导图社区 American literature美国文学思维导图
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American literature美国文学思维导图
这是一篇关于美国文学的思维导图。该思维导图对美国文学选读第三版的内容进行了分类整理 ，对于美国感兴趣的同学有意义。
编辑于2021-07-07 18:40:41- 美国文学
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American literature
The origin of American literature
Native American tradition is the foundation
Oral tradition
Stories as the most recognized construction within the oral tradition
Choice of words,arrangement and their effect are by large determined by the storyteller
The basic kind of story is centered on an event
Purpose:writing for Europe
Handover to their homeland audiences fresh news of the NEW WORLD
The first classics American literature were written for Europe
Puritans and American Puritanism
The English settlement began in the early part of 17th century The new comers are religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles
American Puritanism :religious principles established by American Puritans
Predestination,total depravity,limited atonement (John Calvin
Human beings were evil and we cannot change it, many of us will be condemned to hell
A way of life:hard work,thrifty,piety, sobriety
A state of mind than a set of tenets
A part of national atmosphere (without understanding it, you may not understand the American literature)
They were idealists, but become practical after the arrival and struggle
A sense of mission and optimism
The metaphorical mode of perception contributed to American symbolism
The physical world is a symbol of god
Sermon was an popular form of literature
1. Their emphasis was on preaching 2. Governed by the rule of clarity 3. The primary purpose was redemption
Colonial literature
History and chronicle
Captain John Smith(governor of Jamestown) Reveal the settler’s version of the new land as something capable of being built into a new Garden of Eden
John Winthrop Model of Christian Charity
William Bradford Of Plymouth Pantation
Robert Beverley
William Byrd
Biography and Autobiography
1. All writing about the self-as-subject 2. Showing the perspective of the author treating a subject( may be a persona ) 3. Reflecting ideological concerns 4. Less fidelity to factual detail, but the emphasis of establishing his account in religious 5. The objective was to prove that New England and her people were special to God
Narratives
Mary Rowlandson
John Williams
The tension between theological restraints and personal emotions
This tension is most frequently emerged in colonial private verse
It was designed for god and the poet
Anne Bradstreet Edward Taylor
It is least evident in colonial public verse
Elegies 挽歌
Didactic and communal in emphasis and shows a fascination with acrostics, the first or final letters of each line spell the name of the deceased
Puritan elegies focus more often on women and children, provokes irreverent satire. Southern colonial elegies are often mocking or ironic, rarely allude to Bible.
Satires 讽刺诗
Ebenezer Cook The Sot-Seed Factor
Anne Bradstreet The Flesh and the Spirit Her fame is based on her later and shorter poems. She looked in to her heart or out upon a real New England world, and was less dependent on stock poetic conventions.
Essays and Pamphlets 小册子
written for civil and religious freedom or national independence
Sermonic writing in the first half of the 18th century
The Great Awakening and the Revival of the Sermonic Writing
Between 1739 to 1742, the religious revival, it was called a great and general awakening Before 1740s, written word was important; in the 1740s, sermons, or the spoken word was important
Jonathan Edwards
1. He and the Awakening restored the oratorical（演说的） 2. Edwards and Franklin represented the heritage of American Puritanism 3. Edwards the religious idealism and Franklin the level-headed common sense
Poetry
Purpose: An auxiliary in the pamphlet skirmishing (争论）
John Trumbull : M’Fingal
Philip Freneau: poet of the American Revolution, the most important poet of 18th Century America : American Independent, on the fall of General Earl Cornwallis
Jonathan Odell: the congratulation, the American Times
Formal celebratory poems: Phillis Wheatley, the first Black American Writer of consequence in America: to his excellency general Washington
Comic Narrative Poems: Francis Hopkinson : the battle of the kegs
Fiction
Charles Brockden Brown, the most important American novelist before James Fenimore Cooper：Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, Edgar Huntley，Ormond, Arthur Mervyn
William Hill Brown: The Power of Sympathy, The Triumph of Nature
Hugh Henry Brackernridge: Modern Chivalry (the first important fictional work of the American frontier
Romanticism
First emerged in 1790s Germany and Britain and 1820s in France Emphasis on freedom of individual self-expression
Neoclassicism
Dominated French literature in the 17th and 18th century
Writing and criticism be guided by derived from Ancient Greek and Roman authors
The decorum that style must suits subject-matter The belief that art must be delight and instruct The assumption modern author should intimate ancient authors
Emphasis of Romanticism
