美国文学选读名词解释

美国文学选读及赏析名词解释

American Transcendentalism （时间，主要主张和特征，代表人物，代表作）定义Transcendentalism was a religious and philosophical movement that developed during the late 1820s and '30s[1] in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest against the general state of spirituality and, in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School.美国超验主义：它宣称存在一种理想的精神实体，超越于经验和科学之处，通过直觉得以把握。

时间：1830s-Civil War主要主张：（我觉得主张就是特征就写一起了）The Transcendental ists “placed emphasis on spirit, or the Over-soul, as the most important thing in the universe”（1）The importance of intuition.（直觉）The Transcendentalists believed that individuals can intuitively receive higher truths otherwise unavailable through common methods of knowing.(2) The importance of the individual.(3) The importance of the nature.代表人物：Ralph Waldo Emerson 爱默生代表作Nature (《论自然》)“The American Scholar”（《论美国学者》）”Our Intellectual Declaration of Independence““Divinity School Address”(《神学院毕业班演说》)Essays（《论文集》）Essays: Second Series“Representative Men" (《人类代表》)Henry David Thoreau (梭罗)Walden (1854) (《瓦尔登湖》)Nathaniel Hawthorne (霍桑)Twice –Told Tales《尽人皆知的故事》Mosses from an Old Manse《古屋青苔》The Scarlet Letter （《红字》）The House of the Seven Gables （《带有七个尖角阁的房子》）The Blithedale Romance （《福谷传奇》）The Marble Faun （《玉石雕像》）“Young Goodman Brown”(《好小伙布朗》)Henry Wadsworth Longfellow亨利.华兹沃斯.朗费罗Voices of the Night (1839) 《夜籁集》-- catch the attentionBallads and Other Poems (1841) 《歌谣及其它》Evangeline (1847) 《伊凡吉林》Hiawatha or The Song of Hiawatha (1855)《海华莎之歌》Imagism （时间，对Image 的定义，主要主张和特征，代表人物，代表作）定义Imagism was poetic movement of England and the united states, flourishing from 1909-1917. Its credo, expressed in some imagist poets, includes the use of precise language, the creation of new rhythms, absolute freedom in choice of subject matter, and the evocation of concrete images.时间：between the years 1909 and 1917特征：(1) “Direct treatment of the 'thing' whet h er subjective or objective;”(2) “To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;”(3) “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome(节拍器).”主张：It came into being as a reaction to the traditional English poetry characterized by cloudy verbiage, and aimed instead at a new clarity and exactness in the short lyric poem.代表人物：Ezra Pound“The Cantos”。

美国文学重点名词解释

2.6.Transcendentalism: is literature，philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reaching against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world instead. Transcendentalism derived some of its basic idealistic concepts from romantic German philosophy, and from such English authors as Carlyle，Coleridge, and Wordsworth. The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essays as Nature and Self-Reliance and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden..Symbolism象征主义：It is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writer, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word. It’s one of the most powerful devices thatpoets employ in creation.8.American naturalism：this term was cr eated by Emile Zola. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory played an important role in naturalism. In the works off naturalism，characters were conceived as complex combinations of inherited attributes and habits conditioned by social and economic forces. At the end of the 19th century，this pessimistic form of realism appeared in america. Naturalism attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness. Characters in the works of naturalism were dominated by their environment and heredity. Naturalism emphasized：the world was around；men had no free will；religious“truth”were illusory；the destiny of human beings was misery in life and oblivion in death. The dominant figures in naturalism were Stephen crane，Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.3.The lost generation: included the young English and American expatriates as well as men and women caught in the war and cut from the old value and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. These writers adopted unconventional style of writing and reacted against the tendencies of the older writers in the 1920s. The term came from Gertrude Stein who said in Hemingway's presence that“you are all a lost generation.”4.Local colorismAs a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本.国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor. The major local colorist is Mark Twain.5.Jazz age: the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term"Jazz Age" retroactively to refer to the decade after World War I and before the stock market crash in 1929, during which Americans embarked upon what he called "the gaudiest spree in history". Jazz Age is inextricably associated with the wealthy white"flappers" and socialites immortalized in Fitzgerald's fiction.6.Free verse: is a poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure, instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech. While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse forms do, free verse does so in a looser way. Whitman's poetry is an example of free verse at its most impressive. It has since been used by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other major American can poets of the 20th century.7.The iceberg analogy: The Iceberg Theory is a writing theory by American writer Ernest Hemingway, as follows：if a writer of a prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader，if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.1.Poe's Poetic IdeasA.His conviction that the function of poetry is not to summarize and interpret earthly experience,but to create a mood in which the soul soars toward supernal beauty.B.He insists that poetry must be disembarrassed of that moral sense.C.Poe believes that the elevation of excitement of the soul should be “the poetic principle” thuspoe try must concern itself only with “supernal beauty”.D.Poe defines poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty” a definition giving unexampledemphasis upon the importance of the rhythmical or musical element in poetry.2．Whitman's style1) The sprawling lines of the poems are often extremely long.2) Parallelism: the parallel lines say the same thing but use different words.3) Envelope structure: the first line begins with the subject, and then more and more lines list modifiers till the verb appears in the last line of the stanza. This is like enclosing a whole list of ideas in an envelope.4) Catalogue technique: means listing. Typical poems by Whitman make long, long lists of images, ofsights, sounds, smells, taste, and touch.5) No regular pattern.6) The verse unit is usually an independent clause.3．Formal features of Dickinson's poetryA.Dickson's poems are usually based on her own experience, her sorrows and joys. Dickinson wasoriginal. She sounded idiosyncratic, sometimes.B.Love is another subject Dickinson dwells on.C.Many poems Dickinson wrote are about nature, in which her general skepticism about therelationship between man and nature is well-expressed. Dickinson sees nature as both gailybenevolent and cruel.D.Dickinson's poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no titles, henceare always quoted by their first lines.E.On the ethical level Dickinson emphasizes free will and human responsibility.All these characteristics of her poetry were to become popular through Stephen Crane with the Imagists such as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the 20th century. She became, with Stephen Crane, the precursor of the Imagist moverment.4．The theme and techniques in Eliot's "The Waste Land"Theme：The theme is modern spiritual barrenness, the despair and depression that followed the WWI, the sterility and turbulence of the modern world, and the decline and break-down of western culture. It also shows the search for regeneration by people living in a chaotic world.Technique：The poem’s noti ceable characteristics are varied length and rhythm to harmonize with the changing subject matter, the unrhymed lines, lots of borrowings from some thirty-five different writers, the employment of materials such as the legends of the Holy Grail, Frazer’s a nthropological work The Golden Bough several popular songs, and passages in six foreign languages, including Sanskrit. The poem, therefore, is obscure and hard to understand, needless to say its absence of logical continuity. The poem The Wast Land by T. S. Eliot, nevertheless, is broadly acknowledged as one of the most recognizable landmarks of modernism.5．Analysis of "Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson"Richard Cory" is a short dramatic poem about a man whose outward appearance belies his inner turmoil. The tragedy in the poem reflects in its spirit the tragedies in Edwin Arlington Robinson's own life: Both of his brothers died young, his family suffered financial failures, and Robinson himself endured hardship before his poetry gained recognition—thanks in part to praise from an influential reader of them, Theodore Roosevelt.Robinson published the poem himself in 1897 as part of a poetry collection called Children of the Night. The poem is a favorite of students and teachers because of the questions it poses about the the title character.6．Comment on"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert FrostA.It is a peaceful poem and makes man feel relaxed when we read the lines: "The only other sounds the sweep of easy wind and downy flake." Frost also uses alliteration and repetition in his poems. The rhyme scheme he uses is a-a-b-a.B.It is one of the most quietly moving of Frost’s lyrics. On the surface, it seems to be simple, descriptive verses, records of close observation, graphic and homely pictures.C.It uses the simplest terms and commonest words. But it is deeply meditative, adding far-reaching meanings to the homely music. It uses its superb craftsmanship to come to a climax of responsibility: the promises to be kept, the obligation to be fulfilled. Few poems have said so much in so little.7.Theme and technique in The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald1. Themes of The Great Gatsby: It resents the decline of the American dream in1920s, the hollowness of the upper class and the falseness of ideals and moves toward disillusion.2. Now Gatsby’s life follow a clear pattern: there is, at first, a dream, then disenchantment, and finallya sense of failure and despair. Gatsby’s personal experience approximates the whole of the American experience up to the first few decades of the 20th century.3. The novel is the presentation of the 1920s, and of what has become known as American Dream. 8.ment on Hemingway's style and Farewell to Arms"1. Hemingway was a glamorous public hero of sorts whose style of writing and living was probably more imitated than any other writers in human memory.2. In one sense Hemingway wrote all his life about one theme, which is neatly summed up in the famous phrase, “grace under pressure”, and created one hero who acts that theme out.3. In the same way that Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age becomes a symbol for an age, Hemingway’s book paints the image of a whole generation, the Lost Ge neration.4. Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms stands the Hemingway hero, an average man of decidedly masculine taste sensitive and intelligent, a man of action; and with other people, somewhat an outsider, keeping emotion under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place where one cannot have happiness.5. Hemingway’s world is a world essentially chaotic and meaningless, in which man fights a solitary struggle against a force he does not even understand.6. The war dominates so that the love story represents a mere dream and the brutal and atrocious realities of life do not allow materializing it.10.Analyze "Dry September" by William Faulkner11.“Dry September” was written in 1931, and is a well-known story of Faulkner.This story touches upon the strange relationship between sex and violence, examines the psychological state of the main characters, and exposes the crime of racial discrimination which makes one bristle with anger.The tone of this story contributes much to its effectiveness, particularly to the imagery of infernal heat and dryness and to the setting itself.From the character Miss Minnie the reader could perceive the obvious impact of Freud’s ideas on William Faulkner.。

