美国文学简答题

1. Transcendentalism:

1. a philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to1860. It stood in reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

2. General features

(1)Emphasis on the significance of imagination, spirit and individualism, exploring the innermost being of man

(2)Opposition against neoclassical conception of formality and order

(3)Divinity of man and nature, perception of nature as symbolic of Spirit or God

(4) Further search into nature to acquire truth and knowledge than Romanticism

3. Major figures of Transcendentalism: Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller.

P78

2. American naturalism：

1. Flourished between1880 to 1940. It was a term created by Emile Zola. Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory and French naturalism played an important role in American naturalism.

2. General features:

(1)A view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment.In naturalistic works, characters were conceived as complex combinations of inherited attributes and habits conditioned by social and economic forces. Naturalism emphasized：the world was around；men had no free will；religious“truth”were illusory；the destiny of human beings was misery in life and oblivion in death.

(2)Scientific accuracy and lots of factual details

(3)Attempt to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness

(4)Tone of such works: ugly side of the society, gloom, hopelessness, despair

3. Major figures of naturalism: Stephen crane，Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser. P275-P277

3.The lost generation:

1. The term came from Gertrude Stein who said in Hemingway's presence that “you are all a lost generation.”

2. It refers to the generation after the World War I or the young writers who lived as expatriates in Western Europe for a short time. Most of them were caught in the war and cut from the old value.

3. They were disillusioned with capitalist ideals and civilization and sense of loss after the world war.

4. These writers adopted unconventional style of writing and reacted against the tendencies of the older writers in the 1920s.

P333-334

4.Jazz age:

1. It refers to the time in 1930s after the World War I when there was a financial boom.

2. It is about life and fate of young men who indulged in stimulus and pleasure, and about disillusionment of American dream.

3. Fitzgerald was the literary spokesman for the Jazz age.

P335, P369

5．F ree verse:

1. It is a style of poetry that has irregular rhythms and lines and attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure. Instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech.

2. While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse forms do, free verse does so in a looser way.