美国文学_思维导图模板

美国文学

The Romantic Period

概况

period

the end of the 18th cerntury

The Sketch Book

Washington Irving

the outbreak of the Civil War

Leaves of Grass

Whitman

"the American Renaissance"

独立后文学内容

the early Puritan settlement

the confrontation with the Indians

the frontiersmen's life

the wild west

文学特点

emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature

like the picturesque, the exotic, the sensuous, the sensational and the supernatural

the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage influences over American moral values

New England Transcendentalism

the most clearly defined Romantic literary movement

Transcendentalism

the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses

"Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your onw mind"

Emerson

nature is ennobling

individual is divine and self-reliant

poets

Philip Freneau

William Cullen Bryant

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

James Russell Lowell

John Greenleaf Whitter

Edgar Ellen Poe

Walt Whitman

fiction

特点

original and diverse

novelists

Washington Irving

the comic fables

Edgar Allen Poe

the Gothic tales

James Fenimore Cooper

the frontier adventures

Herman Melville

the narrative quests

Nathaniel Hawthorne

the psychological romances

Rebecca Harding Davis

the social realism

human nature

man is divine in nature and forever perfectible

Emerson and Thoreau (transcendentalists)

everybody is potentially a sinner, and great moral courage is indispensable for the improvement

Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter

Melville

Washington Irving

The Sketch Book

Rip Van Winkle

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

Ralph Waldo Emerson

New England Transcendentalism

Thoreau

Walden

nature is not merely symbolic, but divine in itself and human beings can receive precise communication from the natural world by way of pure senses

Nathaniel Hawthorne

interest in "interior of the heart"

作品

Twice-Told Tales

The Scarlet Letter

best work

four people living in a Puritan community are involved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different ways

full display of

understanding of the colonial history in New England

apparent preoccupation with the moral issues of sin and guilt

keen psychological analysis of people

"The Custom-House" as an introductory note proves fruitful to Hawthorne's imagination

"Pearl" is a thematic symbol

Hawthorne proves himself to be one of the best symbolists

The House of the Seven Gables

based on the tradition of a curse pronounced on the author's family when his great-grandfather was a judge in the Salem witchcraft trials

The Marble Faun

about the dark aberrations of the human spirit

Young Goodman Brown

everyone possesses some evil secret

When he is about to be confirmed into the group, he finds his wife Faith is also there beside him

concern with guilt and evil

"power of blackness"

The Birthmark

evil is man's birthmark, something his born with

effected by transcendentalist of Emerson and Thoreau

intimate relationship with Melville

特点

literary is disturbed, tormented and problematical

"black" vision of life and human beings

"there is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity"

discusses sin and evil in almost every book

concerned most is intellectuals are too proud and too sure

usually villains, dreadful because of they are devoid of warmth and feeling

view of man and human history originates in Puritanism

Walt Whitman

poet with a strong sense of mission

"free verse"

作品

Leaves of Grass

Drum Taps

politically committed

before and during the Civil War, Whitman stood firmly on the side of the North

Cavalry Crossing a Ford

reminds readers of a picture of a scene of the American Civil War

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

death of Lincoln

Song of Myself

two principal beliefs

the theory of universality

the belief in the singularity and equality of all beings in value

特点

poetry could play a vital part in the process of creating a new nation. It could enable Americans to celebrate their release from the Old World and the colonial rule

concern for the whole hardworking people and the burgeoning life of cities

Herman Melville

作品

early period 1846-1852

sea adventure

Moby-Dick

the first American prose epic

a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of universe, a spiritual exploration into man's deep reality and psychology

Moby Dick symbolizes

nature

evil

mysterious things

an ultimate mystery of the universe

成为名著原因

symbolism, great gifts of language, invention, psychological analysis, speculative agility, narrative power

主要名称

The Pequod

hero: Ishmael

Ahab

adventures among the people of the South Pacific islands

Typee

Omoo

Mardi

Redburn

semi-autobiographical novel

concerning the sufferings of a genteel youth among brutal sailors

White Jacket

life on a United States man-of-war

late period

The Confidence-Man

explore the paradoxes of belief and the optimisms and hypocrisies of American life

