An Introduction to British and
American Literature
传媒学院
王淼
Course objectives
• 《英美文学史》讲授英国、美国文学发展
历史的课程，它按照历史发展顺序介绍了
英美文学的发展过程，并就每个历史阶段
的主要代表人物和流派进行介绍。本课程
是英语专业高年级的必修课程，也是系统
学习和研究英美文学作品的必要环节。对
主要的英美文学作家和作品有所了解。基
本了解主要英语国家的地理、历史、现状、
文化传统，初步具备英语文学知识。
Reference books
• 英国文学简史 刘炳善编，上海外语教育出
版社
• 美国文学简史 常耀信编，南开大学出版社
• 美国文学学习指南 李正栓 编 清华大学出
版社
Part I A brief introduction of
British Literature
Old English Literature (450 -1066)
• Middle English literature (1066-1500)
• English Renaissance and Shakespeare (later half of
the 15th-the beginning of 17th Century)
• The 17th and 18th Century Literature
• Romantic Literature and Critical Realist (1798-1832)
• The Victorian Age (1832-1901)
• The 20th century Literature
Part II A History of American
Literature
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Early American and Colonial Period to 1776
Romanticism
New England Transcendentalism
Realism
Local Colorism
American Naturalism
The 1920s, imagism
The 1930s
Black American Literature
American Drama
Novels in the Post-War
Old English Literature (450 –
1066)
• The Anglo-Saxon Period: 449-1066
The early inhabitants in British Isles were
Britons, a tribe of Celts.
Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
Old English: Anglo-Saxon language
Norman Conquer: 1066
• Beowulf: The legendary hero of an
anonymous Old English epic poem
believed to have been composed in the
early eighth century. The subject matter of
this verse is concerning legendary or
historical figures that lived before the
Anglo-Saxon conquest of England.
Beowulf slays the monster Grendel and its
mother, becomes king of the Geats, and
dies fighting a dragon.
Middle English Literature (10661485)
• Background: England was in feudal
society
• King Arthur & His Knights of the Round
Table
• Sir Gawain & the Green Knight
(culmination, the prime)
• Ballad: Robin Hood
The Age of Chaucer
• Geoffrey Chaucer(1340?-1400 ): the founder of
English poetry. Forerunner of English realism
Forerunner of English humanism
• 24 stories in The Canterbury Tales cover major
literary genres in medieval Europe
• The Canterbury Tales is one of the landmarks of
English literature, perhaps the greatest work
produced in Middle English
The Significance of The
Canterbury Tales
• It gives a comprehensive picture of Chaucer’s
time;
• The dramatic structure of the poem is highly
commended;
• Chaucer’s gentle satire and mild irony made
him a pioneering English humorist writer;
• Chaucer wrote in the London dialect of his day.
In so doing Chaucer greatly increased the
prestige of the English language.
English Renaissance(1485-1603)
• Renaissance and Humanism
• Francis Bacon (essayist): essays
• Christopher Marlowe( 1564-1593): playwright;
Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor
Faustus.
• William Shakespeare: the greatest of all writers
and poets
• Tragedies: Hamlet; Othello; King Lear; Macbeth
• Comedies: The Twelfth Night; A Midsummer
Night’s Dream; The Merchant of Venice
• Sonnets
Shakespeare(1564-1616)
• The first period: Henry VI; Richard II,
III; Romeo and Juliet; A Mid-Summer
Night’s Dream; The Merchant of Venice;
Julius Caesar; As you like it; Twelfth Night
• The 2nd Period: Hamlet; Measure of
Measure; Othello; King Lear; Macbeth;
Antony and Cleopatra
• The 3rd Period: The Winter’s Tale; The
Tempest; Henry VIII
• Thomas More(1478-1535): Renaissance
English writer and Catholic martyr, in the
Tudor court of King Henry VIII. Utopia
• Ben Johnson(1572-1637): Renaissance
dramatist, playwright, and poet.
• Edmund Spenser (1552-1599): was an
important English poet and Poet Laureate
best known for The Faerie Queene
The Early 17th Century(16031660)
• English Bourgeois Revolution: the Puritan
Revolution
• John Milton: poet; Paradise Lost，
Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes.
Paradise Lost is a long epic in 12 books,
done in blank verse. The stories were
taken from the Old Testament.
• John Bunyan (1628-1688): : a typical
Puritan writer. The Pilgrim’s Progress
• Restoration Period: John Dryden(16311700), English dramatist, poet, critic and
leader in Restoration comedy wrote the
comedic play Marriage A-la-Mode, and the
tragedy All for Love.
