美国文学 名词解释简答整理

I. 名词解释

Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were those who followed the doctrine of John Calvin and wanted to purify the Church of England. They believe that human beings were predestined by God before they were born. Some were God’s chosen people while others were damned to hell. No church or good works could save people. The sign of being God’s select people was the success in his work or the prosperity in his calling. They also argued that everyone should read Bible in order to find God’s will and establish a direct contact with God. American Puritanism also had an enduring influence on American literature.

was an important movement in philosophy and literature that flourished from 1830s to the Civil War. 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.

Realism refers to the literary tendency appeared after the American Civil War. The Americans began to be tired of the sentimental feelings of Romanticism. A new generation of writers came up with a new attitude characterized by a great interest in realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color.

Free verse is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventional rules of meter. The purpose was to deliver poetry from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate the free rhythms of natural speech. Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many modern American poets, including Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg.

Naturalism is a critical term applied to the method of literary composition that aims at a detached, subjective objectivity in the treatment of natural man. It holds to the philosophy of determinism, thus the naturalists writers does not attempt to make moral judgments, outgrown the 19th-century scientific thought. In a word, Naturalism developed on the basis of realism but went a step further than it in portraying social reality.

In the aftermath of World War I, many novelists produced a literature of disillusionment. Some lived in Europe. They seemed hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. They were known as the “lost generation”. Two of the representative writers of the “lost generation” were Hemingway and Fitzgerald

A literary movement launched by British and American poets early in the 20th century that advocated the use of free verse, common speech patterns, and clear concrete images as a reaction to Victorian sentimentalism.It was a movement in poetry represented by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, aiming at clarity of expression through the use of precise visual images.

When referring to literature, local color is a term applied to fiction or verse devoted to capturing the unique customs, manners, speech, and other qualities of a particular regional community, usually in humorous short stories. Local color writings came to prominence in the USA in the late 19th century. The most famous local colorist was Mark Twain; others included Bret Harte, Hamlin Garland, Kate Chopin, and Sarah Orne Jewett.

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 Puritanism

1). Total Depravity - the concept of Original Si

2). Unconditional Election - the concept of predestination

3). 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. 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 treat the 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.