美国文学史术语翻译 作家作品
如何构建社会主义和谐社会-优秀辅导员事迹材料
Puritanism:
A religious doctrine that
advocates hard work, self-discipline, thrift, and
sobriety, regards labour
as one’s divine task,
without the enjoyment of the fruit of the labour.
The purpose is to purify the
corrupted church
as had been established by Jesus Chris himself.
John cotton and William roger
Romanticism
Is intellectual movement
originating in Germany at the end of 18
th
century that gained strength in
Western Europe
after the Industrial Revolution, in the reaction
to the social and political norms of
the Age
of Enlightenment, its scientific rationalization
of nature. The romantic values revolved
around
the full spectrum of the human emotional side
embracing its instincts and rejecting the
conventions of the Age of Reason.
Romanticism的特点：frequently shared certain
general characteristics, moral enthusiasm, faith
in
the value of individualism and intuitive
perception, and a presumption that he natural
world was a
source of corruption.
Transcendentalism
as a moral philosophy,
transcendentalism was neither logical nor
systematized. It exalted feeling
over reason,
individual expression over the restraints of law
and custom.2) they spoke for cultural
rejuvenation and against the materialism of
American society. 3）they believe in the
transcendence
of
things are a part.
Emerson 第一个提出 idealism
代表人物：Emerson，believed that man was a part of
absolute good。
Thoreau ，beheld divinity in the
“unspotted innocence” of nature.
Social
&cultural background
1 a protest of
intellectualism and doctrine of the church
2
a protest of foreign influences
A idealistic
philosophy of German & France (Fichte Schelling
and Kant)
B oriental mysticism Hindu works,
Buddhismthe doctrine and philosophy of Chinese
Confucius
and Mencius
3 product of the
dual heritage of American Puritanism
Inner
communication of the soul with Godpuritan
principle of self culture and self-improvement.
Features: 1 emphasis on the spirit or over
soul 2 emphasis on the importance of individual 3
nature as the symbolic of Godspiritover soul
Realism
is a movement in European and
American literature from 1830s to the end of the
century. This
new attitude was characterized
by a great interest in the realities of life. It
aimed at the
interpretation of the actualities
of any aspect of life, free from subjective
prejudice, idealism, or
romantic colour. It
expressed the concern for the world of experience,
of the commonplace, and
for the familiar and
the low.
代表作家：William Dean Howells Mark Twain
and Henry James
1. Changes for the better
2. Changes for the worse
Naturalism
“is the application of
the principles of scientific determinism to
fiction and drama” in the last
decade of
19
th
century.
Associated with realism,
they shared emphasis on the depicting surface
reality, but naturalism was
more inclusive and
less selective than realism. It emphasized the
limited ability of humans to
impose will upon
their own destiny.
Topics of literature in
America
1. Object of study: lower ranks of
society and misery, poverty of the “underdogs”2.
Theme:
human bestiality, esp. as an
explanation of the sexual desire.3. Mood:
pessimistic
Representatives: Jack London
Stephen Crane Theodore Dreiser Frank Norris
Washington Irving the first great belletrist
第一个纯文学作家
三个主要contribution ① the first great
prose stylist of American romanticism.②“Sketch
Book”
Rip van winkle The legend of Sleepy
Hollow-Icabod Crane
The father of American
literature or the father of American letters
Nathaniel Hawthorne（1804—1864）
Theory of
Sin: unpardonable sin---There is evil in every
human heart, which may remain latent,
perhaps
through the whole life; but circumstance may rouse
it to activity.
“The Scarlet Letter”
Characters: Hester Prynne: heroine----Pearl
Dimmesdale: a young clergyman
Chillingworth:
rigid priest
Symbols“A” : a. Punishment,
shamedisgrace, immorality and sin. B. able, angel
and charity;
pride
Theme: 1it focuses on
the nature of the individual and the individual
relationship with the
community 2The
implication of self-reliance, the difference
between the private and the public
character
and the consequences of passion and repression are
discussed.
Significance: 1 he was the first
major novelist in English to combine morality with
art. 2 he is
significant for the themes with
regard to : the consequences of pride,
selfishness, and secret guilt
and so on. 3 he
is significant for his style of writing romance,
which he though a predestined from
American
narrative.
“The House of the Seven Gables”
Mosses from an Old Manse The Marble Faun
Herman Melville
Moby Dick
Characters
Ishmael, the narrator Ahab, captain of the ship
Moby Dick, the whale hunted
Locale: Pequod,
the whaling ship
Theme A. Man vs
Natureuniverse—foreshadows the 20th century
literature, such as T.S. Eliot
and Samuel
Beckett (sense of belongings) B. Alienation of the
major character, Ahab;
Revenge—nothingness of
life
Symbolism
the voyage: “search and
discovery, the search for the ultimate truth of
experience. ”
The Pequod: the ship of American
soul
Moby Dick: many interpretations—evil, or
goodness, or both.
Ahab: the evil of human
mind.
