American Literature:the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States.●For more than a millennium, each stage in the development of the English language has produced itsmasterworks.●Following the NormanConquest of 1066, French influence shaped the vocabulary as well as the literarypreoccupations of Middle English.●The publication of the King James V ersion of the Bible in 1611 infused the literature of the period withboth religious imagery and a remarkably vigorous language, and it served as an important instrument for the spread of literacy throughout England.●Gradually seven kingdoms arose in Britain. By the 7th century, these small kingdoms were combinedinto a united kingdom called England.●Angles, Saxons and Jutes usually known as Anglo-Saxons are the first Englishmen. Language spokenby them is called Old English, which is the foundation of English language and literature. With the Anglo-Saxon settlement in Britain, the history of English literature began.Beowulf is the oldest poem in the English language.●Thus three languages existed in England at that time. The Normans spoke French, the lower classspoke English, and the scholars and clergymen used Latin.●The romance was the prevailing form of literature in the Middle Ages.●The central character of the romance is the knight, a man of noble birth skilled in the use of weapons. GEOFFREY CHAUCER乔叟Chaucer was the representative writer of the 14th century, and therefore the 14th century is usually called the Age of Chaucer.the outstanding English poet before Shakespeare and ―the first finder of our language.‖ His The Canterbury Tales ranks as one of the greatest poetic works in English.The Canterbury Tales坎特伯雷故事集The great majority of the words Chaucer uses are the same in meaning and function as their Modern English counterparts. They usually differ greatly in spelling. But this initial difficulty soon disappears as one reads through the text -- especially if one reads the text aloud.Chaucer‘s contribution to English poetry is that he introduced from France the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter, which was later called the heroic couplet, to English poetry, instead of the old Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.文艺复兴时期The English Renaissance●The Renaissance was a European phenomenon. It revived the study of Roman and Greek classics andmarked the beginning of bourgeois revolution.English literature in the Renaissance period is usually regarded as the high light in the history of English literature. In the Elizabethan period, English literature developed with a great speed and made a magnificent achievement. William Shakespeare 莎士比亚●Shakespeare occupies a position unique in world literature. Hamlet is made a hero of the Renaissanceperiod and the representative of humanism. Through him Shakespeare expressed his own humanist ideas, Hamlet is made a hero of the Renaissance period and the representative of humanism. Through him Shakespeare expressed his own humanist ideas,●Shall I compare thee to a summer‘s day?●Thou art more lovely and more temperate:●Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,●And summer‘s lease hath all too short a date:●So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,●So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.iambic pentameter 抑扬格五音步●in poetry, a line of verse containing five metrical feet. Bacon‘s essays have a literary style peculiar totheir own. They are noted for their clearness, brevity and force of expression.●The Faerie Queene is a long poem with sweet melody and its lines are very musical. Spenserinvented a new verse form for this poem. The verse form has been called Spenserian Stanza. Each stanza has nine lines, each of the first eight lines is in iambic pentametre form, and the ninth line is an iambic hexametre line, rhyming a b a b b c b c c.Metaphysical poet 玄学诗人John Milton(1608-1674) 弥尔顿Milton ranks second only to Shakespeare among English poets; his writings and his influence are an important part of the history of English literature, culture, and libertarian thought. He is best known for Paradise Lost, which is generally regarded as the greatest epic poem in the English language.Paradise Lost 失乐园Paradise Lost is an epic poem written in blank verse—i.e., unrhymed iambic pentameter verse. It tells the story of Satan's rebellion against God and his expulsion from heaven and the subsequent temptation and expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.●It is a long epic in 12 books, done in blank verse. All is not lost; the unconquerable will●And study of revenge, immortal hate,●And courage never to submit or yield：The best-known section in this book is the V anity Fair episode. On the V anity Fair, honors, titles, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures and lives can be sold or bought, and cheating, roguery, murder and adultery are normal phenomena. Enlightenment 启蒙运动The Enlightenment was a progressive intellectual movement throughout W estern Europe in the 18th century. It was an expression of struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism.●The main literary stream of the 18th century was realism. What the writers described in theirworks were social realities. The main characters were usually common men. Most of the writers concentrated their attention to daily life.Samuel Johnson 约翰逊博士●His letter to Chesterfield is often taken as sounding ―the death-knell of patronage,‖ which it did not. Butit did assert the dignity of the author.Sentimentalism感伤主义Daniel Defoe(1660-1731) 笛福Robinson Crusoe 鲁滨逊飘流记Robinson Crusoe (1719), an immediate success at home and on the Continent, is a unique fictional blending of the traditions of Puritan spiritual autobiography with an insistent scrutiny of the nature of man as social creature and an extraordinary ability to invent a sustaining modern myth.Jonathan Swift(1667-1745) 斯威夫特Gulliver‗s Travels 格列佛游记Numerous obstacles have to be overcome before he achieves this, however, and in the course of the action the various sets of characters pursue each other from one part of the country to another, giving Fielding an opportunity to paint an incomparably vivid picture of England in the mid-18th century.Romanticism浪漫主义Romanticism was marked by intense human sympathy, and by a consequent understanding of the human heart.The sympathy for the poor, and the cry against oppression grew stronger and stronger.Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton were inspiration of the romantic movement. W e can hardly read a poem of the early romanticists without finding a suggestion of the influence of one of these great leaders.Robert Burns 彭斯●national poet of Scotland, who wrote lyrics and songs in the Scottish dialect of English.The Romantic Age began in 1798 and came to an end in 1832. The publication of the L yrical Ballads marked the break with classicism and the beginning of the Romantic Age.In 1832, the last romantic writer Walter Scott died, so in that year, the Romantic Age came to an end.●This age is emphatically an age of poetry. Many young enthusiastic writers turned to poetry as ahappy man to singing. The glory of the age lies in the poetry of W ordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats.●W omen as novelists appeared in this age. It was during this period that women assumed, for thefirst time, an important place in English literature. Jane Austen offered us her charming descriptions of everyday life in her enduring works, which raised woman to the high place in literature she has ever since maintained.William Wordsworth华兹华斯●major English Romantic poet and poet laureate of England (1843–50). His Lyrical Ballads (1798),written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the English Romantic movement.●I wandered lonely as a cloud●That floats on high o‘er vales and hills,●When all at once I saw a crowd,●A host of golden daffodils:●Beside the lake, beneath the trees,●Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.Lake Poet 湖畔派诗人Jane Austen 奥斯丁English writer who first gave the novel its distinctly modern character through her treatment of ordinary people in everyday life. Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time in such novels●Although the birth of the English novel is to be seen in the first half of the 18th century in the workof Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding, it is with Jane Austen that the novel takes on its distinctively modern character in the realistic treatment of unremarkable people in the unremarkable situations of everyday life.In her six novels—Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion—Austen created the comedy of manners of middle-class life in the England of her time, revealing the possibilities of ―domestic‖ literature.George Gordon Byron 拜伦Percy Bysshe Shelley 雪莱Ode to the W est Wind 西风颂●Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth●Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!●Be through my lips to unawakened earth●The trumpet of a prophecy!O Wind,●If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?John Keats 济慈●English Romantic lyric poet who devoted his short life to the perfection of a poetry marked byvivid imagery, great sensuous appeal, and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend.维多利亚时代English Literature in the Victorian AgeCritical Realism 批判现实主义English critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the forties and the early fifties. It foun d its expression in the form of novel. The critical realists, most whom were novelists, described with much vividness and artistic skill the chief traits of the English society and criticized the capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint. The greatest English realist of the time was Charles Dickens.Charles Dickens 狄更斯Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity than had any previous author during his lifetime. Much in his work could appeal to simple and sophisticated, to the poor and to the Queen, and technological developments as well as the qualities of his work enabled his fame to