美国文学术语

American Literary Terms

美国文学术语

1. Romanticism

This literary movement started in the late 18th century in Europe. Romanticists take materials or subjects from mythologies or from history. The depiction of individual emotions is emphasized and life is dramatized. Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman are regarded as the representatives of American Romanticism.

2. American Romanticism

(1) It is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature that 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 Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

(2) Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance”.

(3) American romantic works emphasize the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature. The strong teddency to eulogize the individual and the common man was typical of this period. Most importantly, the writings of American Romanticism are typically American. Works concentrate on unique characteristics of the American land.

(4) New England Transcendentalism is the summit of American Romanticism.

(5) Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.

3. Transcendentalism

(1) 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”.

(2) Transcendentalism stress the importance of the Over-soul, the Individual and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is ddivine and, therefore, self-reliant. New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European Romanticism.

4. Free Verse

(1) Free verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conventional rules of meter.

(2) Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19th century.

(3) Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead the free rhythms of natural speech.

(4) What Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps, the most notable example.

5. Symbol

(1) It means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacle that stands for something else, usually something less palpable than the named symbol.

(2) The relationship etween the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Allegorical symbols usually express a neater equivalence with what they stand for than the symbols found in modern realistic fiction.