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American literature. Xue Ling. Chapter One. Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849). Born in Boston, the son of itinerant actors who died before he was 3 years old. Became the ward of a Virginia couple, the Allans, whose name he added to his own.
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American literature Xue Ling
Chapter One • Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)
Born in Boston, the son of itinerant actors who died before he was 3 years old. • Became the ward of a Virginia couple, the Allans, whose name he added to his own. • An editor of a number of magazines and won a number of literary prizes for his poems and fiction.
His short fiction, with its effects of terror and its supernatural trappings, made him a household name for American readers. • He is regarded as father of modern American short story. • His poems have been highly appreciated for their aesthetical quality and music is essential in them as it is associated with indefinite sensations.
Literary terms • Romanticism • As a literary trend or movement, it occurred and developed in Europe and America at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries under the historical background of the Industrial Revolution around 1760 and the French Revolution (1789 – 1799).
Characteristics of Romanticism • It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. • For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense.
Romantics did not think of the world as a ticking watch made by God. They thought of the world as a living, breathing being. They stressed the close relationship between man and nature. • They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group, against authority.
They affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted each person to be free to develop and express his own inner thought. • They cherished strong interest in the past, especially the medieval.
They are attracted by the wild, the irregular, the indefinite, the remote, the mysterious, and the strange. • They are interested in variety. They aspired the sublime and the wonderful, and tried to find the absolute, the ideal by transcending the actual.
American Romanticism • American romantics tend to moralize, to edify rather than to entertain. • It presented an entirely new experience alien to European culture. • The exotic landscape, the frontier life, the westward expansion, the myth of a New Garden of Eden in America, and the Puritan heritage were just a few examples of the native material for an indigenous literature.
Literary theories • Poe preferred the tale to other fictional forms such as novel because it is brief. • The writer must decide the effect first and then determine the incidents.
Truth rather than beauty is often the aim of the tale. As beauty can be better treated in the poems, tales can deal with terror, passion, horror, humor, sarcasm, wit, and ratiocination. • The merit of a work of art should be judged by its psychological effect upon the reader.
Text study: The Cask of Amontillado • Setting: a nameless Italian city • Time: an unspecified year (possibly in the 18th century) • Theme: Itconcerns the deadly revenge taken by the narrator on a friend whom he claims has insulted him. • Writing style: Poe conveys the story through the murderer's perspective.
Class activities • Read the dialogue parts by pair-work. • Recite the parts from the last paragraph on P15 to the end.
Questions to ponder • Who is the narrator of the story? • Is the murderer punished by law or not? What evidence can you give? • How do you comment on the two characters in the story? • What romantic elements are expressed through the story?
Further reading recommendation • 1. The Black Cat http://www.online-literature.com/poe/24/ • 2. The Tell-Tale Heart http://www.online-literature.com/poe/44/
Chapter Two • Nathaniel Hawthorne ( 1804 – 1864) 1.Born in Salem, Massachusetts and studied at Bowdoin College. 2.The Scarlet Letter (1850) brought him recognition as a major literary figure.
Literary term • Romance An ideal combination of facts and fancy, idealistic details and fanciful things, or reality and imagination.
Text study: The Scarlet Letter • The Scarlet Letter (1850) is a novel written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, considered to be his masterpiece and most famous work. Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, it tells the story of Hester Prynne, who gives birth after committing adultery and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity. Throughout the novel, Hawthorne explores themes of legalism, sin, and guilt.
Major themes 1、 Sin 2、 Past and present
The Scarlet Letter Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory The Prison Door Pearl, Hester’s Daughter The Scarlet Letter The Red Mark on Dimmesdale’s Chest The Meteor The Black Man The Forest and the Wilderness
The Scarlet Letter Genre Gothic Romance Historical
Class activities • 1. Role-play: The five women’s comments on Hester Prynne’s punishment. • 2. Group discussion: -Why should the women be so hard on Hester Prynne? -What social norm do you see through the women’s words?
Questions to ponder • Do you agree with Hester’s folk that she should be punished? Why or why not? • What image is Hester Prynne set before readers? • Why Hawthorne describes Hester’s appearance in such a way? What might be his purpose?
Further reading recommendation • The Scarlet Letterhttp://www.classicreader.com/book/69/2/ • The Minister’s Black Veilhttp://www.classicreader.com/book/205/1/
Chapter Three 19th-Century American Poets
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)
To Helen Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs, have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! In yon brilliant window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand! Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy-Land!
Poe’s principles on poetry writing • A poem should be short, readable at one sitting. • The chief aim of a poem is to produce a sense of beauty. • The most appropriate tone for all poems is melancholy. • A poem must be composed with rhythms. • A poem must be pure, written for its own sake.
Literary term Free verse: A form of poetry which refrains from meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.
Poetic theory • Whitman wrote in the preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it." He believed there was a vital, symbiotic relationship between the poet and society.This connection was emphasized especially in "Song of Myself" by using an all-powerful first-person narration.
As an American epic, it deviated from the historic use of an elevated hero and instead assumed the identity of the common people. Leaves of Grass also responded to the impact that recent urbanization in the United States had on the masses.
Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886) • frequent use of dashes; • sporadic capitalization of nouns; • convoluted and ungrammatical phrasing; • off-rhymes; • broken meters; • bold and unconventional and often startling metaphors; • aphoristic wit.
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, One clover and a bee, And revery. Revery alone will do, If bees are few. To Make a Prairie…
Class activities • Recite all the poems in this chapter. • Perform recitation of one of you favorite poems in this chapter.
Questions to ponder • How do you like the poems in this chapter? • Whose poems do you like best? Why? • What are the differences in writing style in these poems? • What have you learned through these poems?
Chapter Four • Stephen Crane (1871 – 1900) • Born in Newark, New Jersey. • In 1893, he published at his own expense Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, a pioneering work of sociological naturalism. • His short stories were collected in The Open Boat and Other Tales of Adventure (1898).
Literary term: Naturalism • Naturalism was a literary movement taking place from 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was depicted as a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment.
Naturalism is the outgrowth of Realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere. Naturalistic writers were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. They believed that one's heredity and social environment determine one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (e.g. the environment or heredity) influencing the actions of its subjects.
Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter; for example, Émile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, sex, prejudice, disease, prostitution, and filth. As a result, naturalistic writers were frequently criticized for being too blunt.
Literary realism • Most often literary realism refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of general "realism," Realist authors opted for depictions of everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.
Impressionistic literature • Impressionistic literature can basically be defined as when an author centers his story/attention on the character's mental life such as the character's impressions, feelings, sensations and emotions, rather than trying to interpret them.
Authors such as Virginia Woolf (Mrs Dalloway) and Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness and The Lagoon) are among the foremost creators of the type. These novels have been said to be the finest examples of a genre which is not easily comprehensible.
