The division of American literary history recognizes the importance given by many literary historians to the Revolutionary War (1775-1781), the Civil War (1861-1865), the First World War (1914-1918), and the Second World War. The importance of the Great War (1939-1945). Below these rough divisions are enumerated some terms that are more widely used to distinguish periods of American literature and subdivisions within them. It must be noted that these terms vary widely; they may stand for a period of time, a form of political organization, a prominent cultural or imaginative mode, or a dominant literary form.
1607-1775. The period from the founding of the first colony at Jamestown to the outbreak of the American Revolution is often referred to as the Colonial Period. Most of the works of this period are religious, practical or historical. Notable journal and narrative writers in the 17th century who wrote about the founding and early history of some colonies included William Bradford, John Winthrop, and theologian Cotton Mather. Over the next century, Jonathan Edwards was the leading philosopher and theologian, and Benjamin Franklin was the master of clear, persuasive prose in early American writing. It was not until 1937, when Edward Tylor's manuscripts were first published, that he was discovered to be an outstanding religious poet in the style of the English pious poets Herbert and Crashaw. Ann Bradstreet was a major poet of the colonial period who employed secular, domestic, and religious themes.
The publication of Poems on Various Subjects by Phillis Wheatley in 1773, when he was still a 19-year-old slave born in Africa, announced the emergence of a large number of outstanding black writers ( or, to use a later more accepted title, African-American writers), but until recently they have been ignored. America’s African cultural traditions are complex and diverse—both Western and African, both oral and written, slave and free, Judeo-Christian and Pagan, both Plantation and city, both desegregation and black nationalism - this cultural tradition has generated tensions and fusions that have produced highly innovative and distinctive literature throughout history. and a musical form considered an important American contribution to the Western musical tradition. See: Making the Negro Poets, by J. Sanders Redding (1939, reprinted 1986); Afro-American Literature, by Houston A. Baker, Jr. (1971); Bernard A. "African American Novel and Its Tradition" (1987), written by W. Bell; "The Image of Blackness" (1987), written by Henry L. Gates Jr., and "Black Literature and Literary Theory" (1984), edited by Henry L. Gates Jr. ; "Norton Anthology of African American Literature" (1997) co-edited by Henry L. Gates Jr., Nellie Y. McKay and others.
The period between the Stamp Act of 1765 and 1790 is sometimes distinguished as the Revolutionary War. This was the era of Thomas Paine's influential essays on revolutionary propaganda; the era of Thomas Jefferson's Virginia Statutes of Religious Liberty and the Declaration of Independence, among many other works; and the era of The Federalist Papers (the most famous of which a time when Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote in support of the Constitution; a time when Philip Freneau and Joel Barlow wrote patriotic satire.
1775-1865. The period 1775-1828 is known as the early national literature period, which ended with the victory of Jacksonian democracy in 1828 and marked the emergence of imaginative national literature. The works of this period include the first American stage comedy [Royle Taylor] "Contrast" (1787)], the earliest American novel [William Hill Brown's "The Power of Sympathy" (1789)] and the first long-lasting American magazine, the North American Review, founded in 1815.
Washington Irving achieved international fame for his essays and stories; Charles Brockden Brown wrote distinctively American gothic novels of mystery and horror; America's first important novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, began his creative career successfully; William Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe wrote poetry relatively independent of their English predecessors. The first of a large number of slave stories and autobiographies by escaped or freed African-American slaves were published in 1760. Most of these works were published between 1830 and 1865, including Frederick Douglass's "French." The Life and Times of Redrick Douglass" (1845) and "The Life and Times of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs (1861).
The period from 1828 to 1865, from the Jackson era to the American Civil War, is often regarded as the Romantic period in the United States (see: Neoclassicism and Romanticism), marking the complete advent of a unique American literary era. . This period is sometimes called the American Renaissance, a name that comes from F. O. Matheson's influential book of the same name (1941), which reviewed the famous writer of this period, Ralph Waldo Emerson. , Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne (see also: Symbolism); this stage is sometimes called The Transcendentalist period, centered on Emerson, began after the dominant philosophical and literary movement in New England (see: Transcendentalism). In all literary genres except drama, the originality and high artistic achievements of the works created by the writers of this period are unsurpassed by later generations of American literature. Emerson, Thoreau, and the early feminist Margaret Fuller influenced many American writers of that era and later generations in terms of ideas, ideals, and literary purposes. This was not just an era when new works by William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper were constantly coming out, but also by Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Harriet Beecher. Stowe and the Southern novelist William Gilmore Sims wrote novels and short stories; this is the era of Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the era when Walt Whitman, the most innovative and influential of all American poets, wrote poetry; it was also the era when Poe, Sims, and James Russell Lowell began to demonstrate outstanding American literary criticism in prose. era. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper continued the poetic tradition of African American women poets, and African American novels such as William Wells Brown's Claudel (1853) and Harry Wilson's "We Negroes" (1859) kicked off the show.
