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英美文学重点作者汇总

来源：二三娱乐

一、早期和中世纪的英国文学

 Geoffrey Chaucer ii

简介：Geoffrey Chaucer is the founder of English poetry and a forerunner of

humanism. He was regarded as the founder of English realism. 代表作：Troilus and Criseyde《特洛伊斯洛与克瑞西达》(改变于意大利)；The Canterbury Tales《坎特伯雷故事

集》（包括：“The Prologue”《总序》；“The Wife of Bath”《巴斯妇人》）。

 The Canterbury Tales《坎特伯雷故事集》的影响：①It shows a true-to-life

picture of Chaucer’s time. (之所以说乔叟是The founder of realism，是因为早期英国文学歌颂英雄(Anglo-Saxon poetry)，中期英国文学歌颂骑士精神(The Romance)，之后虽然有了piers the plowman,也不曾直接写社会不公，直到乔叟真实描写中世纪及各层人民。) ②Taking from the stand of rising bourgeoisie, Chaucer affirms men and opposes the dogma of asceticism preached by the Church. ③His tales expose and satirize the evils of his time, attack degeneration of the noble, the corruption of the Church.

语言特色/贡献：①He is the first great poet who wrote in the English language.

②He introduced from France the rhymed stanza of various types, especially the Heroic couplet to English poetry. ③He is good at the terza rima, which makes his language a high style.

二、英国文艺复兴

 Thomas More ii

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简介：Thomas More is an English humanism churchman. 代表作：Utopia《乌

托邦》。

评价：①More dared to fight against the feudalism ruler and he was a

humanist. ②But, he was no revolutionary in the sense of wishing to arouse the people or to start any revolutionary movement. ③The system of bondsmen suggested to solve the problem of social productivity still remains the features of class exploitation. ④He could never find the means by which socialism could be realized.

 Francis Bacon

简介：He is the founder of English materialist philosophy, the first English

essayist and the founder of English Modern Science. He is the one who introduced essay, the literary form, to England. 代表作：Advancement of Learning《学问的演进》；

New Instrument《新工具》；The Essays《随笔》（58篇）“Of Studies”《论学习》；“Of

Beauty”《论美》；“Of Wisdom for a Man’s Self”《论自私》。

 “Of Studies”《论学习》：Its message is conveyed with sweeping effect and

overwhelming power, which lie in the unity of the message and the consistence of forceful argumentations. 内容：The text focuses on one controlling idea——“studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability.”

 “Of Beauty”《论美》：Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bacon makes

full use of so meager a vocabulary to explicate his great theme: the criterion of beauty. He makes a conclusion that only the beauty of virtue can “shine” eternally, beyond

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time and space.

主题/技法：Bacon’s essay writing is classified into Classic Essay. The classic

essay is as comprehensive in subject matters and styles as in all classic literature. In subjects, the classic essay deals with a variety of themes: philosophy, literary criticism, arts, politics, history, social problems, travels and other aspects of life. In style, Bacon is weight and highly sententious. Many of his sentences have become wise old sayings.

 Edmund Spenser

简介：Edmund Spenser was recognized as the “Poet’s poet”. 代表作：The Shepherd’s Calendar《牧羊人日历》；Epithalamion《结婚曲》；Amoritti《爱情小唱》；The Faerie Queene《仙后》。

 The Spenserian Stanza: It refers to a nine-line-stanza with the following

rhyme scheme: ababbcbcc. The first eight lines are written in iambic pentameter. The ninth line is written in iambic hexameter which is called an alexandrine.

 The Faerie Queene《仙后》：①A long poem planned in 12 books, of which

he finished only six. ②It is set in the mythical world of King Arthur and his knights. ③theme: Nationalism, Humanism and Puritanism.

地位：①The publication of The Shepherd’s Calendar marked the budding of

the Renaissance flower in the northern island of England(Ireland). ②The language had changed into Modern English distinguished from the Middle English of Chaucer’s day.

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Spenser is the first master to make that language the natural music of his poetic effusions. ③He invented the Spenserian stanza, which became a popular verse form in the historical development of English poetry.

 Christopher Marlowe ii

简介：Christopher Marlowe was the most preeminent figure among the

“university wits”, as well as the greatest playwright before the rise of Shakespeare. 代表作：Tamburlaine《帖木儿大帝》(对权力的贪婪)；The Jew of Malta《马耳他的犹太人》(对金钱的贪欲)；Doctor Faustus《浮士德博士》。

 Doctor Faustus《浮士德博士》：The play deals with themes including sin,

redemption, and damnation. The chief feature of Faustus’s character is an insatiable thirst for knowledge. The tragedy of Doctor Faustus is characteristic of a humanist in the age of Renaissance.

社会意义：①Marlowe’s plays show the spirit of the rising bourgeoisie. The

heroes of his plays are typical images of the era of the primitive accumulation of capital. ②The theme of Marlowe’s plays is the praise of individuality freed from the restraints of medieval dogmas and law. ③However, the heroes in Marlowe’s plays are merely individualists. Their individualistic ambition often brings ruin to the world and sometimes to themselves.

文学成就：①Marlowe was the greatest of the pioneers of English drama. He

reformed the English drama and perfected the language and verse of dramatic works.

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②He first made blank verse the principal instrument of English drama. ③Although his plays lack of variety in characterization and construction, he was famous for his “mighty line”.

 William Shakespeare

简介：Shakespeare is the most remarkable playwright and poet all over the

world. 戏剧分期：① 1590-1594初期，实验各种戏剧类型。早期人物塑造不够丰满，历史精确性不够，以诗剧为主要形式却无法摆脱押韵诗的死板僵硬。Henry VI《亨利六世》；Richard III《理查德三世》；The Comedy of Errors《错中错》；The Taming of the Shrew《驯悍记》；Love’s Labour’s Lost《爱的徒劳》；Romeo and Juliet《罗密欧与朱丽叶》。② 1595-1600

成熟期，史剧、十四行诗都很成熟。总体上积极向上但已有了些许苦痛，人物成熟饱满，史料丰富，采用马洛的无韵诗写法。Richard II《理查德二世》；Henry IV《亨利四世》；Henry V《亨利五世》；The Merry Wives of Windsor《温莎的风流娘们》；Julius Caesar《朱利尤斯·凯撒》；伟大喜剧“Great Comedies”——A Midsummer Night’s Dream《仲夏夜之梦》，The Merchant of Venice《威尼斯商人》；As You Like it《皆大欢喜》；Twelfth Night《第十二夜》。

③ 1601-1607伟大悲剧时期，由于社会剧变，作品悲观。All’s Well That Ends Well《终成眷属》；Measure for Measure《一报还一报》；Antony and Cleopatra《安东尼和克里奥佩特拉》；伟大悲剧“Great Tragedies”——Hamlet《哈姆莱特》；Othello《奥赛罗》；King Lear《李尔王》；Macbeth《麦克白》。④ 传奇剧时代。Cymbeline《辛白林》；The Winter’s Tale《冬天的童话》；The Tempest《暴风雨》；Henry VIII《亨利八世》。⑤ 诗歌：Venus and Adonis《维纳斯和阿多尼斯》；The Rape of Lucrece《鲁克丽丝受辱记》；Sonnets《十四行诗集》。

 Ben Jonson

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简介：Ben Jonson was one of the leading dramatists of the Renaissance

period. 代表作：Every Man in His Humour《个性互异》；Volpone, or the Fox《福尔蓬奈》（或《狐狸》）；The Alchemist《炼金术士》；Bartholomew Fair《巴梭罗缪市集》。

作品特点：① Jonson’s comedies are “comedies of humours”. His portrayal

of characters is one-sided, flat, and lacking development instead of being round and flexible. ② Jonson took a firm stand for the “three unities” (time, place and action) and strongly disapproved of a mixture of serious and comic episodes in a play. ③ He advocates a truthful and realistic description of life and people. He was a forerunner of classicism in English literature.

三、英国资产阶级革命时期

 John Milton

简介：John Milton is the third greatest English poet after Chaucer and

Shakespeare. 早期写诗歌，中期写宣传册，晚期写史诗。代表作：“Lycidas”《利西达斯》（悼亡诗）；“On his Deceased Wife”《致亡妻》；Areopagirica《论出版自由》；Defence of the English People《为英国人民辩护》（查理二世雇人写文章讨伐英国人民，因为当年他们支

持处死查理一世，米尔顿写此文为英国人民辩护。）；Paradise Lost《失乐园》；Paradise Regained《复乐园》；Samson Agonistes《力士参孙》。

 Paradise Lost《失乐园》: 概况：Paradise lost, consisting of 12 books,

naturally divides into three equal parts of four books each. The stories were taken from the Old Testament and written in blank verse. In this work Milton tried to answer the

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old question challenging all Christians, namely: if God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there so much suffering and evil in this world? 主题：There are three striking aspects of his intention can be felt in this epic: his faith in God, his inclination for classicism, and his yearning for reformation and freedom. 人物：① Satan, though defeated, still sought revenge, is the most striking character in the poem. Though feebler in force, he remains superior in nobility, since he prefers independence to happy servility. Satan is the spirit of questioning the authority of God. ② In the poem God is no better than a selfish despot, seated upon a throne with a chorus of angels about him eternally singing his praises. However, we can never take it for granted that Milton is attacking God. The God Milton cursed was, in fact, not the Christian Providence but a mere symbol for anything he believed to be bad or immoral. ③ Adam and Eve embody Milton’s belief in the powers of man. 2.

