美国文学的形成与发展

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(1) American Literature in Colonial and Revolutionary Age(殖民地时期美国文学)

The major topic of this period is about American Puritanism, the one enduring influence in American Literature. American Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of Puritans. Hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety were the Puritan spirit that dominated much of the earliest writing.

Influenced by Puritanism, American literature had the characteristic of simplicity, plainness or rhetoric and indication to the Holy Bible. Letters, diaries, sermons, journals, travel books and histories were the main form of the literature in early colonial period. In content, they served either God or the colonial expansion or both. In form, they were mainly the imitation of the English tradition.

(2)The Literature of American Romanticism(美国浪漫主义文学)

The romantic period is the most significant period in the history of American literature. It began from the end of 18th century throughout the outbreak of the Civil War. In this period, novels, short stories and poems replaced sermons and manifestos as America’s principle literary forms. The literature movement can be divided into two stages:early romanticism(1770s-1830s) and transcendentalism or American Renaissance(1830s-1860s)

Transcendentalism is neither logical nor systematized. It exalts feeling over reason, individual expression over the restrains of law and custom. They believe in the transcendence of the “Over soul”, an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come and of which all things are a part. Two important representatives of Transcendentalism are Emerson, who believed that man was a part of absolute good and Thoreau, who beheld divinity in the “unspotted innocence” of nature.

(3)American Realism Literature(美国现实主义文学)

By the 1870s, the age of Romanticism and Transcendentalism was by and large over. And the age of realism then arrived. Three great masters of American Realism are Howells, Henry James and Mark Twain.

American Realism developed into naturalism, which develops on the basis of realism but goes a step further than it in portraying social reality. It is a type of literature that attempts to apply principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism, in which subjects might receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment.

American Naturalism first came into existence in Maggie, a Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane, then had its manifesto in McTeague by Frank Norris, and later came to its maturity in Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. The impact of Darwin’s evolutionary theory gave rise to yet another school of realism: American Naturalism.

(4)The modern American Literature(美国现代文学)

With the changes of the society, American literature situation changed as well. Modernism began in the late 19th century and was defined by its rejection of the literary conventions of the 19th century and by its opposition to conventional morality, taste, tradition, and economic values.

Imagism appears in this period. It is a movement in poetry characterized by the use of concrete language and figures of speech, modern subject matter, metrical freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes. The representatives of Imagism are T.E. Eulme’s Autumn, F.S.Flint’s The Swan, William Caerlos Williams’ The Red Wheelbarrow and Erra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro.

Besides, the Lost Generation also appears in this period. It refers to the post-WWI generation, but specially a group of U.S. writers who came of age during the war and established their literary reputation in the 1920s. Ernest Hemingway in one of the representatives.