American literature

American literature

Part One

The Literature of American Romanticism

1. Literary terms:

American Romanticism: 1> is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature. 2> it was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense. They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group. They affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and strange. They stressed the element “Americanness” in their works. 3> it started with the publication of

Washington Irving?s the sketch book and ended with Walt Whitman?s leaves of Grass. 4> being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance”. 5> American Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.

Transcendentalism: 1> the transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe. 2> they stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society. 3> they offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with God?s

overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses.

Free verse: is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech. While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse forms do, free verse does so in a looser way. Walt Whitman?s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps, most notable example.

Symbol: means any object, person, place, or action that has meaning in itself and that also stands for something larger than itself, such as quality, an attitude, a belief, or a value. The relationship between the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. A rose is often a symbol of love and beauty; a skull is often a symbol of death; spring and winter often symbolize youth and old age.

Theme: the general idea or insight about life that a writer wishes to express in a literary work. All the element of a literary work-plot, setting, characterization, and figurative language-contribute to the development of its theme. A simple theme can often be stated in a single sentence. But sometimes a literary work is rich and complex, and a paragraph or even an essay is needed to state the theme. Not all literary works have a controlling theme.

Short story: is a brief prose fiction, usually one that can be reading a single setting, it generally contains the six major elements of fiction- characterization, setting, theme, plot, point of view and style.

2. Main Writers:

Washington Irving: the style of his works: his style can be described as beautiful. He

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was a highly skillful writer. The gentility, urbanity, and pleasantness of man all seems to have found adequate expression in his style. 1> he avoids moralizing as much as possible; he wrote to amuse and entertain. 2> he was good at developing his stories in an atmosphere, the richness of which is often more than compensation for the slimness of the plot. His characters are vivid and true so that they tend to linger in the mind of the readers. The humor which has built itself into the very texture of his writing is such that reading him, it is difficult not to smile and occasionally even chuckle. 3> there is a great deal of craft and sills in the man.

The analysis of Rip Van Winkle: literary critics point out four main analyses in their approach to Rip and the story theme: 1> the story of man who has difficulties facing his advancing age; 2> the contradictory impulses in America toward work-the puritan attitude as opposed to the American desire for leisure; 3> the theme of escape from one?s responsibilities and even one?s history; 4> the loss of identity. Each of these themes is woven together throughout the tale. That is: 1> Rip finds it difficult to communicate with the practical world, for he is lonely, and consequently spends much of his time with those people and things which help him feel comfortable. 2> he cannot be really be happy or content in the settings; wherever he goes, he cannot escape the thoughts of, and collisions with, the Dame, whom Irving calls” a shrew”, a “virago”, and a “ termagant”, a woman who even hates dogs. 3> Rip Van Winkle has been seen as a symbol of several aspects of America. Rip, like America, is immature, self-centered, careless,

anti-intellectual, imaginative, and jolly as the overgrown child. The Dame is another symbol- of puritanical discipline and the work ethic of Franklin. The town itself is problematic of America-forever and rapidly changing. 4> his conflicts and dreams are those of the nation- the conflict of innocence and experience, work and leisure, the old and the new, the head and the heart. 5> at any level, the story is one of a man who has looked toward the onset of civilization in America and made a choice in his analysis of his own life.

The analysis of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: the creation of archetypes is a particularly subtle feat of Irving?s consummate craftsmanship. We may see in Ichabod Crane a precocious, effete New Englander, shrewd, commercial, a city-slicker, who is rather an interloper, a somewhat destructive force, and who comes along to swindle the villagers. His book learning turns on him, and he is driven away from where he does not belong, so that the serene village remains

permanently good and happy. Brom Bones, on the other hand, is of a Huck Finn-type of country bumpkin, rough, vigorous, boisterous but inwardly very good, a frontier type put out there to shift for himself. Thus the rivalry in love between Ichabod and Brom, viewed in this way, suddenly assumes the dimensions of two ethical groups locked in a kind of historic contest. As to the style of the piece, it represents Irving at his best. The association between a certain locale and the inward movement of a character, the emotional loading of almost every line of the story, their effect on the five senses of the reader whose attention is so fully engaged and who feels so much involved in what is happening- all these have placed this and other Irving stories among the best of American short stories.

William Cullen Bryant: the analysis of the Thanatopsis: meter: iambic pentameter.

1> the Greek title of the poem means “a view of death”. In terms of a brief outline, the following scheme should suffice: Lines1-17-be comforted by nature; lines 17-30-when you die you turn to earth; lines 31-45- the earth is the tomb of all men; lines 45-57-whenever you go you will be at the graves of men; lines 58-72-everybody has to die; lines 73-81-live so that you won?t be afraid to

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meet your maker. 2> the author develops a view of death which represents a sharp break from the puritan attitude toward man?s final destiny. To the puritan, death was seen as a preliminary to an afterlife. Bryant, however, treats death part of nature, the destiny of us all, and the great equalizer. 3> this poem should be read in light of both literary tradition and Bryant ?s own religious

background, from the English poets he learned of the possibilities of blank verse and the themes of the graveyard school of writers.

The analysis of To a Waterfowl: the poem called “the most perfect brief poem in the language” was composed by Bryant after a walk from Cumming ton to Plainfield, Massachusetts, in

December1815. Arranged in alternating rhymed quatrains, it expressed both the poet?s grateful view, at the close of a day of self-doubt and despair, of a solitary bird on the horizon, and his sense of a divine power guiding and protecting everything in nature. The clarity of the central image and the aptness and simplicity of the moral analogy have always been admired, even by those who dislike “preaching” in poetry. The effect of the stanza form has been described as gliding, appropriate to the visual image of the second stanza.