美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）

1. American Puritanism it it comes comes comes from from from the the the American American American puritans, puritans, puritans, who who who were were were the the the first first first immigrants immigrants immigrants moved moved moved to to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination （预言）（预言） and salvation （拯救） were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness （虔诚,尽职）， thrift and sobriety （清醒）（清醒）（清醒） were praised. 2. Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th century in Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used used in in in American American American literature literature literature it it it referred referred referred to to to the the the writers writers writers of of of the the the middle middle middle of of of the the 19th century century who who who stimulated stimulated （刺激）（刺激） the the sentimental sentimental sentimental emotions emotions emotions of of of their their their readers. readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all all kinds kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography. 3. 2. 2. Transcendentalism Transcendentalism Transcendentalism ((先验说,超越论): ): is is is a a a philosophic philosophic philosophic and and and literary literary literary movement movement that that flourished flourished flourished in in in New New New England, England, England, particular particular particular at at at Concord, Concord, Concord, as as as a a a reaction reaction reaction against against Rationalism Rationalism and and and Calvinism Calvinism Calvinism ((理性主义and 喀尔文主义). ). Mainly Mainly Mainly it it it stressed stressed intuitive intuitive understanding understanding understanding of of of God, God, God, without without without the the the help help help of of of the the the church, church, church, and and and advocated advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau. 4. Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s ，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and and background background background that that that it it it could could could not not not have have have been been been written written written in in in any any any other other other place place place or or or by by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) ) the the the distinctive distinctive distinctive natural, natural, natural, social social social and and and linguistic linguistic linguistic features. features. features. It It It is is characteristic of vernacular(本国语本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor 5. Stream of consciousness （意识流）： It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is is the the the style style style of of of writing writing writing that that that attempts attempts attempts to to to imitate imitate imitate the the the natural natural natural flow flow flow of of of a a a character’s character’s thoughts, thoughts, feelings, feelings, feelings, reflections, reflections, reflections, memories, memories, memories, and and and mental mental mental images images images as as as the the the character character experiences experiences them. them. them. It It It was was was first first first used used used in in in 1922 1922 1922 by by by the the the Irish Irish Irish novelist novelist novelist James James James Joyce. Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and and skillfully skillfully skillfully the the the unconscious unconscious unconscious activity activity activity of of of the the the mind mind mind fast fast fast changing changing changing and and and flowing flowing incessantly 。

美国文学名词解释

（一）About Puritanism清教主义1.“would-be purifier”They wanted to purify the English Church and to restore church worship to the “pure and unspotted”condition of its earlier days .They opposed the elaborate rituals of the English Church. They believed that the Bible was the revealed word of God, therefore, people should guide their daily behavior with the Bible.2.Basic Puritan Beliefs（1）Total Depravity - through Adam's fall, every human is born sinful - concept of Original Sin.（2）Unconditional Election - God "saves" those he wishes - only a few are selected for salvation - concept of predestination（3）Limited Atonement - Jesus died for the chosen only, not for everyone.（4）Irresistible Grace - God's grace is freely given, it cannot be earned or denied. Grace is defined as the saving and transfiguring power of God.（5）Perseverance of the "saints" - those elected by God have full power to interpret the will of God, and to live uprightly. If anyone rejects grace after feeling its power in his life, he will be going against the will of God - something impossible in Puritanism.2.The impact of Puritanism (1)High standards of moral excellence and conscience ;(2) Emphasis on education(3)Hard working, thrifty, independent spirit;(4)“Chosen people”consciousness .(诺斯替教）（二）Enlightenment(启蒙运动)Enlightenment is man’s leaving his self-caused immaturity.Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another.@A term used to describe the trends in thought and letters in Europe and the American colonies during the 18th century prior to the French Revolution. The precursors of the Enlightenment can be traced to the 17th century and earlier.@The phrase was frequently employed by writers of the period itself, convinced that they were emerging from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science, and a respect for humanity.（三）Romanticism （浪漫主义）As an approach in literary creation, romanticism is ever present in literature of all times. But as a literary trend or movement, it occurred and developed in Europe and America at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries under the historical background of the Industrial Revolution around 1760 and the French Revolution (1789-1799). @ A movement in the literature of virtually every country of Europe, the United States, and Latin America that lasted from about 1750 to about 1870,@It was characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature.（四）Transcendentalism（超验主义）Transcendentalism is the summit of the Romantic Movement in theU.S. in the first half of the 19th century. It asserts the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition .Transcendentalists place emphasis on the importance of the Over-soul, the individual and Nature. It was, in essence, romantic idealism on Puritan soil.（五）Free versepoetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.(六）Blank verse“Blank verse” is poetry written in regular metrical but unrhymed lines, almost always iambic pentameters.（七）American Realism (1865—1918)（现实主义）American Realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against Romanticism. It stresses truthful treatment of material. It focuses on commonness of the lives of the common people, and emphasizes objectivity and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. The three dominant figures of the period are William Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James.（八）Definition of Local Color（乡土特色）1.Literature that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography（地形）, and other features particular to a specific region that exploits the speech, dress, mannerisms, and habits of thatspecific region .2.Twain’s Local colorismTwain preferred to present social life through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects, costumes and so on. So the rich material of his boyhood experience on the Mississippi became endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi valley and the west became his major theme.（九）American Naturalism (1890s-1910s) （自然主义）1.Historical Background:—The spread of industrialization created extremes of wealth and poverty. —Farmers were still going westward, but frontiers were about the close. They had to depend on the transcontinental railway to transport their products.—The spread of Darwin’s theory of evolution changed people’s ideology.2. Thematically, naturalistic writers：-- wrote detailed descriptions of the lives of the downtrodden and of the abnormal-- had frank treatment of human passion and sexualit-- were concerned about how men and women were overwhelmed by the forces of environment and by the forces of heredity-- made detailed documentation of life: nothing but the truth, more naked and wicked than realism-- created gloomy and pessimistic atmosphere3. Here are the major features of naturalism.Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires. @Naturalistic writers are pessimistic. They choose their subjects from the lower.(10)Modernism（现代主义）(1)appeared after World War I(2)cutting off history and a sense of despair and loss(3)refusing to accept the traditional concept of value and all traditional ideological influences.1. BackgroundIn the first world war, America got considerable benefits with animal cost, but many artist and thinkers with suffering consciousness felt the terribleness of modern wars.Their heroism in mind gradually disappeared. Some of them going into battle suffered the sight of blood and all kinds of disasters. After back to America, they found that the social reality had experienced great change.2.Features or changes of the period(1)Increasing industrialization (2)Deepening urbanization(3)High speed development of technology and science(4 )Trauma of the first world war(5)1930s economic depression(6)Collapse of social value system(7)Dropping moral standards(8)Common depression , fear ,sense of loss3. Features of the worksFreud’s psychoanalysis ,William James stream of consciousnesstheory and archetypal symbol had great impact on the writers of modern American writers. They pay special attention to the inner world of the people, during this period ,the most compelling literature movement is the writer’s self exile, also known as the second American renaissance .(十一）Novelists ——the Lost Generation“迷惘的一代”(1920s) The novelists who produced a literature of disillusionment in the aftermath of World War I, and some of them lived abroad:(1)Used their wartime experience as the basis for their works (2)were cut off from old values yet unable to come to terms with the new era(3)wondered pointlessly and restlessly(4)were frustrated by the war(5)spokesman ——Hemingway(十二）The Jazz AgeThe Jazz Age is the nickname in America of the decade of the 1920’s, beginning from 1919 to the Crash at the end of 1929.These ten years were, for Americans, a time of carefree prosperity, isolated from the world’s problem, bewildering great social change, and a feverish pursuit of pleasure.These were the ten years when the First World War was just over, when new inventions and manufacturing techniques greatly changed the way people lived; when people moved from the countryside in great numbers; when women won the right to vote and many started to earn their own money; when cars,washing machines,radios and vacuum cleaners became commonplace; and when millions of people lived beyond their means and went into debt in order to obtain such things while the middle class frantically pursued individual “success”and personal enjoyment. They lived a rich, extravagant, frivolous moneymaking life, and it was this style of living gave the decade of the 1920’s such nickname as the “Jazz Age”, the “Dollar Decade”, and the “Roaring Twenties.”（十三）Imagism(1900S-1910S)(意象派)The Imagist movement included English and American poets in the early twentieth century who wrote free verse and were devoted to "clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images." The Imagist Movement began in London and later spread to the US. It underwent three major phases in its development.（十四）IronyA contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature.。

