美国文学史及选读期末复习题.doc

Captain John Smith became the first American writer. The puritans looked upon themselves as a chosen people. The first major intellectual spokesman of the Massachusetts Bay colony was John Cotton, sometimes called “the Patriarch of New England.” Anne Bradstreet published The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, and she was nicknamed the tenth Muse. Poor Richard’s Almanac is an annual collection of proverbs written by Benjamin Franklin. Thomas Paine’s famous pamphlet Common Sense boldly advocated a “Declaration for Independence”. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence with John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston. Philip Freneau developed a natural, simple, and concrete diction, best illustrated in such nature lyrics as “The Wild Honey Suckle” and “The Indian Burying Ground”. Philip Freneau has been called the “Father of American Poetry”. In Washington Irving’s Sketch Book appeared the first modern short stories and the first great American juvenile literature. Cooper’s enduring fame rests on his frontier stories, especially the five novels that comprise the Leatherstocking tales. “To a Waterfowl” is perhaps the peak of William Cullen Bryant “Thanatopsis”, William Cullen Bryant’s best-known poem, consists of four stanzas in iambic tetrameter abab. The title means “view of death”. Edgar Allan Poe is considered “father of American detective stories and American gothic stories”. Emerson believed above all in individualism, independence of mind, and self-reliance. In Walden, Thoreau thought it better for a man to work one day a week and rest six, and the rest of the time could be devoted to thought. Hawthorne’s stories touch the deepest roots of man’s moral nature. Moby Dick is a tremendous chronicle of a whaling voyage in pursuit of a seemingly supernatural white whale. After his death, Longfellow became the only American to be honored with a bust in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author