美国文学常耀信书中关键词分类整理

1、Ø FATHER FIGURES1. Benjamin Franklin for quite some time he was regarded as the father of his country, even more than Washington was.2. To say that Washington Irving was father of American literature is not much exaggeration.3. Pound, who called Walt Whitman a "pigheaded father," reco

2、gnized him nonetheless as a father figure who led the break from the past.4. Edgar Allan Poe was father of many things, one of which is psychoanalytic criticism, the other being the detective story.5. Ezra Pounds Cantos, especially his Pisan Cantos, became the new model for contemporary poets with i

3、ts features such as its autobiographical and personal tone, and its open, spontaneous, and sometimes agrammatical style. And he became a father figure.6. Wallace Stevens was a very successful business man, rising to the position of vice-president in a Connecticut insurance company, while at the same

4、 time writing poetry of a kind which was to make him a father-figure among contemporary poets.7. William Carlos Williams has been recognized as a forefather of open verse.8. For Faulkner the younger writer expressed his respect for the older more than adequately when he stated that Sherwood Anderson

5、 was "the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on." Anderson has been called "a writer's writer."9. Susan Glaspell has been regarded by some people as "mother of American drama."Ø SPOK

6、ESMAN1. With Benjamin Franklin as its spokesman, eighteen-century America experienced an age of enlightenment, reason, and order like England and Europe.2. Ralph Waldo Emerson became the most eloquent spokesman of New England Transcendentalism.3. In political-social ideas and attitudes Henry James,

7、writing about the wealthy, deep-rooted leisure class, became in a way its spokesman, stressing travel, cosmopolitanism, manners, and taste as indices to social superiority.4. F. Scott Fitzgerald was essentially a 1920s person. He was part of it and eventually died with it. Inside he knew it well. Ou

8、tside he saw it ironically. And he continued to write about it right until his death. Even The Last Tycoon is not a book about anything else. He thus became the spokesman of a crucial and revealing period in the cultural history of his country.5. Allen Ginsberg will be remembered, first and foremost

9、, as the spokesman of the postwar Beat Generation in American literary history.Ø MANIFESTO1. McTeague has been called "the first full-bodied naturalistic American novel" and "a consciously naturalistic manifesto."2. The Waste Land which, revealing as it does the spiritual cr

10、isis of postwar Europe, read like the manifesto of the "Lost Generation" and established Eliot's position as the leader not only of new American poetry, but of a whole generation of writers later to be identified as "Waste Land Painters" like Hemingway and Faulkner.Ø THE

11、 GREATEST1. Roger Williams was one of the greatest Puritan dissenters in the early days of Puritan theocracy in New England.2. With the publication of The Scarlet Letter in 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne became famous as the greatest writer living then in the United States (as indeed some critics put it)

12、 and his reputation as a major American author has been on the increase ever since.3. Edgar Allan Poe was, Bernard Shaw said on the centenary of his birth, "the greatest journalistic critic of his time" his poetry is "exquisitely refined" and his tales are "complete works of

13、 art."4. Carl Sandburg is the greatest of the prairie poets.5. Randall Jarrell was a very famous critic of his time. He was probably the greatest poet-critic of his generation.6. Frederick Douglass was the greatest voice of the African Americans in the nineteenth century.7. The Four Quartets is

14、 the best work of the later phase of T. S. Eliots career, and some critics claim that it is one of best long poems (if not the best) to come out of the twentieth century.8. William Faulkner has been considered America's greatest novelist to come out of the twentieth century. The best of his fict

15、ions, which deal with basic human nature and the basic patterns of human behavior, rank among the most enduring works of world literature.9. The thirties also witnessed the vogue of the hard-boiled novels, of which the best was perhaps John O'Hara's (1905-1970) Appointment in Samara (1934).1

16、0. In a sense the thirties can be called the decade of John Dos Passos. He was the leading naturalist of the Depression, and his masterwork, U. S. A., was probably the best work that came out of the period.Ø FIRST1. William Bradford led the Mayflower endeavor and became the first governor of th

17、e Plymouth Plantation that he established with his group of Pilgrim Fathers.2. Anne Bradstreet is the first describes the initial response of a Puritan to a disastrous occurrence.3. One most prominent among these writers was Charles Brockden Brown, whose first novel, Wieland; or, The Transformation:

18、 An American Tale (1798) has been regarded as the first American novel.4. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was probably the first of its kind in literature.5. Washington Irving was the first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame.6. The Pioneers historical importa

19、nce lies in the fact that it was probably the first true romance of the frontier in American literature. (Leatherstocking Tales)7. They are among the first Indians to appear in American fiction and probably the first group of noble savages. (Leatherstocking Tales)8. "The Raven" is thus a p