贡献/技法：① Milton was political in both his life and his art. ② He wrote the

greatest epic in English literature. He and Shakespeare have always been regarded as two patterns of English verse. ③ He is a master of the blank verse. He first used blank verse in non-dramatic works. ④ He is a great stylist. He is famous for his grand style. (a). His style is characterized with the epic elements in it. (b). He always inverse the word order. (c). His writing is circumlocution (累赘的陈述). (d). His use of immensely long sentences and the epanalepsis (语句间隔反复) ⑤ He has always been admired for his sublimity of thought and majesty of expression. 四、十八世纪英国文学(思想启蒙时期)

 Alexander Pope

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简介：Alexander Pope was known as representative of the Enlightenment. He

is one of the first to introduce rationalism into England. He believed in the necessity of universal education, especially that of social morality, classic culture and scientific knowledge. He also assumed the role of champion of traditional civilization. (为什么说他是启蒙运动的代表)。代表作：Essay on Criticism《论批评》(用英雄双韵体作)；The Rape of the Lock《卷发遇劫记》；The Dunciad《群愚史记》；Essay on Man《人论》（启蒙主义重

要的作品）。

成就/局限性：① Pope was an outstanding enlightener and the greatest

English poet of the classical school in the first half of the 18th century. He usually writes in the form of heroic couplets. ② His style is direct and compact. ③ He was at his best in satire and epigram. Almost all his works are satires. He is good at saying brilliant and true things in a sparkling way. But he lacked the lyrical gift.

 Daniel Defoe（赏析）ii

Desert Island Fiction：is a form of fiction in which a remote and uncivilized

island is used as the venue of the story and action. Usually it can be placed right outside the “real” world and may be an image of the ideal, unspoiled or primitive existence, for it is often presented as an example of inner goodness, bravery, dignity and nobility, or adolescent innocence and purity uncorrupted by the evil force in civilization.

写作技巧：Defoe wrote in a plain factual, almost documentary style without

elaborate, romantic extravagances and encouraged the development of realistic fiction.

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His vocabulary is colloquial, uncoloured and free-running, but firm and concrete. The first-person narration is vivid, authentic and impressive with unadorned realism. Defoe creates, with no sigh of deliberate intent, the realistic fiction——the dominant literary form for the following centuries.

内容：Here Defoe describes how the hero, after years of solitude and

hardships, managed to construct for himself a habitable and even prosperous settlement by his unaided effort.殖民主义表现：Actually Crusoe did more than mere survival, for he established a plantation, opened up a colony, and created even a civilization in the wilderness. 人物精神：Defoe presents here in Crusoe a heroic image of the bourgeois man, a man who is daring, persistent, resourceful and ambitious, adventurous, enterprising as well; a man who richly represents the spirit of capitalism. 赞颂了：The adventure romance becomes an optimistic song of humanity, singing of man’s ability to survive, his courage to struggle against nature, his ambition to conquer new land.  Henry Fielding

简介：Henry Fielding is the founder of the English realistic school in literature

with Samuel Richardson. 代表作：Joseph Andrews《约瑟夫·安德鲁》；Jonathan Wild《大伟人乔纳森·魏尔德》；Tom Jones《汤姆·琼斯》。

特点：①Fielding is the founder of the English realistic novel and sets up the

theory of realism in literary creation. ②Fielding’s way in telling the story of a novel is the story may be told by the author. ③Fielding’s way of satire is to slash the evils of

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the corrupt ruling classes as in Jonathan Wild.

 Jonathan Swift

简介：Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, poet and political

pamphleteer. 代表作：The Battle of the Books《书战》；A Tale of a Tub《一个木桶的故事》；Bickerstaff Almanac《比克斯塔辅历书》；Gulliver’s Travels《格列夫游记》；The Drapier’s Letters《一个麻布商的来信》；A Modest Proposal《一个小小的建议》。

风格：①Swift is one of the greatest masters of English prose. His language is

simple, clear and vigorous. He said, “Proper words in proper places, makes the true definition of a style.” ② He is a master satirist and his irony is deadly.

 William Blake（前浪漫主义诗人）

简介：William Blake is a British poet, painter and engraver. 代表作：Songs of Innocence《天真之歌》；Songs of Experience《经验之歌》；The Marriage of Heaven and Hell《天堂与地狱的婚姻》。

地位：①The whole temper of Blake’s genius was essentially opposed to the

classical tradition of that age. ②His lyric poetry displays the characteristics of the romantic spirit.③ Blake’s revolutionary passion came near that of Shelly.

五、英国浪漫主义时期

 浪漫主义时期的主要特点：

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时间： At the turn of the18th and 19th centuries, romanticism appeared in

England as a new trend in literature. It rose and grew under the impetus of the Industrial Revolution and French Revolution.

① The Romantic Period is one of poetical revival. It is a period of poetry.

Emotion, imagination and intuition of humankind are what the romanticists emphasize in their works. ② The general feature of the works of the romanticists is the dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society. ③ They pay more attention to the spiritual and emotional life of man. Nature plays an important role in their works.

 William Wordsworth （湖畔诗人，消极浪漫主义诗人，早期浪漫主义诗人）

简介：The representative of the passive Romantic poets, who expressed the

deepest aspirations of English Romanticism. He has innovated the traditional form of ballad. He and Coleridge jointly published the Lyrical Ballads《抒情歌谣集》 in 1798.  The preface to the Lyrical Ballads: (诗歌创作原则) ① Wordsworth based

his own poetical principle on the premise that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling”. He appealed to individual sensation as the foundation in the creation and appreciation of poetry. ② Poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”. ③ 诗歌要用普通人的语言写普通生活中的普通事。

代表作：“To the Cuckoo”《致杜鹃》；“I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”《我如

行云独自游》；“She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways”《独自幽居》（Lucy Poems中的一首）；“I Travelled among Unknown Men”《我曾在海外的异乡漫游》。 11

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写作手法/特色：simplicity and purity of his language; His theme is “back to

nature” which is originated from his dissatisfaction with the social reality under capitalism; Nearly all of his good poetry was written during the first decade of his literary career.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1.

简介：Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the first critic of the Romantic school. 代

表作：“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”《古舟子咏》；“Kubla Khan”《忽必烈汗》；

Biographia Literaria, or Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions《文学传记或我的文学

生涯和文学观点》。

贡献：His Biographia Literaria afforded the new Romantic poetry a new

principle of criticism, whose task was not to judge but to appreciate and interpret.

 George Gordon Byron （晚期浪漫主义诗人，积极浪漫主义时期）

简介：Byron is one of the greatest romantic poets in England. He created the

“Byronic hero”, which had a great influence in the literary field. 代表作：Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage《恰尔德·哈罗德游记》；The Prisoner of Chillon《锡隆的囚徒》；Don Juan《唐璜》；“She Walks in Beauty”《她走在美的光影中》； “Elegy on Thyrza”《赛

沙挽歌》（即：“And Thou Art Dead”《你已经长逝》）；“Elegy”《挽歌》。

 “And Thou Art Dead”《你已经长逝》：It is an elegiac poem written by

Byron who attempts to express his feelings of loss upon the death of an oriental girl

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and also show his great affection to this young beautiful lady.

 Byronic heroes（拜伦式英雄）：It refers to characters described in Byron’s

works who are men with fiery passions and unbending will and express the poet’s own ideal of freedom. 缺点：These heroes rise against tyranny and injustice, but they are merely lone fighters striving for personal freedom and some individualistic ends.

 Percy Bysshe Shelley

简介：Shelley and Byron are justifiably regarded as two great poets of

revolutionary romanticism in England. He loved the people and hated their oppressors and exploiters. He called on the people to overthrow the rule of tyranny and injustice and prophesied a happy and free future for mankind. 代表作：Queen Mab《麦布女王》；

The Revolt of Islam《伊斯兰的起义》；Prometheus Unbound《解放了的普罗米修斯》；The Masque of Anarchy《假面的游行》；Adonais《阿多尼》（给济慈写的挽歌）；A Defence of Poetry《诗辩》（散文）；“Ode to the West Wind”《西风颂》；“One Word is Too Often

Profaned”《有一个字常被人亵渎》；“To a Sky-Lark”《致云雀》。

 Queen Mab《麦布女王》：It is a revolutionary poem. It contains almost all

Shelley’s major social and political ideas. 缺：However,. Shelley in this poem was mealy a Utopian-socialist in views, looking forward to a happy future for mankind but rejecting the path of revolution by violence.

 John Keats

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简介：A representative of the second generation English Romantic poets. 代

表作：长诗：Endymion《恩底弥翁》（纪念Thomas Chatterton，女神与美丽的牧羊人）；Isabella《伊莎贝拉》（根据薄卡丘的《十日谈》所改，讲伊莎贝拉将爱人的头颅放在花盆里，每天守护他）；The Eve of St. Agnes《圣阿格尼斯前夜》（与罗密欧朱丽叶的故事相似，圣阿格尼丝前夜，虔诚的少女可以梦见自己的丈夫）；Lamia《拉米亚》（有点类似《白蛇传》，蛇女爱上凡人）。短诗：“Ode to a Nightingale”《夜莺颂》；“Ode on a Grecian Urn”《希腊古瓮颂》；“To Autumn”《秋颂》。  “Ode on a Grecian Urn”《希腊古瓮颂》 : （部分内容赏析)Though the

sculpture on the urn were quiet forms, the human beauty and love captured in the figures on its freeze can never fade or die as they do in real life. Thus the urn remains forever a testimony that “beauty is truth, truth beauty”, for its silent loveliness has the profound stability of the eternal.

 “To Autumn”《秋颂》：（部分内容赏析）Although the last stanza falls on a

mixed note of subdued joy and mild melancholy, the whole poem gives us vivid and delightful scenes of the rural environment in the autumn season. Keats celebrates the world of nature in the autumn season, with “autumn” personified as a figure in various autumnal landscapes. He describes the fruitfulness of autumn, the sound of autumn and the color of autumn.

 “Ode to a Nightingale”《夜莺颂》：（部分内容赏析）In this ode, Keats not

only expresses his raptures upon hearing the beautiful songs of the nightingale and his desire to go to the ethereal world of beauty together with the bird, bur he also shows his deep sympathy for and his keen understanding oh human miseries in the society in

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which he lived.

