美国文学史及选读名词解释
美国文学史及选读中古英语时期的名词解释
美国文学史及选读中古英语时期的名词解释中古英语时期的名词解释1.Old English period (the Anglo-Saxon period): The Old English Period, extended from the invasion of Celtic England by Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes) in the first half of the fifth century to the conquest of England in 1066 by the Norman French under the leadership of the seventh century did the Anglo-Saxons, whose earlier literature had been oral, begin to develop a written literature.2. Alliteration: Alliteration is the repetition of a speech sound in a sequence of nearby words. The term is usually applied only to consonants, and only when the recurrent sound begins a word or a stressed syllable within a word.3. Prose: Prose is an inclusive term for all discourse, spoken or written, which is not patterned into the lines either of metric verse or free verse.4. Couplet: A couplet is a pair of rhymed lines that are equal in length.5. Meter: Meter is the recurrence, in regular units, of a prominent feature in the sequence of speech-sounds of a language.6. Foot: A foot is the combination of a strong stress and the associated weak stress or stresses which make up the recurrent metric unit of a line. The relatively stronger-stressed syllable is called, for short, “stressed”; the relatively weaker-stressed syllables are called “light,” or most commonly, “unstressed”. The four standard feet distinguished in English are: (1) Iambic (the noun is “iamb”): an unstressed syllable followed by a s tressed syllable. (2) Anapestic (the noun is “anapest”): twounstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. (3)Trochaic (the noun is “trochee”): a stressed syllable. (4) Dactylic (the noun is “dactyl”): a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.A metric line is named according to the number of feet composing it:Monometer: one footDimeter: two feetTrimester: three feetTetrameter: four feetPentameter: five feetHexameter: six feetHeptameter: seven feetOctameter: eight feet7. Ballad (popular ballad): Ballad is also known as the folk ballad or traditional ballad. It is a song, transmitted orally, which tells a story. Ballads are thus the narrative species of folk songs, which originate, and are communicated orally, among illiterate or only partly literate people.8. Arthurian legend: It is a group of tales (in several languages) that developed in the Middle Ages concerning Arthur, semi-historical king of the Britons and his knights. The legend is a complex weaving of ancient Celtic mythology with later traditions around a core of possible historical authenticity.9. Courtly love: It is a doctrine of love, together with an elaborate code governing the relations betwe4en aristocratic lovers, which was widely represented in the lyric poems and chivalric romances of Western Europe during the Middle Ages.10. Romance: It is a literary genre popular in the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century), dealing, in verse or prose, withlegendary, supernatural, or amorous subjects and characters. The name refers to Romance languages and originally denoted any lengthy composition in one of those languages. Later the term was applied to tales specifically concerned with knights, chivalry, and courtly love. Romances were written by court musicians, clerics, scribes, and aristocrats for the entertainment and moral edification of the nobility. Popular subjects for romances included the Macedonian King Alexander the Great, King Arthur Charlemagne. Later prose and verse narratives, particularly those in the 19th-century romantic tradition, are also referred to as romances; set in distant or mythological places and times, like most romances they stress adventure and supernatural elements.。
美国文学选读及赏析名词解释
American Transcendentalism （时间，主要主张和特征，代表人物，代表作）定义Transcendentalism was a religious and philosophical movement that developed during the late 1820s and '30s[1] in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest against the general state of spirituality and, in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard University and the doctrine of the Unitarian church as taught at Harvard Divinity School.美国超验主义：它宣称存在一种理想的精神实体，超越于经验和科学之处，通过直觉得以把握。
时间：1830s-Civil War主要主张：（我觉得主张就是特征就写一起了）The Transcendental ists “placed emphasis on spirit, or the Over-soul, as the most important thing in the universe”（1）The importance of intuition.（直觉）The Transcendentalists believed that individuals can intuitively receive higher truths otherwise unavailable through common methods of knowing.(2) The importance of the individual.(3) The importance of the nature.代表人物：Ralph Waldo Emerson 爱默生代表作Nature (《论自然》)“The American Scholar”（《论美国学者》）”Our Intellectual Declaration of Independence““Divinity School Address”(《神学院毕业班演说》)Essays（《论文集》）Essays: Second Series“Representative Men" (《人类代表》)Henry David Thoreau (梭罗)Walden (1854) (《瓦尔登湖》)Nathaniel Hawthorne (霍桑)Twice –Told Tales《尽人皆知的故事》Mosses from an Old Manse《古屋青苔》The Scarlet Letter （《红字》）The House of the Seven Gables （《带有七个尖角阁的房子》）The Blithedale Romance （《福谷传奇》）The Marble Faun （《玉石雕像》）“Young Goodman Brown”(《好小伙布朗》)Henry Wadsworth Longfellow亨利.华兹沃斯.朗费罗Voices of the Night (1839) 《夜籁集》-- catch the attentionBallads and Other Poems (1841) 《歌谣及其它》Evangeline (1847) 《伊凡吉林》Hiawatha or The Song of Hiawatha (1855)《海华莎之歌》Imagism （时间，对Image 的定义，主要主张和特征，代表人物，代表作）定义Imagism was poetic movement of England and the united states, flourishing from 1909-1917. Its credo, expressed in some imagist poets, includes the use of precise language, the creation of new rhythms, absolute freedom in choice of subject matter, and the evocation of concrete images.时间：between the years 1909 and 1917特征：(1) “Direct treatment of the 'thing' whet h er subjective or objective;”(2) “To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;”(3) “As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome(节拍器).”主张：It came into being as a reaction to the traditional English poetry characterized by cloudy verbiage, and aimed instead at a new clarity and exactness in the short lyric poem.代表人物：Ezra Pound“The Cantos”。
美国文学史复习资料(名词解释)
1. American Puritanism: a domination factor in American life. AmericanPuritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thoughts and literature.2. Transcendentalism: time 1836. Features: 1.the transcendentalistsplaced emphasis on spirit, or over soul, as the most important thing in the universe 2. The transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. 3. The transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the spirit of God. The representatives are Emerson and Thoreau.3. Free Verse: like traditional verse, it is printed in short lines instead ofthe continuity of prose, but it has no meter and either lack rhyme or uses it occasionally. A representative is Whitman’s Leave of Grass. 4. Realism: time: 2nd and half of 19th century. Features: verisimilitude ofdetails derived from observation. Representatives are Howells, James, Mark Twain5. Local Colorism: It is a branch of Realism; it refers to detailedrepresentation, in fiction of the setting, dialect, customs, dress and ways of thinking which are distinctive of a particular region. The representative of Local Colorism is Mark Twain.6. American Naturalism: time: 1890s. Features: 1. naturalists wroteabout the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold world, and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of environment and heredity.2. They reported truthfully and objectively with passion for scientific accuracy and an overwhelming accumulation of factual detail.3. The representatives are Crane, Dreiser.7. Imagism: six principles: momentary, one dominant image, hardpersonal word, direct treatment, concise, free verse. The representatives are Pound.8. Lost generations: it refers to a group of American writers of thedecade following WWI, disillusioned by their War experience or by materialization of American culture, holds a pessimistic new of life.The representatives are Fitzgerald and Hemingway.9. Flashback: interpolating narratives or scenes which represent eventsthat happened before the story began. For example: Miller used flashback in Death of Salesman.10. Black Humor: the tragic absurdity of the human condition is oftenseen in their novels. As a cosmic joke. The response they intend to provoke in the reader to the blackness of modern life is a laughter that is, laughing in face of a tragic situation. The representative work of black humor is Heller’s Catch-22.11. Harlem Renaissance: a period of remarkable creativity in literatureand other arts by African Americans, from the end of WWI in 1917 through the 1920s. The representative is Hughes.12. Irving: 1.He is was the first American writer of imagination literature to gain international fame. 2 The short story as a genre in American literature probably began with Irving’s The Sketch Book.3.The Sketch Book also marked the beginning of American romanticism.13. Hawthorne: feature: 1, symbol2, deep analysis of psychology3, gloomy and depressive tone4. evil sides of the world5, super natural element14. The Scarlet Letter (Hawthorne): 1, Character: Hester Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdable, Roger Chillingworth. 2. Theme: criticizing Puritan suppression/ sin and atonement.15. Emily Dickinson: feature: 1.short and concise2. approximate rhyme and meter3. ungrammatical elements 4. original images5. many poems about death15. Moby Dick (Melville): character: Ishmael (survivor), Ahab (captain) 12.Allan Poe: 1. the poetic principle ①the poem, he says, should be short, at one sitting ②Its chief aim is beauty ③melancholy is the most legitimate of all the poetic tone. ④the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.⑤stress rhyme, defines true poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty. 2. Work: to Helen, The Fall of the House of Usher.13. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain): 1. His usually use French, mostly Anglo-Saxon on origin, and his words are short, concrete and direct in effect.2. Most of his sentence structures are simple or compound.3. he use”took”repeatedly.4. There have ungrammatical elements in his work. One of his significant contributions to American literature lies in fact that he made colloquial speech an accepted.14. Frost: the features of his work1.he usually use traditional form 2. His language is plain3. He likes to use symbolism4. Most his poems describe nature of famers’ life.15. Fitzgerald: the Great Gatsby: 1.characters: Nick Carraway, Daisy Buchanam, Tom Buchanam, Myrtle Wilson, George Wilson, Jay Gatsby, 2. Theme: criticizing materialized society, disillusionment of American dream.16. Miller: Death of Salesman: 1.Charaters: Willy &Linda&Biff&Happy Loman, Chalery and Bernard. 2. Theme: a criticizing metalized society/ understanding between parents and children.17. Salinger: The Catch in the①. Setting: 1950s New York2. Plot: Holden Caulfied 1st day: expelled. 2nd day: Sally (shallow). Carl (hypocritical).2nd night: Sneak home—Phoebe, Mr.Antolini. 3rd day: go to the west.②.character: Holden---rebellious, innocent, sincerely③. Style: This novel use colloquial and vulgar worlds. There also has exaggeration in this work ④: theme: growing pain.18: Cath-22: Yossarian, Milo, And Snowden.19. Lolita :( Nabokov): character: Humbert Humbert, Dolores Haze (Lolita), Clare Qulity .。
