美国文学名词解释复习
美国文学期末考试——名词解释
1.Hemingway Code Hero It refers to some protagonists in Hemingway's works. In the general situation of Hemingway's novels, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos and man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. Those who survive and perhaps emerge victorious in the process of seeking to master the code with a set of principles such as honor, courage, endurance, wisdom, discipline and dignity are known as "the Hemingway code". man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually.2.Iceberg theory of Writing: it refers a writing style of Hemingway that is the sentences only give one small bit of the meaning. The rest is implied. One must go very deep beneath the surface to understand the full meaning of his writing.3.Imagism: imagism is the doctrine and poetic practice of a small but influential group of American and British poets calling themselves imagists between 1912 and 1917.aiming at a new clarity and exactness in the short lyric poem, the imagists cultivated concision and directness, building their short poems around single images; they also preferred looser cadences to traditional regular rhythms.4.free verse (自由诗体) without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.5.Lost Generation：it defines a sense of moral loss or aimlessness. The WWI destroyed the innocent ideas, many good young men went to the war and died, or returned damaged, both physically and mentally; their moral faith were no longer valid they are lost. narrow sense means a group of American writers, including Hemingway, F.S.Fitzgerald, etc. broad sense: the entire post WWI American young generation.6.The Beat generation:it was a group of authors whose literature explored and influenced American culture in the post-WW2 era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. Central elements of “Beat “ culture: rejection of standard narrative values, the spiritual quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions, rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation, exploration.7.Modernism现代主义：is loosely a synonym of anything contemporary. Strictly, especially in literary criticism, which began in the late 19th century and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. They pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one.8.Realism: realism is a term applied to literary composition that aims at an interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life ,free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color.9.Naturalism:naturalism is a critical term applied to the method of literary composition that aims at a detached, objectivity in the treatment of natural man.10.Local color:loc al color is a term applied to literature which emphasizes its setting, being concerned with the character of district or of an era, as marked by its customs, dialects, costumes, landscape or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influences.11.American romanticism : Romanticism is 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 expressi on of emotion and imagination ,departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism ,and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.12.The Harlem Renaissance The first flowering of African-American literature. It was the African American artistic movement in the 1920s that celebrated black life and culture and Hughes is best-known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.13. Stream-of-Consciousness Stream of Consciousness, in literature, is the technique that records the multifarious thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence.15.Transcendentalism:In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18th century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. The transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend thelimitations of the material world. They found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson‟s essay nature was the major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it.16.The Jazz Age(享乐时代)：when New Orleans musicians moved “up the river”to Chicago, and the theatre of New Yorks Harlem pulsed with the music that had become a symbol of the times. Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a generation of “the beautiful and damned”, drowning in their pleasures.17.Symbolism: It is a movement in literature and the visual arts that originated in France in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire in the late 19th century. In literature, symbolism was an aesthetic movement that encouraged writers to express their ideas, feelings, and values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct statements. Hawthorne and Melville are masters of symbolism in America in the 19th century.18.Darwinism:达尔文主义:an evident influence on naturalism, stress the animality of man, to suggest that be was dominated by the irresistible forces of evolution.19.Psychological realism:It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters‟ thoughts and motivation. Henry James‟ novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.20. Puritanism: The word is originally used to refer to the theory advocated by a party within the Church of England. It is also used to refer to attitudes and values considered characteristics of the Puritans. It denotes a rigid moral, or the condemnation of innocent pleasure, or religious narrowness adhered by the early New England Puritans. It exerted great influence over American Romanticism. The preoccupation with the Calvinist view of original sin and the mystery of evil marked the works by such famous writers as Hawthorne and Melville.21.Multiple points of view The employment of several narrators or narrative points of views to tell a story, thus making the structure of the book somewhat radioactive. For example, The Sound and the Fury uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view.。
美国文学名词解释
1 The Enlightenment（启蒙运动）: The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement originating in France, which attracted widespread support among the ruling and intellectual classes of Europ e and North America in the second half of the 18th century. It characterizes the efforts by certain European writers to use critical reason to free minds from prejudice, unexamined authority and oppression by Church or State. Therefore, the Enlightenment is sometimes called the Age of Reason2 American Dream(美国梦): It 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 asmeasure of success or happiness3. 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).4. American Puritanism: It is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Puritan 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宿命论, original sin and total depravity性恶说, and limited atonement 有限的救赎 through a special infusion 浸渍 of grace from God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did havea profound influence on the early American mind.5.Symbolism：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.7.Gothic novel is a type of romance very popular late in the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century.Gothic novel emphasizes things which are grotesque怪异的， violent， mysterious， supernatural，desolate 荒凉 and horrifying. Gothic， originally in the sense of“medic医学，not classical”，with its descriptions of the dark，irrational side of human nature，Gothic novel has exerted a great influence over the writers of the Romantic period.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 movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell艾米•洛威尔.8. 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.9. Stream of Consciousness(意识流): It is a style used in the presentation of the character’s inner working of mind. The assumption is that an individual’s psychological processes are a continuous flow like a shifting, uninterrupted stream, highly changeable and confusing, often appearing illogical and contrary to reason. In tracing the stream of consciousness of an individual the writer may present interior monologue(内心独白) by his character, hint with symbols, reverse(颠倒) the order of time, and alternate（轮流的／交替的） recollections（回忆） with the present or sometime illusions（幻想） with given facts.10. Point of view( 视角)：It is a term referring to the vantage point (能观察某事物的有利位置) or position from which a story is told. To identify（识别） the narrator of a story is to identify the story’s point of view. Basically there are two narrative ways: first-person point of view and the third-personpoint of view.12. The Harlem Renaissance: it was the first important movement in black American literature. Immediately after the First World War, as a result of a massive black migration to Northern cities, a group of young, talented black artists congregated in Harlem, a predominantly black section of New York City, and made it the cultural, and intellectual capital of black America. They carried forward the cultural traditions of their people and demonstrated their achievements to the white society that habitually ignored them.13. Expressionism 表现主义: it arouse in German theater after World War I. Delighting in bizarre (奇异的) stage design and exaggerated makeup and costuming(服装), expressionists sought to reflect intense states of emotion. Its mode is “the externalization(外表性) of t he inner.”14.Black humor: 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）.（专业文档资料素材和资料部分来自网络，供参考。
美国文学名词解释
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. 超验主义，它是一个蓬勃发展的新英格兰的哲学和文学运动，反对理性主义和加尔文主义的反应。
它强调直观地了解上帝没有教会的帮助下，主张心灵的独立性。
2. Romanticism had appeared in England in the last years of the eighteenth century. It spread to conti nental Europe and then came to America early in the nineteenth century. It came into being as a re action against the prevailing neoclassical spirit and rationalism during the Age of Reason. 浪漫主义曾经出现在英国，在过去几年的十八世纪。
它蔓延到欧洲大陆，然后来到美国在十九世纪初。
它应运而生作为理性的时代中针对当时新古典主义精神和理性的反应。
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. 清教主义，它是清教徒，谁曾打算净化和简化英国教会的宗教礼仪的宗教信仰。
美国文学史复习名词解释
