英语专业美国文学期末考试复习资料个人整理.doc

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1、 一Colonial America1. The first English colony: Jamestown in Virginia in 16072Puritanism :Influence on American value system: simplicity, freedom, independence, hard work, etc.3Anne Bradstreet， once called “Tenth Muse”二Reason and Revolution1. Benjamin Franklin-Poor Richards Almanac Modeled on farmers

2、 annual calendar; kept publishing for many years; includes many classical sayings, 2. Thomas PaineCommon Sense: a strong push for the Revolution Warfour parts (British enslavement of the colonies; praising democratic election; Americas economic and military potential to protect the rights of people)

3、 三 RomanticismAn expression of an individuals feeling and experiences; imagination & natureThe first literary Renaissance, in the history of American literature. It stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It started with the publication of Washington Irvings

4、 The Sketch Book and ended with Whitmans Leaves of Grass.1.Washington Irving (1783-1859)(1)Literary status: the first American to earn an international reputation; Father of the American short stories(2)Tow short stories-“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: Americanized versions of Eu

5、ropean folk tales, from German legends, but achieving a distinct American tone and theme (3)The Sketch Book:The first modern short stories and the first great American juvenile literature, winning him international popularity2.James Fenimore Cooperthe first major American writer to deal imaginativel

6、y with American life, a critic of the political, social and religious problems of the day.Leatherstocking TalesIncluding: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, The DeerslayerCentre Character: Natty Bumppo (an ideal romantically; various names: Leatherstocking, Deerslay

7、er, Pathfinder, Hawkeye; with two noble red men: Mohican Chief Chingachgook and his son, Uncas)3.William Cullen BryantLiterary status: one of Americas earliest naturalist poets; “the American Wordsworth”most famous poems: “Thanatopsis”; “To a Waterfowl” 4.Edgar Allen PoeThe Raven:The poem is a verse

8、-narrative and has 108 lines in 18 stanzas. TranscendentalismNatures voice pushed American Romanticism into a new phase, the phase of New England Transcendentalism, the summit of American Romanticism.5.Henry David ThoreauLiterary status: a thorough practitioner of Transcendentalism; greatly influenc

9、ed by Emerson (more radical)Civil Disobedience(在什么情况下写的：没交战争税，入狱 )Walden (Walden is a faithful record of his reflections when he was in solitary communion with nature, an eloquent indication that he not only embraced Emersons Transcendentalist philosophy but went even further to illustrate that pant

10、heistic quality of nature.) 6Nathaniel HawthorneThe Scarlet Letter 红字(a simple but very moving story in which four people living in a Puritan community are involved in and affected by the sin of adultery in different ways, showing the reader the tension between society and individuals)7.Herman Melvi

11、llea master of allegory and symbolismmost of his novels based on sea sailors and adventure except The Confidence-Man(1857)Literary achievements: Moby Dick 四 Realism1Walt Whitman -Innovative poetic form: “free verse 自由体诗” (poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme; intriguing the readers ow

12、n imagination); a looser and more open-ended syntactical structure; lines and sentences of different lengths; few compound sentences2.Theodore Dreiser(填空题)(1)欲望三部曲 The Financier The Titan The Stoic(2) American Tragedy为什么叫美国悲剧-典型地反应了当时美国人对财富的追求2.Mark Twain (1) The Gilded Age 镀金时代: written in collabor

13、ation with Charles Dudley Warner, exploring the individualism in a world of unstable values, naming the get-rich-quick years of the post-Civil War (2).Mark Twain的贡献：making colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of the country3.Henry James (1)the first Amer

14、ican writer to conceive his career in international termsInternational themes：the clashes between two different cultures and the emotional and moral problems of Americans in Europe, or Europeans in America 主题：inner world (2)The Portrait of A Lady -It incarnates the clash between the Old World and th

