英美文学名词解释

I. terms:
Free Verse 自由体诗
Free verse is rhymed or unrhymed poetry free from conventional rules of meter. The aesthetic and musical effect of free verse is achieved through rhythms and cadence of natural speech. Poets famous for their works composed in free verse include Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot. Transcendentalism 超验主义
The religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in New England in the middle 1800’s, which emphasized the importance of individual inspiration and had an important influence on American thought and literature. It gave the expression to several strains of thought: the weakening of Calvinistic views about the corruption of human nature; the rise of Romantic attitudes toward the pervasiveness of the divine and the inherent power of the individual imagination; and the frustration with what was seen as the polite and unemotional rationalism of Unitarian thought Stream-of-Consciousness Novel 意识流小说The type of psychological novel taking the uninterrupted, uneven, and endless flow of the stream of consciousness of one or more of
its characters as its subject matter. The stream of consciousness novels use various techniques to represent this consciousness adequately. In general, most psychological novels report the flow of consciousness and ordered intelligence, as in Henry James, or the flow of memory activated by association.
Local Colorism 乡土文学, 地方色彩小说Local colorism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. Expressionism表现主义
The term refers to a movement in Germany early in the 20th century, in which a number of painters sought to avoid the representation of external reality and, instead, to project a highly personal or subjective vision of the world. Theatrically, expressionism was a reaction against realism in that it emphasized the subjective expression of the inner experiences of the artist.
The Lost Generation迷惘的一代
A term used to describe a group of American writers of the
postwar years. When the First World War broke out, many young men volunteered to take part in 'the war to end wars' only to find that modern warfare was not glorious or heroic as they thought it to be. Disillusioned and disgusted by the frivolous, greedy and heedless way of life in America, they began to write and they wrote from their own experiences in the war. Among these young writers were the most prominent figures in American literature, especially in modern American literature. They were basically 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. These writers were later named by an American writer, Gertrude Stein, also an expatriate, “the Lost Generation”. Hemingway’s “iceberg principle”
Hemingway once said “I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows”. He believes that a good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or action; the one-eighth that is present will suggest all other meaningful dimensions of the story. According to him, good literary writing should be able to make readers feel the emotion of the characters directly and the best
way to produce the effect is to set down exactly every particular kind of feeling without any authorial comments, with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs.
II. Text comprehension。