美国文学术语

Terms in American Literature (1)

1) American Puritanism

AP is one of the dominant factors in American life and America literature. It was first the religious belief of the Puritans, who had intended to purify and simplify the religious ritual of the Church of England. The optimistic American Puritans were practical idealists, believing that the church should be restored to the “Purity” of the 1st century as established by Jesus Christ himself. The simplicity, freshness and directness characterize the Puritan style of writing. Benjamin as the spokesman of the 18th century America represents Puritan Materialism.

2) American Romanticism

Coming 20 years later than its British counterpart, American Romanticism was regarded as a period of Renaissance in art and literature in the United States. It is generally held that true American literature was born in this period.

Major features:

a. The Westward Movement, the pioneering into the West, provided the American writers with

the best subject and materials.

b. T he newness as a nation, with people’s ideals of individualism and freedom, their dream

that America was to be built into a new Garden of Eden, was strong enough to inspire romantic imagination.

c. American Romanticism was both imitative and innovative. it stresses the relationship

between man and nature.

3) American Transcendentalism

American Transcendentalism is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in the early 19th century New England, as a reaction against rationalism and Calvinism. It stressed intuitive understanding of god without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. It was a collection of eclectic ideas about literature, philosophy, religion, social reform, and the general state of American culture. Transcendentalism had different meanings for each person involved in the movement, including those who attended the Transcendental Club.

Major features:

a.The transcendentalists especially Emerson placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as

the most important thing in the universe.

b.The transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual.

c.The transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the spirit of Go

d.

Influences: Even today it is difficult to say definitively who can be considered a transcendentalist. Yet all agree that that transcendentalism did flourish, primarily in Concord and Boston in the 19th century and that its influence on American culture and literature was profound. In literature, it’s the summit of American Romanticism It inspired a whole new generation of

such famous authors as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson.

Terms in American Literature (2)

4) American Realism

In American litareature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period in an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against Romanticism. It stresses truthful treatment of material. It focuses on commonness of the lives of the common people, and emphasizes objectivity and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human mature and human experience. The three dominant figures of the period are William Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James.

5) Local Colorism

Local Colorism as a trend became dominant in American literature in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It is a variation of American literary realism. Generally, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes.

Local colorists: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Sara Orne Jewett

6) American Naturalism

The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. Naturalistic writers thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such writers as Stephen Crane, Benjamin Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.

Terms in American Literature (3)

7）The Jazz Age

To many, World War I was a tragic failure of old values, of old politics, of old ideas. The social mood was often one of confusion and despair. Yet, on the surface the mood in America during the 1920s did not seem desperate. Instead, Americans entered a decade of prosperity and exhibitionism. Fashions were extravagant; more and more automobiles crowded the roads. People danced the Charleston, and they sat on the flagpoles. This was the jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. F. Scott. Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a generation of “the beautiful and

damned”, drowning in their pleasures.

8）The Lost Generation

This term is applied to the American writers, most of whom were basically expatriates. They left America and formed a community of writers and artists in Paris, involved with other European novelists and poets in their experimentation on new modes of thought and expression. The term "Lost Generation " came from Gertrude Stein's remark to a mechanic in Hemingway's presence that "You are all a lost generation. " Hemingway used it as a motto in his novel The Sun Also Rises. Among those greatest figures in "The Lost Generation" and Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane who lost the traditional values as a result of the war and fought hard to seek new values and beliefs to fill the void of the post - war world which was full of physical wounds as well as mental chaos.

9）Yoknapatawpha County

It is a fictional setting in northern Mississippi for the saga of 14 novels and many stories by William Faulkner. Based on Lafayette County and its capital, Oxford, Faulkner's mythical land, whose capital is called Jefferson, has an area of 2,400 square miles. He populated it with a broad spectrum of remarkable characters - farmers, hunters, aristocrats, businessmen, former black slaves, dispossessed Indians and several generations of whole families moving on different levels of southern society. He set his characters in the country he knew well and against a background of history he profoundly understood. Yoknapatawpha County stands as a grand allegory about the real American South in history.

10）Modernism

This term is applied to one of the main directions in writing in the 20th century. "Modern" refers to a group of characteristics, and not all of them appear in any one writer who merits the designation "modern". In a broad sense, it is applied to writing marked by a strong and conscious break with traditional forms and techniques of expression. "Modern" implies a historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, of loss and of despair. It elevates the individual and his inner being over social man, and prefers the unconscious to the self - conscious. Its most interesting strategies are its attempt to deal with the unconscious and the mythopoeic. It is basically anti-intellectual, celebrating passion and will over reason and systematic morality. In many respects, it is a reaction against realism and naturalism.