美国文学史及选读18世纪的名词解释
18世纪的名词解释1. Three unities: Principles of dramatic structure proposed by critics and dramatists of the 16th and the 17th centuries, claiming the authority of Aristotle’s Poetics. The three unities are the unity of action (all the action of the work must occur within one continuous plot without extraneous subplot), the unity of time (all the action of the work must occur within 24 hours, or one whole day), and the unity of place (all the action of the work must occur in one place or city).2. Didactic literature: Literary works that are designed to expound a branch of knowledge, or else to embody, in imaginative or fictional form, a moral, religious, or philosophical doctrine or them. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Edmund Spencer’s The Queene are good example of didactic poetry.3. Satire:It is a literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. Satire uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual, or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation or even the entire human race (as in much of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels).4. Mock epic: It is a poem employing the lofty style and the conventions of epic poetry to describe a trivial or undignified series of events; thus a kind of satire that mocks its subject by treating it in an inappropriately grandiose manner, usually at some length. The outstanding examples in English literature are Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Dunciad.5. Farce: It is a type of low comedy that employs improbable or otherwise ridiculous situations and mix-ups, slapsticks and horseplay, and crude and even bawdy dialogue. It smacks the audience full-force in the face, aiming simply to entertain and evoke guffaws from the audience.6. Picaresque novel: Derived from the Spanish word picara, meaning “rogue” or “rascal”, the term generally refers to a basically realistic and often satire work of fiction chronicling the career of an engaging, lower-class rogue-hero, who takes to the road for a sidekick. A well-known example of the picaresque novel is Cervantes’Don Quixote (165). Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is another classic example7. Melodrama: Originally, any drama accompanied by music which was used to enhance the emotional impact and mood of the performance. The term derived from the Greek melos, which means “song”. In early nineteenth-century London, melodramas became increasingly popular, which came to emphasize the conflict between pure good and evil. Its heroes and heroines were inevitably completely moral and uypright, but terrorized, harassed, or otherwise troubled by thoroughly despicable villains. The chief concern of melodrama was to elicit the desired emotional response from the audience.8. Persona:The assumed identity or fictional “I” (literary a “mask”) assumed by a writer in a literary work; thus the speaker in a lyric poem, or the narrator in a fictional narrative. Although the persona often serves as the “voice” of the writer, it nonetheless should not be confused with the writer, for the persona may not accurately reflect the writer’s personal opinions, feelings, or perspectives on a subject.9. Epigram:The term is now used for a statement, whether in verse or prose, which is terse, pointed and witty. The epigram may be on any subject, amatory, elegiac,meditative,complimentary, anecdotal, or most often satiric.10. Gothic novel: An alternative term is Gothic romance. It is a story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle of monastery. Following the appearance of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic novel flourished in Britain from the 1790s to the 1820s, dominated by Ann Radcliffe, whose The Mysteries of Udolpho had may imitators.11. Graveyard school of poetry: It refers to a group of eighteen-century English poets who emphasized subjectivity, mystery, and melancholy. Death, mortality (immortality), and gloom were frequent subjects of elements of their meditative poem, which were often actually set in graveyards. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is the most famous example.12. Neoclassicism: It is a style of Western literature that flourished from themid-seventeenth until the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of Romanticism. The neoclassicists looked to the great classical writers for inspiration and guidance, considering them to have mastered the noblest literary forms, tragic epic and the epic. Neoclassical writers shared several beliefs. They believed that literature should both instruct and delight, and the proper subject of art was humanity. Neoclassicism stressed rules, reason, harmony, balance, restraint, decorum, order, serenity, realism, and form —above all, an appeal to the intellect rather than emotion. The Restoration in 1660 marked the beginning of the Neoclassical Period in England, whose writers included John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, etc.13. Fiction: In an inclusive sense, fiction is any literary narrative, whether in prose or verse, which is invented instead of being an account of events that in fact happened. In a narrow sense, however, fiction denotes only narratives that are written in prose (the novel and the short story).14. Antihero: It is a protagonist in a modern work who does not exhibit the qualities of the tradition hero. Instead of being a grand and admirable figure—brave, honest, and magnanimous, for example—an antihero is all too ordinary and may even be petty or downright dishonest. The use of nonheroic protagonist occurs as early as the picaresque novel of the sixteenth century, and the heroine of Defoe’s Moll Flanders is a thief and a prostitute.15. Foreshadowing:The use of hints or clues in a narrative to suggest what will happen later. Writers use foreshadowing to create interest and to build suspense. Sometimes foreshadowing also prepares the reader for the ending of the story.。
美国文学史及选读的名词解释（全）
1. American Puritanism it it comes comes comes from from from the the the American American American puritans, puritans, puritans, who who who were were were the the the first first first immigrants immigrants immigrants moved moved moved to to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination （预言）（预言） and salvation （拯救） were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness （虔诚,尽职）， thrift and sobriety （清醒）（清醒）（清醒） were praised. 2. Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th century in Europe who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used used in in in American American American literature literature literature it it it referred referred referred to to to the the the writers writers writers of of of the the the middle middle middle of of of the the 19th century century who who who stimulated stimulated （刺激）（刺激） the the sentimental sentimental sentimental emotions emotions emotions of of of their their their readers. readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all all kinds kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography. 3. 2. 2. Transcendentalism Transcendentalism Transcendentalism ((先验说,超越论): ): is is is a a a philosophic philosophic philosophic and and and literary literary literary movement movement that that flourished flourished flourished in in in New New New England, England, England, particular particular particular at at at Concord, Concord, Concord, as as as a a a reaction reaction reaction against against Rationalism Rationalism and and and Calvinism Calvinism Calvinism ((理性主义and 喀尔文主义). ). Mainly Mainly Mainly it it it stressed stressed intuitive intuitive understanding understanding understanding of of of God, God, God, without without without the the the help help help of of of the the the church, church, church, and and and advocated advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau. 4. Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s ，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and and background background background that that that it it it could could could not not not have have have been been been written written written in in in any any any other other other place place place or or or by by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) ) the the the distinctive distinctive distinctive natural, natural, natural, social social social and and and linguistic linguistic linguistic features. features. features. It It It is is characteristic of vernacular(本国语本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor 5. Stream of consciousness （意识流）： It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is is the the the style style style of of of writing writing writing that that that attempts attempts attempts to to to imitate imitate imitate the the the natural natural natural flow flow flow of of of a a a character’s character’s thoughts, thoughts, feelings, feelings, feelings, reflections, reflections, reflections, memories, memories, memories, and and and mental mental mental images images images as as as the the the character character experiences experiences them. them. them. It It It was was was first first first used used used in in in 1922 1922 1922 by by by the the the Irish Irish Irish novelist novelist novelist James James James Joyce. Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and and skillfully skillfully skillfully the the the unconscious unconscious unconscious activity activity activity of of of the the the mind mind mind fast fast fast changing changing changing and and and flowing flowing incessantly 。
美国文学史及选读的名词解释(全)
The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-late 18th century (1715–1789), especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand and the European Enlightenment on the other. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the17th century and the humanist period during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature, society, and religion.Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon liberty, democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance – culminating in the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a rejection of prophecy, miracle and revealed religion, often in preference for Deism. Historians have considered how the ideas of John Locke and republicanism merged to form republicanism in the United States. The most important leaders of the American Enlightenment include Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.1.2. American Puritanismit comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift and sobriety（清醒）were praised.3. Romanticism: the literature term was first applied to the writers of the 18th century inEurope who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing. When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the 19th century who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography.4. Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论): is a philosophic and literary movement thatflourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.5. Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), aslocal colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor 6. Stream of consciousness（意识流）：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is thestyle of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, 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。
