brief 美国文学系列.docVIP

American literature Part one American Romanticism -- the American Renaissance, --the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the civil war. -- a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. --To stress-- the feelings, intuitions and emotions the close relationship between man and nature, individualism and the inner life of the self. --a new emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qua1ities of literature; --free expression of emotions; the psychic states of their characters. --The strong tendency to exalt the individual and the common man; --American romantics tended more to moralize rather than to entertain. Early American romanticism was best represented by William Cullen Bryant and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in poetry and James Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving in fiction. 1. Washington Irving(1783-l859)--one of the first American writers to earn an international reputation, Father of the American short stories. The Sketch Book ---- Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Irvings style: beautiful, quite lucid; The musical language; First, he avoids moralizing as much as possible, he wrote to amuse and entertain. Then he was good at enveloping his stories in an atmosphere. His characters are true and vivid. The humor built itself into the very texture of his writings. 2. James Fennimore Cooper --Leather Stocking Tales”-- the Pioneers (I823), the Last of the Mohicans(1826), The Prairie(1827), The Pathfinder(1840) and The Deerslayer(1841). The figures in his novels helped create that part of American mythology most popular today: the story of the cowboy and the winning of the American West. The Leatherstocking Tales, tell the tale of their central character Natty Bumppo, backwoodsman and wilderness scout. Natty is a fictional character, based on certain originals remembered from the author’s boyhood. Here, embodied in a clear-cut romantic type is the American moral ideal. Hawkeye in The Last of the Mohicans, was a perfect example