第二篇：大学美国文学复习资料

American Literature

Puritanism清教主义

The word Puritanism is originally used to refer the theology advocated by a party within the Church of England. The term Puritanism is also used in a broader sense to refer to attitudes and values considered characteristic of the Puritans. It has been employed to denote a rigid moralism, or the condemnation of innocent pleasure, or religious narrowness adhered by the early New England Puritans. The American Puritanism as cultural heritage exerted great influence over American moral values. And this Puritan influence over American Romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. The American Puritans accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God.

Transcendentalism超验主义

In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts, and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Romanticism, Transcendentalism rejected both 18th-century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson’s essay Nature(1836) was the first major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it.

Free verse 自由诗体

Free Verse, is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventional rules of meter. Free verse is used to deliver poetry free from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to re-create instead the free rhythms of natural speech. Pointing to the American poet Walt Whitman as their precursor, they wrote lines of varying length and cadence节奏, usually not rhymed. The emotional content or meaning of the work was expressed through its rhythm. Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many modern American poets, including Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg. Local Colorism地方色彩

Post-Civil War America was large and various enough to sense its own local difference. Regional voices had emerged from newly settled territories in the South and to the west of the Appalachan. Local colorism is a unique variation of the American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specified setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence.

Naturalism自然主义

In literature, the term refers to the theory that literary composition should aim at a detached, scientific objectivity in the treatment of natural man. The movement is an outgrowth of 19th-century scientific thought, following in general the biological determinism of Darwin’s theory, or the economic determinism of Karl Marx. Artistically, naturalistic writings are usually unpolished in language, lacking in academic skills and unwieldy in structure. Philosophically, the naturalists believe that the real and true is always partially hidden from the individual, or beyond his control and that men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, instinct, chance and above all environment. Notable writers of naturalistic fiction were Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. characteristics of modern American literature

In general terms, much serious literature written from 20th century onwards attempted to convey a vision of social breakdown and moral decay and the writers’ task was to develop technique that could represent a break with the past. Thus the defining formal characteristics of the modernistic works are

discontinuity and fragmentation. An awareness of the irrational and the workings of the unconscious mind are pervasive in much modernist writing. Technically, modernism was marked by a persistent experimentalism. It rejected the traditional framework of narrative, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose, in favor of a stream-of –consciousness presentation of personality, a dependence on the poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic communication, and upon myth as a characteristic structural principle. Compared with earlier writings, modern American writings are notable for what they omit: the explanations, interpretations, connections, and summaries. There are shifts in perspective, voice, and tone, but the biggest shift is from the external to the internal, from the public to the private, from the chronological to the psychic, from the objective description to the subjective projection.

Lost Generation迷惘的一代

The Lost Generation refers to the disillusioned(awaken) intellectuals and artists of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace them only by despair of a cynical bedonism. The remark of Gertrude Stein, “You are a lost generation,” addressed to Hemingway, was used as a preface to the latter’s novel The Sun also Rises, which brilliantly describes those expatriates who had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types of writing.

Beat Generation垮了的一代

Beat Generation is a group of American writers of the 1950s whose writing expressed profound dissatisfaction with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. They rejected traditional forms and sought expression in the beatific illumination. The term sometimes is used to refer to those who embraced the ideas of these writers. The Beat Generation’s best-known figures were writers Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (劳伦斯·费林盖蒂) and Jack Kerouac.

Yoknapatawpha County

Yoknapatawpha County is an imagined place based on Faulkner's own hometown, a place

that he took for the setting of 15 of his 19 novels and many short stories. This small region

in the American South becomes in Faulkner's fiction an allegory or a parable of the Old

Deep South.

Harlem Renaissance哈莱姆文艺复兴

The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. It marked the first time that African American literature attracted significant attention. No comm.on style or ideology defined the Harlem Renaissance, but the poets, novelists, political essayists, and dramatists who participated in the endeavor shared a commitment to giving artistic expression to the African American experience. They also shared a strong sense of racial pride and a desire to better the social and economic situation of blacks. Major prose writers in the movement were historian and sociologist W.E.Du Bois, and writer Langston Hughes.

imagism：意象派

Led by the American poets Ezra Pound, imagist movement flourished in the USA and England between 1909 and 1917. Pound endorsed three main principles as guidelines for Imagism, including direct treatment of poetic subjects, elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, and rhythmical composition should be composed with the phrasing of music, not a metronome. The primary Imagist objective is to avoid rhetoric and moralizing, to stick closely to the object or experience being described, and to move from explicit generalization. The characteristic products of the movement are more easily recognized than its theories defined; they tend to be short, composed of short lines of

musical cadence rather than metrical regularity, to avoid abstraction, and to treat the image with a hard, clear precision rather than with overt symbolic intent. Most of the imagist poets wrote in free verse and they like to employ common speech. They stressed the freedom in the choice of subject matter and form.

Black Humor黑色幽默

Black humor is a type of modern humor that is caused by anger. It often describes gruesome events, which are normally associated with pleasant occasions, thus producing the congruous effect for humor. Black humor attacks on social mores through shocking language and offensive imagery. Black humor is a kind of desperate humor. It is the laughter at tragic things. In this meaningless world, according to Black Humorists, man’s fate is decided by incomprehensive powers. We can’t do anything about it; therefore we may as well laugh. Sardonic and imaginative 20th-century American writers often used the novel to ridicule society. Such novelists as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut, came to be known as the black humorists, because of their darkly comic writings.