Ralph Waldo Emersion
①be responsible for bringing Transcendentalism
to New England,
②Emerson believed above all
in individualism个人主义, independence of mind思想独立,
and
self-reliance自强
作品：“Nature”“Essays”、“The American Scholar”,
our intellectual Declaration of Independence.
Henry David Thoreau Walden
To him nature
is a concrete existence, is the integration of all
the details in the universe. In his
eyes man
and nature are in an integral and harmonious
existence. He dedicated his whole being to
his
lobe of nature.
Edgar Allan Poe
As a
critic:
A Talk on “A twice-Told Tale”
The
Philosophy of Composition
The Poetic Principle
(beauty, pure poetry and melancholy)
2. A
short story writer: good at psychoanalysis, and
art for art’s sake
A. Detective story The
Purloined Letter The Murders in the Rue Morgue
B. Gothic Novels Ligeia; Black Ca;t The Fall
of the House of Usher The Cask of Amontillado;
3. A poet The Raven; To Helen; Annabel Lee;
Israfel Sonnet—to Science
4. The Themes:
Death, Revenge, and Rebirth.
Walt Whitman
Major work Leaves of Grass (1855)(Song of
Myself; O Captain! My Captain!)
Ideals:
freedom, equality, democracy, dignity, self-
reliance and joy of man.
Free verse – verse
librates in French, refers to the poem without
fixed rhyme or beat, it has
varied length of
lines, different from blank verse. Walt Whitman
used this form of verse in Leaves
of Grass in
1855.
1. What is the theme of O Captain! My
Captain?
Walt Whitman's
Whitman compares
the nation to a ship that had just returned form
sea (i.e. the country had just
pulled itself
out of civil war), and Lincoln to the ship's
captain, slain upon returning home
(Lincoln
was assassinated shortly after the South
surrendered).
LoveLoyalty, Coming of age and
Death.
2. What figures of speech are
employed? Metaphor.
3. Illustrate the rhyme
scheme aa-bb-cd-cd
Emily Dickinson
Themes
: death immortality love nature
William Dean
Howells
The Rise of Silas Lapham
Economically bankrupt, socially disgraced, he
gained his moral rise. His moral rise began with
financial fall. Falling, he achieved his moral
and ethical rise.
Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle
Tom’s Cabin anti-slavery
Henry
James
International theme American
innocence and naivety are contrasted with European
experienced
and sophistication.
The name
of the heroine “in the Portrait of a Lady” is
Isabel Acher. The novel is representative
of
the best of James’ mature work. The plot concerns
the courtship, marriage, and development of
the character of Isabel Archer, a young
American girl who has been left penniless by the
death of
her father. The intricate novel of
psychological and moral interrelationships is in
one sense another
treatment of the Jamesian
theme of the American conflict with European
culture and in another
sense the most personal
of his novels, an intimate picture of a woman’s
soul presented with
masterly psychological
finesse.
The Art of Fiction:
1) “point-
of-view”;2) Anticipating the stream of
consciousness T2. Relationship between life and
art3. Political views
The first of the
modern psychological novelists and a realist of
the inner life
Mark Twain 马克.吐温
①
“Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”
②特点local
colorist 地方特色:a unique variation of American
literary realism, it refers to the
particular
concern about the local character of a region.
③contribution：colloquial speech accepted as
literary medium
④代表作：“The Gilded Age”“The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer” “Life on the
Mississippi”
What are the prominent features
of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
？
a)The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
relates the story of the escape of an uneducated
and
ignorant Black slave Jim from slavery and
how the uneducated outcast white boy Huckleberry
Finn, floating along with him and helping him
as best he could along the Mississippi River,
changes his mind, his prejudice about Black
people, and comes to accept Jim as a Man and as a
close friend as well.
b) The novel is a
veritable recreation of living models. Nearly all
the characters had prototypes in
real life:
Huck, his father, Jim, the swindlers (the Duke and
Dauphin), Colonel Sherburn and the
drunkard
Boggs. The portrayal of individual incidents and
characters achieved intense
verisimilitude of
detail.
c)The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is especially famous for its language. The book is
written
in the colloquial style, in the
general standard speech of uneducated Americans.
Large amount of
dialects or vernaculars are
employed to depict the characters of their lower
positions, such as Huck
and Jim are always
speaking in the ungrammatical, simple structure.
d)The colloquial style has impacted American
literature and made the book Huck Finn and after
it
quite different. It was Mark Twain who made
colloquial speech an accepted, respectable
literary
medium in the literary history of the
U.S.A. Its influence has extended to the 20th
century
American literature; it is continued
in both prose and poetry. Sherwood Anderson and
Ernest
Hemingway were the direct descendents
of the colloquial style; T.S. Eliot and William
Faulkner, J.
D. Salinger, Robert Frost, to
name just a few, find their trace of Mark Twain’s
style.
Frank Norris “the octopus”
Theodore Dreiser
An American Tragedy
Three different worlds: her sister’s working
class existence, her life with Druet in Chicago,
and
with Hurstwood in New York.
Sister Carrie
His style
1. Simple and
moving characters2. The journalistic method of
reiteration
3. word-pictures, sharp contrast,
truth in color, and movement in outline.