美国文学名词解释和作家介绍

The first Puritan colonists who settled New England were known as the "Pilgrims," they were a believers who had migrated from England to Holland -- in 1608, during a time of persecutions.

1. Definitions of Puritans

The term "Puritan" first began as a taunt or insult applied by traditional Anglicans to those who criticized or wished to "purify" the Church of England.

2. Puritanism

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. In content it means scrupulous moral rigor, especially hostility to social pleasures and indulgences, that is strictness,sternness and austerity in conduct and religion

3. Enlightenment

The 18th-century American Enlightenment was a movement marked by an emphasis on rationality rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead of unquestioning religious dogma, and representative government in place of monarchy. Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality as the natural rights of man.

3.Transcendentalism:

As a philosophical and literary movement, transcendentalism flourished in New England from 1830s to the civil war. It stressed the intuitive understanding of God, without the church and advocates independence of the mind. The representatives are Emerson and Thoreau.

4. Oversoul:

Emerson’s word for God. Emerson rejected both the formal religion of the churches and the Deistic philosophy; instead he based his religion on an intuitive belief in an ultimate unity, which he called the “Over-soul. It is an impersonal force that is eternal,

moral, harmonious, and beneficent in tendency and an all-pervading power from which all things come from and of which all are a part. One of the tendencies of the "oversoul " is to express itself in form, hence the world of nature as an emanation of the world of spirit.

5.The Romantic movement,which originated in Germany but quickly spread to England, France, and reached America around the year 1820. It stressed individualism, affirmed the value of the common person, and looked to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values.

6．free verse : that is, poetry without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme, with Walt Whitman’s poetry as the best exemplification.

7.American realism?

As a literary movement realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against “the lie”of