英语学习资料

1. Stages of American literature and the representative writers of each stage

I. Colonial America (1607-1765) Captain John Smith Anne Bradstreet Edward Taylor

II. American Revolution (1766-1800) Benjamin Franklin Thomas Jefferson Thomas Paine

III. American Romanticism (1800-1865) Washington Irving Henry David Thoreau Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Walt Whitman Emily Dickinson Nathaniel Hawthorne Edgar Allan Poe

VI. American Realism (1865-1918) Jack London O Henry Mark Twain Henry James

V. American Modernism (1918-1945)

Ezra Pound Robert Frost Ernest Hemingway William Faulkner T. S. Eliot

VI. American Contemporary Literature (1945- )

D.H. Lawrence Richard Wright Ralph Ellison James Baldwin Arthur Miller

2. Characteristics of Poe’s short stories

a. The use of complex narrators. The ability to manipulate narrative point of view was quite new in Poe’s time.

b. To place his characters in a special situation so that their psychological states can be detailed and sharply described. c. The incompleteness and self-loathing part of an individual, leading to the destruction of the other, thus to self-destruction.

d. The abundant use of symbols.

3. Classification of the works of Mark Twin The Gilded Age，The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Innocents Abroad，A Tramp Abroad The Prince and Pauper，A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court，A Note of £1000000. Roughing It，Following the Equator，The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County，The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

4. Symbolic meaning in The Scarlet Letter

The narrator of The Scarlet Letter chooses to begin his story with the image of rosebushes next to the prison door. The