美国文学三个重要时期

1.

The Age of American Romanticism

The period 1820s-1865 in American Literature is commonly identified as the

Romantic Period in America. After the establishment of the Federal Government of

1789, American entered a new age. Its population was considerably added to by the

influx of immigration. The American pioneers pushed the frontier further west beyond

the Mississippi. Before 1860, the United States began to change into an industrial and

urban society. The rapid growth of population, the westward expansion and the spread

of industrialism produced something of an economic boom and a tremendous sense of

optimism and hope among the people. The writers of this period produced works

of originality and excellence that helped shape the ideas, ideals, and literary aims

of many American writers. Writers of the American Romantic Period include Ralph

Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Nathaniel

Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Emily Dickinson,

and Walt Whitman.

Romantic Period is one of the most important periods in the history of American

literature.

It was an age of westward expansion, of the increasing gravity of the

slavery question, of an intensification of the spirit of embattled sectionalism in the

South, and of a powerful impulse to reform in the North. In literature it was America’s

first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impulse on American soil.

The characteristics of American Romanticism

Although greatly influenced by their English counterparts, the American

romantic writers revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they

grew on the native lands. For examp1e，the American national experience of

"pioneering into the west" proved to be a rich source of material for American

writers to draw upon. They celebrated America's landscape with its virgin forests,

meadows, groves, endless prairies, streams, and vast oceans. The wilderness came to

function almost as a dramatic character that symbolized moral 1aw. The desire for an

escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of

American literature. Such a desire is particularly evident in Cooper’s Leather

Stocking Tales, in Thoreau's Walden and， later, in Mark Twain’s Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn. With the growth of American national consciousness, American

character types speaking local dialects appeared in poetry and fiction with

increasing frequency. (4)Then the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage

exerted great influences over American moral values and American Romanticism.

One of the manifestations is the fact that American romantic writers tended more to

moralize than their English and European counterparts. Besides, a preoccupation

with the Calvinistic view of origina1 sin and the mystery of evil marked the

works of Hawthorne, Melville and a host of lesser writers.

Later，American literature came to Transcendentalism Period which

emphasized individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of tradition authority. It was

actually greatly influenced by romanticism. American Romanticism culminated

around the 1840s in what has come to be known as “New England

Transcendentalism” or “American Renaissance” (1836-1855). The

Transcendentalist movement, embodied by essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and

Henry David Thoreau, was a reaction against 18th century Rationalism, and closely

linked to the Romantic Movement.

In general, Transcendentalism was a liberal philosophy favoring nature

over formal religious structure, individual insight over dogma, and humane

instinct over social convention. American Transcendental Romantics pushed

radical individualism to the extreme. American writers—then or later —often saw

themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. There was a trust in

the individual, democracy, possibility of continued change for the better, a need to see

beyond what is before our eyes, and to see a deeper significance, a transcendent

reality. Nature conceived of not as a machine but as an organism, symbol and

analogue of the mind. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given.

Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was

tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice.

The romantic period of American literature stretches from the end of the

18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. The Civil War brought the Romantic

Period to an end. The age of Realism came into existence.

2.

The age of Realism

If you study American literature, you’d better learn more about Realism.

The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in

the history of Unite States, which is actually a movement or tendency that dominated

the spirit of American literature, especially American fiction from the 1850s onwards.

In art and literature, Realism refers to an attempt to describe human behavior and

surroundings or to represent figures exactly as they act or appear in life. Realism

entered American literature after the Civil War, when the American society provided

rich soil for the rise and development of Realism. William Dean Howells defined

realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”.

Realists searched for the social and human nature more directly. In part, Realism was

a reaction against the Romantic emphasis on the strange, idealistic, and long-ago and

far-away. It has been chiefly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday life

among the middle and lower classes where character is a product of social factors and

environment is the integral element in the dramatic complications.

Literature Features in Realism Period

The major form of literature produced in this era was realistic fiction. Unlike

romantic fiction, realistic fiction aims to represent life as it really is and make the

reader believe that the characters actually might exist and the situations might actually

happen. In order to have this effect on the reader, realistic fiction focuses on the

ordinary and commonplace. The major writers of the Realistic Period include William

Dean Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Bret Harte, and Kate Chopin.

