美国文学-名词解释
美国文学
1.殖民地时期及独立革命战争时期的美国文学
Philip Freneau（菲利普﹒弗瑞诺）
(1)He was considered as the “Poet of the American revolution” as the most outstanding poet in America of the 18th century. (2)He was a satirist, a bitter polemicist. (3)He wrote many poems encouraging revolution and encouraging the glory that would be won by overcoming the British.
The Wild Honey Suckle 《野金银花》
The Indian Burying Ground 《印第安人的殡葬地》
The British Ship《英国囚船》
The Rising Glory of America 《美洲光辉的兴起》
(1)The Wild Honey Suckle is Freneau’s best lyric (2)It anticipated the 19th—century use of simple nature imagery.
The Indian Burying Ground anticipated romantic primitivism and the celebration of the “Noble Savage”.
Thomas Jefferson（托马斯﹒杰弗逊）
The Declaration of Independence《独立宣言》
(1)The Declaration of Independence was adopted July 4, 1776. (2)It not only announced the birth of a new nation, but also expounded a philosophy of human freedom. (3)It lists 13 cruelties committed by the King of Britain. (4)The famous lines are: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”(5) Thomas Jefferson’s thought was inspired by the thoughts of John Locke.
浪漫主义时期的美国文学
Calvinism（加尔文主义）
(1)Calvinism refers to the religious teachings of John Calvin and his followers. (2) Calvin taught that only certain persons, the elect, were chosen by God to be saved, and these could be saved only by God’s grace. (3) Calvinism forms the basis for the doctrines and practices of the Huguenots, Puritans, Presbyterians, and the Reformed churches.
American Romanticism（美国浪漫主义）
(1) American Romanticism is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature.
(2) It was a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the feelings ,intuitions and emotions were more important than reason and common sense. They emphasized individualism, placing the individual against the group. They affirmed the inner life of the self, and cherished strong interest in the past, the wild, the remote, the mysterious and the strange. They stressed the element “Americanness” in their works.(3)It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Gra ss. (4) Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called “the American Renaissance.” (5) American Romantici sts include such literary figures as Washington Irving, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, William
Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and some others.
Transcendentalism（超验主义）
(1) Transcendentalism refers to the religious and philosophical doctrines of Ralph Waldo Emerson and others in New England in the middle 1800’s, which emphasized the importance of individual inspiration and intuition, the Over—soul, and Nature. Other concepts that accompanied Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine and, therefore, self—reliant. (2)New England Transcendentalism is the product of a combination of native American Puritanism and European Romanticism.
Free verse（自由体诗歌）
(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)Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is, perhaps, the most notable example.
Symbol（象征）
(1) Symbol 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 between 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.
Theme（主题）
(1) Theme means the unifying point or general idea of a literary work. (2) It provides an answer to such questions as “What is the work about”(3)Each literary work carries its own theme or themes. For example, King Lear has many themes, among which are blindness and madness.
现实主义与自然主义时期的美国文学
American Naturalism(美国自然主义)
The American Naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to account for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.
American Naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.
Dreiser is a leading figure of his school.
Darwinism(达尔文主义)
Darwinism is a term that comes from Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
Darwinist think that those who survive in the world are the fittest and those who fail to adapt themselves to the environment will perish. They believe that man has evolved from lower forms of life. Humans are special not because God created them in His image, but because they have successfully adapted to changing environmental conditions and have passed on their survival-making characteristics genetically.
Influenced by this theory, some American naturalist writers apply Darwinism as an explanation of human nature and social reality.
Local Colorists(乡土作家)
Generally speaking, the writing 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 historian of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions. They worked from personal experience to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the locale.
Major local colorists include Hamlin Garland, Mark Twain , Kate Chopin, etc.
Theodore Dreiser(西奥多·德莱塞)
He is generally acknowledged as one of America’s literary naturalists.
Works Sister Carrie《嘉莉妹妹》
(1) Sister Carrie tells about a poor country girl (Carrie Meeber) who goes
to Chicago to pursue the American Dream.
