文学术语解释

●.Romanticism: It occurred in the middle 18th century. It strongly protests against neoclassism,

which emphasized reason and order. The general features are: expressiveness, imagination, individual, worship of nature and freedom.

●Critical realism: It occurred in the 1840s. The writers criticized the capitalist system from a

democratic viewpoint. They are concerned about the fate of the common people and

described what was faithful to reality. Charles Dickens.

●Critical Realism:（批判现实主义）The critical realism of the 19th century flourished in the

forties and in the beginning of fifties. The realists first and foremost set themselves the task of criticizing capitalist society from a democratic viewpoint and delineated the crying

contradictions of bourgeois reality. But they did not find a way to eradicate social evils.

Representative writers of this trend include Charles Dickens and William Makepeace

Thackeray and so on.

●Dramatic monologue: A single speaker speaks to a silent audience. Such poems reveal not

the poet’s own thoughts but the mind of the impersonated character. . Dramatic Monologue:（戏剧独白）a monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person. Dramatic monologue does not designate a component in a play, but a type of lyric poem that was perfected by Robert Browning. By using dramatic monologue, a single person, who is patently not the poet, utters the speech that makes up the whole of the poem, in a specific situation at a critical moment.

For example, Robert Browning’s famous poem “My Last Duchess” was written in dramatic monologue.

●Modernism: Began in the late 19th century and flourished until 1950s. It takes the irrational

philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between men and men, men and society, man and himself. They are more concerned with the inner world of an individual. They move from the objective to the subjective. It also include: alienation, loss of identity, loneliness,

meaningless life, absurdity of the world, dehumanization of the society. Frequent techniques: juxtaposition and multiple points of view. . Modernism（现代主义）：The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the 20th century, but especially after WWI. The specific features signif ied by “modernism” vary with the user, but many critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the traditional bases not only of Western art, but of Western culture in general.

●Steam of consciousness: It is used to depict the mental and emotional reactions of

characters to external events, rather than the events themselves. It adopts the

psycho-analytic approach to explore the existence of unconscious and unconscious

elements in the mind. The action is presented in terms of images and attitudes within the mind of one or more figures, often to get at the psychic nature of the character.

●Post-modernism: Refers to certain radically experimental works of literature and art after

WWⅡ. Much of the works reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals the

meaningless of human existence. They use new devices, forms .Postmodernism（后现代主义）：The term postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after WWII.

Postmodernism involves not only a continuation, sometimes carried to an extreme, of the counter traditional experiments of modernism, but also diverse attempts to break away from modernist forms which had, inevitably, become in their turn conventional, as well as to

overthrow the elitism of modernist “high art” by recourse to the models of “mass art”.

●Epiphany:（顿悟）In the early draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

employed this term to signify a sudden sense of radiance and revelation that one may feel