【英美文学选读】名词解释笔记总结

01. Humanism（人文主义）Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance.It emphasizes the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. Humanists voiced their beliefs that man was the center of the universe and man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of the present life，but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders.02. Renaissance（文艺复兴）The word “Renaissance”means “rebirth”，it meant the reintroduction into western Europe of the full cultural heritage of Greece and Rome.2>the essence of the Renaissance is Humanism. Attitudes and feelings which had been characteristic of the 14th and 15th centuries persisted well down into the era of Humanism and reformation.3> the real mainstream of the English Renaissance is the Elizabethan drama with William Shakespeare being the leading dramatist.03. Metaphysical poetry（玄学派诗歌）Metaphysical poetry is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne.2>with a rebellious spirit，the Metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry.3>the diction is simple as compared with that of the Elizabethan or the Neoclassical periods，and echoes the words and cadences of common speech.4>the imagery is drawn from actual life.04. Classicism（古典主义）Classicism refers to a movement or tendency in art，literature，or music that reflects the principles manifested in the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Classicism emphasizes the traditional and the universal，and places value on reason，clarity，balance，and order. Classicism，with its concern for reason and universal themes，is traditionally opposed to Romanticism，which is concerned with emotions and personal themes.05. Enlightenment（启蒙运动）Enlightenment movement was a progressive philosophical and artistic movement which flourished in France and swept through western Europe in the 18th century.2> the movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance from 14th century to the mid-17th century.3>its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas.4>it celebrated reason or rationality，equality and science. It advocated universal education.5>famous among the great enlighteners in England were those great writers like Alexander pope, Jonathan Swift, etc.06.Neoclassicism（新古典主义）In the field of literature，the enlightenment movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works.2>this tendency is known as neoclassicism. The Neoclassicists held that forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Homer and Virgil and those of the contemporary French ones.3> they believed that the artistic ideals should be order，logic，restrained emotion and accuracy，and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity.07. The Graveyard School（墓地派诗歌）The Graveyard School refers to a school of poets of the 18th century whose poems are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or meditation on life. Past and present，with death and graveyard as themes.2>Thomas Gray is considered to be the leading figure of this school and his Elegy written in a country churchyard is its most representative work.08. Romanticism（浪漫主义）1>In the mid-18th century， a new literary movement called romanticism came to Europe and then to England.2>It was characterized by a strong protest against the bondage of neoclassicism，which emphasized reason，order and elegant wit. Instead，romanticism gave primary concern to passion，emotion，and natural beauty.3>In the history of literature. Romanticism is generally regarded as the thought that designates a literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual as the very center of all life and experience. 4> The English romantic period is an age of poetry which prevailed in England from 1798 to 1837. The major romantic poets include Wordsworth，Byron and Shelley.09. Byronic Hero（拜伦式英雄）Byronic hero refers to a proud，mysterious rebel figure of noble origin.2> with immense superiority in his passions and powers，this Byronic Hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corruptsociety. And would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government，in religion，or in moral principles with unconquerable wills and inexhaustible energies.3> Byron‘s chief contribution to English literature is his creation of the “Byronic Hero”10. Critical Realism（批判现实主义）Critical Realism is a term applied to the realistic fiction in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.2> It means the tendency of writers and intellectuals in the period between 1875 and 1920 to apply the methods of realistic fiction to the criticism of society and the examination of social issues.3> Realist writers were all concerned about the fate of the common people and described what was faithful to reality.4> Charles Dickens is the most important critical realist.11. Aestheticism（美学主义）The basic theory of the Aesthetic movement——“art for art‘s sake” was set forth by a French poet，Theophile Gautier，the first Englishman who wrote about the theory of aestheticism was Walter Pater.2> aestheticism places art above life，and holds that life should imitate art，not art imitate life.3> According to the aesthetes，all artistic creation is absolutely subjective as opposed to objective. Art should be free from any influence of egoism. Only when art is for art‘s sake，can it be immortal. They believed that art should be unconcerned with controversial issues，such as politics and morality，and that it should be restricted to contributing beauty in a highly polished style.4> This is one of the reactions against the materialism and commercialism of the Victorian industrial era，as well as a reaction against the Victorian convention of art for morality‘s sake，or art for money’s sake.美学运动的基本原则“为艺术而艺术”最初由法国诗人西奥费尔。

美国文学史名词解释_综合版

美国文学史名词解释_综合版第一篇：美国文学史名词解释_综合版美国文学选读复习资料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 coincidentwith 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 thanreason 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 andexpress 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（“The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon” “Bracebridge Hall”“Tales of a Traveller”“The History of the Life and Voyages of ChristopherColumbus ”）American TranscendentalismIn 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.Transcendentalism① The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe.② The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual.To them, the individual is the most important element of Societ y.③ The 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：WaldenHenry Wadsworth LongfellowWalt Whitman：Leaves of Grass Emily Dickinson：I Died for Beauty；Because I couldnot stop for DeathWilliam Faulkner(1897-19621949 Nobel priceAs I Lay Dying(1930)Light in the August(1932)Absalom, Absalom(1936)Go Down Moses(1942)Ernest HemingwayIceberg 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 andCatherine 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 DickOther Works are: Billy Budd,Typee, Omoo, Mardi.Nathaniel HawthorneThe Scarlet LetterMosses from an Old Manse;Twice-Told Tales;The Marble Faun;The House of theSeven GablesRealismAs a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticismwith the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Romanticism andsentimentalism, and paved the way to Modernism.This literary interest in the so-called “reality” of life started a new period in theAmerican literary writing known as The Age of Realism.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 localedistinguished from the outside world;(2)describing the exoticof the picturesque;(3)glorifying the past;(4)showing things as they are;(5)influence of setting oncharacters.The well known local colorism authors were Mark Twain with his bookTom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bret Harte’s with his TheLuck of the Roaring Camp.American naturalists accepted the more negativeinterpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to accout for the behaviorof those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complexcombinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economicforces.2)naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writingbecomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic.It isno more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to humanexistence.3>Dreiser with his Sister Carrie is a leading figure of his school.1917.The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the directtreatment of the thing” and the economy of wording.“poetic techniques to recordexactly the momentary impressions”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 doesnot contribute to the presentation.[3] rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in thesequence of a metronome.4> pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-knownpoem.The Modern PeriodPart 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”(spiritually)There had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and naturalsciences.Darwinism(Darwin), Socialism(Karl Marx), Psychoanalysis(Sigmund Freud)The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe thepost-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense ofbetrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>full ofyouthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, hadlove affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the threebest-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway andJohn dos Passos.The Beat Generation is a group of American young writersand artists popular in the 1950s and early 1960s.the member of the beat generationwere 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 DreamThe 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.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.PuritanismAmerican 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 s in, total depravity and limited atonement for God’s grace.They also believed in hard working, piety and sobriety.In a word, American Puritanism exerted great influences upon American thought and literature.第二篇：美国文学史名词解释It were flourishing from the beginning of 17th to the middle period of 18th.They stressed predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement from God‟s grace.They went to America to prove that they were God‟s chosen people who would enjoy God‟s blessings on earth and in Heaven.Finally, they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.Both doctrinaire and an opportunist.Its Influence on literary were as follows:（影响）(1)American Literature is based on a myth------the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden.(2)The American Puritan‟s metaphorical made of perception----symbolism.The representatives were Edwards(The Freedom of the Will), Franklin(On the Art of Self-improvement), Crevecoeur(Letters from an American Farmer).代表作家及代表作：Captain John SmithTrue Relation of Virginia(1608)Anne Bradstreet“To My Dear and Loving Husband”Benjamin Franklin:The Autobiography of Benjamin FranklinRomanticism was a complex artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.Elements of Romanticism1.Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations.2.Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.不要这么多，我就删掉了3、4、5条。

