Part 1:Colonial and Revolutionary PeriodSeparatists①In the colonial period, the Puritans who gone to extreme were known as ―S eparatists‖.②Unlike the majority of Puritans, they saw no hope of reforming the Church of England from within. They felt that the influence of politics and the court had led to corruptions within the church. They wished to break free from the Church of England.③Among them was the Plymouth plantation group. They wished to follow Calvin’s model, and toset up ―particular‖ churches.①It refers to the people who believed in Puritanism.②In England they wanted to ―purify‖ the Church of England and was prosecuted.③They accept the doctrine and practice of predestination, original sin and total depravity and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from god.①They were the people, mostly Puritans, who arrived in New England in 1620 in May Flower.②In a broad sense, they represented the ancestors of the American people.美国清教主义)①It arose in the early 17th century. Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of puritans.②The American puritans, like their English brothers, are idealist. They accept the doctrine andpractice of predestination, original sin and total depravity and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from god.③But due to the grim struggle for living in the new continent, they become more and more practical. Besides, the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influence over American moral values, and this Puritan influence over American Romanticism was conspicuously noticeable.原罪)①Original sin, in Christian theology, the sin of Adam: by which humankind fell from divine grace.②It is the central religious belief of the Puritans that people are sinful ever since their birth.③The purpose of baptism(洗礼) is to wash away original sin and to restore the individual to an innocent state, although even after baptism a tendency to sin remains as a result of original sin.神权政体)①It is a state system in which the state and church are combined into one, with the idea that God would govern through the church.②It was the major form of government in colonial American.Literary Journals①A journal is an individual’s day-by-day account of events. It provides valuable details that can be supplied only by a participant or an eyewitness. As a record of personal relations, a journal reveals much about the writers.②While offering insights into the life of the writer, a journal is not necessarily a reliable record of facts. The writer’s impression may color the telling of events, particularly when he or she is a participant.③Journals written for publication rather than private use are even less likely to be objective. TheEuropean encounters with and conquest of the Americas are recorded in the journals of the explorers.John Smith①He was one of England’s most famous explorers by helping to lead the first successful English colony in American,②Stories of his adventures, often embellished by his own pen, fascinated readers of his day and continue to provide details about early explorations of the Americans.①It refers to the literary period roughly from 1776 to 1823 in American literature.②The Enlightenment is the dominant literary movement in this period.③Reason is the key notion for writers of the Enlightenment like Franklin.It is a famous pamphlet by Thomas Paine, which appeared in 1776, and boldly advocates a ―Declaration for Independence‖ and brings the separatist agitation to a crisis.American Enlightenment (美国启蒙运动)th and early 17th centuries.) The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-late 18th century, especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand and the European Enlightenment on the other.②Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17th century and the humanist period during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature, society, and religion. Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon liberty, democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance –culminating in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.③The most important leaders of the American Enlightenment include Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.Autobiography（自传）①An autobiography is a person’s account of his or her life.②Generally written in the first person , with the author speaking as ―I‖. It presents life events as the writers views them, and offers insights into the beliefs and perceptions of the author.③Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography set the standard for what was then a new genre. Nonfiction①It refers to any prose narrative that tells about things as they actually happen or that presents factual information about something.②The purpose of this kind of writing is to give a presumably accurate accounting of a person’s life.③Autobiography, biology and essay are among the major forms of nonfiction.Almanac(历书)①An almanac is an annual publication that includes information such as weather forecasts, farmers' planting dates, tide tables, and tabular information in a particular field or fields often arranged according to the calendar etc.②Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac is a case in point.①It is an important and interesting literary work by Franklin, an annual collection of proverbs.②Franklin’s pragmatism and sense of humor are fully demonstrated in this work.Persuasion①Persuasion is a writing meant to convince readers to think or act in a certain way.