American-Puritanism-美国文学史

American Puritanism: 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. They were a group of serious,

religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints,

Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of

predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of

grace form God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early

American mind. American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature.

6.

American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period

to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of

romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a

faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for

commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature

and human experience.

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American Transcendentalism: Transcendentalists terroras from the romantic

literature of Europe. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of

Americagogopirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe. They stressed the

importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society.

They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them,

alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the

most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of

the senses. Emerson’s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism〞

and his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as America’s “Declaration of Intellectual

Independence〞.

Black humor, in literature, drama, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express

the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters

or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black

humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic

farce. For example, Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop

Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963) is a terrifying comic treatment of the circumstances

surrounding the dropping of an atom bomb, while Jules Feiffer's comedy Little Murders

(1965) is a delineation of the horrors of modern urban life, focusing particularly on random

assassinations. The novels of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John

Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.

6. The Lost Generation: It’s used to describe the people of the postwar years. It

describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates〞 or exiles.

It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semipoverty. It describes the

Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an

unfamiliar changing world.

After World War I, the young disappointed American writers, such as Hemingway,

Pound, Cummings Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their place of exile. They came from the

East or the Middle West of the U. S. A, and most of them had been shocked or

wounded in the war. An American woman writer named Gertrude Stein, who had lived

in Paris since 1903, welcomed these young writers to her apartment which was

already famous as a literary salon. She called them “the lost generation〞, because

they had cut themselves off from their past in American in order to create new types of

writing which had never been tried before. “The Lost Generation〞 is also painted in

the writers’ writings. The young English and American expatriates, men and women,

were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms

with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and

restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but

they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their

whole life is undercut and defeated.

Characteristics of Romanticism:

a. Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. (subjectivity)

b. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason

and common sense.

c. They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group, against

authority.

d. The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop and express his

own inner thoughts.

e. Typical literary forms of romanticism include ballad, lyric, sentimental comedy, problem

novel, historical novel , gothic romance, metrical romance, sonnet.

Representatives:

• New England Poets: William Cullen Bryant; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;

• Writers: James Fenimaore Cooper, Washington Irving“The Sketch Book of Geoffrey

Grayon〞

9. Naturalism 自然主义

1. Naturalism is a literary trend prevailing in Europe, especially in France and Germany, in the

second half of the 19th century.

2. Naturalism theory: literature must be “true to life〞 and exactly reproduce real life,

including all its details without any selection.

3. Naturist writers usu. write about the lives of the poor and oppressed, or the “slum life贫民窟生活〞, but by giving all the details without discrimination, they can only represent the

external appearance instead of the inner essence of real life.

4. Naturalism, in reality, was a development of realism.

5. Emile Zola(1840-1902), the French novelist and the master of modern naturalism.

George Gissing(1857-1903)-the most significant figure in the period of transition from the

Victorian to the modern novel.

Representative: George Gissing(1857-1903)

1. His novels were mainly a description of the appalling可怜的 conditions of the poor and a

reflection of his own painful experiences and impressions.

2. His most outstanding novel is New Grub Street(1891) – a minor classic which depicts the

literary life of his time.

3. Other works:

a) Charles Dickens: A critical Study(1898) – which shows his sound appreciation of Dickens’s

achievements in character portrayal and language art.

b) The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft(1903) – the most popular of his work written in the

form of part diary, part essays and part confessions.

4. Gossing is a chronicler年代史编者 of the seamy堕落的 side of later Victorian England.

17. American naturalism

American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like realism, it had come from Europe.

Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology,

human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century.

Background:

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern

science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold,

indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this chance world he was both helpless and

hopeless.

Major Features:

Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment

The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.

Representatives:

The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American

writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.

Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the first American naturalism work. Norris’s McTeague is

the manifesto of American naturalism. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is the work in which naturalism

attained maturity. These writers’ detailed description of the lives of the downtrodden and the

abnormal, their frank threatment of human passion and sexuality, and their portrayal of men and

women overwhelmed by blind forces of nature still exert a powerful influence on modern writers.

Influence:

Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes

also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. This combination of grim reality and

desire for improvements is typical of America as it moved into the twentieth century.