上海外国语大学美国文学课件：chapter 9.ppt

* * Chapter Nine：The Turning Point of American Literature Social Background of This Period： As the new century entered its second decade, the forward movement of American literature seemed to have stopped. The realist novel of W. D. Howells and Hamlin Garland were beginning to seem old-fashioned. Among the exciting young writers of the Turn of the Century, Jack London seemed to have lost his genius and Frank Norris and Stephen Crane were already dead. People were again asking what was wrong with American literature. Part of the problem was that most American readers and writers had not yet outgrown the nineteenth century. In the 1840s, Emerson had shown American literature the way forward. In the 1880s, W. D. Howells gave similar leadership to the realist movement. Starting in 1915, the critic Van Wyck Brooks opened a period of self-criticism. Young writers took notice of Brooks’s criticism. The result was the new realism which lasted up to the 1950s. It made American literature one of the most exciting and most influential literatures of the world. With The Flowering of New England: 1815-1865 (1936), which won the Pulitzer Prize, Brook became recognized as America’s first serious literary historian. In a sense, the nineteenth century didn’t end in America until about 1913. Around this time, the new critics- Brooks, H. L. Mencken and Hanna Larson- began celebrating the death of Puritanism. In the nineteenth century, there was a “double standard” in both public and private morality: people had to “talk one way while acting in a completely different way”. But this was beginning to change. American readers were beginning to lose their fear of those who looked below the surface of human relationships. In 1919, Sigmund Freud, the great Austrian psychologist, had given a famous lecture series in American artists. But even before Freud’s arrival, two American novelists were starting to destroy the “double standard” of America’s puritanical morality: Edith Wharton a