Billy Budd

特点

the purpose of Melville's fictional tales, exotic or philosophical, is to penetrate as deeply as possible into the metaphysical, theological, moral, psychological, and social truths of human existence

a master of allegory and symbolism, like Hawthorne

The Realistic Period

概述

1865~1914

against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and self-creating fictions, and paved the way to Modernism

"The Gilded Age"

Mark Twain

realism writer

more attention to the "life" of the Americans

William Dean Howells

Mark Twain

emphasis on the "inner world" of man

Henry James

three prominent writers wrote at the same time, and differed in their understanding of the "truth"

American naturalism

from

Darwin's evolutionary theory

19th century French literature

Emile Zola

subjects

lower ranks of society

portrayed misery

poverty of the "underdogs"

human "bestiality"

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"the true father of our national literature"

H. L. Mencken

作品

combination of American folk humor and serious literature

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

a boy's book specially written for the adults

a journey down the Mississippi undertaken by two fugitives, Huck and Jim

"all modern American literature comes"

Hemingway

unpretentious style of colloquialism is best described as "vernacular"

Huck

a typical American Boy who is a boy with "a sound heart and a deformed conscience"

Life on the Mississippi

Innocents Abroad

literary career began to blossom

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

classic book written for boys about their particular horrors and joys

The Gilded Age

collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner

explored the scrupulous individualism in a world of fantastic speculation and unstable values in the years of post-Civil War era

特点

known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities life the customs, dialects, costumes and so on

the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi become the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the West became his major theme

wrote about the lower-class people

magic power with language, his use of vernacular

Henry James

the first American writer to conceive his career in international terms

became a naturalized British citizen in 1915

特点

an admirer of ancient European civilization

Mark Twain and William Howells satirized European manners

fame generally rests upon his novels and stories with the international theme

James's realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter

why James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th-century stream-of-consciousness novels and the founder of psychological realism

techniques innovated to cater for this psychological emphasis is his narrative "point of view"

language is not so easy to understand, often highly refined and insightful

作品

fiction

first period

The American

a young and innocent American confronting the complexity of the European life

Daisy Miller

a young American girl who get "killed" by the winter in Rome

early works that dealt with the international theme

The Europeans

The Portrait of A Lady

second period

The Turn of the Screw

short fiction

a story about the troubled and abnormal psychology of oppressed children, in which a whole household is terrorized by "ghost"

last and major period

return "international theme"

What Maisie Knows

The Wings of the Dove

The Ambassadors

The Golden Bowl

prose

The Art of Fiction

aim of the novel is to present life, so it is not surprising to find in his writings human experiences explored in every possible form: illusion, despair, reward, torment, inspiration, delight

Emily Dickinson

"letter to the world"

特点

poems are usually based on her own experiences, her sorrows and joys

concern the whole human beings, include religion, death, immortality, love and nature

more than 500 poems about nature, about skepticism about the relationship between man and nature

作品

I heard a fly buzz - when I died -

description of the moment of death

greatest rendering of the moment of death

This is my letter to the World

expresses Dickinson's anxiety about her communication with the outside world

I like to see it lap the Miles

makes the train part of nature by animalizing it

Because I could not stop for Death

personifies death and immortality so as to make her message strongly felt

Theodore Dreiser

America's literary naturalists

naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances

作品

Trilogy of Desire

The Financier

The Titan

The Stoic

Sister Carrie

express naturalistic pursuit by expounding the purposelessness of life and attacking the conventional moral standards

from Sister Carrie, Dreiser set himself to project the American values for what he had found them to be materialistic to the core

An American Tragedy

social pressure makes Clyde's downfall inevitable

特点

man is "victim of forces over which he has no control"

affected by Darwinist idea of "survival of the fittest"

world is jungle, where "kill or to be killed" was the law

style has been a controversial aspect of his work from the beginning

lack of concision

massive detailed descriptions

disorganized in voice and tone

The Modern Period

概况

a strong sense of social breakdown

a spiritual crisis in this period, but a full blossoming of literary writings

20th century American literature

the second American Renaissance

the expatriate movement

"The Lost Generation"

when WWI broke out, many young men volunteered to take part in "the war to end wars"

disgusted by the frivolous, greedy, and heedless way of life in America, they began to write about their experiences in the war

famous poets

Ezra Pound

William Carlos Williams

Robert Frost

E. E. Cummings

"I" → “i”