②A persuasive writer appeals to emotions or reason, offers opinions, and urges actions..Part 2: Literature of Romanticism①During Romantic period in American literature, the major writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and most of the ―fireside school‖ were from New England.②Besides, New England has become the center of literary creation, with Transcendentalism as the most influential literary trend.③Thus critics call this period of literary flourishment in New England the New England Renaissance.美国浪漫主义)①Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.②The romantic period in American literature stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil war.③Irving, Whitman and Thoreau are the representatives.New England poets (新英格兰诗人)①The New England poets were representatives of imitation.②They tried to imitate the forms and themes of there English brothers, such as Robert Burns and William Wordsworth.③Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant are some of its representatives.It is a fictitious person Washington Irving created, he was supposed to be the author of A History of New York, by Diedrich knickerbocker, a rollicking burlesque of a current serious history of the early Dutch settlers which became a classic of humor.①It is a serial consisting of five related novels by James Fenimore Cooper—T he Pioneers, The Last of Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer.②The protagonist of the novel, Natty Bumppo, is a frontier hero, a prototype for the Western cowboy.③With the memorable main characters and a vast group of supporting characters, it becomes the greatest American novels about its past.①Natty Bumppo is the protagonist of the Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, who goes by various names of Leatherstocking, Deerslayer, Pathfinder and Hawkeye.②He is a frontier hero, a prototype for the Western cowboy.美国超验主义)①Transcendentalism is the summit of the Romantic Movement in the history of American literature in the 19th century, which flourished from about 1835 to 1860.②Transcendentalists place emphasis on the importance of the Oversoul, the individual and nature. Specifically, they stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind.③The most important representatives are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Ralph Waldo Emerson①Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, philosopher and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the mid 19th century.②He expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature.③Besides, his The American Scholar was considered to be American’s ―Intellectual Declaration of Independence‖.①It is an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come of which all things are a part.②It is a key doctrine for Transcendentalists.Self-reliance①Self-reliance is an essay written by American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.②It contains the most solid statement of one of his repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas.③These ideas are considered a reaction to a commercial identify. Emerson calls for a return to individual identity.Individualism(个人主义)①Individualism is a moral, political, and social philosophy, which emphasizes individual liberty, the primary importance of the individual, and the “virtues of self-reliance”.②It is thus directly opposed to collectivism, social psychology and sociology, which consider the individual’s rapport to the society or community.③It is often confused with ―egoism‖, but an individualist need not be an egoist.①It is one of the American classics written by Henry David Thoreau.②It records his experiment in living at Walden pond, his sympathetic understanding of nature, his meditation on the meanings of life and his social criticism.③Compared with Emerson’s Nature, it is more radical and social-minded.Calvinism (加尔文主义)①Calvinism refers to the religious teachings of John Calvin and his followers.②Calvin taught that only certain persons, the elect, were chosen by God to be saved, and these could be get only by God’s grace.③It marked the work of Hawthorne and Melville.①It is one of the famous New England experiments in communal living, where some of the region’s most remarkable people gathered.②Hawthorne once lived there for a few months; the experience was reflected in his Blithedale Romance.Ambiguity①Ambiguity means two or more simultaneous interpretation of a word, phrase, action, orsituation, all of which can be supported by the context of a work.②Deliberate ambiguity can contribute to the effectiveness and richness of a work, for example, the open-ended conclusion of Hawthorn e’s Young Goodman Brown.③However, unintentional ambiguity obscures meaning and can confuse readers.①Symbolism is a literary device with which the author deliberately makes concrete objects (the symbols) evolve into some abstractions, usually moralistic or philosophical.②Hawthorne and Melville used this device frequently in their works.①She is a character in The Scarlet Letter.②She was the innocent daughter of Hester and the minister.③She is more of a symbol than a character. To Hester, she was the fruit of human love and physical passion; to Dimmesdale, she was a reminder of his sin; to Chillingworth she was an unforgettable shame and the motivation to take his revenge.①It refers to a novel or story with an allegorical feature, that is, charactering name, an actual or symbolic journey and usually a ―good vs. evil‖ theme.