吴伟仁美国文学第一册学习指南填空题集合.docVIP

Early in the seventeenth century, the English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the American national history. The earliest settlers in America include Dutch, Swedes, Germans, French,Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese. The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607. Captain John Smith’s reports of exploration, published in the early 1600s, have been described as the first distinctly American literature to be written in English. There was a little of the religious ferment ans zeal that inspired such a tide of literature to flow Puritan New England. The Puritans had come to New English for the sake of religious freedom, while Virginia had been planted mainly as a commercial venture. Hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety were the Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American writing, including the sermons, books, and letters of such noted Puritan clergymen as John Cotton and Cotton Mather. William Bradford, first governor of Plymouth, and John Winthrop, who held the same post at Boston, were superior to even the remarkable qualities that distinguished many of their associations. Each has left a priceless gift: the former, The History of Plymouth plantation, the latter, the History of New England. The best way to learn more of the colonial Puritan mind is to meet two important figures, John Cotton and Roger Williams. Most Puritan verse was directly plodding, but the work of two writers, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, rose to the level of real poetry. Who were the earliest settlers? Where were they then? Who was the most influential group? What were the first American writings? Could you give a description of American Puritans? As we have seen, theology dominated the Puritan phase of American writing. Politics was the next great subject to command the attention of the best minds. Freedom was won as much by the fiery rhetoric of Thomas Paine’s C