英语专八人文知识辅导：美国文学简史（2）
II. Emily Dickenson1. life
2. works
(1) My Life Closed Twice before Its Close
(2) Because I Can’t Stop for Death
(3) I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I died
(4) Mine – by the Right of the White Election
(5) Wild Nights – Wild Nights
3. themes: based on her own experiences/joys/sorrows
(1) religion – doubt and belief about religious subjects
(2) death and immortality
(3) love – suffering and frustration caused by love
(4) physical aspect of desire
(5) nature – kind and cruel
(6) free will and human responsibility
4. style
(1) poems without titles
(2) severe economy of expression
(3) directness, brevity
(4) musical device to create cadence (rhythm)
(5) capital letters – emphasis
(6) short poems, mainly two stanzas
(7) rhetoric techniques: personification – make some of abstract ideas vivid
III. Comparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson
1. Similarities:
(1) Thematically, they both extolled, in their different ways, an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of “American Renaissance”.
(2) Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry.
2. differences:
(1) Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual.
(2) Whereas Whitman is “national” in his outlook, Dickinson is “regional”.
(3) Dickinson has the “catalogue technique” (direct, simple style) which Whitman doesn’t have.
Edgar Allen Poe
I. Life
II. Works
1. short stories
(1) ratiocinative stories
a. Ms Found in a Bottle
b. The Murders in the Rue Morgue
c. The Purloined Letter
(2) Revenge, death and rebirth
a. The Fall of the House of Usher
b. Ligeia
c. The Masque of the Red Death
(3) Literary theory
a. The Philosophy of Composition
b. The Poetic Principle
c. Review of Hawthorne’s Twice-told Tales
III. Themes
1. death – predominant theme in Poe’s writing
“Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everything in Poe’s writings is dead.”
2. disintegration (separation) of life
3. horror
4. negative thoughts of science
IV. Aesthetic ideas
1. The short stories should be of brevity, totality, single effect, compression and finality.
2. The poems should be short, and the aim should be beauty, the tone melancholy. Poems should not be of moralizing. He calls for pure poetry and stresses rhythm.
V. Style – traditional, but not easy to read
VI. Reputation: “the jingle man” (Emerson)
VII. His influences
Chapter 3 The Age of Realism
I. Background: From Romanticism to Realism
1. the three conflicts that reached breaking point in this period
(1) industrialism vs. agrarian
(2) culturely-measured east vs. newly-developed west
(3) plantation gentility vs. commercial gentility
2. 1880’s urbanization: from free competition tomonopoly capitalism
3. the closing of American frontier
II. Characteristics
1. truthful description of life
2. typical character under typical circumstance
3. objective rather than idealized, close observation and investigation of life
“Realistic writers are like scientists.”
4. open-ending:
Life is complex and cannot be fully understood. It leaves much room for readers to think by themselves.
5. concerned with social and psychological problems, revealing the frustrations of characters in an environment of sordidness and depravity
III. Three Giants in Realistic Period
1. William Dean Howells – “Dean of American Realism”
(1) Realistic principles
a. Realism is “fidelity to experience and probability of motive”.
b. The aim is “talk of some ordinary traits of American life”.
c. Man in his natural and unaffected dullness was the object of Howells’s fictional representation.
d. Realism is by no means mere photographic pictures of externals but includes a central concern with “motives” and psychological conflicts.
e. He condemns novels of sentimentality and morbid self-sacrifice, and avoids such themes as illicit love.
f. Authors should minimize plot and the artificial ordering of the sense of something “desultory, unfinished, imperfect”.
g. Characters should have solidity of specification and be real.
h. Interpreting sympathetically the “common feelings of commonplace people” was best suited as a technique to express the spirit of America.
i. He urged writers to winnow tradition and write in keeping with current humanitarian ideals.
j. Truth is the highest beauty, but it includes the view that morality penetrates all things.
k. With regard to literary criticism, Howells felt that the literary critic should not try to impose arbitrary or subjective evaluations on books but should follow the detached scientist in accurate description, interpretation, and classification.
(2) Works
a. The Rise of Silas Lapham
b. A Chance Acquaintance
c. A Modern Instance
(3) Features of His Works
a. Optimistic tone
b. Moral development/ethics
c. Lacking of psychological depth
2. Henry James
(1) Life
(2) Literary career: three stages
a. 1865~1882: international theme
The American
Daisy Miller
The Portrait of a Lady
b. 1882~1895: inter-personal relationships and some plays
Daisy Miller (play)
c. 1895~1900: novellas and tales dealing with childhood and adolescence, then back to international theme
The Turn of the Screw
When Maisie Knew
The Ambassadors
The Wings of the Dove
The Golden Bowl
(3) Aesthetic ideas
a. The aim of novel: represent life
b. Common, even ugly side of life
c. Social function of art
d. Avoiding omniscient point of view
(4) Point of view
a. Psychological analysis, forefather of stream of consciousness
b. Psychological realism
c. Highly-refined language
(5) Style – “stylist”
a. Language: highly-refined, polished, insightful, accurate
b. Vocabulary: large
c. Construction: complicated, intricate
3. Mark Twain (see next section)
Local Colorism
1860s, 1870s~1890s
I. Appearance
1. uneven development in economy in America
2. culture: flourishing of frontier literature, humourists
3. magazines appeared to let writer publish their works
II. What is “Local Colour”?
Tasks of local colourists: to write or present local characters of their regions in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.
Regional literature (similar, but larger in world)
Garland, Harte – the west
Eggleston – Indiana
Mrs Stowe
Jewett – Maine
Chopin – Louisiana
III. Mark Twain – Mississippi
1. life
2. works
(1) The Gilded Age
(2) “the two advantages”
(3) Life on the Mississippi
(4) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(5) The Man That Corrupted Hardleybug
3. style
(1) colloquial language, vernacular language, dialects
(2) local colour
(3) syntactic feature: sentences are simple, brief, sometimes ungrammatical
(4) humour
(5) tall tales (highly exaggerated)
(6) social criticism (satire on the different ugly things in society)
IV. Comparison of the three “giants” of American Realism
英语专八人文知识辅导：美国文学简史（2）
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