美国文学史名词解释 综合
美国文学术语解释
美国文学术语解释美国文学术语解释American puritanism(美国清教主义)Colonial American(殖民时期的美国)Great Aweaking(宗教大觉醒运动)American Romanticism(美国浪漫主义)Gothic tradition(哥特传统) Historical novel(历史小说)Civil War（美国内战）Transcendentalism(超验主义) Individualism(个人主义) Unitarianism(上帝一位论) Allegory(寓言) American Renaissance(美国文艺复兴)Original Sin(原罪)American Enlightenment(美国启蒙运动)Free verse(自由诗) Alliteration(头韵) Assonance(类韵) Consonance(和音)Lyric(抒情诗)Sonnet(十四行诗)Point of view(视角)Realism(现实主义)Local Colorism(地方特色主义) Irony(反讽)Naturalism(自然主义)Social Darwinism(社会达尔文主义)Dadaism(达尔文主义) Expressionism(表现主义) Harlem Renaissance(哈姆雷特文艺复兴)Imagism(意象主义)Jazz Age(爵士乐时代) Surrealism(超现实主义)V orticism(漩涡派)Dramatic Monologue(戏剧性独白)Lost Generation(迷惘的一代) Metaphysical poets(玄学派诗人)Narrator(叙述者)Stream of Consciousness(意识流) The Beat Generation(垮掉的一代) The 1930s(美国30年代)New Criticism(新批评主义) Theatre of the Absurd(荒诞剧) Postmodernism(后现代主义) Metafiction(元小说) Confessional poetry(自白派诗歌) The New York School(纽约派诗人)The absurd(荒谬派)Parody(戏讽)Magic realism(魔幻现实主义) The National Association for the Advancement of ColoredPeople(NAACP)(美国有色人种协进会)The Native American Renaissance(土著美国人文艺复兴)。
美国文学史复习提纲 名词解释
I. Explain the following literary terms(名词解释).1. RomanticismThe most profound and comprehensive idea of romanticism is the vision of a greater personal freedom for the individual. Appeals to imagination; Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, gen iality. Subjectivity: in form and meaning.2 American transcendentalismAmerican transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860). For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains.3 Realism: ―nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.‖ the Civil wara. verisimilitude of details derived from observationb. representative in plot, setting and characterc. an objective rather than an idealized view of human experienceor（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.）4. Modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at the turn of the 20th century with its core period between World War I and World War II and continuing into the 21st century.5、American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God. 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.6、Transcendentalism: In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18th century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. The transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. They found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson’s essay Nature was the major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it.7、Free verse: free verse is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventio nal rules of meter. Free verse was first written and labeled by a group of French poets of the late 19th century. Their purpose was to deliver poetry from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate the free rhythms of natural speech. Walt Whitman was the precursor who wrote lines of varying length and cadence, usually not rhymed. The emotional content or meaning of the work was expressed through its rhythm. Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many modern American poets, including Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg.8、Naturalism: A more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. Naturalism was a new and harsher realism. Itdeveloped on the basis of realism but went a step further than it in portraying social reality.9、Lost Generation: Also termed the Sad Young Men, which was created by F.S. Fitzgerald in his book All the Sad Young Men. The term in general refers to the post- World War I generation, but specifically a group of US writers who came of age during the war and established their reputation in the 1920s. It stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, ―You are all a lost generation.‖ Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises, a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris. The generation was ―lost‖ in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from US, they seemed hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings and so on.10、International theme：The meeting of America and Europe, American innocence in contrast with European decadence and the moral and psychological complications arising therefore. The typical pattern of the conflict between the two cultures could be that of a young American man or girl who goes to Europe and affronts his or her destiny. Marriage and love are used by James as the focal point of the confrontation between the two value Systems, and the protagonist usually goes through a painful process of spiritual growth, gaining knowledge of good and evil from the conflict.11、Symbolism: It is a movement in literature and the visual arts that originated in France in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire in the late 19th century. In literature, 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. Hawthorne and Melville are masters of symbolism in America in the 19th century.II. Questions and Answers. Give brief answers to each of the following questions in English.1. What is local color？an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things immediately observable: the dialects, customs, sights, and sounds of regional America‖2. What is American Puritanism1). Total Depravity - the concept of Original Si2). Unconditional Election - the concept of predestination3). Limited Atonement - Jesus died for the chosen only, not for everyone.4). Irresistible Grace - God's grace is freely given, it cannot be earned or denied.5). Perseverance of the "saints" - those elected by God have full power to interpret the will of God, and to live uprightly. If anyone rejects grace after feeling its power in his life, he will be going against the will of God.3. Analyze Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.themes in autobiography: Self- Improvement Mind: Self-education Body: Physical Activity Behavior: Moral Perfection Religion: The best service to God is to be good to manBenjamin Franklin and aspects of The American DreamRags to Riches: Impotence to Importance: A Philosophy of Individualism:Freewill vs. Determinism: Hope and Optimism:The Autobiography is a record of self-examination and self-improvement.Benjamin Franklin was a spokesman for the new order of the 18th century enlightenmentThe Autobiography is a how-to-do-it book, a book on the art of self-improvement. (for example, Franklin’s 13 virtues)Through telling a success story of self-reliance, the book celebrates, in fact, the fulfillment of the American dream. The Autobiography is in the pattern of Puritan simplicity, directness, and concision4. What is Imagism?It is a movement of English and American poets in revolt from Romanticism, which flourish 1910-1917. The characteristic products of the movement are more easily recognized than its theories defined: they tend to be short ,composed of short lines of musical cadence rather than metrical regularity, to avoid abstraction, and to treatthe image with a hard, clear precision rather than with overt symbolic intent.As part of the modernist movement, away from the sentimentality and moralizing tone of nineteenth-century Victorian poetry, imagist poets looked to many sources to help them create a new poetic expression, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.III. Topic discussion.1. Discuss Allen Poe’s literary achievements with his works.famous American poet, short-story writer and critic father of detective story master of gothic novel forerunner of symbolism a father of detective storyPoe introduced of a new form of short fiction--- the detective story.The word ―detective‖ did not exist in English at the time that Poe was writing, but the genre has becomea )fundamental mode of twentieth-century literature and film.b) master of gothic novelGothic novel, a genre that rose with Romanticism in Britain in the late eighteenth century, explores the dark side of human experience—death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts, and haunted landscapes. Poe brought the Gothic to America.Gothic novels originated from The Castle of Otranto, written by Horace Walpole in Britain at the end of the 18th century, which created the early classical Gothic novel mode.It leads habitually with darkness and horror. Gothic elements include horror, mystery, supernatural phenomenon, misfortune, death, haunted houses, and family curses.c Literary criticPoe is one of the few American writers who not only wrote poetry, but also wrote about how to write poetry. His critical essays on poetry include The Poetic Principle, and The Philosophy of Composition.Poe remained the most controversial and most misunderstood literary figure in the history of American literature. 2. Analyze Freneau’s The Wild Honeysuckle.