(2) The novel shows Dreiser’s naturalistic view about life by illustrating
the purposelessness of life.
(3) The dominant symbol of the novel is the rocking chair that is the rocking chair that is indicative of the uncertainty of life.
Jennie Gerhardt《珍妮姑娘》
Trilogy of Desire《欲望》三部曲
a. The Financier《金融家》
b. The Titan《巨人》
c. The Stoic《斯多葛》
The Genius 《天才》
An American Tragedy 《美国的悲剧》
(1) An American Tragedy is Dreiser’s greatest work and the title of the
Book implies Dreiser intention to tell us that it is the social pressure
that makes Clyde’s downfall inevitable.
(2) Clyde’s tragedy is a tragedy that depends upon the American social
system which encouraged people to pursue the “dream of success ” at
all costs.
Sherwood Anderson (舍伍德·安德森)
He has been called the first of America’s “psychological writers” because he first explored the motivations and frustrations of his fictional characters in terms of Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychology.
He tremendously influenced such writers as Hemingway and Faulkner.
Works Winesburg, Ohio《小镇畸人》
(1) Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of 23 interrelated stories of
samll-town life. These stories sound morbid and grotesque, but
Underneath them runs a strong desire to communicate, and love and
be loved.
(2) It won the author a foremost position in contemporary American
literary.
现代时期的美国文学
The Lost Generation (迷惘的一代)
The Lost Generation is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World 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.
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.
The three best-know representatives of Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.
Others usually included among the list are Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle, Hart Crane, Ford Maddox Ford and Zelda Fitzgerald.
Imagism (意象派诗歌)
Imagism came into being in Britain ans U.S. around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation.
The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image.
Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles:
i) direct treatment of subject matter;
ii) economy of expression;
iii) as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome.
Ezra Pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known imagist poem.
The Beat Generation (垮掉的一代)
The members of the Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines, who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes 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 Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Howl became the manifesto of the Beat Generation.
American Dream (美国梦)
American Dream refers to the dream of material success, in which one, regardless of social status, acquires wealth and gains success by working hard and good luck.
In literature, the theme of American Dream recurs. In The Great Gatsby, Gatsby comes from the west to the east with the dream of material success. By bootlegging and other illegal means he fulfilled his dream but ended up being killed. The novel tells the shattering of American Dream rather than its success.
Expressionism (表现主义)
Expressionism refers to a movement in Germany early in the 20th century, in which a number of painters sought to avoid the representation of external reality and, instead, to project a highly personal or subjective vision of the world.
Expressionism is a reaction against realism or naturalism, aiming at presenting a post-war world violently distorted.
Works noted for expressionism include: Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, etc..
In a further sense, the term is sometimes applied to the belief that literary works are essentially expressions of their own authors’ moods and thoughts; this has been the dominant assumption about literature since the rise of Romanticism.
Feminism (女权主义)
(1) Feminism incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for women and an ideology of social transformation aiming to create a world for women beyond simple social equality.
(2) In general, feminism is the ideology of women’s liberation based on the belief that women suffer injustice because of their sex. Under this broad umbrella various feminists offer differing analyses of the causes, or agents, of female oppression.
(3) Definitions of feminism by feminists tend to be shaped by their training, ideology or race. So, for example, Marxist and Socialist feminists stress the interaction within feminism of class with gender and focus on social distinctions between men and women. Black feminists argue much more for an integrated analysis which can unlock the multiple systems of oppression.
Hemingway Code Hero (海明威式英雄)
Hemingway Hero, also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong, more sensitive, enjoys the pleasures of life (sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.
Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Henry in A Farewell to Arms and Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea are typical of Hemingway Hero.
Harlem Renaissance (哈莱姆文艺复兴)
（1）Harlem Renaissance refers to a period of outstanding literary vigor and creativity that occurred in the United States during the 1920s.
（2）The Harlem Renaissance changed the images of literature created by many black and white American writers. New black images were no longer obedient and docile, instead they showed a new confidence and racial pride.
