Selected Readings in American Literature ??????

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Selected Readings in American Literature??????
  

• Ma Ke-yun Foreign Languages School
  Shaoxing UniversityJan.12th, 2007 Email
  marco663_at_sohu.com
• Tel [phone]

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The United States
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• Table of Contents
• Part I The Literature of colonial America
•  
• 1.     Historical Background
• 2.     The Literature
• 3.     Puritan Thoughts

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• Part II The Literature of Romanticism
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• 1. Historical Introduction Literary
  Characteristics
• 2.  Edgar Allan Poe
• The Cask of Amontillado To Helen
• Annabel Lee
• 3.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Self-Reliance
• 4.  Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Young Goodman Brown

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• Part III The Literature of Realism
• 1. Walt Whitman
• Ones Self I Sing O Captain! My
  Captain!
• 2. Mark Twain
• The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
  County

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• Part IV Twentieth-century Literature
• 1. William Faulkner
• A Rose for Emily
• 2. Ernest Hemingway
• A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
• 3. Robert Frost
• Fire and Ice
• Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
• The Road Not Taken

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Part V Modern American Drama

• 1. Eugene Glastone ONeill
• Desire Under the Elms
• 2. Arthur Miller
• Death of a Salesman

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• Part I The Literature of Colonial America
• 1. Historical Background
• After Christopher Columbuss exploration of
  the new continent (1504), in the early sixteenth
  century, the colonists, English and European
  explorers arrived in the new vast continental
  area. The earliest settlers included Dutch,
  Swedes, Germans, French, Spaniards, Italians and
  Portuguese. They established respectively their
  own colonies in the new continent. Dutch settled
  along the Hudson River, Swedes explored the
  Delaware, Germans and Scotch-Irish conquered in
  New York and Pennsylvania Frenchmen settled in
  the Northern Colonies and along the St. Lawrence
  River, and the Spanish controlled Florida.

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• At last early in the seventeenth century, the
  English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts
  began the main stream of what we recognize as the
  American national history. All these settlers
  contributed to the forming of the American
  civilization, but the English settlements were
  most influential. The most part of the English
  colonies was sustained by English traditions,
  ruled by English laws, supported by English
  commerce, and named after English monarchs and
  English lands Georgia, Carolina, Virginia,
  Maryland, New York, New Hampshire, New England
  (the northeastern most region of the U.S.A.
  comprising the states of Connecticut, Maine,
  Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and
  Vermont, so named by John Smith when he explored
  it in 1614. New Englander a native or resident
  of New England.).

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• 2.       The Literature
• The first American literature was neither
  American nor really literature. It was not
  American because it was the work mainly of
  immigrants from England. It was not literature as
  we know it---in the form of poetry, essays, or
  fiction---but rather an interesting mixture of
  travel accounts and religious writings. The
  earliest colonial travel accounts are records of
  the perils and frustrations that challenged the
  courage of Americas first settlers. The early
  settlers wrote about their voyage to the new
  land, about adapting themselves to unfamiliar
  climates and crops, about dealing with Indians.
  They wrote in diaries and in journals. They wrote
  letters and contracts and government charters and
  religious and political statements. They wrote
  about the land which stretched before
  them---unimaginable and immense, with rich dense
  forests and deep-blue lakes and rich soil.

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• 3.       Puritan Thoughts
• The English immigrants (The Mayflower voyage
  1620) who settled on Americas northern seacoast,
  appropriately called New England, came in order
  to practice their religion freely. They were
  either Englishmen who wanted to reform the Church
  of England or people who wanted to have an
  entirely new church. These two groups combined,
  especially in what became Massachusetts, came to
  be known as Puritans, so named after those who
  wished to purify the church of England.
  Puritans wanted to make pure their religious
  beliefs and practices. The Puritan was a
  would-be purifier who thought himself holier or
  better than others.

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• The Puritans wished to restore simplicity to
  church services and the authority of the Bible to
  theology. They felt that the Church of England
  was too close to the Church of Rome in doctrine,
  form of worship, and organization of authority.
  Another point of controversy was that the Church
  of England was the established church, that is,
  the official church of the state, and the most
  extreme Puritans, among them the Plymouth
  Plantation group, felt that the influences of
  politics and the court had led to corruption
  within the church. These Puritans were
  Separatists, that is, they wished to break free
  from the Church of England. The Massachusetts Bay
  group, on the other hand, wished to reform the
  church but remain a part of it.

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• The Puritans followed many of the ideas of the
  French reformer John Calvin. Through the
  Calvinist influence the Puritans emphasized the
  then common belief that human beings were
  basically evil and could do nothing about it and
  that many of them, though not all, would surely
  be condemned to hell. Over the years the Puritans
  built a way of life that was in harmony with
  their somber religion, one that stressed hard
  work, thrift, piety, and sobriety. These were the
  Puritan values that dominated much of the
  earliest American writing, including the sermons,
  books, and letters of such noted Puritan
  clergymen as John Cotton and Cotton Mather.

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• Questions
• 1. How can you rate the English Settlement
  in America in the 17th century?
• 2. Why do we say the colonial American literature
  is neither American nor really literature?
• 3. Whats your understanding of the American
  Puritan thoughts? What are the motifs?

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Thanks for Your Participation!