手法/特色：①独特之处： He belongs to the school of romanticism, but unlike

Byron and Shelley, he was not active in the expression of his radically political sympathies. He restricted his application of the principle of liberty to the sphere of art only. The artistic aim in his poetry was always to create a beautiful world of imagination as opposed to the sordid reality of his day. He wrote for beauty, his leading principle is: “Beauty in truth, truth in beauty.” ② 作诗技巧：He expresses the delight which comes not only through the eye and the ear but through the senses of touch, taste and smell. So Keats has always been known as a sensuous poet. ③ 对艺术执着的原因：At the bottom of his poems lies his dissatisfaction with the society in which he lived and experienced great miseries and sufferings.  英国浪漫主义时期的散文成就

时代背景：In the 19th century periodicals increased and modern magazines

sprang up. They were instrumental to the rapid development of essays, both formal and informal, which became very popular. 主要的散文家：Under this encouragement appeared a number of brilliant essayists, such as Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt and De Quincy. 时代大事件：These prose-writer worked under the influence of the French Revolution in politics and of the Romantic Movement in literature. 他们的风格：They did not write according to the old rules and models of classicism but made the informal essay a pliable vehicle for expressing the writer’s own personality, thus bringing into English literature the familiar essay（小品文）. This new form of literature is best represented by Lamb.

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Charles Lamb

① 简介：Charles Lamb was important in English literature for his contribution to the essays. 代表作：His most well known literary work is Tales from Shakespeare《莎士比亚戏剧故事集》, which he wrote with his sister；Essays of Elia《伊利亚随笔集》。

② 散文特点：A. The most striking feature of Lamb’s essays is his humor. Laughter in his essays is often mingled with tears and there is sadness behind his humor. B. His essays are full of long and curious words. C. He was a romanticist, but his romanticism was the romanticist of the city. His imagination was fired with the busy life of London. 3.

William Hazlitt

① 简介：Hazlitt’s first fame came as literary critic. 代表作：Lectures on the English Poets《评英国诗人》；The English Comic Writers《评英国戏剧作家》(对复辟时期喜剧的评

价)；Table Talk《桌边闲谈》；Sketches and Essays《札记与散文》。

② 浪漫主义文学批评的特点：Hazlitt is one of the representatives of Romantic criticism who took individual taste as the foundation of literary criticism, instead of universal reason.

 Walter Scott

简介：Walter Scott fathered the historical novel in England and Europe. His

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chief achievement was the 20 novels he wrote, which have given him a unique place in the literary history. 代表作：Waverley《威弗利》（苏格兰史）；Rob Roy《罗伯·罗伊》（苏格兰史）；Ivanhoe《艾凡赫》（英国史）。

写作特征：① Scott has an outstanding gift of vivifying the past. ② In his

novels, historical events are closely interwoven with the fates of individuals. ③ Scott’s literary career marks the transition from romanticism to realism in English literature of the 19th century.

六、英国批判现实主义时期

 Charles Dickens（赏析）ii

Problem novel：（问题小说）Problem novel, “the type of prose fiction that

derives its chief interest from working out, through characters and incidents, some central problem”, is often considered a sub-type of realism and naturalism. More or less it focuses on social reality or actual experience rather than psychological presentation. Problem novels’ exposures are at most satiric, ironic and sometimes exaggerated to a dramatic extent.

背景：Hard Times is perhaps the most successful novel to satirize “the effects

of the Industrial Revolution in Northern England”. Under Dickens’ pen, Coketown, which is portrayed as “a triumph of fact” and having “no greater taint of fancy in it,” gives a striking impression of pollutedness and monotony——the negative effects of the Industrial Revolution. 主题：The novel investigates the central issues of “the

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clash between fact and fancy” and “the need for a healthy imaginative life with a proper balance for work and play.” Here Dickens aims his criticism mainly at the theory of utilitarianism——the keynote of the novel, which constructs the value problem of the mid-nineteenth-century English society as well as the central theme of Hard Times. 工业化的主要思潮实用主义对当时社会与人们带来的负面影响：The mentality of industrialization, in Dickens’ Hard Times at least, corresponds well with the idea of utilitarianism, and as far as the city of Coketown is concerned, has produced devastating effects, not only upon the city itself, but also upon the people who dwell there. For one thing, Coketown is turned into a hell of filth, lacking diversity and liveliness; for another, one group of people like Gradgrind act according to their principles of self-interest, devoid of fancy, imagination and human compassions. Another group is rendered as characters filled with kindness, forming a conspicuous contrast with the utilitarian and selfish people.

简介：Charles Dickens was the greatest representative of English critical

realism. 代表作：Sketches by Boz《博兹随笔》；The Pickwick Papers《匹克威克外传》；Oliver Twist《雾都孤儿》；Nicholas Nickleby《尼古拉斯·尼克尔贝》；The Old Curiosity Shop《老古玩店》；Martin Chuzzlewit《马丁·瞿述伟》；A Christmas Carol《圣诞颂歌》；The Chimes《钟声》；The Cricket on the Hearty《炉边蟋蟀》；Dombey and son《董贝父子》；David Cropperfield《大卫·科波菲尔》；Bleak House《荒凉山庄》；Hard Times《艰难时刻》；Little Dorrit《小杜丽》；A Tale of Two Cities《双城记》；Great Expectations《远大前程》；Our Mutual Friend《我们共同的朋友》。

作品特色：①As a novelist, Dickens is remembered first of all for his

character-portrayal. Every character his creative finger touched comes alive. ②Another

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feature of Dickens’ fictional art is his humour and satire. ③In terms of the construction in Dickens’ novels, the main plot is often interwoven with more than one sub-plot. ④Dickens is remembered not for one masterpiece but for a creative world.

 Charlotte Bronte（赏析）ii

Feminist novel：General speaking, the term “feminist novel” refers to

works about women by women novelists. It first appeared in England during the second half of the 18th century and developed in the 19th and the 20th centuries.

总述：Jane Eyre is Charlotte Bronte’s best literary production. The novel is

autobiographical, in that it clearly leans on Charlotte’s own experience as a governess and the feeling of humiliation it produces in her. It is a novel of passion, love and mystery. 人物：Edward Rochester is a proud, masterful, sardonic character, seemingly harsh and morose. Jane is plain and slight in build, but she has a willfulness and spiritedness of her own and can give as good as she gets in a war of words, even with her domineering master. Jane Eyre, through the first-person narrative, becomes an intensely real heroine. From her speech about love, we can learn that the humblest person also has the right to affection and self-realization, honesty and integrity. Love doesn’t mean an equality in a legal or political sense, but an equality in emotion and spirit.

 Emily Bronte （赏析）ii

Wuthering Heights is noted for its intense psychological description. 题目：

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“Heights” means “high place.” “Wuthering” is a significant provincial adjective used to describe the sound of north wind blowing in stormy weather. The author chose this title in order to tell the readers about what happened in this terrible stormy weather. In this high place, there’re few people, only this terrible sound “wuthering”. 叙事手法：Beginning near the denouement and tracing back to the events long before, the story is unfolded in an unusual way, and told chiefly by two narrators——Lockwood and Nelly Dean, with supplementary material like Catherine’s diary. Having the story related to Lockwood by Nelly removes the reader from direct contact with the wild and improbable events described. Through these twin mediums, the events of Wuthering Heights are credible to the readers. 场景：The two houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, embody the two major principles of life in this novel: storm and calm. The inhabitants of the Heights seem to be creature of the storm and violence is their natural language. 人物名称：Emily Bronte’s purpose in using the name Cathy for the first Catherine’s daughter is to show the damage one generation does to the subsequent one. Cathy marries her cousin and becomes Catherine Heathcliff, the name her mother might have had. The name Heathcliff is the combination of heath and cliff, which means some weed growing on the cliff. One can find that the road to Wuthering Heights was covered with heath. This name indicates Heathcliff’s character: stubborn, self-reliance. 主题：The theme of this novel is the extreme love and hatred.  George Eliot

简介：Most of George Eliot’s works dealt with moral problems and

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on the Floss《弗洛斯河上的磨坊》；Silas Marner《织工马南》；Middlemarch《米德尔马锲》。

特点：① Her characters were not grotesque types, but real common men and

women, whose psychology Eliot revealed very skillfully to the reader. ② Her works to some extend marks retrogression: She shifted the centre of gravity in the novel from the social problems to the problems of religion and morality. She cherished the illusion that humanity and love could do away with the evils of capitalism.

七、 19世纪中后期的散文家和诗人（维多利亚时期）

 Matthew Arnold

简介：As a poet, Arnold provides an example of “a sick individual in a sick

society”. Apparently dissatisfied with the reflective poetry he was writing, he turned to literary and social criticism. 代表作：“Dover Beach”《多弗海岸》；Essays in Criticism《评论文集》；Culture and Anarchy《文化与无政府主义》。

文学批评原则：① “Disinterestedness” is the first necessity in a literary critic.

② The function of literary criticism is to find and propagate the best which has been thought and said in the world. ③ He paid great attention to the moral values of poetry.

社会批评：①Arnold’s social criticism deals with the whole structure of

English civilization and culture. ②According to him, English society of his time was composed of “Barbarians, Philistines and Populace”. ③Arnold believed that the

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world of the future would be a middle-class world and the middle classes could be educated to be better qualified for the task of governing the country.

 Alfred Tennyson

简介：Alfred Tennyson, the most important poet of the Victorian Age. 代表作：

“Break，Break, Break”《碎了，碎了，碎了》；Maud《莫德》；The Idylls of the King《国王叙事诗》(根据亚瑟王和他的圆桌骑士的故事改编，主题是体现灵与肉的冲突，人物为败笔。)；

In Memoriam《悼念》。

评价：Tennyson was a typical poet of the self-complacent Victorian

middle-classes.