(3) The leading figures are Langston Hughs, James Weldon Johnson, Wallace Thurman, etc.. Impressionism (印象主义)
Impressionism is a style of painting that gives the impression made by the subject on the artist without much attention to details. Writers accepted the same conviction that the personal attitudes and moods of the writer were legitimate elements in depicting character or setting or action. Briefly, it is a style of literature characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather than realistic moods.
现代时期的美国文学
Ezra Pound
(1) He was identified as the father of modern American poetry and the most influential leader of the Imagist Movement.
(2) He had an enormous influence on the modernist writers in Britain and America after WWII.
Works The Cantos《诗章》
In a Station of the Metro 《在地铁站里》
(1) In a Station of the Metro serves as a typical example of the Imagist ideas.
(2) The one-image poem is an observation of the poet of the human faces seen in a Paris subway station.
(3) “Apparition” suggests a visible appearance of something not present, and especially of a dead person. Here the faces of people in the subway station are compared to petals on a wet, black bough.
A Pact 《盟约》
(1) A Pact is a poem in which Pound started to find some agreement between “Whitmanesque” free verse, which he had attacked for its carelessness in composition.
(2) In the poem “broke the new wood” means that Whitman made experiments with the conventions of traditional poetry. “commerce” means the exchange of views or attitudes. The poem indicates that Pound would like to learn from the free verse and show respect to Whitman.
美国文学名词解释
1. Transcendentalism The origin of it is a philosophical and literary movement centered in Concord and Boston, which marks the summit of American Transcendentalism. 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. The major features of American Transcendentalism are:It emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. It stressed the importance of the individual. To them the individual was the most important element of society. It offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. 2.Romanticism The Romanticism period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a term associate with imagination boundlessness, and in critical usage is contrasted with classicism which is commonly associated with reason and restriction. The features of Romanticism are: American Romanticism was in a way derivative: American romantic writing was some of them modeled on English and European works. American romanticism was in essence the expression of "a real new experience "and contained"an alien quality".Representatives:William Cullen Bryant; Henry Longfellow and James Cooper, Washington Irving. 3.Realism: 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.The representatives are Howells, James, and Mark Twain. 4. Naturalism American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. The background of naturalism are: In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this chance world he was both helpless and hopeless.Major Features of it are:Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.Representatives of it such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. 5.New Criticism The New Criticism as a school of poetry and criticism established itself in the 1940s as an academic orthodoxy in the United States. The school has its beginning in the 1920s. It focus on the analysis of the text rather paying attention to external elements such as its social background, its author's intention and political attitude, and its impact on society. Then it explores the artistic structure of the work rather than its author's frame of mind or its reader's responses. It also see a literary work as an organic entity, the unity of content and form, and places emphasis on the close reading of the text. These New Critics included T.S. Eliot,I.A.Richards,John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and some other critics. The New Criticism has tended to divorce criticism from social and moral concerns, which was to become one salient feature of the movement. 6.Imagism: Between 1912 and 1922 there came a great poetry boom in which about 1000 poets published over 1000 volumes of poetry. Indeed ,to express the modern spirit, the sense of fragmentization and dislocation, was in large measure the aim of quite a few modern literary movements, of which Imagism was one.The first Imagist theorist, the English writer T.E.Hulme. Hulme suggests that modern art deals with expression and communication of momentary phases in the poet's mind. The most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of dominant image.It is a literary movement launched 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. The representatives are Ezra pound, William Carlos Williams and some other poets.