②Hawthorn e’s Young Goodman Brown and Melville’s Moby Dick are typical allegorical novels.①He is the narrator of the Moby Dick.②He is a cool observer and judge of the whole incident.③His thoughtful mind added a strong philosophical notion to the novel and his good knowledge in whaling made the novel an interesting book on whaling.自由体诗歌)①Free verse is a general term referring to the modern form of verse with no fixed foot, rhythm or rime schemes.②It was first written and labeled by a group of French poets of the late 19th century.③Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many American poets, including Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg.①It is the best known poem in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.②It is a celebration of the individual as well as the common people.Edgar Allan Poe suggested that any literary work should have a single effect, that is a single theme, tone and atmosphere.炉边诗人)①William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell constituted a group sometimes called the Fireside Poets.②They earned this nickname because they frequently used the hearth as an image of comfort and unity, a place where families gathered to learn and tell stories.③They wrote familiar poems for the common reader and interpreted the aspirations of the age to their countrymen and brought honor to the nation by achieving international fame.关于死亡的感想)①―T hanatopsis‖ is William Cullen Bryant’s best-known poem in the form of blank verse withthe theme of death.②It follows the tradition of the English ―graveyard school‖ and the central image is the ―mighty sepulcher‖, which will bring contentment to the dead.③The title of the poem means ―view of death‖①The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been preferred to as the age of Realism.②It was a literary doctrine that called for ―reality and truth‖ in the depiction of ordinary life. It is, in literature, an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity.③Three dominant figures are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James.达尔文主义)①It is a term that comes from Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory.②Darwinists think that those who survive in the world are the fittest and those who fail to adapt themselves to the environment will perish.③Influenced by Darwinism, some American naturalist writers apply it as an explanation of human nature and social reality.Social Darwinism(社会达尔文主义)①It was an application of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory to the field of social relation.②Social Darwinist argued that social progress resulted from conflicts in which the fittest or best adapted individuals, or entire societies, would prevail.心理现实主义)①It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’thoughts and motivation.②Henry James’novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.Henry James often wrote about the conflicts, both amusing and serious, between American and European manners and customs. This is widely known as the ―international theme‖.地方特色主义)①Local Colorism is popular in the late 19th century, particularly among authors in the south of the U.S.②This style relied heavily on using words, phrases, and slang that were native to the particular region in which the story took place. The term has come to mean any device which implies a specific focus, whether it is geographical or temporal.③A well-know local colorism author was Mark Twain with his book The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn.①It refers to the period roughly from the Civil War to the beginning of the 20th century, an age of seeming wealth and prosperity.②It comes from a novel, by Mark Twain and Warner, of the same title.Tall story/ Tall tale①It is a humorously exaggerated story of impossible feats.②It flourished in the oral tradition of the American frontier in the 19th century.③Mark Twain is famous for writing tall tale.美国自然主义)①Naturalism is a literary school that originated in France and came to American literature at the end of the 19th century.②The naturalistic writers attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity. Besides, their works were usually in an ironic and pessimistic tone.③Theodore Dreiser is a leading figure of this school with his masterpiece Sister Carrie. Determinism(宿命论)①Determinism is the philosophical belief that events are shaped by forces beyond the control of human beings.②Determinism, important to the literature at the end of the 19th century, assigns control especially to heredity and environment, without seeking their origins further than science can trace.③Determinism usually leads to the tragic fate of the characters in novel.Caroline Meeber①She is the heroine in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. She is a pretty, small-town girl who drifts to Chicago with vague ambition in pursuit of a job and fortune.②As a result, she is used by men and uses them in turn to become a successful actress.③She is a case in point that shows Dreiser’s naturalistic ideas about human conditions.①It refers to Theodore Dreiser’s three novels: T he Financer,The Titan and The Stoic.②The trilogy is based on the life of Charles T. Yerkes, an American transportation magnate.③In this trilogy Dreiser’s focus shifted from the pathos of the helpless protagonists at the bottom of the society to the power of the American financial tycoons in the late 19th century.①It is a French poetic form of 19 lines employing only two rhymes.②―The House on the Hill‖ by Edwin Arlington Robinson uses this poetic form.