american literature history summary

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american literature history summary篇一：A Brief Summary of History of American Literature

A Brief Summary of History of American Literature (before The flourishing of American literature in 19th

Century )

By Zhao Hua

090502011937

Class 9

Abstract:

America’s history of literature began with the swarming in of immigrants with different background and cultures. After that, American literature had been greatly influenced by the European culture for a long period. It was not until America’s independence, did Americans realized that they need national literature strongly, and American literature began to developed. The Civil War was a watershed in the history, after which American literature entered a period of full blooming. Romantics, which emphasized individualism and intuition and Tnscendentalism represented by Emerson came out into being. This was an exciting period in the history of American literature. Like the flowers of spring, there were suddenly many different kinds of writing at the same time. They have given depth and strength to American literature, and accelerated the forming of High Romantics. But due to the influence of Civil War, the American society was in a turbulent situation. The writings about local life, critical realism and unveiling the dark side of the society were increased. After The First World War, Americans were at a loss postwar, and the Modern American literature began.

My piece of paper is written in chronological order as these periods developed in order to have a clear outline of its progress.

Keywords: National Literature, Romanism, Transcendentalism, Local Color, Realism, Modern literature

American is a multi-national country. Just like a big container, which put in various kinds of elements. Different cultures, that can not only be co-existed but also form a sharp contrast, mixed together, It makes American literature style has a flavor of distinct and various aesthetic feeling. Many writers come from lower level, which makes American literature has the rich flavor of life and local color. Furthermore, many new styles of literature in the world are oriented in America since 20th century. The process of American literature can be divided into following main periods: Colony and Puritan literature; early national literature; latter national literature and Modern literature.

America’s history of literature began with the swarming in of immigrants with different background and cultures. After that, American literature had been greatly influenced by the European culture for a long period. It was not until America’s independence, did Americans realize that they need national literature strongly, and American literature began to develop. The Civil War was a watershed in the history, after which American literature entered a period of full blooming. Romantics, which emphasized individualism and intuition，and Tnscendentalism represented by Emerson came out into being. This was an exciting period in the history of American literature. Like the flowers of spring, there were suddenly many different kinds of writing at the same time. They have given depth and strength to American literature, and accelerated the forming of High Romantics. But due to the influence if Civil War, the American society was in a turbulent situation. The writings about local life, critical realism and unveiling the dark side of the society were increased. After The First World War, Americans were at a loss postwar, and the Modern American literature began.

1. Colonial and early American literature

(1). Travelers and Explorers

When the European explorers first came to this new continent, the native Indians who probably got here from Asia about fifteen thousand years ago were still in origin, and they even had no written language, “The traditional literature was originally transmitted almost entirely by word of mouth, and therefore belongs to the category

of oral literature,” (Wu Dingbo, 1) As time past, more and more travelers and explorers swarmed in. They wrote a lot of diaries、letters, and travel accounts to describe the new land as second Eden. No wander somebody said that the earliest American literature were the travel accounts written by European adventurers. Among the most remained were Captain John Smith’s True Relation of Virginia (1608), and Description of New England (1616).

Although most of the Indian history was preserved in tales and songs, they had thoughts about life and nature. They loved the natural world around them deeply, and they believed that when a person was dead, he would give back what had borrowed while he was alive to nature. This kind of philosophy had influenced later or even modern American writers. It’s interesting that when we look at the literature of the Puritans, the Transcendentalists, the Naturalists, and even the Moderns, when we read Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, and Ernest Hemingway, we can find similar themes.

(2) Pilgrim settlements

Several years later, another group of settlers also arrived in the New World. This group was looking for the Jamestown settlement. However , because of bad navigation, they landed in Massachusetts. They were also coming to the New World with dreams of success, but their goal was different from the Jamestown settlement. They wanted to start a new world governed by the Bible. They were called Puritans because they wanted to live a better life by making themselves pure. They first arrived on the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth. This is the group we are usually thinking about when we talk about the "first Americans."

The clearest history of their journey to the New World can be found in History of Plymouth Plantation (1608) written by William Bradford, who was also one of the Mayflower passengers. The History of Plymouth Plantation is a Puritan book in the best sense. “It’s loosely annalistic, but a direct and simple style gives charm, as a sincere faith in Puritanism gives purity, to the entire book.” (W. P. Trent, 1997)

The Puritans had several kinds of literature. By far the most common form is the writing related to Biblical teachings, or sermons, that the church leaders wrote. The Puritans believed that they were in the New World because God had brought them there for a special purpose. They thought that by studying the Bible they could learn more about this way of life. So they were very strict to their life, and they didn’t allow any kind of entertainment even in literature. That’s way Wu Dingbo said in his book “Literature of the New England Settlement is mainly a literary expression of the Puritan idealism” and “The literature of the colonial settlement served either God or colonial expansion or both.” (Wu Dingbo, 4)

Another important form of writing from this period is the histories. These books, like Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation, are important because they tell us about life at the time of the Puritans.

People also wrote many poems. But a lot of works were hidden and lost because people often considered poetry to be an inferior form of writing and not totally acceptable to Puritan thinking.

One of the most significant poets from this period was Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672). Her poems in Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up In America (1650) reflected the con concerns of women who came to settle in the colonies, and in all her poems, however, she shows her strong belief in God.

2. 18th century—the Age of reason

(1) The Age of reason

In the 18th century, people believed in man’s own nature and the power of human reason. With Franklin as its spokesman, the 18th century America experienced an age of reason.

Words had never been so useful and so important in human history. People wrote a lot of political writings. Numerous pamphlets and printings were published. These works agitated revolutionary people not only in America but also around the world. Among the most renowned was the work Common Sense (1776) of Thomas Paine (1737-1809). It’s the ringing call for the decoration of liberty. He also wrote Crisis (1774-1783) and The Age of Reason (1794-1796), according to Wu, “He thought that religion should

be based on rational, reasonable ground. ” (Wu Dingbo, 12) The pamphlets helped complete the debate that resulted in America's separation from England.

And of course for all the Americans, the most important document from this period was a single sheet of paper called The Declaration of Independence (1776), mainly written by Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), the most distinguished person and giant in American history, he wrote and worked for American independence hardly and had made so many great efforts to America that he has been called "The First American." a

world-renowned scientist, diplomat, philosopher, and writer. He perfected the smooth, clear, short sentences of the Puritan plain style. His Autobiography encourages hard work and emphasizes the importance of achievement. Another work that is well known is Poor Richard's Almanack, and many of the sentences have become popular quotations.