• John Donne(1572-1631):17th century
English Metaphysical poet. Songs and
Sonnets, Holy Sonnets
The 18th Century (the Age of
Reason)
• The Enlightenment Movement
• Enlighteners: Joseph Addison and
Richard Steele: The Spectator
• Neoclassicism :
• Alexander Pope: Essay on Man, Essay on
Criticism, The Rape of the Lock
• Samuel Johnson: The Dictionary of the
English Language (1755), Lives of the
Poets
Realistic Novelists
• Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe, Moll
Flanders
• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
• Henry Fielding: Tom Jones
• Sentimentalism: overindulgence in one’s
emotion for the sake of his overwhelming
discontent towards the social reality and
pessimistic belief and emphasis upon the
virtues of man
• Samuel Richardson: Pamela, Clarissa
(epistolary novels)
• Oliver Goldsmith: The Vicar of Wakefield, The
deserted Village
• Lawrence Sterne: The Life and Opinions of
Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; A Sentimental
Journey Through France and Italy
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan: The School for
Scandal
• George Gordon, Lord Byron: Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage, Don Juan. A libertine;
a profligate. A man who is an obsessive
seducer of women. Completed in 1819,
published in 1821
• Percy Bysshe Shelley: Queen Mab;
Prometheus Unbound; Ode to the West
Wind; The Revolt of Islam, Prometheus
Unbound, The Masque of Anarchy
• John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale; Ode on a
Grecian Urn; To Autumn; Ode on Melancholy
• Sir Walter Scott: wrote historical novels: Rob
Roy; The Heart of Midlothian; Ivanhoe
• Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility; Pride and
Prejudice; Emma; Persuasion
• Samuel Johnson(1709-1784): Dictionary of
English language. A Preface of Shakespeare,
Lives of Poets
English Romanticism(1798-1832)
• Pre-romantic poets
• Robert Burns: the greatest of Scottish poets
• William Blake: Songs of Innocence and Songs of
Experience; The Lamb and The Tyger
• Romantic Period (1798-1832)
• The Lake Poets: William Wordsworth (I
Wandered Lonely as a Cloud), Samuel Taylor
Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Kubla Khan ), and Robert Southey
• William Wordsworth: the representative
poet of passive romanticism. Lyrical
Ballads, the break with the conventional
poetical tradition of the 18th century. The
preface to the Lyrical Ballads served as
the manifesto of the English Romantic
Movement in poetry. I Wandered Lonely
as a Cloud (1807)
The Victorian Age (1832-1901)
• Chartist Movement 1836-1848
• An age of prose; moral purpose; an age of doubt
and pessimism
• Poets:
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Alfred Tennyson: In Memoriam, The Idylls of
the King
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Robert Browning: Pippa Passes, My Last
Duchess
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Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Sonnets from the
Portuguese
Critical realists and their works
• Charles Dickens: the greatest representative of English
critical realism. The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The
Old Curiosity Shop, A Christmas Carol, Dombey and
Son, David Copperfield, Hard Times, A Tale of Two
Cities, Great Expectations
William Thackeray: Vanity Fair(1848)
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre (1847)
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Elizabeth Gaskell: Mary Barton; North and South
George Eliot: was the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans.
Adam Bede; The Mill on the Floss; Silas
Marner;Middlemarch
The 20th Century English
Literature
• Modernism: a break with all tradition
• Modernist Poetry :
• T. S. Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,
The Waste Land
• W.B. Yeats
• Dylan Thomas
• Philip Larkin
• Ted Hughes
• Seamus Heaney
Drama
• George Bernard Shaw: the 25th Nobel
Literature winner. Mrs. Warren’s
Profession; The Widower’s Houses;
Pygmalion; Man and Superman; Back to
Methuselah; Saint Joan; Arms and the
Man; Pygmalion
• Oscar Wilde: art for art’s sake. The
Picture of Dorian Gray; Lady
Windermere’s Fan; An Ideal Husband, etc.
