1492 is an important year!
Colonial Period
About Edward Taylor
1. He hold the chief place as a most gifted of the Puritan poets.
2. His famous work: "Meditation Eight"About Anne Bradstreet
About Prologue
Lord, Can a Crumb of Dust the Earth outweigh,
Outmatch all mountains, nay, the Crystal sky?
=> Dust 引用自Bible典故：man are created by clay.
=> "Dust to dust, ashes to ashes."
About William Blake
1. He was an English painter, poet and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.
2. In 2002, Blake was placed at number 38 in the BBC's poll of the 100 Greatest Britons.
Tiger
TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies 5
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?
And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart? 10
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? What dread grasp 15
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee? 20
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
=> It is similar to Edward Taylor- Prologue " Unless Thous mak'st the Pen, and Scrivener"是讚美造物主
About Anne Bradstreet
1. She was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first female writer in the British North American colonies to be published. She was also a prominent Puritan figure in American Literature.
2. Her famous work: "The Author to Her Book", "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America"
Thou ill-formed offspring of my feeble brain,
Who after birth didst by my side remain,
=> didt 為德語的殘留，古詩的做法
I stretched thy joint to make thee even feet,
Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet;
=> thee 指的是poetry； feet 是作者對作品的謙稱，也是韻腳
If for thy father asked, say thou hadst none;
And for thy mother, she alas is poor,
=> thy father 象徵逃離父權英國
About Jonathan Edwards
1. The most impressive mind of the colonial period.
2. Edwards "is widely acknowledged to be America's most important and original philosophical theologian," and one of America's greatest intellectuals.
3. Edwards's theological work is broad in scope, but he was rooted in Reformed theology, the metaphysics of theological determinism, and the Puritan heritage.
4. His greatest work:"Freedom of Will" has been neglected in the general history of American thought ever since the decline of the P
uritan in fluence in the country.
5. His work: "Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God"
=> original sin, Jesus
About Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God
=> 使用了很多恫嚇的文字
=> Religious papraganda : wrath, fierce
Puritanism: 1. origin sin
2. predesting
3. inherited guilt
Revolutionary Period
About Benjamin Franklin
1. Benjamin Franklin is a renaisenoce man. He had an uncanny instinct for success and knew that new commercialism demanded that anyone in business assume a public persona that best served his and his clients' interest.
=> 時代背景： 掌控文字即可掌控權力
2. Franklin 's observation on electricity were published in London in 1751 and, despite his disclaimers in the Autobiogrophy, won him the applause of British scientist.
3. Franklin's remaining years, however, were spent not in a labortory, but at diplomatic tabes in London, Paris, and Philadelphia, where his gift for irony served him well.
=> Thomas Jefferson attend Treaty of Paris.
=> treaty 合約
4. Franklin protested his too-long stay in Europe and returned to Philadelphia in1785, serving as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. By the time he died in 1790, he was the most beloved American. Twenty thousand people attend his funeral.
About Autobiogrophy
1. felicity (hypothesis)
2. old men (indulge/ nature)
3. vanity
4. The Name of Virtues--> 信望愛 (Faith, Hope,Charity)
=> 新生活運動
About Thomas Jefferson
1. Thomas Jefferson once said that he wished to be remembered for only three things: drafting the Declaration of Independence, writing and supporting the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom(1786), and founding the University of Virginia.
2. Jefferson attended the Treaty of Paris with Benjamin Franklin.
About Autobiogrophy of Thomas Jefferson
1. We hold these truths to be self evident: tha all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness.
About The Federalist
1. Advocate of the new Constitution, dubbed Federalist, and their Antifederalist opponents quickly rose to the occasion, and a great debate followed.
2. No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgement and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.
=>Checks & Balance 三權分立，三權制衡 (legislation for making law, judicial for interpret the law, and executive for enforce the law)
Romantic Period
About Washington Irving
1. Irving regularly addressed darker and more complex themes of historical transformation and personal dislocation. His innovative travel sketched blurred the line between the personal essay and fiction, and he is considered one of the => "inventors" of the modern short story.
=> 因為中產階級地位提升、女性讀者增加、雜誌的興起早成了short story 的流行
2. His canny understanding of the literary marketplace helped him to become the first American who was able to support himself solely through his writing.
=> 第一個專業文人
3. He met Sir Walter Scott, an admirer of the Knickerbocker History, who directed him to the wealth of unused literary material in German folktales. There, as scholars have shown, Irving found the source for "Rip Van Winkle," some passage of which are close paraphrases of the original J.C.C.N. Otmar's "Peter Klaus".
4. But among The Sketch Book's graceful tributes to English scenes and characters were two immensely popular tales set in rural New York, "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleep Hollow."
5. Cooper, Hawthorne, and many other American writers were inspired by the success of The Sketch Book.
6. From the beginning , many readers identified with Rip as a counterhero, an anti-Franklinian who made a success of failure; and subsquent generations have responded profoundly to Irving's pervasive theme of mutability, especially as localized in his portrayal of the bewildering rapidly of change in American life.
About Rip Van Winkle
1. setting: time & place
2. change: mountains -> barometers
3. "......which in the last rays of the setting sun, will glow and light up like a crown of glory." => 呼應英國的消長
4. "Dame Van Winkle" 的 "Dame" : being condame / madame
下一則： 10/08 美國文學 week 5: transcendentalism
