American Literature复习资料

美国文学二十世纪前主要作家创作风格及主要成就简介

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

1. Franklin was a brilliant, industrious and versatile man (a statesman, economist, businessman, scientist and writer)

2. He was the only good American author before the Revolutionary war (the only writer before Revolution who are still read today)

3. His writings range from informal sermon on thrift to urbane essays. He wrote gracefully as well as clearly.

4. As an author he had power of expression, simplicity, a subtle humor. He was also sarcastic.

5. His best writing is found in his own The Autobiography. It is an inspiring account of a poor boy’s rise to a high position. The author tells his story modestly and objectively. It is a how-to-do-it book, on the art of self-improvement. The style of The Autobiography is the pattern of puritan simplicity, directness and concision. The plainness of its style, the homeliness of imagery, the simplicity if diction, syntax and expression are some of the features we cannot mistake.

Washington Irving (1783-1859)

1. Irving was one of the important founders of American literature, and called “the father of American literature”, for he was the first American writer acknowledged by Europe. His contribution to American literature is unique in more ways than one. He was the first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame.

2. The short stories as a genre in American literature began with Irving’s The Sketch Book, a collection of essays, sketches and tales. It marked the beginning of American Romanticism.

3. Irving’s style can be described as beautiful. His language is vivid, and he is good at humor and exaggeration.

4. He provided the young nation with humorous accounts of the colonial past. Through his stories, he helped to create an American mythology. These stories became so powerful that his reputation as a man of letters was established.

5. His The Legend of Sleepy Hollow tells a short story based on a local legend. It reads smooth, mysterious and humorous. The language is very vivid and beautiful, different from Franklin’s plain language. In the story Irving succeeded in creating some comic characters and described vividly the local scenery and customs.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

1. Allan Poe was a versatile man. He was an editor, poet, literary critic and writer of fiction (short stories, novel).He was recognized as the father of modern short story, and the first American literary critic.

2. He was a notable American poet, a master of prose tales, a gifted tormented man. He was also very skilled in detective-story writing. His position is unique in the history of American literature.

3. In Europe he was hailed as a pioneer in poetic and fictional techniques. His influence was especially strong on many French writers.

4. Poe’s principles for the short story are brevity (readable at one sitting) and finality (giving the

reader an impression of completeness)

5. Poe’s poetic theories emphasized that the poem should be short, readable at one sitting. Its chief aim is beauty, namely, to produce a feeling of beauty in the reader. Beauty aims at “an elevating excitement of the soul”. ”Melancholy” the most legitimate all the poetic tone. He calls forth “pure” poetry. He stresses rhythm, defines true poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty”, and declares that “music” is the perfection of the soul, or idea of poetry. So his style is traditional.

6. The Raven is about 108 lines, perfectly readable at one sitting. A sense of melancholy over the death of a beloved young woman pervades the whole poem, the portrayal of a young woman grieving for his lost Lenore, his grief being turned to madness under the steady one-word (nevermore) repetition of the talking bird. It is obvious that the poem has regular rhyme, strong rhythm and music effect. Alliteration and repetition are used frequently. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

1. Emerson was responsible for bringing transcendentalism to New England, and he was the leader of the movement throughout his life.

2. He was one of the most influential American writers. He believed in individualism, independence of mind, and self-reliance.

3. His poetry is uneven in quality, but always highly individual, and some of his poems are excellent. His prose style was sometimes as highly individual as his poetry. His skill in polishing each sentence into a striking thought makes his writing memorable. So there are many great statements in his works. He places emphasis on ideas, symbols and imaginative words. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

1. Hawthorne was a major Romantic writer. His favorite theme was Puritan New England. He

was a master of symbols and short stories.

2. In his works, he wrote as a moralist, and showed great interest in what happened in the minds

of the characters, the interior of heart. He focused his examination on the moral and psychological consequences.

3. The Scarlet Letter, which brought him great success, is one of his best novels. It is a treatment

of the effects of sin on human spirit. And the effect of ambiguity achieved successfully through employing the technique of multiple view in his narratives.