11）stream of consciousness

The artist, who wants to reach the highest stage and to gain the insights necessary for the creation of dramatic art, should have the complete conscious control over the creative process and depersonalize his own emotion in the artistic creation. He should appear as an omniscient author and present unspoken materials directly from the psyche of the characters, of making the characters tell their own inner thoughts in monologues. This literary approach to the presentation of psychological aspects of characters is usually termed as "stream of consciousness".

The artistic features of Earnest Hemingway's novels

(1) Hemingway code hero or tough guy.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. “In O ur Time" is the first book to present a Hemingway hero—Nick, a rough guy. Exposed to and victimized by violence in various forms, Nick becomes the prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could master, confronts situations which are not of his own choosing yet threaten his destruction.

(2) Reflection of "The Lost Generation".

"The Sun Also Rises" (1926) is Hemingway's first true novel. It casts light on a whole generation after the First World War and the effects of the war by way of a vivid portrait of "The Lost Generation," a group of young Americans who left their native land and fought in the war and later engaged themselves in writing in a new way about their own experiences.

(3) Grace under pressure.

Hemingway's world is limited. He deals with a limited range of characters in quite similar circumstances and measures them against an unvarying code, known as "grace under pressure," which is actually an attitude towards life that Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works. Those who survive in the process of seeking to master the code with the honesty, the discipline, and the restraint are Hemingway Code heroes.

(4) "Iceberg" principle.

And this concern is closely connected with the code, even has the resonance that has come to mark his prose style. Hemingway himself once said, "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one - berg is due to only - eighth of it being above water." According to Hemingway, good literary writing should be able to make readers feel the emotion of the characters directly and the best way to produce the effect is to set down exactly every particular kind of feeling without any authorial comments, without conventionally emotive language, and with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs.

(5) Colloquialism.

Hemingway develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms of human speech are so well presented that the characters are full of flesh and blood and the use of short, simple and conventional words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care.

Terms 4 & Review

12. Imagism:

Expressionism: the term is used to describe the works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision, transforming nature rather than imitating it. In literature it is often considered a revolt against realism and naturalism, a seeking to achieve a psychological or spiritual reality rather than to record external events. In drama, the expressionist work was characterized by a bizarre distortion of reality. On the American stage, elements of expressionism can be seen in the plays of Eugene O' Neill and Arthur Miller.

13. Beat Generation: the Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a movement later. The term “Beat Generation” gradually came to represent an entire period in time, but the entire original Beat Generation in literature was small enough to have fit into a couple of cars. The term was created by Jack Kerouac in 1948. The original word meant nothing more than “bad” or “ruined” or “spent” or “beaten-down, beaten-up and beaten-out”. The connotation is defeat, resignation, and disappointment. Literally, the Beats were all experimenters who sought to express spontaneity of thought and feeling in a seemingly formless verse as Ginsberg did or prose as Kerouac.

14. Black Humor. In contemporary literary criticism, black humor is a term applied to a large group of American novels beginning in the 1950s. Although the writers of black humor did not intentionally form a school of literary movement, there is in their novels a common core of satire that is directed against hypocrisy, materialism, racial prejudice, and above all, the dehumanization of the individual by a modern society. In their opinion, their society is full of institutionalized absurdity. Therefore, all of them hold a cynical attitude toward society and the conventional moral values that support that society.

15. The Harlem Renaissance (1917-1935) brought new attention to African American literature. The Harlem Renaissance, based in the African American community in Harlem in New York City, existed as a larger flowering of social thought and culture, with numerous Black artists, musicians, and others producing classic works in fields from jazz to theater. During the American Civil Rights movement, authors wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism. Since the 1970s, African American literature reached the mainstream as books by Black writers continually achieved best-selling and award-winning status.

?Ralph Ellison （1914-1994）

?Maya Angelou (1928- ) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings1983

?Toni Morrison(1931- )

?Alice Walker (1944- )

American Woman Literature

Late 19th century: Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) Kate Chopin (1851-1904) The Awakening (1899)

Beginning of the 20th century:

Willa Cather (1873-1947) My Antonia 1918;

Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) Flowering Judas1930

Ship of Fools 1962

Post world-war II : Carson McCullers (1917-1967) The ballad of the sad cafe 1951

Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) Wise Blood, 1952

美国文学史名词解释

1、the Lost Generation In general, the post-World War I generation, but specifically a group of U.S. writers who came of age during the war and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term 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 (1926). 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 a U.S. that, b asking under President Harding's “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e.e. cummings and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the '20s. They were never a literary school. In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period. The last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald's Tender Lost generation The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2>full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3>the three best-known representatives of lost generation are F.Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and John dos Passos. Lost generation The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who used “a lost generation” to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I experiences and disillusioned with American society. Hemingway later used the phrase as an epigraph for his novel The Sun Also Rises. It consisted of many influential American writers, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Carlos Williams and Archibald MacLeish. 2、Iceberg Theory It is a term used to describe the writing style of American writer Ernest Hemingway. The meaning of a piece is not immediately evident, because the crux of the story lies below the surface, just as most of the mass of a real iceberg similarly lies beneath the surface. Iceberg Theory Ernest Hemingway’s “iceberg theory” sugge sts that the writer include in the text only a small portion of what he knows, leaving about ninety percent of the content a mystery that grows beneath the surface of the writing. If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of

英美文学专有名词术语解释

Literary Terms（文学术语解释） *Legend（传说）: A song or narrative handed down from the past, legend differs from myths on the basis of the elements of historical truth they contain. *Epic（史诗）: 1)Epic, in poetry, refers to a long work dealing with the actions of gods and heroes. 2)Beowulf is the greatest national epic of the Anglo-Saxons. John Milton wrote three great epics: Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes. *Romance（罗曼史/骑士文学）: 1)Romance is a popular literary form in the medieval England. 2)It sings knightly adventures or other heroic deeds. 3)Chivalry(such as bravery, honor, generosity, loyalty and kindness to the weak and poor) is the spirit of romance. *Ballad（民谣）: 1)Ballad is a story in poetic form to be sung or recited. 2)Ballads were passed down from generation to generation. 3)Robin Hood is a famous ballad singing the goods of Robin Hood. Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a 19th century English ballad. *The Heroic Couplet（英雄对偶句）:1)It means a pair of lines of a type once common in English poetry, in other words, it means iambic pentameter rhymed in two lines. 2)The rhyme is masculine. 3)Use of the heroic couplet was first pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer. *Humanism（人文主义）:1)Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It emphasizes the dignity of human beings and the importance of the present life. 2)Humanists voiced their beliefs that man was the center of the universe and man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of the present life, but had the ability to prefect himself and to perform wonders. *Renaissance（文艺复兴）:1)It refers to the transitional period from the medieval to the modern world. It first started in Italy in the 14th century. 2)The Renaissance means rebirth or revival. 3)It was stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek classics, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion. 4)Humanism is the essence of Renaissance. 5)The English Renaissance didn’t begin until the reign of Henry Ⅷ. It was reg arded as England’s Golden Age, especially in literature. 6)The real mainstream of the English Renaissance is the Elizabethan drama. 7)This period produced such literary giants as Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe, Bacon, Donne and Milton, etc. *University Wits（大学才子）: 1)It refers to a group of scholars during the Elizabethan age who graduate from either Oxford or Cambridge. They came to London with the ambition to become professional writers. Some of them later become famous poets and playwrights. 2)Thomas Greene, John Lily and Christopher Marlowe were among them. 3)They paved the way, to some degree, for the coming of Shakespeare. *Blank verse（无韵体）:1)It is verse written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. 2)It is the verse form used in some of the greatest English poetry, including that of William Shakespeare and John Milton. *Spenserian Stanza（斯宾塞诗节）:1)It is the creation of Edmund Spenser. 2)It refers to a stanza of nine lines, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter and the last line in iambic hexameter（六音步）,r hyming ababbcbcc. 3)Spenser’s The Faerie Queene was written in this kind of stanza. *Sonnet(十四行诗)1)It is the one of the most conventional and influential forms of poetry in English.2)A sonnet is a lyric consisting of 14 lines, usually in iambic pentameter, restricted to a definite rhyme scheme.3)Shakespeare’s sonnets are well-known. *Soliloquy(独白)1)Soliloquy, in drama, means a moment when a character is alone and speaks his or her thoughts aloud. 2)In the line “To be, or not to be, that is the question”, which begins the famous soliloquy from Act3, Scene1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In this soliloquy Hamlet questions whether or not life is worth living and speaks of the reasons why he does not end his life. *Metaphysical Poets（玄学派诗人）：They refer to a group of religious poets in the first half of the 17th century whose works were characterized by their wit, imaginative picturing, compressions, often cryptic expression, play of paradoxes and juxtapositions of metaphor. *Enlightenment Movement(启蒙运动)1)It was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept through Western Europe in the 18th century.2)The movement was a furtherance of the Renaissance from 14th century to the mid-17th century.3)Its purpose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas.4)It celebrated reason or nationality, equality and science. It advocated universal education. Literature at the time became a very popular means of public education.5)Famous among the great enlighteners in England were those great writers like John Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Sheridan, etc. Neoclassicism(新古典主义)1)In the field of literature, the 18th century Enlightenment Movement brought about a revival of interest in the old classical works. This tendency is known as neoclassicism.2)The neoclassicists hold that forms of literature were to be modeled after the classical works of the ancient Greek and Roman writers such as Homer and Virgil and those of the contemporary French ones.3)They believed that the artistic ideas should be order, logic, restrained emotion and accuracy, and that literature should be judged in terms of its service to humanity *Sentimentalism(感伤主义文学)1)It is a pejorative term to describe false or superficial emotion, assumed feeling, self-regarding postures of grief and pain.2)In literature it denotes overmuch use of pathetic effects and attempts to arouse feeling by pathetic indulgence.3)The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith is a case in point. *The Graveyard School(墓地派诗歌)1)It refers to a school of poets of the 18th century whose poems are mostly devoted to a sentimental lamentation or meditation on life, past and present, with death and graveyard as theams.2)Thomas Gray is considered to be the leading figure of this school and his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is its most representative work. *Epistolary novel(书信体小说)1)It consists of the letters the characters write to each other. The usual form is the letter, but diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used.2)The epistolary novel’s reliance on subjective poi nts of view makes it the forerunner of the modern psychological novel.3)Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is typical of this kind. *Gothic Romance(哥特传奇)1)A type of novel that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th century in England.2)Gothic romances are mysteries, often involving the supernatural and heavily tinged with horror, and they are usually against dark backgrounds of medieval ruins and haunted castles. *Picaresque novel(流浪汉小说)1)It is a popular sub-genre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society. 2)As indicated by its name, this style of novel originated in Spain, flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, and continues to influence modern literature. *English Romanticism(英国浪漫主义文学)1)The English Romantic period is an age of poetry. Poets started a rebellion against the neoclassical literature, which was later regarded as the poetic revolution. They saw poetry as a healing energy; they believed that poetry could purify both individual souls and the society.2)The Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 acts as a manifesto for the English Romanticism.3)The Romantics not only eulogize the faculty of imagination, but also stress the concept of spontaneity and inspiration, regarding them as something crucial for true poetry.4)The natural world comes to the forefront of the poetic imagination. Nature is not only the major source of poetic imagery, but also provides the dominant subject matter. *Ode(颂歌)1)Ode is a dignified and elaborately lyric poem of some length, praising and glorifying an individual, commemorating an event, or describing nature intellectually rather than emotionally.2)John Keats wrote great odes. His Ode on a Grecian Urn is a case in point. *Lake Poets(湖畔派诗人)They refer to such romantic poets as William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey who lived in the Lake District. They came to be known as the Lake School or “Lakers”. *Byronic hero（拜伦式英雄）: It refers to a proud, mysterious rebel figure of noble origin. With immense superiority in his passions and powers, this Byronic hero would carry on his shoulders the burden of righting all the wrongs in a corrupt society, and would rise single-handedly against any kind of tyrannical rules either in government, in religion, or in moral principles with

