美国文学 常耀信 书中关键词分类整理精选.doc

FATHER FIGURES Benjamin Franklin for quite some time he was regarded as the father of his country, even more than Washington was. To say that Washington Irving was father of American literature is not much exaggeration. Pound, who called Walt Whitman a pigheaded father, recognized him nonetheless as a father figure who led the break from the past. Edgar Allan Poe was father of many things, one of which is psychoanalytic criticism, the other being the detective story. Ezra Pound’s Cantos, especially his Pisan Cantos, became the new model for contemporary poets with its features such as its autobiographical and personal tone, and its open, spontaneous, and sometimes agrammatical style. And he became a father figure. Wallace Stevens was a very successful business man, rising to the position of vice-president in a Connecticut insurance company, while at the same time writing poetry of a kind which was to make him a father-figure among contemporary poets. William Carlos Williams has been recognized as a forefather of open verse. For Faulkner the younger writer expressed his respect for the older more than adequately when he stated that Sherwood Anderson 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 writers writer. Susan Glaspell has been regarded by some people as mother of American drama. SPOKESMAN With Benjamin Franklin as its spokesman, eighteen-century America experienced an age of enlightenment, reason, and order like England and Europe. Ralph Waldo Emerson became the most eloquent spokesman of New England Transcendentalism. In political-social ideas and attitudes Henry James, 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. F. Scott Fitzgerald was essentially a 1920s person. He was part of it and eventually died with it. Inside he knew it