英语美国文学史复习资料

英语美国文学史复习资料

一、时期综述（关于清教的应该都是重点）

1、清教徒采用的文学体裁：A、narratives 日记

B、journals 游记

2、清教徒在美国的写作内容：①their voyage to the new land ②adapting themselves to unfamiliar climates and

crops

③about dealing with Indians ④guide to the new land, endless bounty, invitation to bold spirit

★3、清教徒的想法：①Puritans want to make up pure their religious beliefs and practices.净化信仰和行为方式②wish to restore simplicity to church services and the authority of the Bible to theology.重建教堂，提供简单服务，建立神圣地位③look upon themselves as a chosen people, and it follow logically that anyone who challenged their way of life is opposing God’s will and is not to be accepted.认为自己是上帝选民，对他们的生活有异议就是反对上帝。④Puritan opposition to pleasure and the arts sometimes has been exaggerated.反对对快乐和艺术的追求到了十分荒唐的地步。⑤religious teaching tended to emphasize the image of a wrathful God.强调上帝严厉

的一面，忽视上帝仁慈的一面。

4、典型的清教徒： John Cotton and Roger Williams

他们的不同：John Cotton was much more concerned with authority than with democracy.

Williams begins the history of religious toleration in America.

5、Williams的宗教观点：Toleration did not stem from a lack of religious convictions. Instead, it sprang from the idea that simply to be virtuous in conduct and devout in belief did not give anyone the right to force belief on

others. He also felt that no political order or church system could identify itself directly with God.

行为上的德，信仰上的诚，并没有给任何人强迫别人该如何行事的权利。没有任何政治秩序和教会体制

能够直接体现神本身的意旨。

6、英国最早移民到美国的诗人：Anne Bradstreet

7、在殖民时期最好的清教徒诗人：the best of Puritan poets is Edward Taylor.

学习指南：

1、Could you give a description of American Puritans? 关于美国清教徒的描绘

Like their brothers back in England, were idealists, believing that the Church should be restored to the ―purity‖ of

the first-century Church as established by Jesus Christ Himself. To them religion was a matter of primary importance. They made it their chief business to see that man lived and thought and acted in a way which tended to

the glory of God. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God, all that John Calvin, the great French theologian who lived in Geneva had preached. It was this kind of religious belief that they brought with them into the wildness. There they meant to prove that were God’s chosen people enjoying his blessings on this earth as in heaven.

2、Hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety were the Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American

writing.

3、The work of two writers, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, rose to the level of real poetry.

4、The earliest settlers included Dutch, Swedes, Germans, French, Spaniards Italian, and Portuguese.

理性和革命时期文学

Economically

Background Colony → state 1770s uprising(争端) in North→ American against→ Britain

→ politics 1776-1783 war of Independence → USA politically

Representatives： Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography

Prose \ essay Thomas Paine: Common Sense

Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence

Philip Freneau: poet \ journalist

启蒙运动对美国的影响 oppose coliral order and religious obscurantism.

Secular education and literature → Franklin

一、时期综述

1、美国的性质：The war for Independence ended in the formation of a Federative bourgeois democratic republic –

the

United States of America.联邦的资产阶级民主共和国——美利坚合众国。

二、代表作家：

1、Benjamin Franklin 本杰明.弗兰克林

①代表作：―Poor Richard’s Almanac‖穷人理查德的年鉴 annual collection of proverbs 流行谚语集 It soon became the most popular book of its kind, largely because of Franklin’s shrewd humor, and

first spread his reputation. 机智、幽默、风趣成为最畅销的书籍，弗兰克林的成名作。

②As an author he had power of expression, simplicity, a subtle humor, sarcastic. 作为作家具有非凡的才能，

表达简洁明了，幽默，讽刺天才。

③―Autobiography‖ 自传 18世纪美国唯一流传至今的自传

2、Thomas Paine 托马斯.佩因 ―Great Commoner of Mankind‖ 最平凡的人

①famous pamphlet ―Common Sense‖ 著名的政治小册子《常识》，it boldly advocated a ―Declaration for

Independence‖, and brought the separatist agitation to a crisis. 拥护―独立宣言‖，使分裂活动发展成最后危机。

②―American Crisis‖《美国危机》, signed ―Common Sense‖.署名为―常识‖。

3、Thomas Jefferson 托马斯.杰弗逊

①drafted the Declaration of Independence. 起草了独立宣言。

②与清教不一样，主张追求幸福。All Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.人人生而平等，他们都从他们的―造物主‖那边被赋予了某些不可转让的权利，其中包括生命权、自由权和追求幸福的权利。

4、Philip Freneau 菲利浦.弗瑞诺 poet and political journalist 诗人和政治方面的新闻记者。

①perhaps the most outstanding writer of the post-Revolutionary period.可能是革命战争后期最杰出的作家。

②has been called the ―Father of American Poetry‖ 美国诗歌之父

学习指南：

1、Theology dominated the Puritan phase of American writing. Politics was the next great subject to command the

attention of the best minds.