英国文学名词解释

Allegory is a tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities. Thus, an allegory is a story with two meaning, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. Bildungsroman: a novel that traces the initiation, development, and education of a young person. Examples are Dickens’s David Copperfield and James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Byronic hero is a character-type found in Byron’s narrative Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He is a boldly defiant but bitterly self-tormenting outcast, proudly contemptuous of social norms but suffering for some unnamed sin. Emily Bronte’s Heath cliff is a later example. Conceit: a kind of metaphor that makes a comparison between two startlingly different things. A conceit usually provides the framework for an entire poem. An especially unusual and intellectual kind of conceit is the metaphysical conceit, used by certain 17th-century poets, such as John Donne.. Comedy of manners is a kind of comedy representing the complex and sophisticated code of behavior current in fashionable circles of society, where appearances count for more than true moral character. Its humor relies chiefly on elegant verbal wit and repartee. In England, the comedy of manners flourished as the dominant form of Restoration comedy in the works of Etheredge, Wycherley and Congreve. It was revived in a more subdued form in the 1770s by Goldsmith and Sheridan, and later by Oscar Wilde. An epic is a long narrative poem in elevated or dignified language, typically one derived from ancient oral tradition, narrating and celebrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the past history of a nation. Epiphany(顿悟）: a sudden revelation of truth about life inspired by a seemingly trivial incident Heroic couplet is the rhymed couplet of iambic pentameter. Intrusive narrator: an omniscient narrator who, in addition to reporting the events of a novel’s story, offers further comments on characters and events, and who sometimes reflects more generally upon the significance of the story. Iambic pentameter: a poetic line consisting of five verse feet, with each foot an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. Iambic pentameter is the most common verse line in English poetry. Metaphysical poetry: the poetry of John Donne and other 17th-century poets who wrote in a similar style. It is characterized by verbal wit and excess, ingenious structure, irregular meter, colloquial language, elaborate imagery, and a drawing together of dissimilar ideas . Metaphysical Poetry Metaphysical Poetry is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. With a rebellious spirit, the metaphysical poets try to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry. They are characterized by mysticism in content and fantasticality in form. John Donne is the lead ing figure of the “metaphysical school.” Naturalism: a post--Darwinian movement of the late 19th century that tried to apply the laws of scientific determinism to fiction. The naturalists went beyond the realists’ insistence on the objective presentation of the details of everyday life to insist that the materials of literature

