美国文学史及选读的名词解释(全)

第一篇：美国文学史及选读的名词解释(全)

1.American Puritanism

it comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century.Original sin, predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism.And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift and sobriety（清醒）were praised.2.Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18thcentury in Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing.When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19thcentury who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers.They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death.The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint.They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.3.2.Transcendentalism(先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism(理性主义and喀尔文主义).Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind.The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.4.Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的)authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽)the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features.It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语)language and satirical(讽刺的)humor

5.Stream of consciousness（意识流）： It is one of the modern literary techniques.It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them.It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce.Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing

incessantly。

6.American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end.The Age of Realism came into existence.It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism.Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived.It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience

7.Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism.American naturalism had been shaped by the war;by the social upheavals（剧变）that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age.America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths.They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity.Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.8.Imagism（意象派）: It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S.flourished from 1909 to 1917.The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording.The leaders of this movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.9.Modernism： It was a complex and diverse（复杂多样的）international movement in all the creative arts（创造性艺术），originating about the end of the 19th century.It provided（出现）the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century.It was made up of many facets（方面），such as symbolism，surrealism（超现实主义），cubism（立体主义），expressionism，futurism（未来主义），ect

10.The Lost generation： it refers to a group of young intellectuals（知识分子）who came back from war，were injured（受伤害）both physically（身体上）and mentally（精神上）.They lived by indulging（放任）themselves in the

Bohemian（波西米亚）way of life.Their American dream was disillusioned（破灭了）.The best representative of the lost generation was Ernest Hemingway.11.American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough.It usually implies a successful and satisfying（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S.12.The Harlem Renaissance：refers to the flowering of African American literature, art, and drama during the 1920s and 1930s.Though centered in Harlem, New York, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States.Black novelists, poets, painters, and playwrights began creating works rooted in their own culture instead of imitating the styles of Europeans and white Americans.

第二篇：美国文学史及选读名词解释

1.American Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism.American naturalism had been shaped by the war;by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age.America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths.They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity.In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death.Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.美国自然主义：美国自然主义是一种新的、更具批判性的现实主义。美国自然主义是在战争和影响人们早期信念的社会**的影响之下形成的。美国的自然主义者往往否定了广为接受的道德真理的正确性，他们想达到极端的客观与直率，他们所展现的人物往往都是下层社会的人，他们的命运受到环境和遗传的制约。在反应生活方面，自然主义作家往往表现出早期浪漫主义中感伤主义特征，但和浪漫主义不同的是，自然主义者认为，世界缺乏道德，人不论男女都没有自由的意愿，他们的生活都受到遗传和环境的控制，人在生前过着悲惨的生活，死后便被人所遗忘。虽然自然主义文学通过更为苛刻的现实主义手法来展现这个世界，但是他有时也是为了通过社会改革来改善这个世界。

2.American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans.The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church.The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them.They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles.As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices.They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God.As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind.American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature.美国清教主义：清教主义是新教徒的原来的一个分支——清教徒的行为和信仰。在美国的第一批居民中有很多就是清教徒，他们有着严格的宗教信仰和道德准则。就像这个词所暗指的那样，清教徒们想“清化”他们的宗教信仰和行为习惯。他们相信宿命论、原罪说、全体堕落和有限的赎罪。作为一种文化遗产，美国清教主义在早期美国人的思想上有着深刻的影响，他对美国文学的影响也是颇为持久的。

3.American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end.The Age of Realism came into existence.It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism.Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived.It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an

objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.美国现实主义：在美国文学史上，内战宣告了浪漫主义的终结和现实主义的开始。现实主义反对浪漫主义和感伤主义的谎言，它从一个陌生的世界转向了普通人的真实生活的描写。它所关心的是普通的下层劳动人民而非理想中的人类本性和现实经历。American Romanticism: The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century.A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, its industrialization, its westward expansion, and a variety of foreign influences were among the important factors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period immediately following the nation’s political independence.Yet, romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption.Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War.The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the nation’s revolutionary heritage and its frontier egalitarianism.美国浪漫主义：浪漫主义阶段涵盖了19世纪前半页。美国的不断壮大和发展以及随之而来的明珠和平等的思想、工业化的发展、西北边疆的不断扩展和国外的各种影响使浪漫主义作家文学不但成为一种可能，而且使它成为美国政治独立后的一种必然。然而，浪漫主义文学往往有很多共性：他们热心于道德、相信个人主义价值观和对世界的直观感受，并且他们认为自然世界是真、善、美的源泉而人类社会则是堕落的根源。在内战以前，浪漫主义价值观占据是政治、艺术、和哲学等领域，浪漫主义者对个人的赞扬正好迎合了美国的革命遗风和边疆开拓者的品均主义。

5.American Transcendentalism: the emergence of the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place during the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy extended much farther back into American religious history.Transcendentalism and evangelical Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from American Puritanism, taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe.They stressed the importance of the individual.To them, the individual was the most important element of society.They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God.Nature was, to them, alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence.Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses.Emerson’s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” and his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as America’s “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”.美国超验主义：美国超验主义出现的19世纪20年代末期到三十年代，但是它的根源在宗教史上要远得多。超验主义和福音派新教分别是美国清教主义的两个分支，他们的祖先是17世纪和18世纪的加尔文神教。超验主义者主张文化的复兴，认为“超灵”是宇宙中最重要的事物。他们强调个人的重要性，反对精神上的物质主义。对他们来说，个人是一个社会最重要的元素。他们认为自然就是“精神”或“上帝”的象征，它是有生命的，而上帝又无处不在。他们认为生与死最基本的真理可以超越感官的世界而获得。艾默生的《自然》被称为是“美国超验主义的宣言”，他的《美国学者》则被认为是美国的“文化独立宣言书”。

6.Local Colorism: The definition of local colorism is made clear by Hamlin Garland in his Crumble Idols, he claims that it has “such quality and texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or anyone else than a native.” Here “text” refers to the elements which characterizes a local culture, elements such as speech, customs, and mores peculiar to one particular place.And his “background” covers physical setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which condition human thought and behavior.The ultimate aim of the local colorism is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that differs from the world outside.7.Imagism: It’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S.flourished from 1909 to 1917.The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording.The leaders of this movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.意象主义：意象主义是在1909到1917年之间在英国和美国的一次诗歌运动。意象主义主张在诗歌通过“直接描写事物”和简介的用词来产生意象，领导人物为庞德和艾米•罗威尔

8.The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s.At the time, it was known as the “New Negro Movement”, of which Harlem was the largest center.Writers and artists emphasized black liberation, retaining black cultural pride, and not giving in to white standards.They began to produce a wide variety of fine and highly original works dealing with African-American life.These works attracted many black readers.New to the wider culture, they also attracted commercial publishers and a large white readership.Writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance include Langston Hughes Who wrote The Weary Blues.HR was more than just a literary movement in AM history.9.Free Verse: Verse that has either no metrical pattern or an irregular pattern.自由诗：按照语言的抑扬顿挫和意象模式，而不是按照固定韵律写出的诗。它的韵律建立在音素、语词、短语、句子和段落等形式的基础上，而不是建立在音步传统格律单位上。因此，自由诗消除了很多不自然的成分和诗体表现的某些审美差距。20世纪初，在英国诗法中自由诗已经流行。

10.Blank verse: Verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter.素体诗：用五音步抑扬格写的无韵诗。

第三篇：美国文学史名词解释

It were flourishing from the beginning of 17th to the middle period of 18th.They stressed predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement from God‟s grace.They went to America to prove that they were God‟s chosen people who would enjoy God‟s blessings on earth and in Heaven.Finally, they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.Both doctrinaire and an opportunist.Its Influence on literary were as follows:（影响）(1)American Literature is based on a myth------the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden.(2)The American Puritan‟s metaphorical made of perception----symbolism.The representatives were Edwards(The Freedom of the Will), Franklin(On the Art of Self-improvement), Crevecoeur(Letters from an American Farmer).代表作家及代表作：Captain John SmithTrue Relation of Virginia(1608)

Anne Bradstreet“To My Dear and Loving Husband”

Benjamin Franklin:The Autobiography of Benjamin FranklinRomanticism was a complex artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.Elements of Romanticism

1.Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations.2.Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.不要这么多，我就删掉了3、4、5条。。

Romantic Attitude

1.Appeals to imagination;use of the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

2.Stress on emotion rather than reason;optimism, geniality.3.Subjectivity: in form and meaning.Characteristics of Romanticism:

a.Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.(subjectivity)

b.For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense.c.They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group, against authority.d.The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts.e.Typical literary forms of romanticism include ballad, lyric, sentimental comedy, problem novel, historical novel ,gothic romance, metrical romance, sonnet.Representatives:

• New England Poets: William Cullen Bryant;Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;

• Writers: James Fenimaore Cooper, Washington Irving“The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon”

• 浪漫主义的影响： The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the nation‟s revolutionary heritage and its

frontier egalitarianism.As a philosophical and literary movement, transcendentalism flourished in New England from 1830s to the Civil War.Its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson who published „Nature‟ in 1836 which represented a new way of intellectual thinking in America and presented„The Universe is composed of Nature and the Soul, Spirit is present everywhere.‟ and romantic idealism on Puritan soil as well as Thoreau.Emerson‟s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism”.As a philosophy, transcendentalism was neither logical nor systematical.It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom.Yet transcendentalism was a powerful expression of the intellectual mood of the age.What is Transcendentalism?

In the realm of art and literature it meant the shattering of pseudo-classic rules and forms in favor of a spirit of freedom, the creation of works filled with the new passion for nature and common humanity and incarnating a fresh sense of the wonder, promise, and romance of life.Major Concepts(main ideas)

1, „transcend ere‟: to rise above, to pass beyond the limits

2, Believe people could learn things both from the outside world by means of the 5 senses and from the inner world by intuition.3, It placed spirit first and matter second

4, It took nature as symbolic of spirit or God.5, It emphasized the significance of the individual

6, Religion was an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal „oversoul‟.Major writers and Literary Works

Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803----1882)Self-Reliance

Henry David Thoreau(1817----1862)Walden

超验主义的影响：it could exercise a healthy and restorative influence on the human mind.The natural implication that things in nature tended to become symbolic, and the physical world was a symbol of the spiritual.This in turn added to the1

tradition of literary symbolism in American literature.the ideas it represented have remained a strong influence on great American writers from the days of Hawthorne and Whitman to the present.——latter half of the nineteenth century

American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end.The Age of Realism came into existence.It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism.Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived.It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.Major Features:

1）Realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspects of contemporary life and everyday scenes are represented in a straightforward or mother-of-fact manner.2）Open ending(means real life is complex and cannot be fully understood)

3）Focuses on the lives of the common people

4）Emphasize objectivity

Representatives:

Howells, Henry James

代表作：William Dean HowellsThe Rise of Silas Lapham

Henry James“The American”、“Daisy Miller”、“ in the Portrait of a Lady”

现实主义影响：Realism was a reaction against Romanticism and paved the way to Modernism。

thlocal colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19(1860s—1870s).Local Color Fiction:

Local colorism as a trend became dominant in American literature in the late 1860s and early 1870.The frontier humorists who had been popular with their “tall tales” before the Civil War paved the way for local color fiction.Basic Features

Local color fiction presents a locale which is distinguished form the outside world.Local color fiction describes the exotic and the picturesque.It describes things that are not common in other regions.Local color fiction also attempts to show things as they as they are.Local color fiction glorifies the past.(nostalgic about the past)

Local color fiction stresses the influence of setting on character.Masters：

Mark Twain（笔名）

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

6.American naturalism

American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like realism, it had come from Europe.Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century.Background:

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe.In this chance world he was both helpless and hopeless.Major Features:

Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment

The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.Representatives:

The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane,Crane‟s is the first American naturalism work.Norris‟s McTeague is the manifesto of American naturalism.Dreiser‟s is the work in which naturalism attained maturity.These writers‟ detailed description of the lives of the downtrodden and the abnormal, their frank threatment of human passion and sexuality, and their portrayal of men and women overwhelmed by blind forces of nature still exert a powerful influence on modern writers.Influence:

Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.This combination of grim reality and desire for improvements is typical of America as it moved into the twentieth century.A poetic movement of England and the U.S.that flourished from 1909 to 1917.The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording.“poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impressions”

Major features:

---it was one of the most essential technique of writing poetry in modern period.---with a spirit of revolt against conventions, imagism was anti—romantic and anti-victorian

---In a sense, imagism was equivalent to naturalism in fiction

---it produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern.---Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet.---it produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern.---Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet.The most outstanding figures:

Ezra Pound Amy Lowell Hilda Doolittle

The form of free verse(Ezra Loomis Pound)

影响：.its influence

1)the imagist theories call for brief language, describing the precise picture in as few words as possible.This new way of poetry composition has a lasting influence in the 20th century poetry.2)the second lasting influence of Imagism is the form of free verse.There are no metrical rules.There are apparent indiscriminate line breaks, which reflects the discontinuity of life itself.That is art of the poem.The poet uses the length of the lines and the strange groupings of words to show how life itself can be broken up into somehow meaningless clustersFree verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19th century.Poetry that is based on the irregular rhythmic cadence(韵律)of the recurrence, with variations, of phrases, images, and syntactical(依照句法的)patterns rather than the conventional use of meter（音步）.Rhyme may or may not be present in it, but when it is , it is used with great freedom.Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead the free rhymes of nature period.Walt Whitman„s leaves of grass is perhaps the most notable example.thIt has since been used Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot and other major American poets of the 20 century.Walt Whiteman‟s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps , the most notable example.9.The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s.The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who used “a lost generation” to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I experiences and disillusioned with American society.Hemingway later used the phrase as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises.It consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams and Archibald MacLeish.The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.10.The Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words.That is an individualist keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place.These people are usually spiritual strong, people of certain skills, and most of them encounter death many times.The heroes in his book are all have something in common which Hemingway values: they have seen the cold world and for one cause or another, they boldly and courageously face the reality;whatever the result is, they are ready to live with grace under pressure.The Hemingway code hero has an indestructible spirit for his optimistic view of life, though he is pessimistic that is Hemingway.Ernest Hemingway‟s “iceberg theory” suggests that the writer include in the text only a small portion of what he knows, leaving about ninety percent of the content a mystery that grows beneath the surface of the writing.If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action

The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between World War I and World War II.Particularly in North America.With the rise of the great depression, the values of this age saw much decline.Perhapsthe most representative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald‟s The Great Gatsby.Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term” Jazz Age”.