During this time writers thought that the truth should be relied on Bible, churchmen, authorities, or practice and experience.

(2) Early National Literature

During the period of American Revolution War, American national literature came into being. Since before the war, American people have already had the awareness of national independence, so they wrote many political writings revolutionary poems. The war helped the first important American prose writers and poets grow up both culturally and artistically. Furthermore, the independence of nation led to the independence of national literature. From this moment on, American people began to understand of meaning of being a real ”American“.

american literature history summary篇二：A Brief Summary of the History of American Literature

A Brief Summary of the History of American

Literature

关键词：美国文学 浪漫主义 超验主义 现实主义 主义

论文摘要：浪漫主义时期是美国文学史上最重要的时期之一。当美国人在大刀阔斧地建设自己的国家时，也开始逐渐意识到逐渐与欧洲的不同。随着不断增强的民族主义意识及民族自豪感，美国人开始希望见到自己的不同与欧洲模式，能表达他们字的美国风情的文学。这个时代伟大的作家充满热情地记录下这个伟大时代的乐观主义精神。随后美国文学进入了超验主义时代。超验主义十分强调个人主义、自立、拒绝传统权威思想。它实际上是对浪漫主义的。

然后，美国的国家自信心受到了内战的动摇。内战过后，美国处在迷茫中。在1900年前后这段时期的文学由于美国国内环境的变化而由浪漫主义和超验主义乐观精神转向对社会和人类本质更直接的探讨。从某种角度，现实主义反对浪漫主义的理想主义和怀旧情绪。它主要关注中下层人民的日常生活，而在这种情况下人物性格是社会因素作用的结果，环境是整个事件发展不可分割的部分。

1910年至1930年间被称为现代主义时期。一战后，美国进入了高度繁荣的十年，商业的繁荣程度超过了许多人的想象。20世纪初期，现代机器改变了人们日常生活的节奏、环境和面貌。大批的家和作家获得了不同程度的成功，开始改造传统的艺术形式，试图从中发现新的元素—人们进入机械时代之后所产生的美学共鸣。在这个时期，很多艺术家和文学运动在很大程度上与19世纪的风格、形式及内容迥异。现代的心对20世纪早期的文学产生了深刻的影响，大多数优秀的现代主义作家对人类心理学表现出浓厚兴趣。

Abstract

Romantic Period is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature. When Americans were constructing their country, they also began to realize their differences from their European counterparts. They began to hope to see an entirely different literature model which expressed American cultures. Great writers of that period captured on their pages the enthusiasm and the optimism of that dream. Later，American literature came to Transcendentalism Period which emphasized individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of tradition authority. It was actually greatly influenced by romanticism.

However, the country’s confidence was waved by the Civil War. After the war, Americans got lost. At about 1900s, American literature came to another entirely different age—the age of Realism. Realists searched for the social and human nature more directly. In part, Realism was a reaction against the Romantic emphasis on the strange, idealistic, and long-ago and far-away. It has been chiefly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday life among the middle and lower classes where character is a product of social factors and environment is the integral element in the dramatic complications.

The period between 1910 and 1930 is referred to as the era of Modernism. As modern machinery had changed the pace, atmosphere, and appearance of daily life in the early 20th century, so many artists and writers, with varying degrees of success, reinvented traditional artistic forms and tried to find radically new ones—an aesthetic echo of what people had come to call ―the machine age.‖ During that period, a large number of artists and literary

movements are totally different from those of the 19th-century’s, in style, form and content. Modern psychology has a profound impact on the early 20th-century’s literature.

Key words: American literature; Romanticism; New England Transcendentalism; Realism; Modernism

1. American Romanticism

Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s experience of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions. The romantic period of American literature stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It was an age of westward expansion, of the increasing gravity of the slavery question, of an intensification of the spirit of embattled sectionalism in the South, and of a powerful impulse to reform in the North. In literature it was America’s first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impulse on American soil.

1.1 The unique characteristics of American Romanticism

Although greatly influenced by their English counterparts, the American romantic writers revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native lands. For examp1e，(1) the American national experience of "pioneering into the west" proved to be a rich source of material for American writers to draw upon. They celebrated America's landscape with its virgin forests, meadows, groves, endless prairies, streams, and vast oceans. The wilderness came to function almost as a dramatic character that symbolized moral 1aw. (2) The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a

permanent convention of American literature. Such a desire is particularly evident in Cooper’s Leather Stocking Tales, in Thoreau's Walden and， later, in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (3) With the growth of American national consciousness, American character types speaking local dialects appeared in poetry and fiction with increasing

frequency. (4)Then the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values and American Romanticism. One of the manifestations is the fact that American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counterparts. (5) Besides, a preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of origina1 sin and the mystery of evil marked the works of Hawthorne, Melville and a host of lesser writers.

1.2 Representative writers and their works

Washington Irving(1783-1859) was the first American storyteller to be internationally recognized as a man of letters and the first great prose stylist of American romanticism, and his familiar style was destined to provide a model for the prevailing prose narrative of the future. His first book A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809), written under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a great

success and won him wide popularity. He is best known for his The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819-1820), especially in which two short stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow have become American classics. Later he wrote works of history and biographies, such as The History of Life and Voyages of Christobra Columbus (1828), A

Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada and The Alhambra (1832). After that, he spent the rest of his life living a life of leisure and comfort, and writing The Life of Goldsmith (1840) and a five-volume Life of Washington (1855-1859). He died in 1859.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) is respectfully remembered as a master of

adventurous narrative and as the creator of an American hero-myth. According to a charming legend, Cooper’s first novel Precaution (1820) was a response to his wife’s challenge to improve on the current British society fiction, and the failure of this work turned him to

historical novels. Later, The Spy, a tale of the Revolution he wrote, became a great success in America and Europe. In 1823, Cooper published The Pioneers (1823), which together with other 4 novels The Deerslayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Prairie (1827) became his well-known Leather-stocking Tales. Cooper went on to write over thirty novels, including exciting adventures of the sea like The Pilot. Cooper created the American historical novel using authentic American subject.