I. Explain the following literary terms. 1.Romanticism The most most profound profound and comprehensive idea idea of of of romanticism romanticism is is the the the vision vision of of a a greater personal freedom for the individual. Appeals to imagination; Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality. Subjectivity: in form and meaning. 2American transcendentalism American American transcendentalism transcendentalism was an important movement in in philosophy philosophy and literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860). For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. 3Realism : “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” the Civil war a. verisimilitude of details derived from observation b. representative in plot, setting and character c. an objective rather than an idealized view of human experience 4. Modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the the changes changes changes in in in Western Western Western society society at at the the the end end of of the the the nineteenth nineteenth and beginning of of the the the twentieth twentieth century. American American modernism modernism modernism is is an artistic and cultural movement in in the the United States starting at at the the turn of of the the 20th 20th century century with with its its core core period period between between World World World War War I I and and World World War War II and continuing into the 21st century. II. Questions and Answers. Give brief answers to each of the following questions in English. 1.What is local color ？ an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things immediately observable: the dialects, customs, sights, and sounds of regional America”2. What is American Puritanism 1). Total Depravity - the concept of Original Si 2). Unconditional Election - the 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. 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. 3. Analyze Benjamin Franklin ’s Autobiography. themes in autobiography: Self- Improvement Mind: Self-education Body: Physical Activity Behavior: Moral Perfection Religion: The best service to God is to be good to man Benjamin Franklin and aspects of The American Dream Rags to Riches: Impotence to Importance: A Philosophy of Individualism: Freewill vs. Determinism: Hope and Optimism: The Autobiography is a record of self-examination and self-improvement. Benjamin Franklin was a spokesman for the new order of the 18th century enlightenment The Autobiography is a how-to-do-it book, a book on the art of self-improvement. (for example, Franklin ’s 13 virtues) Through telling a success story of self-reliance, the book celebrates, in fact, the fulfillment of the American dream. The Autobiography is in the pattern of Puritan simplicity, directness, and concision 4. What is Imagism? It is is a a movement of of English English and American American poets poets in in revolt revolt from from Romanticism, Romanticism, which which flourish flourish 1910-1917. The characteristic products of of the the movement are are more more easily recognized than than its its theories defined: they tend to to be be be short short ,composed ,composed of of of short short lines of of musical musical cadence cadence rather rather than than metrical metrical regularity, to avoid abstraction, and to treat the image with a hard, clear precision rather than with overt symbolic intent. As part of the modernist movement, away from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources to help them create a new poetic expression, aiming aiming at at at clarity clarity of of expression expression through the use use of of of precise precise visual images. III. Topic discussion. 1. Discuss Allen Poe ’s literary achievements with his works.famous American poet, short-story writer and critic father of detective story master of gothic novel forerunner of symbolism a father of detective story Poe introduced of a new form of short fiction--- the detective story. The word The word ““detective ” did not exist in English at the time that Poe was writing, but the genre has become a )fundamental mode of twentieth-century literature and film. b ) master of gothic novel Gothic novel, a genre that rose with Romanticism in Britain in the late eighteenth century, explores the dark side of human experience —death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts, and haunted landscapes. Poe brought the Gothic to America. Gothic novels originated from The Castle of Otranto, written by Horace Walpole in Britain at the end of the 18th century, which created the early classical Gothic novel mode. It leads habitually with darkness and horror. Gothic elements include horror, mystery, supernatural phenomenon, misfortune, death, haunted houses, and family curses. c Literary critic Poe is one of the few American writers who not only wrote poetry, but also wrote about how to write poetry. His critical essays on poetry include The Poetic Principle, and The Philosophy of Composition. Poe remained the most controversial and most misunderstood literary figure in the history of American literature.2. Analyze Freneau ’s The Wild Honeysuckle.野金银花Philip Freneau as Father of American Poetry as Leader of 18th Century Naturalism The following poem was published in his Poems (1786) and was virtually unread in the time when he was living. In the poem the poet expresses his keen awareness of the liveliness and transience of nature celebrating the beauty of the frail forest flower, thus showing his deep love for nature. The poem was written in six-line iambic tetrameter stanzas rhymed on ababcc pattern. The poem is said to anticipate the nineteenth-century romantic use of simple nature imagery. It is considered one of the author ’s finest nature poems. Comments on The Wild Honey Suckle 1. A flower may be the most beautiful and overlooked piece of nature. Cherish it while it lasts for by the change of each season it may dissipate only to become a desire. Perhaps Freneau knew of a beauty that only nature could describe, provoked by the insincerity of the British people. 2. Philip Freneau, in this poem, was expressing his dream of a paradise in nature, or rather, on the new continent of of America. America. His His dream dream was the originality of of the the paradise on the earth, i.e, USA. The wild honey suckle is something of freedom, tranquility, nature, and of no convention, no suppression, no traditional or anything beyond the pure nature. This poem poem is is not only a mere description of nature, but something ideal in the poet's construction of a real paradise of human beings. This paradise is of real freedom, pure nature, total independence, grand beauty. As we know, Freneau was against the British interference in the independence of the new land, and was hoping to establish a real free country of the people on the new Continent. So in my opinion, this poem was in fact the beautiful bode of a paradise in in nature(on nature(on the the earth), earth), in in very very very brief brief and true words. words. This This This paradise paradise is is independent independent without meeting any vicious interference, beautiful without catering to any viewer, tranquil but fearful of no hardships, wild in nature without any vulgar provocation. in this poem the poet expressed a keen awareness of the loveliness and transien ce of nature.he not only meditated on mortality but also celebrated nature.it im plies that life and death are inevitable law of nature, "the wild honey suckle"is philipfreneau's most widely read natureal lyric with th e theme of transience.the central image is a nativewild flower,which makes a dra stic difference from elite flower images typical of tradition english poems. the poem showed strong feelings for the natural beauty,which was the characteristic of romantic. 3. Analyze Poe ’s To Helen and translate the third stanza in your own words.The theme of this short poem is the beauty of a woman with whom Poe became acquainted when he was 14. Apparently she treated him kindly and may have urged him –or perhaps inspired him –to write poetry. Beauty, as Poe uses the word in the poem, appears to refer to the woman's soul as well as as her her her body. body. On the one one hand, hand, hand, he he he represents represents her her as as as Helen Helen Helen of of of Troy Troy –the quintessence of of physical physical beauty –at at the the the beginning beginning of of the the poem. poem. On On the other, he he represents represents her her as as as Psyche Psyche –the quintessence of soulful beauty –at the end of the poem. In Greek, psyche means soul. It was first published in 1831 collection Poems of Poe then reprinted in 1836 in the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe revised the poem in 1845, making several improvements, most notably changing "the beauty of fair Greece, and the grandeur of old Rome" to "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." These improved lines are the most well-known lines of the poem. Imagery and Summary of the Poem Poe opens opens the the poem with with a a simile –“Helen, thy beauty is to to me me / / Like Like those Nic éan barks barks of of of yore yore ”–that compares compares the the beauty of of Helen Helen Helen (Mrs. (Mrs. Stanard) with small sailing boats (barks) that carried home travelers in ancient times. He extends this boat imagery into the second stanza, when he says Helen brought him home to the shores of the greatest civilizations of antiquity, classical Greece Greece and and Rome. It may well have have been been been that that Mrs. Mrs. Stanard Stanard ’s s beauty beauty and other admirable qualities, as well as her taking notice of Poe ’s writing ability, helped inspire him to write poetry that mimicked in some ways the classical tradition of Greece and Rome. Certainly the poem ’s s allusions allusions to to mythology mythology and the the classical classical age age suggest suggest that he he had had a grounding in, and a fondness for, ancient history and literature. In the final stanza of the poem, Poe imagines that Mrs. Stanard (Helen) is standing before him in a recess or alcove in front of a window. window. She She She is is holding an agate lamp, lamp, as as as the the the beautiful beautiful Psyche Psyche did did did when when she she discovered discovered the identity of Eros (Cupid). in the first stanza,helen's beauty is soothing.it provides security and safety.perhaps the reader is expected to associate marlowe's famousline:was this the face that launched a thousand ships? to helen's beauty,for her beauty is as hypnotic for the speaker as the ships that transported another wanderer-Ulysses-home from Troy. throughout the poem,Poe uses allusions to classical names and places,as well as certain kinds of images to create the impression of a far-off idealized,unreal w oman,like a Greek statue.words that support the image of an ideal woman are "hy acinth"and"classic""Naiad airs"and"statued like.helen stands,not like a real woman,bu t like a saint in a "windows-niche.she becomes a symbol both of beauty and of frustration,a romantically idealized,yet inaccessible image of the heart's desire. it's believed that few american poets can surpass Poe's ability in the use of english as a medium of pure musical and rhythmic beauty.Poe made good use of rhythm is not regular,which shows the poet was excited,the poem is a haunting melody done with extreme artistry of alliteration as in "weary"and"way-worn",assonanc e as in "wont to roam"and masculine end rhyme,for example,with"me"rhythm with "se a",the rhyme scheme is ababb,cdcec,fggfg.in the poem words containing vowels or diphthongs were used to bring about the slow rhythm which reveals the speaker's admiration and deep regret and suggest a theme that beauty is soothing yet inaccessible.in light of analysis above,the general tone of the poem is passionate a nd regretful. 4. Discuss Mark Twain Discuss Mark Twain’’s art of fiction: the setting, the language, and the characters, etc., based on his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huckleberry Finn (1884) was first considered adult fiction. Huck Finn, which painted a picture of of Mississippi Mississippi frontier life, was intended as as a a sequel to to Tom Tom Sawyer. Huck, Huck, who who could could not not not possibly possibly write a story, tells us the story. Twain wrote a novel that embodies the search for freedom. He wrote during the post-Civil War period when there was an intense white reaction against blacks. According to some critics,[who?] Twain took aim squarely against racial prejudice, increasing segregation, lynchings, and the generally accepted belief that blacks were sub-human. He "made it clear that Jim was good, deeply loving, human, and anxious for freedom."