美国文学术语

American Literary Terms 美国文学术语 1. Romanticism This literary movement started in the late 18th century in Europe. Romanticists take materials or subjects from mythologies or from history. The depiction of individual emotions is emphasized and life is dramatized. Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman are regarded as the representatives of American Romanticism. 2. American Romanticism (1) It is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature that stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. (2) Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance”. (3) American romantic works emphasize the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature. The strong teddency to eulogize the individual and the common man was typical of this period. Most importantly, the writings of American Romanticism are typically American. Works concentrate on unique characteristics of the American land. (4) New England Transcendentalism is the summit of American Romanticism. (5) Romanticists include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others. 3. Transcendentalism (1) Transcendentalism has been defined philosophically as “the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach of the senses”. (2) Transcendentalism stress the importance of the Over-soul, the Individual and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is ddivine and, therefore, self-reliant. New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European Romanticism. 4. Free Verse (1) Free verse means the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without paying attention to conventional rules of meter. (2) Free verse was originated by a group of French poets of the late 19th century. (3) Their purpose was to free themselves from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead the free rhythms of natural speech. (4) What Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps, the most notable example. 5. Symbol (1) It means an act, a person, a thing, or a spectacle that stands for something else, usually something less palpable than the named symbol. (2) The relationship etween the symbol and its referent is not often one of simple equivalence. Allegorical symbols usually express a neater equivalence with what they stand for than the symbols found in modern realistic fiction.

美国文学史名词解释

1.American Puritanism清教 2.It comes from the American puritans, who were the first immigrants moved to American continent in the 17th century. Original sin, predestination（预言）and salvation（拯救）were the basic ideas of American Puritanism. And, hard-working, piousness（虔诚,尽职），thrift and sobriety（清醒）were praised. Characteristics: 特点 1. Idealistic: Puritans pursue the purity and simplicity in worship. They focuse the glory of God, and the angry believe in the doctrine of destiny, original sin, limited atonement 2. Practical: Puritans come to Amrican to do business and make profits with the desire of chasing wealth and status. They have to struggle for survival under the severity of the western frontier. 3 .The struggle between the spiritual and the material is the basics of the Puritan mind. On the one hand, Puritans chase the purity of the early the other hand, they come to America to earn money. This contradictory will be reflected by their thoughts. 4. In a word, it rests on purity, ambition, harding work, and an intense struggling for success. Romanticism浪漫主义: 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（刺激）the sentimental emotions of their readers. They wrote of the mysterious of life, love, birth and death. The Romantic writers expressed themselves freely and without restraint. They wrote all kinds of materials, poetry, essays, plays, fictions, history, works of travel, and biography. Transcendentalism先验说,超越论: is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particular at Concord, as a reaction against Rationalism and Calvinism (理性主义and喀尔文主义). Mainly it stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. The representative writers are Emerson and Thoreau. American Realism现实主义: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience Local colorism乡土文学: as a trend became dominant in American literature in the 1860s and early 1870s，it is defined by Hamlin Garland as having such quality of texture and background that it could not have been written in any other place or by anyone else than a native stories of local colorism have a quality of circumstantial(详细的) authenticity(确实性), as local colorists tried to immortalize(使不朽) the distinctive natural, social and linguistic features. It is characteristic of vernacular(本国语) language and satirical(讽刺的) humor Naturalism自然主义: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals（剧变）that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform. Stream of consciousness意识流：It 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. Those novels broke