2. New England Transcendentalism

American Romanticism culminated around the 1840s in what has come to be known as ―New England Transcendentalism‖ or ―American Renaissance‖ (1836-1855).

2.1 Characteristics of New England Transcendentalism

The Transcendentalist movement, embodied by essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was a reaction against 18th century Rationalism, and closely linked to the Romantic Movement. It is closely associated with Concord, Massachusetts, a town near Boston, where Emerson, Thoreau, and a group of other writers lived.

In general, Transcendentalism was a liberal philosophy favoring nature over formal

religious structure, individual insight over dogma, and humane instinct over social convention. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers—then or later —often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and

convention. The American hero—like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain’s Huck Finn—typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical

self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social

conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice.

2.2 Representative writers and their works

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him ―to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church.‖ The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson accused the church of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit. Emerson is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism.

Henry David Thoreau was from a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond, near Concord. This long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. Thoreau’s essay ―Civil Disobedience,‖ with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King’s struggle for black Americans’ civil rights in the 20th century.

Walt Whitman was a part-time carpenter and man of the people, whose brilliant,

innovative work expressed the country’s democratic spirit. His Leaves of Grass (1855), which he rewrote and revised throughout his life, contains ―Song of Myself,‖ the most stunningly original poem ever written by an American.The poem’s innovative, unrhymed, free-verse form, open celebration of sexuality, vibrant democratic sensibility, and extreme Romantic assertion that the poet’s self was one with the universe and the reader, permanently altered the course of American poetry.

Emily Dickinson is, in a sense, a link between her era and the literary sensitivities of the 20th century. She never married, and she led an unconventional life that was outwardly uneventful but was full of inner intensity. She loved nature and found deep inspiration in the birds, animals, plants, and changing seasons of the New England countryside. Dickinson spent the latter part of her life as a recluse, due to an extremely sensitive psyche and possibly to make time for writing. Dickinson’s terse, frequently imagistic style is even more modern and innovative than Whitman’s. She sometimes shows a terrifying existential awareness. Her clean, clear, chiseled poems, rediscovered in the 1950s, are some of the most fascinating and challenging in American literature.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (born Nathaniel Hathorne; July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. Hawthorne is best known today for his many short stories (he called them "tales") and his four major romances written between 1850 and 1860:

The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852) and The Marble Faun (1860). Another novel-length romance, Fanshawe was

published anonymously in 1828. Hawthorne defined a romance as being radically different from a novel by not being concerned with the possible or probable course of ordinary experience. Many of his works are inspired by Puritan New England, combining historical romance loaded with symbolism and deep psychological themes, bordering on surrealism. Hawthorne's works belong to romanticism or, more specifically, dark romanticism, cautionary tales that suggest that guilt, sin, and evil are the most inherent natural qualities of humanity. His later writings would also reflect his negative view of the Transcendentalism movement. Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was one of the most widely read and influential American writers. At the age of 18, he published his first book of poetry. In 1838 Poe published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon. He died in 1849. During a short life of poverty, anxiety, and fantastic tragedy, Poe achieved the establishment of a new symbolic poetry; the formalization of the new short story and the slow development of an important critical theory. Poe is best known for his poems and horror stories. Among his works are the stories The Fall of the House of Usher, William Wilson, Ligeia and The Cask of Amontillado, and the poems The Raven, Annabel Lee, Sonnet—To Science, To Helen and Israfel.

The Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The age of Realism came into existence.

3. The age of Realism

As a literary movement, realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against ―the lie‖ of romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and low.

3.1 Literature Features in Realism Period

The American authors lumped together as ―realists‖ seem to have some features in

common: ―verisimilitude of detail derived from observation,‖ the effort to approach the norm of experience—a reliance on the representative in plot, setting, and character, and to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and experience.

Local colorism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early 70s. Local colorist concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. The tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life.

Naturalism is a more deliberate kind of realism, usually involves a view of human beings as a passive victims of natural forces and social environment. The most significant work of naturalism in English is Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900).

american literature history summary篇三：A Brief Summary of The History of American Literature

A Brief Summary of The History of American Literature

1. outline

“Each generation should produce at least one literary history of the United States, for each generation must define the past in its own terms.”

Influenced by literary current and movement of Europe and their own nation such as Neo-Classicism, Industrial Revolution, American War of Independence in late 18th and early 19th century, the Civil War, Industrialization, Darwin’s evolutionary theory in late 19 and early 20 century, World War I, Great Depression, World War II in 20th century, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War in late 20th century, the history of American literature from Romanticism to Post-modernism came into being in a context that was uniquely American.

we will have a further discussion on this period by dividing them into several parts: Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism and Post-modernism.

2. American Romanticism

The American Romantic period strectched from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. The literature of this period was crucial to the development of American literary traditions and the 55 years from 1810 to 1865 saw miraculous achievements in American literature.

3.1 Background and Reasons

3.1.1 Politics

Politically the time was ripe. The 18 century left a heritage of optimism about

man’s possibilities and perfectibility. The lofty ideals of democracy asserted the value of individuals, regardless of class and education. Of course, these values primarily applied to white males. In fact, tensions were building which cried out for creative release. Inequality, not equality was the rule for many, especially women and slaves.

Meanwhile, the nation witnessed an incredible expansion, among which the most

influential one was westward expansion. The conquest of the new territories certaionly opened new horizons, but the country was also torn by the risk of internal division, which led to American Civil War.

3.1.2 Economy

Economically America had never been wealthier. But the rising materialism

affected by industralization and focus on business at the cost of the mind and the spirit was spawning reform movements all over America. Over 150 intentional communities — from the Shakers to Oneida to Brook Farm — were formed by people disillusioned by the materialistic values and inequities of American society.

3.1.3 Cultural and Social Background

Culturally, American own value emerged. America’s mountains, deserts, and

tropics and most of all its unexplored vastness provided a setting for its fresh concepts and ideals.

There were readers, often women eager to expand their minds. It was actually

possible to make a kind of living as a writer, although it was difficult and limited, making these writers agonize over the problem of “vocation.”

3.1.4 Religion

Religion, always a basic concern for Americans, was also ripe for romanticism and

its kind of pantheistic religion. ththth

3.2 Definition

Romanticism is a movement of the 18 and 19 centuries that marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics against the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period.