①Nietzsche’s ideal conception of man is to realize his philosophical principle.②It influenced writers like jack London, who created Wolf Larsen to represent this ideal in The Sea wolf.①He is the protagonist of The Sea wolf, who is the ruthless and amoral captain of the Ghost.②He is the embodiment of London’s ideal superman.①It was one of London’s best novels, which show how, in the Alaskan wilderness, a gentle dog gradually reverts to the ways of his wolf ancestors in order to survive.②It was the best expression of his belief in the Darwinistic notion that man also had the capacity to return to his brute beginnings.Slave Narratives①A uniquely American literary genre, a slave narrative is an autobiographical account of life as aslave.②Often written to expose the horrors of human bondage, it documents a slave’s experiences from his or her own point of view.③Encouraged by abolitionists, many freed or escaped slaves published narratives in the years before the Civil War.th①Imagism was a poetic school at the beginning of the 20th century.②Imagist poets strived for a simple, clear and vivid image, which in itself is the expression of art and meaning. The imagist poetry is a kind of free verse shaking of conventional metres and emphasizing the use of common speech and new rhythms.③This movement was led by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.Imagery (意象)①Imagery means words and phrases that create pictures ,or images in the readers’ mind.②In a literary text, it occurs when an author uses an object that is not really there, in order to create a comparison between one that is, usually evoking a more meaningful visual experience for the reader.③It is useful as it allows an author to add depth and understanding to his work, like a sculptor adding layer and layer to his statue, building it up into a beautiful work of art.①Written by T.S.Eliot, it is a poem of mystical conflict between faith and doubt, beautiful in its language if difficult in its symbolism.②It shows the author’s positive turn toward faith in life.①It is a popular theme in modern American literature derived from the poem The Waste Land by T.S.Eliot.②Terms associated with this theme are dehumanization, infertility of modern civilization and alienation.Waste land Painters(荒原派作家)①Waste land Painters refers to such writers as T.S.Eliot, F. Scott. Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.②With their writings, all of them paint the post-war Western world as a waste land, lifeless and hopeless.迷失的一代)①It is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.②Full 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.③The three best-known representatives of Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.①It is Wallace Steven’s most important poetic collection of poems.②It was part of a revolution in American poetry.③He adapted a variety of experimental styles, odd sounds, curious analogies and inscrutable titles.爵士乐时代)①The Jazz Age refers to the 1920s, a time marked by hedonism and excitement in the life of flaming youth.②With the rise of the Great Depression, materially rich, spiritually lost, the generation felt frustrated with life and indulged in pleasure.③Perhaps the most r epresentative literary work of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.American Dream(美国梦)①The American Dream is the faith held in America that through hard working, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generation.②Nowadays the American dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as a measure of success and happiness.③The Great Gatsby is a highly symbolic meditation on 1920s America as a whole, in particular the disintegration of the American dream.①It is one of the Eggs of Long Island, which are the main settings for The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald.②It was where Nick and Gatsby lived, with a suggestion of roughness and unsophisticated compared with the East Egg where the Buccanans lived.The Snopes Trilogy①It includes The Hamlet, The Town and The Mansion by Faulkner.②It traced the rise of the Snopes family, the representative of the ―poor whites‖and the embodiment of the degraded values.Hemingway code hero(海明威式英雄)①As a concept from Hemingway’s work, code hero is defined by Hemingway as a man who lives correctly, following the ideals of honour, courage, and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful, and always painful.②A code hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, a man who is sensitive and intelligent, a man of actions and of new words. This kind of people are usually spiritually strong, with certain skills, and most of them encounter death many times.③Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea is a typical Hemingway code hero.Santiago①Santiago is the protagonist of The Old Man and the Sea, written by American novelist Ernest Hemingway.②He is an old man who hasn’t caught by any fishes for 84 days. On the final journey he has a fight with shakes.③He embodies Hemingway’s definition of courage as ―grace under pressure‖, who never losesdignity in the face of death.Southern Renaissance(南方文艺复兴)①It is the revival of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s until the 1950s.②The writers affirmed their position on the superiority of the Southern lifestyle over that of the industrialized north.③William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter are writers of this type.