美国文学

彭荻、万莉莉、陈义华

目录

  • 1 colonial period
    • 1.1 I. Background: Puritanism
    • 1.2 1.2Jonathan Edwards: Sinner in the Hands of Angry God
    • 1.3 1.3Anne Bradstreet: Verse upon the Burning of Our House
  • 2 Age of Enlightenment
    • 2.1 Benjamin Franklin ;autobiography
    • 2.2 Thomas Jefferson: The Declaration of Independence
  • 3 American Romanticism
    • 3.1 What is Romanticsim
    • 3.2 Washington Irving
  • 4 Summit of Romanticism – American Transcendentalism
    • 4.1 four sources, appearance, feature, influence
    • 4.2 Ralph Waldo Emerson :Self-Reliance
    • 4.3 Henry David Thoreau: Walden
  • 5 late Romanticism
    • 5.1 nathaniel Hawthorne
    • 5.2 Herman Melville
  • 6 Romantic Poet
    • 6.1 Walter Whitman
    • 6.2 Emily Dickinson
    • 6.3 comparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson
  • 7 American Gothic Literature
    • 7.1 Edgar Allen Poe
    • 7.2 Raven, The Masque of the Red Death
  • 8 The Age of Realism
    • 8.1 background, characteristics
    • 8.2 Three Giants in Realistic Period
    • 8.3 local colorism
  • 9 American Naturalism
    • 9.1 background,features, significance
    • 9.2 Poems of naturalism
  • 10 The Modern Period
    • 10.1 The 1920s and imagist movement
    • 10.2 Robert Frost
  • 11 Novels in the 1920s
    • 11.1 I.F. Scott Fitzgerald
    • 11.2 II.Ernest Hemingway
  • 12 Southern Literature
    • 12.1 William Faulkner
    • 12.2 Barn Burning
  • 13 American Drama
    • 13.1 Eugene O'Neil
    • 13.2 Absurd Drama
  • 14 The Post-War Period: 50s & 60s
    • 14.1 Allen Ginsburg: Howl
    • 14.2 Sylvia Plath: Daddy (confessionist)
  • 15 Post-War American literature
    • 15.1 Salinger
    • 15.2 Joseph Heller
  • 16 Multi-ethic American Literature
    • 16.1 Hughes:
    • 16.2 Toni Morrison
Henry David Thoreau: Walden

I. Henry David Thoreau

1. life

2. works

(1) A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River

(2) Walden

(3) A Plea for John Brown (an essay)

3. point of view

(1) He did not like the way a materialistic America was developing and was vehemently outspoken on the point.

(2) He hated the human injustice as represented by the slavery system.

(3) Like Emerson, but more than him, Thoreau saw nature as a genuine restorative, healthy influence on man’s spiritual well-being.

(4) He has faith in the inner virtue and inward, spiritual grace of man.

(5) He was very critical of modern civilization.

(6) “Simplicity…simplify!”

(7) He was sorely disgusted with “the inundations of the dirty institutions of men’s odd-fellow society”.

(8) He has calm trust in the future and his ardent belief in a new generation of men.