美国文学史及选读
美国文学史及选读
美国文学史及选读，作为一个有数百年歷史的文学流派，有许多伟大的作家，他们的作品塑造了美国文学的发展；最具有代表性的作者是乔治·梭罗，他的作品集中反映了美国社会和人文的发展；詹姆斯·菲茨杰拉德则有其独特的写作风格，表现出美国南方独特的生活理念；现代作家斯蒂芬·金则反映了现代社会的变化，以及老百姓们的故事；另外，特洛伊·萨索洛也有许多优秀的作品，如《失落的一代》，这部作品讲述了美国父辈们如何在战争中战胜同时又被战争毁灭了的故事。
此外，美国20世纪文学也有许多精彩作品，如厄休拉·哈里斯的《百年孤独》就反映了拉美社会发展的全貌；乔纳森·艾默生的《小妇人》描述了美国南方小镇的现实生活；詹姆斯理查德森的《春风沉醉的晚上》赢得了普利策奖，描述了一系列发生在美国农村的故事；克莱尔·麦卡锡更是凭借其《麦田里的守望者》荣膺诺贝尔文学奖，这本书反映了美国童年的美好。
当然，美国文学史不仅体现在各种优秀作品上，它生动有趣的故事也吸引了很多读者，如詹妮弗·洛夫的《歿日的比萨店》等，这些作品彰显着美国文学史所流行的特点：思想作家们对美国文化、宗教、历史和社会的深刻观察，以及深入探讨人性、价值和价值观念。
可以说，美国文学史和各种优秀作品是美国历史发展和发展潮流的最初考验，也是美国文学君主制以及点明美国道路的象征。
总而言之，美国文学史及选读有助于人们更好地了解美国文学，了解美国社会历史、文化现象，增进现代人的文化觉悟。
美国文学史名词解释
1.American Puritanism:The first setters who became the founding fathers of the American nation.they were a group of serious,religious people,advocating highly religious and moral principle.they carried with them to American a code of values,a philosophy of life,and a point of a view,in time,took root in the new world.Puritanism:a r eligious reform movement in the late 16th and 17th centuries that sought to “purify”the Church of England of remnants ([ˈremnənt)遗迹of the Roman Catholic “popery” that the Puritans claimed had been retained after the religious settlement reached early in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Puritans became noted in the 17th century for a spirit of moral and religious earnestness that informed their whole way of life, and they sought through church reform to make their lifestyle the pattern for the whole nation.2.Transcendentalism:it was a literary movement that flourished during the middle 19th century.it began as a rebellion against traditionally beliefs held by the english church that the god superseded the individual.it stressed intuitive understanding of god without help of church,and advocated independence of the mind.transcendentalists departed from orthodox Calvinism in that the importance and efficacy of human striving,as opposed to the bleaker puritan picture ofcomplete and inescapable depravity堕落.3.American Romanticism:an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature,emphasis on individual’s emotion and imagination,departure背离from attitudes and forms of classicism,and rebellion 反抗from established rules and conventions.4.American naturalism：it is a literary movement taking place from the 1880s to 1940s that used detailed realism to suggest that social conditions, heredity, and environment had inescapable force in shaping human character. It was depicted as a literary movement that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalism is the outgrowth of literary realism, a prominent literary movement in mid-19th-century France and elsewhere. Naturalistic writers were influenced by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.[5.Imagism：It was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favoredprecision of imagery and clear, sharp language，As a poetic style it gave Modernism its start in the early 20th century，and is considered to be the first organized Modernist literary movement in the English language.Imagism is sometimes viewed as 'a succession of creative moments' rather than any continuous or sustained period of development6.Modernism:is loosely a synonym同义词of anything contemporary,strictly,,especially in literary criticism ,which began in the late 19th century and the theory psycho-analysis as its theoretical base,they pay more attention to psychic time than chronological 编年的one.7.Realism:it came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism.realism express the concern for commonplace and low.it offer an objective rather than an idealistic view of nature and experience.。
美国文学史名词解释_综合版
美国文学史名词解释_综合版第一篇：美国文学史名词解释_综合版美国文学选读复习资料the settlement of North American continent by English started in the early 17th century.Under siege from church and crown, it sent an offshoot in the third and fourth decades of the seventeenth century to the northern English colonies in the New World—a migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England.Puritanism, however was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincidentwith the founding of New Zealand;it was also a way of being in the world—a style of response to lived experience—that has reverberated through American life ever since.As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind.American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature.American Romanticism The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War.• Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.(subjectivity)• For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important thanreason and common sense.• They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group,against authority.• The affirmed the inner life of the self, and wanted to be free to develop andexpress his own inner thoughts.New England Poets: William Cullen Bryant;Henry Wadsworth Longfellow;Writers: James Fenimaore Cooper The Spy(1821)The Leatherstocking Tales(1823—1841)The Pilot(1824)The Red Rover(1827)Washington Irving（“The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon” “Bracebridge Hall”“Tales of a Traveller”“The History of the Life and Voyages of ChristopherColumbus ”）American TranscendentalismIn the realm of art and literature it meant the shattering of pseudo-classic rules and forms in favor of a spirit of freedom, the creation of works filled with the new passion for nature and common humanity and incarnating a fresh sense of the wonder, promise, and romance of life.Transcendentalism① The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe.② The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual.To them, the individual is the most important element of Societ y.③ The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God.Nature was not purely matter.It was alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence.Writers Emerson’s：Nature；Self-Reliance；The American Scholar；The Over-soul；H.D.Thoreau：WaldenHenry Wadsworth LongfellowWalt Whitman：Leaves of Grass Emily Dickinson：I Died for Beauty；Because I couldnot stop for DeathWilliam Faulkner(1897-19621949 Nobel priceAs I Lay Dying(1930)Light in the August(1932)Absalom, Absalom(1936)Go Down Moses(1942)Ernest HemingwayIceberg Principle(Theory)“grace under pressure”Major Works:The Sun Also Rises 1926(Jake Barnes)A Farewell to Arms 1928(a tragic story about war and love)(Frederic Henry andCatherine Barkley)For Whom the Bell Tolls 1940(Spanish civil war)(Robert Jordan)The Old Man and the Sea 1952(Santiago)Herman Melville代表作：白鲸Moby DickOther Works are: Billy Budd,Typee, Omoo, Mardi.Nathaniel HawthorneThe Scarlet LetterMosses from an Old Manse;Twice-Told Tales;The Marble Faun;The House of theSeven GablesRealismAs a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticismwith the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Romanticism andsentimentalism, and paved the way to Modernism.This literary interest in the so-called “reality” of life started a new period in theAmerican literary writing known as The Age of Realism.local colorism is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th(1860s—1870s).The feature of local colorism are:(1)presenting a localedistinguished from the outside world;(2)describing the exoticof the picturesque;(3)glorifying the past;(4)showing things as they are;(5)influence of setting oncharacters.The well known local colorism authors were Mark Twain with his bookTom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bret Harte’s with his TheLuck of the Roaring Camp.American naturalists accepted the more negativeinterpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to accout for the behaviorof those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complexcombinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economicforces.2)naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writingbecomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic.It isno more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to humanexistence.3>Dreiser with his Sister Carrie is a leading figure of his school.1917.The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the directtreatment of the thing” and the economy of wording.“poetic techniques to recordexactly the momentary impressions”Three main principles of the Imagist Movement(1912):[1] direct treatment of poetic subjects[2] elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words,to use no word that doesnot contribute to the presentation.[3] rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in thesequence of a metronome.4> pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-knownpoem.The Modern PeriodPart I The 1920s-1930s(the second renaissance of American literature)l The Roaring Twenties(economically)l The Jazz Age(socially)l“lost” and “waste land”(spiritually)There had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and naturalsciences.Darwinism(Darwin), Socialism(Karl Marx), Psychoanalysis(Sigmund Freud)The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe thepost-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense ofbetrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>full ofyouthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, hadlove affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the threebest-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway andJohn dos Passos.The Beat Generation is a group of American young writersand artists popular in the 1950s and early 1960s.the member of the beat generationwere new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy,creativity.The beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non conformity and for its non conforming style.The major writing are jack Kerouac’s on the road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.American DreamThe is the idea held by many in the United States that through hard work, courage and determination one could achieve prosperity.These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations.The term was first used by James Truslow Adams in his book The Epic of America.IMAGERY: A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the “mental pictures” that readers experience with a passage of literature.It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a poem, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor.PuritanismAmerican Puritanism was practice and belief of Puritans.Puritans were the people who wanted to purify the Church of England and then were persecuted in England.They came to America for various reasons.But because they were a group of serious and religious people, they carried a code of value and a philosophy of life.To them, religion was the most important thing.They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original s in, total depravity and limited atonement for God’s grace.They also believed in hard working, piety and sobriety.In a word, American Puritanism exerted great influences upon American thought and literature.第二篇：美国文学史名词解释It were flourishing from the beginning of 17th to the middle period of 18th.They stressed predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited atonement from God‟s grace.They went to America to prove that they were God‟s chosen people who would enjoy God‟s blessings on earth and in Heaven.Finally, they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.Both doctrinaire and an opportunist.Its Influence on literary were as follows:（影响）(1)American Literature is based on a myth------the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden.(2)The American Puritan‟s metaphorical made of perception----symbolism.The representatives were Edwards(The Freedom of the Will), Franklin(On the Art of Self-improvement), Crevecoeur(Letters from an American Farmer).代表作家及代表作：Captain John SmithTrue Relation of Virginia(1608)Anne Bradstreet“To My Dear and Loving Husband”Benjamin Franklin:The Autobiography of Benjamin FranklinRomanticism was a complex artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution.Elements of Romanticism1.Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations.2.Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.不要这么多，我就删掉了3、4、5条。