 Robert Browning

简介：Browning and Tennyson were the two most important poets of the

Victorian Period.代表作：Strafford《斯特拉福》；Pippa Passes《皮帕经过》；The Ring and the Book《指环与书》；Dramatic Lyrics《戏剧抒情诗》；Dramatic Romances and Lyrics《戏

剧浪漫诗与抒情诗》；Dramatic Personae《戏剧人生》。

特点：Browning’s principal achievement lies in his introducing to English

poetry a new form, the dramatic monologue.

八、 20世纪英国文学

 Thomas Hardy（赏析）ii

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地方色彩小说：角色：Tess was presented by Hardy as “a pure woman”. Her

tragedy exposes the prudery and hypocrisy of Victorian society and the injustice of society’s attitude to women. Her tragedy, in fact, is a tragedy of Victorian society which rejected a real human being. In this chapter, Hardy successfully exposed Angel’s psychological insight and created a person who is torn between the traditional dogma and his love to Tess. He refuses the traditional principle, but in his mind he cannot abandon its fetter. It is hi s conflict that makes him a suffering human being but also inevitably inflicts suffering on others.

简介：Thomas Hardy is one of the representatives of English critical realism at

the turn of the 20th century. 代表作：Under the Greenwood Tree《绿荫下》；Far From the Madding Crowd《远离尘嚣》；The Return of the Native《还乡》；The Mayor of Casterbridge《卡斯特桥市长》；Tess of the D’Urbervilles《德伯家的苔丝》；Jude the Obscure《无名的裘德》。

主题/人物：①The main theme of Hardy’s novels is the conflict between the

necessity to express honestly what human beings are actually like and the taboo on doing so in contemporary English society. (Tess and Jude are destroyed by Victorian prudery, hypocrisy, and intolerance, that’s why Hardy’s novels were attacked by the critics at his time.); ②Another theme of Hardy’s novel is oneness with Nature. ③Many of Hardy’s central characters were described as psychologically disturbed and spiritually anguished. They pursue passionate emotion and rich spiritual life. They are tormented by the frustration in love and the difficulty in finding harmony of mind and body.

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特点：①His principal works are the Wessex Novels, i.e. , the novels describing

the characters and environment of his native countryside. ②According to Hardy’s pessimistic philosophy, mankind is subjected to the rule of some hostile mysterious fate, which brings misfortune into human life.

 John Galsworthy（赏析）ii

Saga Novels（世家小说）The saga is a medieval legend of Iceland and

Scandinavia, usually narrating about the life of a famous hero or the history of a prominent family or an expedition of legendary kings and warriors.

人物：The Man of Property, the first novel of the Forsyte Saga, presents John

Galsworthy’s definition of Fosytism referring to the typical English kind of bourgeois morality and social attitudes. Hereby, the author criticizes Forsytes’ consciousness on property through a character names Soames Forsyte, who is a thoroughly materialist man with a compulsion to own things. 3.

福尔赛世家代表了：Galsworthy saw the Forsytes as archetypically English, and

their dynastic development as a microcosm of English history in real time. The Forsyte sage preserves a view of the contemporary upper middle class in Galsworthy’s life. 4.

技法：①Galsworthy is remarkable for his powerful, brilliant characterization

with deep psychological analysis. ②His calm, impersonal third person point of view contributes to the development of the plot with both round and flat characters. ③Galsworthy seldom resorts to modern techniques of symbolism. 主题：The man of

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property is typically a continuation of the 19th century critical realism aiming at offering a satirical portrayal of the falling English bourgeoisie and ruthless exposure of the greed and hypocrisy of the ruling class. 5.

简介：Galsworthy is one of the most prominent of the twentieth century

English realistic writers. 代表作：The Forsyte Sage《福尔赛世家》；A Modern Comedy《现代喜剧》。  James Joyce（赏析）I

Epiphany: means a sudden spiritual manifestation in which the whatness of a

common object or gesture appears radiant to the observer.

意识流：As a narrative approach, stream of consciousness was not developed

fully until James Joyce who used it in Ulysses. 作品地位：Ulysses, a modernist reconstruction of Homer’s Odyssey, was James Joyce’s first epic-length novel. It is most famous for using a variant of the interior monologue known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. 技法/理念：To him : ①Words have shades of meanings and sound that release feelings below your conscious awareness. ②Words can also release a chain of thoughts and memories. ③Words also have symbolic value.

简介：James Joyce was an Irish. His books were all written about Dublin and

he believed that by writing about Dublin he was at the same time penetrating the hearts of all cities and all mankind. 代表作：Dubliners《都柏林人》；A Portrait of the Artist as an Young Man《青年艺术家的肖像》；Ulysses《尤利西斯》；Finnegans Wake《芬尼根的

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觉醒》。

特点：James Joyce was one of the most original novelists of the 20th century,

whose work shows a unique synthesis of realism, the “stream of consciousness” and symbolism. His masterpiece Ulysses has been called “a modern prose epic”.

 George Bernard Shaw

代表作：Plays Unpleasant（不愉快的戏剧集）：Widowers’ Houses《鳏夫的遗

产》；Mrs. Warren’s Profession《华伦夫人的职业》。Plays Pleasant（愉快的戏剧集）：Candida《康蒂坦》；Arms and Man《武器和人》。The Devil’s Disciple《魔鬼的门徒》；Pygmalion《卖花女》；Major Barbara《芭芭拉上校》；Heartbreak House《伤心之家》；The Apple Cart《苹果车》；Saint Joan《圣女贞德》；The Philanderer《登徒子》。

He achieved mainly by the brilliant dialogues between the characters,

instead of the structures of the plot. Shaw was against “art for art’s sake”.

 David Herbert Lawrence（赏析）I

Psychological novel/fiction：（心理小说）Psychological novel is a vague term

to describe that kind of fiction which is for the most part concerned with the spiritual, emotional and mental lives of the characters and with the analysis of characters rather than with the plot and the action.

Oedipus Complex is a Freudian term originating from a Greek tragedy, in

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which King Oedipus unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. Oedipus Complex is a group of largely unconscious ideas and feelings which centers around the desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the parent of the same sex. D. H. Lawrence described this complex in his novel Sons and Lovers, in which the son has passion toward his mother and desire to possess her.

主题：①The central theme of the novel is the intense relationship between

mother and son. ②The other theme is the polarity between conventional sexual purity and liberated sexual response. To Lawrence, sexual desire was not just “normal” but a uniquely precious thing. He opposed violently all restraints on the sexual life—religious, moral, or merely social. Paul的女友们：Miriam and Clara symbolized two pole of an axis: one spiritual and pure, the other lewd, representing a mistaken dualism of body and soul. Paul could not gain complete satisfaction from either. What Lawrence managed to suggest in this novel is “Life is only bearable when the mind and body are in harmony, and there is a natural balance between them, and each has a natural respect for the other.” 母亲这一角色：In the background of the novel is the pain of Paul’s mother’s unfulfilled life, which ends with the physical pain of cancer. Gertrude Morel tries to find in her sons the fulfillment she has failed to find in her husband. In the course of her intense and passionate devotion to them, she arouses in her sons a reciprocal attachment which is essentially unhealthy and fails to establish her sons as self-sufficient and independent individuals. Paul has to fight her to find his own life.

手法：①Lawrence employed a loose, few-flowing, episodic form of narration.

②He rejected the literary tradition which assigns to each person a fixed and definite character. ③Lawrence is a master of the symbol in the psychological sense. He made

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the landscape and the seasons appropriate to the mood of characters.

简介：Lawrence is a master of symbolism in the psychological field. Unlike

later psychological novelists, Lawrence never used any techniques like stream-of-consciousness. 代表作：Sons and lovers《儿子和情人》；The Rainbow《虹》；

Women in Love《恋爱中的女人》；Lady Chatterley’s Lover《查特莱夫人的情人》；The White Peacock《白孔雀》；The Rocking-Horse Winner《木马赢家》。

评价：For quite a long time, Lawrence’s novels were associated with

pornography and decadent morality. In fact, this is a misconception. Lawrence was dissatisfied with the Western industrial civilization and advocated the principle of saving the decaying civilization through a rearrangement of personal relationships, especially a rearrangement of the relationship between men and women.

 英(美)国现代主义诗歌【2009】

时代背景：Modernist poetry in England is generally considered to have

emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagists. At that time, science and technology had advanced beyond the utmost bound of human thought. Evolutionism, Skepticism and materialism brought pessimism, passivism and misanthropy. The poet, however, immediately observed the humiliation and the degradation of man. To the poet, a vision of the meaningless and trivial human world revealed itself. 代表人物：In common with many other modernists, poets like W. B. Yeats wrote in reaction to the perceived excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and ornate diction. The imagist poets represented by Ezra Pound

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and T. S. Eliot employ new methods to create their poems.主题：The poets paid more attention to the devastating wars. Cares about the position of Modern Man; the alienation of Modern Man; the psychological identity of Modern Man; the soul-body relationship (to the poets of modern times the two are often separate from each other); the life-art relationship(In modern poetry, man’s life is often practical, mechanical and trivial, deprived of artistic content.) and the salvation of modern man. 特色：Much of early modernist poetry took the form of short compact lyrics. As it developed, however, longer poems came to the fore. [具体人物见以下]

 Ezra Pound

Imagism（意象主义）：The Imagist poem was the invention of a small group of

English and American poets who came together in the first years of the 20th century to work out some new way of writing poem. The Imagist poetry is a kind of free verse aiming at hard and dry clarity and precision in representing natural objects and ideas.

简介：Ezra Pound was identified as the father of modern American poetry and

the most influential leader of the Imagist Movement. 代表作：“In a Station of the Metro”《在地铁站里》；The Cantos《诗章》（He is attempt to impose, through art, order and meaning upon a chaotic and meaningless world.）。

 “In a Station of the Metro”《在地铁站里》：This is a classic example of the

Imagist poetry. “The object” to be treated is the faces in that dim and damp context.