2、Freneau was neoclassical by training and taste yet romantic in essential spirit.

第三部分 浪漫主义文学

End of 18C ～ out break of Civil War

Political： ①Democracy and Equality ②Parties scramble for power

Economic：①industrialism ②technology ③sharp entrant ④frontier westward 西进 utility and perfection

Cultural： ①buoyant spirit、eduation、magazine ②simplicity简单

Independence：

第四部分 现实主义文学

课堂笔记

1、Realism 特征：①Mechanization 机器化 ②urbanization 城市化，许多人涌入城市，阶级差异明显 ③induseridization 工业化 ④federal government (race种族平等进入宪法)标志着马克.吐温《镀金时代》

开始 ⑤railway system 工业化的一大标志，电力和石油的应用发挥了重大作用。

wrence的作品中突出了对铁路的描写。

2、文化特征：①女性发挥作用明显，女性的作者和读者明显增多。②开始关注中产阶级

Mid class. ③现实主 义 realism，New York replaced Boston as the nation’s literary center. 纽约成为新的文化中心。3、Realism： Mark Twain local colorist 本土色彩浓厚 Henry James psychologist 心理描写深

刻

Naturalism 自然主义 pessimistic 悲观的

Environment 环境

Heredity (lower) 底层的继承

4、Calvinist family Predestination 预知的

卡尔文主义 Pessimism 悲观的

悲观的，宿命的 tone(诗歌基调) tragic 关注死亡 Death and immortality(永恒)

5、两个作家的比较 Dickinson Whitman

关注点： inner world of individual 关注个人内心 Society / large 关注社会

形式： free verse free verse

语言： concise、direct、simple 简洁、直接的 ( diction )

书上内容：

一、时期综述：

1、镀金时代：The Gilded Age, an age of excess and extremes, of decline and progress, of poverty and dazzling wealth, of gloom and buoyant hope. 无节制、走极端，倒退和进步、贫困和富有并存，既令人沮丧又让人有

希望的时代。

2、Although Americans continued to read the works of Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Poe, the great age of

American romanticism had ended. By the 1870s the New England Renaissance had waned.

新英格兰的文艺复兴已开始接近尾声。

3、现实主义和自然主义作家的人物刻画方法：

19世纪末,the literary naturalists who followed them, rejected the portrayal of idealized characters and events. Instead, they sought to describe the wide range of American experience and to present the subtleties of

human personality, to portray characters who were less simply all good or all bed.

反对在作品中描绘理想化了的人物和事件，关注人性中的微妙之处。

4、Realism：（现实主义）appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things was immediately observable. the dialects, customs, sights.现实主义有浓厚的美国本土特色，是浪漫主义故事情节和现实主义描写相结合的产物：美国风味的方言、风俗、各种观点

5、自然主义：naturalism, a new and harsher realism, 新型的更为冷峻的现实主义，产生悲观的流派 ， 产生于the end of the century 十九世纪末，因为Perception of society’s disorders 对社会无序的感知。 Presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and

heredity. 设法尽力客观真实地展现出受环境与出身局限的下层人民和各种经济阶层人物的真正生活。 The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment, the religious ―truths‖ were illusory, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. 强调世界的非道德性，人们没有意志的自由，宗教上的真理

是虚幻的，现实生活是痛苦的。 Deterministic 决定论，宿命的，

代表作家：Stephen Crane 史蒂芬.克莱恩, Frank Norris 弗朗克.诺里斯,

Jack London 杰克.伦敦, Theodore Dreiser 西奥多.德莱塞.

6、Darwinism: 达尔文主义:an evident influence on naturalism, stress the animality of man, to suggest that be was dominated by the irresistible forces of evolution. 对自然主义影响极大，强调人的动物性，意味着人的命运受

进化的不可抗力来决定的。

7、William Dean Howells 威廉.迪安.豪厄斯，

①The arbiter of 19th century literary realism in America。十九世纪美国现实主义文学泰斗，提拔许多年轻

作家

②His defined realism: nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.