美国文学史复习提纲 名词解释
I. Explain the following literary terms(名词解释). 1. Romanticism The most profound and comprehensive idea of romanticism is the vision of a greater personal freedom for the individual. Appeals to imagination; Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, gen iality. Subjectivity: in form and meaning. 2 American transcendentalism American transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy and literature that flourished during the early to middle years of the nineteenth century (about 1836-1860). For the transcendentalists, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world and contains what the world contains. 3 Realism: ―nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.‖ the Civil war a. verisimilitude of details derived from observation b. representative in plot, setting and character c. an objective rather than an idealized view of human experience or（American Realism: 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.） 4. Modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic. The general term covers many political, cultural and artistic movements rooted in the changes in Western society at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. American modernism is an artistic and cultural movement in the United States starting at the turn of the 20th century with its core period between World War I and World War II and continuing into the 21st century. 5、American Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the Protestant Church. The first settlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few of them. They were a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, Puritans wanted to purity their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace form God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have a profound influence on the early American mind. American Puritanism also had a enduring influence on American literature. 6、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. 7、Free verse: free verse is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventio nal 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. 8、Naturalism: A more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. Naturalism was a new and harsher realism. It
美国文学选读名词解释
1.Puritanism: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. 1.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. 2.In content it means scrupulous ,moral rigor ,especially hostility to social pleasure and religion . 3.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 extent it is a state of mind,a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the American breathes ,rather than a set of tenets. 4.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 . 2.The American Romanticism(浪漫主义):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.(Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe.) II.Features 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 (4)American romanticism was both imitative and independent. 3.Transcendentalism 超验主义 The major features of Transcendentalism: ① The Transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. 思想超灵宇宙 ② The Transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual is the most important element of Society. ③ The Transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was not purely matter. It was alive, filled with God’s ove rwhelming presence. 自然+上帝 Ralph Waldo Emerson. American Transcendentalism:As a philosophical and literary
美国文学名词解释
1. Transcendentalism—it is a philosophic and literary movement that flourish in 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. 超验主义，它是一个蓬勃发展的新英格兰的哲学和文学运动，反对理性主义和加尔文主义的反应。它强调直观地了解上帝没有教会的帮助下，主张心灵的独立性。 2. Romanticism had appeared in England in the last years of the eighteenth century. It spread to conti nental Europe and then came to America early in the nineteenth century. It came into being as a re action against the prevailing neoclassical spirit and rationalism during the Age of Reason. 浪漫主义曾经出现在英国，在过去几年的十八世纪。它蔓延到欧洲大陆，然后来到美国在十九世纪初。它应运而生作为理性的时代中针对当时新古典主义精神和理性的反应。 3. Puritanism—it is the religious belief of the Puritans, who had intended to purify and simplify the religious ritual of the Church of England. 清教主义，它是清教徒，谁曾打算净化和简化英国教会的宗教礼仪的宗教信仰。 4. Imagism is to present an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. An imagistic poem must present the object exactly the way the thing is seen. And the reader can form the image of the object through the process of reading the abstract and concrete words. Imagism 意象派：is a poetic movement of England and the United States, flourished from 1909-1917. Its credo, expressed in Some Imagist Poets, included the use of the language of common speech, project matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration. 英国是与美国的诗意动作，从1909-1917蓬勃发展。它的信条，在表达意象的一些诗人，包括使用共同的讲话，不管项目，图像的硬盘，明确诗歌和浓度唤起的语言。 5、Realism：（现实主义）appeared in the United States in the literature of local color, an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things was immediately observable. the dialects, customs, sights.现实主义有浓厚的美国本土特色，是浪漫主义故事情节和现实主义描写相结合的产物：美国风味的方言、风俗、各种观点 6.Naturalism：自然主义 a new and harsher realism, 新型的更为冷峻的现实主义，产生悲观的流派，产生于the end of the century 十九世纪末，因为Perception of society’s disorders 对社会无序的感知。Presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity. 设法尽力客观真实地展现出受环境与出身局限的下层人民和各种经济阶层人物的真正生活。The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment, the religious “truths” were illusory, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. 强调世界的非道德性，人们没有意志的自由，宗教上的真理是虚幻的，现实生活是痛苦的。Deterministic 决定论，宿命的， 代表作家：Stephen Crane 史蒂芬.克莱恩, Frank Norris 弗朗克.诺里斯, Jack London 杰克.伦敦, Theodore Dreiser 西奥多.德莱塞. 6. The naturalists tend to depict the dark side of the socity, and always take the low classes as their heros or heroes. Compare to the realism and romanticism, they have a more pessimistic view toward the society, the life. Take Theodore Dreiser for example, his Sister Carrie or American Tragedy reveal that man can not control themselves, and is at the mercy of the nature, the heredity, the society and instinct.博物学家倾向于描绘社会的阴暗面,总是以低类为他们的英雄和英雄。比较现实主义和浪漫主义,他们对社会有更悲观的观点,生活。以西奥多·德莱塞为例,他的嘉莉妹妹还是美国的悲剧表明,男人不能控制自己,自然的摆布,遗传,社会和本能。