James Fennimore Cooper: the analysis of The Leather stocking Tales: are five

novels set in early frontier period of American history about the American wilderness: The Pioneers; The Last of Mohicans; The Prairie; The Pathfinder; and The Deer slayer. They illustrate the importance of the frontier and the wilderness for the first time in the history of American literature. With the central figure Natty Bumppo, these novels unfold an epic account about his adventures from his initiation into the backwoods until his final death in old age out on the prairies in the middle of America. Natty Bumppo moves westward, always staying just one step ahead of civilization. He is a symbol of the American desire for unity with nature as his actions are shaped by the forest in which he lives. Through this character, Cooper was able to examine what happened to American culture as it became more and more civilized as civilization pushed farther and farther west. He presented Natty Bumppo as an ideal, not realistically but romantically. This man stands for innocence and purity for the way Americans wished they could be, for what they could achieve in close identification with nature rather than what the actual fact was as they were destroying nature and tearing it up as they moved farther and farther west. He seems to be related to the deepest meaning of the American national experience of adventure into the wilderness of the American West.

The analysis of the Natty Bumppo: he is the essential American soul. He is an isolated, almost selfless, stoic and enduring man. He is the first American hero of this type. And many, many novelists have used the same kind of man down through the decades. Americans have a strong interest in thinking of heroes in this way. A strong individual withstands dangers and hardships without complaint. He is humanitarian and through all of the hardships he is able to enjoy. The figure of Natty Bumppo is the first in a long line of heroes who are like this. His greatest gift is a reverence for life, a deep understanding of the genius of man.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: the style of his work: 1> his essays often have a casual style,

for most of them were derived from his journals or lectures. 2> they are usually characterized by a series of short, declarative sentences, which are quite logically connected but will flower out into illustrative statements of truth and thoughts. His philosophical discussion is sometimes difficult to understand but he uses comparisons and metaphors to make the general idea of his work clearly

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expressed. 3> well-read in the classics of Western European literature, Emerson often employed these literary sources to make and enrich his own points but never let them take the full reins of his discussion. 4> he uses short sentences to break the rhythm of the longer ones. He also uses exclamations to interrupt the flow of thought. In the next room, his voice is sufficiently clear and emphatic, and starling images. Other styles: 1. a tendency to restate the propositions 2. many varied illustrations to support the propositions. 3. parallelism. 4. paradox. 5. an epigrammatic quality. Emerson?s most striking stylistic quality is his ability to work his thought into a short, shocking, quotable utterance. Oversoul means the religion on an intuitive belief in an ultimate unity. The analysis of Nature: he regards nature as the purest, the most sanctifying moral influence on man, and advocated a direct intuition of a spiritual and immanent God in nature. In this connection, Emerson?s emotional experiences are exemplary in more ways than one. Now this is a moment of “conversion” when one feels completely merged with the outside world, when one has completely sunk into nature and become one with it, and when the soul has gone beyond the physical limits of the body to share the omniscience of the Oversoul. In a word, the soul has completely transcended the limits of individuality and become part of the Oversoul. Emerson sees spirit pervading everywhere, not only in the soul of man, but behind nature, throughout nature. The analysis of Self-Reliance: 1> 提出要“相信自己，不要模仿”。 他认为羡慕的无知，模仿等于自杀。在爱默生看开，人人有能力， 不过只有自己努力去做某事时，才了解自己的能力有多大。2> 号召人们不要做循规蹈矩的人，自己认为对的，就要大胆去做，不要顾虑世人的意见，不要屈从于头衔、有名望的人，大的学术团体或无生命的机构。表现了强烈的个人主义理想。3> 不要害怕自己的言行自相矛盾，只要这些言行在当时是“自然的，真诚的”。从总体上看，这些不一致最终总能统一起来。他还强调人不单应该有思想，还应该有行动。而且应该让人自己去了解自己的价值。他在分析自信的理由、根据时，提出天才、品德和生命是自发的天性，并把这一首要的智慧称之为直觉。 在他看来，人们识别正义和真理时，并没有主动做些什么，只不过是给正义和真理的光芒让出通道来。他认为上帝就存在人的灵魂中，依靠自己就是尊重人的神灵。4> 爱默生的超验主义思想是美国资本主义发展时期的产物，它反过来又概括的反映了年轻美国共和国的精神。他的自助是以个人为核心的，只强调个人的作用。在处理人与人的关系上，他强调独立地位，并坚持人人可以自助。

Henry David Thoreau: the truest disciple of Emerson. The analysis of Walden: 1>

Walden is deceptively casual and reads like a diary of a nature lover. It contains essays of a semi-philosophical character, expanding the spiritual life by simplifying material needs. Walden is a microcosm which can be applied to life and to the whole world in general. He kept a journal about the daily events of his life and found their spiritual significance. He took experience as a symbol of spiritual importance. 2> the purposes of this book: to make the readers evaluate the way he lived and thought, to reveal the hidden spiritual possibilities in everyone?s life, and to condemn the weaknesses and errors of society, such as the pursuit of material things. 3> Thoreau used his life at Walden as a symbol, a symbol of what could happen to every person. He made his life a symbol of spiritual inspiration. He made the water in Walden Pond another symbol of spiritual knowledge of washing away evil, being reborn, being refreshed with the water of pure, innocent nature. The subjects: 1. the book is concerned with the essentials of life, living rather than getting a living. 2. It is a condemnation of making social improvement and comfort all important. 3. It stresses the importance of thought over material circumstance. People should choose the proper

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