(完整版)美国文学史及选读名词解释
美国文学史及选读名词解释1。
Transcendentalism19th—century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. In their religious quest， the Transcendentalists rejected the conventions of 18th—century thought； and what began in a dissatisfaction with Unitarianism developed into a repudiation of the whole established order.2。
Langston HughesAmerican poet and writer emphasized on lower—class black life。
He established himself as a major force of the Harlem Renaissance。
In 1926， in the Nation, he provided the movement with a manifesto when he skillfully argued the need for both race pride and artistic independence in his most memorable essay， 'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” In many ways Hughes always remained loyal to the principles he had laid down for the younger black writers in 1926。
美国文学史及选读_部分名词解释 解释详细,备有汉语解释
Free V erse:is poetry that is based on irregular rhythmic cadence（抑扬顿挫，节奏）recurring ,withvariations of phrases ,image ,and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of meter . In other word ,free verse has no rhythm scheme, pattern or line length, new form, new subject, message was always moreimportant than form .However ,much poetic language and devices（手段，策略）are found in free verse .It is used in Walt Whitman’s poems.Local Colorism: is defined by Hamlin Garland加兰in his Crumbling Idols as having “such quality of texture（手感，质感）and background that is could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native”Texture refers to the elements which characterize（是---特征，以----为特征）a local culture , elements such as speech , customs , and mores peculiar to one particular place.Background covers physical身体setting and those distinctive qualities of landscape which human thoughtand behavior.Other definition: a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early 1870s in America. It may be defined as the careful attention in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality.The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion错觉，幻想of an indigenous土生土长的，固有的little word with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside.Major Local Colorists: Mark Twain; Hamlin Garland (Main Travelled Roads)Imagism:1) It is a Movement in U.S and English poetry characterized by the use of concrete明确的，实体的language and figures of speech, modern subject matter主旨, metrical韵律freedom, and avoidance of romantic or mystical themes, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise精确的visual看得见的images.2) It grew out of the symbolism movement in 1912 and was initially led by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others.3) The Imagist manifesto宣言came out in 1912 showed three Imagist poetic principles:A: Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subject or objective.B: To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.C: As regarding rhythm: to compose创作in the sequenc e有关联的一组事物, 一连串of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome节拍器.4) Pound defined the image as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time,版权所有本人亲自打出来的期末复习资料and later he extended this definition when he started that an image was “a vortex旋窝or cluster串of fused熔化; 融合ideas, endowed with energy”.5) The existed great influence in Chinese poetry on the movement of Imagism. Imagists found value in Chinese poetry was because Chinese poetry is, by virtue长处of the ideographic象形文字and pictographic nature of Chinese language, essentially imagistic poetry.The Lost Generation:is a term used to describe a group of American intellectuals知识分子, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post WW1 years to reject the values of American materialism唯物主义and to seek the bohemian(放浪者)(a person with artistic or literary interests who disregards conventional standards ofbehavior) lifestyle in Pairs. Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.Refers to the disillusioned使不再抱幻想intellectuals and aesthetes审美家of the years following WW1, who rebelled against former ideals and values but could replace them only by despair or a cynical愤世嫉俗的hedonism(快乐主义).The main representatives代表人of Lost Generation include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and so on.Modernism:is a culture movement that is generally includes the progressive不断有进展的art and architecture建筑学,design, literature, music, painting ,dance and other visual arts which emerged in the beginning of 20th century, particular in the years following WW1. It was a movement of artists and designers who rebelled against the 19th century academic and historicist tradition, and embraced信奉，拥抱the new economic,social and political aspects of the emerging modern world.Modernism in literature is not easily to summarized, but the key elements are experimentation, anti-realism, individualism and a stress on the cerebral诉诸理性的;非感情方面的rather than emotive-aspects.The avant-garde革新者movements that followed-including Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism立体派, Futurism未来主义, Expressionism, Constructivism构成主义and Abstract抽象Expressionism are generally defined as Modernist.版权所有本人亲自打出来的期末复习资料The work of Modernist writers is characterized by showing the disenchantment脱离, 分离, dislocation脱位, and alienation疏远of men in the world, and by the emphasis on experimentation and formalism形式主义and objectivism which are, in most cases, a reaction to the cataclysm大灾难known as the Modern Age.Among the American writer, the best known Modernism is Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and so on.Transcendentalism:is a philosophical哲学上的and literary movement that flourished繁荣in New England from about 1836-1860. It originated among a small group of intellectuals who were reacting against the orthodoxy正统观念of Calvinism and rationalism理性主义of the Unitarian唯一神论者Church, developing their own faith centering on the divinit y宗教的，神学的of humanity and the natural world. Transcendentalismderived some of its basic idealistic concepts from romantic German philosophy, and from such English authors as Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Its mystical aspects were partly influenced by Indian and Chinese religiousteachings. The beliefs that God is immanent天生的，内在的in each person and in nature and that individual intuition直觉is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance,and rejection of traditional authority. The Ideas of transcendentalism were mostly eloquently expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in such essay as Nature and Self-reliance and by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. Major Features:A. placing emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe --- a new way of looking at the world (omnipresent无所不在, omniscient无所不知, omnipotent全能的)B. the importance of the individual as the most important element of society. --- A new way of looking at man (The regeneration新生，革新of the society could only come about through the regeneration of the individual, through his self-perfection, self-culture, self-improvement, self-reliance)C. offering a fresh perception认识，看法of nature as symbolic of Spirit or God. (Nature was not purely matter. It was the garment衣服of the Oversoul.)Jazz Age:describe he period of 1920s and 1930s, the years between WW1 and WW2, particular in NorthAmerican; with the rise of the Great Depression, the values of the age saw much decline. The most representative literature work is The Great Gatsby highlighting强调what some describe as the decadence衰落，堕落and hedonism享乐主义, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term 版权所有本人亲自打出来的期末复习资料。
美国古代文学史名词解释、简答、论述题
美国古代文学史名词解释、简答、论述题本文旨在阐述美国古代文学发展史中的重要名词、简述相关内容及针对论述题展开适当讨论。
一、名词解释1. Puritanism（清教主义）：是17世纪时在英格兰和美洲流行的宗教改革运动。
清教徒最初移民纽英格兰是为了逃避英王的压迫。
清教徒的中包括坚信的意志对人的一切事宜具有决定性作用，反对世俗和欲望，鼓励个人的努力，强调个人的责任以及间接地强调了民主的概念。
2. Transcendentalism（超验主义）：是19世纪30年代美国文化中一股对启蒙运动的反动，反对理性主义和经验主义。
超验主义者认为人们应该依靠个人直觉和灵感开启心灵深处的真实，超越感官经验。
超验主义者强调个人的自由发展，自然的神秘和美好。
3. Regionalism（地方主义）：是19世纪晚期至20世纪初美国文学的一种流派。
运动的核心思想是反对现代工业化和全球化，提倡重视地方风景、文化和民俗，关注本土的人、事、物，并以此为原材料创作文学。
二、简答题1. Nathaniel Hawthorne的小说《红字》反映了哪些思想和文化特征？《红字》十分典型地表现了清教徒文化对美国文学的影响，其中包括对罪恶的强烈谴责和对个人自由的崇尚。
小说中的同情感是从人性中萃取出来的，同时还揭示了社会伦理和人性的冲突。
2. 简要说明Mark Twain的《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》中的重要主题。
《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》中最为重要的主题之一是反对奴隶制度和种族歧视。
小说通过边缘化非洲裔角色吉姆和他与哈克贝利的冒险来表达这一主题。
通过小说中的观点发表间接批判制奴政策和对黑人的压迫。
三、论述题威廉·福克纳的小说《荒野上的救世主》中如何体现了超验主义思想？《荒野上的救世主》小说通过多个角色的人生经历，呈现出一种东西方的宗教信仰和精神世界上的共性。
超验主义的思想在小说中得到了体现，例如鲍姆对科学和机械世界的愤恨，以及詹妮·霍查神秘的形象等等。
美国文学选读名词解释
1.Puritanism (清教主义)：Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans.1.) simply speaking , American Puritanism just refers to the spirit and ideal of puritans,who settled in the North American continent in the early part of the seventeenth century because of religious persecutions.2.)In content it means scrupulous ,moral rigor ,eapecially hostility to social pleasure and religion .3.)with time passing it became a dominant factor in American life , one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and literature .to some extentit is a state of mind , a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the American breathes ,rather than a set of tenets.4.) Actually it is a code of values , a philosophy of life and a point of view in American minds , also a two-faceted tradition of religious idealism and level -headed in common sense .5) Major topic:American Puritanism IntroductionThere were no written literature among the more than 500 different Indian languages and tribal cultures, American writing began with the work of English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of readers in the mother country.Therefore the writing in this period was essentially two kinds:(1) practical matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting, travel, etc. designed to inform people “at home” what life was like in the new world, and, often, to induce their immigration;(2) highly theoretical, generally polemical^辩的)，discussions of religious questions.2.The American Romanticism(浪漫主义)I.What is Romanticism a literary movement flourished as a cultural force the early period and the late period.associated with imagination and boundlessness, as an historical movement it arose in the 18th and 19th centuries. The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U. S.A was Transcendentalism.Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and those of the late periodcontain Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe.□.Features of A merican romanticism（1）It was the expression of “a real new experience（全新体验）”.（2）American Puritanism was a cultural heritage. Many American romantic writings intended to edify（启发）more than they entertained.⑶American Romanticism is full of “newness（新奇）”. Ideals：Individualism; political equality Dream：America: a new Garden of Eden （4）American romanticism was both imitative and independent.3..transcendentalism、（超验主义）transcendentalism: It stressed the power of intuition, believing that people could learn things both from the outside world by means of the five senses and from the inner world by intuition. It took nature as symbolic of spirit or God. All things in nature were symbols of the spiritual, of God’s presence. It emphasized the significance o f the individual and believed that the individual was the most important element in society and that the ideal kind of individual was self-reliant and unselfish. Transcendentalists envisioned religion as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “Oversoul”.4.Naturalism: It views human beings as animals in the natural world responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, over none of which they have control and none of which they fully understand. The literary naturalists have a major difference from the realists. They look at a different spot to find real life.5.Free verse: It is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech.6.International novel: IN brings together persons of various nationalities who represent certain characteristics of their own countries.7.the lost generation: reveals the huge destruction of the wars to the young generation. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colonyof “expatriates”. They were lost in disillusionment.8.American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful andsatisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism （资本主义），its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights9.American Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience .10.Black Humor:also called Black Comedy, writing that juxtaposes morbid or ghastly elements with comical ones. The term did not come into common use until the 1960s. Then it was applied to the works of the novelists Nathanael West, Vladimir Nabokov, and Joseph Heller. The latter's Catch-22 （1961） is a notable example, in which Captain Yossarian battles the horrors of air warfare over the Mediterranean during World War II with hilarious irrationalities matching the stupidities of the military system. The term black comedy has been applied to playwrights in the Theatre of the Absurd.11.Local colorism: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s, it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial（详细的）authenticity（确实性）,as local colorists tried to immortalize（使不朽）the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular（本国语） language and satirical （讽刺的）humor12.Code HeroGeneral Features:1.He has great physical potential and courage.2.The “ code heroes ” have strong willpower.3.Thirdly , another important feature of the “code heroes" is their loyalty.4.Fourthly , the" code heroes "maintain great dignity in all situations.5.Fifthly , the “code heroes ” are endowed with certain specialized skills , such as fishing , bull fighting , and hunting , etc6.the “code heroes "are always put in some touch-and go situations, what the heroes must always face up to is their own personal fear of death and the threat of destruction, and it is this obstacle, death, that they have to overcome.13.iceberg theory:The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.2 American TranscendentalismAs a philosophical and literary movement, American Transcendentalism （also known as “ American Renaissance"） flourished in New England from the 1830s to the Civil War. It is the high tide of American romanticism and its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalists spoke for the cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society.Transcendentalism 超验主义（+ H. D. Thoreau; NathanielHawthorne;)The major features of Transcendentalism:①The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. 思想超灵宇宙②The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society.个体+社会③The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was not purely matter. It was alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence.自然+上帝3 Stream of Consciousness 意识流or “interior monologue”,内心独白is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce.。
美国文学史及选读名词解释
美国文学史及选读名词解释1.Transcendentalism—it is a philosophic and literary movement that flourish in New England, as a reaction against rationalism and Calvinism. It stressed intuitive understanding of god without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind.2. The Lost Generation Writers of the first postwar era self-consciously acknowledged that they were a “lost Generation”, devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization.3. Puritanism—it is the religious belief of the Puritans, who had intended to purify and simplify the religious ritual of the Church of England.4. Imagism is to present an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. An imagistic poem must present the object exactly the way the thing is seen. And the reader can form the image of the object through the process of reading the abstract and concrete words.Imagism 意象派：is a poetic movement of England and the United States, flourished from 1909-1917. Its credo, expressed in Some Imagist Poets, included the use of the language of common speech, project matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration.5、Realism：（现实主义）appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things was immediately observable. the dialects, customs, sights.现实主义有浓厚的美国本土特色，是浪漫主义故事情节和现实主义描写相结合的产物：美国风味的方言、风俗、各种观点6.Naturalism：自然主义 a new and harsher realism, 新型的更为冷峻的现实主义，产生悲观的流派，产生于the end of the century 十九世纪末，因为Perception of society’s disorders 对社会无序的感知。
美国文学选读期末名词解释
1.American Romanticism(美国浪漫主义)①Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.②The romantic period in American literature stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil war.③Irving, Whitman and Thoreau are the representatives.Background(1)Political background and economic development(2)Romantic movement in European countriesDerivative – foreign influencefeatures(1)American romanticism was in essence the expression of ―a real newexperience and contained ―an alien quality‖ for the simple reason that ―thespirit of the place‖ was radically new and alien.(2)There is American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. Americanromantic authors tended more to moralize. Many American romanticwritings intended to edify more than they entertained.(3)The ―newness‖ of Americans as a nation is in connection with AmericanRomanticism.(4)As a logical result of the foreign and native factors at work, Americanromanticism was both imitative and independent.浪漫主义两大主题：爱和大自然的力量The social and cultural background of Romanticism：---The young Republic was flourishing into a politically, economically and culturally independent country.---The Romantic writings revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native lands.---The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature.---The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values.Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world wa s a source of goodness and man’s societies as a source of corruption.2. Transcendentalism (超验主义、先验主义) : It was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the middle 19th century. It began as a protest against the general state of culture and society. Among transcendentalist’s core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that “transcends”the physical and empirical(以观察或实验为依据的) and is only realized through the individual’s intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson（爱默生）, Henry David Thoreau（梭罗）, Walt Whitman（惠特曼）, etc. It is a kind of philosophy that stresses belief in transcendental things and the importanceof spiritual rather than material existence. （相信超凡的事物，认为精神存在比物质存在更重要).American Transcendentalism(美国超验主义)①Transcendentalism is the summit of the Romantic Movement in the history of American literature in the 19th century, which flourished from about 1835 to 1860.②Transcendentalists place emphasis on the importance of the Oversoul, the individual and nature. Specifically, they stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind.③The most important representatives are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.Ralph Waldo Emerson①Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, philosopher and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the mid 19th century.②He expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature.③Besides, his The American Scholar was considered to be American’s ―Intellectual Declaration of Independence‖.Oversoul①It is an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come of which all things are a part.②It is a key doctrine for Transcendentalists.Self-reliance①Self-reliance is an essay written by American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.②It contains the most solid statement of one of his repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas.③These ideas are considered a reaction to a commercial identify. Emerson calls for a return to individual identity.Individualism(个人主义)①Individualism is a moral, political, and social philosophy, which emphasizes individual liberty, the primary importance of the individual, and the “virtues of self-reliance”.②It is thus directly opposed to collectivism, social psychology and sociology, which consider the individual’s rapport to the society or communit y.③It is often confused with ―egoism‖, but an individualist need not be an egoist. Walden①It is one of the American classics written by Henry David Thoreau.②It records his experiment in living at Walden pond, his sympathetic understanding of nature, his meditation on the meanings of life and his social criticism.③Compared with Emerson’s Nature, it is more radical and social-minded.3.Free verse (自由体诗歌)①Free verse is a general term referring to the modern form of verse with no fixed foot, rhythm or rime schemes.②It was first written and labeled by a group of French poets of the late 19th century.③Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many American poets, includingWalt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg.“The Song of Myself”①It is the best known poem in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.②It is a celebration of the individual as well as the common people.4.American Realism（美国现实主义）①The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been preferred to as the age of Realism.②It was a literary doctrine that called for ―reality and truth‖ in the depiction of ordinary life. It is, in literature, an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity.③Three dominant figures are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James. Local Colorism/ Regionalism (地方特色主义)①Local Colorism is popular in the late 19th century, particularly among authors in the south of the U.S.②This style relied heavily on using words, phrases, and slang that were native to the particular region in which the story took place. The term has come to mean any device which implies a specific focus, whether it is geographical or temporal.