3.3 Formation and Development

American Romanticism shares many characteristics with British romanticism. It flourished in the flow of Wordsworth’s poetic encounter with nature in The Prelude. However, developing as it did from the rhetoric of salvation, guilt, and providential visions of Puritanism, the wilderness reaches of the American continent, and the fiery thetoric of freedom and equality, the American brand of romanticism developed its own character, especially as these writers tried self-consiciously to be new and original.

3.4 Features and Styles

American romantic writers shared some common features with the English romanticists. In most of the American writings of the period there was a new emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature. Even though American romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct features of its own. Here are some major principles:

1) Expressiveness: the romanticists held that the writers should express their emotions, feelings, empressions, instinct, intuition, or their beliefs in their works instead of the imitation of the classical writers.

2) Imagination

3) Worship of nature: nature including human nature as a source of instruction, delight, and nourishment for the soul; returen to nature as a source of inspiration and wisdom.

4) Simiplicity: turned to the humble people and the everyday life, adopted the everyday language.

3.4 Representitive Writers and Works

Belletristic literature, or literature as fine art, finally emerged in the 19th century. The 50 year between 1815 and 1865 saw miraculous achievements in American literature. After a period of early romanticism that included Irning, Cooper and Bryant, there was a sudden outburst of creative power. Literary gaints such as Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville began producing works of great vitality and distinction. Soon, their achievements would be matched by those from Whitman and Dickinson, among others. In the half decade of 1850—1855 alone appeared Emerson’s Representative Men (1850), Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851)，Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852), Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), and other noted literary works. Taken together, these zccomplishments suggest that American literatre matured.

3.5 Achievement and Influence

In literature Romanticism was America’s first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impulse on American soil. The poetry was predominantly romantic in spirit and form united to a concept of democracy that was pervasivelyegalitarian. In essays and in lectures the New England transcendentalists carried the expression of philosophic and religious ideas to a high level. In the new nation’s search for a culturally independent identity, romanticism also helped build the bridge between the past and present, and between America thth

and Europe It was a Renaissance in the sense of a flowering, full of excitement over human possibilities, and a high regard for individual ego.

Romanticism and sentimantalism, as literary and cultural modes, have persisted in American culture. It may be argued in fact that the United States continues to be a Romantic culture whose fundamental values and symbols were shaped in the first half of the 19th century.

3.6 Shortcomings and Decline

By the end of the Civil War a new nation had been born, and it was to demand and receive a new literature less idealistic and more practical, less exalted and more earthy, less consciously artistic and more honest than produced in the age when the American dream had glowed with greatest intensity and American writers had created a great literary period by capturing on their pages the enthusiasm and the optimism of that dream. Gradually, the Romanticism era in the United States was surpassed by the rise of Realism in the later 19 century.

3. American Realism

4.1 The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the

literary history of the United States, which is actually a movement or tendency that dominated the spirit of American literature, especially American fiction, from the 1850s onwards.

4.1.1 Politics

Politically the Civil War affected both the social and the value system of the

country. America had transformed itself from a Jeffersonian afrarian community into an industrialized and commercialized society.

4.1.2 Economy

The war also brought some noticeable changes to the American economy. It had

stimulated the technological development, and new methods of organization and management were tested to adapt to industrial modernization on a large scale.

4.1.3 Cutural and Social background

As far as the ideology was concerned, people were on a shaking ground. The harsh

realities of life as well as the disillusion of heroism resulting from the dark memories of the Civil War had set the nation against the romance.

4.2 Definition

Realism is a movement of the 19th and 20th centuries that marked the reaction in literatural method, a philosophical and political attitude, and a particular kind of subject matter against Romanticism’s emphasis on intuition, imagination, a dreamy (or innocent) sense of wonder, idealism, faith in nature, and general optimistic belief in the goodness of things and claim to seek truth that is verifiable by experience and has practical consequences.

4.3 Formation and Development

In American literature, the term “Realism” encompasses the period of time from the Civil War to the turn of the 20 century. American Realism, although influenced by English and European authors, was basically native. Realism first appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things immediately observable: the dialects, customs, sights, and sounds of regional America.

4.4 Features and Styles thth

As a new literature, Realism emerged for an age. Under the influence of the Civil War and industrialization, Realism surely formed its own features.

1) Realism aims at the description of the actualities of the life and free from subjective prejudice, idealism or romantic color.

2) Realism focuses on commonness of the common people. The emphasis is on ordinary people, settings and events

3) Life is presented as it is.

4) Use real characters, real incidents, real language and local dialects.

5) In matters of style, diction and sentence structure tend towards a plain style

4.5 Representative Writers and Works

The major realists who published their works in this period were Mark Twain, William Dean Howell, and Henry James. Mark Twain was one of America’s first and foremost realists and humorists. William Dean Howells was the founder of American Realism and the most prominent critic of the entire realistic period. No American has done more to encourage realistic writings in the United States than he did. Henry James was an early psychological realist. His novels had much influence on modern American writers. So he is often called one of the fathers of the psychological novel.

One of the most significant trends of the period was the type of realism called local colorism. Prominent among these were Bret Harte, Mary E. Wilking Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and O. Henry. Harte’s region was the Far West. Ms. Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett wrote short stories about the rural life in New England, while O. Henry was taking local color directly into New York City. The major realistic writer Mark Twain was a great local colorist too, who often wrote about life on and around the Mississippi River. his masterpieces, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, are excellent examples of Local Color Realism.

4.6 Achievement and Influence

Realism in America emerged in the latter half of the 19th century as a reaction against “the lie” of Romanticism and Sentimentalism. They also argued for a new set of conventions privileging the spoken language and fidelity to ordinary experience especially for Mark Twain. In American realist fiction, familiar aspects of contemporary life an everyday scenes are represented in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner, in which characters from all social levels are examined in depth. It stresses truthful treatment of material. As a powerful impulse to mirror the unmitigated realities of life, realism expresses its concern for the world of experience, of the commplace, and for the familiar and the low.

Being a subordinate order of realism, Reginalism can be viewed as the expression of desire both to preserve distinctive ways of life before industrialization destroyed them and to come to terns with the harsh industrialized realities. Though often sffused with nostalgia, the best work of these regionalists both renders a convincing surface of a particular time and location and investigate psychological character traits from a more universal perspective.