第四篇：美国文学史及选读教案

闽 江 学 院

教

案

课 程 名 称:主要英语国家文学史及文学作品选读 2 课 程 代 码: 31020022 授 课 教 师 ： 吴文南 系 别 ： 外语系

2010年3 月2 日 授课专业班级 ： 英语本科, 英语师范, 英语专升本

Introduction Teaching aid tool: a map of early America Teaching aim: the students learn why and how to learn literature course, get the general idea of the colonial America and their literary forms.Key Points: a.learning aim;b.Learning method;c.Colonial American characteristics.I.Introduction of the course 1.Why should we learn the course:

a.One of the main reasons might be that literature offers a bountiful and extremely varied body of written material, which is “important in the sense that it says something about fundamental human issues and which is enduring rather than ephemeral.Its relevance moves with the passing of time, but seldom disappears completely the Shakespeare plays whose ending were rewritten to conform to late 17th century taste and which were later staged to give maximum prominence to their romantic hero figures are now explored for their psychoanalytic import.In this way, though its meaning does not remain static, a literary work can transcend both time and culture to speak directly to a reader in another country or a different period of history.Literature is authentic material.By that we simply mean that most works of literature are not fashioned for the specific purpose of teaching a language.Recent course materials have quite rightly incorporated many authentic samples of language---for example, travel timetable, city plans, forms, pamphlets, cartoons, advertisements, newspaper or magazine articles.Learners are thus exposed to language that is as genuine and undistorted as can be managed in the classroom context.In reading literary texts, students have also to cope with language intended for native speakers and thus we gain additional familiarity with many different linguistic uses, forms and conventions of the written mode with irony, exposition, argument, narration and so on.b.Cultural enrichment: For many language learners, more indirect routes to understand a country must be adopted so that they gain an understanding of the way of life of the country: radio programmers, films and videos, newspapers and last, literary works.It is true of course that the “world” of a novel, play, or short story is a created one, yet it offers a full and vivid context in which characters from many social backgrounds can be depicted.A reader can discover their thoughts, feelings, customs, and possessions: what they buy, believe in, fear, enjoy;how they speak and behave closed doors.Reading the literature of a historical period is one of the ways we have to help us imagine what life was like in that other foreign territory.Literature is perhaps best seen as a complement to other materials used to increase the foreign learner‟s insight into the country whose language is being learnt.c.language enrichment: we have said that reading literary works exposes the student to many function of the written language, but what about other linguistic advantages? Language enrichment is one benefit often sought through literature, while there is little a=doubt that extensive reading increases a learner‟s receptive vocabulary and facilitates transfer to a more active form of knowledge, it is sometimes objected that literature does not give learners the kind of vocabulary they really need.It may be “authentic” in the sense already mentioned, but the language of literary works is not typical of the language of daily life, nor is it like the language used in learners‟ textbooks.We would not wish students to think that Elizabeth Berret Brownning‟s “How Do I love Thee? Is the kind of utterance normally whispered into a lover‟s era nowadays!The objection to literature on the grounds of lexical appropracy has some validity, but it need not be an overriding one if teachers make a judicious choice of the text to be read, considering it as a counterpoise and supplement to other materials.On the positive side, literature provides a rich context in which individual lexical or syntactical items are made more memorable.Reading a substantial and contextual zed body of text, students gain familiarity with many features of the written language---the formation and function of relines, the variety of possible structures, the different ways of connecting ideas---which broaden and enrich their own writing skills.The extensive reading required in tackling a novel or long play develops the student‟s ability to make inferences from linguistic clues, and to deduce meaning from context, both useful tools in reading other sorts of material as well.Literature helps extend the intermediate or advanced learner‟s awareness of the range of language itself.Literary language is not always that of daily communication, as we have mentioned, but it is special in its way.It is heightened: sometimes elaborate, sometimes marvelously simply yet, somehow, absolutely “right”.2.What should we learn? History and Anthology of American literature 3.Some Literary works: Selected Reading in American Literature

扬岂深 Selected Reading in American Literature

陶洁 Selected Reading in American Literature

常耀信

Contemporary American Literature with Collateral Readings 秦小孟 High Lights of American Literature

钱青

An Anthology of 20th Century American Fiction

万培德 A Survey of American Literature

常耀信 20世纪美国文学导论

李公昭 二十世纪美国文学导读

张立新

Part I

The Literature of Colonial America I.II.Teaching Time: 2 teaching hours.Teaching Aim: through introduction, the students should get an idea about the history and development of American nation and how did the American literature came into being and what is the characteristic of its early literature.III.Teaching method: Teacher‟s Presentation.IV.Teaching Tool: multi-medium.V.Key points: the characteristics of early literature.Introduction I.The native Americans and their culture:

Before being explored by European adventurers the American Continent had long been inhabitated by the natives---American Indians.Physical characteristics of the American Indians are mongolocial or a mixture of that with something else.They probably first began coming from Asia to America during the Ice „Age,8000-5999 BC.They crossed Berring Strait by raft.Through hundred and thousands of years these earliest inhabitants developed their own civilizations.They learned agriculture, basketry and pottery.The most striking achievements were in agriculture.Maize---“Indian Corn” was developed from a wild grass.The white potato, the cacao bean, tobacco were all developed by Indians.Indians remained in tribe society.II.The historical background of the Colonial Time: 1.the first England settlement: Christophe Columbus(1451 he believed the world is round, find the route to East by sailing West, he asked the help from Queen of Spain to support him.On Aug.3.1492, three small vessels set sail with 100 crews, after several months of sailing they arrived at Balama Island---San Salvador on Oct.12.1492.He landed and in March 1493 returned.He had 4 voyages in his lifetime.2.English settlement: 1607 Captain Christopher Newport, three ships---Chesapeake Bay Jamestown

Mayflower

1620 Plymouth Puritans

New England area 3.Conflicts with Indians and the founding of 13 colonies.III.The development of Literature:

American literature emerged out of obscurity into history only some four centuries ago.It is the newest of the literatures of great nations, yet it is original in many aspects.It is original because it mirrors the history of America, and epitomizes the development of political and economics, social and psychological institutions.It is original because upon it has played most of those great historical forces and factors that have molded the modern world: immigration, nationalism, individualism, imperialism, religion, science, technology and democracy.In addition to its realistic and vivid reflection of the madding of the distinctly shaped character of American people, it is original in variety and cultural colors;such features of American literature may find expression in its products in the colonial period.John Smith

a British soldier of fortune “A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as hath happened in Virginia”

“New England Trials”

“The General History of Virginia”

Within a few decades a considerable number of learned people, such as Puritan clergymen and governors, produced a considerable body of writing of high literary quality, yet they were not literary people in the professional sense.Their writing included diaries, travel books, collections of letters, journals, histories, poetry, biographies, autobiographies and prose, to which the Puritans contributed much.In addition to being true believers of their religious doctrines, the early puritans generally have college education with a sound knowledge of the literary classics, and learned much about the basic qualities of literature from the ancient and contemporary authors in the old continent.Such responsible for the two essential characteristics of the early American literature: their religious subject and imitation of English literary traditions.(1)William Bradford(1590-1657)Of Plymouth Plantation

(2)John Winthrop

(governor of Massachusetts Bay)Journal

1790 The History of New England(3)Edward Taylor

The New England Quarterly(4)Cotton Mather Magnolia Christi Americana Characteristics:

In spite of the unique features that the colonial men of letters, reflected in their writings, some common characteristic run through almost all the principal works of the major literary figures of the colonial period, which mirrored the nature of colonial American literature and continued to be the subsequent development of American literature and of America itself.Puritanism was central to colonial American literature and its impact could find expression in almost all respects concerning literature.The conviction that all religious progress centered in the individual led colonial writers to make records of his spiritual development in the forms of diary and autobiography: a strenuous self-analysis and ceaseless searching of conscience in the writings of the Puritans was the result of their belief that “election” would show itself in the behavior and in the experiences of the inner life of the individual.In keeping with the belief that American literature should concern itself with spiritual and in the experiences of the inner life of the individual.In keeping with the belief that literature should concern with spiritual values, the sermon became the most highly developed and the most popular of Puritan and compact expression, and its avoidance of rhetorical decoration excellently illustrated Puritan aesthetic and moral theories.In accordance with their way of life, the Puritans preferred a style characterized by homeliness of imagery, simplicity of diction and an emphasis on the values most easily recognized by their readers.It is for the same reason that they disliked the sensuous appeal of certain types of imagery and favored the figures and images drawn from the common experiences of the New England settlers.Questions for discussion: 1.What were the features of colonial America? 2.What were the literary characteristics? 3.What was the Puritanism? Reference Books: 1.《美国文学教程》 第一章2． 《美国文学的周期》

E.Spiller 3.《新编美国文学史》 第二章

刘海平

常曜信

Part II

The Literature of Reason and Revolution I，Teaching time: 2 teaching hours II.Teaching Aim: the students should know the reason and effect of American Revolution, and the characteristics of the literature.Through learning the selected works, the students get to know the writing style of them.III.Teaching Method: a.presentation, b.analysis of the contexts of the works, c.questions and discussion.IV.Key points: writing style of the prose works.Introduction: I.The Historical Background: a)two revolutions {American Revolution

Enlightenment(1)European‟s conflicts in the New Continent;(2)The cause of the Revolution;(3)The procedure of the Revolution;(4)The significance of the Revolution.II.The Development of Literature:(1)prose of Thomas Paine, Franklin and Thomas Jefferson;(2)Poetry of Byrant Questions for Discussion:(1)What do you know about American Revolution?(2)What do you know about Washinton?(3)What is the main trend of literature? III.Authors and their writings in this period:(1)Benjamin Franklin a.his life and works: Benjamin Franklin was a brilliant, industrious and versatile man.Starting as a poor boy in a family of 17 children, he became famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a statesman, scientist and author.Despite his fame, he always remained a man of industry and simple tastes.Franklin‟s writings range from informal sermons on thrift to urbane essays.He wrote gracefully as well as clearly with a wit which often gave an edge to his words.Though the style he formed came from imitating two noted English essayists, Addison and Steele, he made it into his own.His most famous work is his Autobiography.Before his autobiography, his “Poor Richard‟s Almanac(1733-1758)became popular readings which contain many proverbs like: Early to bed, and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.Franklin‟s Autobiography is many things.First of all it is an inspiring account of a poor boy‟s rise to a high position.Franklin tells his story modestly, omitting some of his misdeeds, his errors as being much less than perfect.He is resigned to the fact that his misdeeds will often receive a punishment of one sort or another.Viewing himself with objectivity, Franklin offers his life story as a lesson to others.It is a positive lesson that teaches the reader to live a useful life.In fact the Autobiography is a how-to-do it book, a book on the art of self-improvement.In 1771, while living in England and serving as ambassador for most of the colonies, Franklin began his autobiography as a letter to his son, Willliam.He got as far as the year 1730(including his arrival in Philadelphia)being interrupted by “the affairs of the Revolution”.In 1784, while living at Passy, France, then a suburb of Paris, he extended his Autobiography through 1731.The bulk of the remainder of the work was added in 1788 and the final few pages were written in1790, the year of his death.None of this was published while Franklin lived.Shortly after his death, a French translation of his life to 1731(the first two section that Franklin wrote)was published.Though this was soon translated into English and published in London, the “official text did not appear until 1818, as part of the works of Benjamin Franklin,” edited by his grandson William Temple Franklin.The first “complete” Autobiography---with the pages written in 1790---did not appear until 1868, edited by John Bigelow, who had bought Franklin‟s original manuscript from a Franklin family the previous year.The Autobiography covers Franklin‟s life only until 1757 when he was 51 years old, well before his major accomplishments as a diplomat.The work as a whole was written by a man well beyond the normal age of retirement, yet it is not the less lively for that fact.Franklin‟s mastery of a prose style characterized by clarity, concision, flexibility and order was central to his fame as a great man of letters.Such major features of his style was summarized by himself in a short paragraph:

The words used should be the most expressive that the language affords, provided that they are the most generally understood.Nothing should be expressed in two words that can as well be expressed in one;that is, no synonyms should be used, or rarely, but the whole should be as short as possible, consistent with clearness: the words should be placed as to agreeable to the ear in reading;summarily, it should be smooth, clear, and short for the contrary qualities are displeasing.(2)Analysis of the Selected part: A.3 paragraphs: a.what interest did Franklin have as a child;a.Being an apprentice to his brother, Franklin began writing;b.Improving argumentation.Summary: Franklin was thirty to knowledge and trying to learn the language with practical methods.B

a.the way of learning languages;b.Practice makes perfect;c.Relations to his relatives;d.Learning club.Summary: Franklin was a practical man.In learning languages we know he had a strong endurance and leaver mind.Part III The Literature of Romanticism I.II.Teaching Time : 8 periods.Teaching Aim: the students should know the characteristic of the origin and development of romanticism in American literature.Transcendentalism as a typical American literature trend developed in American land should be mastered.The students should know how to analyze Bryant‟s two poems.III.Key Points: characteristic of American romanticism and their writers.Part One: Historical Introduction:

We are now dealing with one f the most important periods in the history of American literature, the Romantic period, which stretches from the end of the eighteenth century through the outbreak of the Civil War.Here we see a rising America fast burgeoning into a political, economic and cultural independence it had never known before.Democracy and political equality became the ideals of the new nation.Radical changes came about in the political life of the country.Parties began to squabble and scramble for power, and a new system was in the making.The spread of industrialism, the sudden influx of immigration, and the “pioneers” pushing the frontier further west---all these produced something of an economic boom and, with it, a tremendous sense of optimism and hope among the people.A nation bursting into new life for literary expression.The buoyant mood of the nation and the sprit of the times seem in some measure responsible for the spectacular outburst of romantic feeling in the first half of the nineteenth century.The literary milieu proved fertile and conducive to the imagination as well.Among other things, magazines appeared in ever-increasing numbers, of which The North American Review, The New York Mirror, The American Quarterly Review, The New England Magazine, The Southern Review, The Southern Literary Messenger, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper‟s Magazine and Knickerbockers Magazine played an important role in facilitating literary expansion in the country.Foreign influences added incentive to the growth of romanticism in America.The Romantic Movement, which had flourished earlier in the century both in England and Europe, proved to be a decisive influence without which the upsurge of American romanticism would hardly have been possible.Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Cole ridge, William Wordsworth, Byron, Robert Burns and many other English and European masters of poetry and prose all made a stimulating impact on the different departments of the country‟s literature.The influence of Sir Walter Scott was particularly powerful and enduring.His border tales and Waverley romances inspired many American authors such as James Fennimore Cooper with irresistible creative impulses.Scott‟s Waverley novels were models for American historical romance, and his The Lady of the Lake, together with Byron‟s Oriental romances, helped toward the development of American Indian romance.He was, in a way, responsible for the romantic description of landscape in American literature.The Gothic tradition, and the cult of solitude and of gloom came through interest in the works of writers like Mrs.Radcliff, E.T.A.Hoffman, James Thomson and the “graveyard‟ poets.Robert Burns and Byron both inspired and spurred the American imagination for lyrics of love and passion and despair.The impact of Lyrical Ballads of Wordswoth and Coleridge added, to some extent, to the nation‟s singing strength.Thus American romanticism was in a way derivative: American romantic writing was some of them modeled on English and European works.On the other hand, American romanticism had distinct features of its own.Different from their European counterparts, American romantics tended to moralize, to edify rather than to entertain.They presented an entirely new experience alien to European culture.The exotic landscape, the frontier life, the westward expansion, the myth of a New Garden of Eden in America, and the Puritan heritage were just a few examples of the native material for an indigenous literature.Evidently, it produced a feeling of “newness” which inspired the romantic imagination.Part II.Writers of the period 1.Washington Irving(1783-1859)I.Introduction of his life and works: Washington Irving was the first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame.He became, in the words of the English novelist Thakeray, “ the first Ambassador whom the new World of letters sent to the old.” Irving was born the youngest of seven children of a precious reader and the author of juvenile poems, plays and essays when he was 16;he began the study of the law for which he had little relish.He preferred instead to pass his time in desultory reading and in the society of literary wits of New York.At 19, he began to contribute a serious of sketches or “letters” on society and the theater to the Morning Chronicle, a New York newspaper.When he was 21, Irving went on a grand tour of Europe.Two years later he returned to New York to be admitted to the bar and to begin the leisurely life of a gentleman lawyer;shortly afterward, Irving started work on what was to be his first literary triumph, his “History of New York(1809)by “Derrick Knickerbockers.” It was an irreverent to spoof of historical scholarship, salted with off-color comments.The book satirized the complacent Dutch burghers of early New York and pointed at the political follies of 19th century America.It also marked the beginning of the “Knickerbockers school” of New York literary satirists including Paulding, Fitzgreen Hallack and Joseph Rodman Drake who took their names and humorous tone from Irving‟s knickbocker History and flourished in New York in the first decades of the 19th century.At the end of the war of 1812, Irving was sent to England to supervise the Liverpool Branch of the family firm, but in 1818, as a result of the war and bad management, the firm went bankrupt.Irving was left only with a dislike for the “dirty soul-killing” world of business and a need to find a livelihood.His “History of New York” has earned the magnificent sum of $3000, so he turned to writing and began preparation of “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent(1820).It was the first work by an American to receive wide international acclaim and it made Irving a celebrity, praised alike in America and England.In it was the two tales that brought him his most enduring fame.“Rip Van Winckles” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

With his new literary success, Irving gave up all thought of returning to America and the world of trade or law.He set out to become a professional man of letters.The Sketch Book was soon followed by Bracebridge Hill(1822), a series of sketches on England country life.In 1824, he published “Tales of a Traveller”, his first volume of fiction, filled with years of the supernatural and clanking with the ghostly machinery of romantic Gothicism.In 1826 his literary fame earned him appointment as an American diplomatic attaché in Spain and there he gathered material for a biography of Christopher Columbers(1826).He wrote severy such kind of biographies.Irving then returned to England, where he accepted appointment as an American diplomat in London and three years later when he was nearing 50, he returned to the United States after an absence of 17 years.He bought “Sunnyside” his famous home on the Hudson River at Tarrytown and there, except for four years as United States minister to Spain he lived as a country spire, writing a series of histories and biographies.A study of Irving‟s works would lead to the conclusion that humor was at the root of almost everything that was significant in them.What was more impressive was that his humor was always well meaning, mild and easy to be accepted.Early in the 19th century when most of the American writers were speaking in the authoritative voice of a gentleman who seems to be superior in maturity, knowledge, sense, and good taste, and when the majority of American periodicals depended heavily on a broad, explosive humor and sarcasm that gradually vulgarized the periodical essay tradition, Irving‟s humor did much to cultivate a new literary taste.The style of Irving‟s work is characterized by simplicity, poise and ease flow.Unlike the tightly structured stories of Poe and Hawthorne, the tastes of Irving lie in his literary innovations and transitional role in the development of American literature.III.Analysis of the tale: 1.Plot structure of action: e.Exposition: time, place, persons preliminary condition of affairs;f.Development Conflicts Crane to Brom Bones;Crane to the girl;Crane to farmers;Crane to ghost;g.Summary----pumpkin, Bones marries the girl, some still believe in ghosts, h.Setting-----i.Style

Questions for discussion: 1.What is the plot of the story? 2.How did the conflict develop in the story? 3.What is the function of the setting? 4.What is the style of the story? Homework: Read the story Rip Van Winkle.2.James Fennimore Cooper(1789-1851)(a)Introduction: Cooper never saw the frontier.The advanced line of settlement that moved westward from the Atlantic had passed beyond Cooperstown, New York before his birth and throughout his life;he never traveled farther west than Michigan.Yet his writing helped create a mythical west that transcended the reality of life on the frontier, and in his greatest character---Natty Bumppo, or “Leatherstocking”---Cooper created an archetypal western hero whose many literary descendants range from the cowboys of popular fiction and the movies to the hero of Melville, Twain and Faulkner.James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey.When he was thirteen months old, he was taken with his family to a small wildness settlement on Lake Otsego, 150 miles north of New York City.The village was named Cooperstown after his father, William Cooper, a rich member of the landed gentry who had acquired vast tracts of land in New York State following the American Revolution.James Cooper was raised in the rural family “Manor House”, and he roamed the edge of a wildness that stretched a thousand miles to the Mississippi.Although he saw the white hunters and the numerous wagon trains of settlers that passed through Cooperstown on their way west, he saw little of the once numerous reedmen of the eastern forests.Later in life he acknowledged, “ I was never among the Indians.All that I know of them is from reading and from hearing my father speak of them.”

