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The Outline of American Literature
Puritanism: Edward Taylor
Revolution and Reason: Franklin, Paine, Jefferson, Freneau
Early Romanticism: Irving, Cooper, Bryant
Transcendentalism: Emerson, Thoreau
Black Romanticism: Allan Poe, Hawthorne, Melville
Realism:
Poem: Whitman and Dickinson
Local Colorism: Mrs. Stowe, Mark Twain
Psychological: Henry James
Naturalism: O’Henry, Jack London, Dreiser
Modernism
Imagism: Ezra Pound
Lyrical Poet: Robert Frost
Jazz Age: Fitzgerald
Lost Generation: Hemingway, T.S. Eliot
Southern literature: Faulkner
II. Blank Filling
1. The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at _____, Virginia.
2. The term “Puritan” was applied to those settlers who originally were devout members of the Church of __.
3. Hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety, these were the _____ values that dominated much of the early American writing.
4. The best of puritan poets was _____, whose complete edition of poems appeared in 1960, more than two hundred years after his death.
5. Franklin’s best writing is found in his masterpiece _____
6. Thomas Paine, with his natural gift for pamphleteering, was appropriately born into an age of ______
7. _____ has been called the “Father of American Poetry”.
8. In American literature, the eighteenth century was an Age of ______ and Revolution.
9. ______ was regarded as the first great prose stylist of American romanticism.
10. In Irving’s work _____ appeared the first modern short stories and the first American juvenile literature.
11. The central figure in the Leatherstocking Tales is _____.
12. To a Waterfowl is perhaps the peak of ______’s work, it has been called by an eminent English critic “the most perfect brief poem in the language”.
13._______ was the first American to gain the stature of a major poet in the world literature.
14. It is supposed by many that Edgar Allan Poe wrote the beautiful poem _____ to remember his dead wife.
15. In 1836, a little book came out which made a tremendous impact on the intellectual life of America. It was entitled Nature by ______.
16. Emerson’s essay _____ has been regarded as “American Declaration of Intellectual Independence”. It called on American writers to write about America in a way peculiarly American.
17. Melville’s novel ______ is a tremendous chronicle of a whaling voyage in pursuit of a seemingly supernatural white whale.
18. After his death, _____ became the only American to be honored with a bust in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.
19. _______ had originated in the country, France as a literary doctrine that called for “reality and truth” in the depiction of ordinary life.
20. The poetic style Whitman devised is now called ______, that is poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.
21. Abraham Lincoln ever said, “a little woman wrote a book which made this great war”, which refers that ______ wrote ______ to make ______war.
22. ______ was Mark Twain’s masterwork from which, as Hemingway noted, “all modern American literature comes”.
23. The title of one of O. Henry’s books ______ indicates that he considered all the people of New York city worth writing about, instead of only the upper class.
24. In the period of American realism, ______ probed deeply at the individual psychology of his characters, writing in a rich and intricate style that supported his intense scrutiny of complex human experience.
25. The novel which was described by an American critic as “an outrage to American girlhood” is Henry James’ ______.
26. Jack London’s masterwork ______ is somewhat autobiographical.
27. The identification of potency with money is at the heart of Dreiser’s masterpiece ______.
28. Ezra Pound was the leader of a new movement in poetry which he called the “______” movement.
29. In 1920. T.S. Eliot began to write his masterpiece ______, one of the major works of modern literature.
30. In 1925, Fitzgerald wrote his best novel ______. It is the story of an idealist who was destroyed by the influence of the wealthy, pleasure-seeking people around him.
31. With the publication of The Sun Also Rises, ______ became the spokesman for what Gertrude Stein had called “a Lost Generation”.
32. In the novel The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway portrayed an old fisherman named ______, who shows triumphant even in defeat.
33. _____ wrote about the disintegration of the old social system in the American Southern States, and its effect on the lives of modern people, both black and white.
III. Questions and Answers (24 points in all, 6 for each)
1. What’s American Puritanism?
2. What’s American Romanticism?
3. What’s American Transcendentalism?
4. Make a brief comment on Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter.
1) intelligent and capable 2) passionate 3) strong
5. List the features of Whitman’s poetry?
6. What’s American Realism?
7. What’s Hemingway’s style and his code Hero?
(1) Hemingway’s novels are always exposed to and victimized by violence in various forms with all the dignity and courage he could muster, confronts situation. (2) They are a group of wandering, amusing, but aimless people, who are caught in the war and removed from the path of ordinary life. (3) They are the men trapped both physically and mentally. (4) God’s design or his beneficence and to suggest that man is doomed to be entrapped. (5) They believe: life is worth living and there are causes worth dying for. (6) In a tragic sense, the struggle of Hemingway’s heroes show: it is a representation of life as a struggle against unconquerable natural forces in which only a partial victory is possible. Nevertheless, there is a feeling of great respect for the struggle and mankind. (7) Hemingway hero of athletic prowess and masculinity and unyielding heroism.
8. What’s the relationship between The Great Gatsby and the American Dream?
Gatsby is a mythical figure whose intensity of dream stands for a state of mind that embodies America itself; Gatsby is the last of the romantic heroes, whose energy and sense of commitment take him in search of his personal grail; Gatsby’s failure symbolizes to a great extent the end of the America Dream.
IV. Topic Discussion (20 points in all, 10 for each)
1. Discuss the figure of speech under the theme of Moby Dick.
2. Discuss Twain’s art of fiction: the setting, the language, and the characters, etc., based on his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
3. How do you understand the Emersonian “Oversoul”?
1) Emerson envisioned religion as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “Oversoul”.
2) The “Oversoul” was an all-pervading unitary spiritual power of goodness, omnipresent and omnipotent, from which all things came and of which everyone was a part.
3) Generally, the Oversoul referred to spirit or God as the most important thing in the universe. Since the Oversoul was a single essence, and since all people derived their beings from the same source, the seeming diversity and clash of human interests was only superficial, and all people were in reality striving toward the same ends by different but converging paths.
4) The harder each person strove to express his or her individuality, the more faithfully he or she followed the inner voice, the more surely would the aims of his or her life coincide with those of his or her neighbor.
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