4.7 Shortcomings and Decline

5.American Naturalism

In the last decade of 19th centuty, the literary natualism was transplanted from France to the United States and became a very important literary movement. It began in the 1890s as an outgrowth and extension of realism and dominated American letters during the important era of

the 20th century, paving the way to Modernism.

5.1 Background

5.1.1 Politics

After the Civil War, it seemed that overnight the rapid industrialization of American society changed an agrarian nation into an industrial gaint. As the westward expansion continued to push the frontier nearer the Pacific coast, the settlers found themselves subject to the ruthless manipulation of forces including the railroad.

5.1.2 Economy

The rapid social changes caused by industrialization brought serious social problems. While the captains of industry piled up huge persional fortunes, the ordinary man became the victim of industrialization. Industrial proletariat were entirely at the mercy of external forces beyond their control, living a life of insecurity, suffering, and violence.

5.1.3 Cultural and Social Background

The harsh reality of the industrialization period changed man’s understanding about himself and the world in which he lived in. living in a cold, indifferent, and essentially Godless world, man was completely thrown upon himself for survival.

5.1.4 Religion

In 1859, Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published. This book, together with Darwin’s Descent of Man (1870) established a new theory of evolution which offered a great challenge to the old idea of man being created by God.

5.2 Definition

Naturalism was a literary movement of the late 19th century that yielded influence on the twentieth. It was an extension of Realism, a reaction against the restrictions inherent in the realistic emphasis on the ordinary, as naturalists insisted that the extraordinary is real, too.

5.3 Formation and Development

Under the influence of European writers such as Emile Zola, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, American literary naturalism emerged in the 1890s as an outgrowth of American realism. Stephen Crane’s Maggie (1893) was the first novel—designed, he wrote, “to show that environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless.” Natualism also appears in the plays of Eufene O’Nell and the novels of James T. Farrell. In other word, in American literature, Natualism had a blooming in the works of Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London, and it reached its peak in the novels of Theodore Dreiser.

5.4 Features and Styles

In reaction against the conventional literature which avoided any reference to the “private parts” of the body, or any description of most bodily functions, the naturalists tended to dwell on these things, and on sexual desire, to emphasize man’s animal nature. Furthermore, the young natualists were likely to write about the slums, or Negro quarters, or jobs which demanded great physical effort and hardship.

1) Characters in natualistic works are frequently, though not invariably, ill-educated or lower-class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, environment, chance, instinct, and passion. The term for this idea is “determinism”.

2) The setting in those novels is frequently an urban one, as in Frank Norris’s

american literature history summary篇四：The history of American literature(美国文学史)

The history of American literature（美国文学史） Introduction

the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States.

Like other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that produced it. For almost a century and a half, America was merely a group of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard of the North American continent—colonies from which a few hardy souls tentatively ventured westward. After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became the United States, a nation. By the end of the 19th century this nation extended southward to the Gulf of Mexico, northward to the 49th parallel, and westward to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, too, it had taken its place among the powers of the world—its fortunes so interrelated with those of other nations that inevitably it became involved in two world wars and, following these conflicts, with the problems of Europe and East Asia. Meanwhile, the rise of science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking and feeling, wrought many modifications in people's lives. All these factors in the development of the United States molded the literature of the country. This article traces the history of American poetry, drama, fiction, and social and literary criticism from the early 17th century to the late 20th century. For information about closely related literary traditions, see English literature and Canadian literature: Canadian literature in English.

The 17th century

American literature at first was naturally a colonial literature, by authors who were Englishmen and who thought and wrote as such. John Smith, a soldier of fortune, is credited with initiating American literature. His chief books included A True Relation of „ Virginia „ (1608) and The generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Although these volumes often glorified their author, they were avowedly written to explain colonizing opportunities to Englishmen. In time, each colony was similarly described: Daniel Denton's Brief Description of New York (1670), William Penn's Brief Account of the Province of Pennsylvania

(1682), and Thomas Ashe's Carolina (1682) were only a few of many works praising America as a land of economic promise.

Such writers acknowledged British allegiance, but others stressed the differences of opinion that spurred the colonists to leave their homeland. More important, they argued questions of government involving the

relationship between church and state. The attitude that most authors attacked was jauntily set forth by Nathaniel Ward of Massachusetts Bay in The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America (1647). Ward amusingly defended the status quo and railed at colonists who sponsored newfangled notions.

A variety of counterarguments to such a conservative view were published. John Winthrop's Journal (written 1630–49) told sympathetically of the attempt of Massachusetts Bay Colony to form a theocracy—a state with God at its head and with its laws based upon the Bible. Later defenders of the theocratic ideal were Increase Mather and his son Cotton. William Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation (through 1646) showed how his pilgrim Separatists broke completely with Anglicanism. Even more radical than Bradford was Roger Williams, who, in a series of controversial pamphlets, advocated not only the separation of church and state but also the vesting of power in the people and the tolerance of different religious beliefs.

The utilitarian writings of the 17th century included biographies, treatises, accounts of voyages, and sermons. There were few achievements in drama or fiction, since there was a widespread prejudice against these forms. Bad but popular poetry appeared in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640 and in Michael Wigglesworth's summary in doggerel verse of Calvinistic belief, The Day of Doom (1662). There was some poetry, at least, of a higher order. Anne Bradstreet of Massachusetts wrote some lyrics published in The Tenth Muse (1650), which movingly conveyed her feelings concerning religion and her family. Ranked still higher by modern critics is a poet whose works were not discovered and published until 1939: Edward Taylor, an

English-born minister and physician who lived in Boston and Westfield, Massachusetts. Less touched by gloom than the typical Puritan, Taylor wrote lyrics that showed his delight in Christian belief and experience. All 17th-century American writings were in the manner of British writings of the same period. John Smith wrote in the tradition of geographic literature, Bradford echoed the cadences of the King James Bible, while the Mathers and Roger Williams wrote bejeweled prose typical of the day. Anne Bradstreet's poetic style derived from a long line of British poets, including Spenser and Sidney, while Taylor was in the tradition of such Metaphysical poets as George Herbert and John Donne. Both the content and form of the literature of this first century in America were thus markedly English.