③A well-know local colorism author was Mark Twain with his book The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn.5.Jazz Age(爵士乐时代)①The Jazz Age refers to the 1920s, a time marked by hedonism and excitement in the life of flaming youth.②With the rise of the Great Depression, materially rich, spiritually lost, the generation felt frustrated with life and indulged in pleasure.③Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.6.Yoknapatawpha(约克纳帕塔法)①Most of Faulkner’s literary works were set in the small county of American South. It is the fictional modification of his hometown, Oxford, Mississippi.②To Faulkner, this small piece of land was worth a life’s work in literary writing and here Faulkner created a world of imagination.③Yoknapatawpha has become an allegory of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience of the whole Southern society.7.Southern Renaissance(南方文艺复兴)①It is the revival of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s until the 1950s.②The writers affirmed their position on the superiority of the Southern lifestyle over that of the industrialized north.③William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter are writers of this type.Avant-garde (先锋派)①It is a French military and political term for the vanguard of an army or political movement.②This term extended since the late 19th century in literature, which refers to the innovative writer who is ahead of the time both in themes and style.③In the 20th century American literature, writers like Faulkner and e.e.cummings can be called avant-garde writers.8 Imagism:it’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S flourished from 1909 to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by ―the direct treatment of the thing‖ and the economy of wording. The leaders of this mov ement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell艾米•洛威尔.Imagism:It came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image. Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles: direct treatment of subject matter; economy of expression; as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome节拍器. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”is a well-known imagist poem.Imagism (意象派)①Imagism was a poetic school at the beginning of the 20th century.②Imagist poets strived for a simple, clear and vivid image, which in itself is the expression of art and meaning. The imagist poetry is a kind of free verse shaking of conventional metres and emphasizing the use of common speech and new rhythms.③This movement was led by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.Imagery (意象)①Imagery means words and phrases that create pictures ,or images in the readers’mind.②In a literary text, it occurs when an author uses an object that is not really there, in order to create a comparison between one that is, usually evoking a more meaningful visual experience for the reader.③It is useful as it allows an author to add depth and understanding to his work, like a sculptor adding layer and layer to his statue, building it up into a beautiful work of art.9.Black humor:To deal with tragic things in comic ways to make it more powerful and more tragic.It refers to the use of morbid病态的and absurd荒谬的for darkly comic purpose. It carries the tone of anger, bitterness in the grotesque situation of suffering, anxiety, and death. It makes the reader laugh at the blackness of modern life. The writers usually do not laugh at the characters.代表人物：Thomas Pynchon + Joseph HelleJoseph Heller：Catch-22 第22条军规It is not only a war novel, but also a novel about people’s life in peaceful time. This novel attacked the dehumanization of all contemporary institutions and corruptions of individuals who gain power in institutions. Armed-forces are the most outrageous example of the two evils.It is a combination of humor with resentment(怨恨), gloom, anger, and despair. Seeing all that is unreasonable, hypocritical, ugly, and even frenzied(狂乱的)，writers of black humor nurse a grievance(不平) against their society which, according to them, is full of institutionalized(制度化的) absurdity. Yet they are cynical. They laugh a morbid(病态的) laugh when facing the hideous（丑恶的）. In hopeless indignation（愤慨）they take up freezing irony and burning satire as their weapons. Their novels are often in the form of anti-novel（反传统小说）, devoid of(缺乏) completeness of plot and characterized by fragmentation（零碎的）and dislocation（混乱）.10.The Lost Generation(迷失的一代)①It is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.②Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.③The three best-known representatives of Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.Beat Generation/ The Beat Writers (垮掉的一代)①It refers to a loosely-knit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second-half of the 1950s and early 1960s.②They shared a set of social attitudes—anti-established, anti-political, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, literary, and moral values, and were in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression.③Representatives of the group were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. And the most famous literary creations produced by this group should be Allen Ginsberg’s long poem Howl(嚎叫) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road(在路上).。
美国文学史及选读17世纪的名词解释
17世纪的名词解释1. Elegy: In Greek and Roman times, the term elegy was used to refer to any poem composed in elegiac meter. Since the 17th century, elegy has typically been used to refer to reflective poems that lament the loss of something or someone, or loss or death more generally, although in Elizabethan times it was also use to refer to certain love poems. Elegies written in English frequently take the form of the pastoral elegy.2. Pamphlet: Originally a pamphlet was a sort of treatise or tract. It then came to mean a short work written on a topical subject on which an author feels strongly. Many outstanding writers have used the pamphlet to express vigorous political or religious views.3. Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowels-especially in stressed syllables-in a sequence of nearby words.4. Stanza: A stanza is a grouping of the verse lines in a poem, often set off by a space in the printed text. Usually the stanzas of a given poem are marked by a recurrent pattern of rhyme and are also uniform in the number and length of the component lines.5. Folktale: Folktale, strictly defined, is a short narrative in prose of unknown authorship which has been transmitted orally; many of these tales eventually achieve written form. The term, however, is often extended to include stories invented by a known author which have been picked up and repeatedly narrated by word of mouth as well as in written form.6. Hyperbole: It is bold overstatement, or the extravagant exaggeration of fact or possibility.7. Prose poems: Prose poems are densely compact, pronouncedly rhythmic, and highly sonorous compositions which are written as a continuous sequence of sentences without line break.8. Conceit: From the Italian concetto (meaning idea or concept), it refers to an unusually far-fetched or elaborate metaphor or simile presenting a surprisingly apt parallel between two apparently dissimilar things or feeling. Poetic conceits are prominent in Elizabethan love sonnets and metaphysical poetry. Conceits often employ the devices of hyperbole, paradox and oxymoron.9. Pastoral: The originator of the pastoral was the Greek poet Theocritus, who in the third century B.C. wrote poems representing the life of Sicilian shepherds. (Pastor is Latin for “shepherd.”) It is a deliberately conventional poem expressing an urban poet’s nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other rural folk in an idealized natural setting.10. Diction: The term diction signifies the types of words, phrases, and sentence structures, and sometimes also of figurative language, that constitute any work of literature. A writer’s diction can be analyzed under a great variety of categories, such as the degree to which the vocabulary and phrasing is abstract or concrete, Latin or Anglo-Saxon in origin, colloquial of formal, technical or common.11. Metaphysical poetry: It is a term that can be applied to any poetry that deals with philosophical or spiritual matters but that is generally limited to works written by a specific group of 17th century poets who are linked by style and modes of poetic organization. Common elements include the following: (1) an analytical approach to subject matter; (2) colloquial language ;( 3) rhythmic patterns that are often rough or irregular, and (4) the metaphysical conceit, a figurative device used to capture thought and emotion as accurately as possible.12. Fable: A fable is also called an apologue. It is short narrative, in prose or verse, which exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behavior; usually, at its conclusion, either the narrator or one of the characters states the moral in the form of an epigram.13. Parable: A parable is a very short narrative about human beings presented so as to stress the tacit analogy, or parallel, with a general thesis or lesson that the narrator is trying to bring home to his audience. The parable was one of Jesus’ favorite devices as a teacher.14. Masques (or Masks): The masque was inaugurated in Renaissance Italy and flourished in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I. It was an elaborate form of court entertainment that combined poetic drama, music, song, dance, splendid costuming, and stage spectacle. A plot—often slight, and mainly mythological and allegorical—served to hold together these diverse elements. The speaking characters, who wore masks(hence the title), were often played by amateurs who belonged to courtly society. The play concluded with a dance in which the players doffed their masks and were joined by the audience.。
美国文学史名词解释
