铁道兵志在四方英美文学考点(美国文学部分)

2021年1月19日发(作者：侯保)

.
美国文学部分

浪漫主义时期
The Romantic Period
第一位：
washington irving

1.A
History
of
New
York
from
the
Beginning
of
the
World
to
the
End
of
the
Dutch
Dynasty,
which written under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a great success.
2. The Sketch Book won a international fame on both sides of the Atlantic.
3.
“
Rip
Van
Winkle
”
and
“
The
Legend
of
Sleepy
Hollow
”
got
ideas
form
German
legends.
4. the Bracebrige Hall and Tales of a Traveler.
5.
the
Alhambra
is
usually
regarded
as
Irving
’
s
“
Spanish
Skethch
Book
”
.
Only
because
it has a strong flavor of spanish culture.

’
s taste was essentially conservative.
7.
washing
Iving
’
s
has
always
been
regarded
as
a
writer
who
perfected
the
best
classic
sytle that American Literature ever produced.
8.
Washing
Iving
is
worth
the
honor
of
being
“
the
American
Goldsmith
”
for
his
literary
craftsmanship
.
9. Irving
’
s pervasive theme of nostalgia
怀旧的
) for the unrecoverable past is at once made
unforgettable.
第二位：
Emerson

1.

Transcendentalism ---the romantic period in the history of American literature.
2.

the chief spokesman of this spiritual movement is Ralph Waldo Emerson
3.

transcendental club, the unofficial manifesto for the club is Nature.
4.

Nature
did
not
establish
him
as
an
important
American
writer,
his
last
reputation
began with the publication of Essays, which convey the best of
his philosophical
discussions
and
transcendental
pursuits.
Such
as
The
American
Scholar
,
Self- Reliance , The Over-Soul.
5.

The
Poet,
a
reflection
upon
the
aesthetic
problems
of
the
present
state
of
American
literature
6.

The Experience, a discussion about the conflict between idealism and ordinary
life.
7.

transcendentalism---with
its
focus
on
the
intuitive
konwledge
of
human
beings
to
grasp the absolute in the universe and the divinity of man. Emerson put forward
his philosopy of over-soul, the importance of individual, nature.

8.

emerson and other transcendentalists believed that there should be a emtotional
comunication between a individual soul and the universal over- soul.

9.

a
“
transparent
eyeball
”
marks
a
paradoxical
state
of
being,
in
which
one
is
merged
into nature, the over-soul. While at the same time retaining a
unique perception
of experience.

n
’
s essays often have a casual style, for most of them were derived from
his journals and lectures.
11.


堪称“
the American Scolar
”

12.

in the essay Emerson clearly expresses the main priciples of his transcendentalist pursuit
and his love for nature.
第三位：
Hawthorne


1.

Hawthorne remains one
of the most
interesting, yet most
ambivalent (
矛盾情感
)
writers in the
American literary history.
2.

The Twice-Told Tales
,
a collection of short stories which attracted critical attention.
3.

The
Mosses
of
an
Old
Manse,
Snow-Image
and
other
Twice-Told
Tales

best
demonstrate
Hawthorne
’
s early obsessions with the moral and phycological consequences of pride, selfishness and
secret guilt that manifest themselves in human beings.
4.

The Scarlet Letter
often regarded as the best of his works, tells a simply but very moving
story in which 4 people living in a Puritan Community are involved in and affected by the
sin of adultery in different ways.
5.

The House of the Seven Gables
6.

The Blithedale Romance
(
福谷传奇
) is a novel he wrote to reveal his own experiences on the
Brook Farm and his own methods as a psychological novelist.
7.

The Mable Faun(
玉石雕像
)
set in Italy, the book is concerned about the dark aberrations(
失
常方面
) of human spirit.
8.

The Birthmark

9.

The Young Goodman Brown
–

everyone possesses evil secret
10.

The Minister
’
s Dark Veil

11.

The Rappaccini
’
s Daughter
12.

Hawthorne
’
s view of man, human history originates, to a great extent, in Puritanism
13.

The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter
反清教思想，同时反清教思想
on the one
hand, it provides him with a subject, on the other hand, with the Puritan world and society
as
a
historical
background,
he
disscusses
some
of
the
most
improtant
issues
that
concern
the
moral life of man and human society.
14.

the
structure
and
form
of
his
writings
is
always
carefully
worked
out
to
cater
for
the
thematic
concern.(
精心设计的
)
15.

allegorist
预言家
symbolist
第四位：
walt whitman
1.

Leaves of Grass
is Whitman
’
s representative work,
体现了
American democratic ideals
反映
了
American Independent War and Cival War.
2.