特色：He tried to derive standards from the cultures of the past and resurrect

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lost principles of order. He is influenced by ancient Chinese culture and especially by Confucius.

 William Butler Yeats

简介：Yeats lived in the time of Irish nationalist awareness and aspiration,

entered the nationalist movement, and gave leadership to the parallel cultural movement that was to be known as the Irish Revival. He is best remembered as a poet, and generally acknowledged as the foremost poet in modern times. 代表作：“Sailing to Byzantium”《航向拜占庭》；“Leda and the Swan”《丽达与天鹅》；“The Tower”《塔》；“A Vision”《幻象》；“The Second Coming”《二次圣临》；“The Winding Stair”《盘旋的楼梯》。

 “Sailing to Byzantium”《航向拜占庭》：In the mind of Yeats, Byzantium is

the symbol of art, of eternity, of oneness of material and spiritual worlds, and the world beyond and above natural and social changes; The reaching in Byzantium depends on oneness of the soul and flesh. The oneness is destroyed by the young and the old at the same time, the former the flesh without soul, and the latter the soul without flesh; Sailing to Byzantium is fulfilled when the speaker makes his soul eternal, and finds the golden bird and reside the eternal soul in it; The golden bird is a symbol of art, of eternity, of oneness of soul and flesh and of the poem itself.

 “Leda and the Swan”《丽达与天鹅》：History, according to Yeats, has been

cycling forward, or advancing in cycles. The bird’s rape of the human, the coupling of god and woman, occurred at the moment at which one epoch ended and another

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began. And at the end of this epoch, another Leda would open her knees to the swan and begins a new age. And history, in its cycling forward, is marked by such antinomies (自相矛盾) as of violence and gentleness of brute blood and civil property, of power and knowledge.

他的理论：Gyre Theory（螺旋理论）：Gyre theory refers to an elaborate theory

of history developed by Yeats from his study of Irish history and legends. He believed that all history or human experience follows a circular, spiral pattern which repeats itself over and over on different levels.

 Thomas Stearns Eliot【2009】

简介：T. S. Eliot, poet, dramatist and critic, was a leader of the modernist

movement in English poetry and a great innovator of verse technique. He profoundly influenced 20th century English poetry between World Wars I and II. 代表作：The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock《杰·阿尔弗雷德·普鲁弗洛克的情歌》；The Waste Land《荒原》；Murder in the Cathedral《大教堂凶杀案》（现代宗教剧）；Four Quartets《四个四重奏》（哲

学诗歌）；The Sacred Wood《圣林》；Tradition and the Individual Talent《传统与个人才能》。

 The Waste Land《荒原》：It was a landmark in English poetry, ending the

Romantic period and signifying the emergence of Modernism. 包含五个部分 The Burial of the Dead《死者的葬礼》；A Game of Chess《对弈》；The First Sermon《第一个训诫》；Death by the Water《水边之死》；What the Thunder Said《闪电的话语》。This poem gave a picture of the spiritual ruins in Europe shortly after the end of World War I, and

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expressed the disillusionment of a generation of intellectuals.

 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock《杰·阿尔弗雷德·普鲁弗洛克的情歌》：The

title implies the ironic contrast between the romantic suggestions of “the love song” and the dully prosaic (平凡的) name of the persona, “J. Alfred Prufrock”. Prufrock’s speech is of no clarity, connectivity or sequence at all. The poem introduces new techniques, and the new techniques fit well with the new themes, among which is the modern individual’s indetermination about his identification in the modern world and about his emotional life.

主题：As a poet and critic living through two catastrophic world wars, his

poems dwelled upon people’s disillusionment toward modern civilization and spiritual emptiness. Distressed with an exhausting quest for modern men’s personal identities and the significance of life itself, he resorted to religion, so in his later critical works and poems, there is abundant expression of his pious faith in religion.

在文学批评领域的贡献：Eliot’s poetry and criticism marked a break with 19th

century Romanticism started by Wordsworth and Coleridge. His contribution to modern criticism, which is marked by his critical principle—impersonalism and his sense his of history. In one perspective, he offered the reader a new approach to the appreciation of poetry：he argued that the audience should pay much attention to the poetry itself instead of the poet. In his critical work, The Sacred Wood, he declared “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion. It is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.” In another perspective, he was an heir to the traditional literature, especially to the literature of Renaissance.

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九、二战前后的诗人和小说家

 文学特征：

Works before and after the Second World War reflect the disillusionment of those who were optimistic with the society, and one of the main theme is to support the communist cause and to oppose the colonial and fascist activities.

 Wystan Hugh Auden

Auden Group：During the 1930s, the most active of the English poets were

the “Auden Group”. They represented a new generation of poets who grew up after World War I. They shared the left-wing point of view, employing their poetry to protest against the ills of capitalism. When the World War II broke out, the group ended.

简介：An objective assessment could be made on Auden that he was T. S.

Eliot’s successor, just as Eliot was the successor of Yeats. 代表作：“Spain 1937”《西班牙1937》。

 William Golding（赏析）ii

Desert Island Fiction：The beginning of the 20th century witnessed a turning

point in many fields including literature. The British writer William Golding made a big impact on desert island fiction with his Nobel-prize winning book Lord of the Flies, it is a total reverse of the traditional desert island fiction.

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作者总的作品主题：Almost all of Golding’s works are imaginative fables,

fantasy presented in the conventions of realism, treating the similar theme of human depravity.

小说主题：Golding suggests here that it is man who creates his own hell, his

own devil; the evil is in man himself. He says, “the theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature.” 小说独特之处：The story totally reverses the traditional concept of man’s ability to survive and remain civilized in a primitive situation, and challenges the popular conviction of the purity and innocence of the unspoiled youth. The traditional survival adventure thus transforms into a political allegory in realistic fantasy. 小说的象征运用：The whole book is highly symbolic. Every detail carries a symbolic meaning and every character has a specific reference. 人物的象征：Ralph represents civilization, Piggy reason, Simon knowledge and Jack passion. In the selected chapter Ralph is impeached, Piggy is ridiculed, Simon is killed and Jack rules. Thus civilization is deserted, reason is rejected, knowledge is ruined and passion prevails——a complete reversion to savagery is accomplished. 题目的象征：The title “Lord of the Flies,” which originally means the Devil in the Bible, is used to refer here to a fly-covered pig’s head. The symbol indicates that the boys are the flies, and the evil, the senseless passion that is in man, in each and every man, is the lord. 怪物的象征：The beast in the novel turned out to be a dead pilot suspended from a parachute on the mountain. The source of evil is traced to be a human corruption.

评价：The whole narration, in rigid structure and lucid style with rich

symbolism, is a powerfully ironic commentary on the nature of man, and an accusation leveled at the contemporary western society.

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十、殖民地时期的美国文学

 英国文学对美国文学的影响【2009】

清教主义对美国文学的影响(Puritanism)：

 教义：predestination, original sin, total depravity and limited atonement.

 Idealism(清教徒的理想主义)：It is a common place that Anglo-American

literature is based on a myth, that is, the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. This literature is in good measure a literary expression of the pious idealism of the American Puritan bequest. Under such influence and a mission of building a new Garden of Eden in America, the Puritan looked upon even the worst of life in the face with a tremendous amount of optimism.

 美国清教徒形象观察事物的方式导致了Symbolism的产生：To the pious

Puritan the physical phenomenal world was nothing but a symbol of god.

 风格上Simplicity.

 早期的美国文学因为缺乏悠久的历史和文化积垫，并不是土生土长的民族文学，

而是从欧洲，特别是英国文学中移植而来的。大多数作品具有模仿的痕迹，创作素材也大多从欧洲大陆搜集撷取。如华盛顿.欧文（Washington Irving）的《见闻札记》（The Sketch Book）。

 清教思想在殖民时期的文学作品中主要有两方面的代表：一方面女诗人安妮.布雷

兹特里特（Anne Bradstreet）的诗歌和神学家乔纳森.爱德华兹（Jonathan Edwards）的宗教

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著作是清教传统中虔诚精神和理想主义的代表(religious idealism)；另一方面本杰明.富兰克林（Benjamin Franklin）的《自传》（The Autobiography）则体现了清教传统中“务实以奉上帝”的思想(levelheaded common sense)。

英国浪漫主义对美国文学的影响：产生了超验主义。

十一、美国浪漫主义

 James Fenimore Cooper（赏析）ii

Frontier Tale：Frontier tales adopted a form of the western novel, inscribing

the whole process of the westward movement of the frontier, which remains a far-reaching and richly touching symbol to Americans. Starting from the 1860s, appearing as dime novels, the “West Novel” reached a large number of audiences and described all kinds of characters in a westward expansion like folks, outlaws and cowboys.

The Leather-Stocking Tales views with ambivalence the progress of

civilization at the cost of native life. 人物：The central figure Natty Bumppo is presented as painfully aware that he has no place in the civilization whose frontier he advances. He is the first embodiment of a powerful American dream yearning for a myth of “virgin land” an America unspoiled by man’s encroachment. 现代化与部落生活的矛盾：In the “noble savage” is shown the tense clash between the wilderness and civilization, between the civil law and natural rights. 作者的态度：Cooper believed that a people living close to the soil was living more wholesomely than a city people

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immersed in trade and manufacture. But he saw what he disliked was happening energetically.

技法：The descriptions of the fighting scenes are brisk and fast-moving, well

matching the actual happening. Lyrical descriptions follow the brutal and cruel fighting, such as the “display of emotions” of the two sisters. Here we see Cooper’s ability to combine the qualities of realism and romanticism in typical American writings.

