1班2012213154 任亚男A Brief Summary of the History of American LiteratureThe American Romantic period, which was regarded as one of the most important period in the history of American literature, stretched from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. The Sketch Book written by Washington Irving marked the beginning of American Romanticism. American Romanticism was a rebellion against objectivity of the rationalism. The romantics emphasized individualism, affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and the strange. In this period, we saw a rising America fast burgeoning into a political, economic, and cultural independence it had never known before.There were many reasons why American Romanticism emerged. First, democracy and political equality became the ideals of the new nation. Radical changes came about in the political life of the country. Parties began to scramble for power, and a new system---two-party system was making. Second, the fast spread of industrialism, the sudden influx of immigrants, and the pioneers pushing the frontier further west---all these produced an economic boom and a sense of optimism and hope among the people. Third, a nation bursting into new life cried for literary expression. The buoyant mood of the nation and the spirit of the times seemed in some measure responsible for the spectacular outburst of romantic feeling in the first half of the nineteenth century. Forth, magazines appeared in ever-increasing numbers, which provided the vast stage for romantics. Fifth, foreign influences added incentive to the growth of romanticism in America. Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Byron, Robert Bums, and many other English and European masters of poetry and prose all made a stimulating impact on the different departments of the country’s literature. For instance, Irving’s The Sketch Book was largely based on the essays of Addison and Steele, Bryan poetry was enlightened by Wordsworth, and Cooper’s novels were modeled after the works of Walter Scott. Thus American Romanticism was derivative in a way.Although greatly influenced by the English and European literature, American Romanticism had distinctive features of its own. Different from their European counterparts, American Romanticism tended to moralize, to edify rather than to entertain. This is because there was American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider in their writings. Besides, American romanticism presented an entirely new experience alien to European culture. The exotic landscape, the frontier life, thewestward expansion, the myth of a New Garden of Eden in American, and the Puritan heritage were just a few examples of the native material for an indigenous literature. Evidently, American romanticism produced a feeling of “newness” which inspired the romantic imagination. Hence, as a logical result of the foreign and native factors, American romanticism was both imitative and independent.The most clearly defined Romantic literary movement in this period was New England Transcendentalism, which lasted from the 1830s to the beginning of the Civil War. The publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 essay Nature is usually regarded as the mark of the birth of this major distinctive cultural movement. Transcendentalism held that one must transcend, in a sense go beyond, logical and experience through intuition in order to find the deepest truth. Transcendentalists stressed spirit or the Oversoul. They affirmed the role or individual and saw nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. American Transcendentalism inaugurated the American Renaissance, giving it both a necessary impulse as well as its foundation.As for the most representative American romantic writers, Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edger Allan Poe, Walt Whitman should be included. Washington Irving is regarded as “The Father of the American Short Stories”. With the publication of The Sketch Book, Irving won a measu re of international fame on both sides of the Atlantic. His Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are classics in American literature. Ralph Waldo Emerson is the founder and center of the transcendental movement. In his essays, Emerson put forward his philosophy of the over-soul, the importance of the individual, and nature. Nathaniel Hawthorne is considered as the first greatest American fiction writer in the moralistic tradition. His wide-spread work, The Scarlet Letter that is notable for its allegory and symbolism is regarded as the first symbolic novel in American literature. Walt Whitman is viewed as the first urban poet. His work has been described as a “rude shock” and “the most audacious and debatable contribution yet made to American liter ature”.After the Civil War, every aspect of American life changed. First, America transformed itself from an agrarian community into an industrialized and commercialized society. Second, 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. However, the changes were not all good. The centralization of wealth and power was in a limited few while the vast laboringmasses were poor and low, which caused the polarization of well-being, with the poor poorer and the rich richer. Third, the abrupt changes left Americans in a morally confused and exhausted “new” world. 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. Americans began to be tired of the sentimental feelings of Romanticism. Therefore, America Realism emerged in the latter half of the 19th century. As a literary movement, it was centered on novel, and dominant in America until the closing decade of the century. It focused on commonness of the lives of the common people, and emphasized objectivity and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.In American realist fiction, familiar aspects of contemporary life an everyday scenes were represented in a straightforward or matter-of-fact manner, in which characters from all social levels were examined in depth. It stressed truthful treatment of material. As a powerful impulse to mirror the unmitigated realities of life, realism expressed its concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low.The three dominant figures of the period are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Mark Twain i s one of America’s first and foremost realists and humorists. William Dean Howells is the founder of American Realism and the most prominent critic of the entire realistic period. Henry James is an early psychological realist. His novels have much influence on modern American writers. So he is often called one of the fathers of the psychological novel. Although the three writes wrote more or less at the same time, they had different understanding of the “truth”. Mark Twain and Howells paid more attention to the “life” of the American, while Henry James stressed the “inner world” of man. In addition, Twain and Howells had their own different emphasis though sharing the same concern. Howells focused on the rising middle-class and the way they lived, while Twain preferred to describe his own region and people.One of the most significant trends of this period was the type of realism called local colorism. Generally, the writings of local colorists were concerned with the life of small, well-denied region or province. The characteristic setting was also the isolated small town. Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. As I mentioned earlier, Mark Twain was a great local coloristtoo, 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.During the latter period of Realism, the harsh reality of the industrialization period changed man’s understanding about himself and the world in which he lived in---cold, indifferent, and essentially Godless world. Finally, people turned to science and found their answers to their puzzles in Charles Darwin’s evolutionary the ory of natural selection. The impact of Darwin evolution theory on the American thought and the influence of the 19th century French literature on the American men of letters gave rise to another school: American Naturalism.American naturalism was an important movement in American literature from the 1890s to 1920s. Although American naturalism was regarded as an outgrowth and extension of realism, it was more inclusive and less selective than realism. It wa s “the application of the principles of scientifi c determinism to fiction and drama.”There are some major features of American naturalism. First, the characters in naturalistic 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”. Second, the setting in those novels is frequently an urban one, as in Frank Norris’s McTeague. The naturalist usually uses carefully chosen surface detail to portray a gloomy and depressing setting. They emphasize that the universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires. They also claim that the works produced in this school have tended to emphasize either a biological determinism or a socio-economic determinism. Forth, in theme, naturalists represent the life of the lower classes truthfully and break into such forbidden regions as violence, death, and sex. In technique, their works exhibit honest skills and artistry. But they are evidently original and experimental in their perspective styles.The major representatives of American naturalists include Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. Stephen Crane is regarded as the first American naturalist. Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is America’s first novel about slums. Norris and London excelled in examining the brute in man and his in presenting the close kinship between humanity and the jungle. Norris’s McTeague and Vandover and the Brute, and London’s The sea-Wolf and The Call of the Wild are among the best primitivistic books in American literature. Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the first American naturalism work. Dreiser is generally regarded as thebellwether of modern fiction. His works, particularly Sister Carrie, Jennie Gerhardt, and the Cowperwood trilogy represent a combination of reluctant naturalism and moral idealism.Though as a literary movement naturalism was short-lived, its influence transcended historical periods and left a mark on the literary creation today.Between 1914 and 1945, influenced by social upheaval, economic and political transformation and European modernism, America also saw the rise of its own modernism. American Modernism, like modernism in general, is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation.Its key elements are experimentation, anti-realism, individualism and a stress on the cerebral rather than emotive aspects. With a large number of great writers producing a huge amount of famous literary works, this period is also called the second renaissance in the history of American literature.With emphasis shifted from the real world to the human mind, disappointment, despair and disillusion became the themes of Modernism writings which tended to show the inner feelings of characters. Modernism tried to reveal the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, man and himself. A typical modernist work will seem to begin arbitrary without explanation and to end without resolution. There will be changes in perspective, tone and voice. Making use of symbols and images instead of statements is an essential way of aesthetic communication.Realistic fiction is the greatest achievement of 20th century American literature. It roughly consisted of two phrases: between the World War’s “natural realism” of the twenties and left-wing realistic fiction of the thirties. During the first period, many writers described their escape from small-town and revealed hypocrisies such as Sherwood Anderson whose best work Winesburg, Ohio appeared in 1919 and remained a major work of experimental fiction about the American Midwest. Some of his best later works like The Triumph of the Egg, Death in the Woods and so on showed some interests in human psychology and the sense of conflicts between inner and outer worlds. He made great efforts to create the simplest prose using brief sentences and vocabulary. Left-wing writing turned into the mai n stream in the 1930s’ American literature. A group of writers such as John Steinbeck and Erskine Caldwell sprung up.The lost generation is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war. Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date. The best-known representatives of Lost Generation are Hemingway, Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos. Hemingway’s distinctive writing style was characterized by economy and understatement which had a big influence on 20th century fiction. And he is famous for the spare, tightly written novels.Southern literature is often twisted, violent and pessimistic, dealing with displacement and human distorted innocence. It is the product of the creative tension between the Southern past and the pressures of the modern world. Southern writers use the south as microcosm and as a miniature world for exploring problems of America, even the universe itself. William Faulkner is famous for his epic portray of many conflicts between the old and the new South. His works like Absalom, Absalom and The Sound and the Fury indicated his frequent use of stream of consciousness. His bold innovations paved the way for considerable number of future writers to continue to exploration of the diverse use of English language.American Poetry began to utter the voice of its own in the mid-19th century. In the 20th century, it has become one of the great literary movement achievements of the nation. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are unanimously acclaimed leaders of modernist American poetry. They are in the same boat rejecting the 19th century literary traditions and innovating new experimental and avant-garde poetic forms.During the 1920s and 1930s, the Harlem Renaissance came into being which refers to the propriety of African American intellectual life. From the black community in Harlem there was a cultural movement which took the reflection of the black culture as its responsibility and from which the figures of the the New Negroes came into being in American literature. Langston Hughes is viewed as a great African American writer, who is famous for his descriptions of black American life. He used his work to praise his people and voice his concerns about race and social injustice.Modern American drama refers to the period from 1910 to 1945 during which many American play writers sought to overturn the 19th century’s formal constraints and outdated styles of performance. American dramatists of the modern era examined human relationship with ruthless candor which showed the moral ambivalence that challenged the status quo. Eugene O’Neill is unquestionable America’s greatest playwright. Most of his plays are tragedies, dealing with the basic issues of humanexistence and predicament: life and death, illusion and disillusion, alienation and communication, dream and reality, self and society, desire and frustration, etc.。