野金银花Philip Freneau as Father of American Poetry as Leader of 18th Century NaturalismThe following poem was published in his Poems (1786) and was virtually unread in the time when he was living. In the poem the poet expresses his keen awareness of the liveliness and transience of nature celebrating the beauty of the frail forest flower, thus showing his deep love for nature.The poem was written in six-line iambic tetrameter stanzas rhymed on ababcc pattern.The poem is said to anticipate the nineteenth-century romantic use of simple nature imagery.It is considered one of the author’s finest nature poems.Comments on The Wild Honey Suckle1. A flower may be the most beautiful and overlooked piece of nature. Cherish it while it lasts for by the change of each season it may dissipate only to become a desire. Perhaps Freneau knew of a beauty that only nature could describe, provoked by the insincerity of the British people.2. Philip Freneau, in this poem, was expressing his dream of a paradise in nature, or rather, on the new continent of America. His dream was the originality of the paradise on the earth, i.e, USA. The wild honey suckle is something of freedom, tranquility, nature, and of no convention, no suppression, no traditional or anything beyond the pure nature.This poem is not only a mere description of nature, but something ideal in the poet's construction of a real paradise of human beings. This paradise is of real freedom, pure nature, total independence, grand beauty. As we know, Freneau was against the British interference in the independence of the new land, and was hoping to establish a real free country of the people on the new Continent. So in my opinion, this poem was in fact the beautiful bode of a paradise in nature(on the earth), in very brief and true words. This paradise is independent without meeting any vicious interference, beautiful without catering to any viewer,tranquil but fearful of no hardships, wild in nature without any vulgar provocation.in this poem the poet expressed a keen awareness of the loveliness and transience of nature.he not only meditated on mortality but also celebrated nature.it implies that life and death are inevitable law of nature,"the wild honey suckle"is philipfreneau's most widely read natureal lyric with the theme of transience.the central i mage is a nativewild flower,which makes a drastic difference from elite flower images typical of tradition english p oems.the poem showed strong feelings for the natural beauty,which was the characteristic of romantic.3. Analyze Poe’s To Helen and translate the third stanza in your own words.The theme of this short poem is the beauty of a woman with whom Poe became acquainted when he was 14. Apparently she treated him kindly and may have urged him–or perhaps inspired him–to write poetry. Beauty, as Poe uses the word in the poem, appears to refer to the woman's soul as well as her body. On the one hand, he represents her as Helen of Troy–the quintessence of physical beauty–at the beginning of the poem. On the other, he represents her as Psyche–the quintessence of soulful beauty–at the end of the poem. In Greek, psyche means soul.It was first published in 1831 collection Poems of Poe then reprinted in 1836 in the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe revised the poem in 1845, making several improvements, most notably changing "the beauty of fair Greece, and the grandeur of old Rome" to "the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome." These improved lines are the most well-known lines of the poem.Imagery and Summary of the PoemPoe opens the poem with a simile–―Helen, thy beauty is to me / Like those Nicéan barks of yore‖–that compares the beauty of Helen (Mrs. Stanard) with small sailing boats (barks) that carried home travelers in ancient times. He extends this boat imagery into the second stanza, when he says Helen brought him home to the shores of the greatest civilizations of antiquity, classical Greece and Rome. It may well have been that Mrs. Stanard’s beauty and other admirable qualities, as well as her taking notice of Poe’s writing ability, helped inspire him to write poetry that mimicked in some ways the classical tradition of Greece and Rome.Certainly the poem’s allusions to mythology and the classical age suggest that he had a grounding in, and a fondness for, ancient history and literature. In the final stanza of the poem, Poe imagines that Mrs. Stanard (Helen) is standing before him in a recess or alcove in front of a window. She is holding an agate lamp, as the beautiful Psyche did when she discovered the identity of Eros (Cupid).in the first stanza,helen's beauty is soothing.it provides security and safety.perhaps the reader is expected to a ssociate marlowe's famousline:was this the face that launched a thousand ships? to helen's beauty,for her beauty is as hypnotic for the speaker as the ships that transported another wanderer-Ulysses-home from Troy. throughout the poem,Poe uses allusions to classical names and places,as well as certain kinds of images to creat e the impression of a far-off idealized,unreal woman,like a Greek statue.words that support the image of an ideal woman are "hyacinth"and"classic""Naiad airs"and"statued like.helen stands,not like a real woman,but like a saint i n a "windows-niche.she becomes a symbol both of beauty and of frustration,a romantically idealized,yet inaccessi ble image of the heart's desire.it's believed that few american poets can surpass Poe's ability in the use of english as a medium of pure musical and rhythmic beauty.Poe made good use of rhythm is not regular,which shows the poet was excited,the poem is a haunting melody done with extreme artistry of alliteration as in "weary"and"way-worn",assonance as in "wont to roam"and masculine end rhyme,for example,with"me"rhythm with "sea",the rhyme scheme is ababb,cdcec,fggfg.i n the poem words containing vowels or diphthongs were used to bring about the slow rhythm which reveals the s peaker's admiration and deep regret and suggest a theme that beauty is soothing yet inaccessible.in light of anal ysis above,the general tone of the poem is passionate and regretful.4. Discuss Mark Twain’s art of fiction: the setting, th e language, and the characters, etc., based on his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Huckleberry Finn (1884) was first considered adult fiction. Huck Finn, which painted a picture of Mississippi frontier life, was intended as a sequel to Tom Sawyer. Huck, who could not possibly write a story, tells us the story. Twain wrote a novel that embodies the search for freedom. He wrote during the post-Civil War period when there was an intense white reaction against blacks. According to some critics,[who?]Twain took aim squarely against racial prejudice, increasing segregation, lynchings, and the generally accepted belief that blacks were sub-human. He "made it clear that Jim was good, deeply loving, human, and anxious for freedom."[12]However, others have criticized the novel as racist, citing the use of the word "nigger" and Jim's Sambo-like character.[2][3]Throughout the story, Huck is in moral conflict with the received values of the society in which he lives, and while he is unable to consciously refute those values even in his thoughts, he makes a moral choice based on his own valuation of Jim's friendship and human worth, a decision in direct oppositio n to the things he has been taught. Mark Twain in his lecture notes proposes that "a sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience," and goes on to describe the novel as "...a book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come in to collision and conscience suffers defeat."[13]5. Discuss James Cooper’s literary contributions.Contributions of CooperThe creation of the famous Leather stocking saga has cemented his position as our first great national novelist and his influence pervades American literature. In his thirty-two years (1820-1851) of authorship, Cooper produced twenty-nine other long works of fiction and fifteen books - enough to fill forty-eight volumes in the new definitive edition of his Works. Among his achievements:1. The first successful American historical romance in the vein of Sir Walter Scott (The Spy, 1821).2. The first sea novel (The Pilot, 1824).3. The first attempt at a fully researched historical novel (Lionel Lincoln, 1825).4. The first full-scale History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839).5. The first American international novel of manners (Homeward Bound and Home as Found, 1838).6. The first trilogy in American fiction (Satanstoe, 1845; The Chainbearer, 1845; and The Redskins, 1846).7. The first and only five-volume epic romance to carry its mythic hero - Natty Bumppo - from youth to old age. James Fenimore Cooper was one of the first novelists to enjoy great fame as a result of his literary career and although some may argue that this is because the subject matter was entertaining (rather than instructive or socially conscious, for example) the fact remains that he was able to introduce Americans to their own frontier. A writer in the style of romanticism, James Fenimore Cooper was enamored with tales of the outdoors and encounters with strange and often hostile people or forces. This material was well-received and because of his literary success James Fenimore Cooper was able to produce his large body of works throughout his lifetime.6. Analyze Whitman’s One’s Self I Sing.Analysis of One’s Self I SingIn 1855 he published Leaves of Grass by himself at his own expense. His intention was to create a truly American poem, one "proportionate to our continent, with its powerful races of men, its tremendous historic events, its great oceans, its mountains, and its illimitable prairies." In fact, his poem goes beyond American subject to deal with the universal themes of nature, fertility, and mortality."One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person," run the opening lines of Leaves of Grass from 1871 on, "Yet utter the word Democratic." A poetic universe of productive tension is hinted by that "Y et"; the tense equipoise between individualism and democracy, this poem suggests, is the foundational theme of Whitman’s book. The poem then goes on to introduce the site and symbol for this reconciliation of individual to mass: the body, "physiology from top to toe." We receive individual identity through our body, . . . yet at the same time, physicality, and especially physical affection, are universal, binding us together in common humanity. Much of the boldly progressive politics of Whitman’s poetry will follow from this emphasis on the body; thus his introduction of the theme of "physiology" isfollowed by his (then quite radical) insistence on the political equality of male and female.In Whitman’s ―One’s Self I Sing‖, the theme of the poem, namely the celebration of both oneself and the whole human beings, is realized at various levels. In this renowned short poem, Whitman trumpets the individualism that underlies American democracy and society, interpreting the politics of democracy into terms of everyday life. The poem is also presented as a drama of democratic identity in which the poet seeks to balance and reconcile major conflicts in the body politic of America: the conflict between "separate person" and "en masse," individualism and equality, liberty and union, female and male, or even alluding to the conflict with the South and the North, the farm and the city, labor and capital, black and white, religion and science.In Whitman’s ―One’s Self I Sing‖, the theme of the poem, namely the celebration of both oneself and the whole human beings, is realized at various levels. In this renowned short poem, Whitman trumpets the individualism that underlies American democracy and society, interpreting the politics of democracy into terms of everyday life. The poem is also presented as a drama of democratic identity in which the poet seeks to balance and reconcile major conflicts in the body politic of America: the conflict between "separate person" and "en masse," individualism and equality, liberty and union, female and male, or even alluding to the conflict with the South and the North, the farm and the city, labor and capital, black and white, religion and science.。