20、erfect illustration of his theory on poetry. A good specimen of a poem which does not say very much is his "The Bells", which is an elaborate display of pure technique with little or no substance. Its poetry exists in its ingenious creation of sounds. All sounds, vowels and diphthongs for

21、example, and all poetic devices such as alliteration, assonance, and consonance are brought into full play for the "rhythmical creation of beauty." This was one of the reasons why Edgar Allan Poe was and has been regarded as one of the first aesthetes in literary history.9. Edgar Allan Poe

22、 was the first author in American literature to make the neurotic the heroic figure, the protagonist, in his stories.10. Henry James, by emphasizing the inner awareness and inward movements of his characters in face of outside occurrences rather than merely delineating their environment in any detai

23、l, became probably the first of the modern psychological analysts in the novel and anticipated in his works the modern stream-of-consciousness technique so widely employed in the first decades of this century. ("the legend of the Master")11. Sherwood Anderson took his cue from Mark Twain a

24、nd became, as Richard Bridgman puts it, about the first writer after Twain to take the vernacular as a serious way of presenting reality.12. William Faulkner declared, "In my opinion, Mark Twain was the first truly American writer, and all of us since are his heirs, who descended from him."

25、;13. Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is the first uncompromising naturalistic novel in America.14. McTeague has been called "the first full-bodied naturalistic American novel" and "a consciously naturalistic manifesto."15. The first Imagist theorist is the English writer T.

26、E. Hulme.16. It is the Imagism that helped to open the first pages of modern English and American poetry.17. T. S. Eliot's was a highly refined sensibility. He was one of the first if not the first to sense the futility and fragmentization of modern life and see modern society at its most disgus

27、ting. As Archibald MacLeish, one of his followers, noted eloquently, Eliot's poetry said more about the modern chaos in fifty or sixty lines than all the social critics and their volumes put together. But his search for order, form, and discipline led him toward conservatism and to religion for

28、salvation.18. Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. T. S. Eliot read The Great Gatsby three times and concluded that it was "the first step that American fiction has taken since Henry James."19. In Our Time is interesting precisely because, for the first time, a

29、Hemingway hero appears on the scene to learn to live in grace under pressure.20. In the last words of Harry Morgan, the hero of To Have and Have Not: "A man alone ain't got no bloody chance." Here for the first time Hemingway's old individualistic postulate gave way to a fresh fait

30、h in the social destinies of men.21. Sartoris (1929) revealed Faulkner's fuller development as a writer. For the first time, he entered his fictional county and began to create a world of his own.22. Sherwood Anderson was probably the first writer since Mark Twain to write in the colloquial styl

31、e.23. The first American author to win the Nobel Prize for literature, Sinclair Lewis has been called the worst important writer in American Literature. / Sinclair Lewis, though "Edwardian" in form, wrote to pave his way for the first Nobel Prize in literature that an American ever won.24.

32、 Whereas Nathanael West was little known when alive, he has received good posthumous critical attention and has been regarded as one of best writers to come out of the 1930s and the first important postwar novelist. He is seen as a predecessor to the American novelists of the absurd in the 1960s.25.

33、 Susan Glaspell founded with her husband the first influential noncommercial theater troupe in America.26. In 1965 Arthur Miller was elected the first American president of the international P. E. N. (International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists). 27. Hanay Geio

34、gamah was the first Native American to bring out his collection of plays in 1980.28. The first to call for a new American verse in the postwar period, Charles Olson has remained an influence on contemporary American poetry. He was one of the first, if not the first, to locate clearly the problem wit

35、h American poetry in the 1950s.29. After graduation, J. D. Salinger attended a short-story writing class at Columbia University, and published his first story "The Young Folks" in the Story magazine. This was the first time Salinger dealt with the subject of a boy thrown into the adult wor

36、ld to shift for himself.30. Postwar American drama has been said to begin with the staging of The Glass Menagerie in 1945. Its author, Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), has certainly become one of the greatest American dramatists to go down in the country's literary history.31. John Barth was the

37、first to announce that the traditional novel is dead, and that traditional novelistic resources have been exhausted. A whole new way of writing would have to be found for the novel to continue as a genre.32. Catch-22 was the first book in America to treat the absurdist theme with absurdist technique

38、s. It protests against the absurdity of modern America as embodied by the military power structure it describes.33. John Barth was born in Maryland and became a college writing teacher in the early 1950s. Both were significant facts of his life because the first relates him to the "southern" literary tradition of Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, and the second places him among a generation of writers many of whom have to do with the academia.34. The African