Shakespeare:
1 \ the Renaissance period: the Renaissance period refers to the period between the 14th and mid-17ceturies. It first started in Italy, it is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events,The European humanist    the scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalish ideas in medieval Europe.
2\  humanism is the essence of the Renaissance:  1> man is the measure of all things.2>humanists not only saw the arts of splendor and enlightenment,but the human values rerepresented in the work.3>they came to see that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfection ,and that the world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question,explore,and enjoy.
3\  Thomas More,Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the english humanist.
4\ William Shakespeare (1564-1616) is one of the most remarkable playwrights and poets the world has ever know.with this 38 plays,154 sonnets and 2 long poems,he has established his giant position in world literature.
5\ in the second period,Shakespeare's style and approach became highly individualized. In this period he wrote five histories:Richard II, king John, henry IV, Parts I and II, and Henry V; six comedies: A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice ,Much Ado About Nothing ,As You Like It, Twelfth Night , and The Merry Wives of Windsor; and  two    tragedies: Romeo and juliet     and Julius Caesar,
6\ Shakespear's third period includes his greatest tragedies and his so-called dark comedies.the tragedies of this period are Harmlet,Othello ,King lear,Macbeth,Antony and Cleopatra,Troilus and Cressida,and Corialanus.the two comedies are All's Well that Ends well and Measure for Measure.
7\ The last period of Shakespear's work includes his principal romantic tragicomedies:Pericles,Cymbeline,The Winter's Tale and The Tempest;and his two final plays:Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kingmen.
8\Shakespear's authentic non-dramatic poetry consists of two long narrative peoms:Venus and Adonis and The rape of Lucrece,
9\ Shakespear,as a humanist of the time ,was shocked by the feudal tyranny and disunity and internal struggle for power at the court which led to civil wars.in his plays,he does not hesitate to descible the cruelty and anti-natureal character of the civil wars,but he did not go all the way against the feudal rule.
10\ Shakespear is against religious persecution and racial discrimination,against social inequality and the corrupting influence of gold and money. In the end,the only thing he can do as a humanist is to escape from the reality to seek comfort in his dream.
12\ Shakespear has accepted the Renaissance views on literature.he holds that literature should be a combination of beauty,kindness and truth,and should reflect nature and reality.
13\ Shakespear's major characters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones;they are individual representing sertain types.
14\ Shakespear's plays are well-known for their adroit plot construction.
15\ Irony is a good means of dramatic presentation.
16\ lastly,to understand Shakespeare.it is necessary to study the subtlest of his instruments-the language.Shakespeare can write skillfully in different poetic forms,like the sonnet,the blank verse,and the rhymed couplet.
17\ Shakespeare is above all writes in the past and in the present time,his influence on later writers is immeasurble.Almost all English writes after him have been influenced by him either in artistic point of view,in literary form or in language.
John Donne
1\  John Donne is the leading figure of the "metaphysical school". the most striking feature of Donne's poetry is precisely its tang of reality. The Songs and Sonnets ,by which Donne is probably best known,contains most of his early lyrics.Love is the basic theme. Donne holds that the nature of love is the union of soul and body.

