美国文学史课程论文A Brief Summary of the Historyof American Literature From Romanticism to Postmodernism姓名：叶红立学号：2011212831班级：2011级3班分数：2013年12月21日IntroductionAmerican is a multi-national country because of its history. Just like a big container, it puts in various kinds of elements. When different cultures mixed together, that can not only be co-existed but also form a sharp contrast, which makes American literature has a flavor of distinct and various aesthetic feeling.The history of America 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. Romantics emphasized individualism and intuition. 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. The Civil War was a watershed in the history, after which American literature entered a period of full blooming. Influenced by the Civil War, the American society was in a turbulent situation. The writings about local life, critical realism, unveiling the dark side of the society and yearning for nature were increased. After the First World War, Americans were at a loss postwar, and the Modern American literature and Postmodern American literature began.This passage will have a further discussion on this period by dividing them into several parts: Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism and Post-modernism.1.Romanticism PeriodRomanticism is a movement of the 18th and 19th centuries that marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics against the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period. And the American Romantic period stretched from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War.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.There were plenty of good historical reasons why literature was so prominent during that period. Politically the time was ripe. After the 1812 war against England, the United States was finally free. Economically America had never been wealthier, but the Industrial Revolution and the nation’s change in status from a small, agricultural country to a major commercial and industrial power led to a massive impulse towards rapid urbanization. Culturally American own value emerged. There were American publishers and copyright laws to protect the writers from having their works printed. And also there were readers eager to expand their minds.American Romanticism shares many characteristics with British Romanticism. It was greatly inspired by Wordsworth’s poetic encounter with nature in The Prelude. However, developing as it did, Romanticism in America exhibited features of its own. It was mainly in the American romantic writers’ works. For examp1e, 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. 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 ofHuckleberry Finn. With the growth of American national consciousness, American character types speaking local dialects appeared in poetry and fiction with increasing frequency. Then the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values and American Romanticism. One of the performances is the fact that American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counterparts. Here are going to introduce two 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 Christopher 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 Fennimore 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 Deer slayer (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.Realism PeriodAs the economy developed, the nation witnessed an incredible expansion, among which the most influential one was westward expansion. The conquest of the new territories opened new horizons, but the country was also torn by the risk of internal division, which led to American Civil War.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 another entirely different age.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 mainly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday life among the middle and lower classes.American realism was the outcome of the Civil War from all the aspects of politics, economy and culture. Politically the Civil War affected both the social and the value system of the country. America had transformed itself into an industrialized and commercialized society. The war also brought some obvious 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. As far as the culture was concerned, 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.As a new literature, Realism emerged for an age. Under the influence of the Civil War and industrialization, Realism surely formed its own features. Realism aims at the description of the actualities of the life and free from subjective prejudice,idealism or romantic color. The writings are about local life, critical realism and unveiling the dark side of the society, and focuses on commonness of the common people, settings and events. Mark Twain is one of the representatives.Mark Twain (1835-1910) was the true father of American literature. He was an American humorist, lecturer, essayist, and author. His primary works are The Innocents Abroad, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. He intentionally deviates from classical genteel and tends to use local dialects, colloquial language, even Black English, slang, clipped structures and ungrammatical sentences. He was a combination of realism with romanticism. His works combine American folk humor and serious literature, characterize a local culture, elements such as speech, customs, and more peculiar to one particular place. The physical settings, and people’s behavior and thoughts are different from the other places.There are many other great writers in this period, such as William Dean Howells, Henry James, O. Henry, and so on. They have made great contribution to the world’s literature.3.Naturalism PeriodAfter the Civil War, it seemed that overnight the rapid industrialization of American society changed an agrarian nation into an industrial giant. 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, as can been seen in Frank Norris’wheat novels. The rapid social changes caused by industrialization brought serious social problems. While the captains of industry piled up huge personal fortunes, the ordinary man became the victim of industrialization. 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. During this special period, the literary naturalism was transplanted from France to the United States and became a very important literary movement in America.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.Naturalism, with its new techniques and new ways of writing, appealed to the imagination of the younger generation like Crane, Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. They tore the mask of gentility to pieces and wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold world, and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of environment and heredity. They reported truthfully and objectively, with a passion for scientific accuracy and an overwhelming accumulation of factual detail. They painted life as it was lived in the slums, and were accused of telling just the hideous side of it. In naturalistic literature, man is always subject to the law of nature, which may not only be indifferent but also hostile. Therefore, gloom and despair characterize American literature of this period.American literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme economic classes who were determined by theirenvironment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalism emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the first American naturalism work. Norris’s McTeague is the manifesto of American naturalism. Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is the work in which naturalism attained maturity. These writers’ detailed description of the lives of the downtrodden and the abnormal, their frank treatment of human passion and sexuality, and their portrayal of men and women overwhelmed by blind forces of nature still exert a powerful influence on modern writers.Without satisfying people’s needs and refl ecting social conditions, Naturalism the same as Realism no longer stood on the historical stage. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. This combination of grim reality and desire for improvements is typical of America as it moved into the twentieth century, and paved the way to modernism.4.Modernism PeriodIn the year of 1914, the World War I broke out. World War I produced great misfortune to all human beings, but brought big fortune to Americans. Since the war was not fought on the American soil, by the second decade of the 20th century, the United States had become the most powerful industrialized nation in the world, outstripping Britain and Germany in terms of industrial production. After the war there was an economic boom and a deceptive affluence. American entered the era of big industry and big technology, a mechanized age that deprived individuals of their sense of identity. Along with the changes in the material landscape came the changes in the non-material system of belief and behavior. The war destroyed not only the lives of many promising young men, but also the early innocent beliefs of a whole generation, casting them into an age of disorientation, alienation and dissent. At the beginning of the 1930s, the economic crisis in America left a mark in the literary creations of this period. In addition, in Europe, there had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences, as well as in the field of art which played an indispensable role in the conversion of American ideologies. The era of 1914 to 1945, marked by tremendous social upheaval and economic and political transformation, gave gave rise to modernism.Modernism originated at the end of the 19th century. It was a complex and diverse international movement in all creative arts: painting, novel, poem and play. It spread worldwide, particularly in the years following World War I. Towards the 1920s, these trends converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement, which swept across the whole Europe and America. Modernist literature in America reached its peak in the 1920s up to the 1940s when this period ended.Literature of this period struggled to understand the new and diverse responses to the advent of modernity. Some writers celebrated the changes; others lamented the loss of old ways of being. Some imagined future utopias; others searched for new forms to speak of the new realities.The most recognizable "modernist" figures i n fiction are “the Lost Generation.”They were permanent expatriates living in Europe such as Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. The Lost Generation writers all gained prominence in 20th century literature. Their innovations challenged assumptions about writing and expression, and paved the way for subsequent generations of writers. Ernest Hemingway once took part in the First Would War, so many of his works deal with war or injury, and nearly all of them examined the nature of courage. By suffering from the violent of war, he felt that he was cut off from all his old beliefs and assumptions about life. He thought “The War had broken America`s culture and traditions, and separated it from its toots”. The works he wrote—The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea—inferred the state of mind, and they became the representatives of the feeling of this generation.Along with the greatest figures in “the Lost Generation” are famous poets such as Ezra Pound, Thomas Stearns Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. African Americans also made significant contributions to the American modernist movement. Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot and E. E. Cummings are three poets who opened the way to modern poetry. Ezra Pound started the “Imagist” movement, and his The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock has been called the first masterpiece of modernism. The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot particularly comments on the inhumanity and decadence of large modern cities.5.Postmodernism PeriodThe period after World War II has witnessed great changes of the United Stated of America in many aspects. The war, on the one hand, provided the base for the country to grow into a dominating superpower both in the western world and in international affairs on the global scale; on the other hand, it brought about tension and crisis within the country. Because the politics of America were influenced by two great fears. First, there was the fear of the Bomb; many Americans were sure there would be a war with the Soviet Union using atomic bombs. Also, in the late forties and early fifties, fear of Communism became a national sickness. Against such background emerges and develops the postmodernism in the 1970s.Postmodernism is regarded as a term encompassing all the new critical theories since the late 1960s. It is, accordingly, more reflective about what is subject, truth, metaphor, and human. Postmodernism is a literary experimentation focused mostly on fiction in the United States from the mid-1960s till about 1975. It became aligned with Post-structuralism and deconstruction between 1975 and 1985. Postmodernism became a general term for the cultural logic in post-industrialist society or the late stage of capitalism that is service-oriented and information-oriented.Post-modernism seems to grow or emerge from Modernism. Post-modernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the counter traditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to overthrow the elitism of modernist “high art” by recourse to the models of “mass art”. In this regard, Postmodernism is a movement against Modernism.Postmodernism as a new development of literature was believed to be nothing, this group of postmodernists created some new rules for the game. For them, existentialist angst should not be what defines literature; instead literary imagination shows a virtual geography.The term of Post-modernism is in fact not an inclusive description of all literature since the 1950s or 1960s, but is applied selectively to those works in widereference to fiction. Firstly, war novels become an important genre after World War II, represented by Norman Mailer. Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead has been held as the masterpiece of its category. James Jones’ best novel From Here to Eternity is a powerful story of army life in Hawaii just before the attack on the Pearl Harbour. Secondly, metafiction as Chris Baldick puts it, is “more especially a kind of fiction that openly comments on its own fictional status.” A notable modern example i s John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Barth’s The Floating Opera, Barthelme’s Snow White, etc.EpilogueRomantic period stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. Then the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism and Naturalism came into existence, which were against the lie of romanticism. The period between World War I and World War II is referred to as the era of Modernism. 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. Since 1945, the United States of America experienced some successive social, political and racial upheavals. Against such background emerged and developed the postmodernism.American literature has gone though the progress of development over 200 years. It is characterized by the distinct individualism, which is optimistic, free and always creative. The living American literature has been providing potent thinking headsprings for the writers past and nowadays, and it will continue reanimating the talents to bequeath and enrich the tradition of American literature, of which deserved to be proud.Bibliography1.Malcolm Bradbury, Richard Ruland, Published in Penguin Books 1992, AmericanLiterature From Puritanism to Postmodernism2.李权文，王卓，华中师范大学出版社2010年8月第一版，《美国文学史》3.王守仁，《<新编美国文学史>简介》。