Test 2听力原文

SECTION A MINI-LECTURE

Five Main Literary Movements in American History

Good morning, everyone. Today’s lecture is the very first of a series of lectures on the main

literary movements in United States history. In this class, we are going to cover five different

movements in literature and discuss the origins and common beliefs of each movement. In this, our

first class, I’d like to take some time to give you an overview of these five movements as a starting

point. I’ll go over the period of time each movement covers, the place in the US where it got its

start, the key figures in each movement, and the core beliefs of each.

We won’t have time in the course to cover all literary movements, so we’re going to be

focusing on the general time period of the 19th and 20th centuries. More specifically, this course

will cover most of the important literary movements from 1830 to around 1940.

The first literary movement we’ll be looking at in detail is called Transcendentalism. The

reason we choose this as our starting point is that writers of this movement or period are the first to

show a clear difference from British writers and British cultural tradition and heritage. Before this

time, American writers and British writers shared similar views of the world and saw the world

through the same lens. We sometimes refer to Transcendentalism as American Transcendentalism to American

Transcendentalists also extolled individualism and encouraged individuals to be reliant on

themselves and their development as human beings. Transcendentalists very often were active in

social movements. Arguably the most important figure of this movement was Ralph Waldo

Emerson, whose book called Nature, published in 1836, remains one of the movements most read

works.

The second movement we’re going to talk about is Romanticism, though it is more a series of

movements in art, music and literature which lasted about 50 years and spread from Britain and

Germany to other parts of the world. Basically, romanticism is centered on strong emotions and strong emotion, unexplained phenomenon, and unusual occurrences.

Our next movement is Realism, a movement which started in France in the mid 19th century

before spreading to other areas, including the United States in the 1870s. This movement was, in

many ways, a reaction to Romanticism in that it rejected strange and, indeed, romantic tales and

aimed to show society and humanity as it was in real life. Realists focused on events that were