1865-1914. The great changes brought about by the bloody American Civil War, the postwar reconstruction of the South, and the subsequent rapid development of industrialization and urbanization in the North profoundly changed the United States' understanding of itself, as well as the American literary model. The period 1865-1900 is often referred to as the Realist Period, which refers to the period of realism including Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Henry James, John W. DeForest, Harold F. Redrick and the works of African American novelist Charles W. Chesnutt. Although different, these works are all classified as "realistic" to distinguish them from the "legendary" works of their prose fiction predecessors Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville (see: prose romance, realism) . Some realist writers used place as a setting for their novels; these writers (in addition to Mark Twain's novels about the Mississippi Valley region) include Bret Hart of California, Sarah Orne Jewell of Maine, Special, Mary Wilkins Freeman of Massachusetts, George W. Cabourg of Louisiana, and Kate Chopin. (See: Regional Fiction.) Chopin is now famous as an early major feminist writer. Whitman continued to write poetry into the last decade of the 19th century, when he was later joined by Emily Dickinson (unbeknownst to Whitman and almost everyone else).
Although only seven of Dickinson's more than 1,000 short poems were published during her lifetime, she is today regarded as one of America's most unique and distinguished poets. Sidney Lanier published experimental verse based on musical beats; the African-American writer Paul Lawrence Dunbar published poetry and novels between 1893 and 1905; and in the 1890s, Stephen Crane (although he died Aged just 29) published free verse verses ahead of the experimental work of Ezra Pound and the Imagists, while also producing brilliant and innovative short stories and short stories that foreshadowed the Two narrative modes emerged later: naturalism and impressionism. Between 1900 and 1914, although James, Howells, and Mark Twain continued to write, Edith Wharton also published her early novels, but in order to express her gratitude to Frank Norris, Jack London, and West Recognizing Odo Dreiser's powerful, if sometimes crude, novels that typify characters who fall victim to a combination of instinctive desires and external social forces, This period is distinguished as the period of naturalism; see: Naturalism in Realism and Naturalism.
1914-1939. This period, between the two world wars and marked by the trauma of the Great Depression that began in 1929, was the period in which what is still called "modern literature" emerged, with its preeminence in the United States reaching It has reached a height comparable to that of the American Renaissance in the mid-19th century; but unlike most early writers, American modernist writers also enjoy extensive international reputation and influence. (See: Modernism.) Poetry, a magazine founded in Chicago by Harriet Munro in 1912, published the works of many innovative writers. Among these famous poets are Edgar Lee Masters, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carter Ross Williams, Ezra Pound, Robinson Jeffers, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and E. E. Cummings. These poets employed an unprecedented variety of poetic modes, including the imagism of Amy Lowell, H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), and others, the metrical poetry of Frost, and the American Free verse poetry composed in dialect, Cummings's experiments in form and typography, Jeffers' poetic naturalism, Pound and Eliot combining French symbolist forms and traditional methods with the wisdom and wisdom of the British metaphysical poets. The metaphorical techniques are integrated, digested and absorbed, and applied to their unique poetry creations. The main writers of prose novels include Edith Wharton, Sinclair Lewis, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, John Doss. Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and John Steinbeck. During this period, the United States produced the first outstanding playwright, Eugene O'Neill, and a large group of famous literary critics, including Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm Cowley, T. S. Eliot, Ed. Mon Wilson and the arrogant and mean-spirited H. L. Mencken.
The literature of this period is often subdivided in a variety of ways. The luxurious, hedonistic period of the 1920s is sometimes called the "Jazz Age", a name popularized by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Stories of the Jazz Age" (1922). This decade was also the period of the Harlem Renaissance, with the likes of Candy Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Joan Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston and many others of African descent. American writers produced major works of the Harlem Renaissance in a variety of literary forms. (See: Harlem Renaissance.