美国文学重点名词解释

2.6.Transcendentalism: is literature，philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reaching against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world instead. Transcendentalism derived some of its basic idealistic concepts from romantic German philosophy, and from such English authors as Carlyle，Coleridge, and Wordsworth. The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essays as Nature and Self-Reliance and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden..Symbolism象征主义：It is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writer, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word. It’s one of the most powerful devices thatpoets employ in creation.8.American naturalism：this term was cr eated by Emile Zola. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory played an important role in naturalism. In the works off naturalism，characters were conceived as complex combinations of inherited attributes and habits conditioned by social and economic forces. At the end of the 19th century，this pessimistic form of realism appeared in america. Naturalism attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness. Characters in the works of naturalism were dominated by their environment and heredity. Naturalism emphasized：the world was around；men had no free will；religious“truth”were illusory；the destiny of human beings was misery in life and oblivion in death. The dominant figures in naturalism were Stephen crane，Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.3.The lost generation: included the young English and American expatriates as well as men and women caught in the war and cut from the old value and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. These writers adopted unconventional style of writing and reacted against the tendencies of the older writers in the 1920s. The term came from Gertrude Stein who said in Hemingway's presence that“you are all a lost generation.”4.Local colorismAs a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本.国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor. The major local colorist is Mark Twain.5.Jazz age: the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald coined the term"Jazz Age" retroactively to refer to the decade after World War I and before the stock market crash in 1929, during which Americans embarked upon what he called "the gaudiest spree in history". Jazz Age is inextricably associated with the wealthy white"flappers" and socialites immortalized in Fitzgerald's fiction.6.Free verse: is a poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure, instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech. While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse forms do, free verse does so in a looser way. Whitman's poetry is an example of free verse at its most impressive. It has since been used by Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other major American can poets of the 20th century.7.The iceberg analogy: The Iceberg Theory is a writing theory by American writer Ernest Hemingway, as follows：if a writer of a prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader，if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.1.Poe's Poetic IdeasA.His conviction that the function of poetry is not to summarize and interpret earthly experience,but to create a mood in which the soul soars toward supernal beauty.B.He insists that poetry must be disembarrassed of that moral sense.C.Poe believes that the elevation of excitement of the soul should be “the poetic principle” thuspoe try must concern itself only with “supernal beauty”.D.Poe defines poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty” a definition giving unexampledemphasis upon the importance of the rhythmical or musical element in poetry.2．Whitman's style1) The sprawling lines of the poems are often extremely long.2) Parallelism: the parallel lines say the same thing but use different words.3) Envelope structure: the first line begins with the subject, and then more and more lines list modifiers till the verb appears in the last line of the stanza. This is like enclosing a whole list of ideas in an envelope.4) Catalogue technique: means listing. Typical poems by Whitman make long, long lists of images, ofsights, sounds, smells, taste, and touch.5) No regular pattern.6) The verse unit is usually an independent clause.3．Formal features of Dickinson's poetryA.Dickson's poems are usually based on her own experience, her sorrows and joys. Dickinson wasoriginal. She sounded idiosyncratic, sometimes.B.Love is another subject Dickinson dwells on.C.Many poems Dickinson wrote are about nature, in which her general skepticism about therelationship between man and nature is well-expressed. Dickinson sees nature as both gailybenevolent and cruel.D.Dickinson's poetry is unique and unconventional in its own way. Her poems have no titles, henceare always quoted by their first lines.E.On the ethical level Dickinson emphasizes free will and human responsibility.All these characteristics of her poetry were to become popular through Stephen Crane with the Imagists such as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the 20th century. She became, with Stephen Crane, the precursor of the Imagist moverment.4．The theme and techniques in Eliot's "The Waste Land"Theme：The theme is modern spiritual barrenness, the despair and depression that followed the WWI, the sterility and turbulence of the modern world, and the decline and break-down of western culture. It also shows the search for regeneration by people living in a chaotic world.Technique：The poem’s noti ceable characteristics are varied length and rhythm to harmonize with the changing subject matter, the unrhymed lines, lots of borrowings from some thirty-five different writers, the employment of materials such as the legends of the Holy Grail, Frazer’s a nthropological work The Golden Bough several popular songs, and passages in six foreign languages, including Sanskrit. The poem, therefore, is obscure and hard to understand, needless to say its absence of logical continuity. The poem The Wast Land by T. S. Eliot, nevertheless, is broadly acknowledged as one of the most recognizable landmarks of modernism.5．Analysis of "Richard Cory" by Edwin Arlington Robinson"Richard Cory" is a short dramatic poem about a man whose outward appearance belies his inner turmoil. The tragedy in the poem reflects in its spirit the tragedies in Edwin Arlington Robinson's own life: Both of his brothers died young, his family suffered financial failures, and Robinson himself endured hardship before his poetry gained recognition—thanks in part to praise from an influential reader of them, Theodore Roosevelt.Robinson published the poem himself in 1897 as part of a poetry collection called Children of the Night. The poem is a favorite of students and teachers because of the questions it poses about the the title character.6．Comment on"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert FrostA.It is a peaceful poem and makes man feel relaxed when we read the lines: "The only other sounds the sweep of easy wind and downy flake." Frost also uses alliteration and repetition in his poems. The rhyme scheme he uses is a-a-b-a.B.It is one of the most quietly moving of Frost’s lyrics. On the surface, it seems to be simple, descriptive verses, records of close observation, graphic and homely pictures.C.It uses the simplest terms and commonest words. But it is deeply meditative, adding far-reaching meanings to the homely music. It uses its superb craftsmanship to come to a climax of responsibility: the promises to be kept, the obligation to be fulfilled. Few poems have said so much in so little.7.Theme and technique in The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald1. Themes of The Great Gatsby: It resents the decline of the American dream in1920s, the hollowness of the upper class and the falseness of ideals and moves toward disillusion.2. Now Gatsby’s life follow a clear pattern: there is, at first, a dream, then disenchantment, and finallya sense of failure and despair. Gatsby’s personal experience approximates the whole of the American experience up to the first few decades of the 20th century.3. The novel is the presentation of the 1920s, and of what has become known as American Dream. 8.ment on Hemingway's style and Farewell to Arms"1. Hemingway was a glamorous public hero of sorts whose style of writing and living was probably more imitated than any other writers in human memory.2. In one sense Hemingway wrote all his life about one theme, which is neatly summed up in the famous phrase, “grace under pressure”, and created one hero who acts that theme out.3. In the same way that Fitzgerald’s Tales of the Jazz Age becomes a symbol for an age, Hemingway’s book paints the image of a whole generation, the Lost Ge neration.4. Lieutenant Henry in A Farewell to Arms stands the Hemingway hero, an average man of decidedly masculine taste sensitive and intelligent, a man of action; and with other people, somewhat an outsider, keeping emotion under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place where one cannot have happiness.5. Hemingway’s world is a world essentially chaotic and meaningless, in which man fights a solitary struggle against a force he does not even understand.6. The war dominates so that the love story represents a mere dream and the brutal and atrocious realities of life do not allow materializing it.10.Analyze "Dry September" by William Faulkner11.“Dry September” was written in 1931, and is a well-known story of Faulkner.This story touches upon the strange relationship between sex and violence, examines the psychological state of the main characters, and exposes the crime of racial discrimination which makes one bristle with anger.The tone of this story contributes much to its effectiveness, particularly to the imagery of infernal heat and dryness and to the setting itself.From the character Miss Minnie the reader could perceive the obvious impact of Freud’s ideas on William Faulkner.。

