AmLitIntro 美国概况 培训讲解.pptVIP

During the long period of colonization, a great deal of literature was composed, some of it a very high order. But it was not in any sense American literature. It did not arise out of an imaginative response to America for America, the USA as we know it, had not yet come into being. ;The most important phase of pre-national literature consists in the writings the Puritans. In this period, writers like William Bradford and John Winthrop address themselves to questions of history. At the end of the 18th century, writers like Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin are usually considered to be representatives of the American Enlightenment. They shared many of the intellectual commitments of what we now call The Age of Reason. ; English settlers had been in America almost a century before the novel. Two factors in American life worked against the acceptance of fiction: The hard, practical demand on the energy in the new country Because the Puritans thought that art tells “lies”---- giving imitations of things, not reality, and also that it stimulates unhealthy emotionalism, particularly sexual emotions which the Puritans especially abhorred. So the development of the novel is associated with the rise of the middle class as it developed its ideals of democracy and equality, industrialization, westward expansion, and took on a variety of foreign influences such as writers Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Richardson and so on.; The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century. In this period, imaginative writing and the American novel and short story begin through writing by Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Both of them began working from English models toward an American sensibility.; As the first important writer in American literature, Washington Irving remains a transitional writer in that he inspired the American Romantic imagination with two of his most famous stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The