1. American Puritanism: is a code of values, a philosophy of life, and a point of view；in essence, it is an idealism；it is the basis of American dream, but it is also concerned with business and profit.3. Realism: is a reaction against "the lie" of Romanticism and sentimentalism in the later half of the 19th century. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low.5. Local colorism: a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They formed an important part of the realistic movement.6. American Naturalism: is a branch and a furtherance of American Realism in the late 19th century. Naturalists tore the mask of gentility to pieces and wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold world and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of environment and heredity（遗传）；they reported truthfully and objectively, with a passion for scientific accuracy and an overwhelming accumulation of factual detail；Naturalists reveal a bitter and wretched world where human beings battle hopelessly against overwhelming odds in a cold, harsh and at best apathetic environment.7.Imagism: Imagist movement came as a reaction to the traditional English poetics to meet the need of expressing the temper of the age, the sense of fragmentization and dislocation.（three phases: ① It first began in London in the years 1908-1909. T. E. Hulme founded a Poets' Club which met in Soho every Wednesday to dine and discuss poetry. ②The second phase of the movement was the period of some three years 1912-1914 when Ezra Pound took over and championed the new poetry. ③ The third phase of Imagism（1914-1917）was when Amy Lowell took over from Pound and pushed the movement into the period of "Amygism," as Pound called it.）8. The Lost Generation: is a term coined by Gertrude Stein. It is a label for the group of American young expatriate writers born at turn 20th century and reached maturing after World War I. These writers felt profound cut off from tradition, disillusioned and alienated with society and cynical idealism. To them, life ismeaningless and futile. F. Scott. Fitigerald, Ernst Hemingway, T. S. Eliot are the most important representatives.9. Iceberg Theory: If a writer 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 as strongly as though the writer had said. The dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it begin above water.10. The Y oknapatawpha county series：It have overall pattern in which the fate of a ruined homeland always focus on the collision of Faulkner’s intelligence sensitive and isealistic protagonist with the society of the 20th century. Most of the major themes are the confrontation.11. The Hemingway hero: the typical Hemingway hero is one who wounded but strong, more sensitive and wounded because stronger, 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.。
美国文学史及选读18世纪的名词解释
18世纪的名词解释1. Three unities: Principles of dramatic structure proposed by critics and dramatists of the 16th and the 17th centuries, claiming the authority of Aristotle’s Poetics. The three unities are the unity of action (all the action of the work must occur within one continuous plot without extraneous subplot), the unity of time (all the action of the work must occur within 24 hours, or one whole day), and the unity of place (all the action of the work must occur in one place or city).2. Didactic literature: Literary works that are designed to expound a branch of knowledge, or else to embody, in imaginative or fictional form, a moral, religious, or philosophical doctrine or them. Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism and Edmund Spencer’s The Queene are good example of didactic poetry.3. Satire:It is a literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. Satire uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt that exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual, or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation or even the entire human race (as in much of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels).4. Mock epic: It is a poem employing the lofty style and the conventions of epic poetry to describe a trivial or undignified series of events; thus a kind of satire that mocks its subject by treating it in an inappropriately grandiose manner, usually at some length. The outstanding examples in English literature are Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and Dunciad.5. Farce: It is a type of low comedy that employs improbable or otherwise ridiculous situations and mix-ups, slapsticks and horseplay, and crude and even bawdy dialogue. It smacks the audience full-force in the face, aiming simply to entertain and evoke guffaws from the audience.6. Picaresque novel: Derived from the Spanish word picara, meaning “rogue” or “rascal”, the term generally refers to a basically realistic and often satire work of fiction chronicling the career of an engaging, lower-class rogue-hero, who takes to the road for a sidekick. A well-known example of the picaresque novel is Cervantes’Don Quixote (165). Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is another classic example7. Melodrama: Originally, any drama accompanied by music which was used to enhance the emotional impact and mood of the performance. The term derived from the Greek melos, which means “song”. In early nineteenth-century London, melodramas became increasingly popular, which came to emphasize the conflict between pure good and evil. Its heroes and heroines were inevitably completely moral and uypright, but terrorized, harassed, or otherwise troubled by thoroughly despicable villains. The chief concern of melodrama was to elicit the desired emotional response from the audience.8. Persona:The assumed identity or fictional “I” (literary a “mask”) assumed by a writer in a literary work; thus the speaker in a lyric poem, or the narrator in a fictional narrative. Although the persona often serves as the “voice” of the writer, it nonetheless should not be confused with the writer, for the persona may not accurately reflect the writer’s personal opinions, feelings, or perspectives on a subject.9. Epigram:The term is now used for a statement, whether in verse or prose, which is terse, pointed and witty. The epigram may be on any subject, amatory, elegiac,meditative,complimentary, anecdotal, or most often satiric.10. Gothic novel: An alternative term is Gothic romance. It is a story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle of monastery. Following the appearance of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), the Gothic novel flourished in Britain from the 1790s to the 1820s, dominated by Ann Radcliffe, whose The Mysteries of Udolpho had may imitators.11. Graveyard school of poetry: It refers to a group of eighteen-century English poets who emphasized subjectivity, mystery, and melancholy. Death, mortality (immortality), and gloom were frequent subjects of elements of their meditative poem, which were often actually set in graveyards. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is the most famous example.12. Neoclassicism: It is a style of Western literature that flourished from themid-seventeenth until the end of the eighteenth century and the rise of Romanticism. The neoclassicists looked to the great classical writers for inspiration and guidance, considering them to have mastered the noblest literary forms, tragic epic and the epic. Neoclassical writers shared several beliefs. They believed that literature should both instruct and delight, and the proper subject of art was humanity. Neoclassicism stressed rules, reason, harmony, balance, restraint, decorum, order, serenity, realism, and form —above all, an appeal to the intellect rather than emotion. The Restoration in 1660 marked the beginning of the Neoclassical Period in England, whose writers included John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, etc.13. Fiction: In an inclusive sense, fiction is any literary narrative, whether in prose or verse, which is invented instead of being an account of events that in fact happened. In a narrow sense, however, fiction denotes only narratives that are written in prose (the novel and the short story).14. Antihero: It is a protagonist in a modern work who does not exhibit the qualities of the tradition hero. Instead of being a grand and admirable figure—brave, honest, and magnanimous, for example—an antihero is all too ordinary and may even be petty or downright dishonest. The use of nonheroic protagonist occurs as early as the picaresque novel of the sixteenth century, and the heroine of Defoe’s Moll Flanders is a thief and a prostitute.15. Foreshadowing:The use of hints or clues in a narrative to suggest what will happen later. Writers use foreshadowing to create interest and to build suspense. Sometimes foreshadowing also prepares the reader for the ending of the story.。
美国文学史名词解释
美国文学史名词解释1. American Puritanism: is a code of values, a philosophy of life, and a point of view；in essence, it is an idealism；it is the basis of American dream, but it is also concerned with business and profit.3. Realism: is a reaction against "the lie" of Romanticism and sentimentalism in the later half of the 19th century. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low.5. Local colorism: a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They formed an important part of the realistic movement.6. American Naturalism: is a branch and a furtherance of American Realism in the late 19th century. Naturalists tore the mask of gentility to pieces and wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold world and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of environment and heredity（遗传）；they reported truthfully and objectively, with a passion for scientific accuracy and an overwhelming accumulation of factual detail；Naturalists reveal a bitter and wretched world where human beings battle hopelessly against overwhelming odds in a cold, harsh and at best apathetic environment.7.Imagism: Imagist movement came as a reaction to the traditional English poetics to meet the need of expressing the temper of the age, the sense of fragmentization and dislocation.（three phases: ① It first began in London in the years 1908-1909. T. E. Hulme founded a Poets' Club which met in Soho everyWednesday to dine and discuss poetry. ②The second phase of the movement was the period of some three years 1912-1914 when Ezra Pound took over and championed the new poetry. ③ The third phase of Imagism（1914-1917）was when Amy Lowell took over from Pound and pushed the movement into the period of "Amygism," as Pound called it.）8. The Lost Generation: is a term coined by Gertrude Stein. It is a label for the group of American young expatriate writers born at turn 20th century and reached maturing after World War I. These writers felt profound cut off from tradition, disillusioned and alienated with society and cynical idealism. To them, life is meaningless and futile. F. Scott. Fitigerald, Ernst Hemingway, T. S. Eliot are the most important representatives.9. Iceberg Theory: If a writer 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 as strongly as though the writer had said. The dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it begin above water.10. The Y oknapatawpha county series：It have overall pattern in which the fate of a ruined homeland always focus on the collision of Faulkner’s intelligence sensitive and isealistic protagonist with the society of the 20th century. Most of the major themes are the confrontation.11. The Hemingway hero: the typical Hemingway hero is one who wounded but strong, more sensitive and wounded because stronger, 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.。
- 1、下载文档前请自行甄别文档内容的完整性，平台不提供额外的编辑、内容补充、找答案等附加服务。
- 2、"仅部分预览"的文档,不可在线预览部分如存在完整性等问题,可反馈申请退款(可完整预览的文档不适用该条件!)。
- 3、如文档侵犯您的权益，请联系客服反馈,我们会尽快为您处理(人工客服工作时间：9:00-18:30)。
