现实主义.docx

1、现实主义Part IV The Realistic Period (1861-1914) the Second Half of the 19th CenturyI.Historical background: In 1804, the new nation began its westward expedition, encouraging people to search for new land to farm. By 1860 the western boundary had reached to the Pacific, and then the number of its state

2、s had increased from the original thirteen at the time of its independence to 21. As American expanded westward, the opening up of each new territory threatened the delicate balance between free and slave states, increasing the animosity between North and South and pushing the nation closer to confl

3、ict. Though the controversy flared up briefly in the founding of the country, the new country did not resolve the grave issue on slavery. Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, tension on the issue grew, and the conflict between North and South became more and more intense, and finally

4、 brought about the Civil War. In 1865 when the civil war ended, Northern industrialism had triumphed over Southern agrarianism and from that victory came a society based on mass labor and mass consumption. Thus, this led to mechanization, industrialization, doubled-popularization and then a rural ec

5、onomy shifted to an urban one. As we know, a nations literature is like a mirror reflecting the nation itself, and its various conditions: social, cultural, economical, and political as well. The urban economy brought the social ills, which began to appear in American literature. II.Literature in th

6、e Realistic Period: With such historical background, romantic outlook on life was destroyed. There appeared some realists who tended to deal with the social problems of real persons in real places in the present, trying to present the life as it really is. Realism had originated in France as realism

7、e, a literary doctrine that called for “reality and truth” in the depiction of ordinary life. As Williams Dean Howells defined, “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material”.Realism first appeared in the United States in the literature of local color. It reached its peak of

8、 popularity in the 1880s, but by the turn of century it had begun to decline as its limited resources were exhausted or turned to other literary modes. The local color writers portrayed in accurate detail the customs, attitudes, characters and dialects of their particular regions which they knew wel

9、l. Although some regional writings especially in the 70s was romantic in the sense that each of the authors tended to idealize his pictures by stressing the picturesque characteristics of his own region, but the movement as a whole has been described as fundamentally realistic. These writers strove

10、to write dialogue that sounded the way persons actually spoke; they generally described places with great fidelity of detail; and they were basically interested in portraying and analyzing ordinary people going about their day-to-day affairs. At the end of the century, a new, extreme, and harsher re

11、alism naturalism appeared. Like realists, the naturalist tried to portray people and events accurately. But unlike the realists, naturalists believed that people have no control over their fates, feeling that human beings are simply victims of their surroundings and of their own drives and desires.

12、They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity. III.Major realistic writers: Bret Harte Bret Harte was the first American writer of local color to achieve wide popularity. He c

13、hose to present stories of western mining towns with colorful gamblers, and scandalous women. The collection The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Sketches (1870) brought him national fame and marked his literary peak. Harriet B. Stowe the author of Uncle Toms Cabin; only one female prose writer in 19t

14、h century; Walt Whitman a famous literary man for his monumental work Leaves of Grass, the first genuine American epic poem; Emily Dickinson a private poetess who had no intention to publish her poems, so she created the very unique and unconventional poems, in which she expressed herself in a subtl

15、e way; her masterpieces are “I died for Beauty”,“Because I could not stop for Death”, I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed, etc. Mark Twain a writer in the realistic period, very famous for his humor / satire; his masterpieces are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Gilded Age

16、, Life on the Mississippi; his biggest contribution is to make colloquial speech accepted as literary medium. Theodore Dreiser a typical naturalist known for his Sister Carrie; Trilogy of Desire： The Financier，The Titan，The Stoic； An American Tragedy His greatest and most successful novel. O. Henry

17、a famous writer of short stories; his works tell about the lives of poor people; plots are exceedingly clever and interesting and the end is always surprising; his language contains a great deal of slang and colloquial expressions, with which humor abounds. His masterpieces: The Four Million, The Gi

18、ft of Magi, The Cop and the Anthem. Henry James:with his special family background (his father is a philosopher, and his brother is a psychologist, philosopher), he is not only a novelist and a literature theoretician, but also the founder of psychological realism. He probed deeply into the individu

19、al psychology of his characters, writing in a rich and intricate style that supported his intense scrutiny of complex human experience. In this sense, he was called “Freud in American Novel circles.” In 1915, he chose to become a British citizen due to his dissatisfaction with the neutrality of Amer

20、ican government in the WWII. His major works: The American, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady; Last full-length novel (his creative peak): The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl. Walt Whitman（1819-1892）1.Family background born into a house builders family (Long Island in Brooklyn

21、); Only 6-year formal education; Seeking employment to support the family An office boya printera teacheran editor;A Writer Leaves of Grass (1855) : a poetry collection Memoranda During the War; Beat, Beat Drums; Drum-Traps;His declining yearsworking on additions and revisions to a new edition of hi

22、s Leaves of Grass; preparing his final volume of poems and prose, Good-bye, My Fancy; buried in a tomb on a lot in Harleigh Cemetery. 2.Critical response to Leaves of Grass praises nature and the individual humans role in it; elevates the human mind, thinking both worthy of poetic praise; Emerson: u

23、rged Whitman to tone down the sexual imagery;Rufus Wilmot Griswold: a mass of stupid filth“; “that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians” 3.Features of his poemsThe origin of his thoughts Thomas Paine; German Transcendentalism Themes freedom, equality, sexuality, death, individual, democ

24、racy; Poetic form “free verse” with two characteristics: Parallelism and phonetic recurrence Free Verse: “open form” verse without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme; depending on natural speech rhythms related to the actual cadence of the poet expressing himself. Parallelism a technique of the Bi

25、blical poetry, of repeating the idea in verse lines, but there might be minor changes in wording. T. S. Eliot ：No verse is free for the man who wants to do a good job. Donald Hall：the form of free verse is as binding and a liberating as the form of a rondeau.Evaluation“The greatest American poet so

26、far”: Americas first poet of democracy”; blazing a new trail for later poets to follow; inserting a great influence on the later poets in many aspects; “You cannot really understand America without Walt Whitman”; Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)I.Life Experience She was born as the second child into a po

27、litically prominent family. The Dickinsons were strong advocates for education and Emily too benefited from an early education in classic literature. She proved to be a dazzling student, and at the age of seventeen, though she was already somewhat of a homebody, Emily left home to attend the Mount H

28、olyoke Female Seminary, but returned home after one year due to her homesickness and poor health. Since then on, she began to gradually withdraw from village activities and ceased to leave home except for short trips to visit relatives. Unmarried, she died in her fathers house in 1886. She now rests

29、 in the West Cemetery of Amherst, Hampshire County, Massachusetts. Today, Emily Dickinson is considered one of the greatest American poets. However, it was not until after her death that her poetry became known. She wrote voluminously. After her death in 1886, her sister found nearly 1800 poems that

30、 she had written, but during her lifetime only seven of the poems were published and before her death she instructed her family to destroy all her writings. Many of the letters were burned, but fortunately her relatives decided that the poetry belonged to the world. In 1890 the first collection of h

31、er poems was printed and she had some admirers. In 1920 when a large number of her poems were published, people realized she was a genius. II.Major Works+My life closed twice before its closed;+“I Heard a Buzz- When I Died”;+I taste a liquor never brewed;+Because I could not stop for death;+Wild Nig

32、htsWild Nights;+I died for beauty;+A Bird came down the Walk;+I felt a funeral, in my Brain. III.Poem Appreciation1.“I Taste a Liquor Never Brewed”2. “Because I could not stop for death”IV.Features of her Poetry Highly subjective. One-fifth of them begin with I . The wide range of her poetry suggests not her limited experiences but the power of creativity and imagination.Concreteness - it is nearly a theorem