spread worldwide very quickly.The range, compassion, and intelligence of his apprehension of his society and its shortcomings enriched his novels and made him both one of the great forces in 19th-century literature and an influential spokesman of the conscience of his age.In his own time Thackeray was regarded as the only possible rival to Dickens. His pictures of contemporary life were obviously real and were accepted as such by the middle classes.V anity Fair 名利场The main plot centers on the story of two women Amelia Sedley and Rebecca Sharp.The Bronte sisters 勃朗特三姐妹●Jane Eyre, the heroine of the novel, maintains that women should have equal rights with men. In thisnove l, Gaskell shows great sympathy for the workers. She highly praises the workers‘ struggle against capitalists●He clasps the crag with crooked hands;●Close to the sun in lonely lands,●Ringed with the azure world, he stands.Robert Browning 布朗宁Browning's dramatic monologues must, as he himself insisted, be recognized as the utterances of fictitious persons drawing their strength from their appropriateness in characterizing the speaker, and not as expressions of Browning's own sentiments.The play is about the training Higgins gives to a Cockney flower girl to enable her to pass as a lady and is also about the repercussions of the experiment's success.●The W aste Land(1922), traced the sickness of modern civilization—a civilization that, on theevidence of the war, preferred death or death-in-life to life—to the spiritual emptiness and rootlessness of modern existence.William Butler Y eats 叶芝T.S.Eliot 艾略特●If one figure had to be named as the pivotal leader among writers in English during the first halfof the twentieth century, it would be Thomas Sterns Eliot. Not only was he a great poet, a greatcritic, a fine playwright, and a far-reaching influence on others, but he became the conscience of his generation, deliberately fitting himself for this role, which he summed up in a celebrated phrase when he defined his belief as ―classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion‘.●What Eliot achieved was an exact expression for the spiritual disease of the twentieth century.After the unquenchable optimist of the Victorian Age had burned itself out in W orld W ar I, a period of intense questioning began. One by one, what had seemed established certainties were questioned; a society that had appeared both stable and progressive for ove r a century broke into fragments. Eliot‘s classic expression of the temper of his age is ‗The W aste Land‖, a poem which, despite its extreme difficulty, brought him immediate fame.The Waste Land 荒原●April is the cruelest month, breeding●Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing●Memory and desire, stirring●Dull roots with spring rain.Seamus Heaney 希尼Bogland 沼泽地●W e have no prairies●To slice a big sun at evening—●Everywhere the eye concedes to●Encroaching horizon.Modernist novelists 现代主义小说家V irginia Woolf 伍尔夫●In her long essay, A Room of One's Own (1929), she described the difficulties encountered bywomen writers in a man's world.William Golding 戈尔丁●Golding's first published novel was Lord of the Flies (1954; film 1963 and 1990), the story of a groupof schoolboys isolated on a coral island who revert to savagery.Its imaginative and brutal depiction of the rapid and inevitable dissolution of social mores aroused widespread interest. Doris Lessing 莱辛●The Golden Notebook (1962), in which a woman writer attempts to come to terms with the life ofher times through her art, is one of the most complex and the most widely read of her novels.美国文学American LiteratureAmerican literature is the youngest of all national literatures. English literature in the United States is therefore only about more than 200 years old. In spite of this fact, the people of the United States have produced some of the world‘s best literature.BradstreetShe wrote her poems while rearing eight children, functioning as a hostess, and performing other domestic duties.▪The English colonies in North America rose in arms against their parent country and the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The W ar of the Independence lasted till 1783, and the United States of America was founded.The 18th century was the age of the Enlightenment. Rationalism was the dominant spirit. The enlighteners were opposed to the colonial order fighting against the Puritan tradition, brought to life secular literatureBenjamin Franklin 富兰克林Franklin, next to George Washington possibly the most famous 18th-century American,Autobiography 自传Thomas Jefferson 杰弗逊draftsman of the Declaration of Independence of the United StatesThe Declaration of Independence 独立宣言▪W e hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.超验主义和浪漫主义Transcendentalism and the Romantic AgeIn this period a new literature was forged by such authors as Irving, Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Melville and Whitman. It was rich in native character and tradition. Like the European literature of the time, it was romantic in character.Transcendentalism wrote an important chapter for the history of ideas in this period. It was the expression of an intuitional idealism which had taken various forms in American thought as a counter-current to rationalistic and authoritarian orthodoxies from early times.