Novelist
• Thomas Hardy: one of the representatives of English
critical realism at the turn of the 19th century. The Return
of the Native; Tess of D’Urbervilles; Jude the Obscure;
The Mayor of Casterbridge
• John Galsworthy: one of the most prominent of the 20th
century English realistic writers. The Island Pharisees;
The Man of Property,;The Forsyte Saga(The Man of
Property)
• D. H. Lawrence: Sons and Lovers; Women in Love; Lady
Chatterley’s Lover
• Joseph Conrad: Lord Jim; The Heart of Darkness
• E.M. Forster: Howard’s End; A Passage to India
Modernistic writers
• Virginia Woolf: Orlando (biography);
Interior Monologue; Mrs. Dalloway; The
Wave; To the Light House
• James Joyce: founder of stream of
consciousness. Dubliners; A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses (modern
epic); Finnegans Wake
Contemporary period
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George Orwell: Animal Farm
William Golding: The Lord of Flies
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman
Doris Lessing: The Grass is Singing, The
Golden Notebook
• V. S. Naipaul: A House of Mr. Biswas, A Bend in
the River
• A.S. Byatt: Possession
• Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses,
Midnight’s Children
Part II American Literature—Early
American and Colonial Period to 1776
• American literature begins with the orally
transmitted myths, legends, tales, and
lyrics (always songs) of Indian cultures.
There was no written literature among the
more than 500 different Indian languages
and tribal cultures that existed in North
America before the first Europeans arrived.
• Thomas Paine (1737-1809):
• Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense
sold over 100,000 copies in the first three
months of its publication.
Revolutionary Writers（1776-1820）
• Benjamin Franklin(1706-1790): Autobiography is
Poor Richard's Almanack. He was an American
politician, scientist, inventor, and educator. He
helped draft the Declaration of Independence.He
conducted the difficult negotiation with France
that brought financial and military support for
America in the war.
• He founded the college that was to become the
University of Pennsylvania.
• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) :
Declaration of Independence (1776).
Jefferson’s great monument in literature
and political theory.
The Literature of American
Romanticism
• The Romantic movement which had
flourished earlier in the century both in
England and Europe proved to be a
decisive influence without which the
upsurge of American romanticism would
hardly have been possible.
• Washington Irving(1783-1859): was the
first native American author to have his
works characterized as classic literature.
Chief works: Rip Van Winkle, The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow
• James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851): Cooper's
novels reveal a deep tension between the lone
individual and society, nature and culture,
spirituality and organized religion. Chief works:
The Pioneers, The Leather-Stocking Tales (five
novels ). He is The Pioneer of
a.American sea novel;
b.American espionage story;
c.American frontier adventure tales;
d.American sociopolitical novel.
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow(1807-1882):
poet Laureate of Middle class values.
Hiawatha
New England Transcendentalism
• Transcendentalism is idealism. New England
Transcendentalism was the product of a
combination of foreign influences and native
American Puritan tradition.
• The term “transcendentalism” is derived from the
Latin verb transcendere meaning.
Transcendentalism has been defined as the
recognition in man of the capacity of acquiring
knowledge transcending the reach of the five
senses, or of knowing truth intuitively, or of
reaching the divine without the need of an
intercessor.
• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882):
Nature
• Henry David Thoreau(1817-1862): his
masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods
(1854). In Walden, Thoreau not only tests
the theories of Transcendentalism, he reenacts the collective American experience
of the 19th century: living on the frontier.
Civil Disobedience
• Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864): The
Scarlet Letter; The House of the Seven
Gables; Twice-Told Tales
• Herman Melville (1819-1891): Moby Dick.
Moby-Dick can be read as a thrilling sea
story, an examination of the conflict
between man and nature.
• Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886) were pioneers in American poetry.
Whitman was the poet of American democracy.
• Works: Leaves of Grass. Major works: The Free
Man; Leaves of Grass
The range of Whitman’s subjects is remarkable
and intentional, for he set out to include and
celebrate everything.
Whitman’s poetic style: original, revolutionary,
indisputably American; Free-verse
• Edgar Allan Poe(1890-1849) : was one of the
earliest writers to discuss the aesthetic qualities
of the short story as a distinct prose narrative
form.
• Poe worked hard at structuring his tales of
aristocratic madmen, self-tormented murderers,
neurasthenic necrophilia’s, and other deviant
types so as to produce the greatest possible
horrific effects on the reader. The Fall of the
House of Usher
The Literature of Realism
• In American literature, the Civil War
brought the Romantic Period to an end.
The age of Realism came into existence.
• Samuel Clemens(1835-1910), pen name
of Mark Twain. The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn; Life on the Mississippi
• William Howells (1837-1920): The Atlantic
Monthly; The Rise of Silas Lapham
• Henry James (1843-1916):
1st period: The American; Daisy Miller ;
The Portrait of a Lady
2nd period: dropped the “international
theme”
3rd period: The Turn of the Screw; What
Maisie Knew; The Golden Bowl; he
returned to his “international theme”.