The Neoclassical Period
1\ what we now call the neocalssical period id the one in English literaturel between the return of the Stuarts to the english throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticiam which came with the publiscation of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798.
2\ The eighteenth-century english is also known as the Age of Enlightment or the Age of Reason.
3\ the Enlightenment Movement was  a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept  through the whole Western Europe at the time. the movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas.
4\ In the field of literature,the Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works.this tendency is known as neoclassicism.
Alexander Pope
1\ As a representative of the Enlightenment,Pope was one of the first to introduse rationalism to England.
2\ Pope made his name as a great poet with the publication of An Essay on Criticism in 1711.
3\ Pope was the greatest poet of his time.He strongly advocated neoclassicism,emphasizing that literary works should be judged by classical rules of order,reason ,logic ,restrained emotion,good taste and decorum.
4\  An Essay on Criticism is a didactic poem written in heroic couplets.It consists of 744 lines and is divided into three parts.
Daniel Defoe
1\ At the age of nearly 60,he started his first novel Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe,an adventure story very much in the spirit of the time ,is universally considered his masterpiece.
2\As a member of the middle class,Defor spoke for and to the members of his class and his novels enjoyed great popularity among the less cultivated readers.in most of his works,he gave his praise to the hard-working,sturdy middle class and showed his sympathy for the downtrodden,unfortunate poor.
3\ Defoe was a very good story-teller.he had a gift for organizing minute details in such a vivid way that his shories could be both credible and fascinating.his sentences are sometimes short,crisp and plain,and sometimes long and rambling,which leave on the reader an impression of casual narration.his language is smooth,easy,colloquial and mostly vernacular.there is nothing artificial in his language;it is common english at its best.
4\ An Excerpt from chapter IV of Robinson Crusoe:   Robinson Cruson,supposelly based on the real adventure of an Alexander  Selkirk who once stayed alone on the uninhabited island Juan Fernandez for five years,is in fact ,a work of sheer imagination .the novel consists actually of three parts though only the first part is most well-known and widely read.
Jonathan Swift
1\Jonathan Swift(1667-1745), a posthumous child ,was born in Dublin,Ireland,of an English family,which had important connections but little wealth.
2\Swift is a master satirist,his satire is usually masked by an outward gravity  and an apparent earnestness which renders his satire all the more powerful.his "A Modest Proposal"is generally taken as a perfect model.
3\ Swift is one of the greatest masters of English prose,he is almost unsurpassed  in the writing of simple,direct,precise prose.he defined a good style as "proper words in proper places".
1\ Richard Brinsley Sheridan: Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) was born in 1751 in Dublin,Ireland.
   Sheridan was the only important english dramatist of the eighteenth century.his plays,especially The Ricals and The School for Scandal..
 Chapter 3 the Romantic Period
1\ the movement which we call Romanticism is something not so easy to define,especially concerning its characteristics or dates.for it is a broad movement that affected the whole of Europe(and America).however,English Romanticism,as a historical phase of literature,is generally said to have begun in 1798with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and to have ended in 1832 with Sir Walter Scott's death and the passage to the first Reform Bill in the Parliament.
2\ it was in effect a revolt of the english imagination against the neoclassical reason .
3\ the French Revolution of 1789-1794 and the English industrial Revolution which happed more slowly,but with astonishing consequences.
4\ the Romantic period is an age of poetry.
William Black
1\ the Songs of Innocence(1809) is a lovely volume of poems,presenting a happy and innocent world.
2\ His Songs of Experience(1794) paints a different world,a world of misery,poverty,disease.war and repression with a melancholy tone.
3\ Childhood is central to Blake's concern in the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience.
William Wordsworth
1\ the three men became known as the "Lake Poets".
2\Wordsworth thinks that common life is the only subject of literary interest.
3\ Wordsworth is a poet in memory of the past.
4\ Wordsworth's deliberate simplicity and refusal to decorate the truth of experience produced a kind of pure and frofound
poetry which no other poet has ever equaled.
5\ William Wordsworth is the leading figure of the english romantic poetry,the focal poetic voice of the period.
George Gordon Byron
1\ as a leading Romanticism ,Byron's chief contribution is his creation of the "Byronic hero," a proud,mysterious rebel
figure of noble origin. with immense superiority in his passions and powers,this Byronic hero would carry on his shoulders
the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society ,and would rise single-handenly against any kind of tyrannical
rules either in government,in religion,or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies .the
conflict is usually one of rebellious individuals against outworn social sysems and conventions .such a hero appears first
