1. 全套美国文学精心整理的各个时期作家作品简介A General Introduction to American

American LiteratureLecture 1 A General Introduction 张慧 hzhang8311@http://www.77cn.com.cn

An Outline of American Literature 1607-1765 1765-1800 1800-1865 1865-1918 1918-1945 1945Colonial American Literature Revolutionary American Literature Romanticism Realism Modernism Contemporary American Literature

1607 The first permanent settlement in north America was established at Jamestown, Virginia.

1765 The Stamp Act

1800 Voting begins in the United States presidential election U.S. President John Adams becomes the first President of the United States to live in the Executive Mansion (later renamed the White House).

1865 The Civil War ended

1918 The end of WWI

Colonial American Literature Time early 17th century - the middle of 18th century

Dominant Thoughts: Puritanism

Literary Forms: travelogue, journal, reports, letters historical records, religious tracts, pious poetry

Major Writers: Anne Bradstreet Edward Taylor

Characteristics: religious, moral, political, historical and practical

Revolutionary American Literature Time: 1765 – the end of 18th Century

Dominant Thoughts: American Enlightenment

Literary Forms Political pamphlets and state papers

Major Writers: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography Thomas Jefferson Thomas Paine Philip Freneau, “The Wild Honey Suckle”

American Romanticism Time The first half of the 19th century

Dominant Thoughts Domestic Factors Foreign influences

Literary Forms Essays, poems, short stories and novels

Romanticism is characterized by a heightened 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

Major Writers and Representative works Early Romantic Writers New England Transcendentalists

Early Romantic writers Washington Irving The first important writer in American literature The Sketch Book Rip Van Winkle The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

James Fenimore Cooper Leatherstocking Tales For the first time the frontier and the wilderness was well illustrated

New England Transcendentalists 1840s Climax of Romanticism New England Transcendentalism The first American renaissance

Manifesto of American Transcendentalists Transcendentalism Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature “The American Scholar”

Henry David Thoreau Walden

Declaration of Intellectual Independence

Writers influenced by Transcendentalism Poets Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass

Emily Dickinson Because I could not Stop for Death

Novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter

Herman Melville Moby Dick

Other figures in this period Edgar Allan Poe The most controversial of American writers

“The Raven”, The Fall of the House of Usher

“New England poets” or “Schoolroom poets” William Cullen Bryant, “Thanatopsis”; “To a Waterfowl” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “A Psalm of Life” James Russel Lowell Oliver Wendell Holmes John Greenleaf Whittier