最新aMERIAN-LIERAURE-1资料.docVIP

American Literature What is literature? Literature is language artistically used to achieve identifiable literary qualities and to convey meaningful messages. General View of American Literature Colonial Period the early 17th C --- the late 18th C American Puritanism Jonathan Edwards Benjamin Franklin Romantic Period the 19th C ---- the Civil War Romanticism Washington Irving James Fenimore Cooper Transcendentalism around the 1840s “oversoul” Ralph Waldo Emerson Henry David Thoreau Age of Realism the Civil War --- WWⅠ truthful description of life Mark Twain Henry James Naturalism Around the 20th C Darwin’s theory: “natural selection” environment and heredity Theodore Dreiser Imagism After WW Ⅰ--- the 1920s symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry Ezra Pound The Lost Generation Around the 1920s lost of American Dreams F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway The 1930s The Great Depression socialist ideas left-oriented John Steinbeck Chapter 1 Colonial Period of American Literature 1. Historical Background ① The settlement of the North American continent by the English began in the early part of the 17th century. These settlements began the main stream of what we recognize as the American national history. Different settlers from European countries all contributed to the forming of the American civilization, but the colonies that became the first United States were for the most part sustained by English tradition. The Mayflower was the ship that transported the English Separatists, better known as the Pilgrims, from Plymouth, England, to Plymouth, Massachusetts The Mayflower has a famous place in American history as a symbol of early European colonization of the future US. Americans whose roots are traceable back to New England often believe themselves to be descended from Mayflower passengers. ② The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them Puritans. They came to America out of