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healthy and restorative influence on human mind. By employing nature as a big symbol of the spirit, or God, or the Over-soul, Emerson has brought the Puritan legacy of symbolism to its perfection.
10. Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) is an American transcendentalist writer, whose work demonstrates how the abstract ideals of libertarianism and individualism can be effectively installed in a person‘s life. In Walden (1854) Thoreau explains his motives for living apart from society and devoting himself to a simple lifestyle and to the observation of nature. The book not only displays Emersonian ideas of self-reliance but also develops and treats Thoreau‘s own transcendentalist idea. For Thoreau, nature is not merely symbolic, but divine in itself and human beings can receive precise communication from the natural world by way of pure sense. To achieve personal spiritual perfection he thinks the most important thing for man is to be self-sufficient.
11. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), is regarded as the first great American writer of fiction. He initiated three genres of fiction: historical novel, sea novel, and frontier novel. His novels are filled with action-packed plots and vivid portrayal of American life in the wild land. In 1823 Cooper wrote The Pioneers, the first of the five novels that make up The Leatherstocking Tales. The remaining four books: The Last of Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841), continue the story of Natty Bumppo, one of the most famous characters in American fiction. The Leathestcoking Tales are noted for their portrayal of American subject matter in American settings. The hero of the tales, Natty Bumppo, embodies the conflict between preserving nature unspoiled and developing the land in the name of progress.
12. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is known as a poet and critics but most famous as the first master of the short story form, especially tales of the mysterious and macabre. Whether or not Poe invested the short story, it is certain that he originated the novel of detection. Perhaps his best-known tale in this genre is The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841). Many of Poe‘s tales are distinguished by the author‘s unique grotesque inventiveness in addition to his superb plot construction. Such stories include The Fall of the House of User (1893), in which the penetrating glooming of the atmosphere is accented equally with plot and characterization. Poe‘s poems are remarkable for their flawless literary construction and for their haunting themes and meters as in the poems ―The Raven‖ and ―Annabel Lee‖.
13. Young Goodman Brown, essentially an allegory, which is included in Hawthorne‘s Mosses from an Old Manse, is one of his most profound tales. Though the story, Hawthorne sought to bring about the moral that, ―There is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole life; but circumstances may rouse it to activity.‖ While using allegory to hold fast against the crushing blows of reality, the symbol serves as a weapon to attack and penetrate it. Hawthorne took his symbolism from Puritan tradition and bequeathed it to American literature in a revivified form. His view of man and history originates, to a great extent, in Puritanism. Hawthorne was burdened with a sense of guilt due to his ancestor‘s notorious role in Salem Witch Trials. This sensibility led to his
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understanding of evil being at the very core of human life, which is typical of the Calvinistic belief being that human beings are basically depraved and corrupted, hence they should obey gad to atone for their sins.
14. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1840-1864), American novelist, whose works are deeply concerned with the ethical problems of sin, punishment, and atonement. His major works include short-story collections such as Twice-Told Tales (1837), Mosses from an Old manse (1846), and novels such as The Scarlet Letter (1850), The House of the Seven Gables (1851), The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860).
15. The Scarlet Letter (1850), a story of rebellion within an emotionally constricted Puritan society, is an undisputed masterpiece written by Hawthorn. The Scarlet Letter reveals both Hawthorne‘s superb craftsmanship and the powerful psychological insight with which he probed guilt and anxiety in the human soul. Hawthorne‘s remarkable sense of the Puritan past, his understanding of the colonial history in England, his apparent preoccupation with the moral issue of sin and guilt, and his keen psychological analysis of people are brought to full display in this novel. So his dream is Thought, full of mental activities. Thought propels action and grows organically out of the interaction of the characters. With modern psychological insight, Hawthorne probe the secret motivation in human behavior and the guilt and anxiety that he believed resulted from all sins against humanity, especially those of pride. Hawthorne is a master of symbolism. The structure and the form of the novel are carefully worked out to cater for the thematic concern. By using Pearl as a thematic symbol, Hawthorne emphasizes the consequence the sin of adultery has brought to the community and people living in that community. As a key to the whole novel, the letter A takes on different layers of symbolic meanings as the plot develops. The ambiguity is one of the salient features of the work.
