美国文学史7(1)the1920S

1、 The 1920s Part 1The flowering of New England TranscendentalismAm RenaissanceThe 1920sthe second Am Renaissance I Backgroundhistorical facts: 1.WWI: enthusiastic, profitable ,deceptive affluence,urbannized, “Jazz Age” 2.the sense of life being dislocated and fragmented keenly felt in the first years

2、 of the twentieth century:idealism evapotated, disillusionment widely felt, high degree of intolerence toward WASP values,loss of faith stronly feltsituation in the literature field Modernism: a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in the lite

3、rature(and other arts)of the early 20th century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dada, and Surrealism, along with the innovations of unaffiliated writers. Modernist literature is characterized chiefly by a rejection of 19th-century traditions. Modernist writers dist

4、urbed their readers by adopting complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters thoughts in their stream-of consciousness style. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot replaced the logical exposition of thoughts

5、 with collages of fragmentary images and complex allusions. Modernist writing is predominantly cosmopolitan, and often expresses a sense of urban cultural dislocation, along with an awareness of new anthropological and psychological theories. Its favored techniques of juxtaposition and multiple poin

6、t of view challenge the reader to reestablish a coherence of meaning from fragmentary forms. In English, its major landmarks are Joyces Ulysses and Eliots The Waste Land (both 1922).Imagism:the doctrine and poetic practice of a small but influential group of American and British poets calling themse

7、lves imagists between 1912 and 1917. Led at first by Ezra Pound, and then by Amy Lowell, the group rejected most 19th-century poetry as cloudy verbiage, and aimed instead at a new clarity and exactness in the short lyric poem. The imagists cultivated concision and directness, building their short po

8、ems around single images; they also preferred looser cadences to traditional regular rhythms. Apart from Pound and Lowell, the group also includes H.D.(Hilda Dolittle), F.S.Flint, D.H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams.1.its three phases2.its influence1)the imagist theories call for brief languag

9、e, describing the precise picture in as few words as possible. This newway of poetry composition has a lasting influence in the 20th century poetry.2)the second lasting influence of Imagism is the form of free verse. There are no metrical rules. There are apparent indiscriminate line breaks, which r

10、eflects the discontinuity of life itself. That is art of the poem. (The poet uses the length of the lines and the strange groupings of words to show how life itself can be broken up into somehow meaningless clusters.) II modernist writers Ezra PoundOften identified as the father of modern American p

11、oetry, he led the experiment in revolutionizing poetry. He is one of the most important imagist & critic of his time. He had enormous influence on the modernist writers in Britain and America after WWI.Works :Homage to Sextus PropertiusHugh Selwyn MauberleyCantos T.S.Eliot He was a poet,playwright,

12、and literary critic. His literary reputation is generally considered greater than his teacher Ezra Pound. He became the acknowledged leader of the new verse and criticism both in Am and Br by 1925. poems: The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock Gerontion The Waste Land Hollow man Ash Wednesday Four Quartetsdrama:critical essays:Anti-hero:It is common in modernistic wo