您现在所在的位置:首页 > 论文中心 > 英语类 >

    A Brief Summary of the History of American Literature(三)

      Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant, innovative work expressed the country’s democratic spirit. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains “Song of Myself,” the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American.The poem’s innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet’s self was one with the universe and the reader, permanently altered the course of American poetry.

      Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the 20th century. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside. Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing. Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman’s. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Her clean, clear, chiseled poems, rediscovered in the 1950s, are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature.

      Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne is best known today for his many short stories (he called them "tales") and his four major romances written between 1850 and 1860: The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860). Another novel-length romance, Fanshawe was published anonymously in 1828. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience. Many of his works are inspired by Puritan New England, combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism. Hawthorne?s works belong to romanticism or, more specifically, dark romanticism, cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity. His later writings would also reflect his negative view of the Transcendentalism movement.

      Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was one of the most widely read and influential American writers. At the age of 18, he published his first book of poetry. In 1838 Poe published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon. He died in 1849. During a short life of poverty, anxiety, and fantastic tragedy, Poe achieved the establishment of a new symbolic poetry; the formalization of the new short story and the slow development of an important critical theory. Poe is best known for his poems and horror stories. Among his works are the stories The Fall of the House of Usher, William Wilson, Ligeia and The Cask of Amontillado, and the poems The Raven, Annabel Lee, Sonnet—To Science, To Helen and Israfel.

      The Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The age of Realism came into existence.

      3. The age of Realism

      As a literary movement, realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and low.

      3.1 Literature Features in Realism Period

      The American authors lumped together as “realists” seem to have some features in common: “verisimilitude of detail derived from observation,” the effort to approach the norm of experience—a reliance on the representative in plot, setting, and character, and to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience.

      Local colorism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early 70s. Local colorist concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. The tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life.