When Cooper was fourteen, he entered Yale, but in his junior years after a series of undergraduate brawls and pranks he was expelled and was sent to sea as a common sailor on an Atlantic merchant ship.In 1808, he became a mild shipman in the U.S navy and served on Lawrence.In 1811, after the death of his father left him an inheritance of $50,000, Cooper resigned from the navy.He then married and began the free-spending life of a wealth gentleman.By 1819, his inheritance was gone and he was heavily in debt.To regain his fortunes, he speculated in land, invested in a frontier store and a whaling ship, and in 1820 he began writing the fiction that eventually brought him wealth and worldly fame.According to tradition, he once tossed aside a popular-sentimental novel with the comment that he could do better himself.When his family challenged him to fulfill his boast he wrote a tale that he quickly recognized as a botch and destroyed.His second attempt was Precaution(1820).It was a full-length novel of English life, written in imitation of Jane Austin and filled with the conventional sentimentality of the day‟s best sellers.Precaution was dull, and a financial failure, but it brought Cooper recognition and helped prepare the way for his next work.The Spy(1821), a novel of the American Revolution.The Spy appealed to patriotic American hungry for exciting fiction that dealt with American scenes and events.It soon went through three editions;it was translated into several European languages and turned into a stage play.And it started Cooper on his career as the first eminent American novelist.Two years later Cooper published The Pioneers(1823), a romance of the American frontier that was an immediate best seller.It was the first of the “Leatherstocking Tales,” five novels of the life of Natty Bumppo.They included “The Last of Mohicans”(1826), The Prairie(1927), The Pathfinder(1840), and the Deerslayer(1841).Following his success with The Pioneer, Cooper drew upon his own experiences and wrote The Pilot(1841)the first of eleven novels of the sea that he wrote over a period of three decades.In 1926, with his financial burdens eased by the profits from his writing Cooper left America to live abroad, partly to escape his remaining debts and partly to experience what he saw as the rich context of European society, while living in Paris and London and touring the Continent, he completed seven more novels and he received the adulation of a vast audience that read the numerous European translations of his works.In 1833, now financially independent, he returned to the United States and eventually settled in Coopstown.There he continued his prolific writing of novels(he eventually wrote 32), histories and essays on society.Patriotic, early critics honored Cooper for creating a literature out of nature materials and they railed him as the American Scott---an accurate but patronizing comparison that Cooper came to detest.But his greatest achievement was his portrayed of the age-old theme of Christian innocence struggling in a paradise lost, the majestic them of the irresistible force of civilization that destroyed the American wilderness and all its noble simplicities.It was a theme that Cooper embodies in his archetypal hero, Natty Bumppo, a character whose flights from society and domesti9city mark him as the first of the symbolic rebels in American writing and one of the most memorable characters in all of fiction.(b)Analysis of the selected part:

Questions for understanding: 1.How does Uncas demonstrate his courage? 2.Do you think that the Hurons were afraid of Uncas and Chingachgook? 3.How was Hawkey‟s weapon different from those used by the others? 4.How many Hurons were there? 5.Describe how Cora was saved from being scalped? 6.How does Magua escape from Chingachgook? 7.What observation does Hawkey make on the difference in defeat in battle between a huron and a Mohican? 8.What advice does Hawkey give to David? 9.Do you think it was unmanly for Heyward to cry? 10.Do you think the fight believable?

4.William Cullen Bryant(„1704-1878)I.Introduction of his life and works:

Long famous as the first American lyric poet of distinction, William Cullen Bryant glorified the morning of the American national literature with several volumes of his brilliant poetry, some of which have proved to be timeless to enrich the treasure house of American poetry.Besides his achievement in poetry, Bryant, as one of the great personalities of his age, was central to the American romantic movement, his force, courage and liberalism as critic and editor provided effective leadership in American cultural and political life for half a century, from the age of Jackson throughout the Civil /war and reconstruction period.The son of an enthusiastic naturalist, Bryant was born in Cummington, Massachusetts, whose beautiful natural landscape exerted such an potential influence upon the future poet that he recalled later his experience when reading The Lyrical Ballads at the age of sixteen: “ a thousand springs seemed to gush up at once into my heart and the force of nature, of sudden, to change into a strange freshness.” In addition to the inspiration of nature, Bryant received the best possible education from his childhood, both at a local school at his hometown and at William College, as well as through his reading in his father‟s ample library.His uncle was also responsible in preparing the way for the growth of the future poet by tutoring him in classical language and literature.Bryant was only 9 when he began to write poems.At the age of 14 he published his satire The Enbargo(1808), a poem in reaction against Jefferson‟s trade restriction.In 1811 he had finished the first draft of his best poem “Thanatopsis”, whose publication in 1817 brought him not only his first success but also general attention to his extraordinary genius.His first collection poems appeared in Boston in 1821, which consisted eight of his poems, such as his most famous poems “To a Waterfowl”, “Thantopsis” and “The Yellow violet” and thereafter established his position in the history of American literature.In 1825 he went to New York, the literary capital of the period and served as assistant editor of the Evening Post, a position providing more opportunities for him to display his dynamic force in American cultural and political life.The year 1829 saw that Bryant became editor in chief of the paper, one of the first great national newspaper in America, and from this time onward he grew to be a dominant leader in American literature and public causes.He established close relationship with Cooper, Irving and other major literary figures, with whom he gave an American formulation to the romantic movement and moreover his frequent lectures on poetry brought him popularity as influential critic.From 1832 to 1864 he published six volumes, including The Fountain(1842), The White-Footed Deer(1944)and The Food of Years(1878), with which he remained a popular favorite.His ever increasing achievements and reputation inn literature also made him become a public speaker, who as a liberal democrat, wrote and published continuously in his newspaper articles to strive for various freedoms, such as freedom of religion, of speech, of free trade, of the masses from the intolerable exploitation of debtor as well as banking and currency regulation and the freedom of the slaves.His devotion to public affairs drained him time and energy, but he never stopped his literary creation.His library of Poetry and song(1871-1872), the first great critical anthology, was his last literary effort.Another treasure that Bryant left was his poetic translation of Homer‟s Iliad(1870)and Odyssey(1871).Nature was the chief theme of Bryant‟s poetry and besides religion and concern for humanitarian reforms and national morality were persistent themes.As a poet, Bryant wrote of his own experience in nature and society, opposed to the conventional insipid generalization about nature, and the best of his poems provided an excellent example of truthful experience, precise expression, and disciplined imagination.Varieties of influences on Bryant‟s early activity as a poet included the neoclassical forms of Addison and Poe, the attitude of the “graveyard poets” like Young and Thomson, and the romantic conceptions of Scott, Burns and Wordsworth.His early poetry reflected some features of imitation, but soon learned to absorb them into his independent style.In addition to the alien influence, nature played a crucial role in the awakening of Bryant as a poet and in his poetic creation.To Bryant, nature was the symbol of the Maker, the mighty cause, and the infinite source;and the purpose of nature as the artifact of the Maker was to keep man‟s mind directed to the Supreme Craftsmen.Bryant held that nature should impact moral instruction and that it should elevate man.II.Analysis to the poem:

Thanatopsis Questions for discussion: 1.Look up the word thantopsis in a dictionary and explain its origin and meaning.2.Bryant divides his poem into three parts.Discuss why you think he made these particular divisions.3.What advice does the speaker give to those who shudder tat the thought of death? 4.What does the speaker mean when he says that the person who dies does not retire alone? 5.Interpret the following passage: “each one as before will chase/His favorite phantom…”

6.Explain how the person addressed as thou” gains in stature and importance as the poem progress.7.What is the message of the poet? Comment on the poem This poem is written in blank verse, namely, in unrhymed iambic pentameter, for the advantage to express with more freedom.At the idea of death, the beauty of nature will make a person less pessimistic.At the age of 16, when other kids were indulging in juvenile frivolity, Bryant already began to meditate over the significance of life and death.As a poet of the early 19th century, Bryant develops a view of man‟s final destiny.To the Puritans, death was seen as a preliminary to an afterlife.Bryant, however, treats death as part of nature, as the destiny of us all, and as the great equalizer in this world.In Bryant‟s view, to those “who in the love of nature,” nature offers all the kindness by presenting a smile and eloquence of beauty when one is in “gayer hours”;it shows sympathy and steals away their sharpness when one is in his darker musings.The death of a man means nothing but the returning to the origin, or a returning to nature.With this prospect, the reader may first be shocked, and soon after, he may shudder and grow sick at heart.However, if at that moment one just goes out to listen, a voice confirms that “Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim thy growth, to be resolved to earth again.” Then he would become brother to rocks, clod, birds and to oak trees, he would lie side by side with patriarchs, with the wise, the good and the beauteous.Running around, is the all-beholding sun.In this kingdom, he is not the first, nor ought to be the last.Before the eternity of nature, a human being is rather frail and weak.Once he joins in the “one mighty sepulcher,” he becomes a part of the hill, the vale, the woods, the river and he is tremendously stronger.Without a single exception, human beings will all share his destiny.To a Waterfowl Stanza 1: With the arrival of evening and in the setting sun and falling dew, where will the waterfowl, through the rosy clouds, fly? Stanza 2: In the rosy light of the setting sun, the hunter might see the bird, but it is too distant to be harmed.Thus it is able for the bird to fly easily and delightedly.Stanza 3: The poet is enquiring the destination of the fowl: Is it by the lake, along the river or at the ocean side? Stanza4: The poet believes that a supernatural power is guiding and protecting the bird.Stanza 5: The evening is falling and the bird, though rather exhausted, kept on flying.Stanza6: Soon the weary flight will end and a shelter will be found.Stanza 7: Though the bird has flown out of sight, the lesson it taught will stay in my heart forever.Stanza 8: As God leads the bird;my life should be guided by the same power, too.Comment on the poem

In the first three stanzas, there is no hint of any morals.However, in the fourth stanza, all of a sudden, a new figure as a god appears.The god has a supernatural power which directs the bird‟s flight.Bryant interrupted himself from describing a bird into teaching a lesson.Bryant may think it is not enough for a poem written just for the sake of its own, or just for the beauty of it, it should say something more than beauty, it should carry morals.It rhymes “abab”, while the lengthy of each line is so different that you cannot find a regular foot.However, the two long lines in the middle of each stanza may refer to the balance in the floating of the bird.The first and the fourth lines, which are relatively shorter, look like two wings.The stanzaic form reminds one of a flying bird.Questions for further understanding: 1.List some specific details that tell at what time of day the action of the poem is taking place.2.How would you argue for or against the idea that the time of day suggests or symbolizes death? 3.Name two or three things that the speaker and the bird have in common.4.As specified in the poem, what is the end of the bird‟s journey? 5.What might be the end of the speaker‟s journey? 6.What is the “lesson “ that the speaker learns? 7.Discuss the idea that it is a poem about blind faith.8.Scanning Poetry.5.Edgar Allan Poe(1809-1849)I.Introduction:

Poe was born in Boston, the child of traveling actors.Before he was 3, his father deserted the family, his mother died and he was taken into the home of John Allan, a prosperous merchant of Richmond, Virginia.Allan treated his foster child with leniency and harsh severity.He had Poe baptized with the middle name of Allan but failed to adopt him legally.In 2815 Allan moved to Europe on business, setting his family in England, where Poe was entered in school.Five years later, the Allans returned to Virginia, where Poe‟s school master judged him: not especially studious” but an “excellent classicist” and “the best reader of Latin verse.”

When he was 17, Poe entered the University of Virginia.He distinguished himself in Latin and French and soon gained a reputation as a self-proclaimed “aristocrat”, a poet, a wit, a gambler, and a heavy drinker.The next year, after bitter quarrels with Allan, who refused to pay Poe‟s gambling debts---he had lost $2000 at cards---Poe left the university and ran off to Boston, where he enlisted in the U.S.Army.While stationed in Boston, he arranged the publication of a slim volume of verse, “Tamerlane and other poems”(1827), his first book of poetry.In April.1829, he gained his release from the army and eight month later, his second volume of poems “Al Aaraaf, Tamerlan and Minor Poems” was published in Baltimore.Following the death of his foster-mother, Poe was briefly reconciled with Allan, who helped him secure appointment to West Point.Poe entered the academy as a cadet, when he was 21, but he remained only eight months.Galled by academy regulations and angered by a lack of support from his foster father, he deliberately violated a series of minor regulation, cut his classes, disobeyed orders to attend church, and early in 1831 he was dismissed.Just after he left West Point, his third volume of poetry was published, dedicated to “the U.S Corps of Cadets.” He then moved to Baltimore and devoted himself to earning his way as a writer.In 1832, five of Poe‟s stories were published in the Saturday Courier, a Philadelphia literary weekly.In 1833 he won first prize of $100 in a short story contest run by a Baltimore newspaper.He then returned to Richmond, where he was appointed editor---in which he published a series of stories, poems and acid literary reviews.When he was 27, he married his 13 years old cousin, Virginia Clemn.The remaining years of his life were filled with intense creativity by fits of acute mental depression and drinking bouts.In 1838 he published “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”, his one full length novel.The next year he became co-editor of Burton‟s Gentleman‟s Magazine, a Philadelphia literary monthly to which he contributed “The Fall of the House of usher”(1839)and his sonnet “Silence”(1840).Later in 1839 his “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” appeared, his first collection of short stories.Then he became an editor of another Philadelphia monthly, Graham‟s Magazine, which printed “The Murder in the Rue Morgue” the ancestor of American detective stories.While living in New York, “The Raven”, his most famous work and an immediate success got published.When his wife died, he felt a great assault, he continued to write, say, “I have a great deal to do;and I have made up my mind not to die till it is done.” On October 3, 1849 he was found unconscious on the streets and four days later, he died.Poe‟s life had been a series of disasters: psychologically crippling childhood deprivations, bitter literary quarrels, overwhelming poverty, failed publishing ventures, even in 1848, an unsuccessful attempt at suicide.American‟s long judged his writing according to the legends.Poe‟s work was sometimes careless and derivative.He was rarely able to break from the need to do profitable hard work.The gothic terror he achieved was often commonplace, little above the popular, overheated romantic fiction of the times.Poe found his inspiration in a romanticism divorced from the actualities of American life, a world of disorder, perversity and romantic emotion.He helped established one of the world‟s most popular literary genres, the detective story.His writing influenced a variety of writers.He was among the first modern literary theorists of America, and his arguments against the didactic motive for literature and for the creation of beauty and intensity of emotion, though they ran counter to the prevailing literary ideals of his time, have had profound effect on the writers and critics who followed him.II.Analysis on his poems and story: To Helen Understanding Questions: 1.Although a real person inspired this poem, whose name was Jane;Poe addressed it to “Helen”.Why might he have done this? 2.In the final stanza, “Helen” is addressed as “Psyche” the Greek word for “breath: or “soul”.How do you reconcile this with the earlier references to Helen of Troy, whose legendary beauty led to the Trojan War? 3.Note that all three stanzas end with a reference to a place.How are these related to each other? To the meaning of the poem as a whole? Stanza 1: The poet first mentioned Helen, the most famous beauty in Greek mythology.Then Poe compared himself to Odysseus, who wandered for ten years over the sea to get home.As Odysseus, Edgar Allan Poe was persistent in his chasing after fine arts with the sincere belief that art or beauty and truth, is the ultimate aim, the home, for the wandering poet;while Helen, the embodiment of ancient beauty, is the guider to that dreamland.Stanza 2;all the art and literature originated from one thing---beauty.Having taken Helen as the embodiment of beauty, the poet was confident that once he saw Helen, he was sure to be led by Helen to the home of beauty---fine art and pure literature.Poe insisted that Greece and Rome are the homes of beauty, the treasure houses of fine art and literature.Stanza 3: The speaker sees Helen standing in the bright niche and holding in her hand an agate lamp.She is quite similar to goddess Psyche from Greek Myth.Through his description of his passion to Helen, Poe expressed his pursuit and sincere devotion to beauty.In this poem, three beauties in ancient Greek mythology---Helen, Naiad and Psyche---are mentioned just to show that beauty is something that existed;it is very holy but it is hard to reach.Comment on the poem This poem is believed to have been written when the poet was only fourteen, inspired, as Poe admitted by the beauty of Mrs.Jane Sitlth Stanard, the young mother of a school fellow who was “the first purely ideal love of my soul.” In this poem, the personal element of the young poet was almost completely sublimated in the idealization of the tradition of supernal beauty in art.The lady died in 1824, but she appeared in this poetic work in the figure of Helen, the well-known ancient beauty, with all the adoration of poet to her.In the first stanza, Helen‟s beauty is compared to the Nicean barks---a suggestion of classical associations;what‟s more, “of yore,” instead of “before” or “long ago”, is applied to add the classical atmosphere to the poem.As the ancient ships had transported the ancient hero---Ulysses—home from Troy, so will the beauty of Helen lead the poet to the home of art? The second stanza starts with “On desperate seas.” Actually, the transferred epithet is used just to show the poet‟s cordiality to the goddess of art.In classic myth, the flower Hyacinth preserved the memory of Apollo‟s love for the dead young Hyacinthus.(Hyacinthus is a very handsome young man of Greek myth and the object of Apollo‟s affections.Unfortunately, he was badly hurt by a discus when Apollo was gaming and dead soon.Very disappointed by that, Apollo changed him into the plant of hyacinth which had been taken as a symbol for affection.)All of these, the hyacinth hair, the face of classic beauty and the expression of Naiad, are charming enough to lead me to the home of art---ancient Greece and ancient Rome.In the third stanza, Helen is directly compared to goddess Psyche from the Holy Land.Through his description of his passion to Helen, Poe expressed his pursuit and sincere devotion to beauty.In the poem, three beauties in ancient Greek mythology are mentioned just to show that beauty is something that existed;it is very holy but it is hard to reach.The Raven Stanza 1: One night, while the poet was tired with reading and pondering, he heard the gentle knocks at his chamber door.Stanza 2: In a cold night when the poet was alone, he was awakened by the tapping and realized that he had failed, by reading a book, to ease his sorrow for the lost Lenore.Stanza 3: The poet felt frightened so he had to calm himself down by persuading that the tapping means a late visitor, and it could not be anything worse than that.Stanza 4: The poet was suddenly excited as to apologize for not hearing the gentle rapping, but when the door is widely opened, he found nothing but darkness outside.Stanza 5.The door was opened but it was all darkness and tranquility outside.The only sound echoing to the poet‟s ear was his murmuring of “Lenore.” He began to wonder who might have done the tapping.But the more he wondered, the more frightened he became.Stanza 6: The poet returned to his chamber but the tapping appeared again and louder.He made up his mind to calm down and find out the truth.Stanza 7: The poet opened the window and finally found that the tapping comes from a Raven perching on a bust of Pallas.Stanza 8: The poet was beguiled into smiling by the black bird and he asked its name and was replied with: “Nevermore,” which becomes the repetitive refrain of several stanzas.Stanza 9: The poet was astonished by the fact of a bird‟s talking, because neither had anybody ever experienced this nor was any bird named “Nevermore” before, despite the widely held belief that crows and ravens can mimic human speech if their tongues are “split” with a sharp tool.Stanza 10: The bird‟s repetition of “Nevermore” accidentally corresponds with the poet‟s self-talk;as if the bird is ensuring him “I will never leave.”

