Am. Lit. of the colonial period

•         Historical backgrounds:

--Establishment of the Anglican Church: Puritans vs. Anglicans (late 16th – early 17th century)

--1607: Establishment of Jamestown, Virginia, first permanent English settlement in America

--1620: Mayflower pilgrims

--Establishment of Plymouth Colony, Massachusetts

--literature was a religious matter

•         Major writers:

-- William Bradford

-- Anne Bradstreet

-- Cotton Mather

-- John Smith

William Bradford (1590-1657)

•         First leader of the Plymouth Colony (30 times)

•         Co-authored and signed the “Plymouth Compact”

•         History of Plymouth Plantation (1620-1647, published in 1856)

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

•         America’s first published poet

•         The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650, London

Cotton Mather (1663-1728)

•         Wrote 450-plus books

•         Best know for Magnalia Christi Americana (1702)

John Smith (1580-1631)

•         Major works:

-- A Description of New England (1616)

-- The General History of New England, and the Summer Isles (1624)

II. Am. Lit. of the revolutionary period

Historical Background:

•         1775-1783: War of Independence (American Revolution)

•         July 4, 1776: The United States Declaration of Independence

•         J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur

•         Benjamin Franklin

•         Thomas Jefferson

•         Thomas Paine

•         Washington Irving

•         James Fenimore Cooper

•         Edgar Allan Poe

J. Hector St. Jean de Crévecoeur (1735-1813)

•         de Crévecoeur, a Frenchman, contributed two important concepts to the American consciousness: the American dream, the melting pot;

•         Letters from an American Farmer (1782)

•         Sketches of Eighteenth Century America, or More Letters from an American Farmer (1923)

Franklin

•         One of the founding fathers of the US;

•         An American inventor, printer, politician, diplomat, and scientist, Franklin was one of the greatest colonial writers. He also founded the first public library, the first city hospital, and the University of Pennsylvania (1740);

•         Autobiography (1771)

•         Poor Richard’s Almanac (1732-1757)

Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

•         The third and fourth President of the US (purchased the Louisiana Territory from France in 1803), Jefferson was also a diplomat, an architect, a musician, a scientist and inventor. He also founded the University of Virginia (1819);

•         Drafted the Declaration of Independence

Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

•         Called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination,” Thomas Paine was an English-American political activist, author, political theorist and revolutionary.

•         Common Sense (1776)

•         The American Crisis (1776–83)

Washington Irving (1789-1851)

•         American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century, Irving, along with James Fenimore Cooper, was among the first American writers to earn acclaim in Europe, and Irving encouraged American authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Edgar Allan Poe.

•         “Father of American literature”

•         Irving published by many pseudonyms (pen names): Jonathan Oldstyle, Geoffrey Crayon, Anthony Evergreen, Diedrich Knickerbocker.

•         A History of New York (1809)

•         He is best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," "Rip Van Winkle,” and “The Devil and Tom Walker”, collected in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820)

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)

•         A prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century, He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales. Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded as his masterpiece.

•         Father of the American novel

•         Major works:

-- Precaution (1820)

-- Leatherstocking tales (5):

The Pioneers (1823)

The Last of the Mohicans (1826)

The Pathfinder (1840)

The Deerslayer (1841)

The Prairie (1827)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

•         An American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Other works:

•         Politian (1835) – Poe's only play

•         The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) – Poe's only complete novel

•         "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) – Essay

•         Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848) – Essay

•         "The Poetic Principle" (1848) – Essay

III. Am. Lit. of the Romantic Period

•         The Romantic Period was also called the New England Renaissance (1840-1855).

•         The most important feature was Transcendentalism (超验主义).

•         Transcendentalism (P. 77-78): a philosophical movement that developed in the 1830s and 1840s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest to the general state of culture and society. Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both man and nature. Transcendentalists believed that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupted the purity of the individual. They had faith that man is at his best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed.

•         The major figures in the movement were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, philosopher John Muir, feminist writer and lecturer Margaret Fuller and educator Amos Bronson Alcott, leader of the transcendentalist and contributor to The Dial, George Ripley,  as well as Elizabeth Palmer, publisher of The Dial.

 

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

•         American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.

•         Emerson is also well known as a mentor and friend of fellow Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.