15、e New World in the life journey of an American girl in a European environment (3)International theme-American innocence in face of European sophistication4 .Bret Harte in the 1860s was the first American writer of local color to achieve wide popularity, presenting stories of western mining towns wit

16、h colorful gambles, outlaws, and scandalous.5.Naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed circumstances. At bottom, life was shown to be ironic even tragic 五Twentieth-Century Literature1

17、.Scott Fitzgerald (1)了不起的盖尔茨比反应了那个年代-Jazz Age2.Robert Frost(填空题)（1）Robert Frost had rejected the revolutionary poetic principles of his contemporaries, choosing instead the old -fashioned way to be new. He employed the plain speech of rural New Englanders and preferred the short , traditional forms

18、of lyric and narrative. （2）After Apple-Picking Of apple-Picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired.What is the two sentences imply?The speaker is indifferent to what he once desired.3The imagist Movement flourished from 1908 to 1917 and involved quite a number of British and Ameri

19、can writers and poets4. Pound A Pact 契约(Ezar Pound)主要表达了意思5.With the slow disintegration of old prejudices came the “Harlem Renaissance” a burst of literary achievement in the 1920s by Negro playwrights, poets, and novelists who presented new insights into the American experience and prepared the wa

20、y for the emergence of numerous black writers after mid-century.阅读题一We passed the school, where children stroveAt recess-in the ring-We passed the fields of gazing grain-We passed the setting sun-1.作者Emily Dickinson作名：Because I could not stop for death2.Three images: school, field, setting sun, whic

21、h stand for three stages of life: youth, mature period, end of life3.The school, the fields of Gazing Grain, the setting sun symbolize three stages of ones life:youth, manhood and old age.4.we were riding in a hearse, heading toward Eternity.二Moby Dick1.作者：Herman Melville 作名：Moby Dick2.船长：Ahab3.发生的事

22、：The story tells the adventures of the wandering sailor Ishmael and his voyage on the whaleship Pequod, commanded by Captain Ahab. Ishmael soon learns that Ahab seeks one specific whale, Moby-Dick, a white whale of tremendous size and ferocity, which destroyed Ahabs boat and bit off his leg. Ahab in

23、tends to exact revenge. However, at last the Pequod is sunk and the whole crew perish in the sea except Ishmael三The woods are lovely, dark and deepBut i have promises to keep,And miles to go before i sleep,And miles to go before i sleep.1.作者：Robert Frost 作名:stopping by woods on a snowy evening2.第二个s

24、leep的意思：die3.whats the meaning of the passage?On the surface, the passage is deceptively simple. However, with the commonest words, it is deeply meditative. The simple poem uses its superb craftsmanship to come to a climax of responsibility: the promises to be kept, the obligations to be filled. The

25、 poet seems to show that he would like to stay forever in the beautiful snowy woods, but as a poet, he still has many tasks to fulfill in his life and has to go ahead.四“God knows,” exclaimed he, at his wits end; “Im not myself-Im somebody else-thats me yonder-no-thats somebody else, got in my shoes,

26、-I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and theyve changed my gun, and every things changed, and Im changed, and I cant tell whats my name, or who I am!”A: Identify the work and the authorB: The speaker says he is changed. Do you think he is changed?C: What idea does the quoted

27、sentences express?Answers -A: Washington Irvings “Rip Van Wrinkle”B: Its the social environment that is changedC: When Rip is back home after a period of 20 years, he find that everything has changed. All those old values are gone, and he can hardly feel at home in a changed society. One of the func

28、tions that Rip serves in the story is to provide a measuring stick for change. It is through him that Irving expresses the theme that a desire for change, improvement, and progress subvert a stable society.问答题1. The symbolic meaning of the Letter A in the Scarlet Letter worn by Hester.The Letter A w

29、orn by Hester has undergone great changes in meaning as the novel progresses.At first,it stands for a token of shame -Adultery. Then Hester suffered from loneliness and alienation. Later with Hesters self-sacrificing sympathy and help offered to her fellow villagers the meaning of the letter A begin