The emotional directness of personal experience and boundless of individual imagination The creative imagination is the center of Romantic views of art
Inspiration for Romanticism
The transcendental philosophy of Kant and Fichte Creative power of mind and nature as a responsive mirror of soul
Native Factor
1. The political economic and cultural independence create a sense of optimism 2. Democracy and equality became the ideals of the new nation 3. A sense of optimism among people 4. The buoyant mood of nation and spirit of the times
Foreign factor
England and Germany was a decisive influence English Poetry and prose make a stimulating impact
Features
1. Expression of American National Experience 2. Moralizing Tendency 3. Reflection the newness of America
The essence is the expression of a real new experience and an alien quality
1. Influenced by American Puritanism 2. Moralize more than European brothers, edify more than entertain 3. Love and sex were taboos
Early American Romanticism
From the end of 18th century to the early 1830s
More foreign than native, more imitative than indigenous, imitative and traditional
Washington Irving
The first American writer who won an international literary fame, mainly rested on essays and short stories The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, in this Sketch, Rip Van Winkle , The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are the most famous
An indigenous American writer His early works were predominantly “ English and Europe”
Limitation 1. A man of his time rather than for all time, describing and commenting but not probing his world 2. The isolation and alienation that is at the heart of much American writing before the Civil War
Contributions 1. The first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame(father of American literature) 2. The first American short story writer 3. The first American Romantic writer( The Sketch Book marked the beginning of American Romanticism
James Fenimore Cooper
The first successful American Novelist The writer of the first novels of their kinds The leatherstocking tales The creator of a myth
Precaution, The Spy, The Pioneers, The leatherstocking Tales
include The Pioneers, The last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer
In these novels, he created Natty Bumppo
This novel answered to the 19th century America’s deepest sense of itself as nature’s nation
Cooper was no deliberate craftsman of fiction in the way Hawthorne or Poe were, he lacked critical sophistication
He creates a myth about the formative period of the American nation
American Renaissance
(New phase of American Romanticism) (New England Transcendentalism)
Transcendentalism is idealism as appears in 1842 A kind of recreation boosted the materialistic-oriented life of the time It is romantic idealism, represented a new way of looking the world, man, and nature.
Emphasis on the importance of spirit
1. Spirit, or the over soul as the most important thing in the universe 2. The oversoul was a omnipresent and omnipotent power, which constitutes the chief element of the universe 3. Give a new way of looking at the world
Emphasis on the importance of the individual
1. Individual is the most important element of society 2. Perfection, self-culture, self-improvement should become the first concern 3. The ideal type of man should be self-reliant individual 4. A reaction against the Calvinist and the process of dehumanization that came in the wake of capitalism
Nature as symbolic of the spirit
1. Nature as the symbolic of the spirit of god 2. Nature was alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence 3. Physical world was a symbol of spiritual
Puritanism on New England Transcendentalism
1. Inward communication of the soul with god and divine symbolic of nature 2. Emphasis on the individual was directly traceable to the Puritan’s self -culture and self-improvement
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The most eloquent spokes man of the New England Transcendentalism He was brought up with Calvinist, but then reject it Formed an informal Transcendental club, founded transcendental journal, the dial
His belief in the transcendence of the oversoul Regard the nature as the purest, sanctifying moral influence on man,an direct intuitive understanding of God
The divinity of man
The importance of individual The possibility for man to develop and improve himself were infinite.
Nature as a mediator between man and god, it is as symbolic of god
“The argument of the poet should decide the form of the poem instead of the traditional technique”
Published Nature, which says that the universe is composed of Nature and the soul, and spirit is present everywhere. It has been called the manifesto of American Transcendentalism
Influence 1. His call for independent culture 2. Americans should write about here and now rather than imitating and importing from other lands, they should write in a American way 3. His works show the desire and struggle for a country to find its identity in its formative period. 4. He believes that there is a force always at work to make the best better and the worst good.