美国文学史名词解释
1.American Puritanism清教It 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.Characteristics: 特点1. Idealistic: Puritans pursue the purity and simplicity in worship. They focuse the glory of God, and the angry God.They believe in the doctrine of destiny, original sin, limited atonement2. Practical: Puritans come to Amrican to do business and make profits with the desire of chasing wealth and status. They have to struggle for survival under the severity of the western frontier.3 .The struggle between the spiritual and the material is the basics of the Puritan mind. On the one hand, Puritans chase the purity of the early church.On the other hand, they come to America to earn money. This contradictory will be reflected by their thoughts.4. In a word, it rests on purity, ambition, harding work, and an intense struggling for success.2.Romanticism浪漫主义: 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 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.3.Transcendentalism先验说,超越论:is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished 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.4.American Realism现实主义: 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 experience5.Local colorism乡土文学: is a type of writing that was popular in the late 19th century, particularly among the authors in the south of the U.S.. this style relied heavily on using words, phrases, and slang that were native to the particular region in which the story took place. 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)humor. A well-known local colorism author was Mark Twain with his books Tom Sowyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.6.Naturalism自然主义: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism.It was initiated in France. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变）that undermined the comforting faith of an ear lier age. America’s literary naturalists attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.7.Stream of consciousness意识流：It is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing thatattempts 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 .。
美国文学史名词解释
1、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 the 1920s. The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used 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 alienation from a U.S. that, b asking under President Harding's “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the '20s. They were never a literary school. In the 1930s, 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 TenderLost generationThe lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>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.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.Lost generationThe Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who used “a lost generation” to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I experiences and disillusioned with American society. Hemingway later used the phrase as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises. It consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams and Archibald MacLeish.2、Iceberg TheoryIt 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.Iceberg TheoryErnest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” suggest s that the writer include in the text only a small portion of what he knows, leaving about ninety percent of the content a mystery that grows beneath the surface of the writing. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity ofmovement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A good writer does not need to reveal every detail of a character or actionThere is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows. Anything you know you can eliminate and it only strengthens your iceberg. It is the part that doesn’t show. (1938)（PPT）3、Code heroThe Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words. That is an individualist keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place. These people are usually spiritual strong, people of certain skills, and most of them encounter death many times. The heroes in his book are all have something in common which Hemingway values: they have seen the cold world and for one cause or another, they boldly and courageously face the reality; whatever the result is, they are ready to live with grace under pressure. The Hemingway code hero has an indestructible spirit for his optimistic view of life, though he is pessimistic that is Hemingway.4、StreamofconsciousnessThecontinuousflowofsense-perceptions,thoughts,feelings,andmemoriesinthehumanmi nd:oraliterarymethodofrepresentingsuchablendingofmentalprocessesinfictionalcharact ers,usuallyinanunpunctuatedordisjointformofinteriormonologue.注：sense-perceptions：认知，观念blending：混合物unpunctuated:未加标点的Disjoint：脱节5、ImagismA poetic movement of England and the U.S. that 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. “poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impressions”The leaders of this movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.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 does not contribute to the presentation.[3] rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the sequence of a metronome.[4]pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known poem.Major features:--- it was one of the most essential technique of writing poetry in modern period.--- with a spirit of revolt against conventions, imagism was anti—romantic andanti-victorian--- In a sense, imagism was equivalent to naturalism in fiction--- it produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern.--- Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet.--- it produced free verse without imposing a rhythmical pattern.--- Imagism tried to record objective observations of an object or a situation without interpretation or comment by the poet.The most outstanding figures:Ezra Pound Amy Lowell Hilda DoolittleThe form of free verse (Ezra Loomis Pound)影响its influence1)the imagist theories call for brief language, describing the precise picture in as few words as possible. This new way of poetry composition has a lasting influence in the 20th century poetry.2)the second lasting influence of Imagism is the form of free verse. There are no metrical rules. There are apparent indiscriminate line breaks, which reflects the discontinuity of life itself. That is art of the poem. The poet uses the length of the lines and the strange groupings of words to show how life itself can be broken up into somehow meaningless clusters6、ModernismModern writing is marked by a strong and conscious break with traditional forms and techniques of expression; it believes that we create the world in the act of perceiving it. Modernism implies historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, of loss, and of despair. It elevates the individual and his inner being over social man and prefers the unconscious to the self-conscious.Modernism（来自老师的PPT)A general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental andavant-garde trends in the literature and other arts of the early 20th century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dada, and Surrealism, along with the innovations of unaffiliated writers.7、The Harlem RenaissanceThe Harlem Renaissance, a flowering of literature (and to a lesser extent other arts) in New York City during the 1920s and 1930s, has long been considered by many to be the high point in African 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 could 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 Renaissance 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 Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer.Harlem Renaissance主要作品：The Weary Blues, The Dream keeper and Other Poems, Fine Clothes to the Jew8、Postmodernism(From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)Postmodernism is a term which describes the postmodernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements. It is in general the erathat follows Modernism.It frequently serves as an ambiguous overarching term forskeptical interpretations of culture, literature, art, philosophy, economics, architecture, fiction, and literary criticism. It is often associated with deconstruction and post-structuralism because its usage as a term gained significant popularity at the same time as twentieth-century post-structural thought.后现代主义是一个术语，它描述了后现代主义运动在艺术，文化倾向和相关的文化运动。
美国文学期末整理