Stanza 11: After his astonishment, the poet realized that the bird was repeating the only word it accidentally picked up from its depressed master and it, as a matter of fact, shared nothing about the poet‟s murmuring about Hope.Stanza 12: The poet came nearer to the bird and began to fancy why the bird repeated that word.Stanza 13: Thinking about that word reminds the poet of his lost Lenore.Stanza 14: The poet felt too much troubled by the memory of Lenore so he wanted some magic drug to release him from thinking about her.Stanza 15: In stanza 14, the poet was inclined to release himself from the memory of Lenore.In the present stanza, he wants to find some magic drug to cure him.Stanza 16: The poet expressed his desire for meeting Lenore, but was boldly denied by a “Nevermore,” and this brings the poem to the climax.Stanza 17: The poet was so irritated by the bird‟s reply in the former stanza that he wanted to drive the bird away from him.However, the bird again responded with a “Nevermore”.Stanza 18: The Raven was rather innocent to the poet‟s reverie about “Lenore”.However, the poet was obsessively in a mood of frustration.Comment on the poem

The Raven was published in the New York Evening Mirror in 1845.Being regarded as the first poem with hazy conception in the West, it is the poem of which Poe himself felt quite proud and had been frequently taken by Poe as an example to illustrate his poetic art.Consisting of 18 stanzas, each with 6 lines, with the first five lines being trochaic octameter and the last line as trochaic tetrameter, this poem corresponds in every aspect with Poe‟s aesthetic standard for poetry: It took the lament over the death of a beautiful woman as its them;with the 108 lines, it is readable at one sitting;it is pervaded with a sense of melancholy.Although this poem was written in traditional feet and regular meters, Poe diverged from tradition with dramatic variation of the tone;mournful at the beginning(vainly I had sought to borrow from my book surcease of sorrow---sorrow for the lost Lenore.);then trepid at some spots;sometimes it showed a touch of humor, sometimes a mood of melancholy.But finally, a very pessimistic illusion.Once upon a dreary midnight, while the poet was pondering weak and weary, with the napping and tapping at the chamber door, the poet was led to a fantasy world of a dialogue between him and a raven.The whole scene might be a real one or just a dream, but the mysterious Raven must be a symbolic character.It may be symbolic in various ways: a.The Raven symbolizes disaster and misfortune.Raven, the large bird like crow with black feathers, in Western countries, as well as it is in China, is conventionally regarded as an ominous fowl, a symbol of misfortune.Thus with the repetition of the “napping and tapping” the poet was filled “with fantastic terrors never felt before.”

b.The raven symbolizes the soul of the radiant maiden, the “lost Lonore”.At the moment when the poet was in the darkness peering, wondering, expecting and whispering Lenore but was just responded with a “nothing more,” the Raven, “with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door.” A conversation was held and the poet was so comforted with it.For twice, the poet felt the bird “beguiling my sad fancy into smiling.”

c.The bird may be taken as a symbol of the sub-consciousness of the poet.In the conversation the poet distinctly expressed his strong passion to Lenore.However, the only response from the Raven was “Nevermore.” It seems what the poet had expressed is simply the view out of the “id”, while the Raven‟s words are rather restrictive and seem out of “ego”.The poet was too affectionate to Lenore to be restrictive, while the Raven was what warned him to be rational and that what had been lost would return “nevermore.”

d.The Raven is the symbol of modern reality.The poet was of the firm belief that in modern society human beings are apathetic creatures.He was deeply resentful at the people‟s indifference towards his mourning to Lenore;therefore, he turned to the Raven for comfort.But quite to his disappointment, he was merely responded with a cold “nevermore.”

As the most melodic poem in American literary history, Poe spent about four years for the creation of this piece of exquisite verse-narrative.In this poem, beside the regular meters and feet, the poet also employed many intricate musical expressions such as alliteration, internal rhyme, slant rhyme, end rhyme, perfect rhyme, imperfect rhyme, refrain and so on, so as to add variation, beauty and melody.Annabel Lee Stanza 1: The pretty young girl Annabel Lee used to live in a kingdom by the seaside.Before her death, the only thing in her hear was to love or to be loved by me.Stanza 2: Our love was so strong and beautiful that angels in heaven, who are with wings and living in heaven and likely to be freer and abler than any human beings, envied us.Seldom did any angels envy anything of the human world.If they did, there must be something spectacular in the object of their admiration.Stanza 3: My Annabel Lee was taken away from me.The faithful lovers were mercilessly separated by a superpower.Poe was indicating that Annabel lee might be an angel from heaven, because she was “brought back to heaven and she had some “highborn kinsmen” up there.Stanza 4: The poet was quite clear about the reason of Annabel Lee‟s is taken away from him.The evil wind came out by night and Annabel Lee was taken away by night, that indicates that somebody may appear as angels in daytime, but as devils during night.Stanza 5: Though the evil wind and the highborn kinsmen are very powerful to take my beautiful Annabel Lee away from me, they are not so powerful as to take her soul away from me.Our love is more powerful than death.After the death of one, our souls are still together.Stanza 6: My Annabel Lee had gone to heaven.She reminds me of her bright face by the moon, so that I can see her in my dream;when I see the stars in the sky, I see her bright eyes, too.We are together and nothing can separate us, neither the human power nor the God of death is possible.Comment on the poem

In Annabel Lee, when Poe was writing about the life and death of his wife, he neither did nor uses her real name, nor did he use the real background.Instead, he provided a false name and an imagined “kingdom by the sea.” On the one hand, Poe wanted to imply to us that such kind of true love could exist nowhere else but in a mythical kingdom of ancient time.Thus poe showed his resentment of reality.In the poem, Poe, instead of feeling sorry for himself, felt lost.The poem is not just a dirge.Much more than that, it is a mourning song for the death of a beautiful woman, which implies the death of beauty.This last poem has always been regarded as the best of Poe‟s poems.It coincides on every side with Poe‟s poetic theories;consisting of 41 lines, it is quite readable at one sitting;it wears a sad and melancholy tone;it tells the story of the death of a beautiful woman;with the repetition of the/ / sound, it was so rhythmically written into a piece of “word music”.Short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” Analysis of the story: When the narrator sees Roderick Usher, he is shocked at the change in his old friend.Never before has he seen a person who looks so much like a corpse with a “cadaverousness of complexion.” Death is in the air;the first meeting prepares us for the untimely and ghastly death of Roderick Usher later in the story.Usher tries to explain the nature of his illness;he suffers from a “morbid acuteness of the senses”.He can eat “only the most insipid food, wear only delicate garments,” and he must avoid the odors of all flowers.His eyes, he says, are “tortured by even a faint light,” and only a few sounds from certain stringed instruments are endurable.As Roderick Usher explains that he has not left the house in many years and that his only companion has been his beloved sister, the lady Madeline, we are startled by Poe‟s unexpectedly introducing her ghostly form far in the distance.Suddenly, while Roderick is speaking, Madeline passes “slowly through a remote portion of the apartment: and disappears without ever having noticed the narrator‟s presence.No doctor has been able to discover the nature of her illness---it is “a settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person” in a “cataleptically” state;that is, Lady Madeline cannot respond to any outside stimuli.The narrator then tells us that nevermore will he see her alive.Of course, then, the question at the end of the story is: Was the Lady Madeline ever alive? Or is the narrator deceiving the reader by this statement? Roderick Usher and the narrator speak no more of the Lady Madeline;they pass the days reading together or painting, and yet Usher continues to be in a gloomy state of mind.We also learn that one of Usher‟s paintings impresses the narrator immensely with its originality and its bizarre depiction: It is a picture of a luminous tunnel or vault with no visible outlet.This visual image is symbolic of what will happen later;it suggests both the vault that Usher will put his sister into and also the maelstrom that will finally destroy the House of Usher.Likewise, the poem “The Haunted palace,” which Poe places almost exactly in the center of the story, is similar to the house of Usher in that some “evil things” are the influencing its occupants in the same way that Roderick Usher, the author of the poem seems to be haunted by some unnamed “evil things.” After he has finished reading the poem, usher offers another of his bizarre views;this time, he muses on the possibility that vegetables and fungi are sentient beings---that is, that they are conscious and capable f having feelings of their own.He feels that the growth around the House of Usher has this peculiar ability to feel and sense matters within the house itself.This otherworldly atmosphere enhances Poe‟s already grimly threatening atmosphere.One day, Roderick Usher announces that the Lady Madeline is “no more”;he says further that he is going to preserve her corpse for two weeks because of the inaccessibility of the family burial ground and also because of the “unusual character of the malady of the deceased.” These enigmatic statements are foreboding;they prepare the reader for the re-emergence of the Lady Madeline as a living corpse.At the request of Usher, the narrator helps carry the “unconfined‟ body to an underground vault where the atmosphere is so oppressive that their torches almost go out.Again Poe is using a highly effective gothic technique by using these deep, dark underground vaults, lighted only by torches, and by having a dead body carried downward to a great depth where everything is dank, dark, and damp.After some days of bitter grief, Usher changes appreciably;now he wanders feverishly and hurries from one chamber to another.Often he stops and stares vacantly into space as though he is listening to some faint sound;his terrified condition brings terror to the narrator.Then we read that on the night of the “seventh or eighth day” after the death of the lady Madeline, the narrator begins to hear “certain low and indefinite sounds” which come from an undetermined source.As we will learn later, these sounds are coming from the buried Lady Madeline, and these are the sounds that Roderick Usher has been hearing for days.Because of his over-sensitiveness and because of the extra-sensory relationship between him and his twin sister, Roderick has been able to hear sounds long before the narrator is able to hear them When Usher appears at the narrator‟s door looking “cadaverously wan” and asking, “Have you not seen it?” the narrator is so ill at ease that he welcomes even the ghostly presence of his friend.Usher does not identify the “it” he speaks of, but he throws open the casement window and reveals a raging storm outside—“a tempestuous…night…singular in its terror and its beauty.” Again, these details are the true and authentic trappings of the gothic tae.Night, a storm raging outside while another storm is raging in Usher‟s heart, and a decaying mansion in which “visible gaseous exhalations…enshrouded the mansion”---all these elements contribute to the eerie gothic effect Poe aimed for.The narrator refuses, however, to allow usher to gaze out into the storm with its weird electrical phenomena, exaggerated by their reflection in the “rank miasma of the tarn.” Protectively, he shuts the window and takes down an antique volume entitled Mad Trist by Sir launce lot Canning and begins reading aloud.When he comes to the section where the hero forces his way into the entrance of the hermit‟s dwelling, the narrator says that it “appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character…the very cracking and ripping sound” which was described in the antique volume which he is reading to Usher.The narrator continues reading, and when he comes to the description of a dragon being killed and dying with “a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing,” he pauses because at the exact moment, he hears a “low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted and most unusual screaming or grating sound” which seems to be the exact counterpart of the scream in the antique volume.He observes usher, who seems to be rocking from side to side, filled with some unknown terror.Very soon the narrator becomes aware of a distinct sound, “hollow, metallic and clangorous, yet apparently muffled.‟ When he approaches Usher, his friend responds that he has been hearing noises for many days and yet he has not dared to speak about them.The noises, he believes, come from lady Madeline: “we have put her living in the tomb!” He heard the first feeble movements a few days ago while she was in the coffin, then struggling with the vault and, finally, she is now on the stairs and so close that usher can hear “the heavy and horrible beating of her heart.” With a leap upward, he shrieks: “ Madman!I tell you that she now stands without the door!” At this moment, with superhuman strength, the antique doors are thrown open and in the half darkness there is revealed “the lofty and enshrouded figure of the Lady Madeline of Usher.” There is blood upon her white robes and the evidence of a bitter struggle on every portion of her emaciated frame.With the last of her energy, while she is trembling and reeling, she falls heavily upon her brother, and “in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.”

The narrator tells us that he fled from the chamber and from the entire mansion and, at some distance, he turned to look back in the light of the “full, setting and blood-red moon” and saw the entire House of Usher split at the point where there was a zigzag fissure and watched as the entire house sank into the “deep and dank tarn which covered, finally, the “fragments of the house of usher.”

