美国文学　全套课件.PPTVIP

HISTORY ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE A TEACHING PROGRAM TEXTBOOK REFERENCE BOOK TEXTBOOK: HISTORY AND ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, VOLUME 1,2, Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press REFERENCE BOOK: The Norton Anthology of American Literature; Highlights of American Literature; Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary Cultural Criticism, Columbia Univ. Press 1 Literature of the Colonial America (1607-1765) 1.1 Historical Background ● In 1492, Christopher Columbus found the new continent called America. ● There were many immigrants: Spanish (they built the first town on the new continent); Dutch (they built New York city at the beginning stage); French (today still lots of people’s mother tongue is French in North America); English (they first settled in Jamestown and Virginia in 1607) The Course of American literature 1. Literature to 1620 1492-1493 Clubmbus’s voyage to American back to Spain; native American oral literature; early American writings from the hands of Europeans-letters narrating the voyages; In1620, the famous “May Flower” shipped 102 Puritans to Plymouth. (Q: transportation is not convenient, why some many immigrants left their hometown and came to such a remote place as America?) ) (A: Economic reasons: to seek fortune; Religious reasons: reformation and religious conflicts in Europe, persecution of Protestants, to seek a paradise of their own 1) John Smith, 1580-1631, an English explorer who stated Jamestown, Virginia, the 1st permanent colony in America. He sent a letter to the Virginia Company in London, defending the handling of the settlement and proclaiming the merits of the new land. The great part of this letter was published in 1608, under the title A True Relation of such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of that colony. Cf. p2, 3 The Course of American literature 2) The first writings were the narratives and journals of those settlements in Georgia, Caro