美国文学史及选读名词解释1.Transcendentalism19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound toge ther by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all cr eation,the innate goodness of man,and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths.In their religious quest,the Transcendentalists rejected the conven tions of18th-century thought;and what began in a dissatisfaction with Unitarianism developed int o a repudiation of the whole established order.ngston HughesAmerican poet and writer emphasized on lower-class black life.He established himself as a major force of the Harlem Renaissance.In1926,in the Nation,he provided the movement with a manife sto when he skillfully argued the need for both race pride and artistic independence in his most me morable essay,'The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."In many ways Hughes always remain ed loyal to the principles he had laid down for the younger black writers in1926.His art was firml y rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he cherished his freedom as an artist.He was both n ationalist and cosmopolitan.As a radical democrat,he believed that art should be accessible to as many people as possible.He could sometimes be bitter,but his art is generally suffused by a keen sense of the ideal and by a profound love of humanity,especially black Americans.3.Henry David ThoreauAmerican essayist,poet,and practical philosopher,renowned for having lived the doctrines of Tra nscendentalism as recorded in his masterwork,Walden(1854),and for having been a vigorous adv ocate of civil liberties,as evidenced in the essay“Civil Disobedience”(1849).In his writings Thor eau was concerned primarily with the possibilities for human culture provided by the American na tural environment.He adapted ideas garnered from the then-current Romantic literatures in order t o extend American libertarianism and individualism beyond the political and religious spheres to t hose of social and personal life.He demanded for all men the freedom to follow unique lifestyles, to make poems of their lives and living itself an art.In a restless,expanding society dedicated to pr actical action,he demonstrated the uses and values of leisure,contemplation,and a harmonious ap preciation of and coexistence with nature.Thoreau established the tradition of nature writing later developed by the Americans4.the Harlem RenaissanceThe Harlem Renaissance,a flowering of literature(and to a lesser extent other arts)in New York City during the1920s and1930s,has long been considered by many to be the high point in Africa n American writing.It probably had its foundation in the works of W.E.B.Du Bois who believed that an educated Black elite should lead Blacks to liberation.He further believed that his people co uld not achieve social equality by emulating white ideals;that equality could be achieved only by teaching Black racial pride with an emphasis on an African cultural heritage.Although the Renaiss ance was not a school,nor did the writers associated with it share a common purpose,nevertheless they had a common bond:they dealt with Black life from a Black perspective.Among the major writers who are usually viewed as part of the Harlem Renaissance are Claude McKay,Countee Cu llen,Langston Hughes,Zora Neale Hurston,Rudolph Fisher,James Weldon Johnson,and Jean To omer.5.Mark Twainpseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens American humorist,writer,and lecturer who won a wo rldwide audience for his stories of youthful adventures,especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),Life on the Mississippi(1883),and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884).Writing in American colloquialism and subjects with humors and satires,Mark Twain shed great influence upon later writers such as Sherwood Anderson,Earnest Hemingway and Faulkner.6.Walt WhitmanAmerican poet,journalist,and essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass is a landmark in th e history of American literature.Whitman's greatest theme is a symbolic identification of the rege nerative power of nature with the deathless divinity of the soul.His poems are filled with a religio us faith in the processes of life,particularly those of fertility,sex,and the“unflagging pregnancy”of nature:sprouting grass,mating birds,phallic vegetation,the maternal ocean,and planets in for mation.The poetic“I”of Leaves of Grass transcends time and space,binding the past with the pre sent and intuiting the future,illustrating Whitman's belief that poetry is a form of knowledge,the s upreme wisdom of mankind.7.the Lost GenerationIn general,the post-World War I generation,but specifically a group of U.S.writers who came of age during the war and established their literary reputations in the1920s.The term stems from a re mark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway,“You are all a lost generation.”Hemingway u sed it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises(1926).The generation was“lost”in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienatio n from a U.S.that,basking under President Harding's“back to normalcy”policy,seemed to its me mbers to be hopelessly provincial,materialistic,and emotionally barren.The term embraces Hemi ngway,F.Scott Fitzgerald,John Dos Passos,e.e.cummings and many other writers who made Par is the centre of their literary activities in the'20s.They were never a literary school.In the1930s, as these writers turned in different directions,their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period.The last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night(1934).8.Ralph Waldo Emerson:American lecturer,poet,and essayist,the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism.N ature,“The American Scholar,”and Address—had rallied together a group that came to be called the Transcendentalists,of which he was popularly acknowledged the spokesman.Emerson helped i nitiate Transcendentalism by publishing his Nature.Emerson felt that there was no place for free will in the chains of mechanical cause and effect that rationalist philosophers conceived the world as being made up of.This world could be known only through the senses rather than through thou ght and intuition;it determined men physically and psychologically;and yet it made them victims of circumstance,beings whose superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly ascertaining rea lity.Emerson asserts the human ability to transcend the materialistic world of sense experience an d facts and become conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities of hu man freedom.Emerson's doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his vi ew that the individual need only look into his own heart for the spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the province of the established churches.The individual must then have the courage to be hi mself and to trust the inner force within him as he lives his life according to his intuitively derived precepts.9.Edgar Allen PoePoe's work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the occult and the satanic.It owes muc h also to his own feverish dreams,to which he applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics o ut of impalpable materials.With an air of objectivity and spontaneity,his productions are closely d ependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate technique.His keen and sound judg ment as appraiser of contemporary literature,his idealism and musical gift as a poet,his dramatic art as a storyteller,considerably appreciated in his lifetime,secured him a prominent place among universally known men of letters.The outstanding fact in Poe's character is a strange duality.Muc h of Poe's best work is concerned with terror and sadness.His yearning for the ideal was both of th e heart and of the imagination.His sensitiveness to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired hi s most touching lyrics He is regarded as the father of detective stories.10.Black Humoralso called Black Comedy,writing that juxtaposes morbid or ghastly elements with comical ones. The term did not come into common use until the1960s.Then it was applied to the works of the n ovelists Nathanael West,Vladimir Nabokov,and Joseph Heller.The latter's Catch-22(1961)is a n otable example,in which Captain Yossarian battles the horrors of air warfare over the Mediterrane an 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.Benjamin FranklinAmerican printer and publisher,author,inventor and scientist,and diplomat.Franklin,next to Geo rge Washington possibly the most famous18th-century American.He established the Poor Richar d of his almanacs as an oracle on how to get ahead in the world,and become widely known in Eur opean scientific circles for his reports of electrical experiments and theories and wrote his Autobio graphy which is a great contribution to the American literature.12.Ernest HemingwayAmerican novelist and short-story writer,awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in1954.He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and for his adventurous and widely publicized life.His succinct and lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and British ficti on in the20th century.The main characters of The Sun Also Rises,A Farewell to Arms,and For Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences.War was for Hemingwa y a potent symbol of the world,which he viewed as complex,filled with moral ambiguities,and of fering almost unavoidable pain,hurt,and destruction.To survive in such a world,and perhaps eme rge victorious,one must conduct oneself with honour,courage,endurance,and dignity,a set of pri nciples known as“the Hemingway code.”13.Sherwood Andersonauthor who strongly influenced American writing between World Wars I and II,particularly the te chnique of the short story.His writing had an impact on such notable writers as Ernest Hemingwa y and William Faulkner,both of whom owe the first publication of their books to his efforts.His p rose style,based on everyday speech was markedly influential on the early Hemingway.His best work is generally thought to be in his short stories,collected in Winesburg,Ohio,The Triumph of the Egg(1921),Horses and Men(1923),and Death in the Woods(1933).美国文学名词解释2.American Puritanismit comes from the American puritans,who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the17th century.Original sin,predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism.And,hard-working,piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift and sobriety（清醒）were praised.3.Romanticism:the literature term was first applied to the writers of the18thcentury inEurope who broke away from the formal rules of classical writing.When it was used in American literature it referred to the writers of the middle of the19thcentury who stimulated（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers.They wrote of the mysterious of life,love,birth an d death.The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint.They wrote all ki nds of materials,poetry,essays,plays,fictions,history,works of travel,and biography.4.Transcendentalism(先验说,超越论):is a philosophic and literary movement thatflourished in New England,particular at Concord,as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义).Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God,without the help of the church,and advocat ed independence of the mind.The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.5.Local colorism:as a trend became dominant in American literature in the1860s andearly1870sit 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)humor6.Stream of consciousness（意识流）：It is one of the modern literary techniques.It isthe style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts,feelings,refl ections,memories,and mental images as the character experiences them.It was first used in1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce.Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space,and d epicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing inces santly。