美国文学史及选读_部分名词解释解释详细,备有汉语解释

Free V erse:is poetry that is based on irregular rhythmic cadence（抑扬顿挫，节奏）recurring ,withvariations of phrases ,image ,and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of meter . In other word ,free verse has no rhythm scheme, pattern or line length, new form, new subject, message was always moreimportant than form .However ,much poetic language and devices（手段，策略）are found in free verse .It is used in Walt Whitman’s poems.Local Colorism: is defined by Hamlin Garland加兰in his Crumbling Idols as having “such quality of texture（手感，质感）and background that is could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native”Texture refers to the elements which characterize（是---特征，以----为特征）a local culture , elements such as speech , customs , and mores peculiar to one particular place.Background covers physical身体setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which human thoughtand behavior.Other definition: a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early 1870s in America. It may be defined as the careful attention in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality.The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion错觉，幻想of an indigenous土生土长的，固有的little word with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside.Major Local Colorists: Mark Twain; Hamlin Garland (Main Travelled Roads)Imagism:1) It is a Movement in U.S and English poetry characterized by the use of concrete明确的，实体的language and figures of speech, modern subject matter主旨, metrical韵律freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise精确的visual看得见的images.2) It grew out of the symbolism movement in 1912 and was initially led by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others.3) The Imagist manifesto宣言came out in 1912 showed three Imagist poetic principles:A: Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subject or objective.B: To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.C: As regarding rhythm: to compose创作in the sequenc e有关联的一组事物, 一连串of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome节拍器.4) Pound defined the image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,版权所有本人亲自打出来的期末复习资料and later he extended this definition when he started that an image was “a vortex旋窝or cluster串of fused熔化; 融合ideas, endowed with energy”.5) The existed great influence in Chinese poetry on the movement of Imagism. Imagists found value in Chinese poetry was because Chinese poetry is, by virtue长处of the ideographic象形文字and pictographic nature of Chinese language, essentially imagistic poetry.The Lost Generation:is a term used to describe a group of American intellectuals知识分子, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post WW1 years to reject the values of American materialism唯物主义and to seek the bohemian(放浪者)(a person with artistic or literary interests who disregards conventional standards ofbehavior) lifestyle in Pairs. 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.Refers to the disillusioned使不再抱幻想intellectuals and aesthetes审美家of the years following WW1, who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace them only by despair or a cynical愤世嫉俗的hedonism(快乐主义).The main representatives代表人of Lost Generation include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and so on.Modernism:is a culture movement that is generally includes the progressive不断有进展的art and architecture建筑学,design, literature, music, painting ,dance and other visual arts which emerged in the beginning of 20th century, particular in the years following WW1. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against the 19th century academic and historicist tradition, and embraced信奉，拥抱the new economic,social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.Modernism in literature is not easily to summarized, but the key elements are experimentation, anti-realism, individualism and a stress on the cerebral诉诸理性的;非感情方面的rather than emotive-aspects.The avant-garde革新者movements that followed-including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism立体派, Futurism未来主义, Expressionism, Constructivism构成主义and Abstract抽象Expressionism are generally defined as Modernist.版权所有本人亲自打出来的期末复习资料The work of Modernist writers is characterized by showing the disenchantment脱离, 分离, dislocation脱位, and alienation疏远of men in the world, and by the emphasis on experimentation and formalism形式主义and objectivism which are, in most cases, a reaction to the cataclysm大灾难known as the Modern Age.Among the American writer, the best known Modernism is Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and so on.Transcendentalism:is a philosophical哲学上的and literary movement that flourished繁荣in New England from about 1836-1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy正统观念of Calvinism and rationalism理性主义of the Unitarian唯一神论者Church, developing their own faith centering on the divinit y宗教的，神学的of humanity and the natural world. Transcendentalismderived some of its basic idealistic concepts from romantic German philosophy, and from such English authors as Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Its mystical aspects were partly influenced by Indian and Chinese religiousteachings. The beliefs that God is immanent天生的，内在的in each person and in nature and that individual intuition直觉is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance,and rejection of traditional authority. The Ideas of transcendentalism were mostly eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essay as Nature and Self-reliance and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. Major Features:A. placing emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe --- a new way of looking at the world (omnipresent无所不在, omniscient无所不知, omnipotent全能的)B. the importance of the individual as the most important element of society. --- A new way of looking at man (The regeneration新生，革新of the society could only come about through the regeneration of the individual, through his self-perfection, self-culture, self-improvement, self-reliance)C. offering a fresh perception认识，看法of nature as symbolic of Spirit or God. (Nature was not purely matter. It was the garment衣服of the Oversoul.)Jazz Age:describe he period of 1920s and 1930s, the years between WW1 and WW2, particular in NorthAmerican; with the rise of the Great Depression, the values of the age saw much decline. The most representative literature work is The Great Gatsby highlighting强调what some describe as the decadence衰落，堕落and hedonism享乐主义, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term 版权所有本人亲自打出来的期末复习资料。

美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）

美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-late 18th century (1715–1789), especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand and the European Enlightenment on the other. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the17th century and the humanist period during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature, society, and religion.Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon liberty, democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance –culminating in the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a rejection of prophecy, miracle and revealed religion, often in preference for Deism. Historians have considered how the ideas of John Locke and republicanism merged to form republicanism in the United States. The most important leaders of the American Enlightenment include Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.1.2. American Puritanismit comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift and sobriety（清醒）were praised.3. Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th century inEurope who broke away from the formal rules of classicalwriting. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19th century who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.4. Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement thatflourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.5. Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), aslocal colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor 6. Stream of consciousness（意识流）：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is thestyle of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memorie s, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novelsbroke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。

美国文学史及选读的名词解释(全)

美国文学名词解释1.American Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th centuryin Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19th century who stimulated （刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.2.Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement that flourishedin New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.3.Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor4.Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. TheAge of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience5.American Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. Americannaturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变）that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.6.The Lost generation：it refers to a group of young intellectuals （知识分子）who came backfrom war，were injured （受伤害）both physically （身体上）and mentally （精神上）.They lived by indulging （放任）themselves in the Bohemian （波西米亚）way of life.Their American dream was disillusioned （破灭了）. The best representative of the lost generation was Ernest Hemingway.7. The Jazz Age :Prohibition (from 1920 to 1933) banned the sale of alcoholic drinks, resultingin illicit speakeasies becoming lively venues of the "Jazz Age. Jazz started to get a reputation as being immoral and many members of the older generations saw it as threatening the old values in culture and promoting the new decadent values of the decade8. individualism个人主义：it is a moral political and social philosophy which emphasizesindividual liberty the primary importance of the individual and the unities of self_reliance9. 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 ti mes, 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 Allan 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.10. Oversoul: an all-pervading unitary spiritual power of goodness; all things come from it and everyone is a part of it; omnipresent and omnipotent; existing in nature and in humanity alike.。

(完整word)美国文学史及选读名词解释

美国文学史及选读名词解释1. Transcendentalism19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man， and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths。

In their religious quest, the Transcendentalists rejected the conventions of 18th—century thought; and what began in a dissatisfaction with Unitarianism developed into a repudiation of the whole established order.2。

Langston HughesAmerican poet and writer emphasized on lower—class black life。

He established himself as a major force of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, in the Nation， he provided the movement with a manifesto when he skillfully argued the need for both race pride and artistic independence in his most memorable essay， 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." In many ways Hughes always remained loyal to the principles he had laid down for the younger black writers in 1926. His art was firmly rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he cherished his freedom as an artist。