in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage,and then further developed in later works such as the Qriented Tales,Manfred,and Don
Juan in different guises .the figure is ,to some extent,modeled on the life and personality of Byron himself,and makes
BYron famous both at home and abroad.
Percy Bysshe shelley
1\Shelley(1792-1822) was born into a wealthy family at Sussex.
2\ Shelley's greatest achievement is his four-act poetic drama ,Prometheus Unbound(1820).According to the Greek
mythology.
Jane Austen
1\ her first novel,Sense and Sensibility (1881),tells a story about two sisters and their love affairs;Pride and Prejudice
(1813),the most popular of her novels.
2\ Emma(1815)gives the thought over self-deceptive vanity;and Peruasion(1818)contrasts the true love with the prudential calculations.
3\ it is a truth universally acknowledged,that a single man in possession of a good fortune,nust be in want of a wife.
however little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood,this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families ,that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their of  their daughters.
Chapter 4  The Victorian Period
1\ Chronologically the Cictorion period roughly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria who ruled over England
from 1836 to 1901.the period has been generally regarded as one of the most glorious in the English history.
2\ in this period ,the novel became the most widely read and the most vital and challenging expression of progressive
thought.among the famous novelists of the time were critical realists like Charles Dickens,Wulliam Makepeace Thackeray
,Charlotte Bronte ,Emily Bronte,Mrs.Gaskell (1810-1865)and Anthony Trollope (1815-1882). they shared one thing in common ,that is ,they were all concerned about the fate of the common people.
Charles Dickens
1\ Dickens is one of the greatest critical realist writers of the Victorian Age.it is his serious intention ro expose and
criticize in his works all the poverty,injustice,hypocrisy and corruptness he sees all around him ,nut his social attitudes are very complicated,he hates  the state apparatus ,especially the Parliament,but as a bourgeois writer,he can in no way supply
and fundamental solution ,to the social plights.the best he can do seems to try to retain an optimism with wishful thinking.
2\ in his works ,Dickens sets out a full map and a large-scale criticism of the nineteenth sentury England,particulary
London.
3\ Charles Dickens in a master story-teller.
4\ Dickens' works are also characterized by a mingling of humor and pathos.he seems to believe that life is itself a mixture of joy and grief. life is delightful because it is at once comic and tragic.he is a humorist..
The Bronte Sieter
1\ Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855),Emily Bronte(1818-1848),and their gifted sisiter Anne Bronte(1820-1849)come from
a large family of Irish origin.their father was a clergyman at Haworth,Yorkshire,when they were yong ,the Bronte sister were sent to a school for clergymen's daughters .the eldest two died there due to the poor and unhealthy conditions. this
passionate yet one-sided love was later recounted in her works,especially in Villette(1853)
2\ selected reading : excerpt one: from Chapter XXIII of jane eyre by Charlotte Bronte.
the story opens with the titular heroine,Jane Eyre,a plain little orphan,at Gateshead Hall with her aunt and cousins.her
aunt ,Mrs.Reed,a selfish and cold-hearted woman,and her three children all treat Jane very bably,one day ,in an
outbreak ,Jane fights back and is shut up in the horrible red room. to get rid of this eye-sore ,Mrs.Reed sends her away to lowood,a charity school for the orphaned or unwanted children .Jane suffers a lot there,both physically and mentally.
only to be consoled by the kindness of a teacher,Miss Temple and the friendship of Helen Burns,a pupil who dies as a
rewsult of the bad conditions there.Jane stays at the school for eight years,first six as  a student and the rest two as a teacher.An advertisement gives her the chance to be a governess at Thornfield Hall.There she falls in love with the master
of the house,Mr.Rochester,a grim-looking,energetic ,quick-tempered to the little plain governess for her quick wit ,honesty
,frankness ,loving heart and her spirit  of independence and selfdignity .but their wedding is canceled on the ground that
Rochester is already married and his wife ,though raving mad ,is still alive ,Shocked and deeply hurt,Jane makes up her mind to leave Rochester.she flees into the moorland.she would have died of starvation but for St.John Rivers and his two sisters.it turns out that the Rivers are really her cousins , and from them she also learns that she is now a rich heriress.one
day ,St.john Rivers,a very handsome clergyman who is determined to devote himself solely to God,asks Jane to marry him and accompany him to India for missionary work,Just when Jane,now desperate of her union with Rochester,is about to accept Jone's loveness proposal,she hears Rochester calling for her Following her own heart,jane returns to Thornfield
.she finds the burnt-down Thornfield Hall and its master,now a blind but free man ,the two lovers are finally united and live happily ever after.
3\ the success of the novel is also due to its introduction to the English novel the first governes heroine.
Alfred Tennyson
1\Alfred Tennyson(1809-1892) is certainly the most representative,if not the greatest,Victorian poet,His poetry voices the
doubt and the faith,the grief and the joy of the English people in an age of fast social changes.
2\ Selected Readings
  Break ,Break ,Break
 Break ,break, break,
 On thy cold grey stones,O Sea!
  and i would that my tongue could utter
 the thougts that arise in me 