16. Published in 1851, Moby Dick is considered a master piece by Herman Melville. Holding the thesis that ―all visible objects are but as pasteboard mask,‖ Melville strikes through the surface of his adventurous narrative to formulate concepts of good and evil imbedded as allegory in its events. Under Melville‘s pen, Moby-Dick urns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man‘s deep reality and psychology. Melville uses symbols as representations of different ideas, and through facts and incidents to acquire universal meanings: the Pequod is the microcosm of human society and the voyage becomes a search for truths. The white whale, Moby Dick, symbolizes nature, for it is complex, unfathomable, malignant, and beautiful as well. For the character Ahab, however, the whale represents only evil; for the author, as well as for the reader and Ishmael, the narrator, Moby Dick is an ultimate mystery of the universe, and the voyage of the mind will forever remain a search of the truth.
17. American novelist, Herman Melville (1819-1891), is a major literary figure whose exploration of psychological and metaphysical themes foreshadowed 20th-century literary concerns. His works remain in obscurity until the 1920s, when his genius was finally recognized. Melville‘s early works include Mardi (1849), Redburn
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(1849) White Jacket (1850) and Moby-Dick (1851); and his later works include Pierre (1852), The Confidence-Man (1857), Billy Budd (1924).
18. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a forceful indictment of slavery and one of the most powerful novels of its kind in American literature, is written by the abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896). The novel is one of the best examples of the so-called sentimental fiction that enjoyed popularity in the US during the 1800. By demonstrating how the slave system violated the most basic bond of humanity, the novel aroused pity for the oppressed and offered a natural form for novelists writing about the evils of slavery. An ardent opponent of slavery, Stowe convinced many Americans, especially in the Northern US, to support the abolitionist movement against slavery. The success of the book was unprecedented; 500000 copies were sold in the US alone within 5 years, and it was translated into more than 20 foreign languages. It did much to crystallize militant antislavery sentiment in the North, and therefore was an important factor in precipitating the American Civil War (1861-1865). No wander President Abraham Lincoln is credited with having humorously described Stowe as ―the little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War.‖ Uncle Tom‘s Cabin was powerful as propaganda and expressed the deep antislavery feelings of the North.
19. Whitman‘s Leaves of Grass has always been considered a monumental work because of its uniquely poetic embodiment of American democratic ideal. The work has nine editions and the first edition was published in 1855. In this giant work, the abundance of themes voices freshens. Whitman shows concern for the whole hardworking people and the burgeoning life of the cities. The realization of the individual value also found a tough position in Whitman‘s poems in a particular way. In celebrating the self, Whitman gives emphasis to the physical dimension of the self and openly celebrates sexuality. And some of Whitman‘s poems are politically committed. Stylistically, Whitman experiments with a mixture of the colloquial diction and prose rhythm of journalism. The direct address is another salient feature of his poetry. He constructs a democratic ―I‖, a voice that sets out to celebrate itself and the rapture of its sense experiencing the world. In addition, Whitman initiated the form of free verse in American that endows his poems with a flow of musicality and a sense of rhythm.
20. Emily Dickenson (1830-1886) is American best known female poet. Her poetry covers the issues vital to humanity, which include religion, death, immortality, love and nature. Her poems have no titles, hence are always quoted by their first lines. In her poetry, there is a particular stress pattern, in which dashes are used as musical device to create cadence and capital letters as a means of emphasis. Most of her poems borrow the repeated four-line, rhymed stanzas of traditional Christian hymns, with two lines of three-beat meter alternating with two lines of three-beat meter. A master of imaginary that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed manifold variations within her simple form; she uses imperfect rhythms, subtle breaks of rhythm, and idiosyncratic syntax and punctuation to create fascinating world puzzles, which have produced greatly divergent
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interpretations over the years. Due to her deliberate seclusion, her poems tend to be very personal and meditative. She frequently personifications to vivify some abstract ideas. Dickinson‘s poetry, despite its ostensible formal simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness; and her limited private world have never confined the limitless power of her creativity and imagination. VI. Analysis of Literary Works.
1. Man muse have an identification to communicate with others in society. But man cannot be treated in a labeled way. In the naturalistic view, man is dynamic and constantly changing. If the change is too radical, man may lose his identity, because he fails to adapt himself to the radical changed.
2. He would sit on a wet rock, with a rod as long and heavy as a Tartar‘s lance, and fish all day without a murmur…
He would carry a fowling-piece on his shoulder for hours together, trudging through woods and swamps, and up hill and down dale…
3. Rip is self-centered, careless, anti-intellectual, imaginative, and jolly as the overgrown child, which symbolizes the immature America. His wife symbolizes the puritanical discipline and the work ethic of Franklin.
4. Washington Irving has Rip sleep through his own country‘s history, through what we might call the birth pangs of America, and return to the busy, bustling, self-consciously adult United States of America. His purpose is to show us clearly the conflicts and dreams of the nations—the conflict of innocence and experience, work and leisure, the old and the new, the head and the heart. It is also to tell us that a man who has looked toward the beginning of civilization in American can make a choice in his analysis of his own life.
5. A termagant wife may, therefore, in some respects, be considered a tolerable blessing, and if so, Rip Van Winkle was thrice blessed.
―Alsa! Gentlemen,‖ cried Rip, somewhat dismayed, ―I am a poor quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the King, God bless him!‖
6. Ralph Waldo Emerson believes in goodness and divinity in man who has access to God, the Universal Self. Since man is a particle of God, he is able to relay on himself that is transcendental, noble and independent of external influence.
7. ―I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.‖ ―My life should be unique.‖ ―I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is not an apology, but a life. It is for itself and not a spectacle.‖ ―What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people think.‖
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson believes that man can intuitively transcend the limits of the senses and of logic and directly receive higher truths and great knowledge. The soul creates the arts wherever they have flourished. It is in his own mind that artist seeks his model. It is an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. So it is unnecessary for people to travel to get what they want.
9. Here Emerson judges social advance in the moral sense while advances in the means of transportation are regarded in the technical sense. So Emerson is right in the argument.
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10. Envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide. Let us advance and advance on Chaos and the Dark. Truth is handsomer than the affection of love. To be great is to be misunderstood. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide.
11. Deathlike, strange, dread, fear, terrible, frightened, shudder, tremor, quake, quiver, tremulous, shiver, shrink, etc.
12. Each member of the congregation, the most innocent girl, and the man of hardened breast, felt as if the preacher had crept upon them, behind his awful veil, and discovered their hoarded iniquity of deed or thought.
13. Maybe he suffers from his own actions; maybe he suffers from the religion. The black veil symbolizes the wickedness of man.
14. Both writers belong to American Romanticism. Both focus on imagination and introspection in one‘s lie. However, Hawthorne believes in the original sin of man of Calvinism, while Emerson believes in the divinity of man, which belongs to transcendentalism. 15. Open.
16. Line 1: weak and weary (Alliteration) Line 7: morrow; borrow (Internal rhyme)
Line 10: silken; uncertain; curtain (Assonance) 17. In the next-to-the-last stanza: jocularity In the last stanza: despair
18. To show us the power of death and to reflect a basic anapestic rhythm.
19. A sense of melancholy over the death of a beloved beautiful young woman pervades the whole poem, the portrayal of a young man grieving for his lost Lenore, his grief turned to madness under the steady one-word repetition of the talking bird.
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