Henry David Thoreau
1. A friend and follower of Emerson 2. Wanted to move away from the rush of America social life 3. He hate the materialistic society and slavery system
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1. The greatest American writer in the first half of the 19th century 2. The scarlet letter
Sense of sin and evil
1. His works are overwhelmed by the black vision. Most works deal with evil one way or another 2. The influence of Calvinist doctrine 3. The aloofness of from Emersonian Transcendentalist optimism
Aesthetics
1. He wanted to create a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairyland where actual and imaginary meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of other 2. He believed romance was the predestined form of American narrative
Scarlet Letter
1. Criticize puritan severity toward sex and its tendency to suppress bright color 2. The load of didacticism is heavier and the desire to elevate is nowhere stronger 3. The moral. Emotional, and psychological effect of sin on people 4. The moral growth of the woman when sinned against 5. The name in this work are all symbolic
Hester Prynne
Herman Melville
Moby Dick 1. An encyclopedia of everything 2. A Shakespeare tragedy of man fighting in an hostile universe 3. Melville’s bleak view of the world 4. The idea that man can make the world for himself is a transcendentalist folly
Theme and techniques 1. Alienation , rejection and quest 2. Symbolism and the multiple point of view
Poets of American Renaissance
Breaking free of the convention of iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in for unknown before
Walt Whitman
Art should be based on originally on nature Poets are seers, individual and complete in themselves
Ideals of equality and democracy and celebrated the dignity, the self-reliant spirit, and the joy of the common man Emphasis on brotherhood and solidarity A transitional figure between transcendentalism and realism
Technique 1. A daring experimental 2. Parallelism or a rhythm of thought in which the line is the rhythmical unit 3. Phonetic recurrence 4. Wrote in free verse
Influence 1. Great influence over modern poetry 2. A mountain in American literature 3. Innovation, versification, censure of the weakness of democratic practice
Emily Dickson
Ideas 1. Her poetry is a clear illustration of her religious-ethical and political-social ideas 2. Yearning for religious certitude,god’s help and good life, her poetry concerns death and immortality 3. Emphasize free will, human responsibility and self-improvement
Edgar Allen Poe Original literary critic
Theories for the short story
The short story must be of such length as to be readable at one sitting , to ensure the totality of impressions (brevity)
No word should be used which does not contribute to the “pre-established”design of the work (compression)
A tale should reveal logical truth, with the last sentence leaving a sense of beauty (completeness)
Theme and technique
The disintegration of the self His style is traditional His choice of words and his syntax is difficult to understand Stress rhythm, defining true poetry as the rhythmical creation of beauty, and declaring that music is the perfection of soul
Influence
His aesthetics and conscious craftsmanship, his attack on the heresy of the didactic, his call for the rhythmical creation of beauty
Father of psychoanalysis criticism 精神分析法 and father of detective story
The New England Poets
William Cullen Bryant, Henry’s Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier
Taken as a whole, they were conservative and imitative writers, serving as spokesmen for the culture of EuRope transplanted to America
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the most popular single American poet of the antebellum period
Women’s Writing
Major features
Imbue thief writings with an ideaology appropriately labeled domestic
Sharply critical of American home life
Represented from a middle-class and white Anglo-Saxon perspective
Record the customs, manners, characters, and feature of the national life
Catharine Maria Sedgwick
First highly successful American woman writer
Preoccupation with the idea of national identity and an ideal of the women citizens
Married or Single
Lydia Maria Child
An appeal in favor of that class of American called Africans American blacks deserve the full protection of law and equal professional and educational opportunities
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Uncle Tom’s Cabin Dried: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp
Woman Essayist: Margaret Fuller
Women in the nineteenth century
She holds that until men recognize women as equal, their own claim to divinity is suspect No woman was exclusively feminine
Slave narratives in the Romantic Period
William Wells Brown Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, which is thought of as the first novel by an African American author
Fredrick Douglass Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave, Written by himself, My bondage and Amy Freedom
Realism
1. A literary movement which came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against romanticism and sentimentalism 2. Express the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low 3. Representation of life is its main subject, the soul the life and the speech of people. 4. There was contrast between genteel and graceful prose on the one hand and vernacular方言的 diction and rough and ready frontier on the other 5. True detail from observation; objective human nature and experience, rather than idealized
Civil War impact American literature
Taught man that life was not so good, man was not and God was not
Commerce was the lead in national economy Move away from farm Spirit of self-reliance changed into admiration for driving ambition, a lust for money and power
