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Jazz Age

It was a movement that took place during the 1920s or the Roaring Twenties from which jazz music and dance emerged.The movement came about with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war.This era ended in the 1930s with the beginning of The Great Depreion but has lived on in American pop culture for decades.American dream

· For many immigrants, the Statue of Liberty was their first view of the United

States, signifying new opportunities in life.The statue is an iconic symbol of the American Dream

• It is a national ethos(社会的精神特质)of the United States in which

freedom includes a promise of the poibility of prosperity and succe.• A belief that if people work hard, they can rise to a higher social cla and they

can have anything if they are willing to get it.• All men are created equal, regardle of social cla or circumstances of birth.• Working hard is the most important element for getting ahead.Transcendentalism

·Transcendentalism was a literary movement that flourished during the middle 19th Century(1836 – 1860).·It began as a rebellion against traditionally held beliefs by the English Church that God superseded the individual.--Knowledge can be obtained through mental proce apart from experiences--denoting “whatever belongs to the cla of intuitive thought”

--Emerson said, Transcendentalism means idealism.Benjamin Franklin

• Benjamin Franklin was born on January 17, 1706 in Boston Maachusetts.• Ben Franklin began teaching himself the basics of geometry and algebra.He

also studied and partially mastered many different languages.• At age 12, Ben began working at his brother’s printing shop.• From 1723 to 1730, Ben worked as a printer.• He became partial owner of a print shop in 1728.•

• Ben wrote Poor Richard's Almanac.He also wrote many sayings that people still use today.• When Benjamin Franklin was 22 years old, he wrote the epitaph that he

imagined might be carved on his tombstone.By the time he actually died at age 84, he had changed his mind.American Realism(1870-1890)

1.Reasons: civil war, social development.People sought to describe the wide range of American experience and to present the subtleties of human personality, to portray characters that were le simply all good or all bad.2.Realism originated in France.A literary doctrine that called for “reality and1

truth” in the depiction of ordinary life.3.American realism, different from European realism, is more varied and

individualistic.4.Development of American realism: first appear in the literature of local color,arbiter: William Dean Howells.He defined realism as “nothing more and nothing

le than the truthful treatment of material”.5.Important writers: Henry James, Mark Twain.Puritanism

American Puritanism comes from the American Puritans, who were the first

immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century Original sin,predestination and salvation were the basic ideas of American Puritanism.And

hard-working piousne, thrift and sobriety were praised.Characteristics of Am.Romanticism:

1.an innate and intuitive perception of man, nature and society

2.an emphasis on freedom and imagination

3.a profound love for nature

4.the quest for beauty

5.the use of antique and grotesque subject matters

The significant of Puritanism in American literature

Because the 17th Century was the great age of British religious literature, in New

England, therefore, aerts Darrel Abel, it was the great century of Puritan

literature.In a way which is difficult for the modern reader to appreciate, Abel

further submits, this literary genre was not only a subject of everyday life, but was

an intelligent, often artistically wrought literature.It was also strenuous and

serious, because Puritans saw life as an unremitting moral struggle.Puritan

literature attempted to represent life truly;moreover, Puritan literature was just as

“realistic” as modern naturalism, albeit in the service of a different perception of

reality.The great structure of the Puritan creed, Perry Miller has aerted, will

only be meaningful to most students today “when they perceive that it rested upon

a deep lying conviction that the universe conformed to a definite, ascertainable

truth, and that human existence was to be had only upon the terms imposed by this

truth.”

II.Literature in the Colonial Period(1607-1820)(1)

I.Cultural Background:

Discovery of America and early settlers

II.American Puritanism

1.Puritans – American Puritans – American Puritanism

2.Calvinism:Predestination,Original Sin, Total Depravity, Limited Atonement

3.Its influence upon American writings:

a.(technique): symbolism

b.(tone): optimism

c.(language): simplicity

d.(theme): redemption and salvation

III.The Literary in the Colonial Period

1.General features: Of Humble origin;documentary;personal

2.Literary Forms:

histories, letters, journals, sermons, narratives, poetry, novels, etc.A.histories:

Captain John Smith’s A Description of New England

William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation

John Winthrop’s A Model of Christian Charity

Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia

B.Personal account: Slave narratives, prisoner’s narratives, etc.e.g.Marry Rowlandson’s personal account of her being captured

and imprisoned by the American Indians

C.Sermons: Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the Hands of An Angry

God

D.Poetry:

Anne Bradstreet and her religious and secular poetry

John Norton and John Rogers’s elegies for Anne

Michael Wigglesworth’s The Day of Doom(1662)

Edward Taylor's religious poetry: Preparatory Meditations

Benjamin Tompson: New England Crisis(satirical poem)John Trumbull, Progre of Dulne and M’Fingal(political satire)

Francis Hopkinson, The Battle of kegs(1779)

Joel Barlow, The Hasty Pudding(1796), The Vision of Columbus(1787)

Timothy Dwight, The Conquest of Canaan(1785)

David Humphreys, The Anarchiard(1787)

Philip Freneau’s patriotic/nature poetry: “The Indian Burial Ground”

Phillis Wheatley the first Afro-American poete: On Mers Huey

and Coffin, Thoughts on the Works of ProvidenceE.Novels:

1.William Hill Brown, Power of Sympathy, 1789(Sentimental epistolary novel).2.Susana Rowson, Charlotte Temple(1791), third-person narrative

3.Hannah Foster, The Coquette(1797)

4.Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry,(1792-1815)(Picaresque novel)

5.Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants(1793)

6.Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive(1797)

7.Charles Brockden Brown and his gothic novels

Wieland(1798), Edgar Huntly(1799), Ormond(1799), Arthur Mervyn(1800)

Three Representative Figures(in prose)

Jonathan Edwards and his sermon: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God

Benjamin Franklin and The Autobiography(1791,1818)and Poor Richard’s AlmanacThomas Paine and his political eays: Common Sense and American Crisis

John de Crevecoeur and his Letters from an American Farmer

Edwards, Franklin, and Crevecoeur