--Major essays and speeches:

•         Nature (1836, essay)

•         The American Scholar (1837, speech, called “intellectual declaration of independence”)

•         Essays: First Series (1841) and Essays: Second Series (1844):

“Self-reliance”

“The Over-soul”

“Circles”

“The Poet”

“Experience”

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

•         an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist (废奴主义者), naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden (《华尔登湖》), a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience (《论公民的不服从》), an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

Major works:

•         The Service (1840)

•         A Walk to Wachusett (1842)

•         Paradise (to be) Regained (1843

•         Reform and the Reformers (1846–48)

•         A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849)

•         Resistance to Civil Government, or Civil Disobedience (1849)

•         Slavery in Massachusetts (1854)

•         Walden (1854)

•         A Plea for Captain John Brown (1859)

•         Remarks After the Hanging of John Brown (1859)

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

•         An American novelist and short story writer, Hawthorne (originally named Hathorne) was born in Salem, MA, which was the site of Salem witch trials (1692-93): 19 hanged, one pressed to death, 8 condemned, about 50 confessed, above 150 in prison, more 200 accused.

•         Much of Hawthorne's writing centers on New England, many works featuring moral allegories with a Puritan inspiration. His fiction works are considered part of the Romantic movement and, more specifically, dark romanticism. His themes often center on the inherent evil and sin of humanity, and his works often have moral messages and deep psychological complexity.

Major works:

•         Fanshawe (anonymously, 1828)

•         The Scarlet Letter (1850)

•         The House of the Seven Gables (1851)

•         The Blithedale Romance (1852)

•         The Marble Faun (1860)

•         Twice-Told Tales (1837)

•         Grandfather’s Chair (1840)

•         Mosses from an Old Manse (1846)

•         The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales (1852)

Herman Melville (1819-1991)

•         An American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick. His first three books gained much contemporary attention (the first, Typee, becoming a bestseller), but after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime.

•         When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the “Melville Revival” in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America.

Major works:

•         Typee (1846)

•         Omoo (1847)

•         Mardi: And a Voyage Thither (1849)

•         Redburn: His First Voyage (1849)

•         Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851)

•         The Confidence-Man (1857)

•         Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) (poetry collection)

•         Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) (epic poem)

•         Billy Budd (1891 unfinished, published posthumously 1924)

IV. Am. Lit. during the Civil War

Historical backgrounds:

•         Slavery in America (slave trade, 1619-1805)

•         Plantation economy in the Deep South

•         The Underground Railroad and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850

•         Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

•         The American Civil War (1861-65)

•         Abraham Lincoln elected Presidentà signed Emancipation Proclamation (1863)

•         Dec. 6, 1865, slavery finally abolished in US

Main Writers:

•         Harriet Beecher Stowe

•         Frederick Douglass

•         Walt Whitman

•         Emily Dickinson

 

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

•         An American abolitionist and author, whose novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was a depiction of life for African-Americans under slavery; it reached millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the United States and United Kingdom. It energized anti-slavery forces in the American North, while provoking widespread anger in the South. She wrote more than 20 books, including novels, three travel memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential both for her writings and her public stands on social issues of the day.

•         When meeting her, President Lincoln said “So this is the little lady who made this big war!”

• Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an instant hit: It sold 3,000 copies the first day, 10,000 copies within a week, and 300,000 within a year. Before 1860 alone, there were 30 British editions, 12 German, 5 French, and 23 other translations.

• To refute critics who argued that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not authentic, she wrote A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853). A Key contained documented case histories, newspaper articles, and legal and scholarly treatises. This was followed by a second anti-slavery novel, Dred, in 1856.

Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)

• An American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-example to slaveholders' arguments that slaves did not have the intellectual capacity to function as independent American citizens. Many Northerners also found it hard to believe that such a great orator had been a slave.

Major works:

• A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)

• My Bondage and My Freedom (1855)

• Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, revised 1892)

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

• An American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse (自由诗).

Major works:

• Franklin Evans (1842)

• Leaves of Grass (1855, revised several times, finally the "Deathbed Edition" 1891)

• Drum-Taps (1865)

• Memoranda During the War

• Specimen Days

• Democratic Vistas (1871)

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

• An American poet. While Dickinson was a prolific private poet, fewer than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime.

