美国文学史期末复习资料.docVIP

PAGE PAGE 1 American Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them Puritans. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. They accepted to the doctrine of predestination, original sin, total depravity, limited atonement. American Puritanism had an enduring influence on The Influence of American Puritanism: 1.American Puritanism is the basis of American literature. All literature is based on a myth – Garden of Eden. The Puritans dreamed of living under a perfect order and worked with indomitable courage and confident hope toward building a new Garden of Eden in America, where man could at long last live the way he should. Fired with such a sense of mission, the Puritans looked even the worst of life in face with a tremendous amount of optimism. All this event, in due time, into the making of American literature. 2. American Puritanism contributed to the development of Symbolism: a technique, widely used. Puritans thought that all the simple objects existing in the world connoted deep meaning. 3. The style is fresh, simple and direct; the rhetoric is plain and honest, not without a touch of nobility often traceable to the direct influence of the Bible. Thus, American Puritanism has been, by and large, a healthy legacy of the Americans. Without understanding of Puritanism, there can be no good understanding of American culture and literature. American Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heighted interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, rebellion against established social rules and conventions. The Romantic period in American literature