American literature

1. American literature Early Romantic period: Irving, Cooper and Bryant

2. General introduction • Time: from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. • Ideals: Democracy and political equality became the ideals of the new nation. • Economic boom: industrialism • Immigration optimism and hope among people • Westward expansion • American Romanticism was both imitative and independent. • Imitative: English and European Romanticists • Independent: Emerson and Whitman • Themes: • Imitative: home, family, nature, children and idealized love • Independent: major problems of American life, like the westward expansion and democracy and equality.

3. Washington Irving (1783--1859) • “Father of American literature” • “Father of the American short story” • The first American writher of imaginative literature to gain international fame. • The short story as a genre in American literature began with Irving’s The Sketch Book. • The Sketch Book also marked the beginning of American Romanticism.

4. Irving’s Works • A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by Diedrich Knickerbocker 1809 《纽约外史》 • The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent 1819-1820 《见闻札记》 • “Rip Van Winkle” • “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” 《睡谷的传说》 • Bracebridge Hall 1822 《布雷斯布里奇庄园》 • Oliver Goldsmith 1840 《哥尔德斯密斯》 • Life of George Washington 1855-1859 《华盛顿传》

5. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) • Works. • Leatherstocking Tales • The Pioneers 1823 《开拓者》……………………….. 4 • The Last of the Mohicans 1826 《最后的莫希干人》…. 2 • The Prairie 1827 《草原》…………………………… 5 • The Pathfinder 1840 《探路者》……………………. . 3 • The Deerslayer 1841 《杀鹿者》…………………….. 1 • Precaution 1820 《戒备》 • The Spy 1821 《间谍》 • The Pilot 1823 《领航人》

6. Leatherstocking Tales • Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels about the frontier of American settlers. • The Pioneers was probably the first true romance of the frontier in American literature. • Natty Bumppo represents the ideal American, living a virtuous and free life in God’s world. To him and to Cooper, the wildness is good, pure, perfect, where there is freedom not tainted and fettered by any forms of human institutions. • Natty Bumppo is a veritable embodiment of human virtues like innocence, simplicity, honesty and generosity, a man born with an immaculate sense of good and evil and right and wrong. • Cooper helped to introduce the “western tradition” into American literature.

7. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) • the first American lyric poet of distinction • Works • Poems 1821 《诗选》 • The Fountain 1842 《泉》 • The White-Footed Deer 1844 《白蹄鹿》 • A Forest Hymn 1860 《森林赋》 • The Flood of Years 1878 《似水流年》 • “To a Waterfowl” 1815 《致水鸟》 • “Thanatopsis” 1817 《死亡随想》 • “The Yellow Violet” 1814 《黄色堇香花》

8. Evaluation • Bryant’s writing demonstrats the imitative mode through which New Englanders of an intellectual bent sought to establish an acceptable American literary voice. • He can also be linked to the Transcendentalists--though with great caution, since much more is going on. • Again, he should be shown in connection with his English models. It's useful to point out the self-conscious regularity of these poems both in connection with their particularly derivative subject matter and in contrast with the form and subjects of those contemporary poems and songs (well represented in this anthology) that were not informed by the dominant English literary culture.