英美文学史名词解释

American Literature

1.American puritanism

In the early part of the 17th century, the settlement of the North American continent by the English began. Quite a few of the first settlers were Puritans. They carried with them to American a code of values, a philodophy of life and a point of view, whivh is popularly known as American Puritarism.

American Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and literature.

1.puritans accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin, total depravity and

limited atonement from God’s grace.

2.they went to prove that they are God’s chosen people enjoying his blessing on this

earth as in heaven.

3.they are both doctrinaire and oppotunist.

Influence on American literature:

1. American literature is based on a myth-the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. Puritans dreamed of building a new Garden of Eden in America.

Fired with such a sence of mission, the puritans were optimistic, which has a great influence on American literature.

2. The American Puritan’s metaphorical mode of perception helps swvelop a literary symbolism which is distinctly American.

3. With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple and direct, the rhetoric is plain and honest, whith have great influence on American writing.

2.American Romanticism

Time: from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. Background:

1.erican political, economic and cultural independence developed fast.

2.reign influences stimulated the growth of romanticism in American.

Features:

1.American national experience of pioneering into the west provided rich material

for American writers.

2.puritanism had a noticeable influence on American Romanticism. American

Romantic authors tended more to moralize than their English and European cournterparts.

3.American’s ideals of indiividualism and political equality and their dream that

American was to be a new Garden of Eden did probably produce a feeling of newness, a feeling stronge enough to inspire the romantic imagination.

4.American Romanticism was both imitative and independent.

Main contents:

The exotic landscape, the frontier life, the westward expansion, the myth of a New Garden of Eden in America(the native materials),New England Poems. Representatives: New England Poets-Longfellow and so on.

Writers: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper

3.New England Transcendentalism

Background:

1.Ralph Waldo Emerson published Nature in 1836 which represented a new way of

intellectual thinking in American: the universe is composed of Nature and the soul.

Spirit is present everywhere.

2.in 1836, some New Englanders organized the Transcendental Club.

Major features:

1.the Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the oversoul, as the most

important things in the universe.

2.the Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual.

3.the Transcendectalists regard nature as symbolic of the spirit or God. Representatives: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Dickinson.

The phrase of New England Transcendentalism was the product of a combination of foreign influences and the American Puritan tradition(it begun with the introduction of idealistic philosophy from Germany and France; it was actually Romanticism on the Puritan Soul). It never had a systematic philosophy, it borrowed from many sourses, but lacked of logical connection, finally, it turned to mysticism.

4.The Age of Realism

Background:

1.after American Civil War, increasing industrialization and mechanization of the

country produced extremes of wealth and poverty.

2.the fact that the frontier was closing ruined people’s hope th escape troubles over

the next hill and have a better life ahead.

3.by the 1870s, New England Renaisance had waned. The age of Romanticism and

Transcendentalism was by and large over. Meanwhile, younger writers oppeared on the scene.

Time:

In the batter half of the 19th century, realism came as a literary movement against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism.

Major features:

1.realism is the theory of writing in which familiar aspects of contemporany life

and everyday scences are represented in a straightforward or mother-of-fact manner.

2.open ending(means real life is complex and cannot be fully understood).

3.focus on the lives of the common people.

4.emphasize objectivity.

Represenrarives: William Dean Howells, Herry James, Mark Twain.

5.Local colorism

Local colorism became dominant in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It originated from the frontier humorists with their “tall tales”. It presents a locale which is distinguished from the outside world；It describes the exotic and the picturesque；It describes things that are not common in other regions；It shows things as they are；It glorifies the past；It stresses the influence of setting on character.

Representative: Mark Twain—“The adventures of Huckleberry Finn”; “The adventures of Tom Sawyer”.