Closing of the frontier
It was the dream for everyone, but beneath the glittering surface, there lay suffering and inhumanity
William Dean Howells
1.He was an eminent literary critic and a prolific writer 2.He was regarded as the champion of literary realism, influenced many writers, such as Henry James, Frank Norris 3.He believed realism was nothing more or less than the truthful treatment of material 4. Novel should be objective or dramatic in point of view, solidly based in convincingly motivated events, true to time and place 5. Place emphasis on ethnics. Stress the need for sympathy and moral integrity. The need for different social classes to adapt to their environment and the one another
1, realism was just picture of external but includes a central concern with motives 2. “Common feelings of commonplace people can express the spirit of America best 3. Judge books with specific rules
The Rise of Silas Latham, a fine specimen of American realistic writing
Henry James
1. Eminent literary critic and a profiling writer 2. One of America’s major novelists and critics and a psychological realist of unsurpassed society
Three periods 1. Fascination with his international theme 2. Wrote inter-personal relationships 3. His most creative period
His fame rested on his handling of America and Europe, the international theme
American contrast with European decadence, and its moral and psychological complication
1. Present the superiority of the values of America to those of Europe 2. Juxtapose American moral innocence with the somber decadence of Europe 3. He wrote about the wealthy, deep-rooted leisure class, conservative toward overzealous reformers, but was critical of US imperialist behavior
1. His criticism is both concerned with form and devoted to human values 2. Stress the importance of point of view, advocate novelists to dramatize 3. Making his characters reveal themselves with minimal intervention of author
Point of view
The position or vantage-point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented to us. There are two ways : first-person point of view and the third-person point of view.
Narrative
A narrative means a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee. A narrative will consist of a set of events recounted in a process of narration, in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular order
Narrator
Refers to one who tells, or is assumed to be telling the story in a given narrative. , it is the imagined voice transmitting the story, and is distinguished both from the real author and from the implied author. They vary according to their degree of participation, the degree of overtones, and their reliability
Narratee
It refers to the imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be addressing in a given narrative. It is a notional figure within the space of the text itself, and is thus not to be confused either with the actual reader or with the implied reader
Local Colorism
Definition: it is the literary trend that was prevalent in America in the second half of the nineteenth century
Characterized by having the qualities that could not be written in any other place or by anyone else than a native. Presenting and interpreting the local character of their region, but also keep an eye on the truthful color of the local
1. Social and intellectual climate of the country( differences existed between different parts of the country) 2. The tall tales of the frontier humorist
Mark Twain
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County made him famous
He preferred to represent social life through portraits of local places, and he thought novelist must not try to generalize about a nation He defined the place and function of the local colorism
Personal experience is the most valuable thing used in the building of novels
He loved life and people, freedom and justice, advocate human dignity and brotherhood of man
He focus on the lower strata of society, made his contribution to realism through his theories of localism and through his colloquial style
Naturalism
Naturalism is a more deliberate kind of realism in novel, stories , and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. It is originated in France and came to American at the end of 19th century
Offer detailed and fully researched investigations into unexplored corners of modern society
The most significant work is Sister Carrie
Social and Economic Changes Industrialism and science and new philosophy of life are the important factors
1. Slums: a life of insecurity, suffering, and violence 2. The ruthless manipulation of forces
Cultural Changes
1. Man lives in a cold, godless world, life became a struggle 2. Darwinian concepts became prevalent 3. Attitude of gloom and despair in American literature
Literary changes
Howellsian realism was too retrained and genteel They reported truthfully and objectively, painted life as it was lived in the slum
Stephen Crane
Maggie: A Girl of the streets, the first uncompromising naturalist novel in America
He believes that environment is a tremendous thing and frequently shapes lives regardless
A good women’s downfall, mere existence becomes a battle and men behave like animals
The red badge of courage
Against the romantic view of war as a symbol of courage and heroism, the war in this book is a plain slaughter-house, initiated a new tradition of war novel by de-romanticizing war and heroism
A pioneer writing in naturalistic tradition
Modernism
It refers to the wide range of experimental and avant-grade trends in the literature of the early twentieth century, including Symbolism, Futursim, Expressionism, iapmahism, vorticism, Dadaism and surrealism
Modernist literature is characterized by a rejection of 19th century traditions and of their consensus between author and reader.
