美国经典文学作品选读_姜晓瑜、陈红锐、邓纯旭_9787513037969

本书所选作家作品贯穿整个美国文学史，结集了美国文学史上重要作家的作品。本书包含着各种风格及各个时期不同作家的作品，从开国先贤，如富兰克林、华盛顿、汉密尔顿、杰斐逊、麦迪逊，到19世纪的文学大师，如马克吐温(Mark Twain)、亨利梭罗(Henry David Thoreau)、爱伦坡(Edgar Allan Poe)，以及20世纪名家，如詹姆斯鲍德温(James Baldwin)、斯科特菲茨杰拉德(F. Scott Fitzgerald)和斯坦贝克(John Steinbeck）等。

Prelude

American literature mainly refers to the literature produced by people living in the United States During its early history, America was a series of British colonies on the eastern coast of the presentday United States Therefore, its literary tradition begins as linked to the broader tradition of English literature However, unique American characteristics and the breadth of its production usually now cause it to be considered a separate path and tradition

The New England colonies were the center of early American literature The revolutionary period contained political writings by Samuel Adams, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine In the postwar period, Thomas Jeffersons United States Declaration of Independence solidified his status as a key American writer It was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries that the nations first novels were published With the War of 1812 and an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture, a number of key new literary figures emerged, perhaps most prominently Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) started a movement known as Transcendentalism Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) wrote Walden, which urges resistance to the dictates of organized society The political conflict surrounding abolitionism inspired the writings of William Lloyd Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe in her worldfamous Uncle Toms Cabin These efforts were supported by the continuation of the slave narrative autobiography, of which the best known example from this period was Frederick Douglasss Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) is notable for his masterpiece The Scarlet Lettera novel about adultery Hawthorne influenced Herman Melville (1819-1891) who is notable for the books MobyDick and Billy Budd Americas two greatest 19th century poets were Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). American poetry reached its peak in the earlytomid20th century, with such noted writers as Wallace Stevens, T S Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and E E Cummings Mark Twain (the pen name used by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) was the first major American writer to be born away from the East Coast Henry James (1843-1916) was notable for novels like The Turn of the Screw At the beginning of the 20th century, American novelists included Edith Wharton (1862-1937), Stephen Crane (1871-1900), and Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945). Experimentation in style and form is seen in the works of Gertrude Stein (1874-1946).

American writers expressed disillusionment following WWI The stories and novels of F Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) capture the mood of the 1920s, and John Dos Passos wrote about the war Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) became notable for The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature William Faulkner (1897-1962) is notable for novels like The Sound and the Fury American drama attained international status only in the 1920s and 1930s, with the works of Eugene ONeill, who won four Pulitzer Prizes and the Nobel Prize In the middle of the 20th century, American drama was dominated by the work of playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as by the maturation of the American musical

Depression era writers included John Steinbeck (1902-1968), notable for his novel The Grapes of Wrath Henry Miller assumed a unique place in American Literature in the 1930s when his semiautobiographical novels were banned from the US From the end of World War II up until, roughly, the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the publication of some of the most popular works in American history such as To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Americas involvement in World War II influenced the creation of works such as Norman Mailers The Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Hellers Catch22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut Jrs SlaughterhouseFive (1969). John Updike was notable for his novel Rabbit, Run (1960). Philip Roth explores Jewish identity in American society From the early 1970s to the present day the most important literary movement has been postmodernism and the flowering of literature by ethnic minority writers

This book, with vivid illustration of pictures and detailed explanation and Chinese version presents you the best works of American literature and will help you have a profound understanding of the classics I hope that this book will be helpful for your English learning

Jiang Xiaoyu

June 2015

你还可能感兴趣

我要评论