What is literature?
Literature is language artistically ud to achieve identifiable literary qualities and to convey meaningful messages.
● Brief Introduction to American Literature
Although American literature may be among the youngest national literatures in the world, it swiftly developed, well matured, began to receive international recognition and has exercid an impactful effect upon the world literature.
hcu● American literature can be divided into veral stages such as the colonial period, the period of enlightenment and American revolution, p r cthe romantic period, the age of realism, the modern period and the contemporary literature.
Schools of American Literature
● 重农派(Agrarians)
● 迷惘的一代(The Lost Generation)
● 黑山派诗歌vicent(BIack Mountain Poems)
● 垮掉的一代(the Beat Generation)
● 黑色幽默(Black humor)
● The Colonial Period
permissionIt was after American independence that American literature began to take shape. In the colonial period, American writers did not turn up with real American style basically, and American literature, by and large, followed the English tradition and did not give ri to the works of great literary value.
● New English Renaissance, Transcendentalism
Between 1840 and 1850, American literature reached its first peak called New English Renaissance. Transcendentalism, according to transcendence through lf-
knowledge, lf-reliance, and the contemplation of nature, fanned the flame and played a motivating role. This first American literature in the 1830s and ended with its flowering in the 1850s. A considerable number of writer such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman fully displayed their talents. They freed themlves from the hindrance of the tradition of English literature, discolored the brand of the English literature shown in the works by the former writers, and created a great number of literary works, brilliant, really American and original in style, in which “Nature”, Walden, the Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, “Song of Mylf”, etc., exert far-reaching influence.
● James Fenimore Cooperplanned who was the first important American novelist to succeed with subjects and tting that were largely American had been widely read in the whole of Europe;
● Washington Irving gained European recognition as America’s first genuine man of letters; Edgar Allan Poe, who often technically complex poetry ud commonplace, romantic themes and Walt Whitman were welcomed in France;
● in Britain, Mark Twain who produced equivalents in American speech in his dialogue never before attempted was favorably received.
● Moreover, Whitman, as a matter of fact, who celebrated an untrammeled communion with nature with overtones of nsuality that appeared shocking even though his poetry expresd sound transcendental doctrine, gave an important impetus to China’s new poetry movement which initiated free ver written in the vernacular.
● Nevertheless, New England Renaissance or New England Transcendentalism, which began in the 40s of the nineteenth century, was a brilliant milestone in literature history, and American literature attained maturity, henceforth.
● The Second Renaissance
About one hundred years after the first renaissance, there aro the cond one. From 1912 to the end of World War Ⅱ came forth, in large numbers, in the American
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literary circles, the writers of talent, who achieved remarkable success in all spheres of fiction, poetry, drama and literary criticism. A scene of literary prosperity, therefore, was prented.
● The Lost Generation
Between World War bbc 中国Ⅰ and the end of the 1930s was the period when “the Lost Generation” with Ernest Hemingway, who The Sun Also Ris and A Farewell to Arms are the collective portrait of “the Lost Generation” and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who himlf and who The Great Gatsby, portraying how American wealthy men spent money like water and led a life of luxury and dissipation in the sumptuous night feast, are the product of “the Jazz Age”, as its important reprentatives dominated the American literary world. Though veral writers in the first renaissance occupied a unique position in the history of American literature, the literature between the two world wars or the cond renaissance surpasd the previous literature, by a great deal, in the light of the numerical superiority of the e
merging brilliant writers and works, in the light of the range of life reflected, richness of theme and contents, and the originality of style.
● The Characteristics of the Second Renaissance
The cond renaissance which was characterized by disillusionment to the war, adopted the despairing tone of The Waste Land and reached its summit in 1930. That year saw the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to mannequinthe first American writerhobbies, Sinclair Lewis, who attacked provincialism in Main Street(1920). From this time on, American writers carried off this unusual honor one after another.
For example, Eugene O’Neill(1936), who means of artistic expression is an agglomeration of naturalism, realism, expressionism, symbolism, etc., particularly, who later works touched on some basic problems of American society and were given much attention by the press. This outstanding dramatist of the cond renaissance t a new standard for American playwrights, shocked the international literary world, and opened the golden age of American drama. O’Neill
mper fiwas joined by a host of talented dramatists, including Maxwell, Anderson, Philip Barry, Lillian Hellman, Elmer Rice, etc.