[12] However, others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and Jim's Sambo-like character.[2][3] Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he he lives, lives, and while he he is is unable to to consciously consciously refute those values even even in in in his his thoughts, he he makes makes a moral moral choice choice based based on on his own valuation of of Jim's Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in in direct direct opposition to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain in his lecture notes proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience," and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat."[13]5. Discuss James Cooper ’s literary contributions. Contributions of Cooper The creation of the famous Leather stocking saga has cemented his position as our first great national novelist and his influence pervades American literature. In his thirty-two years (1820-1851) of authorship, Cooper produced twenty-nine other long works of fiction and fifteen books - enough to fill forty-eight volumes in the new definitive edition of his Works. Among his achievements: 1. The first successful American historical romance in the vein of Sir Walter Scott (The Spy, 1821). 2. The first sea novel (The Pilot, 1824). 3. The first attempt at a fully researched historical novel (Lionel Lincoln, 1825). 4. The first full-scale History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839). 5. The first American international novel of manners (Homeward Bound and Home as Found, 1838). 6. 6. The The first trilogy in in American American American fiction fiction (Satanstoe, 1845; 1845; The The Chainbearer, 1845; 1845; and and The Redskins, 1846). 7. The first and only five-volume epic romance to carry its mythic hero - Natty Bumppo - from youth to old age. James Fenimore Fenimore Cooper Cooper was one of of the the the first first novelists to to enjoy enjoy enjoy great great fame as a result of of his his his literary literary career and although some may argue argue that that this is is because because because the the the subject subject matter was entertaining (rather than than instructive instructive or or socially socially conscious, for for example) example) example) the the the fact fact remains remains that that he was able able to to to introduce introduce Americans to their own frontier . A writer in the style of romanticism, James Fenimore Cooper was enamored with with tales tales of of the the the outdoors outdoors and encounters with with strange strange and often hostile people people or or or forces. forces. This material was well-received and because of his literary success James Fenimore Cooper was able to produce his large body of works throughout his lifetime. 6. Analyze Whitman Analyze Whitman’’s One s One’’s Self I Sing. Analysis of One ’s Self I Sing In In 1855 1855 he he published published Leaves Leaves of of of Grass Grass Grass by by by himself himself at at his his own expense. His His intention intention was to to create create a truly American poem, one "proportionate to our continent, with its powerful races of men, its tremendous historic events, its great oceans, its mountains, and its illimitable prairies." In fact, his his poem poem g oes goes goes beyond beyond beyond American American American subject subject to to deal deal deal with with with the the the universal universal themes themes of of of nature, nature, fertility, and mortality. "One "One’’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person," run the opening lines of Leaves of Grass from 1871 on, "Yet utter the word Democratic." A poetic universe of productive tension is hinted by that "Yet"; the tense equipoise between individualism and democracy, this poem suggests, is the foundational theme of Whitman’s book. The poem then goes on to introduce the site and symbol for this reconciliation of of individual individual to to mass: mass: mass: the the body, "physiology from from top top top to to to toe." toe." We receive individual identity through our body, . . . yet at the same time, physicality, and especially physical affection, are universal, binding us together in common humanity. Much of the boldly progressive politics of Whitman ’s poetry will follow from this emphasis on the body; thus his introduction of the theme of "physiology" is followed by his (then quite radical) insistence on the political equality of male and female. In In Whitman Whitman Whitman’’s s ““One ’s Self I I Sing Sing ”, , the the the theme theme theme of of of the the the poem, poem, namely namely the the the celebration celebration of of both both both oneself oneself and the whole human beings, is realized at various levels. In this renowned short poem, Whitman trumpets the individualism that underlies American democracy and society, interpreting the politics of democracy into terms of everyday life. The poem is also presented as a drama of democratic identity in which the poet seeks to balance and reconcile major conflicts in the body politic of America: the conflict between "separate person" and "en masse," individualism and equality, liberty and union, female and male, or even alluding to the conflict with the South and the North, the farm and the city, labor and capital, black and white, religion and science. In In Whitman Whitman Whitman’’s s ““One ’s Self I I Sing Sing ”, , the the the theme theme theme of of of the the the poem, poem, namely namely the the the celebration celebration of of both both both oneself oneself and the whole human beings, is realized at various levels. In this renowned short poem, Whitman trumpets the individualism that underlies American democracy and society, interpreting the politics of democracy into terms of everyday life. The poem is also presented as a drama of democratic identity in which the poet seeks to balance and reconcile major conflicts in the body politic of America: the conflict between "separate person" and "en masse," individualism and equality, liberty and union, female and male, or even alluding to the conflict with the South and the North, the farm and the city, labor and capital, black and white, religion and science. 。
美国文学的名词解释_特点_流派
美国文学的名词解释_特点_流派美国文学的名词解释美国文学(American Literature 或Literature of the United States)指在美国产生的文学(也包括建国前殖民地时期的文学作品)。
用英语写成的美国文学可视为英语文学的一部分。
美国文学的历史不长，它几乎是和美国自由资本主义同时出现，较少受到封建贵族文化的束缚。
美国早期人口稀少，有大片未开发的土地，为个人理想的实现提供了很大的可能性。
美国人民富于民主自由精神，个人主义、个性解放的观念较为强烈，这在文学中有突出的反映。
美国又是一个多民族的国家，移民不断涌入，各自带来了本民族的文化，这决定了美国文学风格的多样性和庞杂性。
美国文学发展的过程就是不断吸取、融化各民族文学特点的过程。
美国文学的特点美国文学的历史不长，它几乎是和美国自由资本主义同时出现，较少受到封建贵族文化的束缚。
美国早期人口稀少，有大片未开发的土地，为个人理想的实现提供了很大的可能性。
美国人民富于民主自由精神，个人主义、个性解放的观念较为强烈，这在文学中有突出的反映。
美国又是一个多民族的国家，移民不断涌入，各自带来了本民族的文化，这决定了美国文学风格的多样性和庞杂性。
美国文学发展的过程就是不断吸取、融化各民族文学特点的过程。
许多美国作家来自社会下层，这使得美国文学生活气息和平民色彩都比较浓厚，总的特点是开朗、豪放。
内容庞杂与色彩鲜明是美国文学的另一特点。
个性自由与自我克制、清教主义与实用主义、激进与反动、反叛和顺从、高雅与庸俗、高级趣味与低级趣味、深刻与肤浅、积极进取与玩世不恭、明快与晦涩、犀利的讽刺与阴郁的幽默、精心雕琢与粗制滥造、对人类命运的思考和探索与对性爱的病态追求等倾向，不仅可以同时并存，而且形成强烈的对照。
从来没有一种潮流或倾向能够在一个时期内一统美国文学的天下。
美国作家敏感、好奇，往往是一个浪潮未落，另一浪潮又起。
作家们永远处在探索和试验的过程之中。
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.。
美国文学名词解释
名词解析1 American Romanticism 浪漫主义The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a period of the great flowering of American literature.1. It started with the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book（1819）and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass（1855）;2. It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense;3. The writers emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group. They affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and the strange.4. the writers stressed the element of “Amerianness”in their works;5. Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called the American Renaissance;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; Nathaniel Hawthorne; )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 themodern 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.4 RealismAs a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism with the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Romanticism and sentimentalism, and paved the way to Modernism.This literary interest in the so-called “reality”of life started a new period in the American literary writing known as The Age of Realism.Psychological RealismIt is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’thoughts andmotivations. And Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it.The three dominant figures of the period are William Dean Howells豪威尔斯, Mark Twain, and Henry James. Mark Twain and Howells seemed to have paid more attention to the “life” of the Americans, and Henry James had apparently laid greater emphasis on the “inner world”of man.5 Puritanismwas a religious reform movement that arose within the Church of England in the late sixteenth century. Under siege from church and crown, it sent an offshoot in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century to the northern English colonies in the New World--a migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England. Puritanism, however, was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincident with the founding of New England; 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.6 American NaturalismAs a literary movement, naturalism grew out of the 19th century realism, the evolutionary theory in his “The Origin of Species”----“the fittest, the survival”in biological sphereThree major concepts of literary naturalism:1) Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.2) The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.3) The naturalists think that the true reality is not found in the smiling aspects of middle class life, but in the dominant forces of Nature in stopping human desires, in keeping humans from accomplishing their dreams.They offered vivid pictures of the lives of the down-trodden and the abnormal7 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.8 Local colorismIn literature, local color fiction refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features –including characters, dialects, customs, history, and landscape –of a particular region.Local colorism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It did notcease to be a dominant fashion until the turn of the 20th century. It formed an important part of the realistic movement.Local colorism founds its own position in national literature by its own localism; at the same time, national literature improves its own status by local colorism. It is with local colorism American literature comes to mature and can compete with European one，after that，American Literature becomes really American one．。
美国文学名词解释
美国文学名词解释美国文学，作为世界文学的重要组成部分，有着丰富多彩的文化背景和独特的创作风格。
在这篇文章中，我将为您解释几个与美国文学相关的重要名词。
1. 美国文学：美国文学是指在美国国土上创作的文学作品，包括小说、诗歌、戏剧和散文等各种文体。
美国文学自17世纪初殖民地时期开始出现，并逐渐形成独特的风格和主题，如自由、探索、个人价值观等。
该文学受到欧洲文学、非裔美国文学、拉丁美洲文学等多个文学传统的影响。
2. 讽刺文学：讽刺文学是通过调侃、嘲笑或批评等手法，通过善意或恶意地对社会、人物、社会习俗等进行揭示和描述的一种文学形式。
美国文学中讽刺常常用来表达对社会问题的关注以及对不公正现象的讽刺批评。
作家马克·吐温的小说《哈克贝里·费恩历险记》便是美国文学中著名的讽刺作品之一。
3. 大都市文学：大都市文学是指以城市为背景、以城市生活为题材的文学作品。
美国是大都市文学的发源地之一，纽约市成为该文学流派的中心。
大都市文学反映了城市的动态与繁华，同时也揭示了城市中的社会问题和人际关系。
美国作家F·斯科特·菲茨杰拉德的小说《了不起的盖茨比》，以及薇拉·刘易斯和李欧·斯坦巴克的作品都是著名的大都市文学作品。
4. 美国本土文学：美国本土文学是指探讨、描写和反映美国本土历史、文化、民族特色的文学作品。
该文学形式着重于展示美洲原住民、欧洲移民、非裔美国人和其他少数族裔的文化传统和经验。
美国作家奥兰多·费斯特的小说《渐近线》以及路易斯·埃里斯的小说《米南多洛之歌》都是美国本土文学的代表作品。
5. 后现代主义文学：后现代主义文学是指具有反传统、颠覆常规、模糊现实与虚幻界限的文学形式。