不加一分，不减一分，百分之百描写现实。

③中央视角：an objective point of view

二、代表作家：1、Walt Whitman 沃尔特.惠特曼

①★free verse (自由诗体) without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. 无固定节奏，无有规律的韵脚 ②―Leaves of Grass‖草叶集 1870 the first genuine epic poem. 美国历史上第一部真正的史诗 Poem’s 特点：most of the poems in ―Leaves of Grass‖are about man and nature. ③关注点：In his poetry, he combined the ideal of democratic common man and that of the rugged individual④诗人职责：he envisioned the poet as a hero, a

savior and a prophet, one who leads the community by his

expressions of the truth.表达真理的前提下，引导社会发展。2、Emily Dickinson 爱米丽.狄金森 ①作品： ―I died for Beauty‖ 我为美而死（诗歌） Beauty / Truth / Goodness are ultimate(终极) the same ―Because I could not stop for Death‖我不能等候死神 Theme：死亡是现永恒Immortality的途径 ②特点：her poetry in unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no titles, hence are always quoted

by their first lines.

3、Harriet Beecher Stowe 哈丽雅特.比彻.斯托 小说家 only one female prose writer(散文作家) in 19th century 代表作：―Uncle Tom’s Cabin‖汤姆叔叔的小屋 关注农奴制度 Pay attention to serf's system4、Mark Twain 马克.吐温①美国现实主义文学代表作―Adventures of Huckleberry Finn‖哈克贝里.费恩历险记(马克最有名的作品) 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贡献：colloquial speech accepted as literary medium口语化被文学界接受 ④代表作：―The Gilded Age‖70-90年代，镀金时代，贫富分化，财富积累―The Adventures of Tom Sawyer‖用词简单、幽默、使用当地语言编写 ―Life on the Mississippi‖5、O. Henry 欧.亨利 short story 短篇小说 ①特点：tell about the lives of poor people in New York关注下层人; usually short简单; plots are exceedingly clever and interesting，humor abounds情节极度聪明有趣并富于幽默; the end is always surprising结尾意外; contain a great deal of slang and colloquial expressions使用大量的俚语和口语. ②代表作：―The Four Million‖《四百万》 小说集 、―The Gift of the Magi‖《麦琪的礼物》 单部小说 ★6、Henry James 亨利.詹姆斯 novelist小说家；Literature theoretician 文学理论家，从小受欧洲教育 ①心理现实主义的开创者：the founder of psychological realism. The literary career of him is generally divided into three periods, in the first periods, James took great interest in international theme; exemplify the mature and formidable style of a third literary period, which critics have come to praise as ―The Major Phase‖ ②特点：(1)deeply into the individual psychology of his characters, writing in a rich and intricate style that supported his intense scrutiny of complex human experience.深刻探讨人物人性心理，用深厚、复杂的写作方式对复杂的个人经历进行揣摩 (2)1st person and 3rd person narration，第一和第三人称

的叙述 (3)omniscient 全视角是不真实的;

③家庭背景：father: philosopher哲学家,富有；brother: psychologist, philosopher心理学家,哲学家；④创作原则：The art of Fiction小说的艺术;art vs. life, brings the meaning of life; ⑤贡献contribution：in his critical commentaries, he made major contributions to the art of fiction itself, helping to transform the novel from its alliance with journalism and romantic story-telling into an art from of penetrating analysis of individuals confronting society, chronicles of the psychological perceptions that James himself defined as the highest from of experience. 詹姆斯把小说从新闻形式和浪漫故事转变成为了对个人在社会大环境中面对种种冲突，进行深

刻剖析的文学形式；对人们心理感受进行反映的一种文学形式，他定义这位感受的最高形式。

⑥代表作：―The American‖、―Daisy Miller‖、― in the Portrait of a Lady‖(早期最好的作品)

Last full-length novel ==―The Wings of the Dove‖、―The Ambassadors‖、―The Golden Bowl‖ ⑦The 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 in 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.

7、Jack London 杰克.伦敦 ①代表作：―The People of the Abyss‖、―The Call of the Wild‖、―The Sea Wolf‖、 ―Martin Eden‖(autobiographical novel自传体小说) ②while embracing the socialism of Marx, London

also believed in the triumph of the strongest individuals. This contradiction is most vividly projected in the patently autobiographical novel.8、Theodore Dreiser 西奥多.德莱塞①代表作：―Sister Carrie‖《嘉莉妹妹》 the

first novel, which traces the material rise of Carrie Meeber

and the tragic decline of G. W. Hurstwood.