The 18th century

In America in the early years of the 18th century, some writers, such as Cotton Mather, carried on the older traditions. His huge history and biography of Puritan New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, in 1702, and his vigorous Manuductio ad Ministerium, or introduction to the ministry, in 1726, were defenses of ancient Puritan convictions. Jonathan Edwards, initiator of the Great Awakening, a religious revival that stirred the eastern seacoast for many years, eloquently defended his burning belief in Calvinistic doctrine—of the concept that man, born totally depraved, could attain virtue and salvation only through God's grace—in his powerful sermons and most notably in the philosophical treatise Freedom of Will (1754). He supported his claims by relating them to a complex metaphysical system and by reasoning brilliantly in clear and often beautiful prose.

But Mather and Edwards were defending a doomed cause. Liberal New England ministers such as John Wise and Jonathan Mayhew moved toward a less rigid religion. Samuel Sewall heralded other changes in his amusing Diary, covering the years 1673–1729. Though sincerely religious, he showed in daily records how commercial life in New England replaced rigid Puritanism with more worldly attitudes. The Journal of Mme Sara Kemble Knight comically detailed a journey that lady took to New York in 1704. She wrote vividly of what she saw and commented upon it from the standpoint of an orthodox believer, but a quality of levity in her witty writings showed that she was much less fervent than the Pilgrim founders had been. In the South, William Byrd of Virginia, an aristocratic plantation owner, contrasted sharply with gloomier predecessors. His record of a surveying trip in 1728, The History of the Dividing Line, and his account of a visit to his frontier properties in 1733, A Journey to the Land of Eden, were his chief works. Years in England, on the Continent, and among the gentry of the South had created gaiety and grace of expression, and, although a devout Anglican, Byrd was as playful as the Restoration wits whose works he clearly admired.

The wrench of the American Revolution emphasized differences that had been growing between American and British political concepts. As the colonists moved to the belief that rebellion was inevitable, fought the bitter war, and worked to found the new nation's government, they were influenced by a number of very effective political writers, such as Samuel Adams and John Dickinson, both of whom favoured the colonists, and loyalist Joseph

Galloway. But two figures loomed above these—Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine.

Franklin, born in 1706, had started to publish his writings in his brother's newspaper, the New England Courant, as early as 1722. This newspaper championed the cause of the “Leather Apron” man and the farmer and appealed by using easily understood language and practical arguments. The idea that common sense was a good guide was clear in both the popular Poor Richard's almanac, which Franklin edited between 1732 and 1757 and filled with prudent and witty aphorisms purportedly written by uneducated but experienced Richard Saunders, and in the author's Autobiography, written between 1771 and 1788, a record of his rise from humble

circumstances that offered worldly wise suggestions for future success. Franklin's self-attained culture, deep and wide, gave substance and skill to varied articles, pamphlets, and reports that he wrote concerning the dispute with Great Britain, many of them extremely effective in stating and shaping the colonists' cause.

Thomas Paine went from his native England to Philadelphia and became a magazine editor and then, about 14 months later, the most effective propagandist for the colonial cause. His pamphlet Common Sense (January 1776) did much to influence the colonists to declare their independence. The American Crisis papers (December 1776–December 1783) spurred

Americans to fight on through the blackest years of the war. Based upon Paine's simple deistic beliefs, they showed the conflict as a stirring melodrama with the angelic colonists against the forces of evil. Such white and black picturings were highly effective propaganda. Another reason for Paine's success was his poetic fervour, which found expression in impassioned words and phrases long to be remembered and quoted.

The new nation

In the postwar period some of these eloquent men were no longer able to win a hearing. Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams lacked the constructive ideas that appealed to those interested in forming a new government. Others fared better—for example, Franklin, whose tolerance and sense showed in addresses to the constitutional convention. A different group of authors, however, became leaders in the new period—Thomas Jefferson and the talented writers of The Federalist papers, a series of 85 essays published in 1787 and 1788 urging the virtues of the proposed new constitution. They were written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay. More

distinguished for insight into problems of government and cool logic than for eloquence, these works became a classic statement of American

governmental, and more generally of republican, theory. At the time they were highly effective in influencing legislators who voted on the new constitution. Hamilton, who wrote perhaps 51 of the Federalist papers, became a leader of the Federalist Party and, as first secretary of the treasury (1789–95), wrote messages that were influential in increasing the power of national government at the expense of the state governments. Thomas Jefferson was an influential political writer during and after the war. The merits of his great summary, the Declaration of Independence, consisted, as Madison pointed out, “in a lucid communication of human rights „ in a style and tone appropriate to the great occasion, and to the spirit of the American people.” After the war he formulated the exact tenets of his faith in various papers but most richly in his letters and inaugural addresses, in which he urged individual freedom and local autonomy—a theory of decentralization differing from Hamilton's belief in strong federal government. Though he held that all men are created equal, Jefferson thought that “a natural aristocracy” of “virtues and talents” should hold high governmental positions.

Notable works of the period

Poets and poetry

Poetry became a weapon during the American Revolution, with both loyalists and Continentals urging their forces on, stating their arguments, and celebrating their heroes in verse and songs such as "Yankee Doodle," "Nathan Hale," and "The Epilogue," mostly set to popular British melodies and in manner resembling other British poems of the period.

The most memorable American poet of the period was Philip Freneau, whose first well-known poems, Revolutionary War satires, served as effective propaganda; later he turned to various aspects of the American scene. Although he wrote much in the stilted manner of the Neoclassicists, such poems as "The Indian Burying Ground," "The Wild Honey Suckle," "To a Caty-did," and "On a Honey Bee" were romantic lyrics of real grace and feeling that were forerunners of a literary movement destined to be important in the 19th century.

american literature history summary篇五：The History of American Literature

american literature history summary篇六：A history of American literature

american literature history summary篇七：A brief summary of American literature

A brief summary of American literature

CONTEHT

1. Abstract

2. Brief introduction

3. American Romanticism

3.1 background of American Romanticism

3.2 major characteristic of the Romanticism

3.3 representative writers and works

4. American Realism

4.1 background of Realism

4.2 major characteristic of Realism

4.3 representative writers of Realism

5. American Naturalism

5.1 background of Naturalism

5.2 major characteristic of Naturalism

5.3 representative writers of Naturalism

6. American Modernism

6.1 background of Modernism

6.2 major characteristic of Modernism

6.3 representative writers of Modernism

7. Conclusions

8. Biographies

1. Abstract

In this paper, I am going to make a brief summary of American Literature; mainly we’ll catch a glimpse of American Literature of the period from American Romanticism to Modernism. And I will divided it into four parts, including Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism and modernism, and introduce them one by one. To achieve this goal, I will mainly deal with the aspects of the back ground: the major characteristic, the most representative writers and their major achievements. And finally I will make a conclusion on American Literature on its development and main features and the similarities and differences between American and European Literature, especially British Literature.

