Part One: Puritan Thought
Sources
The puritans were originally members of a division of the protestant Church. The first ttlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them puritans. They were a group of rious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles.
Am. Puritanism
The Am. Puritans, like their brothers back in England, were idealists. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin, and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from god. But in the grim struggle for survival in Am., they became more and more practical. Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early Am. mind and Am. literature. It had become a state of mind, a part of the national cultural atmosphere.
(1) A group of good qualities – hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety
(2) It led to the everlasting myth. All literature is bad on a myth – garden of Eden.
(3) Symbolism: the physical world is a symbol of God.
(4) Simplicity: fresh, simple and direct; plain and honest; the Bible.
(5) Fired with a n of mission; optimistic; elected; sacred task; American dreams
The development of Puritanism
The Puritanism has played an important role in American literature and here were many exceptional writers influenced by it in deferent periods in America.
1) In colonial period
Two of the famous Puritan Poets: Anne Bradstreet the first noted poetess in this period, Edward Taylor the most gifted (finest) of the Puritan poets. Puritan writers treated themlves as rvants of God.
2) As time went by, The Puritanism was divided into two groups, one was pragmatic, the reprents was Benjamin Franklin, and the other was idealist. The reprents was Emerson
In the period of Reason and Revolution园林绿化工程师, the chief reprentative of the American Enlightenment，Benjamin Franklin advocated a humanistic ideal. Pragmatic and optimistic, he highly regarded science, knowledge and education and believed in the possibilities of human progress and the comforts of material success.
3) In the period of American Romanticism
The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values and American Romanticism. One of the manifestations is the fact that American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counterparts. Besides, a preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of original sin and the mystery of evil marked the works of Hawthorne, Melville, etc.
Part Two: Transcendentalism:
绿色梦想
Definition:
Transcendentalism is a group of ideas in literature and philosophy that developed in the 1830s and '40s as a protest against the general state of culture and society. It is more of a tendency, an attitude, than the philosophy of Transcendentalists, speaking for cultural rejuvenation, and against the materialism of America society.
Main themes:
Emphasis on spirit, or the Over soul: the most important thing in the univer. (a new way of looking at the world)
Stress the importance of individualism. The individual is the most important element of society. (A new way of looking at man)
Nature as symbolic of the spirit of God. Nature was filled with God’s overwhelming prence. Transcendentalism is bad on the fact that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of ns. (The physical w
orld is a symbol of the spiritual)
Reprentative writers:
Its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson, who believed that man was a part of absolute good, and in Thoreau, who beheld divinity in the “unspotted innocence” of nature.
To later generations, scared by the horrors of the civil war, the transcendenlist persuasion that humanity was godlike and that evil was nonexistent appeared to be an optimistic folly. Yet transcendentalism was a powerful expression of the intellectual mood of the age, and the ideas it reprented have remained a strong influence on great American writers from the days of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman to the prent.
Part Three:
1. Washington Irving（ father of American literature ）
Comments 哀的意思
1. He is the first belletrist in American literature, writing for pleasure at a time when writing was practical and for uful purpos
无可厚非什么意思2. He is the first American literary humorist.
3. He has written the first modern short stories微信怎么设置不让别人加好友.
4. He is the first to write history and biography as entertainment启开.
5. He introduced the nonfiction pro as a literary genre.
6. His u of the gothic关于恐龙 looks forward to Poe.
Writing style
Gentility, urbanity, pleasantness
Enveloping stories in an atmosphere
Vivid and true character
Humor smiling while reading珍爱十字绣
Musical language
His works
The Sketch Book《见闻札记》
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 《睡谷的传说》
The analysis of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
The story: It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a priggish schoolmaster from Connecticut, who compete with Abraham”Brom Bones” Van Brunt, a buff and tough man, for the hand of eighteen-old Katrina Van Tasl.
