Preface

A New Course of the American Literary History is a diachronic study of the literature of the United States of America,covering its whole range from the New World all the way down to the Postwar Period.It aims to offer a basic framework of the American literary history.The general layout of the book follows the different literary periods chronologically,with every part typically discussing a separate period.Accordingly,the whole book consists of seven parts, which are subdivided into 27 chapters.Each part gives a brief account of the historical background against which the literary works emerge(d),the major literary trend(s) and current(s) of thought that dominate (d) the literary scene in the given period, and the representative literary figures and their literary achievements that attract the critical attention.

The book begins with the Early American Literature,namely,the literature before and after the English settlement in the New World.Part one,composed of three chapters,puts its focus on the Colonial Period,in which personal literature in its various forms like narratives (biographies and autobiographies), journals (diaries and letters),sermons and poems occupied a major position.The major concern is American Puritanism,one enduring influence in American literature,and the literary achievements made by the colonial governors like John Smith,William Bradford and John Winthrop,by the Puritan poets like Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor,and by the great preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards as well.The second part discusses the Revolutionary Period, which, covering roughly the second half of the 18th century,witnessed the Enlightenment Movement on the European Continent.The literary works in this period were above all marked by the heroic and revolutionary ambitions of the age and there appeared numerous great political pamphlets and state papers.Essayists and journalists shaped the nation's beliefs with reason dressed in clear and forceful prose,represented by Thomas Paine's The American Crisis, Thomas Jefferson's“The Declaration of Independence”and Benjamin Franklin's The Autobiography.Meanwhile, the imaginative writing came on the literary scene of the Revolutionary America; Philip Freneau, among others, paved the way for the American Romanticism and is naturally an integral topic here.Part two is thus divided into three chapters,separately dealing with the historical context,the works of reason and revolution, and the creative writing.

Part three gives a sketch of the American literature during the Romantic Period,which came immediately after the political independence of the new nation and lasted till the outbreak of the Civil War.A rising America with its industrialization,its westward expansion and its ideals of democracy and equality, and a variety of foreign influences (such as that from Walter Scott) were among the important factors that made the first efflorescence of American literature.The early Romantic writers that deserve credit are Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.The former,well known for his The Sketch Book,is usually honored as the“Father of American Literature”for his role in inspiring the American romantic imagination while the latter established his fame in American literature through his Leather-stocking Tales, which offers some fictional version of the American Westward movement and well illustrates the importance of the frontier and the wilderness in American literature.The American Romanticism culminated around the 1840s in“New England Transcendentalism”or“American Renaissance.”Active in this context were such Transcendentalists and/or writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman,Emily Dickinson,Nathaniel Hawthorne,Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe.Among them,Emerson was the leading figure, from whom many of his contemporaries benefited, either drawing from or reacting against his doctrine.Well-known for his Nature,“the manifesto of American Transcendentalism,”and his The American Scholar,America's“Intellectual Declaration of Independence,”he exerted a most seminal influence on the development of an independent American culture.Thoreau,Emerson's follower,is best remembered for his masterpiece Walden,in which the author wrote about his own experience on Walden Pond.Whitman, the greatest poet of the 19th-century American literature, tried to describe the native American experience in his boldly experimentalist work Leaves of Grass,whose first edition was praised as“the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.”Dickinson,no less indebted to Emerson,wrote about the life of her time in her completely original way.Hawthorne,Melville and Poe,as Emerson's contemporaries,were either marginally or not associated with the ideas of Transcendentalism.Often taking a critical distance from that movement,they helped push American literature to the phase of maturity in the 19th century.Additionally,in this period appeared antislavery writing by writers of different backgrounds,particularly those like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs.Consequently,this part contains four chapters.After a general introduction to the American Romanticism in the first chapter,the following three chapters handle early Romanticism, New England Transcendentalism and antislavery writing respectively.

Part four,made up of three chapters,is devoted to the American Realism,which came in the latter half of the 19th century as a reaction against the lie/falsehood of romanticism and sentimentalism.With William Dean Howells,Henry James and Mark Twain active on the scene, the American Realism flourished in the 1870s and the 1880s.Local-color writing,an outstanding literary achievement in this period, is categorized individually, chiefly focusing on the representative figure Twain and his colloquial style.To decrease the number of the chapters, the other writers like Howells, James as well as O.Henry are all put in one, although they, like Twain, displayed marked differences in terms of their contributions to the American Realism.Howells was a fearless and enthusiastic champion of the new school,and made for the triumph of realism over romanticism;James was not only famous for his“international theme”and psychological realism but also exceptionally popular in the world of literary criticism through his critical theory on the art of fiction;O.Henry's achievement lies in his stories characterized by surprise endings and witty narration.The last decade of the 19th century witnessed the appearance of Naturalism and ushered in another era in American literature,which stretched till the outbreak of World War I.Seeing man's life as governed by the two forces of heredity and environment,forces absolutely beyond man's control,American Naturalists produced a great many masterpieces, including Stephen Crane's Maggie, Frank Norris' McTeague, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and Jack London's Martin Eden.While these male writers engaged themselves in their natu ralistic writing,there also emerged some women writers who,concerned with women's rights and liberation,began writing on the“woman question.”Kate Chopin,Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Edith Wharton,among others,advertised women's irreplaceable position in American literature.The fifth part is thus made up of three chapters,one giving a brief introduction to the age as a whole,one covering the great Naturalists,and one the prominent literary women.The major contribution made by the American Realists and Naturalists was their perfection of fiction.Hence all the writers listed in the fourth and fifth parts are,first and foremost,novelists and/or short-story writers.

