美国文学名词解释

名词解析1 American Romanticism 浪漫主义

The Romantic Period stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a period of the great flowering of American literature.

1. It started with the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book（1819）and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass（1855）;

2. It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense;

3. The writers emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group. They affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and the strange.

4. the writers stressed the element of “Amerianness”in their works;

5. Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called the American Renaissance;

2 American Transcendentalism

As a philosophical and literary movement, American Transcendentalism (also known as “ American Renaissance”) flourished in New England from the 1830s to the Civil War. It is the high tide of American romanticism and its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson and Thoreau. Transcendentalists spoke for the cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society.

Transcendentalism 超验主义(+ H. D. Thoreau; Nathaniel Hawthorne; )

The major features of Transcendentalism:

①The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. 思想超灵宇宙

②The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society. 个体+社会

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. 自然+上帝

3 Stream of Consciousness 意识流or “interior monologue”,内心独白is one of the

modern literary techniques. 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.

4 Realism

As a literary movement, the Age of Realism came into existence after Romanticism with the Civil War It was a reaction against “the lie” of Romanticism 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 Realism

It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters’thoughts and