美国文学考试之term

1 The Lost Generation: This term is applied to the American writers who lost the traditional values as a result of the war and fought hard to seek new values and beliefs to fill the void of the post - war world which was full of physical wounds as well as mental chaos.
2 Jazz age :It refers to the 1920s, a time marked by frivolity, carelessness, hedonism and excitement in the life of the flaming youth. Fitzgerald is largely responsible for the term and many of his literary works portray it.
3 Iceberg Theory : It is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway. The meaning of a piece is not immediately evident, because the crux of the story lies below the surface, just as most of the mass of a real iceberg similarly lies beneath the surface.
4 Harlem Renaissance：It refers to the Blossoming (1918 –1937) of African American culture, particularly in the creative arts, centered in Harlem in New York City. As a literary movement, it laid the groundwork for all later African American literature and had a significant impact on black literature and consciousness worldwide. Central to the movement were efforts to explore all aspects of the African American experience and to reconceptualize "the Negro" independent of white stereotypes.

5 Transcendentalism: Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as "the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses." The main notions include: a) living close to nature; b) the dignity of manual labor; c) the divinity in man in his own right; d) one great brotherhood among all the people; e) self - trust and self – reliance.
6 Imagism：Imagism was a spirit of revolt against conventionalities rather than a goal set up as in itself a permanently lasting objective. All poetic language is the language of exploration. The point of Imagism is that it does not use images as ornaments. The image is itself the speech. The image is the word beyond formulated language.
7 Free Verse : Free verse is rhymed or unrhymed poetry free from conventional rules of meter. The aesthetic and musical effect of free verse is achieved through rhythms and cadence of natural speech.
8 International theme：It refers to novels that are set against a large international background, usually between Europe and America, and centered on the confrontation of the two different cultures with two different groups of people representing two different value systems.
9 Hemingway Code Hero: It refers to some protagonists in Hemingway's works. In the general situation of Hemingway's novels, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos and man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. Those who survive and perhaps emerge victorious in the process of seeking to master the code with a set of principles such as honor, courage, endurance, wisdom, discipline and dignity are known as "the Hemingway code". th

e spirit of code hero
? Endurance: to accept pain, even loss
? Pride: of knowing that one has done one’s best
? Courage: act truly according to one’s own nature
? Will: to face defeat or victory
? He is a man of action but not a thinker.
10 Puritanism：American Puritanism was the practice and belief of Puritans who were a group of serious and religious people ,and 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 sin, 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.


American Romanticism : American Romanticism is the literary movement stretching from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It exhibited from the very outset distinct features of its own. 1) It was in essence the expression of a “a real new experience” and contained “an alien quality”. 2) As a logical result of the foreign and native factors at work, American romanticism, was both imitative and independent. Those features can be found in the major works by the writers such as Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman.
Modernism: It is term referring to the art, poetry, literature, architecture, and philosophy of Europe and America in the early twentieth-century. In general, modernism is marked by the following characteristics: (1) the desire to break away from established traditions, (2) a quest to find fresh ways to view man's position or function in the universe, (3) experiments in form and style, particularly with fragmentation--as opposed to the "organic" theories of literary unity appearing in the Romantic and Victorian periods.
Stream of Consciousness: It is the continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind. In literary works, it refers to the literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in an unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior monologue.
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.
Surrealism is an artistic movement doing away with the restrictions of realism and verisimilitude that might be imposed on an artist. In this movement, the artist sought to do away with conscious control and instead respond to the irrational urges of the subconscious mind. From this results the hallucinatory, bizarre, often nightmarish quality of surrealistic paintings and writings. Sample surrealist writers include Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, and Franz Kafka.
Expressionism in literature, especially drama, flourished in the early 1900's. Expressionis

t playwrights try to portray life as modified and distorted by their personal interpretation of reality. . Characters in expressionist drama tend to be one-sided, standing for single ideas and attitudes. They are placed in situations in which the objects of the outer world are distorted to reveal the tortured minds of the characters or the dramatist. Playwrights achieve these effects with symbolic settings, bizarre lighting, and nonrealistic acting. Eugene O'Neill is a major American expressionist playwright.
Beat Generation : Beat generation is a term applied to a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s who were in romantic rebellion against the culture and value systems of America. They expressed their revolt through the literary works of loose structure and slang diction.
Calvinism: It the religious teachings of John Calvin and his followers. Calvin taught that only certain persons, the elect, were chosen by God to be saved, and these could be saved only by God’s grave. Calvinism forms the basis for the doctrines and practices of the Huguenots, Puritans, Presbyterians(长, and the Reformed churches.

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.
Symbolism: It is a movement in literature and the visual arts in the late 19th century. Symbolism was an aesthetic movement that encouraged writers to express their ideas, feelings, and values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct statements.
American Naturalism : American naturalism is a literary tendency that prevailed in 1890s. American naturalists wrote about the helplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold, amoral world, and his lack of dignity in face of the crushing forces of environment and heredity. They reported truthfully and objectively, with a passion of scientific accuracy and an overwhelming accumulation of factual detail. They told the gloomy, ugly side of the society in a despairing tone.
Local Colorism: As a literary trend, local colorism made its presence felt in the late 1860s to early 70s .Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local characters of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tells it apart from the world outside.
American Dream : A popular belief that people can achieve success, whether it is wealth, fame or love through honest hard working in a n

ew world of liberty, equality, chances and promises.
Gilded Age, originally referring to the post-Civil War period in the United States, came to represent an era of rapid industrialization "characterized by ruthless pursuit of profit, government corruption, conspicuous consumption, and vu