 O' well for the fisherman's boy,
that  he shout with his sister at play
O' ,well for the sailor lad.
that he sings in his boat on the bay

And the stately ships go on
to their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
and the sound of a voice that is still!

Break,break,break
at the foot of thy crags,O sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me .
Notes: this short lyric is written in memory of Tennyson's best friend,Arthur Hallam,whose death has a lifelong influence
on the poet.Here ,the poet's own feeling of sadness are contrasted with the carefree, innocent joys of the children and the unfeeling movement of the ship and the sea waves.the beauty of the lyric is to be found in the musical language and in
the association of sound and images with feeling and emotions.the poem contains four quains,with combined iambic
and anapaestic feet.most lines have three feet and some four.the rhyme scheme is abcb.
Crossing the Bar
Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me
and may there be no moaning of the bar,
when i put out to sea

but such a tide as moving seems asleep,
too full for sound and foam
when that which drew from out the boundles deep
Turns again home

Twilight and evening bell
And after that the dark
And may there be no sadness of farewell
when i embark

for though from out our hourne of time and Place,
the flood may bear me far,
i hope to see my Pilot face to face
when i have crossed the bar.
Note: this poem was written in the later years of Tennyson's life.we can feel his fearlessoness towards death,his
faith in god and an afterlife .Bar :a bank of sand or stones under the water as in a river,paralled to the shore,at the entrance
to a harbor."Crossing the bar"means leaving this world and entering the next world.
Robert Browning
1\ the name of Browning is often associated with the term:"dramantic monologue"
2\ my last duchess:Note: "my last duchess"is Browning's best-known dramatic monologue.the peom takes its sources
from the life of alfonso II,duke of Ferrara of the 16th-century Italy,whose young wife died suspiciously after three years
of marriage.
Thomas Hardy
1\ In 1871,his first novel Desperate Remedies was published and well received.however,the real success came with Under the Greenwood Tree (1872),the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd in 1874 finally enabled him to give up 
architecture for writing. his last two novels:Tess of the D'Urberuilles(1891)and Jude the Obscure(1896).such as The Return if the Native(1878),The Trumpet Major(1880)The mayor of Casterbridge(1886),The Woodlanders(1887),Twss of the D'Urberuilles and Jude the Dbscure.These works,known as "novels of character and environment",are the most representative of him as both a naturalistic and a critical realist writer.

