共用题干
The Beginning of American Literature America has always been a land of beginnings.After Europeans"discovered"America in the fifteenth century,the mysterious New World became for many people a genuine hope of a new life,an escape from poverty and persecution,a chance to start again.We can say that,as a nation,America begins with that hope.When,however,does American literature begin?
American literature begins with American experiences.Long before the first colonists arrived,before Christopher Columbus,before the Northmen who"found"America about the year 1000,native Americans lived here.Each tribe's literature was tightly woven into the fabric of daily life and reflected the unmistakably American experience of linking with the land.Another kind of experience,one filled with fear and excitement,found its expression in the reports that Columbus and other explorers sent home in Spain, French and English.In addition,the journals of the people who lived and died in the New England wilder- ness tell unforgettable tales of hard and sometimes heartbreaking experiences of those early years. Experience,then, is the key to early American literature.
The New World provided a great variety of experiences,and these experiences demanded a wide variety of expressions by an even wider variety of early American writers.These writers included John Smith,who spent only two-and-a-half year on the American continent.
They included Jonathan Edwards and William Byrd,who thought of themselves as British subjects,never suspecting a revolution that would create a United States of America with a literature of its own.American Indians,explorers,Puritan ministers,frontier wives,plantation owners-they are all the creators of the first American literature.
What can we learn from the literature of the tribes of the native Americans?
A:About the everyday life of the native Americans.
B:About the arrival of Columbus.
C:About the experience of the first European settlers.
D:About the experience of those who died in the New England wilderness.