简介：Cooper was one of the first authors to write about the American

Westward movement. He was a representative writer of the American Romantic period. 代表作：Leatherstocking Tales《皮袜子故事集》（包括The Pioneers《拓荒者》；The last of the Mohicans《最后的莫西干人》；The prairie《草原》；The pathfinder《探路者》；The Deerslayer《猎鹿者》）。

贡献/风格：He created a myth about the formative period of the American

nation. ① Cooper is good at inventing plots. ② His landscape descriptions are majestic and suggestive of Sir Walter Scott. ③ He was quite conscious of the association of locales. He had never been to the frontier which is an eloquent proof of the richness of his imagination. 缺点：His style is dreadful. His characterization seems wooden and lacks probability, and his language, his use of dialect, is not authentic.

十二、新英格兰超验主义主义时期

 时代：

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It is the time of American renaissance or called high Romanticism.

 Ralph Waldo Emerson

简介：American essayist and philosopher. He is the most eloquent spokesman

of New England Transcendentalism. 代表作：“The American Scholar”《美国学者》（美国人应停止模仿外国文学，创作此时此地的美国，被誉为“美国思想文化领域的独立宣言”。美国人应该停止模仿和引进外国文学，转而描绘此时此刻的美国。）；Nature《论自然》；

Self-Reliance《论自立》。

 Nature《论自然》：① Nature is generally regarded as the Bible of New

England Transcendentalism. ② He emphasizes the transcendence of the “Oversoul”. He holds the universe is composed of Nature and Soul. ③ He insists that the spiritual God is operative in the soul of man, and that man is divine. ④ He holds that nature is the emblematic of God.

超验主义：In the 1830s and 1840s some New Englanders, not quite happy

about the materialistic-oriented life of their time, formed themselves into an informal club, the Transcendentalist Club, and met to discuss matters of interest to the life of the nation as a whole. They expressed their views, published their journal, the Dial, and made their voice heard. 特征：① The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. ② The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. The individual soul communed with the Oversoul and was therefore divine. ③ The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the spirit or God.

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 Nathaniel Hawthorne（赏析）ii

Morality Fiction：（说教小说）The Morality Fiction usually changed the way

that the readers see or understand their world by criticizing the reality and giving religious or moral influences didactically. This pragmatic approach of literature has in a broad sense become the main aesthetic attitude in the West.

内容：“Young Goodman Brown” is considered as Hawthorne’s most

successful psychological story. It describes the “Goodman” Brown’s adventure into the forest——a legendary meeting with the ghosts. 主题：The name of the hero carries sort of universal sense. This story pinpoints Hawthorne’s favorite theme: the evil conscience of a usually isolated person. In this tale, realism, allegory and symbolism fused into an organic whole. Hawthorne explores the dark side of Brown’s nature and expresses an extraordinary “power of blackness” that is central to American imagination. 作者的加尔文主义观：In this fiction, Hawthorne is habitually reacting to the Calvinist tradition, the writing is thus theologically rooted and the author’s belief in the Calvinistic “original sin” is fully shown. 技法：This fiction serves to be a typical Hawthornian “psychological romance”. Psychological depiction of the hero Brown is subtle and impressive. The whole tale is tense and compact in structure.

简介：Hawthorne is a writer in American High Romantic period. He was a

leader in the development of the short story as a distinctive American genre. 代表作：

The Scarlet Letter《红字》；The House of the Seven Gables《带有七个尖角阁的房子》；The Blithdale Romance《福谷传奇》；The Marble Faun《玉石雕像》；“Young Goodman Brown”

《年轻人古德曼布朗》；“The Minister’s Black Veil”《牧师的黑面纱》。

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思想：① He was haunted by his sense of sin and evil in life. Evil seems to be

man’s birthmark. In almost every book he wrote, Hawthorne discussed sin and evil. He thought sin or evil can be passed from generation to generation. ② He rejected the Transcendentalists’ transparent optimism about the potentialities on human nature. ③ He believed that romance was the predestined form of American narrative. 5.

风格：① Ambiguity ② Multiple views ③ Mental activity ④Symbolism

 Walt Whitman

简介：Whitman has been compared to mountain in American literary history.

He is the most courageous native voice the States had ever heard. He added both new forms and new subject matter to poetry. 代表作：Leaves of Grass《草叶集》；“Song of Myself”《自我之歌》；“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”《当紫丁香最近在庭院开放》； “I Sit and Look Out”《我坐而观望》。

 Leaves of Grass《草叶集》: 草的象征意义：Grass, the most common thing

with the greatest vitality, is an image of the poet himself, a symbol of the then rising American nation and an embodiment of his ideals about democracy and freedom.

 “Song of Myself”《自我之歌》：This poem is filled with the vehemence of

the pride of the persona himself, and with the vehemence of the audacity of freedom. The persona is Walt Whitman, is every American, and is every human being. The “Song of Myself”, is the song of oneness, of the persona with every American man and woman and with every human being, in terms of the sense and the sound. “Song

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of Myself” is characterized by its simplicity and art.

 “I Sit and Look Out”《我坐而观望》：a short poem of 10 lines, opens with

immediate presentation of the speaker’s stance and frame of view. The stance, sitting, is fixed, and within the frame are placed “all the sorrows of the world”.

主题：He shows concern for the whole hard-working people and the

burgeoning life of cities; He advocates the realization of the individual value; Pursuit of love and happiness is approved in his lines.

文学观点：以自然为基础，依赖自己的内心与直觉，信奉理想主义。

写作风格：① Whitman broke free from the traditional iambic pentameter and

wrote “free verse”. ② His poems own a strong sense of being rhythmical and musical. ③ Whitman’s language is relatively simple and even rather crude and there is a strong tendency to use oral English.

影响/为什么是美国文学之父：His innovations in diction and versification; his

frankness about sex; his inclusion of the commonplace and the ugly; his censure of the weakness of the American democratic practice — These have paved his way to a share of immortality in American literature.

 Emily Dickinson

简介： Emily Dickinson is regarded as the precursor of Imagism. Her creation

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of new syntactic and rhythmic possibilities had a tremendous influence on many important 20th century poets. 代表作：“The Soul selects her own Society”《心灵选择了自己的友伴》；“Because I could not stop for Death”《因为我不能等待死神》；“I heard a fly buzz when I died”《我死时听到了苍蝇的嗡嗡声》；“My life closed twice before its close”《我的生命在结束之前已结束了两次》“There Was a Child Went Forth”《有一个孩子向前走》。

风格：① Her poetry abounds in telling images. ② Her poetic idiom is noted

for its conciseness, directness and plainest words. ③ She and Whitman both added to the literary independence of by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form. They pioneer in American poetry. ④ Religious and metaphysical themes such as God, death and immortality frequented her writing.

 Edgar Allan Poe

简介：Edgar Allen Poe has been recognized as a great writer of fiction, a poet

of the first rank, and a critic of acumen and insight. Poe is the father of many things, one of which is psychoanalytic criticism, the other being the detective story. (For a long time after his death Poe remained probably the most controversial and most misunderstood literary figure in the history of American literature.) 代表作：Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque《奇异怪诞故事集》；“The Fall of the House of Usher”《厄舍古屋的倒塌》；“To Helen”《致海伦》；“The Raven”《乌鸦》(体现了艾伦坡的诗歌创作理论)。

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主题/风格：He is a romantic poet who is preoccupied with the subject of the

death of one’s beloved lover of great intelligence. He wrote Gothic Novels. Poe’s style is traditional.

文学成就（文学批评观）：

 短篇小说：① The short story must be such length as to be read at one

sitting. ② The very first sentence ought to help to bring out the “single effect” of the story. ③ A tale should be logical and the last sentence should leave a sense of finality with the reader.

 诗歌：① Poems should be short. ② The aim of poem writing is beauty.

The tone is melancholy. ③ He opposed didactic poems. ④He stressed the form of poem. He defined poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty”.

十三、美国现实主义时期

 Henry James

简介：He settled down in London and then became a naturalized British

citizen. He lived a life of an observer of his limited world of Americans in Europe and is the forerunner of the “stream of consciousness” literature. He is considered the founder of psychological realism. He was the first American writer to conceive his artistic work in international themes.代表作：The American《美国人》，Daisy Miller《黛西·米勒》，The Portrait of a Lady《贵妇人的画像》，The Ambassadors《专使》，The Wings 欢迎下载 43

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of the Dove《鸽翼》，The Art of Fiction《小说的艺术》；The Golden Bowl《金碗》；Washington Square《华盛顿广场》。

作品：

 Daisy Miller: 弗雷德里克到欧洲旅行，在旅馆认识了米勒先生一家，并爱上了他

的女儿黛西。随着感情深入的发展，弗雷德听信他言，且亲眼看见黛西与别的男人夜游娱乐场，认为她是一个轻浮女子。不料黛西染上了热病，在弥留之际给他留下一张纸条表达了自己的忠贞爱情，弗雷德里克懊悔莫及。Daisy Miller, the young and innocent American Daisy finds her values in conflict with European sophistication.

 The Portrait of a Lady: A young American woman is fooled during her

travels in Europe.

主题：His fame rested largely on his handling of his major fictional theme,

“the international theme”: the meeting of America and Europe, American innocence in contact and contrast with European decadence, and its moral and psychological complications. He wrote about the wealthy, deep-rooted leisure class. 他的写作重点还是放在美国人身上：For the American it was a process of progression from inexperience to experience, from innocence to knowledge and maturity. (James’ fictional world is peopled almost always by American heroes and heroines who, confronting European sophistication, either triumph over it or are overwhelmed.) 英美人性格有怎样的不同，英美人冲突的原因：Americans often regarded Europeans as over-refined, degenerate and artificial, and many Europeans considered Americans naïve, vulgar and ignorant —— the misunderstanding caused personality conflicts; the national differences provided

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an opportunity for contrasts of characters.