Wallace Stevens

style is more cultivated and refined

attention on man and things

The world is even more disintegrating and fragmentary and people are even more estranged and despondent after war

"the Beat Movement"

manifesto

Howl

Allen Ginsberg

Saul Bellow

Jewish-American writer

Black fiction

Richard Wright

Ralph Ellison

Salinger

The Catcher in the Rye

students' classic

"new fiction" in the 1960s and 1970s

Kurt Vonnegut

Joseph Heller

John Bath

Thomas Pynchon

Ezra Pound

poets

spokesman of "Imagist Movement"

Translations

The Translations of Ezra Pound

Confucius

Shih-Ching

Robert Lee Frost

serious and regional poet

4-time Pulitzer Prize winner

作品

A boy's will

first book

lyrics trace a boy's development from self-centered idealism to maturity

marked by an intense but restrained emotion and the characteristic flavor of New England life

North of Boston

volume of poems

"a book of people"

shows a brilliant insight into New England character and the background

New Hampshire

the first Pulitzer Prize

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

特点

subject matters mainly focus on the landscape and people in New England

can hardly be classified with the old or the new

unlike his contemporaries in the early 20th century, he did not break up with the poetic tradition nor made any experiment on form

simple in the way that they are dramatic monologues or dialogues, they are short and direct on the informational level, and they have simple diction

Eugene O'Neill

America's greatest playwright

F. Scott Fitzgerald

spokesman of Jazz Age

作品

This Side of Paradise

first novel

his own story

The Great Gatsby

made him one of the greatest American novelists

set against the ending of the WWI

evokes a haunting mood of a glamorous, wild time that seemingly will never come again

Gatsby is a mythical figure whose intensity of dream partakes of a state of mind that embodies America itself

Gatsby is the last of the romantic heroes

Tender is the Night

特点

both an insider and an outsider of the Jazz Age with a double vision

his fictional world is the best embodiment of the spirit of the Jazz Age

show a particular interest in the upper-class society, especially the upper-class young people

great stylist in American literature

his style, closely related to his themes, is explicit and chilly

Ernest Hemingway

one of the greatest American writers

a Nobel Prize winner for literature

作品

In Our Time

the first book to present a Hemingway hero: Nick Adams

Indian Camp

The Sun Also Rises

first true novel

casts light on a whole a generation after the WWI and the effects of the war by way of a vivid portrait of "The Lost Generation"

A Farewell to Arms

second big success

wrote the epitaph to a decade and to the whole generation in the 1920s in telling us a story about the tragic love affair of a wounded American soldier with a British nurse

For Whom the Bell Tolls

represents a new beginning in Hemingway's career as a writer

concerns a volunteer American guerrilla Robert Jordan fighting in the Spanish Civil War

The Old Man and the Sea

the Nobel Prize

about an old Cuban fisherman Santiago and his losing battle with a giant marlin

representation of life as struggle against unconquerable natural forces in which only a partial victory is possible

there is a feeling of great respect for the struggle and mankind

Death in the Afternoon

presents his philosophy about life and death trough the depiction of the bullfight as a kind microcosmic tragedy

To Have and Have Not

Hemingway's characteristic pattern of a lonely individual struggling against nature and the envrionment

特点

"However, though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually"

"The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water"

develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain

"less is more"

"his powerful style-forming mastery of the art" of creating modern fiction

praised by the Nobel Prize Committee

William Faulkner

one of the leading American writers in the literary history of the United States

作品

The Marble Faun

a volume of poetry

Soldiers' Pay

first novel

Intruder in the Dust

the Noble prize for the anti-racist

The Sound and the Fury

a story of "lost innocence"

Light in August

about the South as a state of mind

Absalom, Absalom!

Go Down, Moses

illuminates the problem of black and white in Southern society

A Rose for Emily

Gothic devices in narration

Emily is typical of those in Faulkner's Yoknapatwapha stories who are symbols of the Old South but the prisoners of the past

特点

work are set in the American South

stories are about people from Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County

the modern stream-of-consciousness technique was also frequently and skillfully exploited by Faulkner to emphasize the reactions and inner musings of the narrator

good at presenting multiple points of view, which gave the story a circular form, where one event is centered, with various points of view radiating from it, or different people responding to the same story

the other narrative techniques to construct stories include symbolism and mythological and biblical allusions

美国文学

模板简介

猜你喜欢

相关文章