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Many outstanding American writers of this decade were deeply disillusioned by their own war experiences after the First World War and what they perceived to be the ignorance and “puritanical” nature of American culture. "The repression and alienation are often called the lost generation (Gertrude Stein first used this term to refer to the young people in France at that time). In pursuit of a more colorful literary and artistic environment and a freer lifestyle, some of these writers emigrated abroad, either to London or Paris. Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot ended up abroad, but most of the younger “exiles,” as Malcolm Cowley called them [The Return of the Exiles] (1934)], all returned to the United States in the 1930s. Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises" and Fitzgerald's "The Night Is Young" are novels that depict the mentality and lifestyle of two American exiles. During the "Radical Thirties," a period of economic and social changes brought about by the Great Depression and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal, some writers devoted themselves to radical political movements, and many others wrote in their literary works It touches on pressing social issues of the time, including the novels of William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, James T. Farrell, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, and Eugene ·Plays by O'Neill, Clifford Odets, and Maxwell Anderson. See: America's 1930s: A Literary History, by Peter Conn (2009); Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, by Maurice Dickstein (2009).
1939 to present, contemporary period. The Second World War, especially the disillusionment with Soviet communism resulting from the ensuing Moscow Trials for alleged treason and the signing of the Soviet-German Pact between Stalin and Hitler in 1939, played a large role in the The literary radicalism of the 1930s came to an end. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 dealt the final blow to those few writers who remained culturally loyal to the Soviet Union. Over the next few decades, Southern conservative writers who actively supported the return from an industrial economy to an agrarian economy in the 1930s, known as equalitarians, dominated New Criticism and represented a common criticism that isolated literature from the author's life and society. The tendency, in formal terms, is to regard literary works as organic and autonomous entities. [See: John L. Stewart, The Burden of Time: Fugitives and Equalitarians (1965). ] However, prominent and influential critics such as Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling—as well as critics including Philip Love, Alfred Cassin, Dwight Macdonald, and Irving ·Other critics, including Howe, who were classified as New York literati - in the 1960s still treated literary works from the perspective of human nature and history, based on the author's life, temperament and social environment as the background of review, and based on the morality and imagination of the work Quality and impact on society as evaluation criteria. See: "The Prodigal Son: New York Literati and Their World" (1986) by Alexander Bloom; Chapter 4 of "American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s" (1988) by V. B. Leach . For a discussion of radical new developments in American literary theory and criticism in the 1970s and beyond, see: Poststructuralism.
In retrospect, although the 1950s are often seen as a period of cultural conformity and contentment with the status quo, the period was marked by the emergence of a variety of dynamic movements that were anti-establishment and anti-traditional. Literary movement: Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; American examples of absurdist literature; Black Mountain poets Charles Olson, Robert Crelai and Robert Duncan; New York poet Frank · O'Hara, Kenneth Koch, and John Ashbery.
This was also a period of confessional poetry and an extremely frank and open attitude towards sexuality in literature, a period marked by the famous writer Henry Miller (who began writing autobiographical and fictional works in the 1930s, but which were only circulated privately until the 1950s) ), as well as the works of Norman Mailer, William Burrows and Vladimir Nabokov ("Lolita" was published in 1955). The counterculture movement of the 1960s and early 1970s inherited some of the creative patterns of the early period, but the rebellious youth movement and the fierce and sometimes violent opposition to the Vietnam War pushed it to extremes and fanaticism; for this movement For a favorable account, see Theodore Roszak, The Making of the Counterculture (1969); for a later review of the movement, see Maurice Dickstein, Eden's Gate : American Culture in the 1960s" (1978). See: Modernism and Postmodernism. For the radical development of African American literary works during this period, see: Black Arts Movement.
Important writers of American prose novels after World War II include: Vladimir Nabokov (immigrated to the United States in 1940), Eudora Welty, Robert Penn Warren, Bernard Malamud, James Coorsens, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, E. L. Doctorow, Cynthia Ozick, and Joyce Carol Oates; major representatives of poetry creation include: Marianne Moore , Robert Penn Warren, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wilbur, Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, A. R. Ammons, and John Ashbery; theater: Thornton Wilder, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, as well as subsequent playwrights including Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, and Wendy Wasserstein. Many of the most innovative and outstanding literary works in the latter decades of the 20th century were often created by writers who were attributed to a certain "minority group" or a certain ethnic literary group (the "ethnic group" is composed of the main body A group of individuals in a cultural and social system who clearly share the same race, religion, language, cultural pattern, national origin, etc.). However, there are many disputes within and outside these groups. The focus of the dispute is: is it more fair and accurate to only regard such writers as part of mainstream American literature, or to emphasize each writer's participation in a certain national culture? It is more fair and accurate to reflect the identity of the author and the unique themes, themes and formal characteristics of the culture to which he belongs. (See: Identity Theorists in Humanism.) Here are the distinguished African American novelists and essayists Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Albert Murray, G. In the era of Loria Naylor, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, it was the era of poets Amiri Baraka (Leroy Jones), Gwendolyn Brooks, Maya Angelou and The era of Rita Dove; the era of playwrights Lorraine Hansberry and August Wilson. (For some developments in popular poetic patterns, see: Performance Poetry.) This is also where Leslie Marmon Silko (American Indian), Oscar Huros, and Sandra Cisneros ( Hispanic Americans), Jupa Lahiri (East Indians), Maxine Kingston (aka Tingting Tang), and Amy Tan (Chinese Americans) and other outstanding minority novelists. See: Three American Literatures: Chicano Humanities, Native American Literature, and Asian American Literature: A Teacher's Handbook of American Literature, edited by Houston A. Baker (1982).