Local Colorism
• Hamlin Garland defined local colorism as having
“such quality of texture and background that it
could not have been written in any other place
by anyone else than a native. ”
• Local colorists:
• Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Mark Twain(1835-1910): pen name of Samuel
Clemens.
Chief works: The Life on the Mississippi; The
adventures of Tom Sawyer; The adventures of
huckleberry Finn; The Gilded Age; The Prince
and the Pauper
American Naturalism
• Stephen Crane(1871-1900): a pioneer
writing in the naturalistic tradition. Maggie:
A Girl of the Streets; The Red Badge of
Courage
• Frank Norris (1870-1902): McTeague; The
Octopus: The Responsibilities of the
Novelist
• Jack London(1876-1916): strong individualism
Martin Eden; White Fang; The Sea Wolf; The
Call of the Wild; The Iron Heel
• O. Henry(1862-1910): pen name of William
• Sidney Porter. A prolific writer. Style: direct; use
of southern dialect; use of slang; master of
surprise. The Gift of the Magi.
• Upton Sinclair (1878-1968): The Jungle
The 1920s: imagism
• It is the second renaissance in the history
of American literature.
• Imagism
• Ezra Pound(1885-1972): In a Station of
the Metro. imagist poems.
• T.S. Eliot(1888-1965): won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1948. The Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Waste
Land; Four Quartets
Modern poets
• William Carlos Williams(1883-1963): In the
American Grain; Spring and All
• Robert Frost(1874-1963): four-time
Pulitzer Prize winning American poet. His
first book of poems, A boy’s will; The road
not taken; Mending Wall
• E.E.Cummings (1894-1963): anti-orthodox.
The Enormous Room
• F. Scott Fitzgerald(1896-1940): This Side
of Paradise; The Beautiful and Damned;
The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night
He was a representative figure of 1920s,
the Jazz Age
• Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945): It is in
Dreiser’s works that American naturalism
is said to have come of age. Sister Carrie;
An American Tragedy Dreiser sets forth
his naturalistic concept of American
society. A pioneer of naturalism in
American literature. Sister Carrie ;The
Financier
• Ernest Hemingway
• A Nobel Prize winner for literature.
• Iceberg theory: “The dignity of movement
of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it
being above water.”
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Hemingway’s chief works
The sun also rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Death in the Afternoon (1932)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
Across the River and into the Trees (1950)
The Old Man and the Sea(1952)
• William Faulkner
• was awarded Nobel Prize for Literature in
1950
• Chief works: The Sound and the
Fury ;Absalom, Absalom! Go Down,
Moses
• Sherwood Anderson
• Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941): Winesberg,
Ohio; The Triumph of the Egg; Poor White
• Sinclair Lewis(1885-1951): the first American
author to win the Nobel Prize for literature. Main
Street; Babbit
• Willa Cather (1873-1947): My Antonia; Oh,
Pioneers
• Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938)
The 1930s
• The depression spread.
• John Steinbeck (1902-1968)：The
foremost novelist of the American
Depression of the 1930s.
• His major works: Of Mice and Men, The
Grapes of Wrath.
• He was awarded Pulitzer Prize in 1940
and, in 1962, a Nobel Prize for literature.
Black American Literature
• The 1920s saw a new upsurge of Black
American literature in what has come to be
known as the Harlem Renaissance.
• The most important person in the Harlem
Renaissance was Langston Hughes. He
was known as Black America’s poet
laureate.
• Richard Wright(1908-1960): Native Son
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
American Drama
• Eugene O’ Neil: American’s greatest
playwright. The Hairy Ape; Long Day’s
Journey into Night
• Tennessee Williams: The Glass
Menagerie; A Streetcar Named Desire
• Arthur Miller: Death of a Salesman. It is a
sad version of the American dream.
Novels in the Post-War
• The post-war prosperity produced a sense
of optimism.
• Norman Mailer: The Naked and the Dead
• Saul Bellow: Dangling Man; The Victim;
The Adventure of Augie March
• J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
• Joseph Heller: Catch-22
Beat generation
• non-confirmist, rebellious attitude towards
conventional values concerning sex,
religion and the American way of life, an
attitude which results from the feeling of
depression and exhaustion and the need
to escape into an unconventionalcommunal-mode of living.