1. religion – doubt and belief about religious subjects
2. death and immortality
3. love – suffering and frustration caused by love
4. physical aspect of desire
5. nature – kind and cruel
6. free will and human responsibility
   4. style

1. poems without titles
2. severe economy of expression
3. directness, brevity
4. musical device to create cadence (rhythm)
5. capital letters – emphasis
6. short poems, mainly two stanzas
7. rhetoric techniques: personification – make some of abstract ideas vivid

3. Comparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson
   1. Similarities:

1. Thematically, they both extolled, in their different ways, an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of “American Renaissance”.
2. Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry.
   2. differences:

1. Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual.
2. Whereas Whitman is “national” in his outlook, Dickinson is “regional”.
3. Dickinson has the “catalogue technique” (direct, simple style) which Whitman doesn’t have.

Edgar Allen Poe

1. Life
2. Works

1. short stories

1. ratiocinative stories
   1. Ms Found in a Bottle
   2. The Murders in the Rue Morgue
   3. The Purloined Letter
2. Revenge, death and rebirth
   1. The Fall of the House of Usher
   2. Ligeia
   3. The Masque of the Red Death
3. Literary theory
   1. The Philosophy of Composition
   2. The Poetic Principle
   3. Review of Hawthorne’s Twice-told Tales

3. Themes
   1. death – predominant theme in Poe’s writing

“Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everything in Poe’s writings is dead.”

2. disintegration (separation) of life
3. horror
4. negative thoughts of science

4. Aesthetic ideas
   1. The short stories should be of brevity, totality, single effect, compression and finality.
   2. The poems should be short, and the aim should be beauty, the tone melancholy. Poems should not be of moralizing. He calls for pure poetry and stresses rhythm.
5. Style – traditional, but not easy to read
6. Reputation: “the jingle man” (Emerson)
7. His influences

Chapter 3 The Age of Realism

1. Background: From Romanticism to Realism

1. the three conflicts that reached breaking point in this period

1. industrialism vs. agrarian
2. culturely-measured east vs. newly-developed west
3. plantation gentility vs. commercial gentility

2. 1880’s urbanization: from free competition to monopoly capitalism
3. the closing of American frontier

2. Characteristics

1. truthful description of life
2. typical character under typical circumstance
3. objective rather than idealized, close observation and investigation of life

“Realistic writers are like scientists.”

4. open-ending:

Life is complex and cannot be fully understood. It leaves much room for readers to think by themselves.

5. concerned with social and psychological problems, revealing the frustrations of characters in an environment of sordidness and depravity

3. Three Giants in Realistic Period

1. William Dean Howells – “Dean of American Realism”

1. Realistic principles

1. Realism is “fidelity to experience and probability of motive”.
2. The aim is “talk of some ordinary traits of American life”.
3. Man in his natural and unaffected dullness was the object of Howells’s fictional representation.
4. Realism is by no means mere photographic pictures of externals but includes a central concern with “motives” and psychological conflicts.
5. He condemns novels of sentimentality and morbid self-sacrifice, and avoids such themes as illicit love.
6. Authors should minimize plot and the artificial ordering of the sense of something “desultory, unfinished, imperfect”.
7. Characters should have solidity of specification and be real.
8. Interpreting sympathetically the “common feelings of commonplace people” was best suited as a technique to express the spirit of America.
9. He urged writers to winnow tradition and write in keeping with current humanitarian ideals.
10. Truth is the highest beauty, but it includes the view that morality penetrates all things.
11. With regard to literary criticism, Howells felt that the literary critic should not try to impose arbitrary or subjective evaluations on books but should follow the detached scientist in accurate description, interpretation, and classification.

2. Works

1. The Rise of Silas Lapham
2. A Chance Acquaintance
3. A Modern Instance

3. Features of His Works

1. Optimistic tone
2. Moral development/ethics
3. Lacking of psychological depth

2. Henry James
   1. Life
   2. Literary career: three stages

1. 1865~1882: international theme

• The American
• Daisy Miller
• The Portrait of a Lady

2. 1882~1895: inter-personal relationships and some plays

• Daisy Miller (play)

3. 1895~1900: novellas and tales dealing with childhood and adolescence, then back to international theme

• The Turn of the Screw
• When Maisie Knew
• The Ambassadors
• The Wings of the Dove
• The Golden Bowl
  3. Aesthetic ideas

1. The aim of novel: represent life
2. Common, even ugly side of life
3. Social function of art
4. Avoiding omniscient point of view
   4. Point of view

1. Psychological analysis, forefather of stream of consciousness
2. Psychological realism
3. Highly-refined language
   5. Style – “stylist”

1. Language: highly-refined, polished, insightful, accurate
2. Vocabulary: large
3. Construction: complicated, intricate

3. Mark Twain (see next section)

Local Colorism

1860s, 1870s~1890s

1. Appearance

1. uneven development in economy in America
2. culture: flourishing of frontier literature, humourists
3. magazines appeared to let writer publish their works

2. What is “Local Colour”?

Tasks of local colourists: to write or present local characters of their regions in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.