1. The "double consciousness" of Chinese Americans in Chinese-American literature
Chinese-American literature flourished in the 1960s, from Li Jinyang's "Flower Drum Song" to In recent years, the "Sinking Fish" published by Amy Tan and the portrayal of Chinese Americans in Chinese-American works all reflect the identity of "ambitious people" between Chinese and American cultures and two worlds. The older generation of immigrants have deep and solid Chinese roots and have little doubt about the superiority of traditional Chinese culture. After coming to the United States, their semi-closed living environment made them outside mainstream American society to a large extent. Their psychological identification with American culture is often slow and passive, and they are not confused about their own positioning: they are Chinese in the United States. The new generation of "Made in America" ??grew up in the ocean of American culture. They naturally and proactively accepted American culture and considered themselves pure Americans. However, the cruel reality shows that they are both Americans and Chinese, but they do not completely belong to either side. No matter what their personal wishes are, they cannot transcend the category of "Chinese Americans"; in the eyes of many Westerners who are blinded by racial prejudice, "Chinese" will always be synonymous with poverty, backwardness, and ignorance. There should be no place for Chinese people in the Western "heaven", even though these Chinese people are also American citizens. This point was commented by Professor Zhang Chong as due to the cross-ethnic, cross-cultural and transnational characteristics of the diaspora ethnic groups, they often reflect the split and conflict between the invisible source culture and source consciousness and the explicit current culture and present consciousness, which reflects the A certain degree of identity uncertainty reflects some kind of "double identity" or "double consciousness"5.
What best embodies this collision of dual consciousness is the conflict between Chinese young people with American cultural values ??and Chinese parents with Chinese cultural values. Based on their own experience and experience, the older generation of immigrants firmly believe that in a society of white supremacy, Chinese children must excel in order to have a foothold and hope for success. Therefore, they strictly discipline their children, even sacrificing themselves for their children's future. In this way, the mothers in "The Joy Luck Club" tried every means to lead their daughters' lives according to traditional Chinese concepts and tried their best to arrange their futures, but what they encountered was open rebellion or passive resistance from their daughters. Mother and daughter get along day and night, but they are strangers; they step on the same land, but live in two completely different worlds. In this way, the generation gap that already exists in the conflict between the two cultural traditions becomes more difficult to bridge. The mother-daughter conflict in Amy Tan's "The Joy Luck Club" (1989) and "The Kitchen God's Wife" (1991) demonstrates the strong "Chinese plot" and "Chinese plot" of the first generation of Chinese-American immigrants. The rebellious psychology of daughters who grew up in the United States is incompatible with each other. They neither understand nor are interested in the "Chinese roots" that the older generation cherishes so much. To them, Chinese traditional culture is just some incredible vulgar customs in a distant and unfamiliar country. Both Tingting Tang's and Amy Tan's novels emphasize that second-generation immigrants have gradually become alienated from the Chinese culture imprinted on their skin, and consciously highlight their desire to integrate into the mainstream white American culture.
2. The image of the “other” in Chinese-American literature in Orientalism
Under the white-centered power discourse, the history of Chinese struggle and survival in the United States has become a Hidden and repressed histories. Tang Tingting spent 8 pages in "Chinese Exclusion Act" after the third chapter "Grandfather in the Sierra Nevada" in "Chinaman", completely faithfully enumerating the U.S. government's annual list from 1868 to The Chinese Exclusion Laws promulgated from 1978 to 1978 and related major events clearly pointed out the history of discrimination and persecution of Chinese by the US government and the absurdity and unreasonableness of the Chinese Exclusion Laws. White-centered power discourses shape their descriptions of Chinese Americans, and Chinese history can be distorted, rewritten, or hidden to fit the power discourses of white supremacy.
Said’s Oriental theory embodies the exclusion and oppression imposed by the weak culture of Chinese literature by the strong culture of Western white people.