▪The American transcendentalists formed a club called the Transcendental Club. The club members often met at Emerson‘s Concord home. Thoreau is the most noteworthy of these in respect to literary values. Emerson was the leading spirit of the Transcendental club.The first great essay writer in the United States was W ashington Irving. He was the first great American author born after the Revolutionary W ar.W ashington Irving 欧文▪The Sketch-Book includes the short stories The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip V an Winkle. Ralph W al do Emerson (1803-1882) 爱默生Ralph W aldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803 in Boston, Massachusetts. He is widely regarded as one of America's most influential authors, philosophers and thinkersThese roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. Henry David Thoreau 梭罗▪at the age of 28 in 1845, wanting to write his first book, he went to W alden pond and built his cabin on land owned by EmersonOver the years, Thoreau's reputation has been strong, although he is often cast into roles -- the hermit in the wilderness, the prophet of passive resistance (so dear to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King) -- that he would have surely seen as somewhat alienBut Thoreau's style differs markedly from that of Emerson, whose natural expression is through abstraction. Thoreau presents experience through concrete images;Romantic Poets▪Often the romantic writers were transcendentalists and mystics. Sometimes they were lovers of nature. All the great poets of the middle of the nineteenth century in American literature were romanticists.Henry W adsworth Longfellow 朗费罗Americans owe a great debt to Longfellow because he was among the first of American writers to use native themes.W alt Whitman 惠特曼Leaves Of Grass 草叶集a collection of some of the finest American free-verse poetry ever written.Emily Dickinson 狄金森▪She is widely considered one of the greatest poets in American literature. Her unique, gemlike lyrics are distillations of profound feeling and original intellect, and they stand outside the mainstream of American literary tradition.American literature produced only one female poet during the nineteenth century. This was Emily Dickinson.▪To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,▪One clover and a bee,▪And revery.▪Revery alone will do,▪If bees are few.James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) 库柏▪They are vivid and fascinating stories about Indian life. They also tell of the poineers in early America. The characters are vigorous, and the description of primitive forest life is captivating.Unfortunately Cooper‘s Indians are ideal Indians. They are very unlike the real American Indian, and have given people a false concept of the aboriginal American.Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) 霍桑▪As America's first true psychological novel, The Scarlet Letter would convey these ideals;contrasting puritan morality with passion and individualism.The Scarlet Letter 红字The Scarlet Letter attained an immediate and lasting success because it addressed spiritual and moral issues from a uniquely American standpoint.▪Hawthorne was masterful in the use of symbolism, and the scarlet letter "A" stands as his most potent symbol, around which interpretations of the novel revolve. At one interpretive pole the "A"stands for adultery and sin, and the novel is the story of individual punishment and reconciliation.At another pole it stands for America and allegory, and the story suggests national sin and its human cost. Y et possibly the most convincing reading, taking account of all others, sees the "A" asa symbol of ambiguity, the very fact of multiple interpretations and the difficulty of achievingconsensus.Moby Dick莫比·迪克▪The novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville is an epic tale of the voyage of the whaling ship the Pequod and its captain, Ahab, who relentlessly pursues the great Sperm Whale (the title character) during a journey around the world.Harriet Beecher Stowe: 1811-1896 斯托夫人Stowe learned about slave life by talking to these people and by reading various materials, including slave narratives and antislavery tracts. She also saw Northern racial prejudice. Uncle Tom‘s Cabin 汤姆叔叔的小屋▪The novel ends with a chapter summarizing the lesson learned from these "sketches" of experiences with slavery: that slavery is indeed a very cruel and evil institution that should be abolished.Abraham Lincoln 林肯The Gettysburg Address Gettysburg, Pennsylvania Nov. 19, 1863 ▪Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation,conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.▪The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.