One key to the story is, of course, the name of the main character.An usher is someone who lets one in or leads one in.Thus, the narrator is ushered into the house by a bizarre-looking servant, and he is then ushered into Roderick Usher‟s private apartment and into his private thoughts.Finally, Usher also means doorkeeper, and as they had previously ushered lady Madeline prematurely into her tomb, at the end of the story Lady Madeline stands outside the door waiting to be ushered in;failing that, she ushers herself in and falls upon her brother.In the concept of twins, there is also a reversal of roles.It is Usher himself who seems to represent the weak, the over-sensitive, the over-delicate, and the feminine.In contrast, lady Madeline, as many critics have pointed out, possesses a superhuman will to live.She is the masculine force, which survives being buried alive and is able, by suing almost supernatural strength, to force her way out and escape from her entombment in the vaults, and then despite being drained of strength, as evidence by the blood on her shroud, she is able to find her brother and fall upon him.Another reading of the story involves the possibility that Roderick usher‟s weakness, his inability to function in light, and his necessity to live constantly in the world of semi-darkness and muted and colors is that the Lady Madeline is a vampire who has been sucking blood from him for years.This would account for his paleness and would fit this story in a category with the stories of Count Dracula that were so popular in Europe at the time.In this interpretation, Roderick Usher buries his sister so as to protect himself.Vampires had to be dealt with harshly;thus, this accounts for the difficulty lady Madeline encounters in escaping from her entombment.In this view, the final embrace must be seen in terms of the Lady Madeline, a vampire, falling upon her brother‟s throat and sucking the last drop of blood from him.The final paragraph supports this view in that the actions occur during the “full blood-red moon,” a time during which vampires are able to prey upon fresh victims.At the opposite end of this phantasmal interpretation is the modern-day psychological view that the twins represent two aspects of one personality.The final embrace, in this case, becomes the unifying of two divergent aspects into one whole being at birth.Certainly many Romantics considered birth itself to be a breaking of oneself with that original spirituality.Lady Madeline can then be seen as the incarnation of “otherworldliness,” the pure spirit purged of all earthly cares.She is, one might note, presented in this very image;at one point in the story, she seems to float through the apartment in a cataleptic state.If Usher embodies the incertitude of life---a condition somewhere between waling and sleeping---when Lady Madeline embraces him, this embrace would symbolize the union of a divided soul, indicating a final restoration and purification of that soul in a life to come.They will now live in pure spirituality and everything that is material in the world is symbolized by the collapse of the House of Usher---the dematerialization of all that was earthly in exchange for the pure spirituality of Roderick Usher and the Lady Madeline.Even though Poe maintains that he did not approve of symbols or allegory, this particular story has been, as suggested above, subjected to many and varied types of allegorical or symbolic interpretations.Basically, the story still functions as a great story on the very basic level of the gothic horror story, in which the element of fear is evoked in its highest form.Further Reading: Allan Poe‟s short stories.6.Emerson and Thoreau‟s Transcendentalism Teaching Period: 2 Teaching hours.Teaching aim and requirement: Students should know what is Transcendentalism, Emerson‟s idea on transcendentalism;learn to analyzes his “of Nature” and the main idea of Thoreau‟s Walden.A.Ralph Waldo Emerson(1823-1882)I.Introduction: Emerson was 19th century American most notable prophet and sage.He was apostle of progress and optimism and his dedication to self-reliant individualism inspired his fellow transcendentalists.Emerson was born in Boston, the son of a Unitarian minister and the descendant of a long line of distinguished New England clergyman.He was educated at Boston Latin School and at Harvard.After his graduation from college in 1821 Emerson taught in a Boston school for young ladies.In 1825 he entered the Harvard Divinity School, where absorbed the liberal intellectualized Christianity of Unitarianism.It rejected the Calvinist ideas of predestination and total depravity, substituting instead a faith in the saving grace of divine love and a brief in the eventual brotherhood of man in a kingdom of Heaven on earth.In 1829 Emerson was ordained the Unitarian minister of the second church of Boston.He was a popular and successful preacher, but after 3 years he had come to doubt the validity of the sacrament of the Lord‟s Supper and his growing abjections to even the remnants of Christian dogma surviving in early 19th century Unitarianism led him to conclude that “to be a good minister it was necessary to leave the ministry.”

After preaching his farewell sermon Emerson went on a tour of Europe, where he met Cole ridge, Wordsworth and was strongly influenced by the ideas of European romanticism.Upon returning to America, he began his lifelong career as a public lecturer, which took him to meeting different variety of his people.He bought a house in Concord, Massachusetts and there he associated with Thoreau, Hawthorn, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller and others who belonged to the informal Transcendental Club, organized for the “exchange of thought among those interested in the new views in philosophy, theology and literature.In concord, Emerson became the chief spokesman of transcendentalism in America.His philosophy was a compound of Yankee Puritanism and Unitarianism merged with the teachings of European romanticism.The word “transcendental” had long been used in philosophy to describe truths that were beyond the reach of man‟s limited senses and as a transcendentalist, Emerson argued that God was all-loving and all-pervading;that there was an essential unity in apparent the spirit;that nature was an image in which man could perceive the divine.Emerson‟s beliefs were a balance of skepticism and faith, stirred by moral fervor.To many of his readers they have been seemed neither coherent nor complete.His early writings were rejected as “the latest form of infidelity”.He has been called “St.Ralph, the optimist and charged with having a serene ignorance of the true nature of evil.His exaltation of intuition over reason has been dismissed as a justification of infantile enthusiasms;his celebration of individualism has been judged an argument for mindless self-assertiveness.Emerson was a seer and poet, not a man of cool logic.In his lectures, essays and poems, he sought to inspire a cultural rejuvenation, to transmit to his listens and readers his own worn traditions and in his faith in goodness and inevitable progress.His words both dazzled and puzzled his audience.Like his philosophy, his writing seemed to lack organization, but it abounded with epigrams and memorable passages.The 19th century found him a man who had “something capital to say about everything.” And his ideas influenced American writers from Melville, Thoreau, Whitman and Emily Dickson in the 19th century to Robert Frost, Hart Crane and Stevenson in the 20th century.Emerson‟s perceptions of man and nature as symbols of universal truth encouraged the development of the symbolist movement in American writing.His assertion that even the commonplaces of American life were worthy of the highest art helped to establish a national literature.His repudiation of established traditions and institutions encouraged a literary revolution;his ideas expressed in his own writing and in the works of others, have been taken as an intellectual foundation for movements of social change that have profoundly altered modern America.Emerson was no political revolutionary.He preached harmony in a discordant age, and he recognized the need of human society as incompatible with unrestrained individualism.As he remained a firm advocate of self-reliant idealism and in his writings and in the example of his life, Emerson has endured as a guide for those who would shun all foolish consistencies and escape blind submission to fate.I.Analysis of “Nature”

The whole work “Nature” is a long essay divided into eight parts: the opening, commodity, beauty, language, discipline, Idealism, spirit and prospects.Our selection is taken from the opening.Taken as a whole, “Nature” expresses Emerson‟s philosophy in a more systematic fashion than any other work of his.Questions for understanding: 1.According to Emerson, what is one of the best ways one can really be alone? 2.What distinguishes the “stick of timber of the wood-cutter from the tree of the poet? 3.In what part of nature does Emerson describe the most profound change taking place? 4.Where does Emerson find the source of the power to produce delight? 5.Interpret the following from nature: “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and heart of the child.”

6.Try to relate that statement(I am nothing)to Emerson‟s pantheism.7.What does Emerson mean when he says “I am nothing”? 8.Does Nature have the potential to lift man‟s spirits at all times, or only occasionally? Questions for further discussion: 1.What is Transcendentalism? 2.What are the Emersonian Transcendentalist ideas and his view of nature? 3.What is the main idea of Thoreau‟s Walden? 8.Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)Teaching Time: 4 teaching hours.Teaching aim and requirement: The students should get to know Hawthorne‟s life and his literary career, his novels and short stories.They should understand the selected section of the “Scarlet Letter.”

I.Introduction of his life and works:

For long time Hawthorne has been considered to be the first great American writer of fiction to work in the moralistic tradition which can be traced down through such leading novelists as Henry James and William Faulkner.Different from his contemporary novelists in relation to literary themes, Hawthorne showed a great interest in the problem of guilt and his major novels generally dealt with sensational material, like poisoning, murder, adultery and crime, because he was ambitious to explore the result of sin, the effect on human conscious of guilt, pride, egotism and isolation.His concern with moral or ethical problems and his talent in dealing with them in the form of novel attained him success as a novelist and a momentous position in the history of „American literature.Hawthorne was born into the family of a sea captain, whose father died when he was only four years of age.Living with his mother and sister in Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne was taken care by his mother‟s brother, who, a well-to-do man, supported Hawthorne to receive the best schooling of the age.In 1821 he entered Bowdoin College and graduated in 1825 in the class with Longfellow and Franklin Pierce, later president of the United States.The next twelve years were so-called “seclusion”, when he lived in his mother‟s Salem home to read widely and prepare for his literary career.During these years of literary apprenticeship he contributed short stories to various periodicals and did hard work for many publishers, but his literary toil brought him little success.Among his publication of immaturity during this period the only work worth mentioning was his first novel Fanshowe, an abortive chronicle of Bowdoin life, which completely failed to attract popular and critical attention.His next book, Twice-told Tales(1837)was successful and its second edition appeared in 1842.The success of Twice-Told Tales encouraged Hawthorne to explore in literature.From 1839-1849 Hawthorne earned his living in the customhouses in Boston and Salem.In 1841-1842 he took part in the transcendental communistic experiment but he admitted later that his experience in the experiment was distasteful.In 1842 he married and settle at the Old Manse.In 1853 Frank Pierce was elected president and he soon appointed his old friend Counsal at Liverpool, one of the most lucrative positions for four years and then after his retirement he traveled extensively in Europe and continued to write before he returned home in 1860.After 1860 Hawthorne lived in Concord and devoted his remaining years to literature until he died suddenly while on a trip to New Hampshire with his lifelong friend Pierce.Before the publication of the Scarlet Letter in 1850, which made his fame and gave to American literature its first symbolic novel another important work that Hawthorne published was Mosses from an Old Manse(1846), a collection of short stories, which included some of his best like “Young Goodman Brown.” “The Celestial Railroad” and “Rappaccini‟s Daughter”.The appearance of “The Scarlet Letter” marked the maturity of Hawthorne as a novelist and soon he composed three important novels, The House of the Seven Gables, a great novels of family decadence, appeared in 1851, which was followed by The Blithedale Romance(1852), a novel describing the transcendental experiment and The Marble Faun(1860), a novel of moral allegory with Italian setting.When compared with The Scarlet letter, these three novels showed more obviously the defects that ran through almost all Hawthorne‟s novels: indulgence in symbolism and a skeptical attitude toward the affair of life.His other works included The Life of Frankllin pierce(1852)which resulted in his appointment of consul at Liverpool and Our Old Home(1863)a sheaf of essays，The central subject of Hawthorne‟s major works was the human soul.This determined that his works could be singularly free from passionate or erotic elements, His exploration of the soul resulted from his skeptical attitude toward the social reality that was characterized by a rapid change in almost all aspects of social life and from his ambition to probe into the nature of man.It was in his exploration of human soul that Hawthorne revealed his criticism of life.In fact, the primary significance of his major works dwells in the interest and the consistent vitality of his criticism of life.Hawthorne lived in an age when the dynamic influence of Puritanism was gone and the impact of romanticism and transcendentalism was largely felt among the intellectuals and thus he made his efforts to explore the roots of all kinds of social evils which appeared in a social background less religious and more industrialized.His experience of living in a limited social background and his seclusion of thinking led to his exclusive preoccupation with the inner world of man, where he believed was the source of social evils, because he looked down on the impact of man of the social environment that was undergoing a vast change.In many of his best stories and his two great novels The Scarlet Letter and The house of Seven Gables, Hawthorne gave his analysis of the moral problems of his own age through a remarkably vivid picture of the New England past.His excellent sense of the past and historical reconstructions and his fidelity to detail were fully expressed in these works although his major appeal lied beneath the allegorical form.Likewise, Hawthorne‟s true genius appears most clearly when he penetrates beneath costume and manner.His characters and setting are puritan and his skillful use of such materials are witchcraft, the Indian life in other dissenters the theocratic society and the general resentment against the royal authority exhibits his command of the history and traditions of the region.Moreover, their problems and situations are fundamentally universal.II.Analysis on the Selected chapter: Chapter 5 serves the purpose of filling in background information about Hester and Pearl and beginning the development of Hester and the scarlet as two of the major symbols of the romance.By positioning Hester‟s cottage between the town and the wildness, physically isolated from the community, the author confirms and builds the image of her that was portrayed in the first scaffold scene---that of an outcast of society being punished for her sin/crime and as a product of nature, society views her “…as the figure, the body, the reality of sin.”

Despite Hester‟s apparent humility and her refusal to strike back at the community, she resents and inwardly rebels against the viciousness of her Puritan persecutors.She becomes a living symbol of sin to the townspeople, who view her not as an individual but as the embodiment of evil in the world.Twice in this chapter, Hawthorne alludes to the community‟s suing Hester‟s errant behavior as a testament of immorality.For moralists, she represents woman‟s frailty and sinful passion, and when she attends church, she is often the subject of the preacher‟s sermon.Banished by society to live her life forever as an outcast, Hester‟s skill in needlework is nevertheless in great demand.Hawthorne derisively condemns Boston‟s Puritan citizens throughout the novel, but here in chapter 5 his criticism is especially sharp.The very community members most appalled by Hester‟s past conduct favor her sewing skills, but they deem their demand for her work almost as charity, as if they are doing her the favor in having her sew garments for them.Their small-minded and contemptuous attitudes are best exemplified in their refusal to allow Hester to sew garments for weddings, as if she would contaminate the sacredness of marriage were she to do so.The irony between the townspeople‟s condemnation of Hester and her providing garments for them is even greater when we learn that Hester is not overly proud of her work, rejects ornamentation as a sin.We must remember that Hester, no matter how much she inwardly rebels against the hypocrisy of Puritan society, still conforms to the moral strictness associated with Puritanism.The theme of public and private disclosure that so greatly marked Dimondale‟s speech in chapter 3 is again present in this chapter, but this time the scarlet A on Hester‟s clothing is associated with the theme.Whereas publicly the letter inflicts scorn on Hester, it also endow her with a new , private sense of other‟s own sinful thoughts and behavior;she gains a “sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts.” The scarlet letter---what it represents---separates Hester from society, but it enables her to recognize sin in the very same society that banishes her.Hawthorne uses this dichotomy to point out the hypocritical nature of Puritanism: Those who condemn Hester are themselves condemnable according to their own set of values.Similar to Hester‟s becoming a living symbol of immoral behavior, the scarlet A becomes an object with a life seemingly its own: Whenever Hester is in the presence of a person who is masking a personal sin, “the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb.”

In the Custom House preface, Hawthorne describes his penchant for mixing fantasy with fact, and this technique is evident in his treatment of the scarlet A.In physical terms, this emblem is only so much fabric and thread.But Hawthorne‟s use of the symbol at various points in the story adds a dimension of fantasy to factual description.In the Custom House, Hawthorne claims to have “experienced a sensation…as if the letter were not of red cloth, but red-hot iron.” Similarly, here in chapter 5, he suggests that, at least according to some townspeople, the scarlet A literally sears Hester‟s chest and that, “red-hot with infernal fire,” it glows in the dark at night.These accounts create doubt in the reader‟s mind regarding the true nature and function of the symbol.Hawthornes‟ imbuing throughout the novel---particularly when Chillingworth sees a scarlet A emblazoned on Dimmesdale‟s bare chest and when townspeople see a giant scarlet A in the sky---and is a technique common to the romance genre.Question for discussion:

What are the artistic characteristics of The Scarlet Letter?