在晚20世纪以后的美国文学中，后现代主义作品开始兴起。
该文学形式常常使用非线性叙事、多重视角和流派的混合等技巧来表达个体性、主观性和相对主义等概念。
美国作家托马斯·品钦的小说《地下时光》以及大卫·福斯特·华莱士的小说《无人生还》都是后现代主义文学的代表作品。
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.。
美国文学名词解释复习
1.Imagism（意象派）: 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 movement were Ezra P ound and Amy Lowell.2.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) humor3.Psychological Realism: James’s realism is characterized by his psychological a pproach to his subject matter. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner l ife of human beings than with overt human actions. His best and most mature wor ks will render the drama of individual consciousness and convey the moment-to-mo ment sense of human experience as bewilderment and discovery. And we observe people and events filtering through the individual consciousness and participate in h is experience. This emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousness prov es to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and has great influence on the comin g generations. James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th century " stream-of-consciousness" novels and the founder of psychological realism.4.International theme:Henry James’s fame generally rests on his novels and stories with the international theme. These novels are always set against a large international background, usually between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cultures with two different groups of people representing two different value systems.The treatment of the international theme is characterized by the richness of syntax and characterization and the originality in point of view, symbolism, metaphoric texture, and organizing rhyme. James is now more mature as an artist, more at home in the craft of fiction.5. Modernism：It was a complex and diverse （复杂多样的）international movement in all the creative arts （创造性艺术），originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided （出现）the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made up of many facets （方面），such as symbolism，surrealism （超现实主义），cubism （立体主义），expressionism，futurism （未来主义），ect6. 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.7.Surrealism(超现实主义):An anti-rational movement of imaginative liberation in European in art and literature in the 1920s and 1930s, which launched by Andre Breton after his break from the Dada group in 1922. Surrealism seeks to break down the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, exploring the resources and revolutionary energies of dreams, hallucinations and sexual desire. Influenced both by the symbolists and by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious, the surrealists experimented with automatic writing and with the free association of random images brought in surprising juxtaposition.8. Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism 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.9. Hemingway Code Hero(海明威式英雄): Hemingway Code Hero ,also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong more sentitive, enjoys the pleasures of life( sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.2> barnes in the sun also Rises, henry in a Farewell to arms and santiago in the old man and the sea are typical of Hemingway Code Hero10.Iceberg Theory :Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory”suggests that the writer include in the text only a small portion of what he knows, leaving about ninety percent of the content a mystery that grows beneath the surface of the writing. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement ofan iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action11.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.12. Jazz age(爵士时代):The 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 Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited wi th coining the term” Jazz Age”.（了解）13.Stream of consciousness（意识流）：It 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. Those novels broke 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
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.。
美国文学名词解释
迷惘的一代(Lost Generation)，又称：迷失的一代。
西方现代派文学的一种。
第一次世界大战以后出现于美国的一个文学流派。
第一次世界大战以后，美国有一批青年作家陆续登上文坛。
他们不仅年龄相仿，而且经历相似，思想情绪相近，在创作中表现出许多共同点，逐渐形成一新的文学流派。
代表作家有海明威(1899—1961)、福克纳(1897—1962)、约·多斯·帕索斯(1896—1970)、菲兹杰拉德(1896—1940)，和诗人肯明斯(1894—1962)等。
他们曾怀着民主的理想奔赴欧洲战场，目睹人类空前的大屠杀，经历种种苦难，深受“民主”、“光荣”、“牺牲”口号的欺骗，对社会、人生大感失望，故通过创作小说描述战争对他们的残害，表现出一种迷惘、彷徨和失望的情绪。
这一流派也包括没有参加过战争但对前途感到迷惘和迟疑的20年代作家，如菲兹杰拉德、艾略特和沃尔夫(1900～1938)等。
特别是菲兹杰拉德，对战争所暴露的资产阶级精神危机深有感触，通过对他所熟悉的上层社会的描写，表明昔日的梦想成了泡影，“美国梦”根本不存在，他的人物历经了觉醒和破灭感中的坎坷与痛苦。
沃尔夫的作品以一个美国青年的经历贯穿始终，体现了在探索人生的过程中的激动和失望，是一种孤独者的迷惘。
迷惘的一代作家在艺术上各有特点，他们的主要成就闪烁于20年代，之后便分道扬镳了意象派诗歌意象派（Imagists）是1909年至1917年间一些英美诗人发起并付诸实践的文学运动，它是当时盛行于西方世界的象征主义文学运动的一个分支。
其宗旨是要求诗人以鲜明、准确、含蓄和高度凝炼的意象生动及形象地展现事物，并将诗人瞬息间的思想感情溶化在诗行中。
它反对发表议论及感叹。
意象派的产生最初是对当时诗坛文风的一种反拨，代表人物是埃兹拉·庞德。
由于意象派诗人大多经历了象征诗歌创作，所以理论界也有人将意象派看做象征主义的分支，实际上意象派和象征主义诗歌有极大的本质差异。
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 -
迷惘的一代(Lost Generation)，又称：迷失的一代。
西方现代派文学的一种。
第一次世界大战以后出现于美国的一个文学流派。
第一次世界大战以后，美国有一批青年作家陆续登上文坛。
他们不仅年龄相仿，而且经历相似，思想情绪相近，在创作中表现出许多共同点，逐渐形成一新的文学流派。
代表作家有海明威(1899—1961)、福克纳(1897—1962)、约·多斯·帕索斯(1896—1970)、菲兹杰拉德(1896—1940)，和诗人肯明斯(1894—1962)等。
他们曾怀着民主的理想奔赴欧洲战场，目睹人类空前的大屠杀，经历种种苦难，深受“民主”、“光荣”、“牺牲”口号的欺骗，对社会、人生大感失望，故通过创作小说描述战争对他们的残害，表现出一种迷惘、彷徨和失望的情绪。
这一流派也包括没有参加过战争但对前途感到迷惘和迟疑的20年代作家，如菲兹杰拉德、艾略特和沃尔夫(1900～1938)等。
特别是菲兹杰拉德，对战争所暴露的资产阶级精神危机深有感触，通过对他所熟悉的上层社会的描写，表明昔日的梦想成了泡影，“美国梦”根本不存在，他的人物历经了觉醒和破灭感中的坎坷与痛苦。
沃尔夫的作品以一个美国青年的经历贯穿始终，体现了在探索人生的过程中的激动和失望，是一种孤独者的迷惘。
迷惘的一代作家在艺术上各有特点，他们的主要成就闪烁于20年代，之后便分道扬镳了意象派诗歌意象派（Imagists）是1909年至1917年间一些英美诗人发起并付诸实践的文学运动，它是当时盛行于西方世界的象征主义文学运动的一个分支。
其宗旨是要求诗人以鲜明、准确、含蓄和高度凝炼的意象生动及形象地展现事物，并将诗人瞬息间的思想感情溶化在诗行中。
它反对发表议论及感叹。
意象派的产生最初是对当时诗坛文风的一种反拨，代表人物是埃兹拉·庞德。
由于意象派诗人大多经历了象征诗歌创作，所以理论界也有人将意象派看做象征主义的分支，实际上意象派和象征主义诗歌有极大的本质差异。
美国文学文学名词解释
1 Modernism(现代主义)Modernism is comprehensive but vague term for a movement , which begin in the late19th century and which has had a wide influence internationally during much of the 20th century、2> modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical case、3> the term pertains to all the creative arts、Especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting, music and architecture、现代主义就是全面但运动模糊的术语,在19世纪末期开始,在国际上有广泛影响的在20世纪的大部分时间。
2 >现代主义以非理性哲学与精神分析理论为其理论的情况。
3 >这个词属于所有的创造性艺术。
特别就是诗歌、小说、戏剧、绘画、音乐与建筑。
2 Transcendentalism(超验主义)Transcendentalism is literature, philosophical and literary movement that flourished in new England from about 1836 to 1860、it is the summit of American Romanticism、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、Transcendentalism derived some of its basic idealistic concepts from romantic German philosophy, and from such English authors as Coleridge and Wordsworth、Its mystical aspects were partly influenced by Indian and Chinese religious teachings、Although Transcendentalism was never a rigorously systematic philosophy, it had some basic tenets that were generally shared by its adherents、The beliefs that God is immanent 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, and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden、超验主义就是从1836至1860于新英格兰发起的一场文学,哲学以及艺术运动。
美国文学总复习名词解释
American Literature1.What is Transcendentalism?In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts, and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Romanticism, Transcendentalism rejected both 18th-century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson’s essay Nature(1836) was the first major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. His other key transcendentalist works include The American Scholar(1837), a volume in which he addressed the intellectual’s duty to culture, and Self-Reliance(1841), an essay in which he asserted the importance of being true to one’s nature.2.What is Puritanism?The word Puritanism is originally used to refer the theology advocated by a party within the Church of England. The term Puritanism is also used in a broader sense to refer to attitudes and values considered characteristic of the Puritans. It has been employed to denote a rigid moralism, or the condemnation谴责of innocent pleasure, or religious narrowness adhered by the early New England Puritans. The American Puritanism as cultural heritage exerted great influence over American moral values. And this Puritan influence over American Romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. The American Puritans accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God.3.What is Free verse ?Free Verse, is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventional rules of meter. Free verse is used to deliver poetry free from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to re-create instead the free rhythms of natural speech. Pointing to the American poet Walt Whitman as their precursor, they wrote lines of varying length and cadence节奏, usually not rhymed. The emotional content or meaning of the work was expressed through its rhythm. Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many modern American poets, including Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg.4.What is Local Colorism?Post-Civil War America was large and diverse(various enough to sense its own local difference. Regional voices had emerged from newly settled territories in the South and tothe west of the Appalachan. Local colorism is a unique variation of the American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specified setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence.What is naturalism?In literature, the term refers to the theory that literary composition should aim at a detached, scientific objectivity in the treatment of natural man. The movement is an outgrowth of 19th-century scientific thought, following in general the biological determinism of Darwin’s theory, or the economic determinism of Karl Marx. Artistically, naturalistic writings are usually unpolished in language, lacking in academic skills and unwieldy in structure. Philosophically, the naturalists believe that the real and true is always partially hidden from the individual, or beyond his control and that men are controlled and conditioned by heredity, instinct, chance and above all environment. Notable writers of naturalistic fiction were Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser.What is “stream-of-consciousness”?Stream of consciousness is a term coined by William James in his The Principles of Psychology to describe the flow of thoughts of the waking mind. Now it is widely used in a literary context to describe the unspoken thoughts and feelings of the characters, without resorting(jiezhu) to objective description or conventional dialogue. It was adapted and developed by Joyce, V. Woolf, and others. The ability to represent the flux of a character’s thought, impressions, emotions, or reminiscences, often without logical sequence or syntax, marked a revolution in the form of novel at that time.What is the Lost Generation?The Lost Generation refers to the disillusioned(awaken) intellectuals and artists of the years following the First World War, who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace them only by despair of a cynical bedonism. The remark of Gertrude Stein, “You are a lost generation,” addressed to Hemingway, was used as a preface to the latter’s novel The Sun also Rises, which brilliantly describes those expatriates(yimin) who