写作方式：① 认为艺术与生活相关，小说就是为了表现生活:As a realist, he holds

that art must be related to life, the aim of the novel is to represent life；② 作品有很明显的心理分析的特点：His realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject matter. Unlike W. D. Howells and other realists, his realism is called psychological realism. ③ 避免全视角(authorial omniscience): He was concerned with “point of view”. He avoids the authorial omniscience as much as possible and makes his characters reveal themselves with his minimal intervention.

Henry James 小说中意识流的作用：【2010年考】

詹姆斯式的意识流：James discovered the trick of making his characters reveal themselves with minimal intervention of the author. He used a particular method of telling the story, that is, illumination of the situation and characters through one or several minds. This method he termed “point of view”. Here we observe events and people filter through the consciousness of his characters. 几个作用：Through his kind of stream of consciousness of several characters James granted an immense of freedom in novel-writing and made his novel lifelike. He fulfilled his insist on aesthetic of the novel that is to correspond to life the author should avoid artificial omniscience as much as possible.

 Mark Twain（赏析）ii

Regional Fiction：（地方主义小说）Local Colorism or Regionalism as a trend

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first came to prominence in the late 19th century in America. The local colorists were devoted to capturing the unique customs, manners, speech, folklore, and other qualities of a particular regional community, usually in humorous short stories. The most famous of the local colorists was Mark Twain, with his masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

This book is somewhat an autobiographical travelogue. After Mark Twain

learns that he can caster the river. He is now a learned man in his specialty. But he finds that he loses something of his appreciation of the natural wonder and beauty of river. The glory and romance have both gone. Now he sees the river and the world in a new way.

简介：He was brought up in a small town on the Mississippi River. He is the

representative of the American Local Colorism. 代表作：Life on the Mississippi《密西西比河上的生活》；The Adventures of Tom Sawyer《汤姆·索亚历险记》；The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》；Innocents Abroad《傻子出国记》；The Gilded Age《镀金时代》；The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg《败坏哈德莱堡的人》。

 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》：通过以小孩为主角

反映出的主题：①反农奴制（第一大主题：Racism and Slavery）In using a child protagonist, Twain is able to imply a comparison between the powerlessness and vulnerability of a child and those of a black man in ante bellum America. ②质疑传统道德习俗（第二大主题：the search for freedom）Twain also uses his child protagonist to dramatize the conflict between socialized or received morality on the one hand and a different kind of morality based on intuition and experience on the other.

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主题：He dealt largely with the lower strata of society and preferred to

represent social life through portraits of local places which he knew best. Mark Twain is also a strong supporter of anti-imperialism, abolition, emancipation, anti-racism and women’s rights.

写作特色：①总述特色His contribution to the development of realism and

American literature was partly through his theories of localism in American fiction, and partly through his colloquial style. ②地方主义His use of local color may be defined as the careful attention to details of the physical scene and to those mannerisms in speech, dress, or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality. ③口语体He reproduced actual daily speech with a degree of accuracy and made colloquial speech an accepted, respectable literary medium in the literary history of America.

晚年变化：Towards the latter part of his life, he grew increasingly bitter. He

was no longer the optimist and humorist as he used to be; instead he turned to be and almost despairing determinist.

 Theodore Dreiser

简介：Theodore Dreiser was the representative of the American Naturalism.

代表作：Sister Carrie《嘉莉妹妹》；An American Tragedy《悲惨的美国》。

自然主义观点：His point of view was the typical of naturalism. He believed in

the social Darwinism and thought that human beings were driven by animal instinct and struggled for living. And only the fittest can survive. Life was determined and

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human beings had no power to assert his will. Nobody was free and everything was determined by some complicated internal mechanism.

十四、 20世纪20年代的美国文学

 时代：

The decade of the 1920s (the roaring twenties, the Jazz Age) was sandwiched between two significant historical events: the First World War and the Great Depression.

 Ezra Pound

Imagism（意象主义）：The Imagist poem was the invention of a small group of

简介：Ezra Pound was identified as the father of modern American poetry and

 “In a Station of the Metro”《在地铁站里》：This is a classic example of the

Imagist poetry. “The object” to be treated is the faces in that dim and damp context.

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特色：He tried to derive standards from the cultures of the past and resurrect

lost principles of order. He is influenced by ancient Chinese culture and especially by Confucius.

 Thomas Stearns Eliot【2009】

简介：T. S. Eliot, poet, dramatist and critic, was a leader of the modernist

学诗歌）；The Sacred Wood《圣林》；Tradition and the Individual Talent《传统与个人才能》。

 The Waste Land《荒原》：It was a landmark in English poetry, ending the

 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock《杰·阿尔弗雷德·普鲁弗洛克的情歌》：The

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techniques, and the new techniques fit well with the new themes, among which is the modern individual’s indetermination about his identification in the modern world and about his emotional life.

主题：As a poet and critic living through two catastrophic world wars, his

在文学批评领域的贡献：① Eliot’s poetry and criticism marked a break with

19th century Romanticism started by Wordsworth and Coleridge. The basic themes of Eliot’s criticism concerned the relationship between tradition and individual talent and between the past, the present, and the future. ② His contribution to modern criticism, which is marked by his critical principle—impersonalism and his sense his of history. In one perspective, he offered the reader a new approach to the appreciation of poetry：he argued that the audience should pay much attention to the poetry itself instead of the poet. All these ideas lead to the emergence of the New Criticism. ③ Eliot made a great contribution to reevaluate and popularize the 17th century “Metaphysical Poets” and the late-19th-century French Symbolism. ④ In his critical work, The Sacred Wood, he declared “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion. It is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality.” In another perspective, he was an heir to the traditional literature, especially to the literature of Renaissance.

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 William Carlos Williams

简介：Williams was independent in his literary judgments. He had his own

distinct views concerning the nature of poetry, the function of the poet, and the poetic process, very much unlike T. S. Eliot’s. He joined in the Imagist Movement in the 1910s. After the Imagist Movement, he extended his poetic experiment to Expressionism. Years later he advocated Objectivism. 代表作：Paterson《佩特森》；“The Red Wheelbarrow”《红色手推车》。

观点：① He strongly disapproves of the Pound-Eliot bookish,

“internationalist,” and intellectual brand of poetry. He holds that American poetry must be rooted in American. ② He feels strongly that poetry must be grounded in everyday experience and in the speech of the common man. ③ He holds that the poet should not talk in vague categories, but to write in particular.

 Robert Frost

简介：Robert Frost is one of the best national poets of America. He had won

the Pulitzer Prize four times, and became the nation’s unofficial Poet Laureate when invited to read his poem at President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. 代表作：North of Boston《波士顿以北》（诗集）；“The Road Not Taken”《未选择的路》；“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”《雪夜林边小驻》；“Neither out Far nor in Deep”《不深也不远》；“Mending Wall”《补墙》。

 “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”《雪夜林边小驻》: The poet

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expresses a complicated feeling about mingling with the beautiful and quite nature and the responsibility which the speaker bears in the real word.

 “Neither out Far nor in Deep”《不深也不远》: （赏析要点）Why do “they

turn their back on the land” and all “look at the sea”? They are looking for truth. Why do the people look to the sea for truth? Is there no truth to be found on the land? What would the sea offer us? Here there exists a conflict between man’s limitless inquiring eagerness and their limited capacity. The land gives us our bearings and represents the known, but the sea is limitless and mysterious to the eye and represents the unknown, exciting the imagination. Though our progress toward the great, final answers is small because their subtleties are too great, the human race keeps the watch and continues to scrutinize the unknown, and there is hope that we shall know more and more about our destiny.

主题：Frost showed indifference to immediate political event. Either national

or international. Instead, he wrote about something universal, about death and life, love and hate, war and peace, the good and the evil, for which he is generally regarded as a poet of philosophy.

诗歌特点：① He has been linked with the tradition of nature poetry(like

William Wordsworth); ② His subjects were chosen from daily life of ordinary people(like William Carlos Williams); ③ He urged poets to use the idioms of spoken English, to rely on the commonplace imagery(like Coleridge); ④ His poems are written in the traditional form. He did not seem particularly enthusiastic about experimentation in form.

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 F. Scott Fitzgerald

简介：Fitzgerald was essentially a 1920s person. His Tales of the Jazz gave its

name to this crucial period in the cultural history of America. He was the spokesman of the Jazz Age. 代表作：This Side of Paradise《人间天堂》；Flappers and Philosophers《轻佻女郎与哲学家》；Tales of the Jazz Age《爵士乐时代的故事》；The Beautiful and the Damned《美丽与诅咒》；The Great Gatsby《了不起的盖茨比》；Tender is the Night《夜色

温柔》；All the Sad Young Men《一代悲哀的年轻人》。

 The Great Gatsby《了不起的盖茨比》：Gatsby’s personal experience

approximates the whole of the American experience up to the first few decades of the twentieth century. Here modern men lives in sterility and meaningless and futility. Gatsby’s personal life has assumed a magnitude as a “cultural-historical allegory” for the nation.

特色：Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose

is smooth, sensitive, and completely original in its diction and metaphors.

 Ernest Hemingway（赏析）I

War Novel. Life’s tragedies, and the courage, required to face them

remains a recurring theme of Hemingway’s writings. To Hemingway, man’s greatest achievement is to show grace under pressure. After Catherine died, Henry has come to realize the importance of finding strength within himself to lead himself through life instead of basing his life on another person or thing, which will eventually leave or

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disappoint him. As in all of Hemingway’s works, the outer world (nature) is a metaphor for the spiritual world of the character. When Catherine dies, immediately after Henry visits her dead body in the hospital, the novel ends with the passage: “I … walked back to the hotel in the rain.” There is no emotional out pouring. Instead the word “rain” is the only hint of the emotional stress that Henry is experiencing.

