Washington Irving（father of American literature）1. He is the first belletrist(pure art writer) in American literature, writing for pleasure at a time when writing was practical and for useful purposes (Franklin).2. He is the first American literary humorist.3. He has written the first modern short stories.4. He is the first to write history and biography as entertainment.5. He introduced the nonfiction prose as a literary genre.6. His use of the gothic looks forward to Poe.Writing styleGentility,urbanity,pleasantnessEnveloping stories in an atmosphereVivid and true characterHumor smiling while readingMusical languageHis famous writingThe Sketch Book《见闻札记》The Legend of Sleepy Hollow《睡谷的传说》The analysis of The Legend of Sleepy HollowThe story: It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a priggish schoolmaster from Connecticut, who compete with Abraham”Brom Bones” V an Brunt, a buff and tough man, for the hand of eighteen-old Katrina V an Tassel.Ichabod Crane: shrewd, credulous, self-assertive, coward, commercial.Theme: one of the great theme of American literature and American folklore is the clash between the city and the country, between civilization and the wilderness. Influence:The book touched the American imagination and foreshadowed the coming of Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe, in whose hands the short story attained a degree of perfection as a literary tradition.It also marked the beginning of American Romanticism.Edgar Allan Poe: (内容很多自己挑着看)Major Themes1. Love -- usually of a mourning man for his deceased beloved.2. Pride -- physical and intellectual.3. Beauty -- of a young woman either dying or dead.4. Death -- a source of horror.Paradoxes in Poe1. His life - basically insecure and highly emotional, but his writing is structured.2. Poe was a romantic writer, but he emphasized rationality.3. He presents realistic details in gothic settings.4. There is a paradox in Poe's critical thinking - he believed in individual creativity but advocated classical norms - the ideal length of a poem, suggested Poe, is 100 lines.Influence of Poe1. Influenced writers of split personality.2. Influenced literary criticism.3. Influenced writers dealing with the disintegration of personality.Poe's Four Types of Short Stories1. Arabesque（奇特）- strange; use of the supernatural; symbolic fantasies of the human condition;2. Grotesque（古怪）– funny, heightening of one aspect of a character3. Ratiocinative （推理）- detective fiction.4. Descriptive（描述）Poe's Aesthetic Theory of EffectEvaluationfather of modern short storyfather of detective storyfather of psychoanalytic criticism1.He is the father of psychoanalytic criticism. In deed, Poe places thesubconscious condition of the mind under investigation and probes beneath the surface of normal existence. What interests him most is the deep abyss of the unconscious and subconscious mental activity of the people, the subterranean recesses秘密的深处of the mind at work.2.He was the first author in American literature to make the neurotic神经病患者the heroic figure, the protagonist, in his stories.3.His theories for the short story and poetry are remarkable in their clarity evenif they lack intellectual detachment超然and catholicity普遍性宽容of taste.4.His tale The Murders in the Rue Morgue, an ingenious独创性detectivestory, became the ancestor of the genre.5.As a short story writer, Poe was a fascinating man of imagination interested indeduction推论and induction归纳. And half a dozen of his stories belong to （Ratiocinative推理）6.His aesthetics and conscious craftsmanship, his attack on “the heresy ofdidactic” and his call for “the rhythmical creation of beauty” have influenced French symbolists and the devotes of “art for art’s sake”.7.Poe’s style is traditional：it is too much rational to reflect the peculiarity ofhis theme. He failed to carry the newness of his idea to his style, but his choice of word and his syntax made him difficult to read.Poe’s Theories on PoetryHis poetry express the same deep hopelessness and rejection of the world as his prose, but in a different way. Expressed in his works“The Philosophy of Composition”,《写作的哲学》“The Poetic principle”《诗歌原理》1. He avoids the intrusion of ugliness and tries to create a vision of beauty and a melodious sound. The chief aim is beauty.2. The function of poetry is not to summarize and interpret earthly experience, but to create a mood in which the soul soars toward supernal beauty. The basic tone is melancholy.3. H e stresses rhythm, opposed to “the heresy of the didactic” and called for “Pure poetry”, defined true poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty” . The artistry of poetry lies not in what is being said but in the way it is said.4. The creation of work of art requires the utmost concentration and unity, as well as the most scrupulous use of words.