According to Said’s description, Orientalism has two meanings: the first refers to the way of thinking based on the ontological and epistemological differences between the East and the West; the second meaning refers to the West’s long-term dominance, reconstruction and Discourse rights approach 1. Therefore, based on this unequal relationship, the so-called Orientalism has become a myth created by the West’s ignorance, prejudice and curiosity about the Eastern world. Orientalism, as a deep-rooted prejudiced understanding system of Westerners against the East, is essentially a man-made fiction created by Western imperialism in its attempt to control and dominate the East. Analyzed from Foucault's discourse theory, this is a product of power, a kind of intellectual power or cultural hegemony. Said regarded the East as the "other" and constructed an "East" that was completely opposite to the West through discourse hegemony. This proved that Western civilization was a superior civilization embodying rationality, morality, and justice, and thus could openly colonize the East. . The deep-rooted consciousness of racism marginalizes, minimizes, and feminizes the cultures of other ethnic minorities, making them unable to dialogue with the cultures of other ethnic groups in an equal sense, let alone as advocated by advocates of multiculturalism. In the United States, a country known as freedom and equality, all people live, survive, and develop together. In the final analysis, Chinese-American literature is still a "hybrid" literary variety in the sense of post-colonial theory, an innovation based on the combination of Chinese and Western cultural traditions. For a long time, mainstream society has formed a conceptual impression of Chinese men: they are passers-by in American society and will always be foreigners; they either open restaurants or laundromats or work as maids for white people, doing girls' work, and are unmanly; They are taciturn and mysterious. The attitude towards Chinese women can be reflected in Huang Yuxue's autobiographical novel "Five Girls". A little Chinese girl was bullied in school. White boys called her a Chinaman and threw blackboard erasers at her. And when the heroine in the article was about to graduate from college, the staff of the placement office said to her: "If you are a sensible person, just go to the Chinese commercial bank to find a job. You will get nothing in the American Chamber of Commerce. Anyway, you must know that the Pacific Coast area The racial prejudice is very detrimental to you.”
In order to join the mainstream American society by catering to the mainstream culture, Chinese-American writers represented by Ha Jin deliberately orientalized their discourse and tried to abandon and hide it. The identity of Chinese culture is to please Western audiences and markets, and Western mainstream culture uses this to consolidate the central position of mainstream culture and the West’s hegemony of discourse over the East. In his novel "Waiting", Ha Jin described Shuyu as a good farmer who could pick and carry, but he wrapped her in a three-inch golden lotus. For Orientalists, this is the symbol and epitome of traditional Chinese women. His short story "In Broad Daylight" completely equates the value of men with sexual ability, and through the description of Mu Ying, he equates feminists who are out of context with the shameless prostitute. Ha Jin "castrates" men to cater to the mainstream Western view of Eastern men as feminine. This earned him the 1993 Cain Book Critics Circle Award and the 1995 Pushen Carter Award. Ha Jin tells the story of Chinese women with an "authentic" voice, but this is just a monster created to cater to Western feminist interests and Orientalist expectations. As a result, the image of the “other” in Chinese American literature was “promoted”.
3. The national image in Chinese-American literary works
In order to resist the devaluation, rejection and misinterpretation of Chinese culture by the dominant white American culture, Chinese-Americans have tried their best to promote the Chinese national culture to seek their own Cultural identity and cultural identity. The works of Chinese-American writers do incorporate Chinese culture. The most typical female image is Tang Tingting's fusion and adaptation of the mother-in-law's tattoos and the legend of Mulan in "The Female Warrior". As the first widely influential writer in the American literary world, Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Female Warrior" can be said to be an important milestone in the development of Chinese-American literature. Although Tang Tingting's understanding of Chinese culture during the creative process was through the veil of American culture, which left some double images, blending and misunderstandings.
This is because the descendants of Chinese Americans who were born and raised in the United States mostly get their understanding of Chinese culture and history from the stories of their elders, and thus become vague about what they regard as an inherent part of American society. Finally, Tang Tingting pointed out through Whitman Axin that American culture itself is multicultural, and the unique Chinese-American culture is an inseparable and important part of this cultural system and should not be belittled or excluded.
Dividing American literature into historical segments or "periods" that are easy to discuss does not gain the knowledge of literary scholars like dividing British literary periods; see: Division of British Literature into Periods. A survey of many college syllabi in Reconstructing American Literature (1983) by Paul Lauter and the article "Redefining American Literature" by A. Lavonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward History” (1990), demonstrates (especially since efforts to do justice to the work of women and minority authors) how variable the divisions of time in literary periods and their designations can be. Recently, some historians, anthropologists, and teachers of American literature have simply segmented their studies by date without attaching names to the phases. But there is a notable trend toward acknowledging the importance of major wars in marking major changes in literature. As scholar Cushing Strout has commented, this trend "suggests that there is a more distinct and compelling order in American political history than in specific literary or cultural categories."