The Scarlet Letter, a story of rebellion within an emotionally constricted Puritan society, is an undisputed masterpiece by Hawthorne.The Scarlet letter reveals both Hawthorne‟s superb craftsmanship and the powerful psychological insight with which he probed guilt and anxiety in the human soul.Hawthorne‟s remarkable sense of the Puritan past, his understanding of the colonial history in England, his apparent preoccupation with the moral issues of sin and guilt, and his keen psychological analysis of people are brought to full display in this novel.So his drama is thought, full of mental activities.Thought propels action and grows organically out of the interaction of the characters.With modern psychological insight, Hawthorne probed the secret motivations in human behavior and the guilt and anxiety that he believed resulted from all sins against humanity, especially those of pride.Hawthorne is a master of symbolism.The structure and the form of the novel are carefully worked out to cater for the thematic concern.By using Pearl as a thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community.As a key to the whole novel, the latter A takes on different layers of symbolic meanings as the plot develops.This ambiguity is one of the features of the work.Herman Melville(1919-1891)I.Introduction about his life and works: Herman Merville was born in 1819, the son of eight children.His father‟s business failed in 1830 and his father died shortly afterward.For the next seven years the family received support from relatives.He signed on as a “boy” on the British ship and sailed with her across the Atlantic to Liverpool and on the return voyage to America.While life as a sailor was harsh, his thirst for the sea was not quenched.Several years of voyage on different waling ships provided him material for his later writing career.In 1846 his first novel on sea appeared.Typee(1846), Omoo(1847), Redburn(1848)and(White-Jacket(1850)are novels on sea.He finished his masterpiece Moby Dick in 1851.He died quietly on September 28, 1891.For nearly the last thirty years of his life he had tried desperately to remain obscure in New York City, hidden from the world of letters.II.Analysis on Chapter 54:

A.Summary: The watery region around the Cape of Good Hope is a place where you meet more travelers than in any other part of the oceans.Soon after speaking to the Albatross, the Pequod encounters another whaler called the Town-Ho.Ahab relents and there is a regular gam.The ship is manned mainly by Polynesians and the reason is found I this story secretly brought aboard, the Pequod and never told to Captain Ahab.As the Town-Ho was sailing in the Pacific the ship sprung a leak.Forced labor at the pumps as the ship headed for the nearest island created a mutiny which was interrupted by the appearance of Moby Dick.The boats were lowered but the harpooner on the boat nearest him was devoured by the Great White whale.The ship made harbor and most of the crew deserted for fear of encountering Moby Dick.Polynesians agreed to help sail the ship the rest of its voyage.In this long story about Radney and Steelkilt, we see another view of Moby Dick.He seems to represent something like Divine Justice entering into the events of life and correcting an evil.Thus, quite the contrary to the manner in which Ahab sees Moby dick, he is here viewed as an agent of God‟s justice.Thus the second gam shows that moby Dick is not universally considered an evil agent and that this view is

particular to Ahab‟s monomania.This chapter contains two aspects of events.It is gone through the narration of boatman.He told the story happened on a whaling ship.21conflict between lakeman---Stilkilt and his rebels and the mate;2.conflict between the mate and the white whale.In both cases, Lakeman failed in the struggle against the unfair treatment and the mate died in the mouth of a whale.Through the story we got to know the life of boatman in whaling industry and the fieresness of the white whale.III.The novel on the whole can be understood from three levels: 1.It is a novel of journey and whale catching;2.it is a conflict between Captain Ahab and Moby Dick;3.It is a story of Ishmael, his thought about human body‟s ego realization, the relationship between man and nature, man and God, man and man, etc.Moby Dick may be read on several levels.It is a thrilling adventure story, “the world‟s greatest sea novel,” compounded of search, pursuit, conflict and catastrophe.It is the plot of unceasing search for revenge, The “Americanized Gothic” of mystery and terror, crowded with omens and forebodings from the cracked Eligah‟s warnings to the prophecies of Fedalla which are reminiscent of the witch‟s croaking in Mackebeth.Clear throughout is a mastery of suspense and horror of both subtle and broad humor, of exciting narrative in vigorous prose.The numerous chapters on whales and whaling dismay readers for the story‟s sake, but they provide verisimilitude.The chapters on whaling prepare the reader for the unfamiliar events, skillfully retard the swift action, and present an authentic, full way of life.The more import level, of course, is these of characterization and meaning, a galley of unique portraits emerges.In spite of their few, brief appearances, Peter coffin, Captain Bilded and Peleg and the officers of passing vellels are vividly described.Melville most convincingly individualizes Starbuck, Stubb and Flask.Starbuck‟s vary courage and “right-mindedness” is fully developed to make him a foil to Ahab.The three harpooners are also individualized---the American Tashtego;the physical admirable African, Daggoo, so unlike the minstrel-show Negroes in the literature of Melville‟s day;and Queengueg, the Polynessian “heatheric” who must help these

Christians, whose characterization is a masterpiece of understanding.The characterizations of the semi-auto-biographical Ishmael and of Ahab are the most important and they are in extricable tied up with the book‟s meaning.Ishmael‟s name connotes the wanderer and outcast.He shares the illness and restlessness of the romantic hero, but he rises above them.He is no more escapist.Himself inclined to melancholy, he recognizes that Ahab‟s concentration on woe is madness.Midway of the book, Ishmael, the participant and narrator, merges with the omniscient author.At first caught by the fever of the oath on the quarter-deck to hunt Moby-Dick to the kill, he alone has the intelligence and will to recognize and oppose the madness.Repudiating society and those in power, he grows in deep respect for and insight into the secrets of human life.Regarding both believer and infidel with an equal and critical eye, he is a believer in the dignity of man and the need of fellowship.32 And he alone of the Puequod‟s saved.The biblical Ahab worshiped false gods;he was slain in battle and the dogs licked up his blood.On his long prepared for entrance, “reality outran apprehension.” Branded like Milton‟s Satan, sturdy, erect on his bone leg, but “ with a crucification in his face,” Ahab has all the “overbearing dignity of some mighty woe.” His actions are of one piece, for he is driven by a force stronger than himself, though of his own creation---right after Moby Dick has sheared off his leg on a previous voyage, his “torn body and gasked soul bled into one another” and the final mononania secres him.With cunning he does his best to conceal the madness, but from the frenzied oath on the quarter-deck the steps to destruction are sure;a man never known to kneel sweats he would strike the sun if it insulted him;he throws overboard his pipe(symbol of serenity);smashes the quadrant(symbol of scientific aid);defies the lightening, breathing the kindred fire of his spirit back at it, and tempering a forged harpoon in the blood of his pagan harpooners, baptires it, as mentioned earlier, in the name of the devil.Isolation, pride, obsession with revenge, reliance on the unaided self and blasphemy make up his tragic flaw.But as his old friend Peleg says: “Ahab has his humanities.” His scenes with the cabin boy Pip show this.But the “humanities” are short lived.Captain Boomen, who lost an arm, to Moby Dick, wants no more of the monster, and such common sense shocks Ahab as idiocy.Various scholars have interpreted the whale in various ways.To Ahab, the whale represents all evils, visibly personified against which he piled, “all the rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down.” But to Ishmael, Ahab is insane.Less bluntly and plainly, Ishmael states what the whole means to him, he is appalled chiefly by the hideous whiteness, which suggests the demonism in the world.Starbuck, at sea to hunt whales, not his commander‟s vengeance, considers the whale a dumb beast, smiting from blindest instinct.Other seamen believe in the malice behind the tremendous strength, but assume no serf-appointed mission to destroy it.In the last chase Starbuck calls to Ahab that it is not too late, that Moby Dick seeks him not: “ It is thou that madly seekest him.” But Bound by more than oaths on the quarter-deck, Ahab is forever Ahab, the “Fate‟s lieutenant” acting under orders, he has fell impelled to follow.In the final analysis, Moby Dick has a richness which he has had enduring value for generations.Its symbolism is vast, its language graphic and powerful.It is romance of moral inquiry.Each of the main characters struggles with good and evil, with fate, with the conflict they see between God and nature.In his Ahab, he specifically molded a character which used his will to try to defy fate, a character of defiance.In Ishmael, he could stand by and allow reason to speculate on the events.Because he supplied no one formula of interpretation, he left his readers the same freedom he gained for himself---the ability to move back and forth between fate and meaning on the bridge of symbolism.He has mastered the art that Hawthorne experiments had taught him because he had the flucidity of spirit to allow his book finally to write itself.Questions for further discussion;1.Comment on character Ahab.33 2.What is the symbolic meanings of the novel? Henry Wadsworth Longfellow(1807-1882)I.Introduction about his life: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, on February 27, 1807, into a well-do-do family.He was educated at Bowdoin College, where he was a fellow student with Nathaniel Hawthorne and Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States(1853-1857).After his graduation in 1825, Longfellow spent three years in Europe studying the culture and languages of Italy, Spain, and Germany.In 1836, Longfellow became professor of French and Spanish at Harvard, where he taught for 18 years and then he resigned in 1854 because he felt it interfered with his writing.Longfellow‟s most productive years were from 1843 to 1860.After 1854, Longfellow devoted himself completely to literary writing.Several long poems and collections of poems were published.But in his late time, he turned to religious and reflective poetry, and to translation.From 1864 to 1867, most of his time was spent in the translating of The Divine Comedy By Dante.His last collection of poems appeared in 1882, the year of his death.As a poet, Longfellow enjoyed the most popular reputation when he was alive, and his poetic works were regarded as the summit of the literary work of the 19th century.However, his tremendous fame decreased rapidly soon after Longfellow‟s death and especially in the 20th century, Longfellow‟s fame as the most important American poet of the previous century had to be vacated to Walt Whitman.Major Works:(1)Voice of the night(1839), his first book of poetry, which contains “Hymn to the Night” and “A Psalm of Life.”

(2)Ballad and Other Poems(1841), containing such favorites as “The village Blacksmith.”(3)Evangeline(1847).(4)“The Song of Hiawatha(1855), a long poem that was based on American Indian legend.(5)Translation of Dante‟s Comedy(1865-1867)II.Features of Longfellow‟s Poetic works: Longfellow was the best-known American poet during the 19th century.(1)Longfellow‟s long stay in Europe led to his mastery of several European languages and a broader knowledge of European literature than most other American literary figures, what‟s more, this enables him to embody in his poetry chief romantic tendencies as humanitarian attitude, love of beauty, love of nature and love for the past;and it enabled him to introduce American themes to Europe;American Indians, anti-slavery ideas and the scenery of the New World.Longfellow was popular because of his high-mindedness, his spiritual aspiration, his refinement of thought, his refinement of manners, and the gentleness, sweetness and purity of his poetry.(2)Longfellow was the first American poet to write narrative poems.“The Song of Hiawatha” is the first American epic in blank verse about the American Indians.(3)Longfellow‟s style and subject were conventional, especially in comparison with those of Whiteman or modern writers.He wrote in traditional regular meters and feet，34 in regular rhyming schemes.Longfellow did not appeal, as most of his contemporary writers did, for the breaking of American literature from European literature.Usually he wrote about American subjects, but always in European styles.(4)Being a highly learned and cultivated man, and a professor of several languages, Longfellow composed all his work with accurately selected words and delicate expressions.The ideas he expressed are generally simple ones but he expressed them musically and powerfully.(5)The child-like simplicity and detachment from the deep and important problems of contemporary life are perhaps the basic elements Longfellow‟s appeal to the common audience;but on the other hand, they led to a fatal weakness in his work---lack of the depth and insight of a great artist such as Whitman.As a poet, Longfellow failed to reflect in his poetry what he felt personally, instead of what he attained from reading.He enriched his poems with second-hand knowledge.However, in the late 19th century, Longfellow was doubtlessly the most popular American poet and a milestone in the development of American poetry.III.Understanding of his poems: a.A Psalm of Life: It was first published in Voice of the Night in the September edition of New York Monthly in 1839.It is very influential in China, because it is said to the first English poem translated into Chinese.The poem was written in 1838 when Longfellow was struck with great dismay;his wife died in 1835, and his courtship of a young woman was unrequired.However, despite all the frustrations, Longfellow tried to encourage himself by writing a piece of optimistic work.The relationship of life and death is a constant theme for poets.Longfellow expresses his pertinent interpretation to that by warning us that though life is hard and everybody must die, time flies and life is short, yet, human beings ought to be bold “to act,” to face the reality straightly so as to make otherwise meaningless life significant.The poem consists of 9 stanzas in trochaic tetrameters.It is rhymed “abab.”

Part IV.Literature of Realism Teaching Time: 8 teaching hours.Teaching aim and requirement: The students should learn the history, cultural background of the 19th century literature.They should know the basic characteristics, ideas and its influence.They should learn the main literary career of the writers in this period and understand the contents and artistic characteristics of the selected works.Teaching methods: presentation and discussion.Teaching tool: Computer.Key points: realistic writers and their main works.I.Introduction of the historical background

In the United States three fundamental issues reached the breaking point in the period of 1865-1900: the conflict between the agrarian ideal of Jefferson and the industrial ideal of Hamilton, the conflict between the plantation gentility of the South and the commercial gentility of the North, and the conflict between a culturally mature East and a raw and expanding West.The political historians would stress the conflict between the North and the South as basic, the economic historians would stress the conflict between agrarianism and industrialism, and the literary and cultural historians would stress the conflict between the West and East which indicated the decline of romanticism and the rise of realism.Realism came as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism and sentimentalism as Everett Carter put it in Howells and the age of Realism.The battle between “idealists‟ and “realists” provided the major issue of American literary history after the Civil War(1861-1865).Literature began to pay less attention to general ideas and more to the immediate facts of life.This movement took two forms: interest in one‟s own backyard and experimentation with more literal methods of writing.“Realism is, in the broadest sense, simply fidelity to actuality in its representation in literature.Realist literature is based on the accurate, unromanticized observation of human experiences.It insists on precise description, authentic action and dialogue, moral honesty, and a democratic openness in subject matter and style.As a way of writing, realism has been applied in almost every literature throughout history.But as a literary movement, realism is a period concept.It refers to the approach of realist fiction occurred at the latter part of the 19th century.In part, the rise of realism came as a protest against the falseness and sentimentality which the realists thought they saw in romantic literature.The realists were determined to create anew kind of literature that was completely and totally realistic.The realistic movement found its effective origins in France with Balzac, in Russia with Rurgenev, in England with George Eliot, and in America with W.D.Howells and Mark Twain.Major Features:(1).Realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspects of contemporary life and everyday scenes are represented in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner.This is the theory that authors try to use and guide them in their writing.It stresses truthful treatment of material.It is anti-romantic, anti-sentimental, and without abstract interest in nature, death, etc.Mark Twain laughed at people who were caught up in the

world of illusions, who were not mature enough to see real situations.This is one example of the truthful treatment of material.(2)In realist fiction characters from all social levels are examined in depth.Before this time characters served some sort of allegorical or symbolic purpose.The realist writers hold on to characters and keep examining how these people relate to each other.They value the individual very highly, stress the function of environment in shaping character, and take characterization as the center of the story.They have a great concern for the effect of action on characters, and a tendency to explore the psychology of the people in the story.This is a major change, and it is one of the examples the truthful treatment of material, because this is how real life is.(3).Open ending is also a good example of the truthful treatment of material.It is something that might be puzzling to the reader, but it has a theoretical purpose.It tells the reader that life is complex and cannot be fully understood.It is impossible to tie up all the loose ends.Besides , open ending leaves much room for the readers to think over the possible conclusion of the story(4).Realism focuses on commonness of the lives of the common people who are customarily ignored by the arts.Realists are interested in the commonplace, the everyday, the average, the trivial, and the representative.These authors are not interested in characters as symbols.They are interested in common characters and the everyday events which show the average life.By the end of the 19th century in America, the reading public was willing to read about average people just like themselves, and the novels during this time by the realist writers were filled with the stories of common people.They were not stories about kings and queens, princes and princesses, or knights in shining armor.They were about average folks.(5)Realism emphasizes objectivity and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.Simple, clear, direct prose is the desirable vehicle, and objectivity on the part of the writer the proper attitude.The realist writers are detached observers of life.They are like scientists, making an investigation.The narrator in their works stand back, and try not to let their own emotions gain the way of the report which their works will give the reader.This is very different from the writers before the Civil War.Those writers were constantly eager to tell the reader what they thought about this character, whether they thought the character had done the right thing or the wrong thing.It is up to the reader to decide what it means.Much of this is the influence of the spirit of Darwin, of Darwin‟s investigations.(6).Realism presents moral visions.The author does have a purpose for presenting an objective account of realistic life.The moral sense is something that resides in the author‟s purpose.Realists are ethical writers.Interested in the problems of the individual conscience in conflict with social institutions.Many of their works show the Ameridcan businessman in the conflict over whether he should accept a bribe, whether he should give a bribe, whether he should participate in unfair business practices, etc.Generally, these writers show how the individual conscience wins when he opposes social conventions and social practices.This indicates their disbelief in romantic individualism.These writers are always interested in focusing on the

dilemma.Realists are aware of accepted social standards.They have a strong ethical sense that there are right ways to do things and wrong way to do things.So in other words, the world has some kind of unity, some kind of plan, and they examine people who have the dilemma of trying to follow that plan or do it the wrong way.In their works they re-create real life and show the dilemma that the people are having as they try to understand what life means in an ethical way.They are able to probe deeply into these problems of the human conscience.Their method is completely objective and carries with it the whole theoretical meaning of why people choose to be objective.II.Writers and their works

1.Walt Whitman I.Introduction about his life and works: In 1855 after first reading “Leaves of Grass” Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Walt Whitman, “ I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass”.I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that American has yet contributed … I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start.”

Whitman was thirty-six years old, and nothing in his “long foreground” suggested that he would write the greatest single book of poetry in America‟s literary history.He was born in 1819 in a rural village in Long island, New York.His parents were semiliterate and provided him with little more than a sympathy for political liberalism and a deistic faith shaped by the teachings of Quakerism.He had only five or sic years of formal schooling, but he was a keen reader of 19th century novelists, the English romantic poets, the “classics” of European literature and the New Testment.His teachers characterized him as a “dreamy and impractical youth” and he drifted through a series of jobs as an office boy, a printer, and as a schoolteacher.He had a natural talent of journalism.For a short time he edited a Long Island weekly newspaper and when he was 22 and attacted to the Bohemian life of Manhatten he went to New York city.In new York, Whitman worked as a printer , an editor and as a free-lance journalist contributing essays, short stories and poems to the popular newspapers and magazines of the 1840‟s when he was 27, he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, but after only two years he was dismissed because of his radically liberal political views.He next made a brief visit to New Orleans, but he soon returned to New York City, where he opened a printing office and stationery store and began to write his greatest poetry.In 1855 he published the first edition of “Leaves of Grass”.It contained 12 poems which Whitman himself had reportedly set in type and printed at his own expense.Few copies of his slim book of poetry were sold, yet those who read it were rarely indifferent.His apparently formless free-verse departures from convention, his incantations and boasts, his sexuality and his exotic and vulgar language caused critics.They said his work was a “poetry of barbarism”, “noxious weeds”, “a mass of stupid filth.” Only Emerson praised it.From 1857 to 1859 Whitman edited the Brooklyn Times and reworked “Leaves of Grass,” published expanded second and third editions in 1856 and 1860.When the

Civil /war began, he traveled South to Washington D.C, where he obtained an appointment as a government clerk and worked as a volunteer nurse in nearby military hospital, while living in Washington he published Drum-taps(1856), Civil War poems he gathered into the fourth edition of “Leaves of Grass.”