Leaves of Grass
has
nine editions.
In this giant work,
openness, freedom, individualism are
all that concerned him. His aim was nothing less than to express some new poetic feelings
and to initiate poetic traditon in which difference should be recognized.
3.

the poet
’
s essential purpose was to indentify his ego with the world and more specifically
with
the
democratic
“
en- masse
”
of
the
America,
which
is
established
in
the
openning
lines
of the
“
Song of Myself
”

4.

most of poems in Leaves of Grass sing of the
“
en- masse
”
and the self as well.
5.

politically committed
政治抒情诗
such as
Dump Taps

6.

Cavalry
Crossing
a
Ford,

Whitman
expressed
much
mouring
for
the
sufferings
of
the
young
lives
in the battlefield and showed a determination to carry on fighting until the final victory.
7.

when Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom
’
d
mournful as these poems are, a reader can detect
a thin trace of ecstasy for the victory of the progress.

8.

Whitman
’
s potetic style is marked by the use of the poetic
”Ⅰ”

9.

free verse, that is , poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.
10.

parallelism and phonetic recurrence at the beginning of the lines are contribute to the


musicality of his poems.
11.

one of the most often-used methods in his poems is to make colors and images fleet past the
mind
’
s eye of the readers.
第五位
Herman Melville
1.

Moby-Dick is his masterpiece.
2.

Billy Budd, his second famous work
3.

Melville
’
s writings can be divided into two groups, each with something in common in the
light of the thematic concern and imginative focus.
4.

Typee,
Omoo,
Mardi
which
drew
from
his
adventures
among
the
people
of
the
south
pacific
island.
Redburn

is
a
semi- autobiographical
novel,
concerining
the
sufferings
of
a
genteel
youth
among
the brutal sailors.
Whitejacket
relates his life on the United States of man-of
–
war.
5.

pierre
作者本意是想发动妇女文学革命，但却遭到强烈反对，结果名声下降。

6.

Bartleby , the Scrivenr,
a short story symbolizing the loniness and anonymity and passivity
of a little man in the big city.
Benito Cereno
, a novella about a ship whose black slave
cargo munity holds their captain a terrorized hostage.
The Confidence- Man,
explore the
paradoxes of belief and the optimisms and hypocrisies of American life.
7.

Billy
Budd,
which
again
deals
with
the
sea
and
sailors
,
and
the
theme
of
the
conflice
betwwen
innocence and corruption.
8.

Moby-Dick
is regarded as the first American prose epic.
9.

有关人物和文章主题意思请细看教科书。

第二部分

现实主义时期
The Realistic Period
1.

The period of ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the age of realism in the
literary history of the United States.
2.

Realism
was
a
reaction
against
the
romanticism
or
a
move
away
from
the
bias
and
towards
romance
and self- creating fictions, and paved the way for modernism.
3.

Mark Twain referred to as the Gilded Age.
4.

William Dean Howells Criticism and Fiction. He confess I do not care to judge any work of
the imagination without first applying this test to it .
5.

The
three
prominent
writers
of
the
period
are
William
Dean
Howells,
Mark
Twain,
Henry
James.
6.

they approached the harsh realities and pressures in the post-cival War society either by
a comprehensive picture of modern life in its various occupations , class stratifications
and manners, or by a psycological exploration of man
’
s subconsciousness.
7.

Tough
the
three
prominent
writers
wrote
more
or
less
at
the
same
time,
they
differed
in
their
understanding of the
“
truth
”
. Mark Twain and Howells paid more attention to the
“
life
”

of the Americans. Henry James had apparently laid a greater emphasis on the innner world of
man. Howells focused his discussion on the rising middle class and the way they lived. Mark
Twain preferred to have his own region and people at the forfront of his stories. This
particular concern about the local character of a region came about as the local colorism,
a unique variation of American literary realism.
8.

除了
Mark Twain, the other local colorists may include
Sarah Orne Jewett, Hamlin Garland,
Joseph Kirkland.

9.

Generally, their writhings are concerned with the life of a small and well-defined region
or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. Local colorists are


consciously
nostalgic
historians
of
a
vanishing
way
of
life,
recorders
of
a
present
that
faded
before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to miutely
accurate desciptions of the life of their regions.
10.

达尔文进化论对美国思想的影响和
19
世纪法国文学对美国的影响，产生了
other
school
of
realism,
American naturalism
. Darwin, in his The Origin of Species, Descent of Man hypothesized that
over the millennia man had evolved from the lower way of life.
11.

