美国文学选读名词解释

（清教主义）: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. ) 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 ,eapecially hostility to social pleasure and religion .

)with time passing it became a dominant factor in American life , one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and literature .to some extentit is a state of mind , a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the American breathes ,rather than a set of tenets.

）Actually it is a code of values , a philosophy of life and a point of view in American minds , also a two-faceted tradition of religious idealism and level -headed in common sense .

5）Major topic:American Puritanism

Introduction

There were no written literature among the more than 500 different Indian languages and tribal cultures，American writing began with the work of English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of readers in the mother country. Therefore the writing in this period was essentially two kinds:

（1）practical matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting, travel, etc. designed to inform people “at home” what life was like in the new world, and, often, to induce their immigration;

(2) highly theoretical, generally polemical(好辩的）, discussions of religious questions.

American Romanticism(浪漫主义)

I. What is Romanticism

a literary movement flourished as a cultural force

the early period and the late period.

associated with imagination and boundlessness,

as an historical movement it arose in the 18th and 19th centuries. The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U.

was Transcendentalism.

Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper,

and those of the late period contain Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe.

of American romanticism

(1) It was the expression of “a real new experience(全新体验)”.

(2) American Puritanism was a cultural heritage. Many American romantic writings intended to edify(启发) more than they entertained.

(3) American Romanticism is full of “newness(新奇)” .

Ideals：Individualism; political equality

Dream：America: a new Garden of Eden

American romanticism was both imitative and independent.

3..transcendentalism、（超验主义）transcendentalism: It stressed the power of intuition, believing that people could learn things both from the outside world by means of the five senses and from the inner world by intuition. It took nature as symbolic of spirit or God. All things in nature were symbols of the spiritual, of God’s presence. It emphasized the significance of the individual and believed that the individual was the most important element in society and that the ideal kind of individual was self-reliant and unselfish. Transcendentalists envisioned religion as an emotional communication between an individual soul and the universal “Oversoul”.

: It views human beings as animals in the natural world responding to environmental forces and internal stresses and drives, over none of which they have control and none of which they fully understand. The literary naturalists have a major difference from the realists. They look at a different spot to find real life.

verse: It is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length and that attempts to avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the cadences of natural speech.

novel: IN brings together persons of various nationalities who represent certain characteristics of their own countries.

lost generation: reveals the huge destruction of the wars to the young generation. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colo ny of “expatriates”. They were lost in disillusionment.

8,American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies