1. American literature Romantic period: Poe and Hawthorne

2. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)  father of modern short story  father of detective story  father of psychoanalytic criticism  Poe remained the most controversial and most misunderstood literary figure in the history of American literature.  Emerson dismissed him in three words “the jingle man” ( 打油 诗人 ) ， Mark Twain declared his prose to be unreadable. And Whitman was the only famous literary figure present at the Poe Memorial Ceremony in 1875.  Today, Poe’s particular power has ensured his position among the greatest writers of the world.

3. Works  Short stories  Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque 《奇异怪诞故 事集》  “MS. Found in a Bottle” 《瓶子里发现的手稿》  “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” 《毛格街杀人案》  “The Fall of the House of Usher” 《厄舍古屋的倒塌》  “The Masque of the Red Death” 《红色死亡的化妆舞会》  “The Cask of Amontillado” 《一桶酒的故事》  Literary criticism  The Poetic Principle 《诗歌原理》  The Philosophy of Composition 《创作哲学》

4. Poe’s poetry  Poetry  The Raven 《乌鸦》  Israfel 《伊斯拉菲尔》  Annabel Lee 《安娜贝尔 李》  To Helen 《致海伦》  A Sonnet: To Science 《致科学》

5. To Helen  Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicean barks of yore, That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore.  On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece And the grandeur that was Rome.  Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche How statue-like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand! Ah, Psyche, from the regions which Are Holy Land!

6. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)  All his life, Hawthorne seems to be haunted by his sense of sin and evil in life—“Black vision”. Evil seems to be man’s birthmark.  The House of the Seven Gables is an appalling fictional version of Hawthorne’s belief that the “wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones.”  One source of evil in Hawthorne is overwhelming intellect.

7. Works  Twice-Told Tales 1837  Mosses from an Old Manse 1843  The Scarlet Letter 1850  The House of the Seven Gables 1851  The Blithedale Romance 1852  The Marble Faun 1860  “Young Goodman Brown”  “The Minister’s Black Veil”  “Rappacini’s Daughter”

8. The Scarlet Letter  Themes  Evil, sin, revenge and redemption  Main characters:  Hester  Chillingworth  Dimmesdale  Pearl  The symbols in the novel:  The scarlet letter  The wild rose  The meteor  Implication of names