had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types of writing.What is Black Humor?Black humor is a type of modern humor that is caused by anger. It often describes gruesome events, which are normally associated with pleasant occasions, thus producing the congruous effect for humor. Black humor attacks on social mores through shocking language and offensive imagery. Black humor is a kind of desperate humor. It is the laughter at tragic things. In this meaningless world, according to Black Humorists, man’s fate is decided by incomprehensive powers. We can’t do anything about it; therefore wemay as well laugh. Sardonic and imaginative 20th-century American writers often used the novel to ridicule society. Such novelists as Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, and Kurt V onnegut, came to be known as the black humorists, because of their darkly comic writings.What is the Beat Generation?Beat Generation is a group of American writers of the 1950s whose writing expressed profound dissatisfaction with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. They rejected traditional forms and sought expression in the beatific illumination. The term sometimes is used to refer to those who embraced the ideas of these writers. The Beat Generation’s best-known figures were writers Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Jack Kerouac.What are the thematic concerns and the artistic characteristics of Emily Dickinson’s poetry?Emily Dickinson is America’s best-known female poet. Her poetry covers the issues vital to humanity, which include religion, death, immortality, love, and nature. Her poems have no titles, hence are always quoted by their first lines. In her poetry, there isa particular stress pattern, in which dashes are used as a musical device to createcadence and capital letters as a means of emphasis. A master of imagery that makes the spiritual materialize in surprising ways, Dickinson managed manifold variations within her simple form. Due to her deliberate seclusion, her poems tend to be very personal and meditative. Dickinson’s poetry, despite its ostensibleobvious formal simplicity, is remarkable for its variety, subtlety and richness; and her limited private world have never confined the limitless power of her creativity and imagination.Discuss the character of Huck in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And what is the social significance of the novel?The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is considered a masterpiece of Mark Twain. The book is the story of the title character, known as Huck, a boy who flees his father by rafting down the Mississippi River with a runaway slave, Jim. The climax arises with Huck’s inner struggle in the Mississippi, when Huck is polarized by the two opposing forces between his heart and his head, between for Jim and the laws of the society against those who help slaves escape. With the eventual victory of his moral conscience over his social awareness, Huck grows. Huckleberry Finn, which is almost entirely narrated from Huck’s point of view, is noted for its authentic language and for its deep commitment to freedom. Huck’s adventures also provide the reader with a panorama of American life along the Mississippi before the Civil War. The readers are impressed by Twain’s thematic contrasts between innocence and experience, nature and culture, wilderness and civilization.Briefly discuss the question from THREE of the following aspects: the setting, the language, the character（s）, the theme and the style.A.Setting: In the novel Mark Twain recreates a small-town world of America and presents the local color.nguage: He uses simple, direct language faithful to the colloquial speech, the vernacular (native)language of the local people.C.Character（s）: The author recreates two rebels and fugitives(taowangzhe) running away from civilization, especially Huckleberry Finn, an innocent boy who refuses to accept the conventional village morality.D.Theme: The novel is a criticism of social injustice, hypocrisy, conservativeness and narrow-mindedness of the American small town society.E.Style: The novel employs a humorous style of narration and is also highly symbolic with the central symbol.5.What is the feature of the main character in W. Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily?A Rose for Emily is Faulkner’s first short story published in 1930. Set in the town of Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha, the story focuses on Emily, an eccentric spinster who refused to accept the passage of time, or the inevitable change and loss that accompanies it. As a descendent of the Southern aristocracy, Emily is typical of those in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha stories that are the symbols of the Old Deep South but the prisoners of the past. The deformed (disabled)personality and abnormality Emily demonstrates Faulkner’s point of view that by alienating oneself from reality, a person is bound to be a tragedy. Emily is regarded as the symbol of tradition and the old way of life. Thus her death parallels with the decline of the Old South.6.William Faulkner, a Nobel Prize winner, has an important position in Americanliterature. Do you know anything about "Yoknapatawpha County?" What are hisartistic achievements?a Yoknapatawpha County is an imagined place based on Faulkner's own hometown, a place that he took for the setting of 15 of his 19 novels and many short stories. This small region in the American South becomes in Faulkner's fiction an allegory or a parable of the Old Deep South.b. The Sound and the Fury, his masterpiece, is an account of the tragic downfall of the Compson family. The novel uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1949. Faulkner especially was interested in multigenerational family chronicles, and many characters appear in more than one book; this gives the Yoknapatawpha County saga a sense of continuity that makes the area and its inhabitants seem real.7.What are the stylistic features of Hemingway’s novels?Hemingway’s novels are mainly concerned with “tough” people, known for the Hemingway hero of athletic prowess(weili) and masculinity(male) and unyielding(never give up) heroism, whose essential courage and honesty are implicitly (implied)contrasted with the brutality of civilized society. He deals with a limited range of chatacters in quite similar circumstance and measures them against an unvarying code, known as “grace under pressure”, which is actually an attitude towards life that Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works. In the general situation of his novels, life is but a losing battle; however, it is also a struggle man can demonstrate in such a way that loss becomes dignity; man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually.Hemingway once said, “The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eight of it being above water.” Typical of this “iceberg” analogy (leisi)is Hemingway’s style: Hemingway’s economical writing style often seems simple, but his method iscalculated(right qiadangde). In his writing, Hemingway provided detached descriptions of action, using simple nouns and verbs to capture scenes precisely. By doing so he avoided describing his character’s emotions and thoughts directly. Hemingway was deeply concerned with authenticity in writing. Besides, Hemingway develops the style of colloquialism initiatied by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms(special habit) of human speech are well presented, and the use of short, simple words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care.8.What is the theme and the major character in F.S. Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby? Considered as Fitzgerald’s finest work, The Great Gatsby, written in crisp, concise prose and told by Nick Carraway, a satiric yet sympathetic narrator, it is the story of Jay Gatsby, a young American from the Midwest. Gatsby becomes a bootlegger in order to attain the wealth and lavish way of life he feels are necessary to win the love of Daisy, a married, upper-class woman who had once rejected him. The story ends tragically with Gatsby’s destruction. The book deals with the bankruptcy of the protagonists’ personal dreams due to the clashes between their romantic vision of life and the sordid reality.The hero of the novel, Gatsby, is the last of romantic heroes, whose energy and sense of commitment takes him in search of his person grail. Gatsby’s failure magnifies to a great extent the end of the American dream. The protagonist’s pursuit of his dream only proves to be nothing but an illusion. Nevertheless, the affirmation of hope and expectation isself-asserted in the characters.9.What does the term Catch-22 refer to?Catch-22 is a darkly comic and wildly inventive novel by Joseph Heller about the insanity of war and the absurdity of military authority. The novel is a leading example of the black-humor movement in American fiction. Catch-22 features the airman Yossarian as the hero and moral center of a satirical depiction of life in the army. Yossarian is portrayed as one of the last rational people in an insane war. In the novel, the absurdities of military life are represented by the regulation “Catch-22”. The regulation, which prevents airmen from escaping service in bombing missions by pleading insanity, states that any airman rational enough to want to be grounded cannot possibly be insane and therefore is fit to fly. The term has now become part of English vocabulary, referring to a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule. What is Robert Frost’s nature poem?Robert Frost, American poet, known for his verse concerning New England life. He learned the familiar conventions of nature poetry from his predecessors, and made the colloquial New England speech into a poetic expression. A poem so conceived thus becomes a symbol or metaphor, a careful, loving exploration of reality. Images or symbols in his poems are drawn from the simple country life. However, profound ideas are delivered under the disguise of the plain language and the simple form, for what Frost did is to take symbols from the limited human world and the pastoral landscape to refer to the great world beyond the rustic scene. These thematic concerns include the terror and tragedy in nature, as well as its beauty, and the loneliness and poverty of the isolated human being. In short, the nature poems demonstrate Frost’s love of life and his belief in a serenity that comes from the common experience.27what are the characteristics of modern American literature?In general terms, much serious literature written from 20th century onwards attempted to convey a vision of social breakdown and moral decay and the writers’ task was to develop technique that could represent a break with the past. Thus the defining formal characteristics of the modernistic works are discontinuity and fragmentation. An awareness of the irrational and the workings of the unconscious mind are pervasive in much modernist writing. Technically, modernism was marked by a persistent experimentalism. It rejected the traditional framework of narrative, description, and rational exposition in poetry and prose, in favor of a stream-of –consciousness presentation of personality, a dependence on the poetic image as the essential vehicle of aesthetic communication, and upon myth as a characteristic structural principle. Compared with earlier writings, modern American writings are notable for what they omit: the explanations, interpretations, connections, and summaries. There are shifts in perspective, voice, and tone, but the biggest shift is from the external to the internal, from the public to the private, from the chronological to the psychic, from the objective description to the subjective projection.29 What is the Harlem Renaissance?The Harlem Renaissance was an African American cultural movement of the late 1920s and early 1930s that was centered in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. It marked the first time that African American literature attracted significant attention. No comm.on style or ideology defined the Harlem Renaissance, but the poets, novelists, political essayists, and dramatists who participated in the endeavor shared a commitment to giving artistic expression to the African American experience. They also shared a strong sense of racial pride and a desire to better the social and economic situation of blacks. Major prose writers in the movement were historian and sociologist W.E .DuBois, and writer Langston Hughes.Hills Like White Elephants。
