【正文】 phy of Christopher Columbers(1826). He wrote severy such kind of biographies. Irving then returned to England, where he accepted appointment as an American diplomat in London and three years later when he was nearing 50, he returned to the United States after an absence of 17 years. He bought “Sunnyside” his famous home on the Hudson River at Tarrytown and there, except for four years as United States minister to Spain he lived as a country spire, writing a series of histories and biographies.A study of Irving’s works would lead to the conclusion that humor was at the root of almost everything that was significant in them. What was more impressive was that his humor was always well meaning, mild and easy to be accepted. Early in the 19th century when most of the American writers were speaking in the authoritative voice of a gentleman who seems to be superior in maturity, knowledge, sense, and good taste, and when the majority of American periodicals depended heavily on a broad, explosive humor and sarcasm that gradually vulgarized the periodical essay tradition, Irving’s humor did much to cultivate a new literary taste.The style of Irving’s work is characterized by simplicity, poise and ease flow. Unlike the tightly structured stories of Poe and Hawthorne, the tastes of Irving lie in his literary innovations and transitional role in the development of American literature. of the tale:1. Plot structure of action:e. Exposition: time, place, persons preliminary condition of affairs。f. DevelopmentConflicts Crane to Brom Bones。 Crane to the girl。 Crane to farmers。 Crane to ghost。g. Summary pumpkin, Bones marries the girl, some still believe in ghosts,h. Setting i. StyleQuestions for discussion:1. What is the plot of the story?2. How did the conflict develop in the story?3. What is the function of the setting?4. What is the style of the story?Homework: Read the story Rip Van Winkle.2. James Fennimore Cooper (17891851)(a)Introduction: Cooper never saw the frontier. The advanced line of settlement that moved westward from the Atlantic had passed beyond Cooperstown, New York before his birth and throughout his life。 he never traveled farther west than Michigan. Yet his writing helped create a mythical west that transcended the reality of life on the frontier, and in his greatest character Natty Bumppo, or “Leatherstocking” Cooper created an archetypal western hero whose many literary descendants range from the cowboys of popular fiction and the movies to the hero of Melville, Twain and Faulkner. James Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey. When he was thirteen months old, he was taken with his family to a small wildness settlement on Lake Otsego, 150 miles north of New York City. The village was named Cooperstown after his father, William Cooper, a rich member of the landed gentry who had acquired vast tracts of land in New York State following the American Revolution. James Cooper was raised in the rural family “Manor House”, and he roamed the edge of a wildness that stretched a thousand miles to the Mississippi. Although he saw the white hunters and the numerous wagon trains of settlers that passed through Cooperstown on their way west, he saw little of the once numerous reedmen of the eastern forests. Later in life he acknowledged, “ I was never among the Indians. All that I know of them is from reading and from hearing my father speak of them.” When Cooper was fourteen, he entered Yale, but in his junior years after a series of undergraduate brawls and pranks he was expelled and was sent to sea as a mon sailor on an Atlantic merchant ship. In 1808, he became a mild shipman in the navy and served on Lawrence. In 1811, after the death of his father left him an inheritance of $50,000, Cooper resigned from the navy. He then married and began the freespending life of a wealth gentleman. By 1819, his inheritance was gone and he was heavily in debt. To regain his fortunes, he speculated in land, invested in a frontier store and a whaling ship, and in 1820 he began writing the fiction that eventually brought him wealth and worldly fame. According to tradition, he once tossed aside a popularsentimental novel with the ment that he could do better himself. When his family challenged him to fulfill his boast he wrote a tale that he quickly recognized as a botch and destroyed. His second attempt was Precaution (1820). It was a fulllength novel of English life, written in imitation of Jane Austin and filled with the conventional sentimentality of the day’s best sellers. Precaution was dull, and a financial failure, but it brought Cooper recognition and helped prepare the way for his next work. The Spy (1821), a novel of the American Revolution. The Spy appealed to patriotic American hungry for exciting fiction that dealt with American scenes and events. It soon went through three editions。 it was translated into several European languages and turned into a stage play. And it started Cooper on his career as the first eminent American novelist.Two years later Cooper published The Pioneers (1823), a romance of the American frontier that was an immediate best seller. It was the first of the “Leatherstocking Tales,” five novels of the life of Natty Bumppo. They included “The Last of Mohicans”(1826), The Prairie(1927), The Pathfinder(1840), and the Deerslayer(1841). Following his success with The Pioneer, Cooper drew upon his own experiences and wrote The Pilot(1841) the first of eleven novels of the sea that he wrote over a period of three decades.In 1926, with his financial burdens eased by the profits from his writing Cooper left America to live abroad, partly to escape his remaining debts and partly to experience what he saw as the rich context of European society, while living in Paris and London and touring the Continent, he pleted seven more novels and he received the adulation of a vast audience that read the numerous European