Catch-22

Catch-22 is a darkly comic and wildly inventive novel by Joseph Heller about the insanity of war and the absurdity of military authority. The novel is a leading example of the black-humor movement in American fiction. Catch-22 features the airman Yossarian as the hero and moral center of a satirical depiction of life in the army. Yossarian is portrayed as one of the last rational people in an insane war. In the novel, the absurdities of military life are represented by the regulation “Catch-22”. The regulation, which prevents airmen from escaping service in bombing missions by pleading insanity, states that any airman rational enough to want to be grounded cannot possibly be insane and therefore is fit to fly. The term has now become part of English vocabulary, referring to a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule.

? Emily Dickinson’s poetry艾米丽·迪金森

Emily Dickinson is America’s best-known female poet. Her poetry covers the issues vital to humanity, which include religion, death, immortality, love, and nature. Her poems have no titles, hence are always quoted by their first lines. In her poetry, there is a particular stress pattern, in which dashes are used as a musical device to create cadence and capital letters as a means of emphasis. A master of imagery that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed manifold variations within her simple form. Due to her deliberate seclusion, her poems tend to be very personal and meditative. Dickinson’s poetry, despite its ostensibleobvious formal simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness; and her limited private world have never confined the limitless power of her creativity and imagination.

? Mark Twain

A.Setting: In the novel Mark Twain recreates a small-town world of America and presents the local color.

B.Language: He uses simple, direct language faithful to the colloquial speech, the vernacular (native)language of the local people.

C.Character（s）: The author recreates two rebels and fugitives running away from civilization, especially Huckleberry Finn, an innocent boy who refuses to accept the conventional village morality.

D.Theme: The novel is a criticism of social injustice, hypocrisy, conservativeness and narrow-mindedness of the American small town society.

E.Style: The novel employs a humorous style of narration and is also highly symbolic with the central symbol.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered a masterpiece of Mark Twain. The book is the story

of the title character, known as Huck, a boy who flees his father by rafting down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave, Jim. The climax arises with Huck’s inner struggle in the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape. With the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows. Huckleberry Finn, which is almost entirely narrated from Huck’s point of view, is noted for its authentic language and for its deep commitment to freedom. Huck’s adventures also provide the reader with a panorama of American life along the Mississippi before the Civil War. The readers are impressed by Twain’s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.

? What is the theme and the major character in F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby?

Considered as Fitzgerald’s finest work, The Great Gatsby, written in crisp, concise prose and told by Nick Carraway, a satiric yet sympathetic narrator, it is the story of Jay Gatsby, a young American from the Midwest. Gatsby becomes a bootlegger in order to attain the wealth and lavish way of life he feels are necessary to win the love of Daisy, a married, upper-class woman who had once rejected him. The story ends tragically with Gatsby’s destruction. The book deals with the bankruptcy of the protagonists’ personal dreams due to the clashes between their romantic vision of life and the sordid reality.

The hero of the novel, Gatsby, is the last of romantic heroes, whose energy and sense of commitment takes him in search of his person grail. Gatsby’s failure magnifies to a great extent the end of the American dream. The protagonist’s pursuit of his dream only proves to be nothing but an illusion. Nevertheless, the affirmation of hope and expectation is self-asserted in the characters.

? What are the stylistic features of Hemingway’s novels?

Hemingway’s novels are mainly concerned with “tough” people, known for the Hemingway hero of athletic prowess(weili) and masculinity(male) and unyielding(never give up) heroism, whose essential courage and honesty are implicitly (implied)contrasted with the brutality of civilized society. He deals with a limited range of chatacters in quite similar circumstance and measures them against an unvarying code, known as “grace under pressure”, which is actually an attitude towards life that

Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works. In the general situation of his novels, life is but a losing battle; however, it is also a struggle man can demonstrate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually.

Hemingway once said, “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eight of it being above water.” Typical of this “iceberg” analogy is Hemingway’s style: Hemingway’s economical writing style often seems simple, but his method is calculated. In his writing, Hemingway provided detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely. By doing so he avoided describing his character’s emotions and thoughts directly. Hemingway was deeply concerned with authenticity in writing. Besides, Hemingway develops the style of colloquialism initiatied by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms(special habit) of human speech are well presented, and the use of short, simple words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care.

? W. Faulkner福克纳

A Rose for Emily is Faulkner’s first short story published in 1930. Set in the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha, the story focuses on Emily, an eccentric spinster who refused to accept the passage of time, or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it. As a descendent of the Southern aristocracy, Emily is typical of those in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories that are the symbols of the Old Deep South but the prisoners of the past. The deformed (disabled)personality and abnormality Emily demonstrates Faulkner’s point of view that by alienating oneself from reality, a person is bound to be a tragedy. Emily is regarded as the symbol of tradition and the old way of life. Thus her death parallels with the decline of the Old South.

The Sound and the Fury, his masterpiece, is an account of the tragic downfall of the Compson family. The novel uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949. Faulkner especially was interested in multigenerational family chronicles, and many characters appear in more than one book; this gives the Yoknapatawpha County saga a sense of continuity that makes the area and its inhabitants seem real.

? Robert Frost’s 佛罗斯特nature poem

Robert Frost, American poet, known for his verse concerning New England life.

He learned the familiar conventions of nature poetry from his predecessors, and made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression. A poem so conceived thus becomes a symbol or

metaphor, a careful, loving exploration of reality. Images or symbols in his poems are drawn from the simple country life. However, profound ideas are delivered under the disguise of the plain language and the simple form, for what Frost did is to take symbols from the limited human world and the pastoral landscape to refer to the great world beyond the rustic scene. These thematic concerns include the terror and tragedy in nature, as well as its beauty, and the loneliness and poverty of the isolated human being. In short, the nature poems demonstrate Frost’s love of life and his belief in a serenity that comes from the common experience.