上海外国语大学美国文学课件：chapter 5.ppt

* * Chapter 5: the Boston Brahmins Social background The “Brahmins” refers to the famous group of aristocratic writers who lived in Boston in the 19th century. Most Brahmins came from rich, old Boston families. They considered Boston “ the thinking center of the (American) continent, and therefore the planet”. Their “ Saturday Club” met on Saturday a month for dinner. Their membership included Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Greenleaf Whittier, James Lowell and the famous historians Prescott and Motley. In 1857, the club started its own magazine, the Atlantic Monthly. Through the magazine, Boston’s literary establishment tried to influence the intellectual life and tastes of the new American republic. For the next twenty or thirty years, it was leading intellectual magazine of the United States.In their time, the Boston Brahmins (as the patrician, Harvard-educated class came to be called) supplied the most respected and genuinely cultivated literary arbiters of the United States. Their lives fitted a pleasant pattern of wealth and leisure directed by the strong New England work ethic and respect for learning. Most of the Brahmin poets traveled or educated in Europe: They were familiar with the ideas and books of Britain, Germany, and France, and often Italy and Spain. Backward Forward Upper class in background but democratic in sympathy, the Brahmin poets carried their genteel, European-oriented views to every section of the United States, through public lectures at the 3,000 lyceums (centers for public lectures) and in the pages of two influential Boston magazines, the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly.The writings of the Brahmin poets fused American and European traditions and sought to create a continuity of shared Atlantic experience. These scholar-poets attempted to educate and elevate the general populace by introducing a European dimension to American literature. Ironically, their overall effect wa