AmericanPuritanism美国文学史
第一篇：American Puritanism 美国文学史
American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans.The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church.The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them.They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles.As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices.They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God.As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind.American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature.6.American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end.The Age of Realism came into existence.It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism.Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is
really lived.It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.8American Transcendentalism: Transcendentalists terroras from the romantic literature of Europe.They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of Americagogopirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe.They stressed the importance of the individual.To them, the individual was the most important element of society.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.Emerson’s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” and his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as America’s “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”.Black humor, in literature, drama, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world.Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated
far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony.Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce.For example, Stanley Kubrick's film Dr.Strangelove;or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb(1963)is a terrifying comic treatment of the circumstances surrounding the dropping of an atom bomb, while Jules Feiffer's comedy Little Murders(1965)is a delineation of the horrors of modern urban life, focusing particularly on random assassinations.The novels of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.6.The Lost Generation: It’s used to describe the people of the postwar years.It
describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles.It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semipoverty.It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world.After World War I, the young disappointed American writers, such as Hemingway, Pound, Cummings Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their place of exile.They came from the East or the Middle West of the U.S.A, and most of them had been shocked or wo
unded in the war.An American woman writer named Gertrude Stein, who had lived
in Paris since 1903, welcomed these young writers to her apartment which was already famous as a literary salon.She called them “the lost generation”, because they had cut themselves off from their past in American in order to create new types of writing which had never been tried before.“The Lost Generation” is also painted in the writers’ writings.The young English and American expatriates, men and women, were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad.They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile.Their whole life is undercut and defeated.Characteristics of Romanticism:
a.Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.(subjectivity)
b.For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason
and They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group, against
authority.d.The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop and express his
own Typical literary forms of romanticism include ballad, lyric, sentimental comedy, problem
unfamiliar
novel, historical novel , gothic romance, metrical romance, sonnet.Representatives:
• New England Poets: William Cullen Bryant;Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;
• Writers: James Fenimaore Cooper, Washington Irving“The Sketch Book of Geoffrey
Grayon”
9.Naturalism 自然主义
1.Naturalism is a literary trend prevailing in Europe, especially in France and Germany, in the
second half of the 19th century.2.Naturalism theory: literature must be “true to life” and exactly reproduce real life, including
all its details without any selection.3.Naturist writers usu.write about the lives of the poor and oppressed, or the “slum life贫民
窟生活”, but by giving all the details without discrimination, they can only represent the external appearance instead of the inner essence of real life.4.Naturalism, in reality, was a development of realism.5.Emile Zola(1840-1902), the French novelist and the master of modern naturalism.George Gissing(1857-1903)-the most significant figure in the period of transition from the Victorian to the modern novel.Representative: George Gissing(1857-1903)
1.His novels were mainly a description of the appalling可怜的 conditions of the poor and a
reflection of his own painful experiences and impressions.2.His most outstanding novel is New Grub Street(1891)– a minor classic which depicts the
literary life of his time.3.Other works:
a)Charles Dickens: A critical Study(1898)– which shows his sound appreciation of Dickens’s
achievements in character portrayal and language art.b)The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft(1903)– the most popular of his work written in the
form of part diary, part essays and part confessions.4.Gossing is a chronicler年代史编者 of the seamy堕落的 side of later Victorian England.17.American naturalism
American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like realism, it had come from Europe.Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century.Background:
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe.In this chance world he was both helpless and hopeless.Major Features:

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