米亚） lifestyle in Paris.

2) Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of
life, drank excessively, had love affairs .


The main representatives of Lost Generation include F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos

F. Scott Fitzgerald——
This Side of the Paradise (1920)《天堂这边》《人间天堂》
The Beautiful and the Damned (1922)《美丽与毁灭》
Flappers and Philosophers (1920) 《姑娘们与哲学家》
Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
The Great Gatsby (1925)
end

The Vegetable (1923) 《蔬菜》
《那些忧伤的年轻人》
《爵士时代的故事》
《了不起的盖茨比》：Unexpected
All the Sad Young Men (1926)
Tender is the Night (1934) 《夜色温柔》
Taps at Reveille (1935) 《里维印象》
The Last Tycoon (1941) 《最后的大亨》
The Crack-up, (post- humorous, ed. Wilson, 1945) 《崩溃》
The Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, (ed. Malcolm Cowley, 1951).

《菲茨杰拉德故事集》
Ernest Hemingway——
The Sun Also Rises (1926) 《太阳照常升起》

A Farewell to Arms (1929) 《永别了，武器》
To Have and Have Not (1933) 《有与没有》


For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) 《丧钟为谁而鸣》
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) 《老人与海》

Die in the afternoon (1932) 《死在午后》
《非洲的青山》 Green Hills of Africa (1935)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)《过河入林》
海明威主题：

Success trauma
风格：
He developed a spare, tight, reportorial prose based on
simple sentence structure and using a restricted vocabulary,
precise imagery, and an impersonal, dramatic tone.

• The South:
– The Deep South: South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama,
Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana
– The extended South, including also the border states such as
Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia,

Arkansas and Texas
• Characteristics of southern literature
• a. The importance of family, sense of community, and religion.
• b. The importance of time and place, exploration of the past, sense
of human limitation (moral dilemma).
• c. The use of southern voice and dialect. Most of the novels

William Faulkner——
• The Sound and The Fury (1929)
《喧嚣与骚动》

– Describes the decay and downfall of an old southern
aristocratic family, symbolizing the old social order, told
from four different points of view
• As I Lay Dying (1930)
《我弥留之际》

• Sanctuary (1931)
《圣殿》

--Temple’s Stockholm Syndrome
• Light in August (1932)
《八月之光》

• Absalom, Absalom (1936)
《押沙龙！押沙龙！》

– Set in early 19th- cent. Jefferson, shows the tragic downfall
of the dynastic desires of the planter Colonel Sutpen
• Go Down, Moses (1942)
《去吧，摩西》


主题：
1. The spiritual deterioration which characterizes modern life stems

from the loss of love and want of emotional response.
2. The story also tells a story of deterioration from the past to the
present and the author idealizes the past.
意识流：
Stream of Consciousness
Telling a story by recording the thought of one character, describing
the mental and emotional reactions of characters to external events,
rather than the events themselves, without regard to logical argument or
narrative sequence


第六章：The 20
th
Century American Drama and African-American
literature
American drama：
American drama imitated English and European theater until well
into the 20th century. Often, plays from England or translated
from European languages dominated theater seasons.

Eugene O’Neill——
Beyond the Horizon (1920)
The Emperor Jones (1920)
Anna Christie (1922)
The Hairy Ape (1922)




《天边外》
《琼斯皇帝》
《安娜·克里斯蒂》
《毛猿》

Desire Under the Elms (1925) 《榆树下的欲望》
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Strange Interlude (1928) 《奇怪的插曲》
Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) 《伊雷特拉的哀伤》
The Iceman Cometh (1939, 1946) 《送冰人来了》
Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939-41, 1956) 《长日入夜行》
Arthur Asher Miller——
Man Who Had All the Luck (1944) 《吉星高照的人》
All My Sons (1947) 《我的儿子们》
Death of A Salesman (1949) 《推销员之死》
The Crucible (1958) 《萨勒姆的女巫》
A Memory of Two Mondays (1955)《纪念两个星期一》
A View From the Bridge (1957) 《桥头眺望》
After the Fall (1964) 《沉沦之后》
《维系事件》 Incident at Vichy (1965)
The Price (1968) 《代价》
写作特点：
Miller wrote plays on broad social themes. He put a
special emphasis on depicting the inner thoughts of individuals
and their conflicts with the morality of their society
Miller's plays often depict how families are destroyed by false
values. Especially his earliest efforts show his admiration for the

classical Greek dramatists.
Death of a Salesman (1949) brought Miller international fame, and
become one of the major achievements of modern American
theatre.

Tennessee Williams——
The Glass Menagerie 《玻璃动物园》
A Streetcar Named Desire 《欲望号街车》
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof《热铁皮屋顶上的猫》
Summer and Smoke《夏天与烟雾》

He won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire
in 1948 and for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955.
The Glass Menagerie (1945) and The Night of the Iguana (1961)
received New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards.
His 1952 play The Rose Tattoo received the Tony Award for
best play.
ⅡAfrican American Literature
• Colonial and Early American (1773-1860)
• Antebellum (1860-1865)
• Post-war and Reconstruction (1865-1900)
• Pre-World War I (1900-1917)

• The Harlem Renaissance (1918-1937)
• Naturalism and Modernism (1937-1960)
• Contemporary (1960-present)
作家：Langston Hughes(休斯)——Dreams, James Weldon
Johnson（约翰逊）, and W.E.B. Du Bois (杜博斯) Claud Mckay(麦
凯)and etc.
“If We Must Die” by Mckay