Writers tend to see themselves as avant-grade, disengaged from bourgeois values, and disturbed adhere by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles
Modernist writing is cosmopolitan, express a sense of urban cultural, favored techniques of juxtaposition and multiple point of view
It’s major landmarks are Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land
The lost generation
1.a term coined by the American writer Gertrude Stein 2. They rebel against America because they want to find literary freedom and a cosmopolitan way of life 3. Full of youthful idealism, they sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created the finest American literature
Ernest Hemingway
1. The leader of the lost generation 2. Write about one theme, “grace under pressure”(a Hemingway theme with a Hemingway hero) 3. He holds a black naturalistic view of the world, because man is insignificant and powerless 4. He developed the colloquial writing style 5.;iceberg theory
John Dos Passos
1. Question the meaning if contemporary life
Scott Fitzgerald
1. The portrayer of the spirit of the Jazz age 2. One of the greatest stylists in American literature
His greatness is that he found the embodiment of the nation and a myth out of American life, which was showed in The Great Gatsby
Sherwood Anderson
1. He explore new material for fiction, American’s small town life 2. He is a experimental writer, reveal the abnormal states of mind 3, the first writer since Mark Twin to write in the colloquial style.
Gertrude Stein
1. Her personality as a patron of art and literature, write a lot of books 2. She believed that art and literature should change with the changing of life 3. Stressed the value of the individual word 4. Filled with cryptic word and deviates from conventional coherence, so it’s difficult to understand
Revival of Naturalism
The 1930s was a dark time, the Depression, writers of that time had to paint the physical wasteland.
John Dos Paddos
1. The greatest novelist of 1930s and the leading naturalist of the Great Depression
U.S.A. 1. A world where no birds sing and the air is breathtaking 2. Collectivist novel
Southern Renaissance
William Faulkner
1. A productive writer 2. Authorial transcendence, let the characters to explain themselves and hinder reader’s experience as little as possible. 3. Employ a fallible narrator 4. A difficult writer, demand in the cooperative response of the readers is exacting Stream of consciousness 意识流
Katherine Anne Porter
1. A short story writer 2. Flowering Judas was the most famous one, and Pale horse, Pale rider, and the novel ship of fools
Eudora Welty
1. A short story writer 2. Major theme relate to traditional southern family relationships and the exploration of inner world and their action and power of love
Carson Mc Cullers
1.Obsessed with alienation, violence and horror 2. Reflections in a Golden Eye, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, The Member of the Wedding , Clock Without Hands
Nathanael West
1. Adapt European avant-gardism to American writing
Sinclair Lewis
1. The first American writer to win Nobel Prize 2. Main Street made her famous, another one is Babbit
Willa Cather
1. A traditional writer, rejecting the modern
Imagism
A poetic movement of England and US flourishing from 1909 to 19” The movement insisted on the creation of images in poetry by the direct treatment of the thing and the word. Each word must be an image seen.
Principles 1. Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective 2. To use no word that does not contribute to the presentation 3. Compose in the sequence of the musical phrase
TS Eliot
1. The love song of J Alfred Prufrock 2. The waste land, revealed the spiritual crisis of postwar Europe and established his position as the leader of the whole generation of writers
1. A distinguished literary critic, which is about the tradition and individual talent, the past , the present and the future 2. Depersonalization 3 impersonal theory, the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality
Ezra Pound
The father of modern American poetry and father of imagist poetry
Harlem Renaissance
An African American cultural movement, the first time that mainstream publishers and critics took African American literature seriously
Summary of Puritan tradition
God’s chosen people
A sense of mission
Optimistic with their life
Perceived the world symbolically, see the physical life as spiritual and a symbol of god
Sermon
Features of colonial American literatures
The writings was mainly about personal literature, they also illustrate the religious seal
In content they served either God or colonial expansion or both
In form, they imitated and transplanted the English literary literary traditions
Some are for civil and religious freedom, some are calling for independence from British colonial rule.
Reflection of the Newness of American
Romanticism mirror the newness of American as a nation
Americans believed they are different from Europeans
Individualism,political equality and the dream that America was the new Garden of Eden for man
This feel of newness inspire romantic imagination and channel it into writing
Differences between Emily and Whitman
Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large , Dickson explores the inner life of the individual
Whitman is national outlook while Dickson is regional
Whitman writes endless, all-inclusive catalogs, while Dickson writes concise, direct, and simple diction and syntax which characterize her poetry