美國(guó)文學(xué)教程

內(nèi)容概要

　　《美國(guó)文學(xué)教程》主要包括The Colonial Period and 17th Century Literature of Puritanism、 The Period of Enlightenment、 New England Transcendentalism and the Romantic Age等內(nèi)容。

書籍目錄

PrefaceI.  The  Colonial  Period  and  17th  Century  Literature  of Puritanism                           The  Historical  Background  The  Development  of  LiteratureII.  The  Period  of  Enlightenment  The  Historical  Background  The  Development  of  Literature  Benjamin  Franklin    from  Autobiography  Philip  Freneau     To  the  Memory  of  the  Brave  Americans    The  Wild  Honey  SuckleIII.  New  England  Transcendentalism  and  the  Romantic  Age                                      A.  Period  of  Pre-Romanticism    The  Historical  Background    The  Development  of  Literature    Washington  Irving      from  Rip  Van  Winkl    William  Cullen  Bryant      Thanatopsis      To  a  Waterfowl  B.  Period  of  Post-Romanticism    The  Historical  Background    The  Development  of  Literature    Edgar  Allan  Poe       To  Helen      The  Raven    Ralph  Waldo  Emerson      from  Nature      The  Rhodora    Nathaniel  Hawthorne      The  Scarlte  Letter      Chapter  XIX    Walt  Whitman      from  Song  of  Myself      When  Lilacs  Last  in  the  Dooryard  Bloom’d                                                      Henry  Wadsworth  Longfellow      A  Psalm  of  Life      The  Tide  Rises，the  Tide  Falls    Harriet  Beecher  Stowe      from  Uncle  Tom’s  Cabin    Emily  Dickinson    ……IV.  The  Age  of  RealismV.  American  NaturalismVI.  American  Modernism VII.  American  Literature  since  1945IndexMain  Reference  Books

