【正文】 t ways, an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of “American Renaissance”. (2) Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry. 2. differences: (1) Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large。 fewer, if anyone at all, have had the courage to declare that they have conquered Pound。美國文學簡史筆記（常耀信版）英語專業(yè)考研必備A Concise History of American Literature What is literature? Literature is language artistically used to achieve identifiable literary qualities and to convey meaningful messages. Chapter 1 Colonial Period I. Background: Puritanism 1. features of Puritanism (1) Predestination: God decided everything before things occurred. (2) Original sin: Human beings were born to be evil, and this original sin can be passed down from generation to generation. (3) Total depravity (4) Limited atonement: Only the “elect” can be saved. 2. Influence (1) A group of good qualities – hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety (serious and thoughtful) influenced American literature. (2) It led to the everlasting myth. All literature is based on a myth – garden of Eden. (3) Symbolism: the American puritan’s metaphorical mode of perception was chiefly instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctly American. (4) With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple and direct。 and many seem to agree that the Cantos is a monumental failure. 6. Contribution He has helped, through theory and practice, to chart out the course of modern poetry. 7. The Cantos – “the intellectual diary since 1915” Features: (1) Language: intricate and obscure (2) Theme: plex subject matters (3) Form: no fixed framework, no central theme, no attention to poetic rules VII. T. S. Eliot 1. life 2. works (1) poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock l The Waste Land l (epic) Hollow Man l Ash Wednesday l Four Quarters l (2) Plays Murder in the Cathedral l Sweeney Agonistes l The Cocktail Party l The Confidential Clerk l (3) Critical essays The Sacred Wood l l Essays on Style and Order Elizabethan Essays l The Use of Poetry and l The Use of Criticisms After Strange Gods l 3. point of view (1) The modern society is futile and chaotic. (2) Only poets can create some order out of chaos. (3) The method to use is to pare the past and the present. 4. Style (1) Fresh visual imagery, flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm (2) Difficult and disconnected images and symbols, quotations and allusions (3) Elliptical structures, strange juxtapositions, an absence of bridges 5. The Waste Land: five parts (1) The Burial of the Dead (2) A Game of Chess (3) The Fire Sermon (4) Death by Water (5) What the Thunder Said VIII. Robert Frost 1. life 2. point of view (1) All his life, Frost was concerned with constructions through poetry. “a momentary stay against confusion”. (2) He understands the terror and tragedy in nature, but also its beauty. (3) Unlike the English romantic poets of 19th century, he didn’t believe that man could find harmony with nature. He believed that serenity came from working, usually amid natural forces, which couldn’t be understood. He regarded work as “significant toil”. 3. works – poems the first: A Boy’s Will collections: North of Boston, Mountain Interval (mature), New Hampshire 4. style/features of his poems (1) Most of his poems took New England as setting, and the subjects were chosen from daily life of ordinary people, such as “mending wall”, “picking apples”. (2) He writes most often about landscape and people – the loneliness and poverty of isolated farmers, beauty, terror and tragedy in nature. He also describes some abnormal people, . “deceptively simple”, “philosophical poet”. (3) Although he was popular during 1920s, he didn’t experiment like other modern poets. He used conventional forms, plain language, traditional metre, and wrote in a pastured tradition. IX. e. e. cummings “a juggler with syntax, grammar and diction” – individualism, “painter poet” Novels in the 1920s I. F. Scott Fitzgerald 1. life – participant in 1920s 2. works (1) This Side of Paradise (2) Flappers and Philosophers (3) The Beautiful and the Damned (4) The Great Gatsby (5) Tender is the Night (6) All the Sad Young Man (7) The Last Tycoon 3. point of view (1) He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the socalled “American Dream” is false in nature. (2) He had always been critical of the rich and tried to show the integrating effects of money on the emotional makeup of his character. He found that wealth altered people’s characters, making them mean and distrusted. He thinks money brought only tragedy and remorse. (3) His novels follow a pattern: dream – lack of attraction – failure and despair. 4. His ideas of “American Dream” It is false to most young people. Only those who were dishonest could bee rich. 5. Style Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose is smooth, sensitive, and pletely original in its diction and metaphors. Its simplicity and gracefulness, its skill in manipulating the relation between the general and the specific reveal his consummate artistry. 6. The Great Gatsby Narrative point of view – Nick He is related to everyone in the novel and is calm and detected observer who is never quick to make judgements. Selected omniscient point of view II. Ernest Hemingway 1. life 2. point of view (influenced by experience in war) (1) He felt that WWI had broken America’s culture and traditions, and separated from its roots. He wrote about men and women who were isolated from tradition, frightened, sometimes ridiculous, trying to