 Chapter 5 The Modern Peroid
1\In the second half of the 19th sentury and the early decades of the 20th century ,both natural and social science in Europe had enormaously advanced.
2\Freud's analytical psychology drastically altered our conception of human nature.Arthur Schopenhauer,a pessimist
philosopher ,started a rebellion against rationalism ,stressing the importance of will and intuition .having inherited the basic principles from Schopenhauer ,Friedrich Nietzsche went further against retionalism by advocating the doctrines of power
and superman and by completely rejecting the Christian morality.based on the major ideas of his predecessors ,
Henri Bergson established his irrational philosophy,which put the emphasis on creation,intuition,irrationality and
unconsciousness.
3\ Modernism rose out of ckepticism and disillusion of capitalism. human nature and human relationship.
4\  The French symbolism ,appearing in th late 18th century,heralded modernism.after the First Worlg War,
all kinds of literary trends of modernismappeard:expressionism ,surrealism ,futurism,Dadaism ,imagiam and stream of
consciousness.The major fihures that were associated with this movement were Kafka,Picasso,Pound,Webern,Eliot,
Joyce and Virginia Woolf.rose with the spur of the existerentialist idea that "the world was absurd,and the human life was an agony."
5\ Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis an its theoretical hase.The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted ,alienated and ill relationships between man and nature,man and society,
man and man ,and man and himself.they are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. In their writings,the past ,the present and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual.
George Bernard Shaw
1\ Bernard Shaw(1856-1850),abrilliant dramatist ,was born in Dublin ,Ireland ,of English parentage. he regarded the
establishment of socialism by the emancipation of land and industrial capital from individual and class ownership
as the final goal ,BUt on how to achieve it , he differed greatly front the Marxists . he was against the means of violent
revolution ar armed struggle in achieving the goal of socialism.
2\ Shaw was strongly against the credo of "art for art's sake" held by those decadent aesthetic artists.
3\ His career as a dramatist began in 1892 ,when his first paly Widowers' Houses(1892) was put on by the Independent
Theater Society.
4\ In his long dramatic career,Shaw wrote more than 50 plays.
5\ Mrs.Warren's Profession,written in 1893 but published 5 years later,is a play about the economic
oppression of women.
6\ Structurally and thematically ,Shaw followed the great traditions of realism .As a realistic dramatist,Most of his plays
are concerned with political,economic,moral,or religious problems ,and ,thus ,can be termed as problem plays,and
his plays have one passion ,and one only,i.e. indignation.
William Butler Yeats
1\ W.B. Yeats(1865-1939) was born into an Anglo-Irish Protestant family in Dublin.
2\ Toward the Irish Nationalist Movement, Yeats attitude went through several different stages.
3\ in his famous poem ,"Sailing to Byzantium," Yeats explored the problems of deach ,love , old age and art .
4\ Yeats is also a dramatist,writing verse  plays in most of the cases.He wrote more than 20 plays is a stretch of 48 years.
5\ The Lake Isle of innisfree: Note:   The poem is written in 1893 .tired of the life of his day ,Yeats sought to escape into
an ideal "faierland" where he could live calmly as a hermit and enjoy the beauty of nature,The poem consists of three
quatrains of iambic pentameter ,with each stanza rhymed abab.Innisfree is an inlet in the lake in Irish legends .here the
author is referring to a place for hermitage.
D.H.Lawrence
1\  David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was born at a mining village in Nottinghamshire. his autobiographical novel
Sons and lovers (1913)
2\ Lawrence is one of the greatest English novelists of the 20th century ,and ,perhaps ,the greatest from a working-class
family.
James Joyce
1\ James Joyce(1882-1941)was born into a Catholic family  in Dublin.
2\ for Joyce regarded exile as the only way to preseve his integrity and to enable  him to recreate the life in Dublin
truthfully, completely and objectively in his writings.
3\ Dubliners(1914),a collection of 15 short stories.
4\ in 1916,joyce published his first novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
5\ Ulysses(1922),Joyce's masterpiece ,has become a prime example of modernism  in literature. there is virtually no story
, no plot ,almost no action, the three major characters are : Leopold Bloom, an Irish Jew , his wife ,Marion Tweedy
Bloom,and Stephen Dedalus ,the protagonist in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