Regional literature (similar, but larger in world)

• Garland, Harte – the west
• Eggleston – Indiana
• Mrs Stowe
• Jewett – Maine
• Chopin – Louisiana

3. Mark Twain – Mississippi
   1. life
   2. works

1. The Gilded Age
2. “the two advantages”
3. Life on the Mississippi
4. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
5. The Man That Corrupted Hardleybug
   3. style

1. colloquial language, vernacular language, dialects
2. local colour
3. syntactic feature: sentences are simple, brief, sometimes ungrammatical
4. humour
5. tall tales (highly exaggerated)
6. social criticism (satire on the different ugly things in society)

4. Comparison of the three “giants” of American Realism
   1. Theme

Howells – middle class

James – upper class

Twain – lower class

2. Technique

Howells – smiling/genteel realism

James – psychological realism

Twain – local colourism and colloquialism

Chapter 4 American Naturalism

1. Background

1. Darwin’s theory: “natural selection”
2. Spenser’s idea: “social Darwinism”
3. French Naturalism: Zora

2. Features

1. environment and heredity
2. scientific accuracy and a lot of details
3. general tone: hopelessness, despair, gloom, ugly side of the society

3. significance

It prepares the way for the writing of 1920s’ “lost generation” and T. S. Eliot.

4. Theodore Dreiser

1. life
2. works

1. Sister Carrie
2. The trilogy: Financier, The Titan, The Stoic
3. Jennie Gerhardt
4. American Tragedy
5. The Genius

3. point of view

1. He embraced social Darwinism – survival of the fittest. He learned to regard man as merely an animal driven by greed and lust in a struggle for existence in which only the “fittest”, the most ruthless, survive.
2. Life is predatory, a “game” of the lecherous and heartless, a jungle struggle in which man, being “a waif and an interloper in Nature”, a “wisp in the wind of social forces”, is a mere pawn in the general scheme of things, with no power whatever to assert his will.
3. No one is ethically free; everything is determined by a complex of internal chemisms and by the forces of social pressure.

4. Sister Carrie

1. Plot
2. Analysis

5. Style

1. Without good structure
2. Deficient characterization
3. Lack in imagination
4. Journalistic method
5. Techniques in painting

Chapter 5 The Modern Period

Section 1 The 1920s

I.Introduction

The 1920s is a flowering period of American literature. It is considered “the second renaissance” of American literature.

The nicknames for this period:

1. Roaring 20s – comfort
2. Dollar Decade – rich
3. Jazz Age – Jazz music

II.Background

a)First World War – “a war to end all wars”

1. Economically: became rich from WWI. Economic boom: new inventions. Highly-consuming society.
2. Spiritually: dislocation, fragmentation.

b)wide-spread contempt for law (looking down upon law)

1. Freud’s theory

III.Features of the literature

Writers: three groups

1. Participants
2. Expatriates
3. Bohemian (unconventional way of life) – on-lookers

Two areas:

1. Failure of communication of Americans
2. Failure of the American society

Imagism

I.       Background

      Imagism was influenced by French symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese literature “haiku”

II.            Development: three stages

1. 1908~1909: London, Hulme
2. 1912~1914: England -> America, Pound
3. 1914~1917: Amy Lowell

III.    What is an “image”?

      An image is defined by Pound as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas” “endowed with energy”. The exact word must bring the effect of the object before the reader as it had presented itself to the poet’s mind at the time of writing.

IV.           Principles

1. Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective;
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;
3. As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

V.       Significance

1. It was a rebellion against the traditional poetics which failed to reflect the new life of the new century.
2. It offered a new way of writing which was valid not only for the Imagist poets but for modern poetry as a whole.
3. The movement was a training school in which many great poets learned their first lessons in the poetic art.
4. It is this movement that helped to open the first pages of modern English and American poetry.

VI.     Ezra Pound

1. life
2. literary career
3. works

1. Cathay
2. Cantos
3. Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

4. point of view

1. Confident in Pound’s belief that the artist was morally and culturally the arbiter and the “saviour” of the race, he took it upon himself to purify the arts and became the prime mover of a few experimental movements, the aim of which was to dump the old into the dustbin and bring forth something new.
2. To him life was sordid personal crushing oppression, and culture produced nothing but “intangible bondage”.
3. Pound sees in Chinese history and the doctrine of Confucius a source of strength and wisdom with which to counterpoint Western gloom and confusion.
4. He saw a chaotic world that wanted setting to rights, and a humanity, suffering from spiritual death and cosmic injustice, that needed saving. He was for the most part of his life trying to offer Confucian philosophy as the one faith which could help to save the West.

5. style: very difficult to read

Pound’s early poems are fresh and lyrical. The Cantos can be notoriously difficult in some sections, but delightfully beautiful in others. Few have made serious study of the long poem; fewer, if anyone at all, have had the courage to declare that they have conquered Pound; and many seem to agree that the Cantos is a monumental failure.

6. Contribution

He has helped, through theory and practice, to chart out the course of modern poetry.

7. The Cantos – “the intellectual diary since 1915”

Features:

1. Language: intricate and obscure
2. Theme: complex subject matters
3. Form: no fixed framework, no central theme, no attention to poetic rules

VII.   T. S. Eliot

1. life
2. works

1. poems

• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
• The Waste Land (epic)
• Hollow Man
• Ash Wednesday