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American Literature History, Early Romantic Literature, the Colonial…
American Literature History
Early Romantic Literature
Washington Irving
(father of American Literature)
The Sketch Book
James Fenimore Cooper
frontier novels and sea novels
Edgar Allan Poe
To Helen
Annabel Lee
the Colonial Period(1607-1775)
the Revolutionary Period (1776-1810)
the Romantic Period(1810-1865)
the Realistic Period (1865-1910)
the Modernist Period(1910-1945)
the Literature since WWII
The scale of World War II was unprecedented.
The American intellectuals' faith in civilization and progress was greatly shaken.
In the 1950s, against the background of the "Cold War", McCarthyism, and the Korean War, the literary world became quiet;
in the 1960s and 1970s, after the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the student movement, the feminist movement, and the Watergate case, the literary world became active and a number of people appeared.
A thoughtful writer.
Grotesque, fantasy, exaggeration, anti-hero
Jewish literature
Black humor
Black literature
Southern Writers
Marxist Realism
the second American Renaissance, the expatriate movement, "the Lost Generation"
Emest Hemingway
Eugene O'Neill ("founder of the American drama")
The Emperor Jones
Ezra Pound
(a leading spokesman of the "Imagist Movement")
In a Station of the Metro
F. Scott Fitzgerald (spokesman of the Jazz Age)
The Great Gatsby
William Faulkner (awarded a Nobel Prize)
The Sound and the Fury
The Sun Also Rises
After the 1980s and 1990s, with the gradual formation of monopoly capital, various social problems focused on labor-management contradictions became sharper and more apparent, and writers were worried and disappointed about the future of society.
Under the influence of European realism and naturalism literature, a group of emerging writers reflected the negative side of society in many ways.
naturalism
Local colorism
Mark Twain
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Realism
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
Theodore Dreiser (pioneer of naturalism in American literature)
Sister Carrie
From the end of the Civil War to WW1, the general tendency of American literature was the rise and development of realism and the decline of romanticism.
In the 20 to 30 years after the end of the Civil War, capitalism was in a stage of free competition. The ideals of democracy and freedom inspired the people and writers, and the optimism in literary creation was in a dominant position.
After the 1980s, after several economic crises and social turmoil, people suspected that the democratic system is "a paradise for everyone's freedom and happiness."
After the 1980s and 1990s, there were more works that criticized reality and exposed the darkness of society. The themes involved the bankruptcy of the countryside, the plight of the people of the lower classes in the city, and labor struggles. Some works even express the mood of utopian socialism.
Transcedentalism: Spirit first and matter second
Such social conditions promoted the literary creation of the first half of the 19th century to be romantic.
The writers absorbed the spirit of European romantic literature and described American history, legends and real life. The content of the American nation gradually became enriched.
From the 1920s and 1930s to the eve of the Civil War, it was the heyday of the Romantic Movement. Writers of different styles springed up. The works have distinct national characteristics from content to form.
By the middle of the century, the tone of romantic literature changed from optimism to doubt, and urgent social contradictions, such as slavery, caused some writers to adopt realistic creative methods.
Representative authors and works
Benjamin Franklin
The Autobiography
Thomas Jefferson
Declartion of Independence
American national literature was formed during the independent revolution
This struggle produced a large number of revolutionary poetry and created the first group of important American essayists and poets.
Political independence promotes cultural independence.
After the war, the works of American writers gradually increased, gradually getting rid of the monopoly of English literature.
The young democratic republic made people full of confidence and attracted more people from the old world to the new continent.
Puritanism
Representative authors and works
John Smith
A Ture Relation of Virginia
Edwards Taylor(Puritanism)
Puritan poet/metapuysical poems
Anne Bradstreet
To My Dear and Loving Husband
When immigrants first arrived in the New World, they were busy struggling for survival, so the development of literature was relatively slow at the beginning.
The earliest published works about North America were travel notes and diaries.
After the establishment of the British colonies, the rulers used religion, mainly Puritanism, as the main means of controlling the colonial ideology. Therefore, many publications were about theological research.
With the growth of industry, trade and national consciousness, the voice of religious freedom has increased, and the theocracy of Puritanism has declined and is replaced by the consciousness of national independence such as humanism and liberal democracy.
Puritanism opposed fictional novels and dramas, so literary works were not very developed. Rare literary works are mainly related to religion, and there are also pamphlets or travel notes that introduce the landscape and daily life of the New World.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Henry David Thoreau
Nathaniel Hawthorne (first great American writer of fiction)
oversoul；the individual；nature as the symbol of the spirit or God；the power of intuition
The Scarlet Letter
Herman Melville
The White Whale (first American prose epic)
Walt Whitman (Father of free verse)
Song of Myself
Emily Dickinson
Because I could not Stop for Death
Walden
Nature
"first boom" of American literature