Key words: American Romanticism; American Realism; American Naturalism; American Modernism;

在这篇论文中我将主要从美国的浪漫主义到现代主义这个文学发展阶段出发，对美国文学的发展史做一个简要的介绍和总结。按照不同阶段的不同特点，这个文学时期由主要分文四个文学阶段：浪漫主义，现实主义，自然主义，现代主义。这里我将主要从三个方面对没一个时期的文学现象进行总结分析---- 历史背景、主要的特征和思想以及代表作家以及代表作。最后还将对美国文学的发展和特征进行整体的分析总结，并简要的对比美国文学和欧洲文学特别是英国文学的异同点.

关键字：美国浪漫主义；美国现实主义；美国自然主义；美国现代主义

2. Introduction

The United States is a very young country and its literature has a history of only some 400 years. Despite its short history, American literature, like the nation, has rapidly developed like mushrooms and soon reaches very high level.

Generally, we divide American literature into several ages, such as Early American Literature, including literature of the Colonial Period and literature of Enlightenment and Revolution, Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism and so on. Here I mainly talk about the literature of the Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism and Modernism.

It is well acknowledged that American Literature reached very high standard in the 19s and early 20s, which covers the ages of Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism and modernism. The American Romantic Period stretched from the end of 18th century to the break of the Civil War in 1865; the age of Realism covered the years between 1865 and 1914; the period between the two world wars saw the domination of American Modernism.

Those periods have witnessed the blooming of American Literature and crowd of masters and handful splendid works.

3. American Romanticism

3.1 backgrounds

There are plenty of factors that contributed to the prosperity of American Literature. America won its independence and free from the control of Britain at the end of 18th century. After the 1812 war against England, the United States was finally free. The severance of political tied with the Empire left some important legacies which worked as solid foundation to promote the U.S. as a future world leading nation. The United States promoted itself a beacon of morality, and its strive for liberty and prosperity and its richness in natural resource provided the new born country with a bright future. The industrial revolution had a resounding effect on American economy and urbanization. The rising materialism and focus on business at the cost of the mind and the

spirit was igniting reform movements all over the nation. Government made laws to protect writers’ rights, and readers, especially women, were eager to expend their minds.

After the found of the United States, immigrants flooded into the promising land and the population of the nation was incredibly expanded, from only 5,308,483 inhabitants in 1800 to 76,000,000 just in a few decades. Mass immigrants from different continent made American a society full of diversity and this also contributed greatly to the prosperity of its literature.

3.2 Characteristics

Romanticism is a term that is associated with imagination and boundlessness and in critical usage is in contract with classicism, which is commonly associated with reason and restriction. A romantic attitude may be detected in literature in the 18th and 19th centuries in reaction to more rational literary, philosophic, artistic, religious and economic standards. The most profound and comprehensive idea of romanticism is the version of a greater personal freedom of individual

The romanticism emphasizes expressiveness, imagination, simplicity and the worship of nature. Romanticists held that writers should not express their emotions, feelings, impressions, instincts, intuition, or their belief in their works instead of the imitation of the classical writers.

American Romanticism shares many characteristics with British Romanticism. It was greatly inspired by British romanticists such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats etc. while American Romanticism displays feature of its own: it was essence the expression of ”a new experience and a new country” and contains an alien quality. Also, the experience of pioneering to the west and the national identity shows through in their works such as the imagination of frontiersman and the prototype of cowboy. American Romanticism advocated spiritual intuition or self-individualism and socially searched for fairness, equality and freedom and was politically aggressive. The “self” in the consciousness of the individual emerged as the core of the American Romantic writers.

american literature history summary篇八：A Brief History of American Literature

A Brief History of American Literature：

1.Colonial Period of American Literature

2. The Romantic Period: Early Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and High Romanticism

3. Realism

4. Naturalism

5. Imagism

6. Modernism

7. Postmodernism

Colonial Period of American Literature

The period stretched roughly from the settlement of America in the early seventeenth century through the end of the eighteenth.

The major topic here will be about American Puritanism, the one enduring influence in American literature.

the major figures to mention will be Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin and Philip Freneau. They represent the heritage of American Puritanism

Christopher Columbus discovered the American continent in 1491.

Captain John Smith reached Virginia in 1607.

Puritans came to the New England area, by Mayflower in 1620. The Pilgrims left England to seek religious freedom, or simply to find a better life. After a period in Holland, they set sail from Plymouth, England, on Sept. 16, 1620, aboard the Mayflower, arrived in Plymouth in Massachusetts on Dec.26, in1620

The first American Puritan settlement was established in Plymouth in 1620.

The First Literature and the First Writers

 Captain John Smith’s reports of exploration, published in the early 16oos.

 William Bradford and John Winthrop

Puritans

 One division of English Protestant. They regarded the reformation of the church under

Elizabeth as incomplete, and called for further purification from what they considered to be unscriptural and corrupt forms and ceremonies retained from the unreformed church.  Their Religious Doctrines: original sin, total depravity, predestination and limited

atonement through a special infusion of grace from God.

 They regarded themselves as chosen people of God. They embraced hardships, industry

and frugality. They favored a disciplined, hard, somber, ascetic and harsh life. They opposed arts and pleasure. They suspect joy and laughter as symptoms of sin.

Puritanism

 A religious and political movement. Through it, one considers emerging the right of the

individual as political and religious independence.

 Their religious doctrines: original sin, total depravity, predestination, limited atonement.  Their attitudes toward entertainment: joy and laughter are symptoms of sin.

 Their attitudes toward work: work itself is a good in addition to what it achieves, time

saved by efficiency or good fortune should be spent in doing further work.

Puritanism’s influence on American literature

 Purpose: pragmatic

 Content: practical accounts of life in the new world; highly theoretical discussions of

religious questions.