美国文学史名词解释及五大流派分析Native American oral literature is of three types: origin stories, trickster tales, and historical narratives.Origin stories are those dramatizing tribal interpretations of how the earth originated or of how people established relationships with plants, animals and the cosmos Trickster tales are humorous tales featuring trickster characters. Trickster figures are people in the form of animals or half animal and half human. They often exist on the margins of the social worldHistorical narratives are diverse in kind. Of this vast historical literature, many stories recount European colonization from the perspective of Native Americans. Puritanism A Puritan was any person who tried to become more pure through worship and doctrine. The Puritans' way of life and set of beliefs were called Puritanism. The most important parts of Puritanism were piety (obeying religious rules), dressing simply, and living a modest life. And “original sin(原罪)” and “grace” are two important premises in Puritanism.Witchcraft trials in the 17th century were a deeply troubling yet significant phenomenon with the puritan community. In 1542, the English Parliament made a capital offense. Subsequently, several hundred people were accused and hanged. A witch was supposed to be someone who performed evil deeds in the service of Satan. They were believed to have familiars or animals that would do evil for them. Witchcraft trials-so it is argued- were perhaps a way to punish improper behavior or to restrict power.Enlightenment, starting in the 17th century with the scientific revolution, was a momentous intellectual movement that gradually established a system of modern values that emphasize reason, science, knowledge and progress. In America, enlightenment ideas nurtured a greater participatory and interest in worldly affairs: Americans gained greater confidence that a more reasonable political and social order could be established. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, Americans also learned to take actions to resist oppressive power and to criticize and reform government. The Enlightenment developed quite rigorously in France and otherEuropean countries in the 18th century. It was also in the 18th that influences of the Enlightenment reached the colonies of America.AutobiographyNegative capability was first used by the British romantic poet John Keats. In the letter written in December 1817, Keats defined is as the capability in good poets of including uncertainties and other negative emotions without stretching for reason and without losing reason. The negative capability, by immersing us in ambiguities, doubts and other negative emotions, in fact strengthens us and improves our judgment by complicating our existing system of judgment. It is therefore a sign of the kind of aesthetic sophistication found only in good poets.Free verse is the kind of poetry that does not follow a regular meter, does not rhyme and does not use regular line lengths. And it is known as Walt Whitman’s major technical innovation.Local colorism is a unique variation of American literary realism. Generally, the works by local colorists are concerned with the life of a small region or province. This kind of fiction depicts the characters from a specific setting or of an era, which are marked by its customs, dialects, landscape, or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influence. Tasks of local colorists: to write or present local characters of their region in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.local color writing, a kind of fiction that came to prominence in the USA in the late 19th century, and was devoted to capturing the unique customs, manners, speech, folklore, and other qualities of a particular regional community, usually in humorous short stories. Local color writings are just as dependent upon a specific geographical location, but they lend more emphasis to the local details by tapping into its folklore, history, mannerism, customs, beliefs and speech. Above all, dialect peculiarities are the defining characteristics of local color writings.Imagism was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. Imagism called for a return to what were seen as more Classical values, such as directness of presentation and economy oflanguage, as well as a willingness to experiment with non-traditional verse forms. Transcendentalism is a religious and philosophical movement that developed during the late 1820s and 1830s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest against the general state of spirituality. And Transcendentalism energized the Romantic Movement that had started earlier. Transcendentalists were strong believers in the power of the individual and divine messages. Their beliefs are closely linked with those of the Romantics.Among the transcendentalists' core beliefs was the inherent goodness of both people and nature. They believe that society and its institutions—particularly organized religion and political parties—ultimately corrupt the purity of the individual. They have faith that people are at their best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. It is only from such real individuals that true community could be formed.As an intensified expression of romanticism, Transcendentalism shares the characteristics of romanticism and its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.The publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Nature is usually considered the moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement.Emerson pronounces the fundamental premise about Nature in Transcendentalism, that is, Nature is not simply the Not-Me but also the universal mind whose signs can be read by the individual with his eyes, heart, and mind.And The Over-Soul, the soul of all individuals commune with the great universal soul, presents the more mystical side of Emerson and the basis of Transcendentalism. It refers to the profound and all-encompassing spiritual nature to which each individual soul should lie open.Thoreau, Emerson’s disciple, practiced the self-reflective and self-reliant Transcendentalism that Emerson preached. Today he is remembered by two of his work: Walden and the essay “Civil disobedience”.Romanticism The romantic period, one of the most important periods in the history of American literature, stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civi l War. It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book .It isalso called the “American Renaissance”Here is a summary of some general characteristics of romanticism.First, romanticism celebrates the triumph of feeling and intuition over reason. A philosophical cornerstone for the romantic resistance to rationalism was laid down by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. Since romantic writers placed a higher value on the free expression of emotion and on the power of imagination, they showed greater interests in the psychic states. As a result, characters in romantic stories sometimes showed extremes of sensitivity.Second, Gothic styles, Oriental styles and other exotic styles were favored by romanticists.Third, romanticism exalted the individual over society, thus showing a strong disliking for the bondage of convention and customs. As it is sometimes the contradiction, nostalgia for the past traditions is also a romantic strain.Fourth, nature is believed to be the source of goodness and the antithesis of society as society tend to be corrupt. A related manifestation is the moral enthusiasm exhibited in some romantic writers.Fifth, cultural nationalism- the proud belief in one’s own cultural genius and heritage- is also a striking characteristic of romanticism. Johnann Gottfried von Herder proposed the idea of V olk which had since become synonymous with cultural nationalism. With V olk, Herder argued for the unique characteristics of a people or nation. V olkgeist , a derivative, thus connotes the celebration of geniuses created by and for a nationalist culture.American romanticism was influenced by European romanticism. While showing characteristics of European romanticism, American romantic writers differed from their European counterparts in that they did not show the kind of political racialism as seen in European romanticism.Realism Following a conventional view, 1865 and 1914 are regarded as the beginning and ending dates for the age of American realism. In the 50-year period, realism was the prevalent literary mode. But realism, as a broader term, is also inclusive of naturalism, regionalism, and local color writing.Realism reacts a gainst romanticism’s emphasis on intuition, imagination, a dreamy sense of wonder, idealism, faith in nature, and general optimistic belief in the goodness of things.Realists claim that they seek truth that is verifiable by experience and has practical consequences.Realism is embedded in a mimetic theory of art.Realists try to describe a small portion of knowable world in order to maintain objectivity.Local color and regional writings constituted the early stage of realism. Naturalism is another variation of realism in that it follows or implies a biological or socioeconomic determination.The foremost American realists were William Dean Howells realism’s most vocal proponent.Henry James，the greatest of the realists and often called “the father of the p sychological novel”. And his most three famous works are The Wing of Dove,The Ambassadors,and the Golden Bowl. The two best-known novellas are Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw.Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow and Mark Twain (1835-1910) is usually counted among the realists, although his fidelity in capturing the essence of a region and its people often departs from realism by presenting exaggerated characters in lurid action and improbable melodrama.Naturalism was a term created by Emile Zola, a French novelist. It refers to the idea that art and literature should show the world and people scientifically and exactly as they are. American literary naturalism developed out of literary realism and shares some o f its characteristics. Like realism, the naturalists in America strove for objectivity and were interested in the commonplace in contemporary life. But unlike the realists, they were more conscious of their philosophical foundations which draw upon scientific or socioeconomic determinations for its view of humanity. Applying these principles, naturalist writers tended to produce literature that is pessimistic, expressing their belief that humans react to thins they cannot control, such as thebiological need for sex and self-preservation, internal stresses, and environmental forces.Modernism is the term applied to an international movement dominating the arts of Western culture from shortly after the turn of the century until around 1950.In general, Modernism discloses a rejection of tradition and a hostile attitude toward the immediate past.Firstly, American modernism is the process of American literature merging into the mainstream of Western modern culture.Secondly, literary modernists are just as concerned with reality as the realists are. However, the modernists have a more complex view of reality. Modernists believe that reality is experienced from different perspectives and at different levels. Thirdly, there is the question of paradigm from modernism. For a long time, it was not uncommon to assume that modernism is an obsessive stylistic experimentation informed by “waste land” view of existence.Based on the afore-mentioned observations, American modernism is less nationalistic but more European and modernists are more aware of how language constitutes and shapes realityIn literature prominent Modernists were T. S. Eliot the waste land, Ezra Pound the cantos.。