美国文学选读名词解释

1.Puritanism (清教主义)：Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans.1.) simply speaking , American Puritanism just refers to the spirit and ideal of puritans,who settled in the North American continent in the early part of the seventeenth century because of religious persecutions.2.)In content it means scrupulous ,moral rigor ,eapecially hostility to social pleasure and religion .3.)with time passing it became a dominant factor in American life , one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and literature .to some extentit is a state of mind , a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the American breathes ,rather than a set of tenets.4.) Actually it is a code of values , a philosophy of life and a point of view in American minds , also a two-faceted tradition of religious idealism and level -headed in common sense .5) Major topic:American Puritanism IntroductionThere were no written literature among the more than 500 different Indian languages and tribal cultures, American writing began with the work of English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of readers in the mother country.Therefore the writing in this period was essentially two kinds:(1) practical matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting, travel, etc. designed to inform people “at home” what life was like in the new world, and, often, to induce their immigration;(2) highly theoretical, generally polemical^辩的)，discussions of religious questions.2.The American Romanticism(浪漫主义)I.What is Romanticism a literary movement flourished as a cultural force the early period and the late period.associated with imagination and boundlessness, as an historical movement it arose in the 18th and 19th centuries. The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U. S.A was Transcendentalism.Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and those of the late periodcontain Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe.□.Features of A merican romanticism（1）It was the expression of “a real new experience（全新体验）”.（2）American Puritanism was a cultural heritage. Many American romantic writings intended to edify（启发）more than they entertained.⑶American Romanticism is full of “newness（新奇）”. Ideals：Individualism; political equality Dream：America: a new Garden of Eden （4）American romanticism was both imitative and independent.3..transcendentalism、（超验主义）transcendentalism: It stressed the power of intuition, believing that people could learn things both from the outside world by means of the five senses and from the inner world by intuition. It took nature as symbolic of spirit or God. All things in nature were symbols of the spiritual, of God’s presence. It emphasized the significance o f the individual and believed that the individual was the most important element in society and that the ideal kind of individual was self-reliant and unselfish. Transcendentalists envisioned religion as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “Oversoul”.4.Naturalism: It views human beings as animals in the natural world responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, over none of which they have control and none of which they fully understand. The literary naturalists have a major difference from the realists. They look at a different spot to find real life.5.Free verse: It is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech.6.International novel: IN brings together persons of various nationalities who represent certain characteristics of their own countries.7.the lost generation: reveals the huge destruction of the wars to the young generation. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colonyof “expatriates”. They were lost in disillusionment.8.American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful andsatisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism （资本主义），its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights9.American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience .10.Black Humor:also called Black Comedy, writing that juxtaposes morbid or ghastly elements with comical ones. The term did not come into common use until the 1960s. Then it was applied to the works of the novelists Nathanael West, Vladimir Nabokov, and Joseph Heller. The latter's Catch-22 （1961） is a notable example, in which Captain Yossarian battles the horrors of air warfare over the Mediterranean during World War II with hilarious irrationalities matching the stupidities of the military system. The term black comedy has been applied to playwrights in the Theatre of the Absurd.11.Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s, it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial（详细的）authenticity（确实性）,as local colorists tried to immortalize（使不朽）the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular（本国语） language and satirical （讽刺的）humor12.Code HeroGeneral Features:1.He has great physical potential and courage.2.The “ code heroes ” have strong willpower.3.Thirdly , another important feature of the “code heroes" is their loyalty.4.Fourthly , the" code heroes "maintain great dignity in all situations.5.Fifthly , the “code heroes ” are endowed with certain specialized skills , such as fishing , bull fighting , and hunting , etc6.the “code heroes "are always put in some touch-and go situations, what the heroes must always face up to is their own personal fear of death and the threat of destruction, and it is this obstacle, death, that they have to overcome.13.iceberg theory:The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.2 American TranscendentalismAs a philosophical and literary movement, American Transcendentalism （also known as “ American Renaissance"） flourished in New England from the 1830s to the Civil War. It is the high tide of American romanticism and its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalists spoke for the cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society.Transcendentalism 超验主义（+ H. D. Thoreau; NathanielHawthorne;)The major features of Transcendentalism:①The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. 思想超灵宇宙②The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society.个体+社会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.自然+上帝3 Stream of Consciousness 意识流or “interior monologue”,内心独白is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce.。

美国文学史及选读名词解释

美国文学史及选读名词解释1.Transcendentalism—it is a philosophic and literary movement that flourish in New England, as a reaction against rationalism and Calvinism. It stressed intuitive understanding of god without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind.2. The Lost Generation Writers of the first postwar era self-consciously acknowledged that they were a “lost Generation”, devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization.3. Puritanism—it is the religious belief of the Puritans, who had intended to purify and simplify the religious ritual of the Church of England.4. Imagism is to present an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. An imagistic poem must present the object exactly the way the thing is seen. And the reader can form the image of the object through the process of reading the abstract and concrete words.Imagism 意象派：is a poetic movement of England and the United States, flourished from 1909-1917. Its credo, expressed in Some Imagist Poets, included the use of the language of common speech, project matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration.5、Realism：（现实主义）appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things was immediately observable. the dialects, customs, sights.现实主义有浓厚的美国本土特色，是浪漫主义故事情节和现实主义描写相结合的产物：美国风味的方言、风俗、各种观点6.Naturalism：自然主义 a new and harsher realism, 新型的更为冷峻的现实主义，产生悲观的流派，产生于the end of the century 十九世纪末，因为Perception of society’s disorders 对社会无序的感知。

美国文学选读期末名词解释

1.American Romanticism(美国浪漫主义)①Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.②The romantic period in American literature stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil war.③Irving, Whitman and Thoreau are the representatives.Background(1)Political background and economic development(2)Romantic movement in European countriesDerivative – foreign influencefeatures(1)American romanticism was in essence the expression of ―a real newexperience and contained ―an alien quality‖ for the simple reason that ―thespirit of the place‖ was radically new and alien.(2)There is American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. Americanromantic authors tended more to moralize. Many American romanticwritings intended to edify more than they entertained.(3)The ―newness‖ of Americans as a nation is in connection with AmericanRomanticism.(4)As a logical result of the foreign and native factors at work, Americanromanticism was both imitative and independent.浪漫主义两大主题：爱和大自然的力量The social and cultural background of Romanticism：---The young Republic was flourishing into a politically, economically and culturally independent country.---The Romantic writings revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native lands.---The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature.---The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values.Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world wa s a source of goodness and man’s societies as a source of corruption.2. Transcendentalism (超验主义、先验主义) : It was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the middle 19th century. It began as a protest against the general state of culture and society. Among transcendentalist’s core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that “transcends”the physical and empirical(以观察或实验为依据的) and is only realized through the individual’s intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson（爱默生）, Henry David Thoreau（梭罗）, Walt Whitman（惠特曼）, etc. It is a kind of philosophy that stresses belief in transcendental things and the importanceof spiritual rather than material existence. （相信超凡的事物，认为精神存在比物质存在更重要).American Transcendentalism(美国超验主义)①Transcendentalism is the summit of the Romantic Movement in the history of American literature in the 19th century, which flourished from about 1835 to 1860.②Transcendentalists place emphasis on the importance of the Oversoul, the individual and nature. Specifically, they stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind.③The most important representatives are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.Ralph Waldo Emerson①Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, philosopher and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the mid 19th century.②He expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature.③Besides, his The American Scholar was considered to be American’s ―Intellectual Declaration of Independence‖.Oversoul①It is an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come of which all things are a part.②It is a key doctrine for Transcendentalists.Self-reliance①Self-reliance is an essay written by American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.②It contains the most solid statement of one of his repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas.③These ideas are considered a reaction to a commercial identify. Emerson calls for a return to individual identity.Individualism(个人主义)①Individualism is a moral, political, and social philosophy, which emphasizes individual liberty, the primary importance of the individual, and the “virtues of self-reliance”.②It is thus directly opposed to collectivism, social psychology and sociology, which consider the individual’s rapport to the society or communit y.③It is often confused with ―egoism‖, but an individualist need not be an egoist. Walden①It is one of the American classics written by Henry David Thoreau.②It records his experiment in living at Walden pond, his sympathetic understanding of nature, his meditation on the meanings of life and his social criticism.③Compared with Emerson’s Nature, it is more radical and social-minded.3.Free verse (自由体诗歌)①Free verse is a general term referring to the modern form of verse with no fixed foot, rhythm or rime schemes.②It was first written and labeled by a group of French poets of the late 19th century.③Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many American poets, includingWalt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg.“The Song of Myself”①It is the best known poem in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.②It is a celebration of the individual as well as the common people.4.American Realism（美国现实主义）①The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been preferred to as the age of Realism.②It was a literary doctrine that called for ―reality and truth‖ in the depiction of ordinary life. It is, in literature, an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity.③Three dominant figures are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James. Local Colorism/ Regionalism (地方特色主义)①Local Colorism is popular in the late 19th century, particularly among authors in the south of the U.S.②This style relied heavily on using words, phrases, and slang that were native to the particular region in which the story took place. The term has come to mean any device which implies a specific focus, whether it is geographical or temporal.③A well-know local colorism author was Mark Twain with his book The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn.5.Jazz Age(爵士乐时代)①The Jazz Age refers to the 1920s, a time marked by hedonism and excitement in the life of flaming youth.②With the rise of the Great Depression, materially rich, spiritually lost, the generation felt frustrated with life and indulged in pleasure.③Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.6.Yoknapatawpha(约克纳帕塔法)①Most of Faulkner’s literary works were set in the small county of American South. It is the fictional modification of his hometown, Oxford, Mississippi.②To Faulkner, this small piece of land was worth a life’s work in literary writing and here Faulkner created a world of imagination.③Yoknapatawpha has become an allegory of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience of the whole Southern society.7.Southern Renaissance(南方文艺复兴)①It is the revival of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s until the 1950s.②The writers affirmed their position on the superiority of the Southern lifestyle over that of the industrialized north.③William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter are writers of this type.Avant-garde (先锋派)①It is a French military and political term for the vanguard of an army or political movement.②This term extended since the late 19th century in literature, which refers to the innovative writer who is ahead of the time both in themes and style.③In the 20th century American literature, writers like Faulkner and e.e.cummings can be called avant-garde writers.8 Imagism:it’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S 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. The leaders of this mov ement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell艾米•洛威尔.Imagism:It came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image. Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles: direct treatment of subject matter; economy of expression; as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome节拍器. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”is a well-known imagist poem.Imagism (意象派)①Imagism was a poetic school at the beginning of the 20th century.②Imagist poets strived for a simple, clear and vivid image, which in itself is the expression of art and meaning. The imagist poetry is a kind of free verse shaking of conventional metres and emphasizing the use of common speech and new rhythms.③This movement was led by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.Imagery (意象)①Imagery means words and phrases that create pictures ,or images in the readers’mind.②In a literary text, it occurs when an author uses an object that is not really there, in order to create a comparison between one that is, usually evoking a more meaningful visual experience for the reader.③It is useful as it allows an author to add depth and understanding to his work, like a sculptor adding layer and layer to his statue, building it up into a beautiful work of art.9.Black humor:To deal with tragic things in comic ways to make it more powerful and more tragic.It refers to the use of morbid病态的and absurd荒谬的for darkly comic purpose. It carries the tone of anger, bitterness in the grotesque situation of suffering, anxiety, and death. It makes the reader laugh at the blackness of modern life. The writers usually do not laugh at the characters.代表人物：Thomas Pynchon + Joseph HelleJoseph Heller：Catch-22 第22条军规It is not only a war novel, but also a novel about people’s life in peaceful time. This novel attacked the dehumanization of all contemporary institutions and corruptions of individuals who gain power in institutions. Armed-forces are the most outrageous example of the two evils.It is a combination of humor with resentment(怨恨), gloom, anger, and despair. Seeing all that is unreasonable, hypocritical, ugly, and even frenzied(狂乱的)，writers of black humor nurse a grievance(不平) against their society which, according to them, is full of institutionalized(制度化的) absurdity. Yet they are cynical. They laugh a morbid(病态的) laugh when facing the hideous（丑恶的）. In hopeless indignation（愤慨）they take up freezing irony and burning satire as their weapons. Their novels are often in the form of anti-novel（反传统小说）, devoid of(缺乏) completeness of plot and characterized by fragmentation（零碎的）and dislocation（混乱）.10.The Lost Generation(迷失的一代)①It is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.②Full 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.③The three best-known representatives of Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.Beat Generation/ The Beat Writers (垮掉的一代)①It refers to a loosely-knit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second-half of the 1950s and early 1960s.②They shared a set of social attitudes—anti-established, anti-political, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, literary, and moral values, and were in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression.③Representatives of the group were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. And the most famous literary creations produced by this group should be Allen Ginsberg’s long poem Howl(嚎叫) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road(在路上).。