PART TWO :AMERRICAN LITERATURE
CHAPTER I The Romantic Period
1\ The Romantic Period ,one of the most importan periods in the history of American literature,stretches from the end of
the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War.it started with the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book
and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
2\ In most of the American writings in the period there was a new emphasis upon the imagination and emotional .
3\ placed an increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions and displayed an increating attention to the
psychic states of their characters.
4\ Transcendentalist group includes two of the most significant writers America has produced so far,Emerson and his
young friend,Henry David Thoreau.
5\ Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as "the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth
intuitively , or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses"
6\ Wilt Whitman ,whose leaues of Grass established him as the most popular American poet of the 19th century.
Washinggton Irving
1\ Washington Irving(1783-1859)was one of the first American writers to earn an international reputation,and regarded
as an early Romantic writers in the American literary history and Fater of the American short stories. in his famous
story "Rip Van Winkle",the story is a tale remembered mostly for Rip's 20-years sleep.
2\ Washington Irving has always been regarded as a writer who "perfected the best classic style that American
literature ever produced." he is worth the honor of being "the American Goldsmith"for his literary craftsmanship.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1\ and the chiref spokeman of this spiritual movement is Ralph Waldo Emerson(1803-1882)
2\ Emerson is generally known as an essayist.During all his life he worked steadily at a succession of essays.many of his famous essays are included in Essays,which convey the best of his philosophical discussions and transcendental pursuits,
sunch as The American Scholar.
3\ Emerson's essays often have a casual style ,for most of them were derived from his journals or lectures.they are usually characterized by a series of short, declarative sentences.
 Nathaniel Hawthorne
1\  Imbued with an inquiring imagination ,an intensely meditative mind ,and unceasing interest in the "interior of the heart"
of man's being ,Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)remains one of  the most interesting ,yet most ambivalent writers
in the American literary history.
2\ As we can see ,Hawthorne's literary world turns out to be a most disturbed,tormented and problematical one possible
to imagine.
3\ one source of evil that hawthorne is concerned most is overreaching intellect.
4\ Hawthorne's view of man and human history originates,to a great extent.in Puritanism.he was not a Puritan himself,but he had Puritan ancestors who played an important role in his life and works.He believed that "the wrong doing of one
generation lives into the successive ones,"and often wondered if he might have inherited some of their guilt.
5\ Hawthorne's remarkable sense of the puritan past ,his understanding of the colonial history in New England,his apparent
preoccupation analysis of people are brought to full display in his master piece The Scarlet letter.
Walt Whitman
1\ Lwaves of Grass has always been considered a monumental work which commands great attention because of its
uniquely poetic embodiment of American democratic ideals as written in the founding documents of both the
revolutionnary War in the United States and the Civil War ,and the author of the book is a giant of American letters.
this man is Walt Whitman(1819-1892).
2\ Walt Whitman ia a poet with a strong sense of mission ,Having devoted all his life to the creation of the "single"
poem ,Leave of Grass .the work has nine editions and first edition was published in 1855.
3\ Walt Whitman has proved a great figure in the literary history of the United States because he embodies a new ideal,
a new world and a new life-style.
4\ Song of myself (this poem first appeared in 1855 edition Leaves of Grass without a title . in the 1856 edtion . the title
was "Poem of Walt Whithout ,an American; then it became "Walt Whitman"in 1860 and remained under that titlr 1881,when it finally became "Song of Myself."in his poem Whitman sets forth two principal belief: the theory of universality,whish
is illustranted by lengthy catalogues of people and things,and the belif in the singularity and equlity of all beings invalue.)