4. His influence has been great on many American writers, such as Herman Melville, Henry

James, William Faulkner, and some gothic novelists in the 20th century.

5. The first paragraph makes a detailed analysis and gives a very specific description of Hester Prynne’s psychology at the moment when she was to step out of the prison-door. It describes impressively the serious effects of sin on her mind and her life. Herman Melville (1819-1891)

1. He was a major American writer, who did not receive recognition until the 20th century

There are three things which deserve mention about his life. Going out to sea is one of them, the other two being his marriage and friendship with Hawthorne. His experiences and adventure on the sea furnished him with abundant material for fiction. His marriage above him forced him to write for money to support his wife and their growing family. His friendship with Hawthorne helped to write his unique and enduring work, Moby Dick (a world classic) 2. Moby Dick, his masterpiece, is regarded as the first American prose epic. The plot deals with ceaseless conflicts between good and evil of nature’s indifference to man. Melville makes the

conflicts live by using symbols. The book is steeped in symbolism. For example, the white whale, Moby Dick symbolizes nature (good or bad) to Melville. To the captain, it symbolizes only evil. It is the symbol of good to the first mate of the ship. The symbol of good is destroyed by the consuming (continuous/endless) desire to root out evil. The captain burns with a wicked fire, becoming evil himself in his thirst to destroy evil. All the sailors died with the whale and the captain, except the one who lived to tell us the story. So the novel is a Shakespearean tragedy.

3. Like Hawthorne, Melville manages to achieve the effect of ambiguity through employing the technique of multiple view in his narratives, so as to create a symbolic effect.

4. Moby Dick is one of the world’s greatest masterpieces. It is an encyclopedia of everything: history, philosophy, religion etc. in addition to a detailed account of the operations of the whaling industry.

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

1. Walt Whitman was one of the great innovators in American literature. He was a transitional figure from Romanticism and Transcendentalism to Realism. He and his contemporary poet Dickinson are called two mountains standing side by side dividing the water in American literary history.

2. His “Leaves of Grass” is America’s first genuine epic poem. Most of the poems are about man and nature. However, a small number of very good poems deal with New York, the city that fascinated him, and with the Civil War, in which he served as a volunteer make nurse.

3. The poetic style he devised is now called free verse---that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme. One of the major principles of Whitman’s technique is parallelism or a rhythm of thought, in which the line is the rhythmical unit, as in the poetry of the English Bible. Another main principle of Whitman’s versification is phonetic recurrence, i.e. the systematic repetition of words and phrases at the beginning of the line, n the middle or at the end. 4. Similarities and differences between Whitman and Dickinson

Both Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were American poets in theme and technique. Thematically, both extolled to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry pointing to Ezra Pound and the Imagist and to William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens and other traditions in modern American poetry.

Whitman seems to keep his eye on society; Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual. Whitman is “national” in his outlook, while Dickinson is regional. In formal terms the two poets are vastly different: Whitman’s endless, all-inclusive category contrast with the concise, direct and simple diction and syntax which characterize Dickinson’s poetry.

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

1. She was one of America’s great poets in American literature, and a precursor of the Imagist movement.

2. She lived her life in complete shadow, abnormally shy and retiring. She was shy, sensitive, and sometimes rebellious. She was a mysterious writer. In her life, she was nobody (only several poems got published), but after her death she gained the recognition of the world and so became somebody.

3. All her poems are about nature, love and a lover whom she either never really found or else give

up), mortality and immortality, and about success and failure (which she considered her constant companion).Her nature poems are great in number and rich in matter such as natural phenomena, changes of seasons, heavenly bodies, animals, birds and insects, flowers of various kinds.

4. Her verses are all short, irregular in rhyme and rhythm, whimsical in its imagery and wry in its view of world.

5. Like Whitman she was a courageous experimentalist. Little that she wrote seemed conventional: her choice of words, her verbal constructions, even her spelling. Her poetry abounds in telling images. In the best of her poems every word is a picture seen. A notable feature of her technique was a severe economy of expression. And brevity, directness and plainest words are important characteristics of her poetry, which influenced the imagists greatly. So she was with Stephen Crane, the precursor of the Imagist movement in the 20th century. Mark Twain (1835-1910)

1. Mark Twain was called “the true father of American national/regional literature (localism) and he was a great humorist.