By the appearance of the fifth edition(1871), Whitman‟s poetry had began to receive increasing critical recognition in England and America.He had come to see his work as a single poem to be revised and improved through a lifetime, but in 1872, when he was 54, he suffered a paralytic stroke.He moved from Washington D.C to his brother‟s home in New Jersey and there declining in his poetic abilities and cared for by a group of devoted friends.Whitman spent most of the remaining 19 years of his life, receiving successive editions of Leaves of Grass until the final version was published shortly before his death in 1892.The more than four hundred poems that had appeared in the nine editions of Leaves of Grass printed in Whitman‟s lifetime were unprecedented in American literature.They were a compound of commonplaces, of disorganized, new experience, of sentimentalism, and of true poetic inspiration.They had ecstatic perceptions of man and nature united and divine.Whitman had an expensive oceanic vision, an urgent desire to incorporate to entire American experience into his life and into poetry.He aspired to be a cosmic consciousness, to experience and glorify all humanity and all human qualities, including “sex, womanhood, maturnity, lustry, animations, organs, acts.‟

He had yearned to be the “bard of democracy”, a public poet celebrated by democratic men “en masse” but while he lived, the most of his poetry was read only by literary enthusiasts and intellectuals.In his final years, Whitman‟s devoted followers solemnized him as “The Good Gray poet”, but he became a national figure as a whiskery sage, but the wide popularity he had got escaped him and he was defeated in his influence on modern American poetry than the work of any other writer.Whitman had been an radically new poet, had made his own rhythms, created his own mythic world, and in writing his sprawing epic of American democracy he helped make possible the free-verse unorthodoxies and private literary intensities of a 20‟s century that would one day came to honor him as one of the great poets of the world.II.His selected poems: 1.Song of Myself: it is a poem consisting of 1345 lines.It is the longest poem in Leaves of Grass.The poet takes for granted the self as the most crucial element of the world and thus sets forth two of his principal beliefs: first, a theory of universality;second, all things are equal n value.In Part 1 of the selected sections, the author unfolds the theme of “ a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars” by cordially celebrating himself.Meanwhile, he “extols the ideals of equality and democracy and celebrates the dignity, the self-reliant spirit and the joy of the common man.‟

In part ten he told us his experience in walking the countryside.He went to the mountain, to the sea and to take part in the marriage ceremony of an Indian couple.At last he told us an experience of saving a runway slave, which showed his attitude

toward slavery b.“I Sit and Look Out: it is a short poem of 10 lines, opens with immediate presentation of the speaker‟s stance and frame of view.The stance, sitting, is fixed, and within the frame are placed “all the sorrows of the world.” Following the opening line, 7 lines, containing 11 juxtaposed parralled clauses, present, in sweeping and scanning way, 1 group of auditory images(I hear，,”)and 10 groups of visual and kinesthetic images(I see…”, I mark…I observe…”)these groups of images are typical ones or representatives of the sorrow of the world.The 9th line, abruptly, an end to the view of the sorrows that occur “without end,” and brings the speaker and the reader back to the stance of the view: a sitting-look-out-upon stance.Upon the stance, the speaker continues to see and hear more of these without end.What he chooses to do or can do is to be silent.What more is heard and seen? Why is he silent? And for how long will he be silent? There is a large blank that the reader should fill in with his own sensation and imagination.c.Beat, Beat, Drums: Walt Whitman

Song of Myself

In the Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman says: “ The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity.Nothing is better than simplicity.” “Song of Myself” is characterized by simplicity of simplicity, but also by art of art.The simplicity lies in the simple expression—the wording and the sentencing and the natural lining of the poem.The art lies in the varying rhythms of the poem---the ebb and flow of emotion within it., the shift of mood, the alternation between moments of intensity and moments of relaxation.And the Preface says,” The messages of great poets to each man and woman are,…What we enclose you enclose, What we enjoy you may enjoy.” “Song of Myself” is saturated with the the pride of the persona himself and with the vehemence of the audacity of freedom.And the persona, that is, the “I” in the poem, is Walt Whitman, is every American and is every human being.The vehemence of pride and audacity flows not only in words, but also from and in the sounds of the lines, powerful and torrential lines bursting out in succession.The oneness of the persona with every American man and woman and with every human being, agrees to the varying but unifying rhythm, and to the harmonious melody.And in other words, not only the words describe the oneness, but also the melody expresses the oneness.This is the agreement between sound and sense.The “Song of Myself”, is the song of oneness, in terms of the sense and the sound.I Sit and Look Out

It is a poem of lines, and it opens with immediate presentation of the speaker‟s stance and frame of view.The stance, sitting, is fixed and within the frame are placed “all the sorrows of the world.”

Following the opening line, 7 lines, containing 11 juxtaposed parallel clauses，40 present, in a sweeping and scanning way, 1 group of auditory images(“I hear…)and 10 groups of visual and kinesthetic images(“I see…”, “I mark…”, “I observe…”).These groups of images are typical ones or representatives of the sorrows of the world.The 9th line puts, abruptly, an end to the view of the sorrows that occur “without end”, and brings the speaker and the reader back to the stance of the view: a sitting-look-out-open stance.Upon the stance, the speaker continues to see and hear more of these without end.What he chooses to do or can do is to be silent.What more is heard and seen? Why is he silent? And for how long will he be silent? There is a large blank that the reader should fill in with his own sensation and imagination.Free Verse: Free verse, also known as “open form” verse, is the verse without regular meter, line length, rhyme(scheme), or stanza form, depending on natural speech rhythms related to the actual cadence of the poet expressing himself.It is different from the conventional schemed verse in several aspects: 1.Regular meter, or controlled rhythmic pattern, is essential to conventional poetry;but free verse is based on the irregular rhythmic cadence of the recurrenc, with variation, of phrases and syntactical patterns rather than the recurrent metrical patterns.2.Rhyme occurs in most traditional poetry(except blank verse), and often with various schemes.In free verse, however, rhyme may or may not be present;but when it is used with great freedom.3.In conventional verse, the unit is often foot, or the line;but in free verse, the units are much larger, sometimes being paragraphs or strophes.If the free verse unit is the line, as it is in Whitman, the line is usually determined by qualities of actual speech rhythm and thought, rather than feet or syllable count;thus the line may be as short as one word, or as long as a passage.4.In comparison with conventional verse, free verse may be composed with rhythms and melodies more personal and individual, more appropriate to the subject and the theme.In the hands of the gifted poets free verse very often acquires rhythms and melodies of its own.There is in free verse greater flexibility of the form and greater agreement between sound and sense.There are signs of it in medieval alliterative verse and in the translation of the Authorized King James Bible, which attempts to approximate the Hebrew cadences.The Psalms and The Song of Solomon are noted examples of free verse.Milton opposed the tyranny of strict versification.Milton, in order to set off the vexation, hindrance and constraint of traditional verse, experimented with free verse in Lycidas and Samson Agonistes.After Milton, European poets, including Macpherson, Blake, Arnold, Heine, Goethe, Rimbaud, Hugo, and Baudelaire, continued the experiment with free verse.And the French poets of the late 19th century established the vers libre movement, from which the term free verse comes.41 Walt Whitman and Gerald Manley Hopkins did more and better than anyone else to develop it to maturity;and Whitman startled the literary world with Leaves of Grass, by using lines of variable lengths which depended for their rhythmic effect on cadenced units and on repetition, balance, and variation of words, phrases, clauses, and lines, instead of on recurrent metric effect.At the end of the 19th century, free verse was already a popular genre of poetry.Emily Dickinson(1830-1886)I.her life story: Emily Dickinson , born in Amherst, Massachusetts on Dec.!9, 1830, was the best poetess American ever created.She was a daughter of a prominent lawyer and politician.She did not receive much formal education but read widely at home.Actually, during the narrow span of her lifetime, she kept staying at home except for a few short trips to Boston or Philadelphia.Emily Dickinson was a witty woman, sensitive, full of humanity and with a genius for poetry.While she was living in almost total seclusion, she wrote in secret whatever she was able to feel, to see, to hear and whatever she was able to imagine.She wrote whenever and wherever.Although she guarded her poems even from her family, 1775 poems were discovered and published after her death.However, as the only noteworthy woman poet in American literature of the 19th century, she had only seven of her poems published during her lifetime, and it was not until the beginning of the 20th century that her genius was widely recognized.2.Features of Emily Dickinson‟s Poems In subject matter Emily Dickinson was very similar to the great romantic poets of her time.Her poems are short, many of them being based on a single image or symbol.But within her little lyrics she wrote about some of the most important things in life: love, nature, morality and immortality.She wrote about success, which she thought she never achieved;and she wrote about failure, which she considered her constant companion.She wrote of these things so brilliantly that she is now ranked as one of American‟s greatest poets.Poetry is for Dickinson a means to attain pleasure, away to preach her doctrine, and a medium to express her world outlook, an outlet for her despair and a remedy to pacify her soul.Her life experience fostered her belief as an existentialist as well as a great poet.Despite her seclusion of life, Emily Dickinson covered a wide range of subjects in poetry.Her favorite subjects are love, death or natural beauty.In her writing she wrote about life and death, expecting to understand the meaning of life by understanding the meaning of death.Living in the 19th century, c comparatively religious era, she did not belong to any organized religion.However, she wrote of God, man and nature;she probed into the spiritual unrest of man and often doubted about the existence and benevolence of God, because she felt that wild nature was her church and she was able to converse directly with God there.Emily Dickinson was a poet who could express feelings of deepest poignancy in terms of the true and wide saying, often in an aphoristc style.Her gemlike

poems are all very short, but fresh and original, marked by the vigor of her images, the daring of her thought and the beauty of her expression.Emily Dickinson wrote in the conventional metrical form, though she did not always strictly observes the rules of versification.Emily Dickinson defamiliarised conventional poetic form, deliberately overusing capitalization and deahes, to make her poems looking strange.In some way, she is very much similar to the style of John „Donne.II.Selected Poems: I Die for Beauty(449)Stanza 1: I died pursuing the beauty of art and immediately as I became accustomed to the new circumstance of a tomb.I was told that there was another who died for truth and arrived in the next room.Stanza 2: I died for beauty and he died for truth.Since “beauty is truth, and truth beauty” we are as close as brothers, or like twins.Stanza3: The two of us are like kinsmen who met at night, and we talked in separated rooms for a very long time until we have harmoniously united into one and have been completely forgotten by the human world.I Heard a Fly buzz---when I died---(465)Stanza 1: When I was dying, I heard the buzz of a fly which reminded me of the stillness in the air.Stanza 2: Before the absolute power of death, I was helpless, so were my relatives and friends.They could do nothing more than gathering around me, tearless and breathless, and watching the arrival of death to me.Stanza 3: When I was abandoning this material world, a fly comes to me.Comment on the poem

This poem is the description of the moment of death.The poetess made use of a very strange image of a fly to symbolize her last touch with the human world and, moreover, the perspective of a decaying corpse.The fly appeared as something which is able to fly between the two worlds of life and death.Besides, the word “fly” is very cleverly used in the work.On the one hand, it refers to that insect;on the other hand, it may indicate “free flying”.Before death, the “fly” was buzzing around, I hear it;after death, it may lead me to go far and forever, I am flying.The fly is inconsequently, of little importance---implying perhaps that death is the same.Because I Could Not Stop for Death(712)Stanza 1: The angel of death, in the image of a kind person, comes in a carriage for the sake of Immortality and the poet.Stanza 2: To show my politeness to god of death, I gave up my work and my enjoyment of life as well;I give up my life.Stanza 3: The journey of our carriage implied the experience of human life;school implies time of childhood;the fields of gazing grain, for youth and adulthood;while the setting sun, for old age.Stanza 4: Probably we may say the sun sets before we reach the destination---the

night falls, death arrives.I felt a fear and chilly after death, for my shroud is thin and my scarf too light.Despite the description of “death”, the usual gloomy and horrifying atmosphere is lightened by the poetess with the elegantly fluttering clothing she describes.Stanza 5.Several centuries had passed since the arriveal of death upon me.However, I felt it is shorter than a day.On that day I suddenly realized that death is the starting point for eternity, and the carriage is heading towards it.Comment on the poem

The poem is discussing death, a very gloomy subject, but it is done with a rather light tone.The tone is light just because the author does not take death as a catastrophe;instead, she treats the angel of death as a very polite gentleman, as a long-missing guest, giving up her work and leisure, putting on her fine silky dresses, she accompanies death in the same carriage to eternity.All the beauty of this work lies in the poetess‟ open-minded attitude towards death.Mark Twain(1835-1910)

I.Introduction about his life: As one of American‟s first and foremost realists and humorist, Mark Twain, the pen name of Samuel Langhore Clemens, usually wrote about his own personal experiences and things he knew about from firsthand experience.His life spanned the two Americans, the frontier America that produced so much of the national mythology and the emerging urban industrial giant of the 20th century.At the heart of Twain‟s achievement is his creation of Tom Sawyer and huck finn, who embody that mythic America midway between the wildness and the modern superstate.Twain, the third of five children, was born in the village of Florida, Missouri and grew up in the larger river town of Hannibal, that mixture of idyll and nightmare in and around which Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn live out their adventure-filled summers.Hannibal was dusty and quiet with large forests nearby which Twain knew as a child and which he uses in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884)when Pap kidnaps Huck and hides out in the great forest.The steamboats which passed daily were the fasination of the town and became the subject matter of Twain‟s Life on the Mississippi(1883).The town of Hannibal is immortalized as St.Petersburg in Twain‟s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer(1876).Twain‟s father was ambitious and suspected but only mildly successful country lawyer and storekeeper.He was a highly intelligent man who was a stern disciplinarian.Twain‟s mother, a southern belle in her youth, had a natural sense of humor, who was emotional and known to be particularly fond of animals and unfortunate human beings.Although the family was not wealthy, Twain apparently had a happy childhood.However, Twain‟s father died when he was twelve years old and for the next ten years, Twain was apprentice printer and then a printer both in Hannibal and in New York City, Hoping to find his fortune he conceived a wild scheme of making a fortune in South America.On a riverboat to New Orleans, he met a famous riverboat pilot who promised to teach him the trade for five hundred dollars.44 After completing his training, Twain was a riverboat pilot for four years and, during the time, he became familiar with all of the towns along the Mississippi River which acquainted with every type of character which inhabits his various novels, especially Huck Finn.When the Civil War destroyed the riverboat business, he went to Nevada with his brother , Orion.From there, he went to California, where he looked on a newspaper.In 1865 he became nationally famous with is short story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog.Based upon stories he heard in California mining camps, the story is about an apparently innocent stranger who cheats a famous frog rather racer and beats him.The stranger fills the stomach of the other man‟s frog with tiny metal balls.It is a typical western humor story called a “hoax”.Like the western humorists, Twain‟s work is filled with stories about how ordinary people trick experts or how the weak succeed in “hoaxing” the story.Twain‟s most famous character, Huck Finn is a master at this.As a journalist, he went to the Sandwish Islands in 1866 and to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867.The latter of the two provided him with the experiences which he shaped into his first book, The Innocents Abroad,.Roughing It, his narrative of pioneers striving to establish civilization on the frontier, appeared in 1872, and his first novel-length fiction written with Charles Duddley Warner, The gilded Age:, came in 1873.It was one of the first novels which creates a picture of the entire nation, rather than of just one region.Although it has a number of Twain‟s typically humrous characters, the real theme is America‟s loss of its old idealism.The book describes how a group of young people are morally destroyed by the dream of becoming rich.III.Analysis on his “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”