现实主义小说Realistic Novelists▪writers who were interested in problems of daily life; authors who could picture the pioneers of the Far W est, the new immigrants, and the struggles of the working classes now began to gain the favor of the reading public. This literary interest in the so-called ‗reality‘ of life started a new period in American writing known as the rise of Realism.Mark Twain 1835 – 1910 马克·吐温The Adventures of Tom Sawyer汤姆·索耶历险记Huckleberry Finn哈克贝利·芬历险记▪The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, is about a young boy, Huck, in search of freedom and adventure. The shores of the Mississippi River provide the backdrop for the entire book.Kate Chopin 1851-1904 肖班The A wakening 觉醒Henry James (1843-1916) 詹姆斯▪Among James' masterpieces are Daisy Miller(1879), where the young and innocent American, Daisy finds her values in conflict with European sophistication and The Portrait Of A Lady (1881) where again a young American woman becomes a victim of her provincialism during her travels i n Europe.Theodore Dreiser 1871-1945 德莱塞In his fiction, Dreiser deals with social problems and with characters who struggle to survive. His sympathetic treatment of a "morally loose" woman in Sister Carrie was called immoralSister Carrie 嘉莉妹妹Cather's work made her one of the most important American novelists of the first half of the 20th century. Cather's fiction is characterized by a strong sense of place, the subtle presentation of human relationships, an often unconventional narrative structure, and a style of clarity and beauty. Beginning with Alexander's Bridge (1912), Cather devoted herself to writing. Many of her books drew on her memories and knowledge of Nebraska. O Pioneers! (1913), My Antonia (1918), and A Lost Lady (1923) offer fascinating explorations of the experience of pioneers of the PlainsMy Antonia 我的安东尼娅The twentieth century witnessed a renaissance in American literature. The volume of American literary activity, the large number of new authors, the high level of their powers, the originality, daring, and general success of many new forms of expression, and the absorbed response of a reading public larger and more critical than ever before, produced a new and brilliant national literature.Robert Frost(1874-1963)弗罗斯特one of the finest of rural New England's 20th century pastoral poets.▪The woods are lovely, dark and deep.But I have promises to keep,And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.Ezra Pound (1885-1972) 庞德▪Ezra Pound founded the Imagist movement in poetry, which encouraged experimenting with different verse forms, and opposed representational art in favor of abstract forms.The apparition of these faces in the crowd;Petals on a wet, black bough.Langston Hughes(1902-1967) 休斯The Lost Generation 迷惘的一代▪Name applied to the disillusioned intellectuals and aesthetes of the years following the First W orld W ar, who rebelled against former ideals and values, but could repalce them only by despair or a cynical hedonism.Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) 海明威William Faulkner 1897-1962 福克纳In an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner has invented a host of characters typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. The human drama in Faulkner's novels is then built on the model of the actual, historical drama extending over almost a century and a half Each story and each novel contributes to the construction of a whole, which is the imaginary Y oknapatawpha County and its inhabitants.John Steinbeck(1902-1968) 斯坦贝克He is best remembered for THE GRAPES OF WRA TH (1939), a novel widely considered to be a 20th-century classic.The Grapes of Wrath 愤怒的葡萄Eugene O‘Neill(1888-1953) 奥尼尔one of the greatest playwrights in American history. Through his experimental and emotionally probing dramas, he addressed the difficulties of human society with a deep psychological complexity.Arthur Miller 1915－2005 阿瑟·米勒Miller's plays are, above all, concerned with morality as they reflect the individual's response to the manifold pressures exerted by the forces of family and society.Joseph Heller (1923-1999) 海勒was a popular and respected writer whose first and best-known novel, Catch-22(1961), is considered a classic of the post-W orld W ar II era.▪Catch-22 is most often interpreted as an antiwar protest novel that foreshadowed the widespread resistance to the Vietnam W ar that erupted in the late 1960s.Toni Morrison 莫里森The Bluest Eye最蓝的眼睛first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision. Set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola BreedloveAlice W alker 沃克The Color Purple紫色published in 1982, tells the story of Celie, a Black woman in the South. Celie writes letters to God in which she tells about her life--her roles as daughter, wife, sister, and mother.Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell 1900-1949 米切尔GONE WITH THE WIND 飘▪The novel had similar success throughout the United States and around the world. It won for Margaret Mitchell a Pulitzer Prize in 1937. It has sold more copies worldwide than any other book except the Bible.。