30、s to imply Able and Admirable ,even Angel at the end of the story.2Herman MelvilleOne of the major themes in Melville is alienation, which he sensed existing in the life of his time on different level, between man and man, man and society, and man and nature. Captain Ahab seems to be the best illust

31、ration of it all. He is a typical Melvillean “isolato”, whose lips are set ever for an “I prefer not to”. He cuts himself off from his wife and kid, and stays away most of the time from his crew. He hates Moby Dick which is an embodiment of nature. He is angry because his pride is wounded. After the

32、 loss of his leg in his encounter whith the white whale, he seems to hold God responsible for the presence of evil in the universe. Thus his anger assumes the proportions of a cosmic nature. He is bent on avenging himself. He hears of no objection. In his egocentric obsession he loses his sanity and

33、 humanity and becomes a devilish creature rushing headlong toward his doom. Moby Dick thus reveals the basic pattern of 19th century American life: loneliness and suicidal individualism in a self-styled democracy3The major characteristics of imagist poetry are:1.Direct treatment of objects, concrete

34、ness of imagery . 2. No idea or insight but things or images . 3.Free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern. 4. Cpmmon speech ,economy of expression.4Emily Dickinson 的诗歌特点Artistic features of Emily Dickinsons poemsUnique and unconventional 1). Her poems have no titles, always quoted by their f

35、irst lines2). A particular stress pattern: dashes are used as a musical device to create cadence and capital letters as a means of emphasis3). The form of her poetry is like the hymns in the churches, familiar, communal, and irregular (sentences)4). Short: rarely more than twenty lines5). Centered o

36、n a single image or symbol and focused on one subject matter6). Personal and meditative due to her deliberate seclusionHer poetry is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness;Her limited private world has never confined the limitless power of her creativity and imagination5naturalismNaturali

37、sm, a more deliberate kind of realism, usually involves a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. As a literary movement, naturalism was initiated in France and it came to be led by Emile Zola, who claimed a scientific status for his studies of impoverished

38、characters miserably subjected to hunger, sexual obsession, and hereditary defects. Natural fiction aspired to a offering detailed and fully researched investigations into unexplored comes of modern society. The most significant work of naturalism in English is Dreisers Sisiter Carrie.6transcendenta

39、lism1. Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively , or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the sense.Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the Over-soul ,the Individual and Nature.Other concepts that

40、accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual divine and, therefore, self-reliant.The New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European Romanticism.7Mark Twain At first, through a local

41、and particular book, it touches upon the human situation in a general, in deed “universal” way. Mark Twain once wrote about the book as “the struggle between a healthy heart and a deformed conscience.” between the false religious beliefs Huck has been taught and his good natural impulses. Humanitari

42、anism ultimately triumphs. Mark Twain gives his young hero very adult problems. In the second, escaping “down” the river is a cruel irony in itself, provides the episodic structure which like in a picaresque novel, is the thread that holds together the developing relationship between the two runaway

43、s on the raft. The escape, the quest for freedom, is literal for both Huck and Jim as they flee from Pap and Miss Watson. It may also be seen as symbolic on several planes: historical, philosophical, and moral. The flight down the rivers is a flight from the complexities of the ever-expanding, westw

44、ard-moving settlements of new civilization. Finally, having learned about the evil of the world during their trip in the various towns and villages along the way, Huck, meantime, is facing a big moral problem. The law of society says he must return Jim to his “owner”. But the moral climax of the nov

45、el comes in Chapter 31, when Huck decides that he “will go to hell” rather than turn in Jim. Huck thinks deeply about morality and then decides to break the law. The slave, to Huck, is now a man, not a “thing”. Many critics see Huck Finn as the great novel of American democracy. It shows the basic goodness and wisdom of ordinary people, of course it fully exhibits Twains particular humor. It is “ a love song of the river.”