美国文学名词解释
美国文学名词解释美国文学是指美国国内所产生的文学作品，包括小说、诗歌、剧本等各种文学体裁。
它具有自己的特点和风格，反映了美国人的文化、价值观念和思想观念。
美国文学中有许多特殊的名词和术语，下面是其中一些常见的名词解释：1. Puritanism（清教主义）: 清教主义是美国文学发展的重要起点之一，它是在17世纪早期由清教徒带入美洲的思想和信仰体系。
清教徒强调个人责任和纯洁的生活方式，他们的文学作品通常传达着信仰、奋斗和自我批判的主题。
2. American Renaissance（美国文艺复兴）: 美国文艺复兴指的是19世纪中期到20世纪初期的一个时期，这个时期出现了一大批杰出的美国作家和作品。
其中包括威廉·福柯特、纳撒尼尔·霍桑、赫尔曼·梅尔维尔等人的文学作品。
这些作品在内容、风格上更加关注人性、自然和道德等问题。
3. Realism（现实主义）: 现实主义是19世纪末至20世纪初的一种文学流派，在美国文学发展史中具有重要的地位。
现实主义作家力求以客观、真实的方式描绘生活中的人和事，关注社会问题和个人命运。
马克·吐温和亨利·詹姆斯被认为是现实主义文学中最有影响力的作家。
4. Harlem Renaissance（哈莱姆文艺复兴）: 哈莱姆文艺复兴是20世纪20年代至30年代期间，在纽约哈莱姆区集中发展起来的一种文化和艺术运动。
这个运动推动了非洲裔美国人在文学、音乐、舞蹈和绘画等领域的发展。
其中包括作家朗斯顿·休斯、小说家托妮·莫里森等的作品被认为是哈莱姆文艺复兴的代表作。
5. Beat Generation（垮掉的一代）: 垮掉的一代是20世纪50年代和60年代期间在美国兴起的一种文学和文化运动。
这个运动反对传统社会规范和价值观，追求自由和个性的表达。
杰克·凯鲁亚克和艾伦·金斯堡是这个运动的代表作家，他们的作品通常以自由、追求和反叛为主题。
(完整word版)美国文学名词解释
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. Transcendentalists spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. It placed emphasis on spirit, or the Over soul, as the most important thing in the world. It stressed the importance of individual and offered a fresh perception nature ad symbolic of the spirit of God. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thorough.American Naturalism美国自然主义文学: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. The naturalists attempt to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by environment and heredity. It emphasized that the world was amoral, the 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. The pessimism and deterministic ideas naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.American Naturalism(美国自然主义文学)：The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.2) naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.3>Dreiser is a leading figure of his school.The Gilded Age镀金时代:the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrial economy. The end of the Gilded Age coincided with the Panic of 1893, a deep depression. The depression lasted until 1897 and marked a major political realignment in the election of 1896. After that came the Progressive Era.The Lost Generation迷惘的一代:The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group was given its name by the American writer Ger trude Stein, who used “a lost generation” to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I experiences and disillusioned with American society. Hemingway later used the phrase as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises. It consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams and Archibald MacLeish.The Lost Generation(迷惘的一代）：The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers:men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos. Tragedy:In general, a literary work in which the protagonist meets an unhappy or disastrous end. Unlike comedy, tragedy depicts the actions of a central character whois usually dignified or heroic. Through a series of events, this tragic hero is brought to a final downfall. The causes of the tragic hero’s downfall vary. In traditional dramas, the cause can be f ate, a flaw in character or an error in judgment. In modern dramas, where the tragic hero is often an ordinary individual, the causes range from moral or psychological weakness to the evils of society.Catch-22第22条军规:Catch-22 is a general critique of bureaucratic operation and reasoning. Resulting from its specific use in the book, the phrase "Catch-22" is common idiomatic usage meaning "a no-win situation" or "a double bind" of any type. The term was originally from Joseph Heller’s anti novel Catch-22.Beat Generation垮掉的一代:、Group of American writers of the 1950s whose writing expressed profound dissatisfaction with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. The term sometimes is used to refer to those who embraced the ideas of these writers. The Beat Generation's best-known figures were writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.The Beat Generation(垮掉的一代):The members of The Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines. Who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity.2> The Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.3> the major beat writings are Allen Ginsberg’s howl.Howl became the manifesto of The Beat Generation.Psychological Realism心理现实主义:It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. It places more than the usual amount of emphasis on interior characterization and on the motives, and internal action which springs from and develops external action. In Psychological Realism, character and characterization are more than usually important. Henry James is considered a great master of psychological realism.Free Verse自由诗体:Free verse 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. While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse form do, free verse dose so in a looser way. Walt Whitman’s poetry is an example of free verse.Confessional Poetry自白诗:It is a type of modern poetry in which poets speak with openness and frankness about their own lives, such as in poems about illness, sexuality and despondence. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg and Theodore Roethke are the most important American poets.Imagism意象派:The 1920s saw a vigorous literary activity in America. In poetry there appeared a strong reaction against Victorian poetry. Imagists placed primary reliance on the use of precise, sharp images as a means of poetic expression and stressed precision in the choice of words, freedom in the choice of subject matter and form, and the use of colloquial language. Most of the imagist poets wrote in free verse, using such devices as assonance and alliteration rather than formal metrical schemes to give structure to their poetry.The movement which had these as its aims is known in literary history as Imagism. Its prime mover was Ezra Pound.Imagism(意象主义)：Imagism 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.2>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.3>imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles:A.direct treatment of subject matter;B.economy of expression;C. as regards rhythm ,to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome. 4> pou nd’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known inagist poem. Black Humor:the use of morbid and the absurd for darkly comic purposes in modern fiction and drama. The term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness as it does to the grotesque and morbid situations, which often deal with suffering, anxiety, and death. Black humor is a substantial element in the Anti-novel and the Theatre of Absurd. Joseph Heller's Catch-22 is an almost archetypal example.Irony:A contrast or an incongruity between what is stated and what is really meant, or between what is expected to happen and what actually happens in drama and literature. There are types of irony: verbal irony, dramatic irony and irony of situation. Irony of situation typically takes the form of a discrepancy between appearance and reality, or between what a character expects and what actually happens. Both verbal and irony of situation share the suggestion of a concealed truth conflicting with surface appearances.A Jja zz age(爵士时代):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 Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term” Jazz Age”.Nathaniel Hawthorneworks(1)Two collections of short stories: Twice-toldTales, Mosses from and Old Manse(2)The Scarlet Letter(3)The House of the Seven Gables(4)The Marble Faun1.point of view(1)Evil is at the core of human life, “thatblackness in Hawthorne”(2)Whenever there is sin, there is punishment.Sin or evil can be passed from generation togeneration (causality).(3)He is of the opinion that evil educates.(4)He has disgust in science.2.aesthetic ideas(1)He took a great interest in history andantiquity. To him these furnish the soil onwhich his mind grows to fruition.(2)He was convinced that romance was thepredestined form of American narrative. Totell the truth and satirize and yet not tooffend: That was what Hawthorne had inmind to achieve.3.style – typical romantic writer(1)the use of symbols(2)revelation of characters’ psychology(3)the use of supernatural mixed with theactual(4)his stories are parable (parable inform) – toteach a lesson(5)use of ambiguity to keep the reader in theworld of uncertainty –multiple point ofviewEdgar Allen PoeWorks1.short stories(1)ratiocinative storiesa.Ms Found in a Bottleb.The Murders in the Rue Morguec.The Purloined Letter(2)Revenge, death and rebirtha.The Fall of the House of Usherb.Ligeiac.The Masque of the Red Death(3)Literary theorya.The Philosophy of Compositionb.The Poetic Principlec.Review of Hawthorne’s Twice-told TalesI.Themes1.death –predominant theme in Poe’s writing“Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everythingin Poe’s writings is dead.”2.disintegration (separation) of life3.horror4.negative thoughts of scienceII.Aesthetic ideas1.The short stories should be of brevity, totality,single effect, compression and finality.2.The poems should be short, and the aim should bebeauty, the tone melancholy. Poems should not beof moralizing. He calls for pure poetry and stressesrhythm.III.Style – traditional, but not easy to read Reputation: “the jingle man” (Emerson)I. F. Scott Fitzgerald1.life – participant in 1920s2.works(1)This Side of Paradise(2)Flappers and Philosophers(3)The Beautiful and the Damned(4)The Great Gatsby(5)Tender is the Night(6)All the Sad Young Man(7)(8)The Last Tycoon3.point of view(1)He expressed what the young peoplebelieved in the 1920s, the so-called“American Dream” is false in nature.(2)He had always been critical of the rich andtried to show the integrating effects ofmoney on the emotional make-up of hischaracter. He found that wealth alteredpeople’s characters, making them mean anddistrusted. He thinks money brought onlytragedy and remorse.