作品任选其一T o HelenTheme: To Helen is a poem about the ideal woman that can only exist byimagination, a woman that was the Goddess of the soul. Poe uses an allusion to refer to Helen .Helen can refer to the Greek goddess of light or Helen of Troy who is considering being the most beautiful woman ever alive. In the poem, beauty, death and the past are combined together.Form: The poem is composed of 35-line stanzas. The end-rhyme pattern is varied inthree stanzas, respectively, ababb in the 1st stanza, ababa in the 2nd, and abbab in the 3rd, both regular and alternate.Such pattern indicates the poet highly respects the classic standard of the poetry and at the same time tries to cultivate his own creativity, his own sense of writing.Stanza 1：The poet first mentioned Helen, the most famous beauty in Great mythology. Then Poe compared himself to Odysseus, who wandered for ten years over the sea to get home. As Odysseus, Edgar Allan Poe was persistent in his chasing after fine arts with the sincere belief that art, or beauty and truth, is the ultimate aim, the home, for the wandering poet; while Helen, the embodiment of ancient beauty, is the guider to that dreamland.Stanza 2：All the art and literature originated from one thing---beauty. Havingtaken Helen as the embodiment of beauty, the poet was confident that once he saw Helen, he was sure to be led by Helen to the home of beauty---fine and pure literature. Poe insisted that Greece and Rome are the homes of beauty, the treasure houses of fine art and literature.Stanza 3：The speaker sees Helen standing in the bright niche and holding in her hand an agate lamp. She is quite similar to goddess Psyche from Greek Myth. Through his description of his passion to Helen, Poe expressed his pursuit and sincere devotion to beauty.In the poem, three beauties in ancient Greek mythology—Helen, Naiad and Psyche---are mentioned just to show that beauty is something that existed; it is very holy but it is hard to reach.（斜体参考使用）The RavenA sense of melancholy over the death of a beloved beautiful young ladypervades the poem. The portrayal of a young man grieving for his lost lover.His grief had been turned into madness under the steady one-word repetition of the talking bird.The changes of the poet’s mood with the development of the poem: sadness—jocularity—despair—madness“Raven” reveals a central theme: the human mind would be healthy and alive if it were incapable of thought, but since it is a mind and does possess the power of introspection内省and self-knowledge自觉, then that very power and knowledge spell its death. In other words, thought is the constituent of the mind, but the act of thinking can be its undoing毁灭取消.Hawthorne一、(关于作者)Hawthorne as a Literary Artist1. First professional writer - college educated, familiar with the great European writers, and influenced by puritan writers like Cotton Mather.2. Hawthorne displayed a love for allegory and symbol. He dealt with tensions involving: light versus dark; warmth versus cold; faith versus doubt; heart versus mind; internal versus external worlds.3. His writing is representative of 19th century, and, thus, in the mainstream due to his use of nature, its primitiveness, and as a source ofinspiration; also in his use of the exotic, the gothic, and the antiquarian.二、关于霍桑的作品Major Themes in Hawthorne's Fiction1. Alienation - a character is in a state of isolation because of self-cause, or societal cause, or a combination of both.2.Initiation - involves the attempts of an alienated character to get rid of his isolated condition.3. Problem of Guilt -a character's sense of guilt forced by the puritanical heritage or by society; also guilt vs. innocence.4. Pride - Hawthorne treats pride as evil: physical pride, spiritual pride and intellectual pride.5. Puritan New England- used as a background and setting in many tales.6. Italian background - especially in The Marble Faun.7. Allegory - Hawthorne's writing is allegorical, didactic and moralistic.8. Other themes include individual vs. society, self-fulfillment vs. accommodation or frustration, hypocrisy vs. integrity, love vs. hate, exploitation vs. hurting, and fate vs. free will.以《红字》为例，分析：Themes in The Scarlet Letter1. Sin, Knowledge, and the Human Condition2. The nature of evil3. Identity and Society（具体的和作品的结合可根据自己的理解简单阐释）。