Elmer Gantry (1927) 《艾尔默.甘特利》
Dodsworth (1929) 《多滋沃斯》
It Can’t Happen Here (1935) 《这不可能在这里发生》
6 Female Writers
(1) Edith Wharton (1862—1937) 伊迪丝.华顿
Born in a distinguished New York family
Privately educated in U.S. and abroad
The House of Mirth (1905)《快乐之家》
--story of a New York girl whose attempts to make a brilliant marriage lead to ostracism because she breaks conventional standards;
(2) Ellen Glasgow (1874—1945) 艾伦.格拉斯哥
Born in Richmond, Virginia, of an aristocratic southern family
The Descendant (1897)--her first novel
The Barren Ground (1925)《荒芜的土地》
The Romantic Comedians (1926)《浪漫主义喜剧演员》
(3) Willa Cather (1873—1947) 维拉.凯瑟
Novelist, short-story teller & poet
Born in Virginia and moved to Nebraska (immigrants)
University of Nebraska
The Sculptor’s Funeral 《雕刻家的葬礼》
A Lost Lady (1923)《一个沉沦的妇女》
The Professor’s House (1925)《教授的住宅》
Death Comes to the Archbishop (1927)《死神迎接大主教》
Shadow on the Rock (1931) 《磐石上的阴影》
7 Literary critics:
New Criticism“新批评派”
---literary analysis identified mainly with concentration on elements of an isolated literary work (usually a poem) as they illuminate the whole. It concentrates on semantics, meter, imagery, metaphor, and symbol and deals with the work’s tone, texture, and tensions to explicate a fused form and content in a piece of writing, rather than dealing with the relation of that piece to an age, a tradition, or an author’s whole body of writing.
(1) Cleanth Brooks (1906—1994) 克里恩斯.布鲁克斯
literary critic
eminent among the New Critics of the mid-20th century
studied at Vanderbilt University
---where he was a student of J. C. Ransom and met R. P. Warren
then at Tulane University
Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University
a professor of English at Yale College
The Well-Wrought Urn (1947)---his best-known work
Modern Poetry and The Tradition (1939)
(2) Malcolm Cowley (1898—1989) 马尔科姆.考利
born in Pennsylvania
served in World War I
graduated from Harvard (1920)
later became an expatriate in France
Exiles’ Return / Exile’s Return: A Narrative of Ideas
《流放者归来》(1934, revised in 1951)
8 Black Literature
Harlem Renaissance哈莱姆文艺复兴
The white intellectuals were tired of the old habits, traditions and lives after W. W. I, and showed increasing interests in black culture and music. As a result, black culture developed greatly.
(1) Langston Hughes (1902—1946) 兰斯顿.休斯
Missouri-born major figure of the Harlem Renaissance
black poet, novelist and playwright
had a nomadic life in the U. S. and Europe
The Weary Blues (1926)《萎靡的布鲁斯》
Fine Clothes to the Jew (1927) 《献给犹太人的好衣裳》
Not Without Laughter (1930) 《不是没有笑声》---long novel
The Ways of White Folks (1934) 《白人的行径》
Simple Speaks of His Mind (1950) 《辛普尔倾吐衷情》
The Best of Simple (1961) 《辛普尔的高明》
Simple’s Uncle Tom (1965) 《辛普尔的山姆叔叔》
The Big Sea (1940) 《大海》
I wonder as I Wander (1956) 《我徘徊，我彷徨》
Laurel poet of Harlem
(2) Richard Wright (1908—1960) 理查德.赖特
self-educated black author
Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)《汤姆大叔的孩子们》
Native Son (1940)《土生子》
Black Boy: A Record of Childhood (1945)《黑孩子》
VI Contemporary Literature (1945-- ) 当代文学
I Postwar American Novels
(I) Background
So much has occurred since 1945 that recent American literature, dealing with the new experience, has acquired an imposing stature. The postwar prosperity produced a sense of optimism, which was, however, very soon vitiated by the “Cold War” between the powers. Crisis was impending. Chaos became institutionalized. A sense of life being absurd undercut the very existence of man. The life of the 1950s was poisoned at the root by McCarthyism, and that of the 60s enriched by the Civil Rights movement, the appearance of a counter culture, and an upsurge of feminism and feminist power. Whereas the Vietnam War weighed all the time on the consciousness of the people, life was complicated by violence, political or racial, including the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Everything seemed to be subjected to a prevailing skepticism. New advances in science and technology have given people an increasing sense of power, but have also further deprived life of its mysteries. The representation of the multifaceted life of postwar America has remained the reward and despair of the writers who began to publish after the war.
This is a very interesting period in the history of American literature, invigorated as it is with robust energy and bustling with creative activity. The new generation of authors has proved their newness and competence by a wide range of experimentation that would have dazzled even their brilliantly original predecessors like Faulkner and Hemingway. The following types of novels came to public notice in the years from the end of the war through 1960: the war novel, the southern novel, the Jewish novel, the Beat novel and alienation, the Black novel, and satire and the novel of manners（战争小说，南方小说、犹太人小说、颓废小说、黑人小说、讽刺与风俗小说）. And the period after that has been one in which American fiction is noted for its fantasy and surrealism, its nonfiction, science fiction, black or absurd humor, parody and pop, and its experimental novelistic techniques（梦幻与超现实主义小说、非虚构小说、科幻小说、黑色或荒诞幽默小说、模仿与通俗小说、实验主义小说.
Post-modernism
Media-influenced aesthetic sensibility of the late 20th century characterized by open-endedness and collage. Post-modernism questions the foundations of cultural and artistic forms through self-referential irony and the juxtaposition of elements from popular culture and electronic technology.
Surrealism
European literary and artistic movement that uses illogical, dreamlike images and events to suggest the unconscious.
Three characteristics of contemporary novels:
1 the beat generation 垮掉的一代
2 black humor 黑色幽默
3 identity 自我本质
Beat Movement:
a bohemian rebellion against established society which came to prominence about 1956 and had its centers in San Francisco and New York. The term “Beat “ expressed both exhaustion and beatification in that the writers, tired of conventional society, and disgusted by it, believed that thoroughgoing disaffiliation from all aspects of the manners and mores of what they saw as a corrupt, crass, commercial world would bring its own kind of blissful illumination, aided by drink and drugs. Writers of the movement expressed their views in their own “hip” vocabulary, combined with phrases from Buddhism, by which they were influenced,.
1 War Novel
40s—50s
(1) John Hersey 约翰.赫西
A Bell for Adano 《阿丹诺之钟》
(2) Norman Mailer 诺曼.梅勒
The Naked and the Dead《裸者和死者》
(3) John Hawks 约翰.霍克斯
The Cannibal 《食人者》
(4) James Jones 詹姆斯.琼斯
From Here to Eternity《从这里到永恒》
(5) Irwin Shaw (1913—1984) 欧文.肖
The Young Lions <幼狮>
after 50s
(6) Thomas Berger托马斯.伯杰
Crazy in Berlin 《疯狂的柏林》
(7) Joseph Heller 约瑟夫.海勒
Catch-22《第22条军规》
(8) Kurt Vonnegut Jr.库尔特.冯尼戈特
Slaughterhouse-Five 《第五号屠场》
2 the southern novel
(1) Eudora Welty 尤多拉.韦尔蒂
Short stories
The Golden Apple 《金苹果》
The Bride of Innisfallen 《英尼斯福伦的新娘》
Death of a Traveling Salesman 《旅行推销员之死》1936
