文学术语

Transcendentalism

19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosel y bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in t he essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of in sight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. In their religio us 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.

American Naturalism appeared in the 1890s with the representatives of Crane, Norris and Theodore Dreiser. They tore the mask of gentility to pieces and wrote about the h elplessness of man, his insignificance in a cold world, and his lack of dignity in face o f the crushing forces of environment and heredity. They reported truthfully and objecti vely, with a passion for scientific accuracy and a lot of details. The whole picture is so mber and dark; and the general tone one of hopelessness and even despair.

Imagism was a poetic movement that flourished in America and England, at the begin ning of the 20th century. Ezra Pound raised three principles for the movement: direct t reatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective; to use absolutely no word tha t does not contribute to the presentation; as regarding rhythm, to compose in the seque nce of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

The Lost Generation

⏹ 1. term: It is a term in frequent use after WWI in reference to the young men who

survived physically but were afterwards spiritually and morally adrift. So the lost generation refers to disillusioned writers who wrote after WWI. Many of them went to the battle. After the war, they rebelled against former ideals and values and can’t find new ones to replace.

⏹ 2. It first coined by Gertrude Stein. In Paris, she opens the door to American expatriates.

She once said to Hemingway, “You’re all a lost generation.”

⏹ 3. It was used as preface to The Sun Also Rises. Then it became popular. Fitzgerald once

said they are “a generation grown up to find all gods died, all wars fought, all faith in men shaken”.

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 locale distinguished from the outsid e world; (2)describing the exotic of the picturesque; (3)glorifying the past; (4) showin g things as they are; (5) influence of setting on characters. The well known local color ism authors were Mark Twain with his book Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huc kleberry Finn.

Free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length, and that attempts av oid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the cadenees of natural speech. While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse forms do, free ver se does so in a looser way. Whiteman‟s poetry is an example of free verse at its most