美国文学名词解释
Allegory is a narrative that serves as an extended metaphor. Allegories are written in the form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and almost any other style or genre. The main purpose of an allegory is to tell a story that has characters, a setting, as well as other types of symbols, that have both literal and figurative meanings. One well-known example of an allegory is Dante’s The Divine Comedy.In Inferno, Dante is on a pilgrimage to try to understand his own life, but his character also represents every man who is in search of his purpose in the world. Alliteration is a pattern of sound that includes the repetition of consonant sounds. The repetition can be located at the beginning of successive words or inside the words. Poets often use alliteration to audibly represent the action that is taking place. Aside is an actor’s speech, directed to the audience, that is not supposed to be heard by other actors on stage. An aside is usually used to let the audience know what a character is about to do or what he or she is thinking. Asides are important because they increase an audience's involvement in a play by giving them vital information pertaining what is happening, both inside of a character's mind and in the plot of the play. Gothic is a literary style popular during the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th. This style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing with horror, despair, the grotesque and other “dark” subjects. Gothic literature was named for the apparent influence of the dark gothic architecture of the period on the genre. Also, many of these Gothic tales took places in such “gothic” surroundings. Other times, this story of darkness may occur in a more everyday setting, such as the quaint house where the man goes mad fro m the "beating" of his guilt in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart.”In essence, these stories were romances, largely due to their love of the imaginary over the logical, and were told from many different points of view. CATHARSIS is an emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragic artistic work. IMAGERY: A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the "mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of literature. It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a poem, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor. Surrealism is an artistic movement doing away with the restrictions of realism and verisimilitude that might be imposed on an artist. In this movement, the artist sought to do away with conscious control and instead respond to the irrational urges of the subconscious mind. From this results the hallucinatory, bizarre, often nightmarish quality of surrealistic paintings and writings. Sample surrealist writers include Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, and Franz Kafka.
美国文学简史名词解释定义
American Puritanism: Puritanism was a religious reform movement that arose within the Church of England in the late sixteenth century. Under siege from church and crown, it sent an offshoot in the third and forth decades of the seventeenth century to the northern English colonies in the New World--- a migration that laid the foundation for the religious, intellectual, and social order of New England, Puritanism, however,was not only a historically specific phenomenon coincident with the founding of New England; it was also a way of being in the world---a style of response to lived experience---that has reverberated through American life ever since. Doctrinally, Puritans adhered to the Five Points of Calvinism as codified at the Synod of Dort in 1619:(1) unconditional election ( the idea that God had decreed who was damned and who was saved from before the beginning of the world); (2) limited atonement ( the idea that Christ died for the elect only); (3) total depravity (humanity's utter corruption since the Fall); (4) irresistible grace (regeneration as entirely a work of God, which cannot be resisted and to which the sinner contributes nothing); and (5) the perseverance of the saints (the elect, despite their backsliding and faintness of heart , cannot fall away from grace). American Dream: The American Dream is the faith held by many in the United States of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations. Nowadays the American Dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as a measure of success and\ or happiness. Gothic tradition: Gothic novel or Gothic romance is a story of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery. In an extended sense, many novels that do not have a medievalized setting, but which share a comparably sinister, grotesque, or chaustrophobic atmosphere have been classed as Gothic. It contributed to the new emotional climate of Romanticism. Historical novel: a novel in which the action takes place during a specific historical period well before the time of writing ( often one or two generations before, sometimes several centuries), and in which some attempt is made to depict accurately the customs and mentality of the period. The central character---real or imagined---is usually subject to divided loyalties within a larger historic conflict of which readers know the outcome. The pioneers of this genre were Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper American Romanticism:Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual's expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions. The romantic period in American literature stretched from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil