美国文学史名词解释 综合

美国文学选读复习资料
American Puritanism:the settlement of North American continent by English started in the early 17th century. Under siege from church and crown, it sent an offshoot in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century to the northern English colonies in the New World—a migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England. Puritanism, however was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincident with the founding of New Zealand; it was also a way of being in the world—a style of response to lived experience—that has reverberated through American life ever since. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature. American Romanticism
The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th \century through the outbreak of the Civil War.
•Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.
(subjectivity)
•For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense.
•They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group, against authority.
•The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts.
New England Poets: William Cullen Bryant; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Writers: James Fenimaore Cooper The Spy (1821) The Leatherstocking Tales (1823—1841)
The Pilot (1824) The Red Rover (1827)
Washington Irving（“Th e Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon” “Bracebridge Hall”“Tales of a Traveller”“The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus ”）
American Transcendentalism
In the realm of art and literature it meant the shattering of pseudo-classic rules and forms in favor of a spirit of freedom, the creation of works filled with the new passion for nature and common humanity and incarnating a fresh sense of the wonder, promise, and romance of life.
Transcendentalism
①The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe.
②The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society.
③The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was not purely matter. It was alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence.
Writers
Emerson’s：Nature；Self-Reliance；The American Scholar；The Over-soul；
H. D. Thoreau：Walden
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Walt Whitman：Leaves of Grass Emily Dickinson：I Died for Beauty；Because I could not stop for Death
William Faulkner(1897-1962 1949 Nobel price
As I Lay Dying (1930)
Light in the August ( 1932)
Absalom, Absalom (1936)
Go Down Moses (1942)
Ernest Hemingway
Iceberg Principle (Theory)
“grace under pressure”
Major Works:
The Sun Also Rises 1926 (Jake Barnes)
A Farewell to Arms 1928 (a tragic story about war and love) (Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley)
For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940 (Spanish civil war) (Robert Jordan)
The Old Man and the Sea 1952 (Santiago)
Herman Melville
代表作：白鲸Moby Dick Other Works are: Billy Budd,Typee, Omoo, Mardi. Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter
Mosses from an Old Manse; Twice-Told Tales; The Marble Faun; The House of the Seven Gables
Realism
As a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism with the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Roma nticism and sentimentalism, and paved the way to Modernism.
This literary interest in the so-called “reality” of life started a new period in the American literary writing known as The Age of Realism.
Psychological Realism
It is the realistic writing th at probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. And Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it.
William Dean Howells：The Rise of Silas Lapham
Henry James：The Portrait of a Lady (Isabel Archer; Madam Merle; Gilbert Osmond) Daisy Miller (Daisy; Mr. Winterbourne; Mr. Giovanelli)
Local colorism: local colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th(1860s—1870s). The feature of local colorism are: (1) presenting a locale distinguished from the outside world; (2)describing the exotic of the picturesque;
(3)glorifying the past; (4) showing things as they are; (5) influence of setting on characters. The well known local colorism authors were Mark Twain with his book Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bret Harte’s with his The Luck of the Roaring Camp.
Black humor: the term black humor was created in 1920s, but it was not noticed until 1960s. it was particularly a literary phenomenon in America after WWⅡ. Black humor, in literature, is drama, novel, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic face. Josegh Heller and Kury V onnegut are famous for their novels of black humor. Especially Heller’s Catch—22.
American Naturalism: The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to accout for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.2) naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.3>Dreiser with his Sister Carrie is a leading figure of his school. Imagism: A poetic movement of England and the U.S. that flourished from 1909 to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. “poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impre ssions”
Three main principles of the Imagist Movement (1912) :
[1] direct treatment of poetic subjects
[2] elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, to use no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
[3] rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the
sequence of a metronome. 4> pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known poem.
Harlem Renaissance：Harlem Renaissance refers to a period of outstanding literary vigor and creativity that occurred in the United states during the 1920s.2> the Harlem Renaissance changed the images of literature created by many black and white American writers. New black images were no longer obedient and docile. Instead they showed a new confidence and racial pride. 3> the center of this movement was the vast black ghetto of Harlem. In New York City.4> the leading figures are langston Hughes, James W.Johnson.etc
主要作品：The Weary Blues, The Dream keeper and Other Poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew
The Modern Period
Part I The 1920s-1930s ( the second renaissance of American literature)
l The Roaring Twenties (economically)
l The Jazz Age (socially)
l “lost” and “waste land” (spiritu ally)
There had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences.
Darwinism(Darwin), Socialism (Karl Marx), Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)
Lost generation:The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.
The Beat Generation:The Beat Generation is a group of American young writers and artists popular in the 1950s and early 1960s. the member of the beat generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non conformity and for its non conforming style. The major writing are jack Kerouac’s on the road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
American Dream
The is the idea held by many in the United States that through hard work, courage and determination one could achieve prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations.
The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America.
Allegory is a narrative that serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories are written in the form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and almost any other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a story that has characters, a setting, as well as other types of symbols, that have both literal and figurative meanings. One well-known example of an allegory is Dante’s The Divine Comedy.In Inferno, Dante is on a pilgrimage to try to understand his own life, but his character also represents every man who is in search of his purpose in the world.
Alliteration is a pattern of sound that includes the repetition of consonant sounds. The repetition can be located at the beginning of successive words or inside the words. Poets often use alliteration to audibly represent the action that is taking place.
Aside is an actor’s speech, directed to the audience, that is not supposed to be heard by other actors on stage. An aside is usually used to let the audience know what a character is about to do or what he or she is thinking. Asides are important because they increase an audience's involvement in a play by giving them vital information pertaining what is happening, both inside of a character's mind and in the plot of the play.
Gothic is a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects. Gothic literature was named for the apparent influence of the dark gothic architecture of the period on the genre. Also, many of these Gothic tales took places in such “gothic” surroundings. Other times, this story of darkness may occur in a more everyday setting, such as the quaint house where the man goes mad from the "beating" of his guilt in Edgar Al lan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.”In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were told from many different points of view.
CATHARSIS is an emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragic artistic work.
IMAGERY: A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the "mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of literature. It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a poem, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor. Surrealism is an artistic movement doing away with the restrictions of realism and verisimilitude that might be imposed on an artist. In this movement, the artist sought to do away with conscious control and instead respond to the irrational urges of the subconscious mind. From this results the hallucinatory, bizarre, often nightmarish quality
of surrealistic paintings and writings. Sample surrealist writers include Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, and Franz Kafka.
Black Humor
Black humor is a term used in literature, drama, and film. It refers to grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. For example, Catch-22 is the model representative of this type. The novels of such writers as Kurt V onnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.
Puritanism
American Puritanism was practice and belief of Puritans. Puritans were the people who wanted to purify the Church of England and then were persecuted in England. They came to America for various reasons. But because they were a group of serious and religious people, they carried a code of value and a philosophy of life. To them, religion was the most important thing. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin, total depravity and limited atonement for God’s grace. They also believed in hard worki ng, piety and sobriety. In a word, American Puritanism exerted great influences upon American thought and literature.。