美国文学重点名词解释

Puritanism:（Benjamin Franklin）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, which is strictness, sternness and austerity in conduct and religion.

Romanticism:(Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson)is a literary movement flourished as a cultural force throughout the 19th century and it is associated with imagination and boundlessness, as contrasted with classicism, which is commonly associated with reason and restriction. Features: A. Stressing emotion rather than reason B. Stressing freedom and individuality C. Idealism rather than materialism D. Writing about nature, medieval legends and with supernatural elements Transcendentalism :( Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau)is a religious and philosophical movement that was developed during the late 1820s and 1830s in the Eastern region of the United States as a protest against the general state of spirituality. Transcendentalism is the summit of the Romantic Movement in the history of American literature in the 19th century. Features: emphasis on intuition\nature as symbolic of spirit of God\emphasis on individual Realism :(Mark Twain, Henry James) As a literary movement realism came in the latter half of the nineteenth century as a reaction against “the lie” of romanticism and sentimentalis m. It expressed the concern for the world of experience, of the commonplace, and for the familiar and the low.

Features: 1.Objective description of real life and concern for the commonplace. 2. Exposure of dark side in human life and human nature.

3.Creation of typical character in typical surroundings and pursuit for verisimilitude of detail derived from observation.

4. Influenced by American Bourgeois democracy, seeking to reform the society. Naturalism: Features:Literary naturalism is regarded as the new development of literary realism, or “pessimistic realism”

A. a mechanical record of society, extreme objectivity and frankness.

B. The characters are of low social and economic classes, with animal

desire, some physically strong but weak-willed figures. Some are healthy and lofty persons, but their ending were miserable.

C. the writers’ viewpoint was amoral, or non-moral. Men had no free will, their lives were controlled by heredity and environment.

D. their material was infinite.

Modernism:is a philosophical movement that, along with cultural trends and changes, arose from wide-scale and far-reaching transformations in Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Features:1.the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base concentrate more on the private and subjective than on the public and objective.2.Mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual.3.Pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one.4.The distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man ans nature, man ans society, man and man, and man and himself.

Imagism (Ezra Pound, Robert Frost):was a movement in early 20th-century Anglo-American poetry that favored precision of imagery and clear, sharp language. Features: 1.To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the early-exact, nor the merely decorative word.2.We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.3.Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.4.rhythms in the sequence of the musical phrase.5.Finally; most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

Lost Generation (F.Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway):is a term used to describe a group of American intellectuals, poets, artists and writers fled to France in the post WWI years to reject the values of American materialism and to seek the bohemian lifestyle in Paris.

Beat Generation (Allen Ginsberg):was a group of American post-World War II writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired. Localism has elements that characterize a local culture, such as speech, customs and mores peculiar to one particular place and physical setting and the distinctive landscape which condition human thoughts and