―The Financier‖、―The Titan‖、―The Stoic‖Trilogy of Desire 欲望三部曲 ②―An American Tragedy‖《美国悲剧》，The identification of potency with money is at the heart of Dreiser’s greatest and most successful novel,

德莱塞最恢宏、最成功的小说，表达了金钱万能的主题。

第五部分 二十世纪的文学

课堂笔记：

1、background

① World War I 第一次世界大战，America have great profit. ② Jump in technology (automobile / radio) 科技方面的跳跃 （汽车/收音机） ③ old moral code breaks 旧道德体系破碎

2、Imagism 意象派：present an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time.

书上内容：

一、时期综述：

1、Imagism 意象派：is a poetic movement of England and the United States, flourished from 1909-1917. Its credo, expressed in Some Imagist Poets, included the use of the language of common speech, project matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration.

2、Lost Generation：迷惘的一代，Writers of the first postwar era self-consciously acknowledged that they were a ―Lost Generation,‖ devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of ―expatriates‖ or exiles. It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semipoverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world.

3、Modernism现代主义：is loosely a synonym of anything contemporary. Strictly, especially in literary criticism, which began in the late 19th century and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. They pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one.

4、现代主义的标志：T. S. Eliot’s ―The Waste Land‖, the most significant American poem of the twentieth century, helped to establish a modern tradition of literature rich with learning and allusive thought.

5、典型的迷惘一代：F. Scott Fitzgerald, ―The Great Gatsby‖ 《了不起的盖茨比》 novel Ernest Hemingway ―The Sun Also Rises‖《太阳照样升起》 ―A Farwell to Arms‖《告别了，武器》 William Faulkner ―The Sound and the Fury‖ 《喧嚣与骚动》

6、Playwrights戏剧、剧作家：Eugene O’Neill ―The Emperor Jones‖《琼斯国王》、―Anna Christie‖《安娜.克里斯蒂》、―The Hairy Ape‖《毛猿》7、The Jazz Age(享乐时代)：when New Orleans musicians moved ―up the river‖ to Chicago, and the theatre of New York’s Harlem pulsed with the music that had become a symbol of the times. Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a generation of ―the beautiful and damned‖, drowning in their pleasures.

二、代表作家：

1、Ezra Pound 埃兹拉.庞德 诗人

①Imagism 意象派的代表人物。Pound and Eliot became the early leaders in restoring to poetry the use of literary reference as an imaginative instrument. 庞德和爱略特都是运用意象主义作为文学表现手法的早期诗人。②major work of poetry is the long poem called ―The Cantos‖

2、Robert Frost 罗伯特.弗洛斯特 自然主义诗人 poet①诗歌特点和内容：(1)rejected the revolutionary poetic principles of his contemporaries, choosing instead ―the old-fashioned way to be new.‖ He employed the plain speech of rural New Englanders and preferred the short, traditional forms of lyric and narrative.(2)He saw nature as a storehouse of analogy and symbol.(3)His concern with nature reflected deep moral uncertainties, and his poetry, for all its apparent simplicity, often probes mysteries of darkness and irrationality in the bleak and chaotic landscapes of an indifferent universe where men stand alone, unaided and perplexed. ②he become a national bard美国民族诗人的翘首, win four Pulitzer Prizes获得了四次普利兹奖. ③―The Road Not Taken‖、―Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening‖向往大自然，想逃避社会；死亡、迷惑3、Wallace Stevens 华莱士.斯蒂文斯 诗人①His work is primarily motivated by the belief that ―ideas of order,‖ that is ,true ideas, correspond with an innate order in nature and universe, and that it is the high privilege of individuals and mankind to discover this correspondence. 作品动机起源于秩序理念，他的秩序就是真理，就是自然与宇宙天然一致的次序，是人类与个体发现这种一致性的特权。

②代表作：―The Man with the Blue Guitar‖《带蓝吉他的人》；―Necessary Angel‖《必要的天使》，collection of his occasional lectures on poetry诗歌的评论.―Anecdote of the Jar‖《坛子的轶事》jar – man made – art, wildness – nature, jar bring order/meaning to the nature, 艺术到自然的秩序， integrated 统一体