先锋派)①It is a French military and political term for the vanguard of an army or political movement.②This term extended since the late 19th century in literature, which refers to the innovative writer who is ahead of the time both in themes and style.③In the 20th century American literature, writers like Faulkner and e.e.cummings can be called avant-garde writers.Yoknapatawpha(约克纳帕塔法)①Most of Faulkner’s literary works were set in the small county of American South. It is the fictional modification of his hometown, Oxford, Mississippi.②To Faulkner, this small piece of land was worth a life’s work in literary writing and here Faulkner created a world of imagination.③Yoknapatawpha has become an allegory of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience of the whole Southern society.Multiple point of view①Point of view is the vantage point from which a narrative is told. Novels sometimes, but infrequently, mix point of views.②William Faulkner is a master at presenting multiple points of view, showing within the same story how characters react differently to the same person or the same events.③The use of this technique gives the story a circular from with one event as the center and various points of view radiating from it. This technique makes it difficult for the reader to see the truth of the story.①A saga is a series of literary works dealing with the history of a family or clan.②Faulkner’s novels and short stories were interrelated by the locality and sometimes by the characters and as a whole they were regarded as sages of the clan or family.①He was an important American novelist of the 1920s and the first American writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature.②His important works include Main Street and Babbitt.Camera eye①It is a literary device developed by John Dos Passos, which provides an autobiographical account of his life corresponding to the time of the fictional narrative.②Written usually in a stream-of-consciousness style, they record the author’s activities and reflections at roughly the same time that events in the fictional narratives are taking place.③These impressionistic accounts recreate his changing moods in a turbulent age, showing that his private life is part of a greater cultural complexity.New Criticism(新批评派)①New criticism was a dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid-20thcentury, from the 1920s to the early 1960s.②Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography.③John Crowe Ransom is a leading figure in this literary trend.It refers to the dramatic works produced by the playwrights of the early 20th century represented by Eugene O’Neil.Willy Loman①He is a character in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which is a sad vision of American dream.②He keeps dreaming on success and living in illusions and lies, but he never seems to be aware of that.③It should be noted that his kind of success is never measured except in terms of dollars. Impressionism(印象主义)①It is a style of painting that gives the impression made by the subject on the artist without much attention to details writers accepted the same conviction that the personal attitudes and moods of the writer were legitimate elements in depicting character or setting or action.②Briefly, it is a style of writing characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather than realistic moods.哈莱姆文艺复兴)①Harlem Renaissance was a period of remarkable creativity in literature by African-Americans, from the end of the First World War in the 1920s.②They presented new insights into the American experience and paved the way for the flourishment of Black literature in the mid 20th century.③Distinguished writers who were part of the movement included Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.Part 5: After the WWIIThe Black Mountain Poets(黑山派诗人)①It is a loosely associated group of poets that formed an important part of the avant-garde of American poetry in the 1950s.②They published innovative yet disciplined verse in the Black Mountain Review, which became a leading forum of experimental verse.③This school is linked with Charles Olson’s theory of ―projective verse‖, which insisted on an open form based on the spontaneity of the breath pause in speech and the typewriter line in writing.The New York School(纽约派诗人)①The New York School was an informal group of American poets and painters active in 1950s New York City.②Their poetic subject matter was often light, violent, or observational, while writing style was often described as cosmopolitan and world-traveled. The poets often drew inspiration from Surrealism and the contemporary avant-garde art movement, in particular the action painting of their friends in the New York City art circle.。
History And Anthology of American Literature （6）附：作者及作品一、殖民主义时期The Literature of Colonial America1．船长约翰·史密斯Captain John Smith《自殖民地第一次在弗吉尼亚垦荒以来发生的各种事件的真实介绍》“A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Colony”《弗吉尼亚地图，附：一个乡村的描述》“A Map of Virginia: with a Description of the Country”《弗吉尼亚通史》“General History of Virginia”2．威廉·布拉德福德William Bradford《普利茅斯开发历史》“The History of Plymouth Plantation”3．约翰·温思罗普John Winthrop《新英格兰历史》“The History of New England”4．罗杰·威廉姆斯Roger Williams《开启美国语言的钥匙》”A Key into the Language of America”或叫《美洲新英格兰部分土著居民语言指南》Or “A Help to the Language of the Natives in That Part of America Called New England ”5．安妮·布莱德斯特Anne Bradstreet《在美洲诞生的第十个谬斯》”The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America”二、理性和革命时期文学The Literature of Reason and Revolution 1。
