Selected Readings in American Literature美国文学选读

   Ma Ke-yun Foreign Languages School

Shaoxing UniversityJan.12th, 2007

Email: marco663@sohu.com

Tel: 0575-8332157

The United States

Table of Contents

• Part I The Literature of colonial America

 

• 1.     Historical Background

• 2.     The Literature

• 3.     Puritan Thoughts

• Part II The Literature of Romanticism

 • 1. Historical Introduction & Literary Characteristics• 2.  Edgar Allan Poe The Cask of Amontillado; To Helen; Annabel Lee• 3.  Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance• 4.  Nathaniel Hawthorne Young Goodman Brown

• Part III The Literature of Realism

• 1. Walt Whitman

One’s Self I Sing; O Captain! My Captain!• 2. Mark Twain

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

• Part IV Twentieth-century Literature

• 1. William Faulkner

A Rose for Emily

• 2. Ernest Hemingway

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

• 3. Robert Frost

Fire and Ice;

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening;

The Road Not Taken

Part V Modern American Drama

• 1. Eugene Glastone O’Neill

Desire Under the Elms

• 2. Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman

• Part I The Literature of Colonial America

• 1. Historical Background:• After Christopher Columbus’s exploration of the new

continent (1504), in the early sixteenth century, the colonists, English and European explorers arrived in the new vast continental area. The earliest settlers included Dutch, Swedes, Germans, French, Spaniards, Italians and Portuguese. They established respectively their own colonies in the new continent. Dutch settled along the Hudson River, Swedes explored the Delaware, Germans and Scotch-Irish conquered in New York and Pennsylvania; Frenchmen settled in the Northern Colonies and along the St. Lawrence River, and the Spanish controlled Florida.

• At last early in the seventeenth century, the English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the American national history. All these settlers contributed to the forming of the American civilization, but the English settlements were most influential. The most part of the English colonies was sustained by English traditions, ruled by English laws, supported by English commerce, and named after English monarchs and English lands: Georgia, Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, New England (the northeastern most region of the U.S.A. comprising the states of Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, so named by John Smith when he explored it in 1614. New Englander: a native or resident of New England.).

• 2.       The Literature: • The first American literature was neither American nor

really literature. It was not American because it was the work mainly of immigrants from England. It was not literature as we know it---in the form of poetry, essays, or fiction---but rather an interesting mixture of travel accounts and religious writings. The earliest colonial travel accounts are records of the perils and frustrations that challenged the courage of America’s first settlers. The early settlers wrote about their voyage to the new land, about adapting themselves to unfamiliar climates and crops, about dealing with Indians. They wrote in diaries and in journals. They wrote letters and contracts and government charters and religious and political statements. They wrote about the land which stretched before them---unimaginable and immense, with rich dense forests and deep-blue lakes and rich soil.

• 3.       Puritan Thoughts• The English immigrants (The Mayflower voyage

1620) who settled on America’s northern seacoast, appropriately called New England, came in order to practice their religion freely. They were either Englishmen who wanted to reform the Church of England or people who wanted to have an entirely new church. These two groups combined, especially in what became Massachusetts, came to be known as “Puritans”, so named after those who wished to “purify” the church of England. Puritans wanted to make pure their religious beliefs and practices. The Puritan was a “would-be purifier” who thought himself holier or better than others.

• The Puritans wished to restore simplicity to church services and the authority of the Bible to theology. They felt that the Church of England was too close to the Church of Rome in doctrine, form of worship, and organization of authority. Another point of controversy was that the Church of England was the established church, that is, the official church of the state, and the most extreme Puritans, among them the Plymouth Plantation group, felt that the influences of politics and the court had led to corruption within the church. These Puritans were “Separatists”, that is, they wished to break free from the Church of England. The Massachusetts Bay group, on the other hand, wished to reform the church but remain a part of it.

• The Puritans followed many of the ideas of the French reformer John Calvin. Through the Calvinist influence the Puritans emphasized the then common belief that human beings were basically evil and could do nothing about it; and that many of them, though not all, would surely be condemned to hell. Over the years the Puritans built a way of life that was in harmony with their somber religion, one that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety. These were the Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American writing, including the sermons, books, and letters of such noted Puritan clergymen as John Cotton and Cotton Mather.

• Questions:

• 1. How can you rate the English Settlement in America in the 17th century?

• 2. Why do we say the colonial American literature is neither American nor really literature?

• 3. What’s your understanding of the American Puritan thoughts? What are the motifs?

Thanks for Your Participation!