The First World War made America a different country,and its literature underwent a substantial change and entered an epochal phase—the age of Modernism.Part six outlines the Modernist literature in six chapters.While the first chapter sketches the era in general terms,the other five chapters are offered to the different particular aspects of the American Modernism,including the literature in the early phase of Modernism,the Modernist poetry, the fiction and drama between the Wars, and the Afro-American literature, whose upsurge appeared in the Harlem Renaissance.The early phase of the American Modernism was one of transition, or rather, a mixture of the traditional and the modernist.If the poets represented by Robert Frost were between the traditional and the modernist, the fiction writers like Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson anticipated the full-fledged American modern writing both in terms of formal experiments and fictive models.Cather, Stein and Anderson were all emulated by the high Modernist writers like Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald.The American Modernism was well expressed in the literary achievements of the great writers in the 1920s and the 1930s.In poetry there appeared a strong reaction against Victorian poetry marked by its moralizing tendencies, its over-padding poetic matter and its traditional iambic pentameter.The Modernist innovators took great interest in poetic experimentation,which was exemplified by Ezra Pound,T.S.Eliot,and a few others.Pound,the prime mover of Imagism, is regarded as the father of modern American poetry and well remembered for The Cantos;T.S.Eliot,a Nobel Prize winner for Literature and the author of the epochal work The Waste Land, is accepted as the greatest English poet in the Modernist world.Both Pound's Imagist poetry and T.S.Eliot's“waste land”vision showed a diverse range of modern poetic styles in American literature.If Pound and T.S.Eliot were the outstanding symbols of modern poetic revolution, then American modern fiction found its crowning achievement in the literary works by the Lost Generation novelists Ernest Hemingway and F.Scott Fitzgerald,the Southern Renaissance representative William Faulkner,and the 1930s’leading figures John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck.Among these outstanding authors three—Hemingway,Faulkner and Steinbeck—were awarded Nobel Prize for Literature.Hemingway brought the colloquial style to near-perfection in American literature;Faulkner made the history of the Deep South the subject of the bulk of his works,among which The Sound and the Fury perhaps is the best one;Steinbeck with The Grapes of Wrath cried out against the injustice of the capitalist system as best shown in the period of the Great Depression.Drama in this period reached a high point in Eugene O’Neill, another Nobel Prize winner for Literature,who carried out his continual, vigorous, courageous experiments in the field of drama.O’Neill was sometimes nihilistic in his outlook and reading some of his plays can be a nightmarish experience.Along with T.S.Eliot,Pound,Faulkner and Hemingway,O’Neill was among the great American authors writing in the Modernist tradition of the 1920s.Similarly,the Afro-American literature between the Wars is praiseworthy.Such black literary figures as Langston Hughes,Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright successfully ranked themselves alongside their white contemporaries.Thus the American literature in the 1920s and the 1930s was thriving not just in terms of the dominant white but of the marginalized black as well.

The postwar/Postmodernist scene in American literature is a colorful one.There emerge a variety of literary trends and schools particularly in poetry and fiction.Centering on the literary diversity in the postwar context,part seven,the last part of the book, is organized in five chapters.The first chapter gives an overview of the postwar context,highlighting its diversity and the impact on the literary writing;the middle three are sorted out according to the literary genres—drama,poetry and fiction;the last chapter is set aside for the multi-ethnic literature, placing emphasis on the Afro-American literature and the Asian American.The postwar poetic accomplishment chiefly lies in the various Postmodernist schools like the Beat Generation represented by Allen Ginsberg, the Confessional school represented by Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath,the New York school by Frank O’Hara,the Black Mountain poetry by Charles Olson,and the Meditative poetry by John Ashbery.The diversity of postwar fiction is also well expressed in the various groups like the southern fiction,the war novels,the Jewish novels,the Beat novels and alienation,the realist/modernist inclinations, and the Postmodernist inclinations, including fantasy and surrealism, black humor, meta-fiction, science fiction, parody and pop, and experimental novelistic techniques.And there have appeared a great number of remarkable works,such as J.D.Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye,John Updike's“Rabbit”series, Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Joseph Heller's Catch-22, Saul Bellow's Herzog, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor.In postwar drama Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller won international recognition.The former is remembered for his great works like The Glass Menagerie and A Street Car Named Desire,while the latter for Death of a Salesman.Among the younger generation of dramatists,Edward Albee was the best,known for his Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.In the multi-ethnic literature,the Afro-American literature takes the lead and has received due recognition as an integral part of American literature; the other minority literary groups like the Asian American and the Hispanic American have also won more and more critical acclaim.While the glory of the postwar Afro-American literature is seen in such works as Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man,James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Alice Walker's The Color Purple, that of the Asian American literature is in Chin Yang Lee's The Flower Drum Song, Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and China Men,and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club.The Postwar Period also produced some Nobel Prize winners for Literature.They were Saul Bellow,Isaac Bashevis Singer and Toni Morrison.

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A New Course of the American Literary History is based on my years of teaching and research experience in American literature.To some extent,it is an expansion of my reading and lecture notes and a kind of sorting of the related materials in the literature.It is thus applicable to undergraduates, graduates and all those who tend to get acquainted with the literature,and is intended to serve both as a textbook and a reference book.The book distinguishes itself from the common kindred textbooks for this course.For one thing,it is characterized by wide coverage.To satisfy its readers with a wide range of options, the book tries to contain the influential writers and their representative works as comprehensively as possible.And,centering on the literary survey, each part of the book comes complete with related exercises, objective and subjective, so that readers will get impressed.For another,the six appendices at the end add value to the book.They list not only the winners of such major awards as Pulitzer Prizes in Literature, National Book Awards, National Book Critics Circle Awards and Tony Award for Best Play, but also the Poets Laureate of the USA and the books once referred to as Great American Novels.All these facilitate those who take interest in American literature.

Shui Caiqin