The American authors lumped together as “realists” seem to have some features

in common: “verisimilitude of detail derived from observation,” the effort to approach

the norm of experience—a reliance on the representative in plot, setting, and character,

and to offer an objective rather than an idealized view of human nature and

experience. They insisted on accurate documentation, sociological insight, and

avoidance of poetic diction and idealization. Local colorism as a trend first made its

presence felt in the late 1860s and early 70s. Local colorist concerned themselves with

presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. The tended to idealize

and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life.

As a literary movement, realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century

as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism and sentimentalism. It expressed the

concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and

low.

Naturalism

is a term of literary history, primarily a French movement in prose

fiction and the drama during the final third of the 19th century. The emergence of

Naturalism does not mark a radical break with Realism, rather a logical

extension of it. Broadly speaking, Naturalism is characterized by a refusal to idealize

experience and by the persuasion that human life is strictly subjected to natural laws.

The Naturalists shared with the earlier Realists the conviction that everyday life of the

middle and lower classes of their own day provided subjects worthy of serious literary

treatment. Emphasis was laid on the influence of the material and economic

environment on behavior， on the determining effects of physical and hereditary

factors in forming the individual’s temperament. In popular use, the term naturalism is

sometimes used to mean fiction that exaggerates the techniques of realism, sacrificing

prose style and depth of characterization for an exhaustive description of the external,

observable world. Naturalism is a more deliberate kind of realism, usually involves a

view of human beings as a passive victims of natural forces and social environment.

3. The Age of Modernism

Between 1914 and 1939, American Literature entered into a phase which is still

referred to as "The Beginnings of Modern Literature". The large cultural wave of

Modernism, which emerged in Europe, and then spread to the United States in the

early years of the 20th century, expressed a sense of modern life through art as a sharp

break from the past. As modern machinery had changed the pace, atmosphere, and

appearance of daily life in the early 20th century, so many artists and writers, with

varying degrees of success, reinvented traditional artistic forms and tried to find

radically new ones—an aesthetic echo of what people had come to call “the machine

age.” During that period, a large number of artists and literary movements are totally

different from those of the 19th-century’s, in style, form and content. Modern

psychology has a profound impact on the early 20th-century’s literature.

American Modernism was a complex and diverse international literary

movement, originating at about the end of the 19th century and reaching its

maturity in the mid 20th. Based on different social realities and influenced by

different ideas and thoughts, Modernism has been made up of many facets—symbolism, surrealism, expressionism, existentialism, stream of consciousness,

Black Humor, the Theatre of the Absurd, and other minor trends.

The literary features of Modernism

Compared with earlier writings, especially those of the 19th century, modern

American writings are notable for what thy omit—the explanations, interpretations,

connections, and summaries. A typical modern work will seem to begin arbitrarily, to

advance without explanation, and to end with resolution. The book is no longer a

record of sequence and coherence but a juxtaposition of the past and the present, of

the history and the memory, or a book. Like their British counterparts, the American

Modernists experimented with subject matter, form, and style and produced

achievements in all literary genres.

The American Modernist Period also produced many other writers that are

considered to be writers of Modernist Period Subclasses. For example, F. Scott

Fitzgerald is considered a writer of The Jazz Age, Langston Hughes and W.E.B.

DuBois writers of The Harlem Renaissance, and Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra

Pound, and Ernest Hemingway writers of the Lost Generation.

The Great Depression marked the end of the American Modernist Period, and

writers such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and Eugene O'Neill dealt with the

social and political issues of the time in their literary works.

Conclusion

Romantic period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak

of the Civil War. Later American literature came to Transcendentalism Period which

emphasized individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of tradition authority. The Civil

War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence,

which was against “the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism”. The period between

1910 and 1930 is referred to as the era of Modernism. During that period, a large

number of artists and literary movements are totally different from those of the

19th-century’s, in style, form and content.