 Form: diary, autobiography, sermon, letter

 Style: tight and logic structure, precise expression, avoidance of rhetorical decoration,

homely imagery, simplicity of diction.

2.Symbolism（象征主义）: lots of American writers liked to employ symbolism in their works. (typical way of Puritans who thought that all the simple objects existing in the world connoted deep meaning.) Symbolism means using symbols in literary works. The symbol means something represents or stands for abstract deep meaning

The Literature of Reason and Revolution

 Colonial American was no longer a group of scattered,struggling settlements.

 It was a series of neighboring, flourishing colonies with rapidly expanding,mixed

populations.

 The industrial and agricultural growth led to intense strain with England.

 The Independent War broke out.

Literary Tendencies Enlightenment

 a movement supported by all progressive forces of the country which opposed themselves

to the old colonial order and religious obscurantism. The representatives of the Enlightenment set themselves the task of disseminating knowledge among the people and advocating revolutionary ideas. They also actively participated in the War for Independence.

 American Enlightenment dealt a decisive blow upon the puritan traditions and brought to

life secular education and literature.

Benjamin Franklin (1)

 Main Works: Poor Richard’s Almanac

Autobiography

 Style: he developed an utilitarian and didactic style.

 His style is characterized by simplicity, frankness, wit, clarity, logic and order.

Autobiography

an account of a person’s life written with the writer’s own life or A book written by someone about their own life. When a person focuses on his individual life, esp. his individual history, we call the retrospective narration the person wrote in prose “Autobiography

Thomas Paine (1)

 Main works:

The American Crisis

Common Sense

The rights of man

The Age of Reason

Thomas Jefferson (1)

Style: dignity, flexibility, clarity, command of generalization

Philip Freneau (1)

 Main Works:

The Rising Glory of America (1772)

The British Prison Ship (1781)

The Wild Honey Suckle (1786) The Indian Burying Ground (1788)

Rhyme(押韵）

Rhyme is the repetition of the stressed vowel sound and all succeeding sounds.

Meter (格律)

Meter refers to the regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables

Foot(音步)

Foot is a unit of poetic meter of stressed and unstressed syllable

Alliteration（头韵）

the repetition of a speech sound in a sequence of nearby words. The term is usually applied only to consonants（The sun sank slowly. The speaker alliterates the “s’s” in that line.）

Features of romanticism in England

It is an expression of the ideology and sentiment of those discontented with, and opposed to, the development of capitalism and an expression of dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society.

american literature history summary篇九：American History Summary 1

American History Mid-Term

1. What did Puritans believe in?

They believed that everybody is predetermined by God. They encourage hard work which is needed and encourage in Laissez-Fair. Therefore we can also say that this was the relationship between Laissez-Fair and the Puritans.

2. What did Puritans do after freeing from English church?

They built churches and forced their beliefs on others. They themselves were sufferer of intolerance. Because they thought they were right. This shows that the Puritans were intolerant like those from whom they ran away.

3. What were the works of the Quakers?

Their work was about business.

4. What is the relationship between Quakers’ belief and their work? The most important factor in their work is good relationships which is exactly the result from their behavior and belief.

5. Who gains from Laissez-Fair?

The rich people gain from this type of economy.

6. What was Zinn’s proof?

He gave examples like how Americans said the Mexican fought them first after attacking the Mexicans, but it was proved wrong from a letter by a Mexican soldier.

【下面是一些概念性东西…】

- Indulgences are what people get if they pay indulgences money for their sin.

- Laissez-Fair is economics without government’s interference. Each person would be shown clearly for who they are.

- The Quakers were a Christian group from Puritans that came together without formality and were opposed to war. They wre tolerate of other beliefs.

- Howard Zinn said “History is written by the winners.”

- Propaganda is something a person make up without caring about whether it is the fact or not.

- The features of propaganda are without concrete proof, over-generalization, and appeals people’s emotions.

【再接下来就是老师给的要涉及的问题、】

1. Argue that the declaration of independence is propaganda.

2. Relate the idea of separate power with the social compromise.

3. What are the three compromises?

The great compromise, the 3/5 compromise, the bill of rights.

4. How did Jefferson change his view on the constitution after the Louisiana Purchase?

【接下来是零碎的…】

有关Jefferson我就不说了、大家和他死磕了这么久应该都问题不大、个别有同学还不清楚的可以来问我或问95或问我侄子~ 这个是前面的东西。我给Reiss发了邮件问一些细节的问题。他回了之后我会给大家添一些更细的。在此之前大家就好好复习但还是不用很很很着急~因为毕竟最后一个考嘛还有时间、、、

BY JESSIE

american literature history summary篇十：summary of American history

A Summary of American History

I divide American history into five parts: pre-colonial period, colonial period, independent period, imperial period, modern period. Indians are American native residents. The history of America traditionally starts with the Declaration of Independence in the year 1776, yet its territory was occupied first by the Native Americans since prehistoric times and then also by European colonists who followed the voyages of Christopher Columbus starting in 1492. The largest settlements were by the Britain on the East Coast, starting in 1607.In the 17th and 18th centuries, the English made huge profits out of American colonies. Since Britain fought several wars with France, it determined to find a means to extract more money not only to pay its debts but to enforce the policy of mercantilism in the colonies. The British government's threat to American self-government led to war in 1775 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776. With major military and financial support from France, the patriots won the American Revolution. The war of 1812 which was known as Second War of Independence changed its semi-colonial economy into a real independent national economy. U.S. territory expanded westward across the continent, brushing aside Native Americans and Mexico, and overcoming modernizers who wanted to deepen the economy rather than expand the geography. Slavery was abolished in the North, but heavy world demand for cotton let it flourish in the South. The bloody American Civil War (1861–65) redefined the nation and remains the central iconic event. The South was defeated and, in the Reconstruction era, the U.S. ended slavery. The national government was much stronger, and it now had the explicit duty to protect individual. Thanks to an outburst of entrepreneurship in the North and the arrival of millions of immigrant workers from Europe, the U.S. became the leading industrialized power by 1900.From this time the US began its modern history. American experienced World War I, Depression, World War II and Cold War. The Cold War ended when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, leaving the U.S. to prosper in the booming Information Age economy that was boosted, at least in part, by information technology. International conflict and economic uncertainty heightened by 2001 with the September 11 attacks and subsequent War on Terror and the late-2000s recession

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