Chapter 2 The  Realistic Period
1\ the peroid ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as the Age of Realism in the literary history of the United
States, Realism was a reaction against Romanticism or a move away from the bias towards romance and selt-creating
fiction ,and paved the way to Modernism.
2\ the impact of Darvin't evolutionary theory on the American thought and the influence  of the 19the sentury French
literature on the American men of letters gave rise to yet another school of realism:American naturalism .Darwin ,in
his The Origin of Species (1859)and Descent of Man (1871), hypothesized that over the millennia man had evolved
from lower forms of life.Humans were speiciel ,not because God had created them in his image,but because they
had successfully adapted to changing envirenmental conditions.the American naturalists accepted the more negative
implications of this theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were
conceived as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes,
Wark Twain
1\ Mark Twain (1835-1910) is a great literary gaint of American,whom H.L.Wencken considered"the ture father of our
national literature." with works like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  (1884) and Life on the Mississippi(1883). Mark
Twain ,pen mane of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
2\ the Adventures of Tom Sawyer.As a sequel to Tom Sawyer,HUckleberry Finn marks the climax of Twain's literary
creativity.Hemingway once described the novel the one book from which "all modern American literature comes."
3\ Twain is also know as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of
his regions , including people living in that area , the landscape ,and other peculiarities like the customs,dialects,costumes
and so on .
4\ Another fack that made Twain unique is his magic power with language ,his use of vernacular ,his words ase colloquial
. concrete and direct in effect,and his sentence structures are simple ,even ungrammatical ,which is typical of the spoken
language.
5\ Mark Twain's humor is remarkble ,too. it is fun to read Twain to begin with ,for most of his works tend to be funny
,containing some practical jokes ,comic details,witty remark ,etc , and some of them are actually tall tales.
Emily Dickinson
1\ Miss Emili Dickinson(1830-1886) was born into a Calvinst family of Amberst,she wanted to live simply as a complete
independent being,and so she did ,as a spinster.
2\ Dickinson 's poem are usuall based on her own experienses,her sorrows and joys.which include religion , death s
immortality , love and nature,While she desire salvation and immortality ,she denied the orthodox view of paradise.
3\ More than five hundred poems Dickinson wrote are about nature,in which her general skepticism about the
relationship between man and nature is well-expressed.
4\ Dickinson's poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way ,her peoms have no titles,hence are always quoted
by their first lines.

Theodore Dreiser
1\ Theodore Dreiser(1871-1945) is generally acknowledged as one of  American's naturalists.
2\ Dreiser is prolific writer and many of his works are familiar to use Chinese reader,Among them ,Sister Carrie(1900)
 is the best known .In 1925 Dreiser's greatest work An American Tragedy appeared

Chapter 3 The Modern Period
Ezra Pound
1\ Ezra pound(1885-1972), a lending spokesman of the "Imagist Movement"
2\  "the point of Imagism," Pound wrote in 1914,"is that it does not use images as ornaments . the image itself is the
speech . the image is the word beyond formulated language ."obviously the primary Imagist object or experience being
described , and to move from explicit generalization . Pound's famous one-image poem "in a station of the Metro" would
serve as a typical example of the Imagist ideas .
F.Scott Fitzgerald
1\ Thus he is often acclaimed literaty spokesman of the Jazz Age.
2\ It was a sort of first attempt at writing his masterpiece The Great Gatsby(1925)

Ernest Hemingway
1\ Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), a Nobel prize winner for literarature, is one of the greatest American writes. his style,
the particular type of hero in his novels , and his life attitudes have been widely recognised and imitated , not only in
English speaking countries but also all over the world.
2\ The Sun Also Rises(1926) is hemingway's first true novel
3\ The Lost Generation: agroup of young Americans who left their native land and fought in the war and later engaged
themselves in writing in a new way about their own eaperiences. the young expatriates in this novel are a group of
wandering , amusing , but aimless people , who are caught in the war and removed from the path of ordinary life .
in this novel the Hemingway Code hero is exemplified in different versions .
4\ Hemingway's second big success is  A Farewell to Arms (1929)
5\ For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)and The Old Man and the Sea(1952 )tell more about the later Hemingway.
6\ Hemingway's world is limited . he deals with a limited rang of characters in quite similar circumstances and measures
them against an unvarying code ,known as "grace under pressure," which is actually an sttitude towards life that
Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works. those who survive in the process of seeking to master the code with the heries. in the general is situation of his novel, life is full of tension and battles;the world is in cgaos;man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. however , though life is but a losing battle, it is a struggle man can dominate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed  but never defeated spiritually.
7\ Typical of this "iceberg"analogy is Hemingway's style.