2. His novel The Gilded Age (1873) marks the ending of American Romanticism and the beginning of American Realism

3. Mark Twain’s contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his theories of localism in American fiction and partly through his colloquial style.

4. In his writing, he uses a number of dialects. Most of the sentences are simple or compound ones, and there is even ungrammatical element in them. He made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary media in the literary history of the country. His characters, speech, ideas and events borrowed very little from European models. So his style was thoroughly American. 5. Differences between Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James

Although Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James all worked for realism, there were obvious differences between them. In thematic terms, for instance, James wrote mostly of the upper reaches of American society, and Howells concerned himself chiefly with middle class life, whereas Mark Twain dealt with the lower strata of society.

Technically, Howells wrote in the vein of genteel realism, James pursued an “imaginative” treatment of reality or psychological realism, but Mark Twain’s contribution to the development of realism and American literature as a whole was partly through his theories of localism in American fiction, and partly through his colloquial style. Some of Mark Twain’s important works

Henry James (1843-1916)

1. He was one of the founders of psychological realism. He was a novelist, essayist, dramatist and literary critic.

2. He made major contributions to the art of fiction itself, helping to transform the novel from its alliances with journalism and storytelling into an art form of penetrating analysis of individuals confronting society. He avoided oversimplification and approached his subject matter indirectly, preferring things to be hinted rather than stated directly. His profound psychological insights form a significant bridge/construction to modern literature.

3. In his whole writing career James was concerned with “point of view” which is at the center of his aesthetic of the novel. He discovered the track of making his characters reveal themselves

with minimal intervention of the author. He used a particular method of telling the story, that is, illumination of the situation and characters through one or several minds. He himself termed this method “point of view”.

4. He had a considerable influence upon American writers, especially in modern stream-of-consciousness technique, which was widely employed in the first decades of the 20th century

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

1. Dreiser was a great naturalistic writer, a powerful novelist, and a profound and prescient critic of debased American values

2. His works are powerful in their portrayal of the changing American life.

3. He was enthroned as the guide and pioneer for the latter-day naturalists by the revival of naturalism in the 1930s.

4. Dreiser’s education was to come from experience and from independent reading and thinking (such as Balzac, Zola, Mark Twain and Jack London). And Herbert Spenser and Darwinism had a determining effect on his outlook. He learned to regard man as merely an animal driven by greed and lust in a struggle for existence in which only the “fittest”, the most ruthless, survive… 5. An American Tragedy was his greatest and most successful novel

6. Dreiser, together with Crane and Norris had to take risks and they were all rejected for some time by the genteel magazines and publishers. But they held out and cleared the way for the next generation, the “lost generation” of the 1920s. In theme, they represented the life of the lower classes truthfully and broke into such forbidden regions as violence, death and sex. In technique, their works exhibit honest skill and artistry. Thus they prepared the way for the smooth acceptance of the younger writers like Hemingway and William Faulkner.

二十世纪主要作家创作风格及主要成就简介

1. Ezra Pound

a. Pound was one of the important founders of imagism. He was a seminal figure in modern poetry. His contribution to the development of modern poetry was altogether unique.

b. His In a Station of the Metro has been regarded as a classic specimen of imagist poetry.

c. The best poem that Pound ever wrote is probably his two—part Hugh Selwyn Mauberly. It is a poem about the commercialization and debasement of art, about the feeling of frustration and failure.

d. The Cantos has been called Pound’s “intellectual diary since 1915”. Containing a total of 117 poems, it is social history, an amalgam of heterogeneous cultures and languages, a poet’s attempt to impose, through art, order and meaning upon a chaotic and meaningless world.

2. Robert Frost

a. Frost was a poet of nature, and the most popular poet in post—war America, who was invited to read his poem at President Kennedy’s inauguration.

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