Modernism and Post-modernism
• Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Richard Wright: Native son
• Ralph Ellison: The Invisible Man
• The outpouring of African American literature in the 1980s and
1990s by such writers as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker.
• In 1993, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
• 1970 The Bluest Eye 《最蓝的眼睛》
• 1973 Sula 《秀拉》
• 1977 Song of Solomon 《所罗门之歌》
• 1981 Tar Baby 《黑宝贝》
• 1988 Beloved 《宠儿》
• 1992 Jazz 《爵士乐》
• 1999 Paradise 《天堂》

• 1993 Love 《爱》
• 2008 A Mercy 《恩惠》
•
第七章：The American Post-Modernism
特点：Characteristics:
– Rejection of rigid genre distinctions, emphasizing parody（恶
搞）, irony and playfulness.
– Favors reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and
discontinuity.
– Emphasis on the de-structured, de-centered, de- humanized
subject.
• 解释：Beat writers are a group of American writers in the late
1950s, led by the poet Allen Ginsberg and the novelist Jack
Kerouac. Writers of the beat generation dropped out of
middle-class society in search of ‘beatific’ （极乐）ecstasy through
drugs, sex, and Zen Buddhism.
• Jewish literature refers to published creative writings by American
Jews about their American experiences. This kind of writings is
shown in Jewish perspective.

The Expressionism and Surrealism ：
Against the Cultural Norm

Borrowed various experimental forms and techniques in probing
the inner world in detail.
It has been a search for a way to connect an oppressed response
to society and history and an awareness of individual loneliness

Joseph Heller——Something Happened《出了毛病》, Good as Gold
《像高尔得一样好》, Picture This《如此美景》, God Knows《天
晓得》, his first novel, Catch-22
• Catch-22 is defined as a law that is illegal to read. Ironically, the
place where it is written that it is illegal is in Catch-22 itself. It is yet
again defined as the law that the enemy is allowed to do anything
that one can't keep him from doing. In short, then, Catch-22 is any
paradoxical, circular reasoning that catches its victim in its illogic
and serves those who have made the law.
• 主题：The Absolute Power of Bureaucracy
• The Impotence of Language
Saul Bellow——
• Dangling Man《晃来晃去挂起来的人》
• The Victim 《受害者》
• The Adventure of Augie March《奥基·马奇历险记》
• Henderson the Rain King《雨王汉德逊》
• Herzog 《赫索格》

• Mr Sammler’s Planet 《塞姆勒先生的行星》
• Humboldt’s Gift 《洪堡的礼物》
• Seize the Day 《且乐今朝》
主题：
• Ccontemporary society is a threat to human life and human
integrity.
• Modern people tend to become paranoid(妄想狂）, high-strung
（高度紧张）, impotent（无力）, and lose their sanity.

er——The Young Folks 《年轻人》
Nine Stories 《故事九篇》
Franny andZooey; 《弗兰尼与佐伊》
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters《木匠们，把屋梁升高》
Seymour: An Introduction 《西摩其人》
The Cather in the Rye 《麦田守望者》

John Updike——(1960) Rabbit, Run 《兔子跑吧》
(1971) Rabbit
，
Redux 《兔子归来》
(1981) Rabbit Is Rich 《兔子富了》
(1990) Rabbit At Rest 《兔子歇了》
(2001) Rabbit Remembered 《记忆中兔子》
A & P

主题：The principal themes are religion, sex, America as well as
death.
His novels often act as dialectical theological辩证神学 debates
between the book itself and the reader to challenge the reader as
the plot runs its course.

Pearl S. Buck——赛珍珠译著《水浒传》（首版）
• A Bridge for Passing 《桥》
• Come, My Beloved 《来吧，亲爱的》
• Command the Morning 《命令与清晨》
• East Wind: West Wind 《东风：西风》
• Fighting Angel 《搏斗的天使》
• Fourteen Stories 《十四个故事》
• The Good Earth 《大地》
• The Hidden Flower 《匿花》
• Imperial Woman 《西太后》

名词解释：
1. American Puritanism
it comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to
American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言） and
salvation（拯救） were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard- working,
piousness（虔诚,尽职）， thrift and sobriety（清醒） were praised.
2. Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18
th
century in

Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used in
American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19
th
century who
stimulated（刺激） the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the
mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves
freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays,
fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.
3. 2. Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement that
flourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism
and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of
God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The
representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.
4. Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and
early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and
background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else
than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的)
authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive
natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语)
language and satirical(讽刺的) humor
5. Stream of consciousness（意识流）： It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is
the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts,
feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences
them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke
through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the
unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。
6. American 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

7. Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American
naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变） that
undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists
dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme
objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes
who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature
described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at
bettering the world through social reform.
8. Imagism（意象派）: It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from
1909 to movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct
treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement
were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.
9. Modernism： It was a complex and diverse （复杂多样的） international movement in
all the creative arts （创造性艺术）， originating about the end of the 19th century. It
provided （出现） the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made
up of many facets （方面）， such as symbolism， surrealism （超现实主义）， cubism
（立体主义）， expressionism， futurism （未来主义）， ect
10. The Lost generation： it refers to a group of young intellectuals （知识分子） who
came back from war， were injured （受伤害） both physically （身体上） and mentally
（精神上）. They lived by indulging （放任） themselves in the Bohemian （波西米
亚） way of life. Their American dream was disillusioned （破灭了）. The best
representative of the lost generation was Ernest Hemingway.
11. American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as
long as heshe 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.
12. The Harlem Renaissance：refers to the flowering of African American literature, art,
and drama during the 1920s and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York, the
movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Black novelists,
poets, painters, and playwrights began creating works rooted in their own culture

instead of imitating the styles of Europeans and white Americans.

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