章節(jié)摘錄

　　CHAPTER I　 THE COLONIAL PERIO DAND 17TH CENTURY LITERATURE OF PURITANISMTHE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND　　Modern archaeology and anthropology have confirmed that the first settlers in America were the Asians known as the ancestors of American Indians or Native Americans, who crossed the Bering Strait and immigrated into America between 25,000 and40,000 years ago. The first immigrants infused new life to the uninhabited continent, but the later changes of the North American glaciers during the Ice Age destroyed the path by which the Asians came to America, and thereafter America became isolated from the other continents until Christopher Columbus arrived with his three ships in 1492. The discovery of America by Colum-bus led to the rush of European immigrants into this fascinating and strange continent and brought the rise of the New World.　 The English settlement in America began in 1607,when Captain Christopher Newport anchored his three storm-beaten ships near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. The English settlers laid out Jamestown as their first permanent settlement in America, and then in rapid succession other English colonies emerged one after another, especially after the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620. The early settlers were so-called Separatists and Puritans, who managed to escape to the New World to avoid the religious persecution. The Puritans were members of the Church of Eng- land who at first wished to reform or "purify" its doctrines ,however, their own firm belief and disconformity with the Church finally led to their withdrawal from it and a great Puritan exodus. Under the influence of John Calvin （1509-1564) and Martin Luther （1483-1546) ,the Puritans, no matter whether they were England or America, kept in common with all advocates of strict Christian orthodoxy, insisting that the omnipotent and omniscient God had created Adam, the first man, in his own perfectimage, and that Adam in his wilf ulness had broken God's covenant. They subscribed to Calvin's belief in original sin as well as in original depravity, and to them the children of Adam were not mere automatons of evil impulse, as a limited freedom of the will, which they possessed as Adam had, would enable the to make the good or evil choice. However, the original sinfulness of a man's nature could not be mitigated by nothing in his personal power, thus his redemption must be a free gift of God's grace: This doctrine led the Puritans to examine their souls to find whether they were of the elect and to search the Bible to determine God's will. Mindful of their outward behavior, they held the belief that good works were the natural evidences of the pos-session of faith and salvation, although they could not secure redemption. To be a Puritan, one had to give sufficient evidence of conversion and then continue to lead a good life.　　Although Puritanism was originally a movement in England which rose in the sixteenth century within the Church of England. aiming at reforms in its doctrines and greater strictness in religious disciplines, and contending that religion should be a matter of personal faith rather than of ritual, with simpler forms of worship （no bishops,no robes,no set prayers,etc. ) instead of those established by tradition and law within the Church of England, it was more than a religious creed to American Puritans, for their hard life and grim struggle for survival helped them comprehend that it should encompass and unify all aspects of man's life, spiritual and material, public and private. A perfect unity could not beachieved by a preoccupation with theology to the exclusion of other interests, but by a synthesis of all phases of human experience in relation to theology. In one word, American Puritans grew more practical. as they had to be when living in the severity of the frontier conditions, in comparision with their counter parts in England. Lovers of a creative life as they were, American Puri tans were blamed at sometimes for their religious intolerance and austere way of life, but in their influence on American life, there should be much more to bless them for than to condemn.　　From the very beginning, the movement of the European settlement in America followed in general east-to-west lines. From the Atlantic seaboard the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes water-way, which offered the readiest access to the interior land, ranroughly in an east-and-west direction. Whereever the European immigrants went, American Indians were too few and too back-ward to be a grave impediment to the advance and colonialization of newcomers. When the first Europeans arrived, the American Indians east of the Mississippi numbered not more than two hundred thousand; those of the whole continent north of Mexic did not exceed five hundred thousand. The Indians were in the tribal society. Armed only with such simple weapons as the bow andarrow,and ignorant of any military art .save the ambush,theywere ordinarily no match for the whites who were well-accoun-tered and superior in number.lt was impossible for them to stop the movement of the white settlement. Still, as the white immigrants advanced, seizing larger tracts of land, the Indians formed extensive tribal alliances for resistance. The stern and extensive struggles between the Indians and the settlers in the colonial period passed through several well-marked stages. The struggles caused the settlers sever losses in life and property, but often ended in the complete destruction of the Native Americans. As afterward the European settlers came into sharp conflict within themselves for their national interests in the New World, the In-deans found European allies against their European enemy. Some of the Northern tribes got combined with the French in order to defeat the English-speaking settlers, and for the same aim some of the Southern tribes received arms and encouragement from the Spaniards. But none of these efforts could prevent the inevitable fall of the backward tribes.　　The Puritan migration between 1620 and 1640 brought New England a population of twenty-five thousand, large enough to assure the colony a long-enduring economic and cultural leadshipamong all the European colonies.Although the settlements of Swedes along the Delaware, of Dutch in the Hudson River Val-Iey,of Quakers in Pennsylvania, and of Catholics in Maryland added color and variety to the pattern of colonial culture, it waste Puritans who wrote most of the literature, and it was Puritanism that was most influential in the intellectual and economic life of the settlers.ln the Massachusetts Bay colony, many of thePuritans had their own libraries that contained not only the Theo-logical volumes but also the classics and the works of leading contemporary English authors. Moreover, the geographical isolation of the American Puritans did not cut off their association with England; many books were imported, and at the same time, since the New England writers were widely read in their mothercountry,many of their manuscripts were sent to England to beprinted.ln addition,the'first colleges in the colonies, such as Harvard University （1638),were established in the first half of the seventeenth century and gave evidences of a great stimulus that the Puritanism afforded to the intellectual life of the settlers.　　However, the English immigration and settlement in Amery-ca was not only the result of religious motives but also that of mercantile ones. Hence, when the Virginia Company promoted the Jamestown colony as the first permanent English settlement in 1607,they expected that its plantations would provide goods for the British trade anal woolly attract Englishmen who neededhomes and land. Driven by such ambition and hope, the settlersavariciouslv fenced and cultivated the hunting grounds of the American Indians who, though ignorant of the English concept ofproperty, refused to be enslaved and retaliated with fire and blood to defend their own rights and interests. In order to solve the problem of labour, the settlers turned their attention to slaves. Slavery had existed in North America even before the Europeans arrived. Many Native-American tribes enslaved those captured in battle from other tribes.ln the middle of the fifteenth century the slave trade began; thousands of Africans were shipped as slaves to America where they were sold into captivity. In 1619, the first African slaves were brought to Jamestown and sold to the plantation owners. By 1775, there were about half million slaves in the thirteen colonies in North America.　　British mercantilism resulted in the eventual shift from an agricultural and tribal society to a slave-holding plantation eco-no my in the South. Such a social transformation demanded a high price to pay for it. A number of laws, such as the Navigation Acts of the late seventeenth century, were intended to compel the set-tiers to sell to the mother country all their raw materials andagricultual exports, for which they were to receive in exchange British manufactured products. British shipping was given monopoly of the carriage, at rates fixed in England, thus the mother country was assured of a credit balance. As to the policy, there was no exception to the northern colonies. The natural con-dictions in the northern area favored commerce and manufactures, which thrived at an unexampled speed, but British exploitation intimae became intolerable, and provided one of the deep-rooted read-sons for the Revolution.　　As the colonies in America grew and expanded, a developing Americanism began to play a role in the social life. Although the European immigrants were an amalgamation of different national stocks and cultures,the English language as a common language and English institutions were dominant everywhere, so that this gave the country a general unity. Different from the French and Spanish colonies which did not possessed a representative self-government, the British colonies had opportunities to erect popular assemblies and to establish governments in which both electors and representatives had real political responsibility. This re-sect paid to essential civil rights began to take root during the colonial period, and bring about increasing changes in the socialstructure,while breaking down many sorts of special privileges.　　……

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