(3)His novels follow a pattern: dream – lack ofattraction – failure and despair.4.His ideas of “American Dream”It is false to most young people. Only those whowere dishonest could become rich.5.StyleFitzgerald was one of the great stylists in Americanliterature. His prose is smooth, sensitive, andcompletely original in its diction and metaphors. Itssimplicity and gracefulness, its skill inmanipulating the relation between the general andthe specific reveal his consummate artistry.6.The Great GatsbyNarrative point of view – NickHe is related to everyone in the novel and is calmand detected observer who is never quick to makejudgements.Selected omniscient point of viewII.Ernest Hemingway1.life2.point of view (influenced by experience in war)(1)He felt that WWI had broken America’sculture and traditions, and separated from itsroots. He wrote about men and women whowere isolated from tradition, frightened,sometimes ridiculous, trying to find theirown way.(2)He condemned war as purposeless slaughter,but the attitude changed when he took partin Spanish Civil War when he found thatfascism was a cause worth fighting for.(3)He wrote about courage and cowardice inbattlefield. He defined courage as “aninstinctive movement towards or away fromthe centre of violence with self-preservationand self-respect, the mixed motive”. He alsotalked about the courage with which to facetragedies of life that can never be remedied.(4)Hemingway is essentially a negative writer.It is very difficult for him to say “yes”. Heholds a black, naturalistic view of the worldand sees it as “all a nothing” and “all nada”.3.works(1)In Our Time(2)Men Without Women(3)Winner Take Nothing(4)The Torrents of Spring(5)The Sun Also Rises(6) A Farewell to Arms(7)Death in the Afternoon(8)To Have and Have Not(9)Green Hills of Africa(10)The Fifth Column(11)For Whom the Bell Tolls(12)Across the River and into the Trees(13)The Old Man and the Sea4.themes –“grace under pressure”(1)war and influence of war on people, withscenes connected with hunting, bull fightingwhich demand stamina and courage, andwith the question “how to live with pain”,“how human being live gracefully underpressure”.(2)“code hero”The Hemingway hero is an average man ofdecidedly masculine tastes, sensitive andintelligent, a man of action, and one of fewwords. That is an individualist keepingemotions under control, stoic andself-disciplined in a dreadful place. Thesepeople are usually spiritual strong, people ofcertain skills, and most of them encounterdeath many times.5.style(1)simple and natural(2)direct, clear and fresh(3)lean and economical(4)simple, conversational, common found,fundamental words(5)simple sentences(6)Iceberg principle: understatement, impliedthings(7)SymbolismI.Mark Twain – Mississippi1.life2.works(1)The Gilded Age(2)“the two advantages”(3)Life on the Mississippi(4) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’sCourt(5)The Man That Corrupted Hardleybug3.style(1)colloquial language, vernacular language,dialects(2)local colour(3)syntactic feature: sentences are simple, brief,sometimes ungrammatical(4)humour(5)tall tales (highly exaggerated)(6)social criticism (satire on the different uglythings in society)I.Emily Dickenson1.life2.works(1)My Life Closed Twice before Its Close(2)Because I Can’t Stop for Death(3)I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I died(4)Mine – by the Right of the White Election(5)Wild Nights – Wild Nights3.themes: based on her ownexperiences/joys/sorrows(1)religion –doubt and belief about religioussubjects(2)death and immortality(3)love –suffering and frustration caused bylove(4)physical aspect of desire(5)nature – kind and cruel(6)free will and human responsibility4.style(1)poems without titles(2)severe economy of expression(3)directness, brevity(4)musical device to create cadence (rhythm)(5)capital letters – emphasis(6)short poems, mainly two stanzasrhetoric techniques: personification –make some of abstract ideas vivid。
美国文学期末考试名词解释
1.American NaturalismAmerican naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. In the decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this chance world he was both helpless and hopeless.European writers like Emile Zola had developed this acute social consciousness. They saw man’s life as governed by the two forces of heredity and environment, forces absolutely beyond man’s control.American naturalism had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Darwinism. American literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme 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 romanticism predecessors, the naturalism emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that the destiny of humanity was misery inlife and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.2.Imagist poetry/ Imagism1)Imagism came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as areaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation.2)The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the mosteffective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominate image.3)Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles:A.direct treatment of subject matter;B.economy of expression;C.as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musicalphrase, not in the sequence of metronome.4)Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is a well-known imagist poem.3. The Lost Generation1) The lost generation is a term first used by stein to describe the post-warI generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2) Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finestAmerican literature to date.3) The three best-known representatives of lost generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.4. Yoknapatawpha sagaMost of Faulkner’s works are set in the American South, with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness. They are about people from a small region in Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County, which is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkner’s childhood memory about the town of Oxford in his native Lafayette County. With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom. The Yoknapatawpha stories deal, generally, with the historical period from the Civil War up to the 1920s when the First World War broke out, and people of a stratified society, the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the blacks. As a result, Yoknapatawpha County has become an allegory or a parable of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society. The Yoknapatawpha saga is Faulkner’s real achievement.5. Sister CarrieAuthor: Theodore Dreiser. His main works are "Sister Carrie", "American Tragedy"; "The Titan"; "Nigger Jeff”.Plots: Sister Carrie (1900) is a novel by Thedore Dreiser about a young county girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream by first becoming a mistress to men that she perceives as superior and later as a famous actress. It tells the story of two characters: Carrie Meeber, an ordinary girl who rises from a low-paid wage earner to a high-paid actress, and Georango Hustwood, a member of the upper middle class who falls from his comfortable lifestyle to a life on the streets. Neither Carrie nor Husthood earn their fates through virtue or vice, but rather through random circumstance. Their successes and failures have no moral value; this stance marks Sister Carrie as a departure from the conventional literature of the period.6. The Great GatsbyAuthor: F. Scott FitzgeraldFirst publishes in 1925, it is set on Long Island’s North Shore and in New York City from spring to autumn of 1922. The novel takes place following the World War·American society enjoyed prosperity during the “roaring” 1920s as the economy soared. At the same time, Prohibition, the ban on the sale and manufacture of alcohol as mandated by the Eighteenth Amendment, made millionaires out of bootleggers. After its republishing in 1945 and 1933, it quickly found a wide readership and is today widely regarded as a paragon of The Great Gatsby has become a standard test in high school and university course on American literaturein countries around the world and is ranked second in the Modern Library’s lists of the 100 Best novels of the 20th century.7. A Farewell to ArmsA Farewell to Arms is a novel by Emest Hemingway set during the Italian campaign of WWI. The book, publish in 1929, is a Lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The title is taken from a poem by 16th-century English dramatist George Peele.A Farewell to Arms is about a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the backdrop of the First World War, cynical soldiers, fighting and the displacement of population. The publication of A Farewell to Arms cemented Hemingway’s stature as a modern American writer, became his first best-seller, and is described by biographer Michael Reynolds as “the premier American war novel from that decade WWI”.2. Mending WallMending Wall is a metaphorical poem written by Robert Frost in blank verse, published in 1914. This poem is set in the countryside and is about one man questioning why he and his neighbor must rebuild the stone wall dividing their farms each spring. The stone wall at Frost’s farm in Derry, which he described in Mending Wall.While living in England with his family, Frost was exceptionally homesick for the farm in New Hampshire where he had lived with hiswife from 1900 to 1909. Despite the eventual failure of the farm, Frost associated his time in New Hampshire with a peaceful, rural sensibility that he instilled in the majority of his subsequent poems. “Mending Wall” is autobiographical on an even more specific level: a French-Canadian named Napoleon Guay had been Frost’s neighbor in New Hampshire, and the two had often walked along their property line and repaired the wall that separated their land.3. The Road Not TakenRobert Frost is one of the finest of rural New England’s 20th century pastoral poets. His poems are great combination of wisdom, harmony and serenity. They are simple at first sight, but demand readers for deep reading to grasp further meaning beyond surface.This poem consists of four stanzas of five lines. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB. the rhymes are strict and masculine, with notable exception of the last line. There are four stressed syllables each line, varying on iambic tetrameter base.The Road Not Taken tells about life choice. Man’s life is metaphorically related to a journey filled with twists and turns. One has to consider a lot before making a wise choice. Though the diverged roads seem identical, they actually lead to different directions, which symbolize different fates.A less than rigorous look at the poem may lead one to believe that Frost’smoral is embodied in those lines. The poem is taken as a call to independence, preaching originality and Emersonian self-reliance. The poem deconstructs its conclusion stanza by stanza.1、A Rose For Emily(1)The features of the novel with examples:Firstly, a rose is symbolizing love and a pledge of faithfulness. A rose for somebody can also mean a kind of memorial, an offering, in memory of somebody. Emily is denied by love and the title has an ironic meaning. Secondly, the narration of "A Rose for Emily" does not follow a normal chronological order. Instead, it shifts in time frequently and gives out bits of information about the main character, Miss Emily, in such a way that the reader has to piece them together by himself. The following implicit chronology has been worked out on the basis of the information from the text.Thirdly,in "A Rose for Emily" author chooses "we", the people of the town, as the collective narrator. The first sentence of the story says, "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to the funeral..." And in the following parts "we" frequently appear as the narrator. Fourthly, in this story, Faulkner makes best use of the Gothic devices in narration, and, the deformed personality and abnormality Emily demonstrates in her relationship with her sweetheart is dramatized in such a way that we feel shocked and thrilled as we read along. The wholeroom was just like a tomb, gloomy and macabre the story was also set under a depressive atmosphere.