• The work that was published during her lifetime was Dickinson's poems are unique for the era in which she wrote; they contain short lines, typically lack titles, and often use slant rhyme as well as unconventional capitalization and punctuation. Many of her poems deal with themes of death and immortality, two recurring topics in letters to her friends.

• Her first collection of poetry was published in 1890 by personal acquaintances Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd, both of whom heavily edited the content. A complete and mostly unaltered collection of her poetry became available for the first time in 1955 when The Poems of Emily Dickinson was published by scholar Thomas H. Johnson. Despite unfavorable reviews and skepticism of her literary prowess during the late 19th and early 20th century, critics now consider Dickinson to be a major American poet.

V. Realist Literature (1865-1915)

• Historical Background: industrialization and alienation, realism and naturalism

• Main Writers:

-- Mark Twain

-- Stephen Crane

-- Jack London

-- Frank Norris

-- Theodore Dreiser

-- Local Colorists (Bret Harte, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Willa Cather)

-- Edith Wharton

-- Henry James

Realism (现实主义)

• Realism was a reaction to Romanticism,. The realists, the 19th century’s answer to the 6 p.m. news, told it like it was, focusing on the lives of ordinary people.

• Literary realism began with mid nineteenth-century French literature and extended to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors. In the spirit of general "realism," Realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation. Rejecting the heroic and adventurous (hallmarks of romanticism), the realists concentrated on pessimistic views of poverty, prostitution, and pain.

Naturalism (自然主义)

• Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character.

• Like the realists, the naturalists focused on the lives of ordinary people and attempted to portray life truthfully and accurately.  But the naturalists took a darker view of the world. According to the naturalist:

àThe universe is unpredictable, spontaneous, and discontinuous;

àOur fate is determined by our environment, heredity, and chance;

àFree will is an illusion;

àLife is a cruel joke.

• Naturalism is the outgrowth of literary realism. Naturalistic writers were influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. They believed that one's heredity and social environment largely determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g., the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, Émile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, violence, prejudice, disease, corruption, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for focusing too much on human vice and misery.

Mark Twain (1835-1910)

•         Real name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens

•         Mark Twain is the phrase Mississippi boatmen used to signify 2 fathoms of water, the depth needed for a boat’s safe passage.

•         Twain was a vocal champion of any oppressed minority: He championed for black rights, supported workers, and deplored anti-Semitism. He also supported Native Americans, which was amazing for his time. And he spoke out in favor of women, too.

Major works:

•         “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country” (short story, 1865)

•         Innocents Abroad (1869)

•         Roughing It (1872)

•         The Gilded Age (1873)

•         The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

•         The Prince and the Pauper (1881)

•         Life on the Mississippi (1883)

•         The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

•         The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900)

Major works:

•         “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras Country” (short story, 1865)

•         Innocents Abroad (1869)

•         Roughing It (1872)

•         The Gilded Age (1873)

•         The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

•         The Prince and the Pauper (1881)

•         Life on the Mississippi (1883)

•         The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

•         The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900)

Stephen Crane (1871-1900)

•         American novelist, short story writer, poet and journalist

•         Stephen Crane died broke at the age of 28. Although his life was brief and painful – he died of tuberculosis and malaria – Crane published an amazing amount: five novels, two volumes of poetry, three big story collections, two books of war stories, and countless works of short fiction and reporting.

•         The first novel to deal realistically with life in the slums, Maggie has been called “the first American novel”, “the first naturalistic novel”, and “the first novel that divides the English with the American novel”.

•         His writing made a deep impression on 20th century writers, most prominent among them Ernest Hemingway, and is thought to have inspired the Modernists and the Imagists (意象派诗人).

Major works:

•         Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893)

•         The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

•         The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895)

•         George's Mother (1896)

•         The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898)

•         War is Kind (1899)

•         Active Service (1899)

•         The Monster and Other Stories (1899)

•         Wounds in the Rain (1900)

•         The O'Ruddy (1903)

Jack London (1876-1916)

•         Real name: John Griffith Chaney, an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone.

•         London was the highest-paid writer of his day (earning more than $70,000 a year), but he lived hard and died young.

