美国文学史复习纲要.docVIP

外国语学院美国文学史复习纲要 PAGE PAGE 1 2010-12-28 1.? The Colonial Period The settlement of America in the early 17th century the end of the 18th century. The major topic American Puritanism. The major figures Benjamin Franklin 2. The Romantic Period Covering the first half of the19th century. The major points: the difference between American romanticism and European romanticism; American Renaissance or New England Transcendentalism. The major figures:, Allan Poe , Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and the “New England Poets”. 3.? The Age of Realism The Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. Covering the end of the 19th century and the first decade of 20th century. It expresses the concern for the commonplace and the low, and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. The major figures: William Dean Howells, the champion of this new school; Mark Twain, Henry James. 4.? American Naturalism From the first decade of twentieth century to the First World War. The major figures: Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and O. Henry 5 American Modernism The literature between the two world wars. This is the most important period in American literature. The major points: modernism, imagism, the lost generation, and stream of consciousness. The major figures: Ezra Pound, Williams Carlos Williams, E.E.Cummings, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost , Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Thomas Stearns Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald,Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner. 6.? American Postmodernism From the World War II up to now. Postmodernist writers: John Barth, Philip Roth, Thomas Pinchon, Ishmael Reed and Don Delillo. The flourishing of minoritarian literature: Jewish-American, African-American and Asian-American literature The Spokesman of Jazz Age- F. Scott Fitzgerald Lost generationErnst He