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1.Early Colonial Literature. 1607-1700
2.The literature of Reason And Revolution(18th century) The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a movement marked by an emphasis on rationality rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and representative government in place of monarchy. Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man.
3. American Romanticism
Features:
1)From the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of he Civil War. It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It is also called “the American Renaissance”.
2)The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature.
3) The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values.
4) Besides, a preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of original sin and the mystery of evil marked the works of Hawthorne, Melville and a host of lesser writers
5)The most clearly defined Romantic literary movement in this period is New England Transcendentalism
6)It ranges from the comic fables of Washington Irving to the Gothic tales of Edgar Allen Poe, from the frontier adventures of James Fenimore Cooper to the narrative quests of Herman Melville, from the psychological romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the social realism of Rebecca Harding.
4. The literature of Realism (1865-1918)
1. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life.
2.Interpreting sympathetically the “common feelings of commonplace people” was best suited as a technique to express the spirit of America.
3.They introduced industrial workers and farmers , ambitious businessmen and vagrants流浪者, prostitutes妓女and unheroic胆怯的soldiers as major characters in fiction .
4.They approached the harsh realities and pressures in the post Civil War society either by a comprehensive picture of modern life , or by a psychological exploration of man's subconsciousness .
5.Artistically ,naturalistic writings are usually unpolished in language , lacking in academic skills and unwieldy in structure . Philosophically , the naturalists believe that the real and true is always partially hidden
from the eyes of the individual , or beyond this control . In a word , naturalism is evolved from realism when the author's tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic .
5. The Modern Period of literature
1.The idea of “seize the day” or “enjoy the present” was pervasive, as opposed to placing all hope in the future.
2.the writer’s task was to develop techniques that could represent a break with the past. Thus, the defining formal characteristics of the modernistic works are discontinuity and fragmentation.
3.A typical modern work will seem to begin arbitrarily, to advance without explanation, and to end without resolution.
4.They usually “screen himself” and speak ind irectly through an impersonal and objective story, which is usually a myth or a piece of the earlier literature, or a “mask”, that is, a persona.
On the Characteristics and Speciality of Literature in Each Stage
美国文学各个时期特点
文理学院
11级英语二班
