美国文学简史框架简介

关于美国文学史的大框架

中心主题

• Colonial period (Chapter 1-2)
  • 1. Time Range: the early 17th C – the end of the 18th C
  • 2. Topic: American Puritanism -- the one enduring influence in American literature
  • 3. Representatives
    • Benjamin Franklin: the religious idealism (1706-1790)
    • Jonathan Edwards: levelheaded common sense (1703-1758)
• Romantic Period (Chapter 3-7)
  • 1.Time: the first half of the 19th century
  • 2.Representatives
    • Group One: Two Novelists
      • Washington Irving (1783-1859)
        • Rip Van Winkle
        • The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
        • The Sketch Book
      • James Fenimore Cooper: Leatherstocking Tales (1789-1851)
    • Group Two: Two Transcendentalists
      • Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
      • Henry David Thoreau : Walden (1817-1862)
    • Group Three: Romantic Poets
      • Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass (1819-1892)
      • Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
    • Group four: Two Major Novelists
      • Nathaniel Hawthorne：The Scarlet Letter (1804-1864)
      • Herman Melville：Moby Dick (1819-1891)
    • Group Five: New England Poets
      • William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
      • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
      • James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
      • Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)
      • John Whittier (1807-1892)
• The age of Realism (Chapter 8-10)
  • 1. Time: The Civil War (1861-65)
    • ① Topic: It came as a reaction against “the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism.” It expresses the concern for the commonplace and the low, and offers an objective view of human nature and human experience.
    • ②Representatives
      • William Dean Howells (1837—1920)
      • Mark Twain (1835-1910)：The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
      • Henry James (1843-1916)
  • 2.Time: in the last decade of the 19th century
    • Stephen Crane (1870—1900): Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
    • Frank Norris (1870—1902): Mc Teague
    • Theodore Dreiser (1871—1945) : Sister Carrie
• The Morden Period (Chapter 11-18)
  • 1. Time: between the two world wars(1914—1945)
  • 2.Representatives
    • Modern Poetry
      • Ezra Pound: Canto
      • T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land
      • William Caelos Williams
      • Robert Frost
    • Modern Novelists: 1920s
      • F.Scot. Fitzgerald (1896 —1940): The Great Gatsby
      • Ernest Hemingway (1899--1961): The Lost Generation;The Old Man and the Sea; The Sun Also Rises
      • William Faulkner (1897--1962): Deep South
    • Modern American Drama
      • Eugene O’Neill
      • Maxwell Anderson
      • Elmer Rice and: The Adding Machine
• After the WWII (Chapter 19-26)
  • Saul Bellow: Henderson the Rain King;Herzog
  • Auther Miller: All My Sons; Death of a Salesman
  • J.D.Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye;
  • Allen Ginsberg: Reality Sandwiches; The Fall of America
  • Sylvia Plath: The Colossus and Other Poems; The Bell Jar
• Topic: New England Transcendentalism
• the heritage of American Puritanism