The boye hero, Tom Sawyer, is Mark Twain himself(although he wrote in his preface that Tom is “a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I know:)Tom‟s leading trait is his faith and delight in the romantic world which adults call made-believe.Tom loves the pomp and valor of Arthurian chivalry;the stout independence and generous fellowship of Robin Hood;the swagger and audasity of pirates and robbers and their assurance that somewhere there are treasures to be seized.He defied the adult nations that counter these: that virtue consists less in pomp and valor than in soberness and submission;that the outlawry of merry men who plunder sheriffs and fat abbots is courageous, and that right conduct is reverence and obedience to rules and officials;that violent enterprise to seize treasures other men hold is wickedness bound to be punished, and that in fact pirates‟ gold is not worth seizing anyhow.Tom‟s adventures are a series of triumphs over the adult world which he defies.As a knight he boasts his rivals and is a gallant champion of his lady.As a humane outlaw he flouts the authorities and tricks the, and rectifies a miscarrage of official justice.As a treasure-hunter, he seizes a glittering gold.Tom‟s companion in these adventures, Huck Finn, belongs neither to Tom‟s world of romantic illusion nor to the social world of convention which Tom resists.He belongs instead to a world of simple nature which detects both the unreality of Tom‟s world and the artificiality of the adult world.Huck, as a pauper and outcast on the frontier of civilization, has had to scramble too hard amongst elemental things to see

anything in life but hard facts incapable of romantic transformation.He has grown up like a weed of gardeners and thinks it on the whole better to acknowledge himself a weed and try to escape the gardener‟s attention than to try to take on the character of a cultivated specimen.Tom and Huck are allies against the adult world of convention and responsibility, but they do not inhabit the same world, and Huck has almost as much difficulty in adjusting his naturalism to Tom‟s romanticism as he has in adjusting it to social conventions.When his literalism comes up against Tom‟s romanticism, and his nature against the village conventions, he has to reject the romantic and the conventional because his literalism and nature are the only things that work for him.He does this, not with bravado as a deliberate choice of the superior thing, but with humanity as a necessary choice of an inferior thing.Tom Sawyer is a story written for boys, full of the horror and joys of childhood flowing on the surface of expressions, generations after generations of young people have held it dear to their hearts.III.Analysis on the selected tow chapters.IV.Questions for discussion:

1.Is the novel only childhood story? 2.Compare your own childhood life with that of Tom‟s.Further Reading: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.O Henry and short story

1.his life: O.Henry is most commonly associated with the short story and masterful ironic “O Henry twist”.William Sidney Porter was born in North Carolina and without much schooling and virtually orphan worked in his uncle‟s drugstore, learning much of human nature.He spent all of his free time reading books, and by the time he was 20, he was still small, weighing less than a hundred pound, gradually retreating into a shy, poverty-stricken world of fantasy escape.He followed several occupations, being a bookkeeper, a drugstore clerk, and a Texas Ranger.During this time, he developed talents for cartooning and singing.In 1887 he met Athol Esta with whom he became enamored, but her family was opposed to the marriage.As a result, the two eloped.In 1894, he founded The Rolling Stone, a comic magazine which soon failed.O.Henry got to know New York and its inhabitants, to know its surface thoroughly by wandering about, by drifting into conversations with strangers on the streets or in the parks, by observing with an accurate eye and ear sights and sounds, of Broadway, Greenwich village, Wall Street.After gathering material on every aspect of New York life, O.Henry became a salaried writer and soon emerged as a central figure in the peak period of the American magazine short story.From that time on he was a wealthy man, living luxuriously and drinking heavily.In 1907 he married his second wife Sara

Lindsay Coleman.He was never a strong man physically and his exciting life eventually wore him out before his time.He died in drunkenness.His work is full of humor, his stories are amusing, flippant, flat, biting and are filled with irony, sentiment, and pathos.Drawing directly from his experience with many odd jobs, he combined realism with a world of his own, reflecting a fatalistic view of life.There is no great concern with unchanging human problems, and he had no firm moral messages.His work is typically American, and he gives us a good idea of various types of people in the United States.The theme of his stories is often based on some self-sacrificing member of a family who is undergoing hardship to help a close relative.He also addresses questions of loneliness, of desolate people, of grotesque underlings.2.his style: O.Henry‟s style is direct, pared of all unnecessary verbiage, except for occasional use of exaggeration or polysyllables.His use of dialect is completely authentic, in classic realist fashion.He uses slang to gain force and humor.Highly skilled in the use of Southen dialect, he was never identified with the local color movement, for he drew from too many sources to be identified with any one.He is the master of surprise, though occasionally he falls into cheapness just as his characters taken to the extreme become caricatures.His first collected work, Cabbage and Kings(1904)is a series of South American tales linked together by a loose plot construction.The characters Americans, revolutionists, patriots and even president of a mythical republic, belong to vaudeville or the comic opera.With The Four Million(1906)O.Henry produced his first book of New York stories, some of which as The gift of the Magi, The Skylight Room, The Cop and the Anthem, Springtime a la Carte and The furnished Room were hardly to be surpassed.Irishman frequents of cafes and of boarding house, white-collar men and women, art students, writers, factory girls, millionaires, cops and crooks jostle each other in these pages whose human comedy and tragedy mingle against the glittering, beautiful ignoble, crowded, lonely city.“The Gift of Magi “contains the most famous of O.Henry‟s trick endings.This Yuletide narrative tells of how a nearby penniless young husband and wife are each determined to buy the other a sactable Christmas present.He sells his watch to buy her a set of combs, she has her beautiful hair cut off and sells the tresses to buy him a watch fob.His characters, lain, simple people and his plots , depending often on the surprising ending, have little diversification, but he was skilled at ringing the changes on a few themes.The gift of Magi and The Furnished Room are among the best known of the tales that illustrate this technique of ironic coincidence and the surprising ending.3.Analysis of The Cop and the Anthem The story adopted one section of wanderer Soapy‟s life to explore the social life

of American society and attack the darkness of its social system.Soapy has no place to sleep and in the winter he had to go to prison for three months.In order to be arrested, he tried to break the shopping window, tease woman, eat without paying and took the other‟s umbrella, but he failed to arise public notice.When he heard the sound from the church and wanted to become good, he was arrested.Through this section of life, the author described the poor destiny of low people.The author adopted a light and humorous tone to tell the story.The humorous style is shown from three aspects.First, the social position and the plot provided the reasonable condition for his humorous sense.In the story Soapy is not a murderer, neither a gentleman, he is a wanderer, no one showed any attention to him.He himself is a thing to be teased.Although he wandered here and there, he didn‟t lose his own dignity.He thought that there were two ways waiting for him, one is to go to the charity, but it is shameful;the other is to go to the prison for three months.Compared with these two, he chose the latter.He designed several tricks which are very common in everyday life.On the other hand, these crimes are not serious to satisfy the condition for three months in prison.He didn‟t have the idea of killing others, or commit serious crime.The tricks suit the case to create the light tone.The other aspect of the humorous character lies in the plot.The sudden change of the plot forms the other element of the humorous.One scene happens that Soapy lies on the bench in the Square.The Square is his home, where he was doing one thing---turn round.Winter is coming and he had to find a place for winter.What should he do? People expect Soapy to find a good place.However, to our unexpectation, he thought of the prison.This is the first turning point, which is unexpected but reasonable.The method is quite familiar for him.Which way he chose had a suspicion and it hinted that it would be uneasy.The story tells 6 scenes to show his effort for being put into prison.The order of the scenes is natural and humorous.As a wanderer, what attracts him most is to eat his full and be sent into prison.This is one stone to kill two birds.But as soon as he entered the restaurant, his broken trousers betrayed him, he was thrown out.And then at the corner of the street, he broke the window of the shop and thought the policeman would catch him, but the police even didn‟t suspect him, because he waited for the cop to arrest him.This is abnormal according to the common thinking.The two different ideas make the scene fantastic and laughable.He went to another restaurant and after easting, the waiters only thrown him out and didn‟t call the police, because they know police would not bother such trival things.The development of the plot is quite different as he planned.The next scenery appeared when he tried to tease a woman but to his surprise he met a prostitute, so he had to escape.But he made efforts to escape.This is particularly funny.The other two cases also failed.The last case happened at the moment when he decided to correct and make a man himself.This time he was sentenced three months in prison.This tells us that the man like soapy did not have the chance to

be corrected.The story was humorous for its language.The whole tone of the story is light, humorous.A dead leaf was called Jack Frost‟s card;his door is North wind, to create the light atmosphere.This made us not feel so heavy and sentimental because the coming of the winter.And then soapy moved uneasily.He decided to solve the problem in “a singular committee of ways and means.” The words made it serious, but he made the decision of going into prison, which is funning.Another is the reverse of speaking.He exaggerates the thing which is not good.Prison is not a place connected with good feeling, to Soapy it is an ideal place that he dreams of for he could have meals and place to spend the long nights.The praise to it shows the poor people‟s living condition and satire towards American reality.Each time soapy failed the author would use the words to show his strong desire for the prison.The sharp contrast used in the story shows the main theme of the story which has the strong force to make our readers feel that we are within the streets of New York to witness the life of the common people.1.Do you like the writing style of the story? Why or why not?

2.Read more of his stories.Naturalism I.Introduction

(1)“Naturalism” is an extraordinarily elastic term;it is applied to many varied writers and is often defined differently by the very novelists who call themselves naturalists.One is tempted to think that it would have been far better for literary criticism had the term never been coined.However it is by now widely used and misused that it seems necessary to examine the often contradictory elements implied in its application and to see why Norris, Crane and London have frequently been classified as naturalists.The term was introduced to the United States by Frank Norris at the end of the 1880‟s.He had spent a year studying art in Paris and had been much impressed by Emile Zola, the French novelist who first formulated and applied the new literary theory.Like many other European writers and artists, Zola had been impressed by Darwin‟s theory of evolution.This explained men‟s origin in the animal world and his development from a higher primate into a Neanderthal man, a caveman and finally a fully human being.Darvin also enphasezed the role played by the struggle for existence in creating or destroying difficult conditions---survival and had descendants, which those poorly adapted to their surroundings died out leaving no one to carry on their kind.This completely contradicted the old idea of man as a being especially created by God who---according to the Christian and many other religions---was made up of two quite separate parts, an immortal spiritual soul and a mortal physical body.In the

religious interpretation of human life, the spirit was in the body somewhat as wine might be contained in a bottle.If the bottle were to be broken, the spirit might be poured into some other container or might continue to exist in heaven when no need for any container as a liquid does when frozen or jelled.But evolution taught that man was simply a part of nature just as a fish or a bird or an ape was.And like any other animal he was governed by his instincts and natural desires for food, warmth and sexual satisfaction.It was therefore foolish to speak of a struggle within man between his higher and lower nature, between conscience and desire.It was also foolish to praise or blame man for what his nature made him to.One may kill a tiger to prevent his eating a sheep, but one cannot blame the tiger for his attempt to do so.One may think a mouse stupid for running into a trap after a piece of cheese but one cannot criticize it for the lack of wisdom.The naturalistic novelist should therefore describe people simply as animals, impelled to act as they did because of the appetites and urges formed by heredity and environment, these were as much a part as their size or strength and more intelligent would win in the struggle for existence while the weaker and slower would be destroyed.Neither was blame worthy or praiseworthy.No one was morally responsible;people did what they had to do and were fortunate or unfortunate.This is all that the philosophy of naturalism actually says.But that philosophy was adapted by Zola and other writers it began to imply a great deal more---and sometimes a great deal that really contra-directed its original meaning.In reaction against the conventional literature which avoided any reference to the “private parts” of the body, or any description of most bodily functions, the naturalists tended to dwell on those things and on sexual desire to emphasize man‟s animal nature.Furthermore, since life could be observed more nakedly in the crowded homes and work places of the poorest people and since the lower depths of society had long been forbidden ground to the novelist, the young naturalist were likely to write about the slums or Negro quarters, or jobs which demanded great physical efforts and hardship.One of the most important of Zola‟s novel “Germinal” deals with life in and around a coal mine where the laborers are forced to work desperately hard in miserable conditions.The heat underground is so intense that women as well as men and children were forced to strip, going on all fours to drag heavy loads through tunnels.Their homes were also unspeakably dirty and crowded with no sanitary facilities.There was no privacy for sexual intercourse or any other bodily functions.As Zola describes mines he shows them becoming as shameless physically as animals defecting and copulating in public.But here we find that Zola himself departs from the original theory---as do most other naturalistic novelists.He is so sorry for the poor mines that he ardently wishes for an uprising to change these conditions and the book becomes a revolutionary book, forcing the reader too to long for a revolution.(2)American Naturalists:

The literary naturalism has an effect on American writing, particularly in the use of subject matter.Under this influence, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser looked at the life of poverty, the life of crime and the life of ear.50

第五篇：美国文学史名词解释_综合版

美国文学选读复习资料

the settlement of North American continent by English started in the early 17th century.Under siege from church and crown, it sent an offshoot in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century to the northern English colonies in the New World—a migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England.Puritanism, however was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincidentwith the founding of New Zealand;it was also a way of being in the world—a style of response to lived experience—that has reverberated through American life ever since.As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind.American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature.American Romanticism

The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War.• Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.(subjectivity)

• For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than

reason and common sense.• They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group,against authority.• The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop and

express his own inner thoughts.New England Poets: William Cullen Bryant;Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;

Writers: James Fenimaore Cooper The Spy(1821)The Leatherstocking Tales(1823—1841)

The Pilot(1824)The Red Rover(1827)

Washington Irving（“The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon” “Bracebridge Hall”“Tales of a Traveller”“The History of the Life and Voyages of ChristopherColumbus ”）

American Transcendentalism

In the realm of art and literature it meant the shattering of pseudo-classic rules and forms in favor of a spirit of freedom, the creation of works filled with the new passion for nature and common humanity and incarnating a fresh sense of the wonder, promise, and romance of life.Transcendentalism

① The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe.② The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual.To them, the individual is the most important element of Society.③ The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God.Nature was not purely matter.It was alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence.Writers

Emerson’s：Nature；Self-Reliance；The American Scholar；The Over-soul；

H.D.Thoreau：Walden

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Walt Whitman：Leaves of Grass Emily Dickinson：I Died for Beauty；Because I could

not stop for Death

William Faulkner(1897-19621949 Nobel price

As I Lay Dying(1930)

Light in the August(1932)

Absalom, Absalom(1936)

Go Down Moses(1942)

Ernest Hemingway

Iceberg Principle(Theory)

“grace under pressure”

Major Works:

The Sun Also Rises 1926(Jake Barnes)

A Farewell to Arms 1928(a tragic story about war and love)(Frederic Henry and

Catherine Barkley)

For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940(Spanish civil war)(Robert Jordan)

The Old Man and the Sea 1952(Santiago)

Herman Melville

代表作：白鲸Moby DickOther Works are: Billy Budd,Typee, Omoo, Mardi.Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter

Mosses from an Old Manse;Twice-Told Tales;The Marble Faun;The House of the

Seven Gables

Realism

As a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism

with the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Romanticism and

sentimentalism, and paved the way to Modernism.This literary interest in the so-called “reality” of life started a new period in the

American literary writing known as The Age of Realism.local colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the late

19th(1860s—1870s).The feature of local colorism are:(1)presenting a locale

distinguished from the outside world;(2)describing the exotic of the picturesque;

(3)glorifying the past;(4)showing things as they are;(5)influence of setting on

characters.The well known local colorism authors were Mark Twain with his book

Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bret Harte’s with his The

Luck of the Roaring Camp.American naturalists accepted the more negative

interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to accout for the behavior

of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex

combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic

forces.2)naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing

becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic.It is

no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human

existence.3>Dreiser with his Sister Carrie is a leading figure of his school.1917.The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct

treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording.“poetic techniques to record

exactly the momentary impressions”

Three main principles of the Imagist Movement(1912):

[1] direct treatment of poetic subjects

[2] elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, to use no word that does

not contribute to the presentation.[3] rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the

sequence of a metronome.4> pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known

poem.The Modern Period

Part I The 1920s-1930s(the second renaissance of American literature)

l The Roaring Twenties(economically)

l The Jazz Age(socially)

l“lost” and “waste land”(spiritually)

There had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural

sciences.Darwinism(Darwin), Socialism(Karl Marx), Psychoanalysis(Sigmund Freud)

The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the

post-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of

betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>full of

youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had

love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the three

best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and

John dos Passos.The Beat Generation is a group of American young writers

and artists popular in the 1950s and early 1960s.the member of the beat generation

were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy,creativity.The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non conformity and for its non conforming style.The major writing are jack Kerouac’s on the road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.American Dream

The is the idea held by many in the United States that through hard work, courage and determination one could achieve prosperity.These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations.The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America.IMAGERY: A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the “mental pictures” that readers experience with a passage of literature.It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a poem, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor.Puritanism

American Puritanism was practice and belief of Puritans.Puritans were the people who wanted to purify the Church of England and then were persecuted in England.They came to America for various reasons.But because they were a group of serious and religious people, they carried a code of value and a philosophy of life.To them, religion was the most important thing.They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin, total depravity and limited atonement for God’s grace.They also believed in hard working, piety and sobriety.In a word, American Puritanism exerted great influences upon American thought and literature.