美国文学期末考试复习大纲
Ⅰ. 文学史
1. American Puritanism (美国请教主义):
Puritanism was a religious reform movement that aro within the Church of England in the late 16th century.
I. Background: Puritanism
1. features of Puritanism
(1) Predestination: God decided everything before things occurred.
(2) Original sin: Human beings were born to be evil, and this original sin can be pasd down from generation to generation.
(3) Total depravity
夜深人静的意思
(4) Limited atonement: Only the “elect” can be saved.
2. Influence
(1) A group of good qualities – hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety (rious and thoughtful) influenced American literature.
(2) It led to the everlasting myth. All literature is bad on a myth – garden of Eden.
(3) Symbolism: the American puritan’s metaphorical mode of perception was chiefly instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctly American.
(4) With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple and direct; the rhetoric is plain and honest, not without a touch of nobility often traceable to the direct influence of the Bible.
II. Overview of the literature
1. types of writing: diaries, histories, journals, letters, travel books, autobiographies/biogra
phies, rmons
2. writers of colonial period
(1) Anne Bradstreet
(2) Edward Taylor
(3) 清肺丸Roger Williams
(4) John Woolman
(5) Thomas Paine
(6) Philip Freneau
(7) Jonathan Edwards
(8) Benjamin Franklin
2. American Enlightenment (信访维稳工作措施美国启蒙运动):
Enlightenment is a philosophical movement of the 18th century that emphasized the u of reason to scrutinize previously accepted doctrines and traditions and that brought about many humanitarian reforms.
The American Enlightenment is a term sometimes employed to describe the intellectual culture of the British North American colonies and the early United States (as they became following the American Revolution).
It is commonly dated from 1750—1820.
Among the leading intellectual figures of this period are Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
Democratic Origins and Revolutionary Writers, 1776—1820
1. Background: American Revolution——historical
European Enlightenment
2. Basic Assumptions:
(1) Regard “enlightenment” or “education” as the principle means for development of society
(2) Show concern for civil rights, democracy in government and tolerance rather than earlier religious mysticism
(3) Reconsider the relationship between man & God. Brief-Deism (natural religion)
3. Transcendentalism (超验主义):
Transcendentalism is literature, philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about1836 to 1860.
It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world.
The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expresd by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essays as Nature (1836) and Self-reliance and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (1854).
I. Background: four sources
1. Unitarianism大日如来佛图片
(1) Fatherhood of God
(2) Brotherhood of men
(3) Leadership of Jesus
(4) Salvation by character (perfection of one’s character)
(5) Continued progress of mankind
(6) Divinity of mankind
(7) Depravity of mankind
2. Romantic Idealism: Center of the world is spirit, absolute spirit (Kant)
3. Oriental mysticism: Center of the world is “oversoul”
4. Puritanism: Eloquent expression in transcendentalism
II. Appearance
1836, “Nature” by Emerson
III. Features
1. spirit/oversoul
2. importance of individualism
3. 汽车电气设备nature – symbol of spirit/God; garment of the oversoul
4. focus in intuition (irrationalism and subconsciousness)
IV. Influence
1. It rved as an ethical guide to life for a young nation and brought about the idea that human can be perfected by nature. It stresd religious tolerance, called to throw off shackles of customs and traditions and go forward to the development of a new and distinctly American culture.
2. It advocated idealism that was great needed in a rapidly expanded economy where opportunity often became opportunism, and the desire to “get on” obscured the moral necessity for rising to spiritual height.
It helped to create the first American renaissance – one of the most prolific period in American literature.
4. Dark Romanticism
1. 桂鱼的功效与作用Dark Romanticism & Gothic Fiction
Similarities: darkness, supernatural, featuring characters过程论
Differences: sheer horror——Gothic Fiction’s purpo
dark mystery & skepticism of man——Dark Romance’s purpo
2. Dark Romanticism——reaction against transcendentalism
Dark Romanticism is a literary subgenre that emerged from the transcendental philosophical movement popular in 19北湖公园th century America. Some writers, including Poe, Hawthorne and Melville, found transcendental belief far too optimistic and egotistical and reacted by modifying.