简介：Ernest Hemingway, American Nobel Prize winner of literature, is usually

considered to be the most celebrated and influential novelist and short story writer of the Lost Generation. 代表作：The Torrents of Spring《春潮》；In Our Times《在我们的时代里》；Men Without Women《没有女人的男人》；The Sun Also Rises《太阳照常升起》；A Farewell to Arms《永别了，武器》；Green Hills of Africa《非洲青山》；For Whom the Bell Tolls《丧钟为谁而鸣》；The Old Man and the Sea《老人与海》。

 For Whom the Bell Tolls《丧钟为谁而鸣》: “Any man’s death diminishes

me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”----John Donne

The Hemingway Hero（海明威式英雄）：Hemingway writes all his life about

one theme, which is summed up in the famous phrase “grace under pressure”. He writes this theme together with a Hemingway hero——a man of honor and integrity who expresses himself not with words, but with actions. The Hemingway hero is a noble but tragic hero fighting with the overwhelming force; though he knows that he will be defeated at last, he decides to act like a hero. He is not a Godlike figure, but an ordinary, often flawed mortal who must look to himself for strength. The Hemingway hero is actually a mirror image of the author himself. Santiago in The Old Man and the 欢迎下载

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Sea is a typical Hemingway hero.

风格：① He contributes to the development of a new style of writing in

America, the colloquial style. ②Being a believer of the “cult of experience”, Ernest Hemingway often located his characters in dangerous situations in order to reveal their inner nature. ③He described his own writing style as an “iceberg” on the sea, its magnificence lies on a fact that only “one eighth of the iceberg” is above the surface, which means the rest under the water is more significant. ④Hemingway’s prose is simple, apparently natural. It has the effect of directness, clarity and freshness and is highly suggestive and connotative.

 William Faulkner(南方文艺复兴)（赏析）I

小说简介：The narration flows backwards or forwards in a line of reality.

Through a story about Emily, the author tries to pinpoint an unavoidable fate of the aristocracy and various changes in the South America after the Civil War. 背景：The South American is a place where human behavior is often determined more by social custom than by legal restraint. 艾米丽的房子：The house becomes a juxtaposition of the past and present and an emblematic presentation of Emily herself. 主题：(One of Faulkner’s chief thematic concern is the past. He is aware of the romantic attraction of the past and realizes that submission to this romance of the past is a form of death.) Emily’s embracing of her dead lover becomes a symbol of what happens when one is fettered to the past. In many respects Emily’s story characterizes the whole of southern society at the time. The glory of the South has gone with the end of the Civil War.

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简介：Faulkner, American novelist and short-story writer best known for his

Yoknapatawpha cycle, is the most important figure in the constellation of the Southern Renaissance writers. 代表作：Sound and Fury《喧哗与骚动》；Absalom, Absalom!《押沙龙，押沙龙！》；The Hamlet《村子》；Go Down, Moses《去吧，摩西》；“A Rose for Emily”《献给艾米丽的玫瑰花》；Light in August《八月之光》。

主题：①Faulkner’s works have been termed the Yoknapatawpha saga in

which he writes about the histories of a number of southern aristocratic families. In the very rise of these family fortunes, Faulkner sees their inevitable fall. ②What Faulkner is talking about concerns not merely the American south but the human situation in general. The spiritual deterioration which characterizes modern life stems directly from the loss of love and want of emotional response.

特点：①Faulkner was a daring formal experimentalist. ②Characterization was,

to Faulkner, the essential medium to reveal the multifaceted nature of man. He allowed the characters to enjoy a maximum degree of autonomy and independence. ③His prose covering a variety of “registers” of the English language.

十五、 20世纪30年代的美国文学

 时代背景

20世纪30年代是真正的黑暗时期。1929年“大萧条”开始。这个时期是物质上的

荒原时期。①所以，大多数作家开始关注社会。社会参与称为这个时代的文学特征。 ②20世纪30年代是小说的伟大时代。Dreiser的自然主义风格成为这个大萧条时期作家的典范。③戏

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剧崛起。

 The New Criticism

简介：The New Criticism as a school of poetry and criticism established itself

in the 1940s as an academic orthodoxy in the United States.

新批评的特点：①The New Criticism is a school of formalist criticism. ②It

focuses on the analysis of the text rather than paying attention to external elements. ③It explores the artistic structure of the work rather than its author’s frame of mind or its reader’s response. ④It sees a literary work as an organic entity, the unity of content and form, and places emphasis on the close reading of the text.

新批评诗歌的特点：The new critical poem kept the basic Modernist values—

—economy, wit, irony, impersonality, careful form etc.

代表人物：John Crowe Ransom with his work The New Criticism.

 Eugene O’Neill (20世纪20年代开始美国戏剧复兴)

简介：Eugene O’Neill was America’s greatest playwright. In 1916 his

one-act play Bound East for Cardiff was staged. The event marked the beginning of O’Neill’s long and successful dramatic career and ushered in the modern era of the American Theater. 代表作：Bound East for Cardiff《东航卡迪夫》；Beyond the Horizon《天边外》；Anna Christie《安娜·克里斯蒂》；The Hairy Ape《毛猿》；Desire under the Elms欢迎下载 57

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《榆树下的欲望》；Ah, Wilderness《啊，荒野》；The Iceman cometh《送冰的人来了》；Long Day’s Journey into Night《进入黑夜的漫长旅途》；A Moon For the Misbegotten《月照

不幸人》。

特点：①O’Neill was a tireless experimentalist in dramatic art. He took drama

away from the old tradition of the last century and rooted it deeply in life. He introduced the realistic or even the naturalistic aspect of life into the American theater. ②He borrowed freely from the best traditions European drama and fused them into the organic art of his own. He borrowed freely from modern literary techniques. ③He made use of setting and stage property to help in his dramatic representation. He was regarded as the American Shakespeare.

 Arthur Miller

简介：Arthur Miller was a great dramatist to come out of the 1940s. 代表作：

The Man Who Had All the Luck《鸿运高照的人》；All My Sons《全是我儿子》；Death of a Salesman《推销员之死》；The Last Yankee《最后一个美国佬》。

写作特色：A typical them of Arthur Miller concerns the dilemma of modern

man in relation to his family and work. The hero in his work always finds himself under a pressure from his society and its ethics, tries in vain to extricate himself from the physical and spiritual quandary into which he has fallen and finds release only in death, often in the form of actual or virtual suicide.

 Edward Albee

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简介：Edward Albee was linked with the tradition of the Theater of the

Absurd（荒诞派戏剧）which came into vogue in the 1950s and 1960s. The theater of absurd refers to some plays the theme of which centers on the meaninglessness of life with its pain and sufferings that seems funny, even ridiculous. 代表作：Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?《谁害怕弗吉尼亚伍尔夫？》；The American Dream《美国梦》；The Sandbox《沙盒》；The Ballad of the Sad Café《伤心咖啡馆之歌》。

特点：In the works of the theater of the absurd, the playwright tries to force

the audience to face up to the human condition as it is. Edward Albee’s plays seem to have dwelled on the one problem only, that is, the absurdity of human life built very much on a frail illusion and spiritual emptiness. 十六、二战后诗歌（20世纪40年代）

 Postmodernism （后现代主义）

Postmodernism represents a new mode of perception and a way of writing.

1. In poetry it strives to go against the vogue of the New Critical poem and its parent style, the High Modernism of the previous decades.

2. In its thematic concerns, Postmodernism views the world as one that is not to be molded, but as formless and unpredictable. Postmodernism does not endeavor to impose on life and reality, but is willing to embrace it for what it is.

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3. In formal aspects, Postmodernism seeks for a freedom in literary expression.

4. The Postmodernist novel exhibits its own unique features such as metafiction, black humor, and forms of avant-gardism.

十七、二战后美国小说

 Saul Bellow（赏析）I

American Jewish Fiction. ①The Jewish writers were primarily concerned

with an urgent or severe mission on the fate of the Jewish nation. Therefore, they were heavily burdened with individual morality and national responsibility. Such a bitter memory is always a motif for the American Jewish writers, who prefer to topics of national history and memory. ②The Jewish authors have cherished their national culture and their words are always deep-rooted in the national tradition with a tone of nostalgia, sentimentality and sadness. ③The everlasting motif of expressing national fate and obligation takes a new shape in the modern time. Because the Jews have well settled down materially, so that they cared no more about survivals, instead, they probed into individual souls for universal human concerns. ④The American Jewish writings are particularly good at characterization. These writings are thus seldom tainted with romantic sketches or illusion or despair.

The characterization of Herzog is successful. He is a loser in his career, in love

and in almost every aspect. This is emblematic of the Jewish people who had had their day but was pushing towards the margin, politically, economically, and culturally.

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简介：Saul Bellow was about the best-known writer of his generation. He was

born into a Jewish family. 代表作：Dangling Man《摇来晃去的人》；Henderson the Rain King《雨王汉德森》；Herzog《赫索格》；The Adventures of Augie March《奥吉马奇历险

记》。

 Toni Morrison（赏析）I

Afro-American Literature. ①In the 16th century, under the extremely harsh

conditions, black slaves had no other way to out pour their indignation and poignancy but to express them through songs. Therefore, Afro-American Literature stems from a story-telling tradition of oral literature. ②During the 19th century, plenty of slave narrations had appeared in American. ③In the Harlem Renaissance, a new generation of blacks formally stepped into the American literary circle as a whole. The Harlem Renaissance had flourished until it was abruptly stopped by the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Depression. It actually stimulated the blacks’ sense of racial pride, but it did not change basically the attitudes of the American society towards the blacks and their literature. ④The book which really turned the white America to the Afro-American literature with a new outlook was Native son written by Richard Wright. ⑤During the 1960s, largely arousing by the Black Nationalism Movement, the Afro-Americans advocated to fight for the “Black Power” in the summer of 1966. In response to this, some black writers set off “the Black Arts Movement” in the literary field.

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