论文关键词：美国文学 浪漫主义 超验主义 现实主义 现代主义 论文摘要：浪漫主义时期是美国文学史上最重要的时期之一。当美国人在大刀阔斧地建设自己的国家时，也开始逐渐意识到逐渐与欧洲的不同。随着不断增强的民族主义意识及民族自豪感，美国人开始希望见到自己的不同与欧洲模式，能表达他们字的美国风情的文学。这个时代伟大的作家充满热情地记录下这个伟大时代的乐观主义精神。随后美国文学进入了超验主义时代。超验主义十分强调个人主义、自立、拒绝传统权威思想。它实际上是对浪漫主义的发展。 然后，美国的国家自信心受到了内战的动摇。内战过后，美国处在迷茫中。在1900年前后这段时期的文学由于美国国内环境的变化而由浪漫主义和超验主义乐观精神转向对社会和人类本质更直接的研讨。从某种角度，现实主义反对浪漫主义的理想主义和怀旧情绪。它主要关注中下层人民的日常生活，而在这种情况下人物性格是社会因素影响的结果，环境是整个事件发展不可分割的部分。 1910年至1930年间被称为现代主义时期。一战后，美国进入了高度繁荣的十年，商业的繁荣程度超过了许多人的想象。20世纪初期，现代机器改变了人们日常生活的节奏、环境和面貌。大批的艺术家和作家获得了不同程度的成功，开始改造传统的艺术形式，试图从中发现新的元素—人们进入机械时代之后所产生的美学共鸣。在这个时期，很多艺术家和文学运动在很大程度上与19世纪的风格、形式及内容迥异。现代的心理学对20世纪早期的文学产生了深刻的作用，法语论文题目，大多数优秀的现代主义作家对人类心理学表现出浓厚兴趣。 Abstract Romantic Period is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature. When Americans were constructing their country, they also began to realize their differences from their European counterparts. They began to hope to see an entirely different literature model which expressed American cultures. Great writers of that period captured on their pages the enthusiasm and the optimism of that dream. Later，法语论文范文，American literature came to Transcendentalism Period which emphasized individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of tradition authority. It was actually greatly influenced by romanticism. However, the country’s confidence was waved by the Civil War. After the war, Americans got lost. At about 1900s, American literature came to another entirely different age—the age of Realism. Realists searched for the social and human nature more directly. In part, Realism was a reaction against the Romantic emphasis on the strange, idealistic, and long-ago and far-away. It has been chiefly concerned with the commonplaces of everyday life among the middle and lower classes where character is a product of social factors and environment is the integral element in the dramatic complications. The period between 1910 and 1930 is referred to as the era of Modernism. As modern machinery had changed the pace, atmosphere, and appearance of daily life in the early 20th century, so many artists and writers, with varying degrees of success, reinvented traditional artistic forms and tried to find radically new ones—an aesthetic echo of what people had come to call “the machine age.” During that period, a large number of artists and literary movements are totally different from those of the 19th-century’s, in style, form and content. Modern psychology has a profound impact on the early 20th-century’s literature. Key words: American literature; Romanticism; New England Transcendentalism; Realism; Modernism 1. American Romanticism Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s experience of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions. The romantic period of American literature stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It was an age of westward expansion, of the increasing gravity of the slavery question, of an intensification of the spirit of embattled sectionalism in the South, and of a powerful impulse to reform in the North. In literature it was America’s first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impulse on American soil. 1.1 The unique characteristics of American Romanticism Although greatly influenced by their English counterparts, the American romantic writers revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native lands. For examp1e，(1) the American national experience of "pioneering into the west" proved to be a rich source of material for American writers to draw upon. They celebrated America‘s landscape with its virgin forests, meadows, groves, endless prairies, streams, and vast oceans. The wilderness came to function almost as a dramatic character that symbolized moral 1aw. (2) The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature. Such a desire is particularly evident in Cooper’s Leather Stocking Tales, in Thoreau‘s Walden and， later, in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (3) With the growth of American national consciousness, American character types speaking local dialects appeared in poetry and fiction with increasing frequency. (4)Then the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values and American Romanticism. One of the manifestations is the fact that American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counterparts. (5) Besides, a preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of origina1 sin and the mystery of evil marked the works of Hawthorne, Melville and a host of lesser writers. 1.2 Representative writers and their works |