(2) Comments on EmilyUnder the suppression of her father, Emily became unsocial and isolated. Puritan value had great influence on Emily. As a kind of revolt, Emily fell in love with someone unacceptable at all cost. At last, she chose to destroy what she loved.2、Discus with details on the theme about the American Dream in the Great GatsbyThe Great Gatsby was written in the year 1925, when it was the high ly prosperous time of America after the World War I. In the book, the auth or F. Scott Fitzgerald creates the main character Jay Gatsby, a young man around thirty years old who rose from a poor childhood to become incredi bly wealthy. Through the whole life of Gatsby we can see that he is the re presentative of the people who pursue the American dream in the 1920s w ith easy money and relaxed social values. After attaining the material wea lth, there are no clearly outlined steps to take.Gatsby’s dream falling down represents the American dream falling down. Then why the American dream should fail in the end. I think that t he following two reasons can explain it.Firstly, Gatsby builds up an illusionary dream. He instills Daisy with a kind of idealized perfection that she neither deserves nor possesses. Though later he comes to know that Daisy is not the girl she once was and s he doesn’t love him. But he cannot stop dreaming and continues to pursue the old days. Gatsby’s dream is ruined by the unworthiness of its object, j ust as the American dream in the 1920s is ruined by the unworthiness of it s object—money and pleasure. Gatsby’s dream of a perfect Daisy collaps es in the book which represents the collapse of the whole American drea m.Secondly, from the beginning he uses a wrong way to achieve his dr eam and this would finally lead to his dream coming into failure. He gets rich through illegal way and hopes to attract Daisy by his money. The Am erican dream of Gatsby corrupts as the unrestrained desire for money and pleasure surpasses more noble goals. This certainly cannot win the love o f Daisy. More importantly, the sharp contrast between the ideal and the re ality will inevitably result in the breakup of the dream. The American dre am destroys not only for the profound social and historical reasons but als o being deeply concerned with the self-destructive characters of Gatsby. When Gatsby’s simple and naïve characters are confronted with the cold s ociety and moral decay of America which is represented by Daisy and To m, there will be no place for Gatsby to escape but he has to die in the end. The idea of Amercan dream still hold true in today’s time. It may be wealt h, fame, love or power. But one thing never changes about American drea m. That is everyone desires something in life, and everyone strives to getit. Gatsby is a prime example of pursuing Amercan dream.3、Comment on the major characters and the theme in A Farewell to ArmsTheme: As the title suggests, it’s in many ways an antiwar novel, but it would not be fair to connect this novel with a literature of pacifism or social protest. In the novel’s system, violence is not necessarily wrong—Henry feel no remorse for shooting the engineering sergeant, and the reader believes Henry when he tells Catherine that he will kill the police if they come to attest him.Nevertheless, A Farewell to Arms opposes the thoughtless violence, massive destruction. And sheer senselessness of war. It also criticizes the psychological damage that war inflicts on individuals and populations. The aim of the novel is not to protest war or encourage peace; it is simply to describe the hostility and violence of a universe in which such a conflict is possible.And there is another theme: the relationship between love and pain. At the beginning, Catherine wanted to distance herself from pain of loss, while Henry wanted to get as far away from talk of the war as possible. In each other, they found temporary comfort. But the couple’s feelings for each other quickly pass from an amusement that distracts them to the veryfuel that sustains them.Major Characters:Henry, his attitude of war is from full-hearted to disgustful. The attitude of life is from taking the life as a game to pursuing love. And the attitude of setback and misfortune from hard fight to aimless. Catherine, she thinks the love should be life standards and life should be bright and wisdom.4、Discuss with the details on the theme of the Sister CarrieTheodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie is the early representative in American naturalism. It tells the story of two characters: Carrie Meeber, an ordinary girl who rises from a low-paid wage earner to a high-paid actress, and Geogre Hurstwood, a member of the upper middle class who falls from his comfortable lifestyle to a life on the streets. Neither Carrie nor Hurstwood earn their fates through virtue or vice, but rather through random circumstance. Their successes and failures have no moral value; this stance marks Sister Carrie as a departure from the conventional literature of the period.(以上可以简写)And the theme of this novel can be described as the following words:①American Dreams: each of Dreiser’s characters in Sister Carrie search for their own “American Dreams”. Carrie is filled with the expectations of acquiring the finer things in life. And Drouet pursues the otherappointments that represent his dream, such as a beautiful woman to adorn his arm and his own home.②Change and Transformation:Carrie and Hurstwood undergo dramatic changes from the beginning of the novel to the end. Carrie’s transition takes her from country to bumpkin to glamorous actress. And Hurstwood’s transition moves him from prominent and trusted businessman, husband, and father to homeless street beggar.③Choices and Consequences:Hurstwood makes one choice that dramatically affects the rest of his life. While all choices result in consequences, those consequences can be positive or negative. Hurstwood’s decision to take the money from his employer’s safe starts his way to the eventual suicide.④Class Conflict: Industrial growth brought the United States a period of prosperity during the late 1800s and early 1900s. With factories flourishing, job opportunities were abundant. People made good money in factory management positions and other white-collar jobs. Factory workers, however, not only earned low incomes, but they also worked long hours. Consequently, a wide division existed between the wealthy and the poor.⑤Identity: Carrie’s transformation from the beginning of the novel to the end occurs as a result of her responses to her experiences. she never really has an identity but adjusts her “act” to fit the situation.⑥Sex: In the early 1900s, the morals and virtues of the Victorian era still guided people's actions. People with proper upbringing did not speak of sex. The public was shocked that Dreiser's characters so openly participated in explicit relationships and that Dreiser seemed to take it granted.。
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1.Imagism（意象派）: 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 movement were Ezra P ound and Amy Lowell.2.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) humor3.Psychological Realism: James’s realism is characterized by his psychological a pproach to his subject matter. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner l ife of human beings than with overt human actions. His best and most mature wor ks will render the drama of individual consciousness and convey the moment-to-mo ment sense of human experience as bewilderment and discovery. And we observe people and events filtering through the individual consciousness and participate in h is experience. This emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousness prov es to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and has great influence on the comin g generations. James is generally regarded as the forerunner of the 20th century " stream-of-consciousness" novels and the founder of psychological realism.4.International theme:Henry James’s fame generally rests on his novels and stories with the international theme. These novels are always set against a large international background, usually between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cultures with two different groups of people representing two different value systems.The treatment of the international theme is characterized by the richness of syntax and characterization and the originality in point of view, symbolism, metaphoric texture, and organizing rhyme. James is now more mature as an artist, more at home in the craft of fiction.5. Modernism：It was a complex and diverse （复杂多样的）international movement in all the creative arts （创造性艺术），originating about the end of the 19th century. It provided （出现）the greatest creative renaissance of the 20th century. It was made up of many facets （方面），such as symbolism，surrealism （超现实主义），cubism （立体主义），expressionism，futurism （未来主义），ect6. 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.7.Surrealism(超现实主义):An anti-rational movement of imaginative liberation in European in art and literature in the 1920s and 1930s, which launched by Andre Breton after his break from the Dada group in 1922. Surrealism seeks to break down the boundaries between rationality and irrationality, exploring the resources and revolutionary energies of dreams, hallucinations and sexual desire. Influenced both by the symbolists and by Sigmund Freud’s theories of the unconscious, the surrealists experimented with automatic writing and with the free association of random images brought in surprising juxtaposition.8. Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism 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.9. Hemingway Code Hero(海明威式英雄): Hemingway Code Hero ,also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong more sentitive, enjoys the pleasures of life( sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.2> barnes in the sun also Rises, henry in a Farewell to arms and santiago in the old man and the sea are typical of Hemingway Code Hero10.Iceberg Theory :Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory”suggests that the writer include in the text only a small portion of what he knows, leaving about ninety percent of the content a mystery that grows beneath the surface of the writing. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement ofan iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action11.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.12. Jazz age(爵士时代):The 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 Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited wi th coining the term” Jazz Age”.（了解）13.Stream of consciousness（意识流）：It 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. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly。