文学名词解释

1. Short story: A fictional prose tale of no specified length, but too short to be published as a volume on its own. A short story will normally concentrate on a single event with only one or two characters, more economically than a novel’s sustained exploration of social background. The short story flourished in the magazines of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in the USA.

2. Plot: Plot is the first and most obvious quality of a story. Plot is what happens in a story. Unlike life, which is random and unpredictable, the story will usually be shaped by a chain of events, one leading inevitably to another in a line of rising action to a moment of crisis—the climax.

1. Autobiography: An autobiography is a person’s account of his or her life. Generally written in the first person, with the author speaking as “I”. Autobiographies present life events as the writer views them. In addition to providing inside details about the writer’s life, autobiographies offer insights into the beliefs and perceptions of the author. They also offer glimpse of what it was like to live in the author’s time period. They often provide a view of historical events that you won’t find in history books. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography set the standard for what was then a new genre.

1.Romanticism: 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 the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote the mysteries of life, love, birth and death. The romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials: poetry, essays, plays, fiction, history, works of travel, and biography.

1. 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.

1. 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.

1. Free verse: free verse is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventional 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.

1. Puritanism: The word is originally used to refer to the theory advocated by a party within the Church of England. It is also used to refer to attitudes and values considered characteristics of the Puritans. It denotes a rigid moral, or the condemnation of innocent pleasure, or religious narrowness adhered by the early New England Puritans. It exerted great influence over American Romanticism. The preoccupation with the Calvinist view of original sin and the mystery of evil marked the works by such famous writers as Hawthorne and Melville.

1. Imagism: Imagism is a school of poetry that flourished in North America and England at the beginning of the 20th century. Imagists rejected the sentimentalism of late 19th century verse in favor of the poetry that relied on concrete imagery. Ezra Pound originally led the movement. Amy Lowell soon became its proponent. The major criteria are : a) regularly use everyday speech but avoids clichés; b) create new rhythms; c) address any subject matter the poet desired; d)depict its subjects through precise, clear images. The poets include H.D., Carl Sandburg; William Carlos William, D. H. Lawrence etc.

1. The Beat Generation: The term Beat Generation was introduced by Jack Kerouac in approximately 1948 to describe his social circle to a novelist who published an early novel about the generation. The members of the beat generation were engaged in a spontaneous, 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 beat writings are Jack Herouac’s On the Road, Allan Ginsberg’s Howl and William Burrough s’Naked Lunch. 1. 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 an d 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.