美国文学名词解释

Transcendentalism: It is a philosophical view, a notion, a concept, an idea, a way of looking at things, a set of attitudes about man, God, and the universe, a way of how to get to the basic truth of the universe. Transcendentalism was neither logical nor systematized. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom.

They believe in the transcendence of "over soul", an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come and of which all things are a part. Representatives are Emerson，believed that man was a part of absolute good, Thoreau，beheld divinity in the “unspotted innocence” of nature.

American Romanticism:①Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense. They stressed the close relationship between man and nature, emphasized individualism and affirmed the inner life of the self. ②American writers shared some common features with the English Romanticists, while American romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct features of its own.③The American Puritanism as

a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values. ④American

romantics tended more to moralize rather than to entertain.⑤Romantic values were prominent in American politics, art, and philosophy until the Civil War.

American Puritanism: The “Puritan”was “a would-be purifier”. Puritans wanted to make pure their religious beliefs and practices, and believed that God decides everything and they are God’s chosen people. Their purposes are for religious freedom and political freedom. Hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety were the Puritan spirit that dominated much of the earliest American writing (including the sermons, books, and letters of such noted Puritan clergyman as John Cotton and Cotton Mather). The major intellectual spokesmen of Puritanism are John Cotton, Roger Williams.

Naturalism: A new and harsher realism,a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment; the religious “truths” were illusory, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. Representatives are：Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London , Theodore Dreiser

Realism: It appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things was immediately observable. The dialects, customs, sights. Important figures of realism: William Howells; Hamlin Garland; Mark Twain; Henry James

Free verse：A kind of poetry that doesn’t’t conform to any regular meter and rhyme.The difference between free verse and blank verse is that blank verse has no rhyme, but it should be iambic pentameter.

Lost Generation：①It refers to the post-World War I generation, but specifically a group of expatriates who left America and formed a community of writers and artists in Paris, involved with other European novelists and poets in their experimentation on new modes of thought and expression. ②The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation”, of which Hemingway used “the Lost Generat ion” as an epigram to The Sun Also Rises. ③The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world because of its spiritual alienation from a U. S. that seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic and emotional barren. ④The term embraces Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Williams, and many other writers who made Paris the center of their literary activities in the 1920s

Deism: is a religious philosophy and movement that derives the existence and nature of God from reason and personal experience.

Emersonian Transcendentalist:①It is actually a philosophical school which absorbed some ideological concerns of American Puritanism and European Roma nticism, with its