(完整word版)美国文学名词解释

American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful and satisfying life。

It usually framed in terms of American capitalism（资本主义）, its associated purported meritocracy,(知识界精华) and the freedoms guaranteed by the U。

S. Bill of Rights.American Puritanism清教主义: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the protestant church who wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrines of predestination， original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God。

American literature in the 17th century mostly consisted of Puritan literature. Puritanism had an enduring influence on American literature. It had become， to some extent, so much a state of mind, so much a part of national cultural atmosphere， rather than a set of tenets.Transcendentalism 超验主义： Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature， religion，culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century。

美国文学名词解释

美国文学名词解释《美国文学》名词解释1. American PuritanismAmerican Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and American literature. It has become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, rather than a set of tenets, so much a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the Americans breathe. It stresses predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement (or the salvation of a selected fe w) from God’s grac e. With such doctrines in their minds, Puritans left Europe for America in order to establish a theocracy in the New World. Over the years in the new homeland they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.2. The American DreamThe American Dream is the faith held by many in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations. Nowadays the American Dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as a measure of success and/or happiness.3. American RomanticismAmerican Romanticism stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It was America’s first great creative period. Although foreign influences were strong, American romanticism exhibited distinct features of its own. First, American romanticism was in essence the expressionof “a real new experience” and contained “an alien quality” for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place” was radically new and alien. Second, Puritan influence over American romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. Famous writers, such as the novelists Hawthorne and Melville; the poets Dickinson and Whitman; the essayists Thoreau and Emerson, had made a great literary period by capturing on their pages the enthusiasm and the optimism of that dream.4. American TranscendentalismAmerican Transcendentalism is literature, philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to 1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy of Calvinism and the rationalism of the Unitarian Church, developing instead their own faith centering on the divinity of humanity and the natural world. The beliefs that God is imminent in each person and in nature and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority. The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essays as Nature(1836), and Self-Reliance and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden (1854).5. American NaturalismAmerican Naturalism is a literary movement that became popular in America in the late 19th century and is often associated with literary realism. Viewed as a combination of realism and romanticism, critics contend that the American form is heavily influenced by the concept of determinism—the theory that heredity and environment influence and determine human behavior. Although naturalism is often associated with realism,which also seeks to accurately represent human existence, the two movements are differentiated by the fact that naturalism is connected to the doctrine of biological, economic and social determinism. Representative writers are, among others, Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.6. International ThemeThe International theme was one of Henry James’s main subjects, which dealt with the relationship between American and European culture. He explored the attractions and conflicts between new and old, innocence and experience, candor and complexity, the puritanical and the aesthetic.7. Local ColorismLocal Colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th century, particularly among authors in the South of the United States. This style relied heavily on using words, phrases, and slang that were native to the particular region in which the story took place. The term has come to mean any device which implies a specific focus, whether it is geographical or temporal.A well-known local colorism author was Mark Twain with his books Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.8. ImagismImagism was a literary movement which came into being in Britain and U.S. around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image. Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles: i) direct treatment of subject matter; ii) economy of expression; iii) as regard rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musicalphrase, not in the sequence of metronome. Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is a well-known imagist poem.9. Harlem RenaissanceHarlem Renaissance is a notable phase of black American writing centered in Harlem (a predominantly black area of New York City) in the 1920s. It brought a new self-awareness and critical respect to black literature in the US. Langston Hughes and Richard Wright are representatives of the movement with their works Weary Blues and Native Son respectively.10. The Lost GenerationThe term Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of American literary notables who lived in Paris from the time period which saw the end of World War I to the beginning of the Great Depression. Significant members included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein herself. Hemingway likely popularized the term, quoting Stein ( “You are all a lost generation” ) as epigraph to his novel, The Sun Also Rises. More generally, the term is being used for the young adults of Europe and America during World War I. They were “lost” because after the war many of them were disillusioned with the world in general and unwilling to move into a settled life.11. The Jazz AgeThe Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between World War I and World War II, particularly in North America; with the rise of the Great Depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer F. Sco tt Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describes as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.Fi tzgerald is largely credited with coining the term “The Jazz Age”.12. Hemingway (Code) HeroesThe works of Ernest Hemingway generally center on the concept of heroism. Each of his novels contains a “Hemingway hero”— a man of honor and integrity who expresses himself not with words, but with actions. The Hemingway hero is a noble but tragic hero fighting with the overwhelming force; though he knows that he will be defeated at last, he decides to act like a hero. He is not a Godlike figure, but an ordinary, often flawed mortal who must look to himself for strength. The Hemingway hero is actually a mirror image of the author himself. Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea is a typical Hemingway hero.13. The Beat GenerationIn the 1950s, there was a widespread discontent among the postwar generation, whose voice was one of protest against all the mainstream culture that America had come to represent. This has come to be known as the Beat Generation. The word “beat” represented a non-conformist, rebellious attitude toward conventional values concerning sex, religion, the arts, and the American way of life. It was an attitude that resulted from the feeling of depression and exhaustion and the need to escape into an unconvention al, sometimes communal, mode of living. Central elements of “Beat” culture included experimentation with drugs, alternative forms of sexuality, an interest in Eastern religion, a rejection of materialism, and the idealizing of exuberant, unexpurgated means of expression and being.Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.14. Black HumorBlack humor, in literature, drama, 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 farce. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the kind.15. The Southern RenaissanceThe Southern Renaissance is the revival of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s until the 1950s. Much of the writings in this unit featured the struggle between those who embraced social changes and those who were more skeptical or challenged social change outright. The writers and intellectuals of the South after the late 1920s were engaged in an attempt to come to terms not only with the inherited values of the Southern tradition, but also with a certain way of perceiving and dealing with the past. In the works of William Faulkner, Katherine Ann Porter, Allen Tate, and Tennessee Williams, among others, the diverse wealth of voices in the early 20th-century South came alive.。

美国文学名词解释完整版

1.Allusion: A reference to a person, a place, an event, or a literary work that a writer expects the reader to recognize and respond to. An allusion may be drawn from history, geography, literature, or religio n.2.American Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America's literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering (he world through social rcfonri.3 American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans・The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them・ They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had an enduring influence on Anlerican literature・4. American Realism: in American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence・ Il came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived・It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience ・5・ American Romanticism: The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century. A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, its industrialization, its westward expansion, and a variety of foreign influences were among the important factors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period immediately following the nation's political independence ・ Yet, romantics frequently shared certain general characieristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man's societies a source of corruption. Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War. The romantic exaltation of the individual suited the nation's revolutionary heritage and its frontier egalitarianism.6. American Transcendentalism: Transcendentalists terrors from the romantic literature of Europe. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of Americagogopirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe・They stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society. They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with God's overwhelming presence・Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses・ Emerson's Nature has been called the "Manifesto of American Transcendentalism" and his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as America's ^Declaration of Intellectual Independence^・7.Dramatic monologue: A kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listeners whose replies are not given in the poem. The occasion is usually a crucial one in the speaker's personality as well as the incident that is the subject of the poem.8.Enlightenment: With the advent of the 18th century, in England, as in other European countries, there sprang into life a public movement known as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment on the whole, was an expression of struggle of the then progressive class of bourgeois against feudalism. The egogo inequality, stagnation. prejudices and other survivals of feudalism. The attempted to place all branches of science at the service of mankind by connecting them with the actual deeds and requirements of the people・9.Imagism: Il’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. 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. The leaders of this movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.10.Local Colorism: Local Colorism or Regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late lX6()s and early seventies in America・may be defined as the careful attegogoms in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside・ The social and intellectual climate of the country provided a stimulating milieu for the growth of local color fiction in America. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and inleqxeting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. They formed an imporlanl part of the realistic movement. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the 19th century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of author.IL Lost Generation; This term has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar years ・ 1( describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “ expatriates^ or exiles. Il describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi poverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world・ The young English and American expatriates, men and women, were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile・ Their whole life is undercut and defeated・12.Beat Generation: the Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a movement later. The term "Beat Generation" gradually came to represent an entire period in lime, but the entire original Beat Generation in literature was small enough to have fit into a couple of cars. The lenn was created by Jack Kerouac in 1948・The original word meant nothing more than "bad" or “ruined" or '*spent M or "beaten-down, beaten-up and beaten-out M. The connotation is defeat, resignation, and disappointment.This kind of beatness is what Kerouac was describing in himself and his friends, bright young Americans who had come of age during WWII but couldn't fit in as clean-cut soldiers or complacent young businessmen. They were beat because they dicing believe in straight jobs and had to struggle to survive, living in dirty apartments, selling drugs or committing crimes for food money hitchhiking across the country because they couldn't stay still without getting bored. But the term "beat^ had a second meaning: beatific or sacred and holy. Kerouac, a devout Catholic, explained many times that bydescribing his generation as beat he was trying to capture the secret holiness of the down trodden. In fact, this is probably the most central theme in Kerouac's work・The Beats were essentially anarchic・ They rejected conventional social and moral values; expressedtheir alienation in their works from conventional “square" society by adopting a life style which featuredsex, drugs, jazz and the freedom of the open road. Literally, the Beats were all experimenters who sought to express spontaneity of thought and feeling in a seemingly formless verse as Ginsberg did or prose as Kerouac・ They tended to blur the line between poetry and prose in their writing, adopting rhythms of simple American speech and of so-called progressive jazz, so such so that the Beat style was criticized as likely to contribute more to American slang than to American letters. Perhaps in this sense they are postmodernist.13.Pre-Romanticism: It originated among the conservative groups of men and letters as a reaction against Enlightenment and found its most manifest expression in the **Gothic novel0. The term arising from the fact that the greater part of such romances were devoted to the medieval times.14.Psalm: A song or lyric poem in praise of God・15.Psychological Realism: It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters, thoughts and motivations・ Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism・His novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism・16.Renaissance: The term originally indicated a revival of classical （Greek and Roman）arts and sciences after the dark ages of medieval obscurantism.17.Romanticism: A movement that flourished in literature, philosophy, music, and art in Western culture during most of the 19th cenlury、beginnigogom.18.Satire: A kind of writing that holds up to ridicule or contempt the weaknesses and wrongdoings of individuals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general. The aim of satirists is to set a moral standard for society, and they attempt to persuade rhe reader to see their point of view through the force of laughter.19.Symbol: A symbol is a sign which suggests more than its literal meaning. In other words, a symbol is both literal and figurative・ A symbol is a way of telling a story and a way of conveying meaning. The best symbols are those that are believable in the lives of the characters and also convincing as they convey a meaning beyond the literal level of the story. If the symbol is obscure or ambiguous, then the very obscurity and the ambiguity may also be part of the meaning of the story.20.Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique of using symbols. Il's a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writers, particularly poels, of the 20th century. Il enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word. Il's one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.2LModernisni：It was a con lplex and diverse international move mem in all the creative artsoriginoting about the end of the 19th century. It provided the greatest creative renaissance of the 20thcentury. It was made up of many facets, such as symbolism, surrealism （超现实上义），cubism （立体丄义），expressionism, futurism （未来上义），ect22Amcrican Drcam: American dream means the belief thau everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. Il usually implies a successful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism （资木上义）,its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S・ Bill of Rights.23.The Harlem Renaissance：refers to the flowering of African American literature, art, and drama during the 1920s and 1930s. Though centered in Harlem, New York, the movement impacted urban centers throughout the United States. Black novelists, poels, painters, and playwrights began creating works rooted in their own culture instead of imitating the styles of Europeans and white American.24.fret verse:: poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme or line length and depends on naturalspeech rhythms, the ebb and flow or cadences of speech・ and the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables・ In conventional verse the unit is the foot, or, perhaps, the line, while in free verse the unit is the stanza or strophe syllables. Fee verse is not written in definite stanzas. The great majority of his poems depends on parallelism and other reiterative devices for its structure and cadence・ 1（ is exactly as its name implies—free, free to wander the printed page that the poet's will, free to create pictures in random order. Imagery is very important in free verse since the poem has to capture the reader's imagination with words alone, unaided by these old favorite rhyme and mete匚。

美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）

美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-late 18th century (1715–1789), especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand and the European Enlightenment on the other. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the17th century and the humanist period during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature, society, and religion.Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon liberty, democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance –culminating in the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a rejection of prophecy, miracle and revealed religion, often in preference for Deism. Historians have considered how the ideas of John Locke and republicanism merged to form republicanism in the United States. The most important leaders of the American Enlightenment include Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.1.2. American Puritanismit comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift and sobriety（清醒）were praised.3. Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th century inEurope who broke away from the formal rules of classicalwriting. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19th century who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.4. Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement thatflourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.5. Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), aslocal colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor 6. Stream of consciousness（意识流）：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is thestyle of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memorie s, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novelsbroke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。

美国文学选读名词解释

美国文学选读及赏析名词解释

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美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）

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美国文学重点名词解释

美国文学史及选读_部分名词解释 解释详细,备有汉语解释

美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）

美国文学史及选读的名词解释(全)

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美国文学选读名词解释

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美国文学名词解释

美国文学名词解释完整版

美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）

美国文学史及选读_部分名词解释解释详细,备有汉语解释