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 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。
美国文学名词解释整理版
Colonial Period:1.American Puritanism（p16）It is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans.,who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. They werea group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious andmoral principles. They wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination original sin and total depravity and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind.Romanticism Period:2.Romanticism(p32)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 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.3.American Romantism(P34)①it is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature that stretches from the 18th century to the outbreak of the civil war. It started with the publication of Washington Irving‟s The Sketch Book and ended with Walt Whitman‟s Leaves of Grass.②being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance ”.③American romantic works emphasize the imaginative and emotional qualities of nature literature. The strong tendency to eulogize the individual and common man was typical of this period. Most importantly, the writings of American Romanticism are typically American. Works concentrate on unique characteristics of the American land.⑤Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.4.Gothic tradition (哥特传统)Gothic novel or Gothic romance is a story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery very popular late in the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century.In an extended sense, many novels do not have a medievalzed setting, but share a comparably sinister, grotesque, or claustrophobic atmosphere have been classed as Gothic. It contributed to the new emotional climate of Romanticism.5.Transcendentalism (先验说,超越论)(p47)It is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished 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,stress the importance of the Over-soul, the Individual and Nature.The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau.6.Stream of consciousness（意识流）：It is one of the modern literarytechniques. 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. 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。
美国文学史名词解释
1、Romanticism浪漫主义a movement of the 18th and 19th century that affected the whole of Europe and America.It is the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules and over the sense of fact or the actual, a psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities.Romanticism was a movement in literature, philosophy, music and art which developed in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.It emphasized individual values and aspirations above those of society as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution.It looked to the Middle Ages and to direct contact with nature for inspiration的特点：frequently shared certain general characteristics, moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that he natural world was a source of corruption.浪漫主义之间大多是相通的，都注重道德，强调个人主义价值观和直觉感受，并且认为自然是美的源头，人类社会是腐败之源。
美国文学史及选读名词解释
美国文学史及选读名词解释本文出自网络，作者不详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. His art was firmly rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he cherished his freedom as an artist. He was both nationalist 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 Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden (1854), and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties, as evidenced in the essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849).In his writings Thoreau was concerned primarily with the possibilities for human culture provided by the American natural environment. He adapted ideas garnered from the then-current Romantic literatures in order to extend American libertarianism and individualism beyond the political and religious spheres to those 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 practical action, he demonstrated the uses and values of leisure, contemplation, and a harmonious appreciation 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 the 1920s and 1930s, has long been considered by many to be the high point in African 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 could 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 Renaissance 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 Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, James Weldon Johnson, and Jean Toomer.5. Mark Twainpseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens American humorist, writer, and lecturer who won a worldwide 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 the history of American literature. Whitman's greatest theme is a symbolic identification of the regenerative power of nature with the deathless divinity of the soul. His poems are filled with a religious 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 formation. The poetic “I” of Leaves of Grass transcends time and space, binding the past with the present and intuiting the future, illustrating Whitman's belief that poetry is a form of knowledge, the supreme 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 the 1920s. The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used 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 alienation from a U.S. that, basking under President Harding's “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provinc ial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the '20s. They were never a literary school. In the 1930s, 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. Nature, “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 initiate 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 thought and intuition; it determined men physically and psychologically; and yet it made them victims of circumstance, beingswhose superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly ascertaining reality. Emerson asserts the human ability to transcend the materialistic world of sense experience and facts and become conscious of theall-pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities of human freedom. Emerson's doctrine of self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his view 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 himself 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 much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate technique. His keen and sound judgment 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. Much of Poe's best work is concerned with terror and sadness. His yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitiveness to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired his 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 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. Benjamin FranklinAmerican printer and publisher, author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. Franklin, next to George Washington possibly the most famous 18th-century American. He established the Poor Richard of his almanacs as an oracle on how to get ahead in the world, and become widely known in European scientific circles for his reports of electrical experiments and theories and wrote his Autobiography which is a great contribution to the American literature.12. Ernest HemingwayAmerican novelist and short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. 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 fiction in the 20th 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 Hemingway a potent symbol of the world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as “the Hemingway code.”13. Sherwood Andersonauthor who strongly influenced American writing between World Wars I and II, particularly the technique of the short story. His writing had an impact on such notable writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, both of whom owe the first publication of their books to his efforts. His prose 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
Puritanism:is the religious belief of the Puritans, who had intended to “purify” or simplify the reli gious rituals of the Church of England. They believed in the original sin and the harsh Day ofDoom, although some good people --- the chosen people or “the Elect” --- may be sav ed.Their way of life was based on their somber religion and stressed hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety. Puritans are more practical, tougher, and to be ever ready for any m isfortune and tragic failure. They areoptimistic.American Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in A merican thought and American literature.Transcendentalism:Following the rise of romanticism, Transcendentalism, which appeared after 1830, ma rked the maturity of American romanticism and the first renaissance in the American l iterary history. the term transcendentalism was derived from the Latin verb transcende re, meaning to rise above, or to pass beyond the limits. In a general sense it may be us ed in English to refer to any philosophy which teaches the transcendent nature of ulti mate reality. Transcendentalism was a romantic idealism, or philosophical romanticis m. It may also be regarded as a considerable-scale ideological and cultural revolution after American people struggled to get free from the English colonial rule. American Naturalism:American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. The naturalists attempt to achiev e extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by environment and heredity. It emphasized that the wo rld was amoral, the men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by her edity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser.The Gilded Age:the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the Unite d States during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th centur y. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in t heir 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrial economy. The end of the Gilded Age coincided wit h the Panic of 1893, a deep depression. The depression lasted until 1897 and marked a major political realignment in the election of 1896. After that came the Progressive E ra.The Lost Generation:The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in P aris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group was given its name by the American write r Gertrude Stein, who used a lost generation to refer to expatriate Americans bitter abo ut their World War I experiences and disillusioned with American society. Hemingwa y later used the phrase as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises. It consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams and Archibald MacLeish.Harlem Renaissance:The Harlem Renaissance was a flowering of the arts in the 1920‟s and 30s.African A mericans used writing, music, and art to demonstrate strong beliefs.Many of these beliefs were mphasized the necessity of black liberation, retaining blac k cultural pride, and not giving into white standards.Especially the awareness of the bl ack‟s identity.//Harlem became the biggest hot spot in America for any aspiring Afric an American artist. The city came alive at night as bars and clubs burst with music an d dancing.//Responding to the heady intellectual atmosphere of the time and place, wr iters and artists, many of whom lived in Harlem, began to produce a wide variety of fi ne and highly original works dealing with African-American life.//These works attract ed many black readers.//HR was more than just a literary movement: it included racial consciousness, …the back to Africa‟ movement led by Marcus Garvey, racial integrat ion, the exploring of music particularly jazz, spirituals and blues, painting, dramatic re vues, and others. It was a huge leap for black liberation and culture.Catch-22:Catch-22 is a general critique of bureaucratic operation and reasoning. Resulting from its specific use in the book, the phrase "Catch-22" is common idiomatic usage meani ng "a no-win situation" or "a double bind" of any type. The term was originally from J oseph Heller…s anti novel Catch-22.The Beat Generation:group of American writers of the 1950s whose writing expressed profound dissatisfact ion with contemporary American society and endorsed an alternative set of values. Th e term sometimes is used to refer to those who embraced the ideas of these writers. Th e Beat Generation's best-known figures were writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack Keroua c.Psychological Realism:it is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters‘ thoughts and motivations. It places more than the usual amount of emphasis on int erior characterization and on the motives, and internal action which springs from and develops external action. In Psychological Realism, character and characterization are more than usually important. Henry James is considered a great master of psychologi cal realism.Free V erse:free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to a void any predetermined verse structure, instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech . While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse form do, free ver se dose so in a looser way. Walt Whitman…s poetry is an example of free verse. Confessional Poetry:it is a type of modern poetry in which poets speak with openness and frankness about their own lives, such as in poems about illness, sexuality and despondence. Robert Lo well, Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg and Theodore Roethke are the most important American poets.Imagism:It‟s a poetic movement of England and the U.S. flourished from 1909 to 1917.Themovement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.The Jazz age:The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between world w ar I and world war II. Particularly in north America. With the rise of the great depressi on, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald‘s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonis m, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining t he term‖ Jazz Age‖.Black Humor:the use of morbid and the absurd for darkly comic purposes in modern fiction and dra ma. The term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness as it does to the grotes que and morbid situations, which often deal with suffering, anxiety, and death. Black humor is a substantial element in the Anti-novel and the Theatre of Absurd. Joseph He ller's Catch-22 is an almost archetypal example.Local Color:Local Color or Regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. It may be defined as the careful attegogoms in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. The social and intellectual climate of the country provided a stimulating milieu for the growth of local color fiction in America. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. They formed an important part of the realistic movement. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the 19th century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of author.Y oknapatawpha saga:Most of Faulkner‟s works are set in the American South, with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness. They are about people from a sma1l region in Northern Mississippi, Y oknapatawpha County, which is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkner‟s childhood memory about the town of Oxford in his native Lafayette County. With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom. The Y oknapatawpha stories deal, generally, with the historical period from the Civil War up to the 1920s when the First World War broke out, and people of a stratified society, the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the blacks. As a result, Y oknapatawpha County has become an allegory or a parable of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society. The Y oknapatawpha saga is Faulkner‟s real achievement.。
(完整word版)美国文学史名词解释
美国文学史名词解释Romanticism1. The American Romanticism covers the first half of the 19th century。
2. American Romanticism was both imitative and independent. Some of American romantic writing was modeled on English and European works. While it was in essence the expression of “a real new experience” and contained “an alien quality” for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place” was radically new and alien。
3。
The American national experience of “pioneering” into the west proved to be a rich fund of material for American writers to draw upon。
4。
The “newness” of the Americans as a nation is another major element connected with American Romanticism. Their ideals of individualism and political equality, and their dream that America was to be a new Garden of Eden for man were distinctly American. 5。
In technique they loved traditional meters and stanza forms； in language their English was usually British.6。
（完整版）美国文学史期末考试名词解释
（完整版）美国⽂学史期末考试名词解释2013-2014第⼆学期《美国⽂学》考查范围I.名词解释部分 20%1.Black Humorhe term black humor was created in 1920s, but it was not noticed until 1960s. It was particularly a literary phenomenon in America after WWII. Black humor,in literature, is drama, novel, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity,paradox and cruelty of the modern world.Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic face. Josegh Heller and Kury Vonnegut are famous for their novels of black humor. Especially Heller?s Catch—22.2.American TranscendentalismThe emergence of the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place during the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy extended much farther back into American religious history. Transcendentalism and evangelical Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from American Puritanism, taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe. They stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society. They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with God’s overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses. Emerson’s Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” and his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as America’s “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”.3.Jazz AgeThe Jazz Age refers to the period of the 1920s when Traditional values of the previous period declined while the American stock market soared. The age takes its name from popular music, which saw a tremendous surge in popularity. The characters of Jazz Age novels live in restless pursuit of stimulus and pleasure and wallow in heavy drinking,fast driving and casual sex.The phrase was coined by Fitzgerald,who greatly criticized this new era of 'relaxation' in novels such as The Great Gatsby.4.The Lost GenerationAfter the WWI, some young writers chose Paris as their place of exile and used their wartime experience as the basis for their works.Those young people were not off from old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era. They wondered pointlessly and restlessly, while at the same time were aware that the world was crazy and meaningless.The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers:1>men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>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.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.5.Harlem RenaissanceThe Harlem Renaissance, known as the "New Negro Movement", was a literary and intellectual flowering that fostered a new black cultural identity in the 1920s and 1930s.During this period, the black community was able to seize upon its "first chances for group expression and self determination." the Harlem Renaissance is considered to have transformed "social disillusionment to race pride."6.ImagismA poetic movement of England and the U.S. that 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. “poetic techniques to record exactly 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 does not contribute to the presentation.[3] rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the s equence of a metronome.7.Free Versefree verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length, and that attempts avoid 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 verse does so in a looser way. Whitman’s poetry is an example of free verse at it s most impressive,for example Song of Myself. It has since been used Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other major American poets of the 20th century.Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps , the most notable example.8.TragedyIn general, a literary work in which the protagonist meets an unhappy or disastrous end. Unlike comedy, tragedy depicts the actions of a central character who is usually dignified or heroic.9.MythMyth is a fictional tale originally with religious significance,which explains the actions of gods or heroes,the causes of natural phenomena,or both.Allusions to characters and motifs from Greek,Roman,Celtic myths are common in English literature.10.PostmodernismA term referring to certain radically experimental works of literature and art produced after World War II. Postmodernism is distinguished from modernism,which generally refers to the revolution in art and literature that occurred during the period of 1910 through 1930,particularly following the disillusion experience of World War I.The postmodern era,with its potential for mass destruction and its shocking history of genocide,has evoked a continuing disillusionment similar to that widely experienced during the Modern period.Much of postmodernist writing reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals and the mindlessness of human existence.Postmodernists frequently stress that human desperately(and ultimately unsuccessfully)cling to illusions of security to conceal and forget the void over which their lives are perched.II⽂本解读部分（50%）以问答作业中出现的作家，作品为主。
美国文学史名词解释
A m e r i c a n P u r i t a n i s m美国清教主义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.美国清教主义指的是清教徒的精神和理想的定居在北美大陆十七世纪初期由于内容的宗教迫害;It migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England. 它为新英格兰奠定了宗教,知识和社会秩序的基础; Puritans adhered to the Five Points of Calvinism as codified at the Synod of Dort: unconditional election, limited atonement, total depravity, irresistible grace and the perseverance of the saints. 清教徒遵循加尔文派于多特宗教会议上制定的五点信条：无条件拣选,有限救赎,完全堕落,不可抗拒的恩典,以及圣徒的坚守;It is basis of American literature. All literature is based on a myth –garden of Eden.It contributing to the development of Symbolism: a technique, widely used.它是美国文学的基础;所有文学基于一个神话——伊甸园;它的发展导致的象征主义:技术,广泛使用;American Romanticism 美国浪漫主义The Romantic Period, one of the most important periods in the history of American literature, stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It started with the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass.浪漫主义时期是美国文学历史上最重要的时期,从18世纪末延伸至爆发内战;它始于华盛顿·欧文的见闻札记,以惠特曼的草叶集结束;In literature it was America’s first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impulse on American soil. 在文学上,这个时期是美国第一次伟大的创作期,浪漫主义的种子在北美的土壤里生根发芽;American romanticism was in essence the expression of “a real new experience”and contained “an alien quality” for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place” was radically new and alien.美国浪漫主义在本质上是一个“全新的经历”的表达,因为这个新大陆充满着生机和活力而使美国的浪漫主义蕴含异国的气质;Puritan influence over American romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. American romantic authors tended more to moralize. Many American romantic writings intended to edify more than they entertained.清教主义对美国浪漫主义有着显着的影响;浪漫主义作家往往更讲道德;许多浪漫主义作品旨在陶冶他们过瘾了;Subjectivity, back to medieval, esp medieval folk literature, back to nature is romanticism’s characteristics. 主体性,回到中世纪,尤其是中世纪民间文学,回归自然是浪漫主义的特征;It stressing emotion rather than reason, stressing freedom and individuality, Idealism rather than materialism. Writing about nature, medieval legends and with supernatural elements. 强调情感,而不是原因,强调自由和个性,理想主义,而不是唯物主义;写关于自然、中世纪的传说和超自然的元素American Transcendentalism 美国超验主义It is the summit of American Romanticism. The beliefs that God is immanent in each person and in nature and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority. 它是美国浪漫主义的顶峰;超验主义者认为人人都有内在的神性,只有通过接触自然才能使神性与人的天性相融合,从而超验主义十分强调个人主义、自立、拒绝传统权威思想;The transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. They stressed the importance of the individual. Taking nature as the symbol of the Spirit. 超验主义者强调精神,或超灵,认为它是是宇宙中最重要的事情;他们强调个人的重要性,以自然为精神的象征;It helped to create the first American renaissance –one of the most prolific period in American literature. It marked the independence of American literature. 建立第一个美国文艺复兴时期,美国文学中最多产时期之一;标志着美国文学的独立;The ideas of transcendentalism were most eloquently expressed by Emerson in such essays as Nature, and Self-Reliance and by Thoreau in his book Walden.超验主义思想在爱默生的论自然和论自立以及梭罗的瓦尔登湖等书中表现的淋漓尽致;Free verse 自由诗Free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; it uses the cadences of nature speech. Free verse does so in a looser way. Whitman’s poetry is an example of free verse at its most impressive. Such as the Song of Myself. Whitman who pioneered the form and made it acceptable in American poetry. 自由诗是一种诗体,押韵和句子长度都不规则,而是采取正常说话的方式,避免固定的诗体结构;它使用大自然的韵律演讲;自由诗比较松散;惠特曼的诗歌是自由诗的最好例子;例如自我之歌;惠特曼被认为是美国自由诗的先驱;Alliteration 头韵It refers to the repetition of the same sounds----usually initial consonants of words or of stressed syllables----in any sequence of neighboring words:”Landscape-lover, lord of language”Tennyson. Such poetry, in which alliteration rather than rhyme is the chief principle of repetition, is known as alliteration verse. 头韵是两个单词或两个单词以上的首字母相同,形成悦耳的读音,最常见的押头韵的短语”Landscape-lover, lord of language”丁尼生;主要使用重复头韵的诗歌被称为头韵体诗歌,其元音相互押韵;Scarlet Letter A: Adultery to Able to Angel Nathaniel Hawthorne Characters: Hester Prynne heroine, attractive, active towards the sinRoger Chillingworth Hester's husband, emotionless, only thinking about revenge, real vallain in the novel, signifying pure intellect which was merciless in Hawthorne's mindArthur Dimmesdale a handsome and admirable young priest, contraditionary on the sin he made with Hester, being a brave man at last Theme: The theme of the story should be the moral, emotional and psychological effects of the sin on people.Scarlet Letter is a cultural allegory, in which the author indirectly tells the future of Puritanism.Scarlet Letter is a sample in which American Romanticism adapted itself to American Puritanism.Because of the strong influence of Puritanism in American society, Hawthorne only expressed his ideas on the sin indirectly by employing symbolism.Moby Dick Herman MelvilleMoby-dick is regarded as the Great American Novel, the first American prose epic. known as the whaling encyclopedia.Moby-Dick tells the story how Ahab,the captain of a whaling ship,is determined to kill the white whale for it has crippled one of his legs.Ambiguity You can understand his Moby Dick differently.First, it can be understand as a tragedy of man fighting against overwhelming odds in an indifferent and even hostile universe. Thus, Captain Ahab is a hero who dares to fight though he failed at last.Nowadays some new research indicated that the story means man should protect the nature otherwise man will be punished as those whalers in the story were punished by the whale.Symbolismthe voyage: the search for the ultimate truth of experience.Moby Dick: the final mystery of the universe which man will do well to desist from pursuing.style: periodical chapters; rich rhythmical prose; great poetical power.。
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.。
美国文学名词解释（★）
美国文学名词解释（★）第一篇：美国文学名词解释1.AmericanTranscendentalism:①transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “ the recognition in man of the capability of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses.②transcendentalists stress the importance of the Over-soul, the Individual and Nature.Other concepts that accompanied transcendentalism include the idea that nature is enabling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore, self-reliant.New England transcendentalism is the product of a combination of Native American Puritanism and European romanticism.③some prominent representatives include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau.2.Free verse free verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conversational rules of meter.Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19th century.Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead the free rhymes of nature period.Walt Whitman…s leaves of grass is perhaps the most notable example.3.American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the puritans.The Puritans were originally members of a division of the protestant church who wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices.They accepted the doctrines of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God.American literature in the 17th century mostly consisted of Puritan literature.Puritanism had an enduring influence on American literature.It had become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, so much a part of nationalcultural atmosphere, rather than a set of tenets.it 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.4.American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough.It usually implies a successful and satisfying 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 Rights.5.Imagism: the 1920s saw a vigorous literary activity in America.In poetry there appeared a strong reaction against Victorian poetry.Imagists placed primary reliance on the use of precise, sharp images as a means of poetic expression and stressed precision in the choice of words, freedom in the choice of subject matter and form, andthe use of colloquial language.Most of the imagist poets wrote in free verse, using such devices as assonance and alliteration rather than formal metrical schemes to give structure to their poetry..The movement which had these as its aims is known in literary history as Imagism.Its prime mover was Ezra Pound.6.American romanticism①it is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature that stretches from the 18th century to the outbreak of the civil war.It started with the publication of Washington Irving‟s The Sketch Book and ended with Walt Whitman‟s Leaves of Grass.