③特点：(1)he adopted a variety of experimental styles, created poetic surfaces of Frenchified elegance, exotic imagery, odd sounds, curious analogies, and inscrutable titles.尝试过多种实验性的写作风格。(2)he confronted the contemporary abandonment of traditional values and sought to come to terms with the confusions of his time. The problem of the interrelation between the ideal and the real became a constant theme in his later poetry.理想和现实中所交叉的矛盾。(3)a series of oppositions between inner and outer worlds – between subject and object,

perceiver and perceived, fiction and fact, ―imagination and reality‖(想象与现实)

★4、Thomas Stearns Eliot 托马斯.斯特恩斯.爱略特 现代主义代言人 ①多重身份：poet诗人, critic评论家, playwright剧作家 ②代表作：

―The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock‖poems，holds its place in the development of Eliot’s poetry as a whole. ―Tradition and the Individual Talent‖essay,随笔《传统和个人天才》, the earliest statement of his aesthetics第一次阐释了自己的审美观点. provided a useful instrument for modern criticism.成为现代评论极为有效的评判标准。

―The Waste Land‖《荒原》one of the major works of modern literature. Use a new form — the orchestration of related themes in successive movement. 新的文学形式即相关的主题在连续运动中构成交响效果。

―Four Quartets‖《四个四重奏》poem

―Murder in the Cathedral‖，poetic tragedy, 诗歌悲诗, a drama(戏剧) of impressive spiritual power.极富感染力的戏剧

③作品特点：(1) concerns various aspects of the frustration and enfeeblement of individual character as seen in perspective with the decay of states, peoples, and religious faith.触及人性中的软弱沮丧的弱点，正确思索了国家、人民、宗教信仰等的丧失。(2)poem conceived as a made object, an organic thing in itself, whose concrete elements are true correlatives of the artist’s imagination and experience with respect to that poem.诗歌是客观成型的东西，诗歌的具体元素与艺术家的想象和经历密切相关，也与诗歌相一致。(3)The degree to which fusion and concentration of intellect, feeling, and experience were achieved was Eliot’s criterion for judging the poem.知识、情感、体验的融合与集中程度是爱略特判定诗歌好坏的标准。

5、F. Scott Fitzgerald F.司各特.菲茨杰拉德 novelist 小说家

①作品：―This Side of Paradise‖《人间天堂》，the first novel.

―The Great Gatsby‖ 《了不起的盖茨比》 novel

―Tender Is the Night‖ 《夜色温柔》 novel

②第二本小说的开展过程：dream梦想 → Daisy self-centered 理想化的淑女，自我为中心 → disenchantment, disillusion魔法消失，(因阶级差异)梦想破灭 → sense of failure and despair (light)失败和绝望 Ash 灰(象征) → forest树木，西部开发，树木变成灰了

③limited point of view有限视角 → suspense悬念 + mystery神秘 真实性→reliable可信的，不偏，不评价

6、Ernest Hemingway 厄恩斯特.海明威 novelist 小说家①写作特点：(1)he developed a spare, tight, reportorial prose based on simply sentence structure and using a restricted vocabulary, precise imagery, and an impersonal, dramatic tone.推动了报告文学的发展，认为报告文学句子结构要简单，用语要节制，想象要简练，要采用不受感情影响的、戏剧化的语调。(2) His primary concern was an individual’s ―moment of truth,‖ and his fascination with the threat of physical, emotional, of psychic death is reflected in his lifelong preoccupation with stories of war.主题强调换个体―真理的瞬时性‖，痴迷于描写肉体情感方面面临的威胁和心灵死亡等主题。(3) man’s greatest achievement is to show grace under pressure作品主题, or purity of line through the maximum of exposure最大限度地挖掘自己使自己成为一个纯粹的人. ②代表作：―The Sun Also Rises‖ Hemingway became the spokesman for ―a lost generation‖

―A Farewell to Arms‖、―For Whom the Bell Tolls‖、―The Old Man and the Sea‖

7、John Steinbeck 约翰.斯坦贝克

①the foremost novelist of the American Depression.美国大萧条时期最杰出的小说家。 ②代表作：―Of Mice and Men‖《人鼠之间》 portrayed the tragic friendship between two migrant workers

―The Grapes of Wrath‖《愤怒的葡萄》regarded as masterpiece 视为杰作。

8、William Faulkner 威廉.福克纳

①作品的主题：the universal theme of ―the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself‖人类心灵与自己冲突是宇宙永恒的主题。②作品：―The Sound and the Fury‖《喧嚣与骚动》成名作、―Absalom, Absalom!‖、―Go Down, Moses‖③narrative method叙述方法:1、stream of consciousness 意识流 2、multiple point of view, narrator多角度，多个叙述者

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