In
a
word,
naturalism
is
evolved
from
the
realism
when
the
author
’
s
tune
become
less
serious
and less sympothetic but more ironic and pessimistic. It is no more than a different
philosophical approach to reality ,or to human exsistence.
第一位
Mark Twain
第二位
Henry James

1
、

Henry
James
was
the
first
American
writer
to
conceive
his
career
in
international
theme.
2
、

William James, who made great contribution to the theory of stream- of-consciousness
technique.
3
、

The materialistic bent of the American life and its lack of culture and sophistication,
be believed, could not provide him with enough materials for great literary works.
4
、

1915. he became a naturalized British citizen. The order of Merit
5
、

it is his novels and literary essays that make him a fascinating case in the American
literary history and a conspicuous figure in world literature.
6
、

The
literary
career
of
Henry
James
is
generally
divided
into
3
periods.
In
the
firsr
period,
James took great interest in international themes. In almost all the stories and novels
during
this
period,
James
treated
with
great
care
the
clashes
between
2
different
cultures
and moral and emotional problems of Americans in Europe,or Europeans in America.
7
、

The
American
,
tells
a
story
about
a
young
and
innocent
American
confronting
the
complexity
of the European life
8
、

Daisy Miller
, a novells about a young American girl who gets killed by Winter in Rome.
Brought James international fame for the first time.
9
、

The Europeans
, the scene is shifted back to the America, where some Europeans, who are
actually
expatriated
Americans,
learn
with
difficulty
to
adapt
themselves
to
the
American
life.
10
、

The
Portrait
of
A
Lady,

Henry
James
’
s
masterpiece,
which
incanates
clashes
between
the Old world and the New in the life journey of an American girl in a European cultural
environment.
11
、

James experimented with different themes and forms in his middle period.
△
The Bostons
, which satirized the women liberation that took place in Boston.
△

The Princess Casamassima
,
which exposed the anarchist conspiracy in the slum of London.
△

The Private Life. The Death of a Lion . the Middle Years

讲的是艺术家与社会的关系，
艺术家不应该为了情感而牺牲真理。

△

The Turn of the Screw,

a story about the troubled and abnormal psychology of oppressed
chiildren, in which the whole household is terrorized by
“
ghosts
”
.

△

The Beast in the Jungle,

which focuses on the imaginative obsession of the some haunted
women and men with their personal disater in future.
12
、

In the last and major period, James returned to his international theme
From
1895
to
1900.
he
worte
novellas
and
stories
dealing
with
the
childhood
and
adolescence.


△

What
Maise
knows.
The
Wings
of
the
Dove.
The
Ambassadors.
The
Golden
Bowel
these
demanding
novels
are
widely
considered
to
be
Jame
’
s
most
influential
contribution
to
the
literature.
Jame
’
s fame usually rests upon the novels and stories with the international theme
.
△

Henry Jame
’
s literary criticism
The Art of Fiction

clearly indicates the aim of novel is to present life.
△
Henry
Jame
’
s
realism
is
characterized
by
his
psychological
approach
to
his
subject
matter.
This emphasis on the psychology and human consciousness proves to be a big breakthrough in
novel writing and has great influence on the coming is why Henry Jame is
th
generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20
-century stream-of-consciousness and the
founder of the psychological realism
Henry James is not only one of the most important realist of the period before the First
World War, but also the most expert stylist of his time.
第三位

Emily Dickinson
△

Dickinson
’
s poetry writing began in the early 1850s, altogether, he wrote1775 poems.
△

Letter to the world
, a way to bridge her private world with the public.
△

Dickinson
’
s poems are usually based on her own experiences, her sorrows and joys.
△

I
heard
a
Fly
Buzz-
When
I
died
,a
poem
universally
considered
to
one
of
her
masterpieces.
△

Love
is another subject Dickinson dwelt on
.
One of group her love poems treats the
suffering and frustratio love can cause
.
If you were coming in the Fall
、
There came a
Day at summer
’
s full
、
I can
’
t live with you.

△

The other group of love poems focuses on the physical aspect of desire.
I am wife- I
’
ve finished that. I
’
m ceded- I
’
ve stopped being theirs

△

A few examples to show Dickinson
’
s confusion and doubt about the role of the women in
th
the 19
century America.
△

Dickinson
’
s
poetry
is
unique
and
unconventional
in
its
own
way.
Her
poems
have
no
titles,
hence always quoted by their first lines.
Ther is a particular stress pattern, in which
dashes are used as a musical device to creat cadence and captial letter as a means of
the emphasis.
△

The form of her poetry is more or less like that of the hymns in community churches,
familiar, communal, and sometimes, irregular.
This is my letter to the World. I heard a Fly buzz- when I died.
I like to see it lap the miles. Because I could not stop for Death
第四位：
Theodore Dreiser
△

Theodore Dreiser is generally acknowledged as one of America
’
s literary naturalists.
△

Influence by Balzac, Charles Darwin. Herbert Spenser
△

Short fictions: Nigger Jeff, His Theresa, Old Rogaum
△

The trilogy of Desire: The Financier, The Titan. The Stoic
斯多

△

The
Genius,
a
classic
story
of
a
“
misunderstood
artist
”
,
was
once
condemned
for
obscenity
and blasphemy.
△

In 1925, Dreiser
’
s greatest work An American Tragedy appeared.
△

In 1927, he accepted an invitation to visit Russia and wrote Dreiser Looks at Russian
the following year, he joined Communist Party shortly before his death in 1945.
△

Literary
naturalism:
naturalism
emphasized
heredity
and
environment
as
improtant
deterministic forces of individualized characters who are presented in special and