②being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance ”.③American romantic works emphasize theimaginative and emotional qualities of nature literature.The strong tendency to eulogize the individual and common man was typical of this period.Most importantly, the writings of American Romanticism are typically American.Works concentrate on uniquecharacteristics of the American land.④New England Transcendentalism is the summit of American R omanticism.⑤Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.第二篇：美国文学名词解释1.Naturalism:American naturalism was a new and harsher realism.America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths.They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity.Puritanism:Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans.They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God.3.Realism: Realism emphasizes on 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.4.Romanticism: romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and m an’s societies a source ofcorruption.Transcendentalism:They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and stressed the importance of the individual.They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God.Nature was, to them, alive, filled with Go d’s overwhelming presence.6.Imagism意象主义: 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.7.Local Colorism: fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features – including characters, dialects, customs, history, and landscape –of a particular region.8.Lost Generation: It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles.It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi poverty.It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world.9.Beat Generation: It was a group of American post-World War IIwho came to prominence in the 1950s.They rejected conventional social and moral values;expressed their alienation in their works from conventional “square” society by adopting a life style which featured sex, drugs, jazz and the freedom of the open road.10.Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique of using symbols.It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one word.It’s one of the most powerful devices that poets employ in creation.11.Modernism：is loosely a synonym of anything contemporary.Strictly, Modernism began in the late 19th century and regarded the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base.They pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one.12.A Jazz age(爵士时代):The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s.With the rise of the greatdepression, the values of this age saw much decline.Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.第三篇：文学名词解释文学名词解释提前注明：名词解释是有技巧性的，要交代年代，作者，代表作，文学特征，文学的历史作用等等，以及对后世的影响。
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美国文学选读复习资料American Puritanism: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 coincident with 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 RomanticismThe 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 than reason 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 and express 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（“Th e Sketch Book of Geoffrey Grayon” “Bracebridge Hall”“Tales of a Traveller”“The History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus ”）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.Transcendentalism①The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe.②The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society.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.WritersEmerson’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 could not stop for DeathWilliam Faulkner(1897-1962 1949 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 and Catherine 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 Dick Other Works are: Billy Budd,Typee, Omoo, Mardi. Nathaniel HawthorneThe Scarlet LetterMosses from an Old Manse; Twice-Told Tales; The Marble Faun; The House of the Seven GablesRealismAs a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism with the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Roma nticism and sentimentalism, and paved the way to Modernism.This literary interest in the so-called “reality” of life started a new period in the American literary writing known as The Age of Realism.Psychological RealismIt is the realistic writing th at probes deeply into the complexities of characters’ thoughts and motivations. And Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. He believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware. Such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it.William Dean Howells：The Rise of Silas LaphamHenry James：The Portrait of a Lady (Isabel Archer; Madam Merle; Gilbert Osmond) Daisy Miller (Daisy; Mr. Winterbourne; Mr. Giovanelli)Local colorism: 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 outside world; (2)describing the exotic of the picturesque;(3)glorifying the past; (4) showing things as they are; (5) influence of setting on characters. The well known local colorism authors were Mark Twain with his book Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Bret Harte’s with his The Luck of the Roaring Camp.Black humor: the term black humor was created in 1920s, but it was not noticed until 1960s. it was particularly a literary phenomenon in America after WWⅡ. Black humor, in literature, is drama, novel, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic face. Josegh Heller and Kury V onnegut are famous for their novels of black humor. Especially Heller’s Catch—22.American Naturalism: The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to accout for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.2) naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.3>Dreiser with his Sister Carrie is a leading figure of his school. Imagism: A poetic movement of England and the U.S. that 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. “poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impre ssions”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 does not 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-known poem.Harlem Renaissance：Harlem Renaissance refers to a period of outstanding literary vigor and creativity that occurred in the United states during the 1920s.2> the Harlem Renaissance changed the images of literature created by many black and white American writers. New black images were no longer obedient and docile. Instead they showed a new confidence and racial pride. 3> the center of this movement was the vast black ghetto of Harlem. In New York City.4> the leading figures are langston Hughes, James W.Johnson.etc主要作品：The Weary Blues, The Dream keeper and Other Poems, Fine Clothes to the JewThe 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” (spiritu ally)There had been a big flush of new theories and new ideas in both social and natural sciences.Darwinism(Darwin), Socialism (Karl Marx), Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud)Lost generation:The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>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.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos.The Beat Generation:The Beat Generation is a group of American young writers and artists popular in the 1950s and early 1960s. the member of the beat generation were 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.Allegory is a narrative that serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories are written in the form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and almost any other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a story that has characters, a setting, as well as other types of symbols, that have both literal and figurative meanings. One well-known example of an allegory is Dante’s The Divine Comedy.In Inferno, Dante is on a pilgrimage to try to understand his own life, but his character also represents every man who is in search of his purpose in the world.Alliteration is a pattern of sound that includes the repetition of consonant sounds. The repetition can be located at the beginning of successive words or inside the words. Poets often use alliteration to audibly represent the action that is taking place.Aside is an actor’s speech, directed to the audience, that is not supposed to be heard by other actors on stage. An aside is usually used to let the audience know what a character is about to do or what he or she is thinking. Asides are important because they increase an audience's involvement in a play by giving them vital information pertaining what is happening, both inside of a character's mind and in the plot of the play.Gothic is a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects. Gothic literature was named for the apparent influence of the dark gothic architecture of the period on the genre. Also, many of these Gothic tales took places in such “gothic” surroundings. Other times, this story of darkness may occur in a more everyday setting, such as the quaint house where the man goes mad from the "beating" of his guilt in Edgar Al lan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.”In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were told from many different points of view.CATHARSIS is an emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragic artistic work.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 qualityof surrealistic paintings and writings. Sample surrealist writers include Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, and Franz Kafka.Black HumorBlack humor is a term used in literature, drama, and film. It refers to grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. For example, Catch-22 is the model representative of this type. The novels of such writers as Kurt V onnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.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 sin, total depravity and limited atonement for God’s grace. They also believed in hard worki ng, piety and sobriety. In a word, American Puritanism exerted great influences upon American thought and literature.。