•         London was a passionate advocate of unionization, socialism, and the rights of workers and wrote several powerful works dealing with these topics such as his dystopian novel, The Iron Heel and his non-fiction exposé, The People of the Abyss.

Novels:

•         The Cruise of the Dazzler (1902)

•         A Daughter of the Snows (1902)

•         The Call of the Wild (1903)

•         The Kempton-Wace Letters (1903)(published anonymously, co-authored with Anna Strunsky)

•         The Sea-Wolf (1904)

•         The Game (1905)

•         White Fang (1906)

•         Before Adam (1907)

•         The Iron Heel (1908)

•         Martin Eden (1909)

•         Burning Daylight (1910)

•         The Scarlet Plague (1912)

•         A Son of the Sun (1912)

•         The Abysmal Brute (1913)

•         The Valley of the Moon (1913)

•         The Mutiny of the Elsinore (1914)

•         The Little Lady of the Big House (1916)

Short story collections:

•         Son of the Wolf (1900)

•         Chris Farrington, Able Seaman (1901)

•         The God of His Fathers & Other Stories (1901)

•         Children of the Frost (1902)

•         The Faith of Men and Other Stories (1904)

•         Tales of the Fish Patrol (1906)

•         Moon-Face and Other Stories (1906)

•         Love of Life and Other Stories (1907)

•         Lost Face (1910)

•         South Sea Tales (1911)

•         When God Laughs and Other Stories (1911)

•         The House of Pride & Other Tales of Hawaii (1912)

•         Smoke Bellew (1912)

•         A Son of the Sun (1912)

•         The Night Born (1913)

•         The Strength of the Strong]] (1911)

•         The Turtles of Tasman (1916)

•         The Human Drift (1917)

•         The Red One (1918)

•         On the Makaloa Mat (1919)

•         Dutch Courage and Other Stories (1922)

Autobiographical memoirs:

•         The Road (1907)

•         John Barleycorn (1913)

•         Non-fiction and essays:

•         The People of the Abyss (1903)

•         How I Became a Socialist (1903)

•         The War of the Classes (1905)

•         Revolution, and other Essays (1910)

•         The Cruise of the Snark (1911)

Frank Norris (1870-1902)

•         an American novelist, during the Progressive Era, writing predominantly in the naturalist genre. His notable works include McTeague (1899), The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), and The Pit (1903).

•         Frank Norris's work often includes depictions of suffering caused by corrupt and greedy turn-of-the-century corporate monopolies. Although he did not openly support socialism as a political system, his work nevertheless evinces a socialist mentality and influenced socialist/progressive writers such as Upton Sinclair.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

•         an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser's best known novels include Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925).

•         Considered by many to be the leader of naturalism in American writing, Dreiser is also remembered for his stinging criticism of the genteel tradition—what literary critic William Dean Howells described as the “smiling aspect of life”—typifying America. In his fiction, Dreiser deals with social problems and with characters who struggle to survive.

Major works – Fiction:

•         Sister Carrie (1900)

•         Old Rogaum and His Theresa (1901)

•         Jennie Gerhardt (1911)

•         The Financier (1912)

•         The Titan (1914)

•         The "Genius" (1915)

•         Free and Other Stories (1918)

•         Twelve Men (1919)

•         An American Tragedy (1925)

•         Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories (1927)

•         A Gallery of Women (1929)

•         The Bulwark (1946)

•         The Stoic (1947)

Local Color writers

•         In literature, regionalism or local color refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features – including characters, dialects, customs, history, and landscape – of a particular region.

•         Most famous writers:

--Bret Harte

--Mary Wilkins Freeman

--Sarah Orne Jewett

-- Kate Chopin

--Charlotte Perkins Gilman

--Willa Cather

Bret Harte (1836-1902)

•         an American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California, including "The Outcasts of Poker Flat“ and  “Tennessee's Partner”.

•         The Tales of the Argonauts, a volume of short sketches published in 1875

•         Plain Language from Truthful James, known also as The Heathen Chinee, was a satire of racial prejudice in northern California, but was embraced by the American public as a mockery of Chinese immigrants, and shaped anti-Chinese sentiment more than any other work at the time.

•         The Stolen Cigar-Case, featuring ace detective "Hemlock Jones", was praised by Ellery Queen as "probably the best parody of Sherlock Holmes ever written".